When the President Does It, It Is Not Illegal

bbronc, the twit must really be a devotee of tricky dick.  the nytimes piece that bw linked for us last night underscores his obstruction of justice attempts.  it’s worthy of a read and repost Trump Ordered Mueller Fired, but Backed Off When White House Counsel Threatened to Quit especially this excerpt:

Mr. McGahn, a longtime Republican campaign finance lawyer in Washington who served on the Federal Election Commission, was the top lawyer on Mr. Trump’s campaign. He has been involved in nearly every key decision Mr. Trump has made — like the firing of the former F.B.I. director — that is being scrutinized by Mr. Mueller.

Mr. McGahn was also concerned that firing the special counsel would incite more questions about whether the White House was trying to obstruct the Russia investigation.

from wapo’s editorial board: GOP leaders’ complicity grows as their members undermine the rule of law

A FOREIGN power interfered in the 2016 presidential election. U.S. law enforcement is trying to get to the bottom of that story. Congress should be doing everything possible to make sure the investigation can take place. Instead, to protect the president of their party, who may or may not be complicit, Republican leaders in Congress are allowing and encouraging the baseless slander of the investigators.
It is a new low for the leadership, and one that could do lasting harm to the nation.

[….]
These men are destroying something that won’t be easily recovered: faith in the idea of impartial law enforcement. It amounts to an assault on the rule of law. Mr. Trump openly wishes for an attorney general who will protect him, asks law enforcement officials whom they voted for, and fires or attempts to fire those he deems disloyal. He does not believe that FBI agents or anyone else is motivated by public-spiritedness or respect for the law, only by self-interest and personal loyalty to his or some other clan.

If Mr. Ryan, Mr. McConnell and others continue in their acquiescence, his cynical view may come closer to reality.

🙂

the less shaken hand the better during this flu epidemic.  I agree with bw as the more likely reason for the polite rebuff

in case you missed maher last night. here he is on the racist twit

and on traitor gate

read worthy op ed in the guardian today by Mohsin Hamid on the rise of Nationalism: ‘In the land of the pure, no one is pure enough’
Perhaps it is living half your life in Pakistan, for Pakistan is the land of the pure. Literally so: the land, stan, of the pure, pak. Perhaps that is why you have come to question the commonly held perception that purity is good and impurity is bad. For a tribe of humans newly arrived in a location never before inhabited by humans, such an outlook is perhaps sensible. Purity in a stream of water renders it fit to drink. Impurity in a piece of meat sickens those who eat it. Purity is hence to be valued and impurity to be avoided, resisted, expelled. And yet you believe the time has come to seek to reverse, at least partially, the emotional polarity of these two words, to extol impurity’s benefits and denounce purity’s harms.
 
The issue is, of course, personal. We are each of us composed of atoms, but equally we are composed by time. Since your time has been spent half inside Pakistan and half outside, and your outlook and attitudes shaped by this, you are in a sense half-Pakistani, which is to say, as Pakistan is the land of the pure, you are half-pure: an impossible state. You cannot exist as you are. Or rather, you must be impure. And if impurity is bad then you are bad. And to be bad is hazardous, in any society. So yes, the issue is personal, and pressing.
But in Pakistan, the issue is political as well, for it affects everyone. Once purity becomes what determines the rights a human being is afforded, indeed whether they are entitled to live or not, then there is a ferocious contest to establish hierarchies of purity, and in that contest no one can win. No one can ever be sufficiently pure to be lastingly safe. In the land of the pure, no one is pure enough. No Muslim is Muslim enough. And so all are suspect. All are at risk. And many are killed by others who find their purity lacking, and many of their killers are in turn killed for the same reason. And on and on, in a chain reaction. The politics of purity is the politics of fission.

[….]

Pakistan is not unique. Rather, it is at the forefront of a global trend. All around the world, governments and would-be governments appear overwhelmed by complexity and are blindly unleashing the power of fission, championing quests for the pure. In India a politics of Hindu purity is wrenching open deep and bloody fissures in a diverse society. In Myanmar a politics of Buddhist purity is massacring and expelling the Rohingya. In the United States a politics of white purity is marching in white hoods and red baseball caps, demonising Muslims and Hispanic people, killing and brutalising black people, jeering at intellectuals, and spitting in the face of climate science.
And what of Europe? Europe, too, is rekindling its love affair with purity, with signs of this deadly ardour everywhere, from the rise of the far right in Germany and Austria to the endless emergency in France to the ethno-national cracking of Ukraine and Spain.
 

And then there is Brexit, particularly saddening for you, since you are not just part-Pakistani, you are part-British (and part-European) as well. Brexit illustrates only too well the politics of fission and the unleashing of the forces of purity. First, or so it was said, the British took back control. But the Scottish and Northern Irish seemed not to want to take back control. So the English took back control from them. And also from Londoners, for London had long ceased to be properly English. And also from the young, addled in their thinking by the ever increasing numbers of the non-English in their midst. In some English newspapers today dissenters are called traitors. In England’s north-west frontier, which is to say Northern Ireland, a return to violence is feared. The ruling party is paralysed, riven by factionalism. No one is deemed pure enough, brazenly English enough, to govern. Judges, journalists, parliamentarians, citizens: everyone is suspect.
 
