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You are here: Home / Politics / Domestic Politics / All the President’s Henchmen

All the President’s Henchmen

by | 120 Comments

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Maddow on AM Joy yesterday:

Me too, Rachel. The Trumps and their mobbed-up flunkies are an extreme danger to the republic and must be defeated. But GOP establishment figures like Barr, who’ve proved willing to go to any lengths to keep the con going, are a more insidious menace.

Some connected and elected Democrats vouched for Barr when Trump nominated him. They figured a long-term DC player could be trusted to protect institutions instead of subverting them on behalf of the demented conman. It was a bad bet.

The hot tub salesman who filled the AG job on an acting basis was an unqualified numpty, but at least he was impeded in his corruption by lack of familiarity with the job. Not so Mr. Barr. Consider a small sample of Barr’s inappropriate actions since his confirmation:

  • Lied about the contents of the Mueller report before its release
  • Held a press conference just prior to the Mueller report release to lie about it some more
  • Buried the whistleblower report and unlawfully failed to transmit the complaint to the FEC
  • Dismissed IG investigations that cleared Trump’s perceived enemies and reopened investigations
  • Undermined relationships with allies to investigate “deep state” conspiracy theories
  • Obstructed investigations into corrupt attempts to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census

Parnas is a shady character with his own agenda, so it makes sense to treat his unverified claims about Barr or anyone else with skepticism. But as Maddow points out, Trump did mention Barr as well as Giuliani during the phone call with Zelensky to advance the extortion scheme.

Speaker Pelosi gets it. She called Barr a “rogue attorney general” and one of “the president’s henchmen” the other day at a press conference (clip included in another post). She’s right:

Does anybody think that the rogue attorney general is going to support–appoint a special prosecutor? No, because he’s implicated in all of this. This is an example of all of the president’s henchmen, and I hope that the senators do not become part of the president’s henchmen.

Pelosi’s remarks about Barr didn’t get the attention they deserved because of the media circus around Trump’s impeachment. But it was reassuring (for me, at least) that she chose to make them.

Because only a portion of one half of one branch of government is currently acting as guardians of the Constitution the entire government swore to uphold, it’s a heavy lift to ask the House Dems to investigate the attorney general too. But no one else is going to shoulder that load. It’s up to the Speaker.

Reader Interactions

120Comments

  1. 1.

    Baud

    I think we have to see how the impeachment trial plays out before thinking about next steps. I don’t want to give the media a distraction that takes the focus of Trump and the GOP senators.

  2. 2.

    Chief Oshkosh

    Pelosi’s remarks about Barr didn’t get the attention they deserved because of the media circus…

    Insert anything of true importance for “Pelosi’s remarks about Barr” and you see Trump’s strategy. Bringing on Dershowitz and Starr is adding more clowns to the circus, and the media will eat it up.

  3. 3.

    geg6

    She was on Bill Maher’s show Friday. She was very, very good and forceful and honest about where we are. The audience went apeshit—I’ve watched that show for years, on and off depending on how much Maher annoyed me that week, and I’ve never seen the audience react like that. Total rock star reception. Even Bill was on his best behavior with her.

  4. 4.

    zhena gogolia

    @Chief Oshkosh:

    The NYT headline was something like “Trump Assembles Celebrity Team.” The media are so disappointing. But my husband’s mantra is, “They want those tax cuts.”

  5. 5.

    donnah

    One of the most incredible and concerning things about the Trump presidency is how easily members of his administration were able to quickly show how corrupt they were and how little was done to stop the corruption. Those members early on who did find out how inept and ignorant Trump is and were horrified were either driven out or resigned in frustration. Guardrails were promised, then abandoned.

    In regards to the appointment of Barr, I remember prosecutor Chuck Rosenberg saying on MSNBC that Barr was a man of integrity, that he had worked with him and trusted his judgment, only to say that after Barr stepped on the Mueller report he was severely disappointed in Barr and appalled by what he had done. Rosenberg has gone on to be outspoken against Barr.

    Trump brings out the worst in anyone who comes his way. If they’re good people they leave, and if they are greedy or power-hungry, they latch onto him like leeches.

    There’s going to be a lot of lies and feigned outrage from the Republicans during the impeachment process. But it really is a major battle for democracy.

  8. 8.

