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Let's not forget about that dear Senator from New York, that is a paragon of virtue who in a June 2017 speech dropped the "f" bomb twice.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/06/09/
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More dirty secrets. (See 1 below)
And
Losing credibility. (See 1a below.)
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All of a sudden information about that pesky Russian Dossier was revealed because Feinstein had a headache? (See 2 below.)
And
Noose beginning to be hung over a tree? (See 2a below.)
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More humor. (See 3 below.)
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Are Bitcoins the 21st Century equivalent of Tulip Bulbs? (See 4 below.)
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Finally, just some random thoughts and a response to a posting.
We all know Trump plays to his base which most polls suggest is around 35 - 40%. What Trump, apparently, does not understand and/or cares about are statistics of mid-term election results for the president's party which generally loses seats.
In this case, should Trump's party lose the House, his opponents will surely seek to impeach him. Therefore, Trump should realize he should think more about being President of the Republican Party and less about focusing solely on himself and the image he portrays to his narrower base.
What Trump and Republicans have going for them is the economy, employment figures, increasing wages and income from the tax cut, all of which Democrats oppose(d.) Therefore, the Demwits must find wedge issues to bring Trump down and another reason why Trump should think twice before tweeting and engaging in outbursts which undercut his and his party's basic agenda.
The mass media are never going to give Trump a fair shake so he needs to avoid comments that allow his detractors to paint him as a racist, totally insensitive etc. As I have previously noted, the bad mouth has been put on him and it is difficult, if not impossible, to shake it because there are so many varied sources arrayed against him.
On another topic we all know the jokes about women having headaches at "critical times." I submit Sen. Feinstein has given a new meaning to the word because she now claims she released Russian Collusion Dossier information because she had a cold which produced a headache. Now her headache must be lingering because she believes we should close Gitmo.
I submit these are wedge issues which are being used to detract attention away from the "good news" Trump should be enjoying if he would quit stepping in his own mess.
But let;s not focus solely on Sen "Release" Feinstein. We also have Rep. Pelosi telling us 'deplorables' $1000 is chicken----. Apparently, Pelosi may have a cold as well and some headache issues that reveal her callous out of touch own degree of sanity.
Drinking Potomac water apparently induces headaches.
As for the posting about Mueller. I am no lawyer, though I have a law degree, nor has Trump sought my legal advice but were he to do so I would tell Mueller he would only respond to any questioning akin to the way Comey's FBI gumshoes conducted their's regarding Hillary. (See 5 below.)
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Dick
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1)
Dirty College Secrets
A frequent point I have made in past columns has been about the educational travesty happening on many college campuses. Some people have labeled my observations and concerns as trivial, unimportant and cherry-picking. While the spring semester awaits us, let’s ask ourselves whether we’d like to see repeats of last year’s antics.
An excellent source for college news is Campus Reform, a conservative website operated by the Leadership Institute. Its reporters are college students. Here is a tiny sample of last year’s bizarre stories.
Donna Riley, a professor at Purdue University’s School of Engineering Education, published an article in the most recent issue of the peer-reviewed Journal of Engineering Education, positing that academic rigor is a “dirty deed” that upholds “white male heterosexual privilege.” Riley added that “scientific knowledge itself is gendered, raced, and colonizing.” Would you hire an engineering education graduate who has little mastery of the rigor of engineering? What does Riley’s vision, if actually practiced by her colleagues, do to the worth of degrees in engineering education from Purdue held by female and black students?
Sympathizing with Riley’s vision is Rochelle Gutierrez, a math education professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In her recent book, she says the ability to solve algebra and geometry problems perpetuates “unearned privilege” among whites. Educators must be aware of the “politics that mathematics brings” in society. She thinks that “on many levels, mathematics itself operates as Whiteness.” After all, she adds, “who gets credit for doing and developing mathematics, who is capable in mathematics, and who is seen as part of the mathematical community is generally viewed as White.” What’s worse is that the university’s interim provost, John Wilkin, sanctioned her vision, telling Fox News that Gutierrez is an established and admired scholar who has been published in many peer-reviewed publications. I hope that the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s black students don’t have the same admiration and stay away from her classes.
Last February, a California State University, Fullerton professor assaulted a CSUF Republicans member during a demonstration against President Donald Trump’s executive order on immigration. The students identified the assailant as Eric Canin, an anthropology professor. Fortunately, the school had the good sense to later suspend Canin after confirming the allegations through an internal investigation.