How Pakistani it all strikes you.
[….continues…]

prime example of if he’s rich he can get away with much much more than an unwanted kiss on the forehead or pat on the tuchis

nbc via msn:
For the women who worked for casino mogul Steve Wynn, it was a roll of the dice whether they would be sexually harassed when they were summoned to his private office, according to a new report Friday.
For decades, the legendary Las Vegas businessman used his power over their livelihoods to pressure the manicurists and massage therapists for sex, The Wall Street Journal reported.
[….]
But Wynn is the latest in the growing list of powerful man to be accused of inappropriate behavior with woman, the current wave of which began with a New York Times expose of Hollywood honcho Harvey Weinstein and has morphed into a #MeToo movement that has swept up some of the most biggest names in politics, sports and show business.
Yet few of the accused men have the access to the Trump White House that Wynn does. After the election, he was named the Republican National Committee’s finance chairman. And the RNC was among the recipients of donations from Wynn, Federal Election Commission records show.
[….continues…]

Jeffrey Toobin at New Yorker “The Answer to Whether Trump Obstructed Justice Now Seems Clear”

[…]

The issue of whether President Trump obstructed justice centers on his decision to fire James Comey, the F.B.I. director, last May. This is a classic intent case. The President clearly had the right to fire Comey, but he did not have the right to do so with improper intent. Specifically, the relevant obstruction-of-justice statute holds that any individual who “corruptly . . . influences, obstructs, or impedes, or endeavors to influence, obstruct, or impede, the due administration of justice” is guilty of the crime. “Corruptly” is the key word. Did Trump act “corruptly” in firing Comey?
It is this question of corrupt intent that makes the Times’s recent blockbuster scoop so important….
[…]
McGahn recognized the key fact—that Trump wanted to fire Mueller for the wrong reasons. Trump wanted to fire Mueller because his investigation was threatening to him. This, of course, also illuminates the reasons behind Trump’s firing of Comey, which took place just a month before the President’s confrontation with McGahn regarding Mueller…..
[….]
Mueller and his team surely have evidence on obstruction of justice that has not yet been made public. But even on the available evidence, Trump’s position looks perilous indeed. The portrait is of a President using every resource at his disposal to shut down an investigation—of Trump himself. And now it has become clear that Trump’s own White House counsel rebelled at the President’s rationale for his actions.
Abundant questions remain about Trump’s fate in the Mueller investigation. Can or will a sitting President be indicted? What, if anything, will the House of Representatives do with respect to its impeachment powers? In what forum and format will the public see the full range of the evidence against the President? But on perhaps the most important question of all—whether the President of the United States committed the crime of obstruction of justice—the answer now seems clear.

also from today’s guardian:

Donald Trump’s refrigerator upgrade for Air Force One set to cost $24m

Officials sign deal with Boeing to replace two food chilling systems
Plane’s fridges must be equipped to handle 3,000 meals per day

What hums, flies above 30,000ft, and costs about as much as Donald Trump’s upstate New York manor?
 
Trump’s new airplane refrigerators.
 
The Trump administration has signed a $24m contract with Boeing to replace two food chilling systems aboard Air Force One, the president’s plane, according to reports.
The systems are two of five such “chillers” aboard Air Force One, which must be equipped with a refrigeration capacity to handle 3,000 meals, according to military specifications.
 
That’s enough to feed the president and 50 of his closest friends three meals a day for three weeks. And that’s assuming the president never indulged in his favorite plane fare: fast food.
 
The $24m price tag, upon which Boeing declined to comment, amounts to enough taxpayer money to fund an estimated eight weekends for the president at Mar-a-Lago, which Trump visited 11 times in his first year as president.
 
Or the cash could be used to provide security at Trump Tower in New York City, where the president no longer lives, for about two months.
 
As president-elect, Trump trashed Boeing’s stock by attacking on Twitter the high-priced Air Force One program.
 
“Boeing is building a brand new 747 Air Force One for future presidents, but costs are out of control, more than $4 billion,” Trump tweeted. “Cancel order!”
It’s not clear where Trump got the $4bn figure; at the time Boeing had a $170m contract to begin work on the next Air Force One.
 
The term “Air Force One” refers not to any particular aircraft but to any plane carrying the president. The list price for the 747 airplanes outfitted as Air Force One is about $350m, but customizing the planes costs much more.
 
A consultant told Defense One that the plane was expensive not because Boeing was gouging the government but because military requirements for the craft are expensive to fulfill.
 
“It’s not a contractor issue, it is a requirements issue,” said Richard Aboulafia, vice-president of analysis at the Teal Group consulting firm. “It’s not getting people rich.”
 

flatus, I agree it was a gotcha story on the fantastic fridge in air one…. tweaking the twit when and however they can.  they also seemed to revel in the golden toilet tale substitution for twit’s art request.