    MattF

    I’ll admit that Barr’s many collusions with criminality came as a surprise to me. There are a select few who have taken the opportunity provided by Trump to Jump head-first into the abyss. Quite the revelation.

  9. 9.

    TS (the original)

    @geg6:  Your post had me looking for the video. She did get a massive welcome from the audience. And it continued throughout her interview.

  11. 11.

    Dorothy A. Winsor

    @donnah:

    Trump is like some artifact in a fantasy novel that people touch at their peril because it tests them. How many fail the Trump test is surprising to me. Maybe you have to be flawed in the first place to go anywhere near him.

  12. 12.

    WaterGirl

    @geg6: Is there a link to that show?

    Or, I guess I get HBO, maybe I can find it that way even though I missed the original airing.

  13. 13.

    MattF

    @Betty Cracker: You’re probably right. However, Bolton is one person who could outsmart McConnell. There’s still a tell-all book from Bolton looming in the background. We shall see.

  14. 14.

    WaterGirl

    I get as outraged and discouraged as the next person, but if we can keep up the momentum just a smidge longer I think we could get to the point where the Republicans are screwed either way.  Either they call witnesses or every remaining thinking person will be outraged and they will lose any independent votes they still have.

  15. 15.

    debbie

    @Baud:

    I hope the House mangers are practicing their being loud, pushy, and bossy voices, having just listened to an NPR interview with Robert Ray.

  16. 16.

    tobie

    I’ve often said to myself since the midterms in 2018 that the only thing standing between us and autocracy is Nancy Pelosi. It’s a comfort to know Pelosi is there. It’s frightening as hell to realize that it’s the Dem victory in the House and the courage of one individual that’s keeping us safe right now.

  17. 17.

    Gin & Tonic

    Pretty funny, somebody I sort of know just posted a picture showing Lev “I don’t know him” Parnas standing next to DJT at what appears like Ivanka’s birthday party when she was like 10 or so (can’t accurately count the candles.) Ivana was still the incumbent wife, standing on one side of DJT, Lev standing on the other side. The Google tells me they divorced in 1991, so this would presumably have been earlier?

  18. 18.

    Baud

    @debbie: We know what they’re like. We just saw them in hearings.

     

    @tobie: It’s never one person. It’s always the team. I think we get in trouble when we look for messiahs and saviors.

  21. 21.

    tobie

    @donnah: Rosenberg said the same about John Durham. Anyone who would agree to take on the task of investigating the investigators in the Russia inquiry is a Republican loyalist in my book.

    P.S. Among the news dumps on Friday was that Rod Rosenberg admitted that he had released Lisa Page’s and Peter Strzok’s text messages to the press…all to advance the theory of a deep state conspiracy against Trump. The go-along-to-get-along crowd is killing democracy and that includes Rosenstein and IG Michael Horowitz.

  22. 22.

    debbie

    @Baud:

    Even though Senators are to remain quiet, what are the odds we’ll hear a shout of “You lie!” while the House Managers are presenting their case?

  24. 24.

    tobie

    @Baud: Agreed. My point was more rhetorical. Were it not for the Dem victory in the House in 2018, there would be no check whatsoever on the executive branch. But I would add that if the Dems in the House had buckled to pressure from the right and left flanks to appoint a less experienced House caucus leader, we also wouldn’t be where we are right now.

  25. 25.

    germy

    “I don’t know him.”

    The President claimed attorney-client privilege over Parnas' knowledge of the Ukrainian op. His former lawyer stated, under penalty of lying to Congress, that Parnas had been working for POTUS on this Ukrainian operation.
    — emptywheel (@emptywheel) January 19, 2020

  26. 26.

    Betty Cracker

    This weekend so far:

    • My husband walked face-first into a sliding glass door (no breakage, thank FSM)
    • I whacked my head while climbing into a low-slung car
    • Badger the dog smacked his head on a table while attempting into jump in my husband’s lap

    And it’s only Sunday morning. I’m tempted to put helmets on us all…

  29. 29.

    MattF

    OT. Kevin Drum notes that Martin Indyk is now in favor of the US disengaging in the Middle East. Indyk was always a major ME hawk, so this is significant. I wonder if giving up on the ME is behind some of the ex-neo-con never-Trumpism.

  30. 30.