Last February, a California State University, Fullerton professor assaulted a CSUF Republicans member during a demonstration against President Donald Trump’s executive order on immigration. The students identified the assailant as Eric Canin, an anthropology professor. Fortunately, the school had the good sense to later suspend Canin after confirming the allegations through an internal investigation.
Last month, the presidents of 13 San Antonio colleges declared in an op-ed written by Ric Baser, president of the Higher Education Council of San Antonio, and signed by San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg and 12 other members of the HECSA that “hate speech” and “inappropriate messages” should not be treated as free speech on college campuses. Their vision should be seen as tyranny. The true test of one’s commitment to free speech doesn’t come when he permits people to be free to make statements that he does not find offensive. The true test of one’s commitment to free speech comes when he permits people to make statements he does deem offensive.
Last year, University of Georgia professor Rick Watson adopted a policy allowing students to select their own grade if they “feel unduly stressed” by their actual grade in the class. Benjamin Ayers, dean of the school’s Terry College of Business, released a statement condemning Watson’s pick-your-own-grade policy, calling it “inappropriate.” He added: “Rest assured that this ill-advised proposal will not be implemented in any Terry classroom. The University of Georgia upholds strict guidelines and academic policies to promote a culture of academic rigor, integrity, and honesty.” Ayers’ response gives us hope that not all is lost in terms of academic honesty.
Other campus good news is a report on the resignation of George Ciccariello-Maher, a white Drexel University professor who tweeted last winter, “All I Want For Christmas is White Genocide.” He said that he resigned from his tenured position because threats against him and his family had become “unsustainable.” If conservative students made such threats, they, too, could benefit from learning the principles of free speech.
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Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.
1a) Black Protest Has Lost Its Power
Have whites finally found the courage to judge African-Americans fairly by universal standards?
By Shelby Steel
And protest has long been an ennobling tradition in black American life. From the Montgomery bus boycott to the march on Selma, from lunch-counter sit-ins and Freedom Rides to the 1963 March on Washington, only protest could open the way to freedom and the acknowledgment of full humanity. So it was a high calling in black life. It required great sacrifice and entailed great risk. Martin Luther King Jr. , the archetypal black protester, made his sacrifices, ennobled all of America, and was then shot dead.
For the NFL players there was no real sacrifice, no risk and no achievement. Still, in black America there remains a great reverence for protest. Through protest—especially in the 1950s and ’60s—we, as a people, touched greatness. Protest, not immigration, was our way into the American Dream. Freedom in this country had always been relative to race, and it was black protest that made freedom an absolute.
It is not surprising, then, that these black football players would don the mantle of protest. The surprise was that it didn’t work. They had misread the historic moment. They were not speaking truth to power. Rather, they were figures of pathos, mindlessly loyal to a black identity that had run its course.
What they missed is a simple truth that is both obvious and unutterable: The oppression of black people is over with. This is politically incorrect news, but it is true nonetheless. We blacks are, today, a free people. It is as if freedom sneaked up and caught us by surprise.
Of course this does not mean there is no racism left in American life. Racism is endemic to the human condition, just as stupidity is. We will always have to be on guard against it. But now it is recognized as a scourge, as the crowning immorality of our age and our history.
Protest always tries to make a point. But what happens when that point already has been made—when, in this case, racism has become anathema and freedom has expanded?
What happened was that black America was confronted with a new problem: the shock of freedom. This is what replaced racism as our primary difficulty. Blacks had survived every form of human debasement with ingenuity, self-reliance, a deep and ironic humor, a capacity for self-reinvention and a heroic fortitude. But we had no experience of wide-open freedom.
Watch out that you get what you ask for, the saying goes. Freedom came to blacks with an overlay of cruelty because it meant we had to look at ourselves without the excuse of oppression. Four centuries of dehumanization had left us underdeveloped in many ways, and within the world’s most highly developed society. When freedom expanded, we became more accountable for that underdevelopment. So freedom put blacks at risk of being judged inferior, the very libel that had always been used against us.
To hear, for example, that more than 4,000 people were shot in Chicago in 2016 embarrasses us because this level of largely black-on-black crime cannot be blamed simply on white racism.
We can say that past oppression left us unprepared for freedom. This is certainly true. But it is no consolation. Freedom is just freedom. It is a condition, not an agent of change. It does not develop or uplift those who win it. Freedom holds us accountable no matter the disadvantages we inherit from the past. The tragedy in Chicago—rightly or wrongly—reflects on black America.
