In this era of fragmented and social media, I think people live in the present more than ever, which is why I don’t think the Russia investigation is going to have much of an impact on the midterm elections. After winning convictions against Paul Manafort and securing his cooperation around Labor Day, the special counsel’s office has kept their promise to maintain a low profile while the public is voting. As a result, the president has almost completely dropped the topic and there has been little news to report.
It’s difficult to know which party this will benefit the most. There have been indications that the electorate is more engaged on other issues and that the Democrats were doing better when talking about issues like health care than about Russia. Perhaps they’re benefitting because their candidates aren’t beating a drum the voters don’t really want to listen to.
On the other hand, if the electorate isn’t thinking about how Trump’s campaign chairman, deputy campaign chairman, national security adviser, and personal lawyer have all been convicted of crimes and are cooperating with investigators then there has to be some advantage in that for the Republicans.
There is something wrong with the way this is playing out. If you’re familiar with hurricanes, you know that inside the eye things are calm but that this gives a false assurance since the winds will shortly return, often with even more force than before. By agreeing to go silent for the election season, Robert Mueller is dutifully avoiding overly politicizing an investigation that should be impartial and fair. But he’s also creating an artificial and temporary environment where people are debating politics without thinking about the biggest and most consequential issue before them. Watergate was a Category 5 political hurricane, and the Russia investigation is at least as big.
We’re all inside the eye now, but if you look carefully you will see that the winds are still swirling. On Friday, Paul Manafort will be back in Judge T.S. Ellis III’s Eastern Virginia courtroom. He’ll be wearing a dark green prison jumpsuit instead of one of his extremely expensive tailored suits because Judge Ellis has denied his lawyer’s request that he be exempted from appearing in prisoner’s clothing.
At the conclusion of Manafort’s Virginia trial, the jury was unable to reach a verdict on some of the charges against him, which means that the government has the option to try again in front of a different jury. They’ve promised not to do that if Manafort cooperates to their satisfaction, but Judge Ellis finds this arrangement strange and wants to discuss it in the Friday hearing. According to him, the government seldom takes more than four months to decide whether to recharge on hung counts and he wants to know why this time should be different.
In the meantime, Manafort has already met with Mueller’s prosecutors several times as he seeks to earn favorable treatment at sentencing. There’s a Nov. 16 deadline in the Washington DC case for the prosecution and defense to issue a joint report to the Judge. So, not long after the election, we’ll learn the extent to which Manafort has been cooperative.
There has been a little bit of news trickling out of late from Trump’s personal attorney, Michael Cohen. He, too, has been spending quite a bit of time with Mueller’s prosecutors, and now he has reportedly changed his party registration to “Democrat” and pledged to campaign against Trump’s reelection. On Sunday, he was back on Twitter:
The #MidtermElections2018 might be the most important vote in our lifetime. #GetOutAndVote #VoteNovember6th
— Michael Cohen (@MichaelCohen212) October 14, 2018
According to Vanity Fair, he’s spent more than 50 hours talking with the special counsel’s people and prosecutors from the Southern District of New York, and he’s done this despite still not having a formal cooperation agreement.
So, even though we haven’t been reading about the Russia investigation much over the last six or seven weeks, it is still churning across our political landscape doing untold damage to Trump’s presidency. We’ll wake up after the midterms and find out what’s left of this administration but we’ll have elected a new Congress to deal with the clean up without having really considered the issue when casting our votes.
I suppose a judge denying you an exemption on prison clothes, particularly for white collar crimes, tells you all you need to know about how the judge feels about you. Yikes.
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. . . arguably engaged in judicial misconduct displaying prejudice against the prosecution! So, yeah, “yikes”, indeed.
Oh, look, it’s Oui troll-rating you completely out of left field! Is it time for another of his right-hand column pity parties?
. . . here that leave me wondering “what just happened here?”
For example, a while back (also when oui was on a ratings-abuse rampage and had succeeded, with assist from voice and/or ag, at downgrading my “trusted user” status via that ratings abuse), suddenly, also out of the blue (as far as I knew):
I don’t know to this day whether that was the result of
And now, since I posted this comment (though I have no idea if there’s any cause-effect involved), oui’s most recent spree of trollratings abuse has again similarly disappeared. (Interesting quirk of ratings system revealed in the process: when a rating is deleted, the ratings average does not get re-calculated. So, for example, the post above that you replied to was rated “1” (by oui, duh!) and “4”, for an average of 2.5. The “1” rating has disappeared. Yet the average still shows 2.5, but for only a single rating (i.e., “2.5/1”), though the only rating now shown is “4”. Weird.)
There are times (e.g., when oui shows up — like now!) when I think “Booman Tribune” needs “Follies” appended to the end for truth-in-advertising purposes.
. . . from “2.5/2” (with ratings of “1” and “4”) to “2.5/1” (with a single rating of “4”) when oui’s ratings-abusing “1” disappeared.
I can understand why Robert Mueller wants to avoid “overly politicising” the investigation by eschewing major new announcements and arrests etc. in the run up to the mid-terms. But is there also another political calculation at play?