    LarrytheRed

    It’s one thing to be a principled advocate of the “unitary executive” theory, which seems to be Dershowitz’s schtick. It’s another to be a toady. Barr doesn’t seem to care about the difference.

  31. 31.

    germy

    Rod Rosenstein is really not that enigmatic or complicated. He is simply a weak character whose moral compass is outweighed by his instinct for self-preservation and need for belonging, and he’s therefore susceptible to stronger forces around him in service of those goals 1/ https://t.co/VQJZhLg2GK
    — Asha Rangappa (@AshaRangappa_) September 3, 2019

    In this regard, Comey assessed him exactly right: RR appointed a Special Counsel only because once the behind-the-scenes notes of POTUS came out, he knew he was going to be accused of obstruction/cover up. He did the right thing in appointing SC, but he did it to save himself 2/— Asha Rangappa (@AshaRangappa_) September 3, 2019

    When Rod is around stronger people with a clear moral compass, like Mueller, he'll defer…and this ends up being a good thing. But when he ends up around people who are deceptive and corrupt, like Barr, he'll defer to them too. Basically, he's a walking piece of Jell-o. END
    — Asha Rangappa (@AshaRangappa_) September 3, 2019

  32. 32.

    Baud

    @tobie:

    Rosenberg said the same about John Durham. Anyone who would agree to take on the task of investigating the investigators in the Russia inquiry is a Republican loyalist in my book.

    Agree, although the reporting says that Durham isn’t willing to manufacture false evidence to please Barr or Trump.  I don’t know that Durham has issued his report yet, however, so maybe they are still trying.

     

    ETA: Never mind. I confused Durham with Huber.

  40. 40.

    PsiFighter37

    I do hope that when the next Democratic administration takes office next year, the full focus is on prosecuting all of the Trump-related corruption to the fullest extent. Fuck the ‘this country needs to heal’ bullshit. Literally demonstrate the full extent of how corrupt everyone one was, and send them all to the slammer.

  42. 42.

    WaterGirl

    @Betty Cracker: Oh my gosh, Betty.  Helmets for sure.  Do not get into a vehicle, possibly no cooking.  Perhaps some TV while cuddled under a blankie would be in order?

  43. 43.

    germy

    WASHINGTON (AP) – No cellphones. No talking. No escape.

    That’s the reality during the Senate’s impeachment trial of President Donald Trump, which will begin each day with a proclamation: “All persons are commanded to keep silence, on pain of imprisonment.” After that, 100 senators will sit at their desks for hours on end to hear from House prosecutors, Trump’s defense team and possibly a series of witnesses.

    The first time the proclamation was used, in the 1868 trial of President Andrew Johnson, lawmakers couldn’t have imagined life in the modern era. The pace of today’s politics would have been hard to foresee even in early 1999, at the start of the impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton, when smartphones didn’t exist.

    And so the senators will have a throwback experience in 2020, disconnected from the outside world, asked only to listen. The normally chummy senators won’t even be allowed to talk at length to people nearby or walk on certain areas of the Senate floor. Mostly they will sit, trapped in the chamber, focused on the issue at hand.

    https://wnyt.com/politics/no-escape-senators-to-be-quiet-unplugged-for-trump-trial/5615773/?cat=659

  44. 44.

    Citizen_X

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: Trump is like some artifact in a fantasy novel that people touch at their peril because it tests them.

    You mean like the Ring?

     

    So I guess Trumpsters should properly be called Trumpwraiths, right?

  49. 49.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @germy:

    Mostly they will sit, trapped in the chamber, focused on the issue at hand.

    Ha ha ha ha!  That will be comedy GOLD.  Republican voters elect people just like them, who do not give a rat’s fart about their jobs, decorum, or anything but their own emotions.  52 toddlers squirming in Time Out.

  50. 50.

    Betty Cracker

    @PsiFighter37: It needs to happen for the sake of justice and deterrence. I’m not a lawyer. I don’t know how it would work. Special prosecutor who would refer evidence of crimes to the appropriate authorities?

    It’s important to avoid the appearance of engaging in tit-for-tat campaigns to jail political opponents, so I’m not sure what kind of mechanism would be appropriate. But yeah, if we manage to roll back these attempts to subvert democracy and weaponize federal law enforcement, fuck any calls to “turn the page.”

  53. 53.