That’s why, in the face of freedom’s unsparing judgmentalism, we reflexively claim that freedom is a lie. We conjure elaborate narratives that give white racism new life in the present: “systemic” and “structural” racism, racist “microaggressions,” “white privilege,” and so on. All these narratives insist that blacks are still victims of racism, and that freedom’s accountability is an injustice.
We end up giving victimization the charisma of black authenticity. Suffering, poverty and underdevelopment are the things that make you “truly black.” Success and achievement throw your authenticity into question.
The NFL protests were not really about injustice. Instead such protests are usually genuflections to today’s victim-focused black identity. Protest is the action arm of this identity. It is not seeking a new and better world; it merely wants documentation that the old racist world still exists. It wants an excuse.
For any formerly oppressed group, there will be an expectation that the past will somehow be an excuse for difficulties in the present. This is the expectation behind the NFL protests and the many protests of groups like Black Lives Matter. The near-hysteria around the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Freddie Gray and others is also a hunger for the excuse of racial victimization, a determination to keep it alive. To a degree, black America’s self-esteem is invested in the illusion that we live under a cloud of continuing injustice.
When you don’t know how to go forward, you never just sit there; you go backward into what you know, into what is familiar and comfortable and, most of all, exonerating. You rebuild in your own mind the oppression that is fading from the world. And you feel this abstract, fabricated oppression as if it were your personal truth, the truth around which your character is formed. Watching the antics of Black Lives Matter is like watching people literally aspiring to black victimization, longing for it as for a consummation.
But the NFL protests may be a harbinger of change. They elicited considerable resentment. There have been counterprotests. TV viewership has gone down. Ticket sales have dropped. What is remarkable about this response is that it may foretell a new fearlessness in white America—a new willingness in whites (and blacks outside the victim-focused identity) to say to blacks what they really think and feel, to judge blacks fairly by standards that are universal.
We blacks have lived in a bubble since the 1960s because whites have been deferential for fear of being seen as racist. The NFL protests reveal the fundamental obsolescence—for both blacks and whites—of a victim-focused approach to racial inequality. It causes whites to retreat into deference and blacks to become nothing more than victims. It makes engaging as human beings and as citizens impermissible, a betrayal of the sacred group identity. Black victimization is not much with us any more as a reality, but it remains all too powerful as a hegemony.
Mr. Steele, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, is author of “Shame: How America’s Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country” (Basic Books, 2015).
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2)The Dossier Rehab Campaign
Congress should work quickly to declassify documents and let the public decide.
By Kimberley A. Strassel
There’s no such thing as a coincidence in Washington, so why the sudden, furious effort by Democrats and the media to give cover to the Steele dossier? As in, the sudden, furious effort that happens to coincide with congressional investigators’ finally being given access to FBI records about the Trump-Russia probe.
This scandal’s pivotal day was Jan. 3. That’s the deadline House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes gave the Federal Bureau of Investigation to turn over documents it had been holding for months. Speaker Paul Ryan backed Mr. Nunes’s threat to cite officials for contempt of Congress. Everyone who played a part in encouraging the FBI’s colonoscopy of the Trump campaign—congressional Democrats, FBI and Justice Department senior career staff, the Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama political mobs, dossier commissioner Fusion GPS, the press corps—knew about the deadline and clearly had been tipped to the likelihood that the FBI would have to comply. Thus the dossier rehabilitation campaign.
Weeks before, the same crew had taken a desperate shot at running away from the dossier, with a New York Times special that attempted to play down its significance in the FBI probe. You can see why. In the year since BuzzFeed published the salacious dossier, we’ve discovered it was a work product of the Clinton campaign, commissioned by an oppo-research firm (Fusion), compiled by a British ex-spook on the basis of anonymous sources, and rolled out to the media in the runup to the election. Oh, and it appears to continue to be almost entirely false. When the best you’ve got is that a campaign orbiter made a public trip to Russia, you haven’t got much.
But with Congress about to obtain documents that show the dossier did matter, it was time for a new line. And so the day before the Nunes deadline, Fusion co-founders Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch broke their public silence to explain in a New York Times op-ed that what really matters was their noble intention—to highlight Donald Trump’s misdeeds. The duo took credit for alerting the “national security community” to a Russian “attack.”
