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The House launches its expected fishing expedition against the Great Orange Whale, Moby Donald — 37 Comments

1. The chairmen of the most important committees in the new House are a true rogues’ gallery– Nadler in Judiciary, Schiff in Intelligence, Cummings in Oversight and the egregious Mad Maxine in Finance. No-one with a functioning brain should take any of their actions seriously.

2. I can’t recall anything even remotely like this, in terms of scope, against a sitting president.

   I can, but not a US president… you have to know history in details to know its repeating unless someone who does you trust tells you… eh?

   and what will the fall out be if they come back empty handed?
   they HAVE to find something… even if there is no Kulaks, they will find it
   Beria will work day and night to find the crime, as we investigate people not crimes

   has it changed enough for you to notice yet what you were missing the past 15 years to suddenly see it now?

   well.. you did read the trials of the centrists and left against the right?

   21 defendants alleged to belong to the so-called “Bloc of Rightists and Trotskyites”:
   Nikolai Bukharin – Marxist theoretician, former head of Communist International and member of Politburo
   Alexei Rykov – former premier and member of Politburo
   Nikolai Krestinsky – former member of Politburo and ambassador to Germany
   Christian Rakovsky – former ambassador to Great Britain and France
   Genrikh Yagoda – former head of NKVD
   Arkady Rosengolts – former People’s Commissar for Foreign Trade
   Vladimir Ivanov – former People’s Commissar for Timber Industry
   Mikhail Alexandrovich Chernov – former People’s Commissar for Agriculture
   Grigori Grinko – former People’s Commissar for Finance
   Isaac Zelensky – former Secretary of Central Committee
   Sergei Bessonov
   Akmal Ikramov – Uzbek leader
   Fayzulla Khodzhayev – Uzbek leader
   Vasily Sharangovich – former first secretary in Belorussia
   Prokopy Zubarev
   Pavel Bulanov – NKVD officer
   Lev Levin – Kremlin doctor
   Dmitry Pletnev – Kremlin doctor
   Ignaty Kazakov – Kremlin doctor
   Venyamin Maximov-Dikovsky
   Pyotr Kryuchkov

   Even sympathetic observers who had stomached the earlier trials found it hard to swallow the new charges as they became ever more absurd

   Cohen, Bukharin?
   Bukharin’s confession in particular became the subject of much debate among Western observers, inspiring Koestler’s novel Darkness at Noon and a philosophical essay by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in Humanism and Terror among others. His confessions were somewhat different from others in that, while he pleaded guilty to general charges, he denied knowledge of any specific crimes.

   A number of American communists and progressive “fellow travellers” outside of the Soviet Union signed a Statement of American Progressives on the Moscow Trials. These included Langston Hughes and Stuart Davis, who would later express regrets.

   Some contemporary observers who thought the trials were inherently fair cite the statements of Molotov, who while conceding that some of the confessions contain unlikely statements, said there may have been several reasons or motives for this – one being that the handful who made doubtful confessions were trying to undermine the Soviet Union and its government by making dubious statements in their confessions to cast doubts on their trial. Molotov postulated that a defendant might invent a story that he collaborated with foreign agents and party members to undermine the government so that those members would falsely come under suspicion, while the false foreign collaboration charge would be believed as well. Thus, the Soviet government was in his view the victim of false confessions. Nonetheless, he said the evidence of mostly out-of-power Communist officials conspiring to make a power grab during a moment of weakness in the upcoming war truly existed

   the soviet union was the victim… see how we have changed…
   by the way, just as the prior lies came out eventually..
   This defense collapsed after the release of Khrushchev’s Secret Speech to the Twentieth Congress.

   funny…
   but you still havent figure they are not original, thye are just steeped in the history of a country you barely know…

3. the Moscow trials were generally viewed negatively by most Western observers including many liberals. The New York Times noted the absurdity in an editorial on March 1, 1938: “It is as if twenty years after Yorktown somebody in power at Washington found it necessary for the safety of the State to send to the scaffold Thomas Jefferson, Madison, John Adams, Hamilton, Jay and most of their associates. The charge against them would be that they conspired to hand over the United States to George III.”

   -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

   In the United States, left-wing advocates such as Corliss Lamont and Lillian Hellman also denounced criticism of the Moscow trials, signing An Open Letter To American Liberals in support of the trials for the March 1937 issue of Soviet Russia Today

   socialist thinker Beatrice Webb “was pleased that Stalin had ‘cut out the dead wood'”

   Communist Party leader Harry Pollitt, in the Daily Worker of March 12, 1936, told the world that “the trials in Moscow represent a new triumph in the history of progress”. [The article was ironically illustrated by a photograph of Stalin with Yezhov, himself shortly to vanish and his photographs airbrushed from history by NKVD archivists.]

   -=-=-=-=-

   Bertram Wolfe became a changer and left stalin… [an American scholar and former communist best known for biographical studies of Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Leon Trotsky, and Diego Rivera. ]

   -=-=-=-=-

   the Dewey Commission, was set up in the United States by supporters of Trotsky, to establish the truth about the trials.

   Good thing you guys read abouyt willi munzenberg and others, so you would know what was going on now… -artfldgr

4. the Commission finds:

   That the conduct of the Moscow Trials was such as to convince any unprejudiced person that no attempt was made to ascertain the truth. [which tells the people what kind of power they now are under!!!!!!!!!!!!]