    Joe Falco

    @germy:

    That gives the Republicans even more reason to have everything dismissed as soon as possible. The horror of having the slightest inconvenience will be too much for them.

  55. 55.

    Wag

    @donnah:

    Trump brings out the worst in anyone who comes his way.

    Correction. Trump reveals the true nature of anyone who comes his way, for good, or for ill.

  56. 56.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @MomSense: yup

    Parnas, 47, was born in Ukraine but moved with his family to the United States as a child and grew up in Brooklyn. He told The Post in an interview conducted before his arrest that he got his start in real estate, at one point selling Trump condos for Donald Trump’s father, Fred, and then worked in trading goods with the former Soviet Union before becoming a securities trader. He moved to Florida in the mid-1990s.

    word is the trump org was very small, I’d bet Parnas at least knew some of the long time retainers

    also, this:

    Parnas, with his Brooklyn-by-way-of-Odessa accent, has sought to fashion himself as the Joe Pesci version of John Dean — t

    I saw “the Joe Pesci of John Deans” on twitter last night, but this was posted early yesterday evening, by the very sober (judging by her TV appearances) Rosalind Helderman. Who gets credit for it?

  57. 57.

    MattF

    @NotMax: Pornhub chief says they do have a closed-caption ‘category’. Fair to say that I’d never thought of closed-captioning as a fetish.

  58. 58.

    chris

    @Citizen_X:

     

    Trumpsters should properly be called Trumpwraiths

    Josh Marshall dubbed them “dignity wraiths.” As in they’re willing to sacrifice their dignity to the orange godking for personal gain.

  59. 59.

    Bill Arnold

    @germy:

    When Rod is around stronger people with a clear moral compass, like Mueller, he’ll defer…and this ends up being a good thing. But when he ends up around people who are deceptive and corrupt, like Barr, he’ll defer to them too.

    Found this yesterday (posted to previous thread). It is a rough taxonomy of the types of people who fail morally (in law enforcement):
    Police Ethics and Integrity (Milan Pagon, 2000, academia.edu free signup, will get you relenteless paper recommendations emails)

    Of course, not all police officers have integrity. Benjamin (1990) describes five psychological types lacking in integrity. The first is the moral chameleon, a person who is anxious to accommodate others, while not being resistant to social pressure, thus willing to quickly abandon or modify previously avowed principles. The second is the moral opportunist, whose values are also ever changing, based on his own short-term self interest. The third type is the moral hypocrite, a person who has one set of virtues for public consumption and another set for actual use as a moral code. The fourth is the morally weak-willed who has a reasonably coherent set of core virtues, but he usually lacks the courage to act on them. The final type is the moral self-deceiver, a person who thinks of himself as acting on a set of core principles, while, in fact, he does not.

  60. 60.

    O. Felix Culpa

    Here’s an opportunity to nominate someone for the JFK Library’s Profile in Courage Award. I’d love for it to go to Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch. Nancy Pelosi received the award last year and Barack Obama in 2017.

    Ordinarily, the award will be made to living Americans who are or were elected officials. Individuals at all levels of government—federal, state and local—are eligible for the award. An emphasis will be placed on contemporary acts of political courage.

  64. 64.

    Bill Arnold

    @Dorothy A. Winsor:

    Trump is like some artifact in a fantasy novel that people touch at their peril because it tests them.

    Comey likened the Trump thing to a Demon who corrupts souls then eats them. [1] He is not wrong.
    He (DJT) also does this in the large, e.g. at his rallies.

    [1] James Comey: Trump has ‘eaten the soul’ of even accomplished people who joined his administration (May 1, 2019)

    ‘Accomplished people lacking inner strength can’t resist the compromises necessary to survive Mr. Trump, and that adds up to something they will never recover from. It takes character like Mr. Mattis’s to avoid the damage, because Mr. Trump eats your soul in small bites.’

  67. 67.

    sdhays

    Didn’t Barr also bounce around Europe looking for ways to discredit the Steele Report, just in the last few months? As if that kind of investigation would be the work of the AG if everything was on the up-and-up.

    Dump years are so long I had forgotten about the “unqualified numpty” between Jeffy Jeff and Barr…

  68. 68.

