Collusion Proven

Updated:  To correct mistake on date, see text below in red.

This summarizes the information I have seen on an excellent Twitter thread by Seth Abramson, Attorney and Professor at that University of New Hampshire.

In the Papadopoulos indictment, it says he met with Russian national to set up Kremlin channel for Trump on 3/24/2016.  He told Trump about it and the ongoing DNC hack by the Russians on 3/31/2016—note the DNC did not know they were being hacked yet (hacked emails were dated from Jan 2015-May 2016).   Also note that Papadopoulos is saying that EVERY attendee of the 3/31/2016 meeting lied about it.  This includes Jeff Sessions, which means there is a good chance that he will face perjury charges soon.

According to J.D. Gordon, Trump campaign’s national-security policy rep for the RNC, told CNN that he and others advocated for watering down the language regarding support for Ukraine because Trump told them to do so back in March 2016–the infamous 3/31 meeting.  This is a change from what Gordon said earlier this year when he said Trump had nothing to do with the change.  He’s probably scared the FBI is coming after him next.

Papdopolous, per the indictment, notified Trump and others about the ongoing DNC hack in April 2016 —note the DNC did not know they were being hacked yet (hacked emails were dated from Jan 2015-May 2016).  Anyway, the DNC emails were released to the world by Wikileaks on July 22, 2016.

So it seems that DNC emails in July 2016 were “quid pro quo” for Trump changing the GOP platform on 3/31/2016.  Basically Trump knew the Russians wanted to collude (per Papdopoulos), that they had info that would help his campaign (also per Papdopoulos) and he took a direct act in furtherance to benefit Russia (per Gordon and others, probably Manafort once he flips, which venal guy that he is is expected, otherwise he’ll rot in Federal prison for the rest of his life).  That is collusion.   Mueller has Trump by short hairs and he’s just getting started with indictments.

Now let’s see what a Narcissist like Trump will do.  If he fires Mueller, a crisis might occur if Congress does nothing to protect Mueller.  The investigation won’t go away but Congress MUST protect Mueller in order to protect Rule of Law and the Balance of Powers.  Will they do it though?  I honestly don’t think they will, sadly.  For the GOP in control of Congress now, staying in power seems to be more important than supporting the foundations of our democracy.  Good Lord, I hope they prove me wrong and do the right thing.

No matter what though……Wow, just wow.

 

Sources:

(THREAD) Paul Manafort and Rick Gates are now indicted. This thread analyzes legal and political aspects of their indictment and surrender. pic.twitter.com/Ir8zKaA1F2

— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) October 30, 2017

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Democratic_National_Committee_email_leak

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/oct/30/trump-russia-indictment-george-papadopoulos

http://www.businessinsider.com/jd-gordon-trump-adviser-ukraine-rnc-2017-3

Will Fear and Spite Elect the Next U.S. President?

I heard a story on NPR yesterday about a recent Bloomberg poll that asked:

Do you support banning Muslims from the United States for a while?

65% of Republican voters said yes and a surprising 18% of Democratic voters said yes.  They did not interview any Independents so it’s safe to assume that more than 37% of American likely voters support what is essentially an unconstitutional and unethical policy.  If that doesn’t worry you maybe their answer to the follow-up question should.  They asked a second question that states it even more clearly…something like “even if it’s unconstitutional and goes against everything that America stands for and it makes us less safe” do you still support it and they STILL answered yes.

They then talked to a focus group of Trump supporters.  Most of them were college educated (so claiming their ignorant isn’t an answer to this conundrum). When asked why they supported the ban it was VERY clear there were two main reasons:  1) fear and 2) spite. The spite is something many online have speculated about.  Essentially they think Trump challenges the status quo and the “elites”, which they define as the media.  They believe the media elites are looking down on them (and they are and rightly so) calling them bigots.  Well if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck…But instead of shaming them, it only makes them madder and makes them support Trump more.  So that’s why we’re seeing his numbers go higher every time he says something awful–so the online and media speculation was correct.

What it all boils down to is these two important points.  First, they are SO afraid of more terrorist attacks that they will trade long term safety (and scoff at rational policy as presented by Pres. Obama and any Democratic nominee) for short term safety (as offerred by Trump).  I.e., they know it’s wrong they just don’t give a f*ck.  Second, the left and the Media telling them it is wrong, makes them so angry that they are willing to cut their nose off to spite their face.  It’s like telling your 4 year old, ‘if you do that one more time I’m going to spank you’ so, of course, they do the forbidden thing out of defiance.

When you really understand the dynamic here and you look at how many Americans probably feel this way, it is incredibly disturbing.  Maybe we should be concerned about the Democratic Party’s nominees chances in the general election.  Fear is contagious and so is anger.  These two emotions have been the main impetus behind some pretty ugly things in our history like the Internment of the Japanese during WWII.   This could be another one of those defining moments.  Unfortunately this decision will most likely be made by people with the mentality of 4 year olds.

You know that warning on plastic bags…..

