[AMV] Amerikaanse politiek #430 A Historic Tax Heist

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The former top FBI official assigned to Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election was taken off that job this summer after his bosses discovered he and another member of Mueller’s team had exchanged politically charged texts disparaging President Trump and supportive of Hillary Clinton, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.

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Op zaterdag 2 december 2017 18:58 schreef Monolith het volgende:
Blijft toch altijd wel vermakelijk hoe men zich wederom in allerlei onmogelijke bochten wringt om dit maar te bagatelliseren.

twitter:

ddale8 twitterde op zaterdag 02-12-2017 om 18:00:57 Trump, per pool reporter, said the Senate managed to pass the tax bill because he told them to sell it as "tax cuts… https://t.co/6MESGdMN2p reageer retweet

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Op zaterdag 2 december 2017 19:13 schreef Tchock het volgende:

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Wat is die man van teflon hè. Niets blijft aan hem plakken.

twitter:

WhiteHouse twitterde op zaterdag 02-12-2017 om 16:02:04 "62 years ago this week, a brave seamstress in Montgomery, Alabama uttered one word that changed history..." https://t.co/CwFeD4LIzc reageer retweet

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Op zaterdag 2 december 2017 19:23 schreef Nintex het volgende:
Linguistic killshot

twitter:

ddale8 twitterde op zaterdag 02-12-2017 om 18:00:57 Trump, per pool reporter, said the Senate managed to pass the tax bill because he told them to sell it as "tax cuts… https://t.co/6MESGdMN2p reageer retweet

[ afbeelding ]

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Op zaterdag 2 december 2017 19:08 schreef Abschirmdienst het volgende:
Trump is weer onbeschadigd door een schandaal gekomen.

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Op zaterdag 2 december 2017 19:38 schreef Tchock het volgende:

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Inderdaad mooi. Maar "all are equal regardless of the colour of our skin" is toch wat minder gezaghebbend uit de mond van iemand die een paar dagen geleden nog extreemrechtse haatvideo's aan het retweeten was.

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Op zaterdag 2 december 2017 19:40 schreef Tijger_m het volgende:

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Nog lang niet.

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Op zaterdag 2 december 2017 19:41 schreef Tchock het volgende:

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Je neemt Abschirm veel te serieus.

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Op zaterdag 2 december 2017 19:33 schreef KoosVogels het volgende:

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Wat een onzin. Het plan is er door omdat de Republikeinen een meerderheid hebben.

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Op zaterdag 2 december 2017 20:02 schreef Monolith het volgende:

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En omdat er nog wel heel wat puntjes aan toegevoegd zijn om bepaalde senatoren over te halen.

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Op zaterdag 2 december 2017 20:08 schreef Nintex het volgende:

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Waarschijnlijk was het Trump die zei: "Waarom schrijven jullie dat er niet gewoon bij?"
Terwijl hij met zijn sharpie aan het stiften was.

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Mueller Investigation: Politics, Not Law Enforcement or Counterintelligence

The end game is the removal of Trump, either by impeachment or by publicly discrediting him and making his reelection politically impossible.
Here’s what I’d be tempted to do if I were President Trump: I’d direct the Justice Department to appoint a special counsel to investigate Iran’s efforts to acquire nuclear weapons, including any Obama-administration collusion in that enterprise. I would make sure to call it a “counterintelligence investigation,” putting no limitations on the special counsel — just as with the investigation that Special Counsel Robert Mueller has been unleashed to conduct into Trump “collusion” with Russia.
That is, I would not restrict the prosecutor and investigators to digging for specified criminal violations. Or, indeed, any criminal violations. I’d just tell the special counsel, “Have at it” — with unbound authority to scrutinize the negotiations surrounding the eventual Iran nuclear deal (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action). Would I really expect the special counsel to find that Obama officials conspired with the mullahs to obtain nukes for Tehran? No . . . but hey, as the “Trump collusion with Russia” crowd says, “You never know.” Meantime, under the guise of investigating this highly unlikely “collusion,” I’d want the special counsel to scrutinize closely any variances between what Obama-administration officials were telling Congress and the public about the negotiations and what they were telling the Iranians; to probe any side deals the administration agreed to but failed to disclose to Congress; and to consider whether any laws or policies were violated in such matters as President Obama’s payment of a cash ransom in exchange for American hostages held by Iran.
Why would I do this? Well, because I disagree with Obama-administration foreign policy, of course. Under the Mueller “collusion” precedent, it is evidently now American practice to criminalize foreign-policy disputes under the pretext of conducting a counterintelligence investigation. It is difficult to come to any other conclusion based on the guilty plea that Mueller just pried out of Michael Flynn. Let’s think about what has happened here. The Justice Department did not, as the pertinent special-counsel regulations require, identify specific crimes it suspected had been committed by Trump-campaign officials. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein disclosed no factual predicate calling for a criminal investigation from which Trump’s Justice Department would be ethically required to recuse itself.