    JPL

    Sullenberger has an oped piece that you can click on from the front page of NYTimes.    The piece is a take down of Lara Trump mocking Biden’s speech pattern..     Sully also stuttered so he understands the pain of her words..   Any way   I thought this was a good paragraph

    So, to every child who feels today, what I felt, after hearing those cruel remarks by an adult who should know better, here is what I want you to know:

    You are fine, just as you are. You can do any job you dream of when you grow up. You can be a pilot who lands your plane on a river and helps save lives, or a president who treats people with respect, rather than making fun of them. You can become a teacher to kids who stutter. A speech disorder is a lot easier to treat than a character defect. You become a true leader, not because of how you speak, but because of what you have to say — and the challenges you have overcome to help others. Ignore kids (and adults) who are mean, or don’t know what it feels like to stutter. Respond by showing them how to be kind, polite, respectful and generous, to be brave enough to try big things, even though you are not perfect

    At the beginning of the article he does mention that he donated to Biden..

  69. 69.

    Steeplejack (phone)

    @Betty Cracker:

    Some connected and elected Democrats vouched for Barr when Trump nominated him. They figured a long-term DC player could be trusted to protect institutions instead of subverting them on behalf of the demented conman.

    @donnah:

    [. . .] Chuck Rosenberg saying on MSNBC that Barr was a man of integrity, that he had worked with him and trusted his judgment [. . .].

    Barr didn’t change because of Trump. He was always corrupt. His first go-round as attorney general was to manage the turnstile as a previous generation of corrupt Republicans exited the Iran-Contra fiasco.

    Rosenberg and these Dems were naïve and bad judges of character, as our own valued commenter Kay has pointed out. They thought that because Barr is a “respected attorney” and a vetted member of the “establishment” that he would play by the rules. They couldn’t see what was right in front of their faces.

  70. 70.

    Shalimar

    @Bill Arnold: I am so happy to hear that Mattis (and Mueller too in a similar way) has lived up to his personal code and not sullied his character too much.  Does stopping the significant damage to the country really matter compared to feeling morally superior to all the lesser humans?

  73. 73.

    patrick II

    Barr gave two speeches this past fall that chill the bone.  The second was at, at the Federalist Society was bad, blaming Democrats for unconstitutional, partisan attacks on poor Donald Trump; expecting everyone to bow down before the (Republican) King, err… the Executive presidency. The chains of laws may not hold him!

    But the speech Barr gave in October at Notre Dame was worse.  Barr does not believe in the Enlightenment, in which the affairs of state were finally controlled by scientific knowledge and respect for each human.  He railed against “militant secular humanists” who were behind a campaign to destroy “moral order.”  He warned that Catholicism and other mainstream religions were the target of “organized destruction” by “secularists and their allies among progressives who have marshalled all the force of mass communications, popular culture, the entertainment industry and academia”. (The Guardian).

    We live in a country based on the proposition that all men are created equal, and to manifest rule among equals we created a sovereign constitution to rule by the agreed upon wishes of equal men. Barr believes in none of that.  He believes that modern secularists encourage social pathology, among those pathologier is being allowed to live as an lgbt person without the shame of sin, which degrades the culture.  He believes the moral order is sovereign, and should rule over all others. The early version of this disagreement had the Catholic church lock up Galileo because he said the earth was not center of the universe, and in its more modern version moral fableists believe there is no climate change because god gave us dominion over earth.

    Barr strikes at the very heart of not just democracy, but science, and rule of law.  He is a 17th centuraly moralist, and he is still waging that battle from the high hill of the Attorney General, which makes him as dangerous to democracy as anyone since the Civil War.

  75. 75.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Steeplejack (phone):

    Barr didn’t change because of Trump. … Rosenberg and these Dems were naïve and bad judges of character, as our own valued commenter Kay has pointed out.

    I agree he didn’t change because of trump, but my hunch is the man who gave that speech about “permissiveness” at Notre Dame is not the William Barr of the early nineties. I’d bet at least one mortgage payment that something happened in his personal life

    edited: Bob Barr is of course the thrice-married anti-Clinton warrior who was slightly embarrassed when photos of him licking whipped cream off a stripper during the Clenis Saga. I think he’s a never-trumper now

  76. 76.

    Kattails

    Can’t help but note, as a slight aside, that all of Pete’s ads, of which there are many, are telling us to look at his plans. Elizabeth’s ads are asking us to give her feedback. Hummm.