Meanwhile, Dianne Feinstein, ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, decided it was suddenly a matter of urgency that the nation see Mr. Simpson’s testimony, which he gave back in August. That move provided the cable news channels with more than 300 pages of self-serving material. Mr. Simpson extols his journalistic chops, praises the integrity of dossier author Christopher Steele (a “Boy Scout”), professes his love of country and his distaste for Russians (other than those paying him), and ladles on more disinformation about Mr. Trump. Democrats and the media have spun this into a new contention: What mattered were the motives and credentials of the dossier’s creators, which were sufficient to give the FBI good cause to run with the document.
Which you have to admit sounds a lot better than “Hillary Clinton’s Campaign Conjured Up an Opposition-Research Document That Was Fed to the Obama FBI, Which Then Used It to Spy on the Trump Campaign.” Even if that’s a more accurate headline.
We don’t know exactly what Congress has seen, but it’s a safe bet it’s hot. The media and Democrats are trashing Sens. Chuck Grassley and Lindsey Graham for their criminal referral of Mr. Steele to the Justice Department. But neither man would make such a move without good—and documented—cause. If anything, the referral is suggestive of FBI misbehavior. Evidently whatever Messrs. Grassley and Graham found came only at this late stage, after the bureau reluctantly made key documents available to lawmakers. The implication is that the FBI and Justice Department knew they had a problem and were concealing it from investigators.
The risk for anti-Trumpers—especially those doubling down on the dossier—is that the black-and-white documents will blow their latest narrative to oblivion. It isn’t as if there is much in the record to date to support it. If Mr. Steele was such a professional, why was he out spreading national-security “intelligence” through the media? If Mr. Simpson was so worried for his country, why did he spend months dodging congressional requests for testimony, and refuse to name his client? If Mr. Steele was confident enough in his document to spool it to the FBI, why has he ducked every congressional request that he explain his work? And that’s before Mr. Grassley’s claim to have credible evidence that Mr. Steele lied to the government.
You can bet that the dossier spin is going to get even crazier, which is why it is so urgent that Congress move quickly to declassify core documents and release them to the public. So long as those documents remain secret, dossier proponents can concoct whatever story they choose. It’s time to end the season of silly spin and begin one of accountability.
2a)
2a)
FINALLY; JUSTICE?
ILoveMyFreedom learned Friday — An 11-count indictment was handed out, in connection to the Russian bribery scheme involving Crooked Hillary Clinton, the Obama administration, and Uranium One.
The charges were leveled against Mark Lambert, the “former co-president of a Maryland-based transportation company that provides services for the transportation of nuclear materials to customers in the United States and abroad.”
Lambert 54, of Maryland, was charged with “one count of conspiracy to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) and to commit wire fraud, seven counts of violating the FCPA, two counts of wire fraud and one count of international promotion money laundering,” the DOJ said in a statement.
The charges are connected to the alleged bribery scheme that involves “Vadim Mikerin, a Russian official at JSC Techsnabexport (TENEX), a subsidiary of Russia’s State Atomic Energy Corporation and the sole supplier and exporter of Russian Federation uranium and uranium enrichment services to nuclear power companies worldwide, in order to secure contracts with TENEX.”TENEX is the commercial sales arm for Russia’s Rosatom, which took full control of Uranium One in 2013.A report from October revealed that federal agents started collecting evidence in 2009 about Russian officials that were engaged in bribery, kickbacks, extortion, and money laundering connected to the Uranium One deal:“Federal agents used a confidential U.S. witness working inside the Russian nuclear industry to gather extensive financial records, make secret recordings and intercept emails as early as 2009 that showed Moscow had compromised an American uranium trucking firm with bribes and kickbacks in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, FBI and court documents show.They also obtained an eyewitness account — backed by documents — indicating Russian nuclear officials had routed millions of dollars to the U.S. designed to benefit former President Bill Clinton’s charitable foundation during the time Secretary of State Hillary Clinton served on a government body that provided a favorable decision to Moscow, sources told The Hill.Rather than bring immediate charges in 2010, however, the Department of Justice (DOJ) continued investigating the matter for nearly four more years, essentially leaving the American public and Congress in the dark about Russian nuclear corruption on U.S. soil during a period when the Obama administration made two major decisions benefiting Putin’s commercial nuclear ambitions.”In December, Attorney General Jeff Sessions ordered that prosecutors at the DOJ start “interviewing FBI agents about evidence they uncovered in a criminal investigation into a highly-controversial uranium deal that involves Bill and Hillary Clinton.”