Instead, Mueller’s investigation was rationalized by the need to conduct a counterintelligence inquiry into Russia’s “cyber-espionage” meddling in the 2016 presidential election. Though there was no probable cause to believe Trump-campaign officials had participated in Russia’s hacking (and remember: the FBI and Obama Justice Department had been investigating for months before the special counsel was appointed), Mueller was encouraged to focus on whether Trump-campaign officials somehow “coordinated” in Russia’s perfidy.
Mueller’s investigation was not a criminal investigation. It started out as a fishing expedition, under the vaporous heading of “collusion,” into “contacts” between Russian officials and Trump associates — notwithstanding that collusion is not conspiracy and that it was perfectly legal for Trump associates to have contacts with Russia (just like Clinton associates did). It was to be expected that the Trump campaign and transition would have such contacts once it was apparent that Trump could well become — and did in fact become — the next president of the United States. Only one conceivable crime could have arisen out of the “collusion” that was the pretext for Mueller’s probe: the knowing complicity of Trump associates in Russia’s hacking of Democratic email accounts. Of course, there was never evidence of such a scheme . . . but why should that matter? The point here was to have the theater of an investigation run by a prosecutor — the rest is just details. See, we’re not following the normal rules, in which a prosecutor is assigned only after evidence of an actual crime has emerged. We’re in the wooly realm of counterintelligence, where anything goes. And in the event our aggressive prosecutor can’t find any crimes — which would be no surprise, since the investigation was not triggered by a crime — no matter:
The special counsel is encouraged to manufacture crimes through the investigative process. Misleading assertions by non-suspects made to investigators probing non-crimes can be charged as felony false statements. The end game of the investigation is the removal of Donald Trump from the presidency, either by impeachment (which does not require proof of a court-prosecutable crime) or by publicly discrediting Trump to such a degree that his reelection becomes politically impossible. The latter can be accomplished by projecting the appearance of a critical investigation (notwithstanding that there is no underlying crime), turning administration officials into suspects, and hopefully generating the false-statement prosecutions that help depict the administration as dishonest and icky.
While all that plays out, though, behold the frightening thing Mueller’s investigation has become: a criminalization of politics. In the new order of things, policy differences are the grist for investigation and prosecution. There is no evidence that Flynn or any other Trump associate was involved in Russia’s election interference. Instead, after being elected on the promise of significant policy shifts from the Obama administration, President-elect Trump directed Flynn, his incoming national-security adviser, to make contact with foreign counterparts, including but not limited to officials from Russia. This is standard operating procedure when administrations change — that’s why they call it a transition. Nevertheless, Trump’s victory caused consternation in the Obama administration for two reasons. First, and most obviously, Obama did not want his policies reversed. Second, neither Obama nor his party could abide a judgment of history holding that the election of Trump, the bane of their existence, was a result of the American people’s rejection of the Obama agenda and of Hillary Clinton, the hapless candidate nominated by Democrats to carry that agenda forward. Consequently, while projecting a public image of cooperation in the transition, the Obama administration used the weeks following the election to do two things: protect Obama’s priorities from Trump, and promote a political narrative that Mrs. Clinton’s defeat was the result of sinister collaboration between Trump’s campaign and the Kremlin. One major Obama-administration priority was to solidify the policy of blaming Israel for the enduring Israeli–Palestinian conflict — specifically, downplaying the ideological roots of Palestinian terrorism and framing as the real culprit Israeli settlement-building in disputed territories that Obama, like Israel’s enemies, regarded as illegally “occupied.” Thus, in his administration’s coup de grace, Obama orchestrated a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlement activity — a stark departure (as I wrote at the time) from America’s commitment to Israel’s security and policy of shielding Israel from such U.N. intrigues. Based on a statement of facts filed by Mueller in connection with Flynn’s guilty plea, we now know that, on December 22, right after this resolution was proposed, a “very senior member” of Trump’s transition team — who has been identified as Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, in a Bloomberg report by Eli Lake — directed Flynn to contact officials from the various foreign governments on the Security Council, including Russia. Pursuant to these directions, Flynn informed his counterparts that Trump opposed the resolution — which opposition, by the way, Trump was quite clear about publicly. Flynn encouraged them to vote against the resolution, or at least delay it until Trump would assume office in January.

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