    @Betty Cracker: Yeowch! Poor babies.  This week I got my mail program into a jam sufficient to require taking it in to pay for one of the kids to un-stick it; was washing the refrigerator tempered glass shelf in the sink when it slipped and pretty much atomized; and slipped on the front step ice that was hidden by a dusting of snow, catching my tush, a rib or 2, and elbow while snapping my neck, not sure which one made the crunchy noise. Cold enough that the padded clothing probably saved the situation. Six inches of snow here.

  78. 78.

    Amir Khalid

    @NotMax:

    The guy is not actually missing out on anything. He doesn’t need to follow the dialogue to enjoy the content on Pornhub. In fact, he’ll enjoy it more without the dialogue.

  79. 79.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @oatler.: is it my own bias and wish-fulfillment that I think Lindsey Graham has aged ten years in the last three, and Ted Cruz has put on about fifty pounds?

  80. 80.

    H.E.Wolf

     

    @MattF:

    Fair to say that I’d never thought of closed-captioning as a fetish.

    To be fair to the person in that article who wanted closed-captioning for his porn, neither deafness nor requesting accessibility is a perversion.

    Off to the grocery store, where the shelves are all closed-captioned. :)

  81. 81.

    Ruckus

    @chris:

    As in they’re willing to sacrifice their dignity to the orange godking for personal gain.

    Isn’t personal gain the entire concept of the republican party for the last 100 yrs or so?

    What can we get and how can we keep it? 

    I believe that’s etched in stone somewhere at republican headquarters.

  83. 83.

    pat

    @MomSense:

    I read somewhere that Lev was born in Odessa in 1972 and was brought to the US at the age of three, which explains that his English is better than his Russian.

    He has worked for Trump since he was about 23.  Wish there was more information out there other than “born in the Soviet Union” which makes it sound like he just came over on the last boat.

  86. 86.

    artem1s

    @Citizen_X:

    So I guess Trumpsters should properly be called Trumpwraiths, right?

    It’s not a bad analogy.  Tolkien’s central theme is all about the corrupting force of power. You either use is responsibly or the temptation to gather more power eats at you like a cancer until you are lost to it. Every main character in the book is measured, judged and their eventual fate is based on how they react to the acquisition of power or the temptation to acquire more power. Gandalf and Galadrial understand this temptation so thoroughly, they won’t even touch the One Ring when it is freely offered to them.

    Only I think Trump is more like Denathor than Sauron.  He has information and forces to fight evil at his fingertips but he was corrupted long ago by the need to keep his empire. He’s even willing to sacrifice his children in the pursuit of more power. He had been tasked with stewarding his empire and the executive branch and handing it over to a successor when the time comes.  But he’s decided to claim the monarchy and it’s power for his own  instead and will do anything to keep it.

    Barr is definitely a wraiths though.  McConnell might be equated to Saruman. Nunes and his ilk, just common Mordor orcs. But they are servants to a larger, more sinister evil than Trump.  Unseen and unnamed. It kills everything it touches until they are incapable of returning to the joys of simple life/democracy. Maybe their Sauron is Putin or The Church or the fucking Illuminati – who knows – doesn’t really matter – Sauron himself was only a minion to a more powerful evil force that was older than Middle Earth itself. But yea, fucking wraiths for sure.

    The order of Wizards, the Maiar who came to Middle-earth after the first millennium of the Third Age. Of these, five came to the northwestern regions; Saruman, Gandalf, Radagast, Alatar and Pallando.

    In this analogy is Pelosi the lost Istari, Pallando?

  87. 87.

    moonbat

    @Baud:  Yeah and sometimes it’s the individual too. Do you think if one of those centrist assholes who was trying to take over the speakership were in charge that we’d be where we are right now? Yes, its a team effort and Nancy Pelosi put the team together.

  88. 88.

    eclare

    @geg6:  Agree, audience went wild, standing ovation. Very deserved. And Bill even said he kept the monologue clean in deference to her.