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3) A Delta plane, bringing passengers from various time zones lands in my home town of Birmingham, Alabama. The hostess gets on the intercom and says to the passengers: ' please set your watches back 100 years to the local time zone.'
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4)Bitcoin Explained...
A lot of monkeys lived near a village. One day a merchant came to the village to buy these monkeys! He announced that he will buy the monkeys @ $100 each. The villagers thought that this man was mad. They thought how can somebody buy stray monkeys at $100 each? Still, some people caught some monkeys and gave it to this merchant and he gave $100 for each monkey.
This news spread like wildfire and people caught monkeys and sold it to the merchant. After a few days, the merchant announced that he will buy monkeys @ $200 each. The lazy villagers also ran around to catch the remaining monkeys! They sold the remaining monkeys @ $200 each. Then the merchant announced that he will buy monkeys @ $500 each!
The villagers start to lose sleep!.They caught six or seven monkeys, which was all that was left and got $500 each. The villagers were waiting anxiously for the next announcement. Then the merchant announced that he is going home for a week. And when he returns, he will buy monkeys @ $1,000 each!
He asked his employee to take care of the monkeys he bought. He was alone taking care of all the monkeys in a cage. The merchant went home. The villagers were very sad as there were no more monkeys left for them to sell at $1,000 each. Then the employee told them that he will sell some monkeys @ $700 each secretly. This news spread like fire.
Since the merchant buys monkey @ $1,000 each, there is a $300 profit for each monkey.
The next day, villagers made a queue near the monkey cage. The employee sold all the monkeys at $700 each. The rich bought monkeys in big lots. The poor borrowed money from money lenders and also bought monkeys!
The villagers took care of their monkeys & waited for the merchant to return. But nobody came! Then they ran to the employee... But he has already left too! The villagers then realized that they have bought the useless stray monkeys @ $700 each and were unable to sell them!
The Bitcoin will be the next monkey business .... It will make a lot of people bankrupt and a few people filthy rich in this monkey business. That's how it will work.
3) A Delta plane, bringing passengers from various time zones lands in my home town of Birmingham, Alabama. The hostess gets on the intercom and says to the passengers: ' please set your watches back 100 years to the local time zone.'
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4)Bitcoin Explained...
A lot of monkeys lived near a village. One day a merchant came to the village to buy these monkeys! He announced that he will buy the monkeys @ $100 each. The villagers thought that this man was mad. They thought how can somebody buy stray monkeys at $100 each? Still, some people caught some monkeys and gave it to this merchant and he gave $100 for each monkey.
This news spread like wildfire and people caught monkeys and sold it to the merchant. After a few days, the merchant announced that he will buy monkeys @ $200 each. The lazy villagers also ran around to catch the remaining monkeys! They sold the remaining monkeys @ $200 each. Then the merchant announced that he will buy monkeys @ $500 each!
The villagers start to lose sleep!.They caught six or seven monkeys, which was all that was left and got $500 each. The villagers were waiting anxiously for the next announcement. Then the merchant announced that he is going home for a week. And when he returns, he will buy monkeys @ $1,000 each!
He asked his employee to take care of the monkeys he bought. He was alone taking care of all the monkeys in a cage. The merchant went home. The villagers were very sad as there were no more monkeys left for them to sell at $1,000 each. Then the employee told them that he will sell some monkeys @ $700 each secretly. This news spread like fire.
Since the merchant buys monkey @ $1,000 each, there is a $300 profit for each monkey.
The next day, villagers made a queue near the monkey cage. The employee sold all the monkeys at $700 each. The rich bought monkeys in big lots. The poor borrowed money from money lenders and also bought monkeys!
The villagers took care of their monkeys & waited for the merchant to return. But nobody came! Then they ran to the employee... But he has already left too! The villagers then realized that they have bought the useless stray monkeys @ $700 each and were unable to sell them!
The Bitcoin will be the next monkey business .... It will make a lot of people bankrupt and a few people filthy rich in this monkey business. That's how it will work.
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5) How far will Trump
go to avoid Mueller’s
questions? Here are
several scenarios.
By Paul Waldman
If you’re one of President Trump’s attorneys, the thought of him sitting down with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III to answer questions about the Russia scandal is absolutely terrifying, even if you knew it would eventually come to this. We learned earlier this week that Mueller raised the issue of an interview with Trump’s attorneys in December, and Wednesday, Trump was asked about it during a news conference.