You know those hideous plastic bags that we use at the grocery store–the ones that take a gazillion years to deteriorate and float like leaves across the Arizona landscape?  Well the State Legislature passed a bill that would forbid local governments from banning them.  And of course, Gov. Douchey signed it.  There’s a warning on most plastic bags that say don’t put this over your head because suffocation….duh!  Too bad we can’t ignore that and put it over the head of the legislators who voted for it and the governor who signed it.  Some day Arizona (if it’s not under water) will be a mountain of trash with tornadoes of dust and plastic bags and the most advanced life form will be cockroaches and conservatives basking in their land of unadulterated freedumb.  Good luck with that.

Don’t black folk know what they’re supposed to do?

Okay, I can’t stand it any more.  I HAVE to say something about Ferguson and the cop shootings that America is now FINALLY paying attention to.  The tipping point came for me yesterday when I finally watched the video of the Tamir Rice shooting and read an article on the audio evidence that proves Officer Darren Wilson was not telling the truth in his accounts of the Michael Brown shooting.

The U.S. is like a drug addict that refuses to acknowledge they have a problem.  All the signs are there.  The data is VERY clear.    Here’s some examples of what I’m talking about.

• More Utahns were killed by police than by street gangs or drugs or child abuse.
• There is a significant disparity between police shootings of white people than other minorities, particularly blacks.
• The ubiquity of guns in our society means that police must be more heavily armed and in recent years they have become militarized to unprecedented degree.*    Young men, particularly, black men pay the price for our gun rights and we all pay dearly for the militarization of law enforcement (not just with our lives but also with our taxes).
• People are prejudiced even when they think they are not.  It’s subconscious.  Even law enforcement who are better trained and have better reflexes.  Don’t believe me? Go test yourself.

Some thoughts that are just pinging around in my brain that I have to get out.  Keep in mind, I’m not some uninformed liberal spouting off–I have a Masters in Criminal Justice and I’ve worked in the system.

• The Prosecutor, Bob McCulloch, in the Brown shooting did not WANT an indictment therefore there wasn’t one.  A typical prosecutor could indict a comatose 90-year old grandmother if he/she wanted to.
  • He dumped a ton of data on the jury without providing any guidance into what was exculpatory, degree of trustworthiness, interpreting (because the forensic stuff can be really tough to understand), etc.  To expect a lay person to be able to sort through, prioritize and understand all of that data is absurd and no real prosecutor would do that.
  • He engaged in victim blaming by telling them that Brown was on drugs when there was no evidence of that
  • He improperly instructed the jury on the law — this is HUGE and if this had been a trial, it would have been excellent grounds for an appeal
  • He should have recused himself.  His father was a police officer who was killed in the line of duty by, you guessed it, a black man.
  • He failed to perform his duty as a Prosecutor–they are supposed to advocate for indictment. In fact the vast majority of grand juries in this country return with an indictment.

  According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. attorneys prosecuted 162,000 federal cases in 2010, the most recent year for which we have data. Grand juries declined to return an indictment in 11 of them. 

• The audio from the Brown shooting proves that Wilson did not tell the truth.
• White people riot all the fucking time for the stupidest shit and no one blames it on their “culture of lawlessness”.  But let some black people riot and the media and the majority of white people will shake their heads and question why.  Why would they riot when there’s no history of racial discrimination in policing in the U.S. (ht to Bob Cesca)? Why would they riot when they only have themselves to blame?  All of the Fox News coverage has been in this vein, but the best examples are interviews with Rudy Giulani.
• The Tamir Rice video is horrifying.  The video shows the police lied about many crucial issues.  If you only listen to the police version (as is too often the case), then it sounds like Tamir was a serious threat .  If you watch the video you will be stunned.
  • They said there were multiple people in the park.  The video shows the 12 year old boy was alone.
  • They said they told him to  put his hands up three times.  The video shows less than 2 seconds passed between the car pulling up, the officers got out of the vehicle and when the shots occurred.  So either the officer gave the fastest and clearest commands in the history of human language (award that man a Guinness World Record!) or he didn’t give them at all.
  • Tamir was already down on the ground when they shot him…he reacted immediately to their presence by making himself non-threatening.
  • After they shot him and the boy was clearly no longer a threat they watched him suffer and provided no first aid until a detective and FBI agent showed up.   Although they’re under no obligation to provide first aid IF they felt the situation is unsafe.  But the boy was no longer a threat.  Actually he wasn’t even a threat when they shot him, but why quibble, amiright?  Ironic that the failure to render aid, made sure their version will be the only one we hear (other than the pure luck of the surveillance video from across the street which can’t really tell us the whole story).
•  The Rice shooting is very scary to me personally.  My stepson is 12 years old, loves guns, and is very familiar with them.   He is also brown–decidedly not white.   We’ve taught him to be safe with them.  He knows not to handle real guns without an adult being present.  BUT he doesn’t know that it’s probably not a good idea to handle fake one’s either.    I am going to make damn sure he never has a fake gun in any public place and when his family is not with him.
• There was a shooting just reported in AZ of a black man by a white cop.  I’m still waiting for more details to come in.  Cop thought the guy had a gun in his pocket–it was a bottle of pills.