  89. 89.

    jimmiraybob

    I am not a lawyer but, since we’re speaking of henchmen in the service of making shite up, wussup with Alan “I am a liberal democrat” Dershowitz, Trump’s new lawyer that will be warping and weaving the US Constitution in defense of the Chief Grifter and signer of pay checks (it should be noted that in the constitutional sense “:checks and balances” does not refer to legal instruments or financial accounting technics)? He was on CNN where he stated:

    “I will be paraphrasing the successful argument from Justice Benjamin Curtis in the trial of Andrew Jackson back in the 1860s where he argued that the framers intended for impeachable conduct to only be criminal-like conduct or the conduct that is prohibitive by the criminal law.”

    What next? Defending slavery and Jim Crow by paraphrasing the successful supreme-court justices in Dred Scott v. Sandford (back in the1850s)? Asking for a friend.

  90. 90.

    RandomMonster

    @chris: I was trying to remember the term Josh used.  Thanks for providing it. “Dignity Wraith” is appropriate. It would also be a good heavy metal band name.

  91. 91.

    Shalimar

    @pat: I found an article (unsourced, so still needs to be confirmed) that said Lev started selling real estate for the Trump Organization (Fred) in 1989, when he was 16.  Others are referring to a picture with Trump going around twitter that was supposedly taken at Ivanka’s 10th birthday party, which would have been 1991.  A quick google search didn’t turn up this photo so I haven’t seen it, but if both those things are true then the Trumps would have remembered Lev very well when he started donating  big money a few years ago.  It would also be very interesting that someone with later alleged ties to the Russian mob began working for the Trump organization the year after Donald went to Moscow for the first time.

  93. 93.

    MomSense

    @jimmiraybob:

    What’s up with Dershowitz?  I doubt he kept his underwear on.  And if your defense is keeping your underwear on when the charge relates to sexual relations with a minor girl, it’s not much of a defense.  Lordy I hope (bet) there are tapes.

  95. 95.

    patrick II

     

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist:

    I agree he didn’t change because of trump, but my hunch is the man who gave that speech about “permissiveness” at Notre Dame is not the William Barr of the early nineties. I’d bet at least one mortgage payment that something happened in his

    I think it has more to do with the Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. He was always a self-righteous moralist living within the acceptable social order of before Trump. His disregard for the law, however, is not that far from what he did during the Bush I years. The social order and their extraordinary delusions now empower what has always been there, and now, he is not just forgiving other criminals with pardons, but participating in the crimes himself.

  97. 97.

    Kathleen

    @WaterGirl: You might try You Tube. I think Maher’s after show is now on You Tube, which may also have clips of the show as well. ETA Nancy’s reception was amazing and when Maher tried to derail conversation to opposition she initially faced in the election for Speaker she cut him off with, “That’s not important.”. She used every minute of her time to make the case for impeachment.

  98. 98.

    Another Scott

    Good morning.

    The most important story from last week.

    Republicans may be on the verge of losing the Texas House for the first time in decades.

    To save their minority power they're looking at a purposeful census undercount that could cost the state seats and hundreds of millions of dollars. https://t.co/JFDj3YkrTG— LOLGOP (@LOLGOP) January 19, 2020

    Eyes on the prize.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  99. 99.

    MomSense

    @jimmiraybob:

    The absurdity of this timeline is breathtaking.  Has there ever been such a cast of bizarre people ? Setting aside their evil and corruption, they are all just so fucking strange.  Stone is a swinger with a Nixon  tattoo on his back. Go through the list. They’re all ridiculously weird.

  100. 100.

    Kathleen

    @tobie: I also give the Dem caucus credit. The Dems in the House are truly the last “Thin Blue Line” against full blown fascism, which is why I detest and abhor those supposedly in the party who actively seek to undermine it. And there are quite a few.

  102. 102.

    Another Scott

    @Gin & Tonic:

    Repost – NewYorker (from October):

    Parnas was born in February, 1972, in the port city of Odessa, in southwestern Ukraine, which was then part of the Soviet Union. He was three when his family moved to the United States. “I came here as a legal immigrant, through a legal process,” he said. His family settled in Detroit, where they lived for about a year, before relocating to Brooklyn. When Parnas was sixteen, he worked at Kings Highway Realty, selling Trump Organization co-ops. “That was my first time knowing who Trump was, but, growing up in that area, you knew who Trump was, because his name was all over the place,” he said.