“We’ll see what happens,” he said, but he added: “When they have no collusion — and nobody’s found any collusion at any level — it seems unlikely that you’d even have an interview.”
Trump is many different kinds of wrong here: There were multiple contacts between Trump officials and Russians that could be called collusion, and collusion isn’t the only thing Mueller is investigating anyway. And if suspects could say to prosecutors and police, “I’m totally innocent, so there’s no need to interrogate me,” then the jails would be empty.
So it certainly seems like we’re headed for a confrontation, since Trump doesn’t want to testify and Mueller very much wants him to. How is it going to play out? Let’s walk through events as they are likely to unfold.
What Mueller surely wants is the most open conversation possible, not limited in time or subject. That way he’d be able to take his time, ask Trump about anything and ask all the follow-up questions he wants. Trump’s attorneys, on the other hand, are dealing with an erratic client whom they surely fear will implicate himself, either through sheer stupidity or because Mueller forces him to do so under oath.
So you can conceive of Trump’s team having an ordered set of preferences. The best scenario would be that Trump answers no questions at all. The next best scenario would be that Trump gives written answers to questions, which would enable the lawyers to carefully edit the answers to make sure none of them are damaging to him. After that would be an interview that’s limited in some way. The least preferable option would be an open-ended deposition.
Trump’s lawyers may try to limit the questions to just those about direct contacts with Russia, since it’s entirely possible that all those contacts happened without Trump’s specific knowledge. But it’s almost impossible to see Mueller agreeing to that since his inquiry is also focused on obstruction of justice — including Trump’s firing of FBI Director James B. Comey, which the president admitted on national television he did out of anger over the Russia investigation and after which he told the Russian foreign minister and ambassador the same thing. Mueller has also been pursuing other avenues of potential prosecution as well, including matters related to Trump’s spectacularly shady financial history, which is peppered with contacts with a colorful cast of Russian characters, including mobsters and oligarchs.
Presidents have testified under oath on a few occasions before. The most direct parallel is with Bill Clinton in 1998. After Clinton had resisted independent counsel Kenneth Starr’s attempts to interview him about his affair with Monica Lewinsky, Starr issued a subpoena for Clinton to testify before a grand jury. In the end, the two sides negotiated ground rules under which Clinton was deposed in the White House instead of a courtroom and his lawyers were allowed to be present. The videotaped deposition, which stretched over five hours, was released publicly.
As that precedent shows, the outcome of what is almost certain to be a confrontation depends on a combination of legal and political factors. It will likely begin with a negotiation (which may already be going on), in which the two sides try to agree on a set of ground rules that is acceptable to both. But if they can’t agree, the next step would be for Mueller to issue a subpoena demanding that Trump appear before the grand jury.
Grand jury testimony could be a real disaster for Trump. His lawyers wouldn’t be there to help him, leaving him with only his wits and his innocence (ahem) to protect him. Which is why Mueller could use that threat the same way Starr did; keep in mind that Starr withdrew his original subpoena once Clinton’s lawyers agreed to what everyone knew would be a pretty invasive deposition.
That brings us to another possibility, one I think we should be prepared for. What if Mueller issues a subpoena for Trump to appear before the grand jury and Trump simply refuses? It would be shocking: the president would be refusing to answer questions in what could turn out to be one of the biggest scandals in American history. But Trump might not care, particularly if he’s worried that the testimony would require him to either admit to crimes or commit the crime of perjury.
If Trump refused to obey the subpoena, I’m sure that his lawyers could come up with some rationale for why he had the right to do so, however legally shaky it might be. Trump has shown time and again that he finds the very idea of courts exercising power over him to be offensive and unacceptable, so it isn’t hard to imagine him tossing a subpoena in the trash and telling his lawyers to get Mueller off his back. And of course, Trump could move to fire Mueller, which would be its own scandal.
Short of that, the question of whether Trump had to answer questions (or invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, which would also be a political disaster) would quickly go all the way up to the Supreme Court. And while reasonable people might assume that of course the court would rule that the president has to comply with a subpoena from a legally appointed special counsel on a matter of national security and potential criminality, there’s no real way to be sure. I’m certain there would be at least three votes (Alito, Thomas, and Gorsuch) for the legal principle known as Republican Presidents Get To Do Whatever They Want; the question would be whether Justice Anthony M. Kennedy and Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. would join them.
So the outcome is very much in doubt. We know Trump is going to resist this as much as he can, and we know Mueller is no pushover. So we’re in for a fight.
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