If you listen to what is being said in the media (not just on Fox but on CNN and local stations too), there is a lot of victim blaming and officer excuse making.  White America’s attitude is coming across like this.

‘Don’t black folk know they should never ever carry anything in their pockets AND should always keep their hands in the air AND always have a pleasant or at least non-demonic look on their face.  AND they can’t be too large or physically intimidating because a big black many is very scary, even to really big white men, even when they’re 25+ feet away**.  So if you’re a big black guy, hunch your shoulders.  And whatever you do, don’t be sullen or angry.’

In other words, don’t give the white cops an excuse to kill you and this message is loud and clear to the black community.  Most of their parents have already told them not to do such things.  Not that doing any of that will actually keep black men safe in this country.  When an entire race of people in our society have to raise their sons to live in fear and act more passive and non-threatening with the police than white people do, then something is terribly, terribly wrong.  The sooner white people acknowledge this, the sooner we can address the problem.  But I don’t think white people in general are capable of acknowledging our complicity in this problem because that would mean acknowledging that we’re wrong about something.  As we’ve seen time and time again, too many Americans think that if we’re not exceptional and right all the time, we’re nothing at all.

Notes:

*I totally understand why the police want bigger and better guns.  When I was a probation officer I always felt like I was outgunned.  I had a Speed 6 Ruger, a “brick” cell phone with a dead battery, no partner or back-up and my crappy little car (VW Fox).  I would go into the field armed with these items.  Here are just some examples of what I faced with those “weapons:

• walking into crack houses where I was surrounded by dozens of male drug addicts and/or dealers
• interviewing a probationers with serious anger control issues (child abuser/molester/wife beater) in their dark and dingy homes
• explaining to VERY angry probationers and their family members why I had to talk to their boss at work about his/her probation and why they lost their job and would soon probably be homeless.  (I took no joy in this task.  I was legally obligated to verify employment with a supervisor a few times a year.  Talk about the system shooting itself in the foot.  The minute they lost their job their risk of recidivism would skyrocket)  

I guess if I couldn’t draw my weapon in time or if I lost it, I could have used the cell phone to brain them.

**Brown was 6 ft 5 in and 290 lbs and Wilson was 6 ft 4 in and 210 lbs.  Wilson isn’t small by any means.  He also had at least two deadly weapons–his pistol and his police car.  Who knows what he had in the trunk–one can safely assume a shotgun.  Plus he had a radio so he could call in reinforcements.  In regards to the distance, the audio article clearly proves Wilson was either lying about the distance or lying about Brown charging him or both.

Some political thoughts for the day…

Some quickies for you:

• Dinesh D’Souza, asshat extraordinaire, is a big whiny child.  Those evil prosecutors are doing their job and trying to put him in prison.  How dare they?!  He’ll get probation and we’ll probably still have to see his idiocy on Bill Maher.
• Conservatives are freaking out because the President saluted with a coffee cup in his hand.  I would rather have a latte in the middle of my salute than a Scottish Terrier.  And never mind about the real problems this country has because the paranoid, desperate, white, male base eats up this shit up.
• Can I just say how much I admire Gabby Giffords?  She is absolutely amazing to have come back from that horrible tragedy in Tucson AND launch a PAC to fight against NRA extremism.  What’s even better?  It’s working.
• If I hear one more liberal complain that the President isn’t liberal enough, is ineffectual and that Congress sucks, I’m going to go nuclear and remind them that it’s probably because they didn’t vote in the f*%!ing 2010 mid-terms.  Here’s just one very good example of how that has hurt and will continue to hurt us for years to come.
• How effed up is that Emma Watson, of Harry Potter fame, gave a speech to the U.N. on feminism and as a result was threatened with sexual violence and having nude photos of her posted online. This kind of terrorizing online is getting worse, not better.  I don’t know the solution but I really feel for any woman who is harrassed and terrorized because she speaks her mind on the Intertoobs.
• Love the fact that big tech companies are divesting themselves of ALEC.  If you don’t know who they are, they’re what’s wrong with America.  A group of corporate representatives and conservatives who draft “model” legislation that they then push using vast resources in multiple states.  Their laws which include gems like SB1070, Stand your Ground,  Voter ID, and many more are nightmares and they’re making headway in many state legislatures because people aren’t paying attention to what’s happening on the state level. They’re too busy hating the President (see “Coffeegate” above and Congress (lowest approval ratings ever) on the national level and worrying about things that aren’t immediate threats (Ebola, Isis, etc).
• And speaking of ISIS, don’t you just love that we’ve gone to war and there was absolutely no debate in Congress?!  They’d rather have yet another vote on appealing Obamacare.  Never mind that the rising cost of healthcare has actually slowed down as a direct result of the law, which was one of the main points of it in the first damn place.  Who needs facts….right?

I’d better stop while I’m ahead.  Methinks I’m getting my mojo for political blogging back and it’s about damn time!