There may be little point in issuing even a damning report to a Republican dominated congress. They are not going to prosecute their own President, period.
But what if the report is issued to a congress where Democrats have won even small majorities? There may not be enough votes to secure a conviction, but at least his report would be considered seriously, and the impeachment process initiated if warranted by the evidence.
Even a failure to convict could educate the public as to what was really going on and provide guidance as to how similar problems could be avoided in the future.
No one would be able to claim they didn’t know what they were doing if they supported Trump’s reelection campaign in 2020.
Anti-sovietism has been a defining feature of much of mainstream and conservative US politics since WWII. An acceptance of Trump’s politics and methods could signal a realisation that there really isn’t all that much difference between Russian Oligarchical rule and US rule by billionaires.
It’s about screwing the little people and all those libruls who claim to be working on their behalf. You don’t even have to disguise it any more with slogans about “freedom” and “democracy” etc. It’s about tax cuts for the rich and all power to the elite.
Now all we need is a good war to cow all opposition into line for fear of being deemed unpatriotic. The Trump project is proceeding exceedingly well…
There is no point. We are in a cold civil war. Even if the report damns him they will (and should) support Trump, break the rule of law, and move the fuck on.
They will do what they have to.
I don’t think it matters much. Everyone who cares about the investigation has already made up their minds. I can’t imagine there are many undecided at this point, but the few who are, are probably focused on more personal concerns.
This!
Everyone who cares about the outcome of the Russia investigation has already made up their minds based of where they side in our cold civil war. No minds are going to be changed by what comes out of this.
The people that aren’t on a side in this situation only care about pocket book issues and haven’t woken up to the fact that the only thing that matters is permanently taking out the other side. And they won’t realize the stakes until their are ground under.
Excellent metaphor as usual. To watch the trappings of the current “campaign” is quite surreal, and yet another sign of how untethered our politics are from reality.
In being forced-marched through the various TV ads for US senate and battleground congressional districts, the themes and methods are easy to spot. The Dems’ ads talk pretty incessantly about healthcare. Indeed, it’s about the only specific issue mentioned. Independence from moneyed special interests is the other.
On the Repub side, most campaigns run nothing but negative attack ads (I include the raging fire hose of Mystery-PAC ads as coordinated with the candidate). By “negative” I mean the ad does absolutely nothing but attack the Dem as some sort of scoundrel over some thing or other–the Repub candidate is simply not even mentioned. Some Repubs will occasionally run an ad that both attacks the Dem, but also contrasts the (desired) Dem evildoing with what the Repub wants to do. Fear and hatred of immigrants also plays an enormous role in the roiling Repub drama.
In short, on the Repub side the overwhelming weight of the ad campaign consists exclusively of personal attacks against the Dem, with specific issues virtually nonexistent, other than fear of Latinos. Disgusting but instructive.
What is not mentioned at all by anyone is that some house of Congress desperately needs to constitute a check against a criminal Quisling prez, and that only if Dems achieve some power will this happen. Instead, we are treated to a fantasy discussion of reforming healthcare and campaign finance–which (suffice to say) is not about to happen in any way before the 2020 election. One can only conclude that the candidates think that “the people” (the persuadables, anyway) are indifferent (or hostile) to the actual critical issue they are being presented with at this point in history.
The current Congress has 58 days after the election to wreak havoc before the next crew can take charge (less Thanksgiving and Christmas recesses).
Mueller might not want to throw any red meat into the cage until the carnivores are under control.
. . . significant element in Mueller’s motivation, though, which I presume to be as it seems, i.e., honoring “60-day” guideline (that Comey so indefensibly violated) to avoid making political waves right before election.
On that topic though, shortly before that arbitrary 60-day deadline, I saw the point made somewhere that it didn’t apply because no targets of or principals in Mueller’s investigation are candidates for elective office (which left me hopeful Mueller would just keep on keepin’ on). Never saw any followup to that, including any “promise to maintain a low profile while the public is voting”, as asserted by booman. Still my best guess that that’s what Mueller’s doing, though.
That was my understanding as well, that Mueller wasn’t constrained by election or other timeline considerations.
Still, were another Saturday night massacre in the offing within the 58 days, one hopes he has the means to either produce a good portion of the report, or to be able to put it under seal for future exposure.
Is it possible for the Supremes to act to guarantee the integrity of the investigation? They are to be the check on the other two branches if things get out of hand – even though they have no way of physically enforcing compliance.
. . . Justices? (YMMV re: apportionment between those two classes in the taxonomy; 4-5 Occupants + 4-5 Justices — under presumption that dubya’s nominees were likewise illegitimate after theft of the 2000 election by judicial coup — works just fine for me, too.)
The turtle said today that he’s going to repeal the ACA after the mid-terms. Rosenstein will probably get canned. They’ll fill the vacancy left on the DC circuit left by Kavanaugh…basically they’re going to reshape this country into the revanchist hellhole they’ve been dreaming about all along. Collusion doesn’t seem all that important at the moment.