    In 1995, when Parnas was twenty-three, he moved from Brooklyn to Florida. On visits to New York, he stayed at Trump properties. Parnas said that, until Trump announced his run for the Presidency, on June 16, 2015, he didn’t consider himself a Republican or a Democrat. “I was really never heavy into politics, never really contributed,” he said. Then, in June, 2015, Parnas’s teen-age son, Aaron, called his father. “Dad, I think one of your friends is running for President,” he joked. Aaron told me that, after Trump announced his candidacy, he called the Trump campaign to get passes to go with his father to a Trump rally in Florida.

    It doesn’t say so directly, but it’s easy to read between the lines that they’ve known each other a long time, and more than just socially.

    Grrr…

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  103. 103.

    Gin & Tonic

    I’m not going to link to this or search for it, but apparently Joe DiGenova went on Breitbart to say that a trip of his to Ukraine was called off because the US Embassy in Kyiv threatened to deny his wife and Rudy visas.

    Two problems with this: American citizens don’t need a visa to go to Ukraine, and if they did, it would be issued by the Ukrainian Embassy (or a Consulate) in the US. The US State Department, in either DC or Kyiv, has no say in whether the Ukrainian government grants a visa to a foreigner.

    Lying liars who lie, again.

    From a Twitter thread on that I also learned that his wife’s son (forgive me, I don’t know if that’s also his son) works for Barr. Mom is on retainer to Firtash.

    Every rock you turn over….

  108. 108.

    artem1s

    Pelosi gave Barr some rope to hang himself.  If the evidence demands the impeachment of Trump, then it seems likely it also now demands Barr be impeached as well for obstruction. I think she may be waiting to see if there are any in the Senate who decide to do the right thing and have a real trial, but I think we are in for a lot more impeachment hearings in the House.

  111. 111.

    ziggy

    Many times it’s been said here that the Republicans in the house and senate all have something to hide and the Russians have all the dirt. It seems to me that that can’t be true across the board (although I would assume most do have plenty to hide, especially in regards to campaign financing). But if Barr is in charge of the DOJ, he determines ultimately who gets investigated and who doesn’t. You don’t have to have dirt on you to get investigated, they can make something out of thin air, and make your life a living hell for nothing (as we’ve seen). Exhibit A, the Clintons. Barr is unfortunately very experienced and very competent at instigating investigations and also shutting things down. I think Parnas is right in saying that his power comes from that, and that is what they are afraid of.

  112. 112.

    Bill Arnold

    @SFAW:

    “Character.” Right.

    And Mattis was one of the lucky ones; he got out with his soul only half-eaten. It wasn’t innocent to start with (e.g Theranos?) , but he had some integrity.

  114. 114.

    WaterGirl

    @Dadadadadadada: Thank you very much, and ugh!

    It says Nancy Pelosi and Andrew Yang.  Was Yang on there, too?  At the same time?  I can barely stand to listen to Yang.

  117. 117.

    joel hanes

    @artem1s:

    Trump is more like Denathor than Sauron

    Utterly not.

    Denethor is a great and wise steward, who keeps in hard training and even in age sleeps in mail to keep ready to fight, a man of subtle thought, deep learning and immense dignity.  Despite the long rule of his line as stewards, he never presumes to call himself king nor sit on the throne.   He engages with Gandalf as an intellectual equal.

    Denethor deeply loves his sons, and yet would have sacrificed both of them and himself if he thought by doing so he could save the remnants of Gondor.  His judgment is overthrown by too much exposure to a seductively useful but compromised source of intelligence information, so that ultimately he despairs.

    Trump is the Misty Mountain orc king Azog from The Hobbit :  ignorant, vulgar, brutal, grasping, completely without principle except for ruthless adherence to power and riches.

  118. 118.

    joel hanes

    @Another Scott:

    Republicans may be on the verge of losing the Texas House for the first time in decades.

    And you can help

    Sugarland TX Democratic organizer Susan Bankston, who blogs at Juanita Jean’s, will be doing a grassroots GOTV effort in January, and will be wanting contributions.

    Y’all remember that I came to you and flat begged for money two years ago. Y’all paid for ballot by mail, voter registration notices for Democrats who had moved into the county from other counties but not  changed their registration, and a whole mess of other grassroots  programs that did not require consultants. We had not won a county wide race in 25 years. We won them all in 2018. Every race where we  fielded a Democrat, we won.

    https://juanitajean.com/ballot-by-mail-program/

    https://juanitajean.com/tex…

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