   That while confessions are necessarily entitled to the most serious consideration, the confessions themselves contain such inherent improbabilities as to convince the Commission that they do not represent the truth, irrespective of any means used to obtain them.” [they are a formality for the future history where they say they confessed but no one read the history, the actual confession, etc… ]

   That Trotsky never instructed any of the accused or witnesses in the Moscow trials to enter into agreements with foreign powers against the Soviet Union [and] that Trotsky never recommended, plotted, or attempted the restoration of capitalism in the USSR.

   That Trump never instructed any of the accused or witnesses in the Moscow trials to enter into agreements with foreign powers [and] that Trump never recommended, plotted, or attempted the restoration of capitalism in the USSA.

   🙂

5. Artfldgr:

   The connection to show trials is obvious and has been made many times to many different events of the last decade or so. Your attention to detail and quotes are fine, but leave out the assumptions about what people know in general and what they don’t know.

6. Artfldgr:

   And I obviously mean a sitting United States president. I also made that clear by the examples I gave.

   You make some incorrect assumptions about what I wrote, and you come to incorrect conclusions. And somehow, those conclusions tend to run in one direction only: that other people (me, the readers here) are ignorant.

   It is glaringly obvious to anyone with even a modicum of historical awareness—and most people who comment here have more than a modicum—that witchhunts and witchhunt-type investigations (as well as coups, violent and non-violent, and revolutions and revolts) have occurred in many countries against a sitting president or other leader.

7. Looks like the Ds are fighting on 2 fronts. That’s always a winning strategy.

   https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/ocasio-cortezs-chief-of-staff-ran-1m-slush-fund-by-diverting-campaign-cash-to-his-own-companies

8. That’s the question isn’t it?

   Just how big is the middle these days?

   Are they, will they be horrified by the Democrat’s insatiable blood lust–their increasingly unhinged willingness to go to any lengths, to supposedly “investigate’ anything to do with President Trump, no matter how far in the past, and before Trump’s Presidency, no matter how tangential, no matter how obviously phony and contrived, and no matter how obviously of no bearing on him or his Presidency?

   At total waste of time on setting up a phony case for Impeachment while, all the while, neglecting to present any practical proposals to fix or even ameliorate any of the many major problems facing this country, other than radical, unworkable, far too disruptive, far too expensive to pay for, pie in the sky Socialist i.e. at root, Communist solutions.

   Solutions that are merely a way to get as much total control over everything, everyone, and their money as they can get away with.

   And will those in the middle not just tsk, tsk and sit on their hands, but vote for Trump come 2020?

9. This Democratic initiative seems calculated to produce many years of litigation regarding executive privilege, attorney-client privilege, etc., similar to the Whitewater investigation. Maybe by 2023 the litigation will be wrapped up.

10. I’m wondering, though, how the vast middle will respond to this. I also wonder how vast the middle actually is anymore. –neo

    If the economy remains solid and positive, voters may still feel queasy about Trump, for reasons good and bad, but they will re-elect him.

    Furthermore, I do believe a backlash is in progress. People didn’t like Nixon all that much, but he wiped the floor with McGovern in 1972.
    ________________________________________

    Let me tell you people that I found a new way
    And I’m tired of all this talk about love
    And the same old story with a new set of words
    About the good and the bad and the poor
    …
    I keep my eyes on the prize, on the long fallen skies
    And I don’t let my friends get hurt
    All you back room schemers, small trip dreamers
    Better find something new to say
    Cause you’re the same old story
    It’s the same old crime
    And you got some heavy dues to pay

    –Steve Miller, “Space Cowboy” (1969)

11. We need some pundits to point out that while CNN et al were focusing on Cohen this week, Trump was in Hanoi trying to get some kind of deal with Kim. He job was made much harder because Kim surely remembers what happened to Ghaddafi after he gave up his nuclear weapons. The Norks are scared to death of the next time Dems control the executive.

    Then they could point out the WaPo lies about duct taping females being smuggled across the border, which had been reported earlier in the NYT.

    The pundits who are supposed to be conservative are often too mealy mouthed. They need to point out that lots of people who voted for Trump did not do so because they loved him or thought he should be canonized. It was because they knew how bad Hillary is: Lincoln bedroom rentals, Juanita Broaddrick, Russian reset, Clinton foundation, Bill’s trips on the Epstein Express, Bill’s pay for speeches in Russia. We can’t let them put us into a box.

12. On the other side: what about those FISA documents that were/are to be declassified?

    Where’s the IG report?

    What’s John Huber up to? If you saw Heather MacDonald on In Depth yesterday, the one point where she went wrong was in her vehement defense of Jeff Sessions. Sessions’ dewy-eyed recusal opened the door for a great deal of malicious activity.

13. AOC says the we’re “all gonna die in 12 years” if we don’t drop everything, totally change our way of life, and carry out a WWII level mobilization of our entire country to combat global warming, by totally rehabbing/rebuilding every structure in the country, by giving up car and air travel in favor of high speed rail and the public transit, give up eating meat to reduce cow farts, get rid of coal and oil in favor of renewable wind and solar energy, etc,—it’s all about reducing our “carbon footprint.”

    Thus, you would think that AOC would make every effort she possibly could to reduce her “carbon footprint”.

    To take the subway or public transit and not a car, to travel by train rather than by plane.

    Yet, an article out just today reports that, despite the fact that the Number 7 subway entrance is 138 feet from her Queens campaign headquarters in New York City, AOC and her campaign have used various car services, including Uber, 1,049 times, spent almost $30,000 on car services and car and van rentals, that AOC or her staff have traveled by train only 18 times, but that, since she won the Primary, her campaign has spent over $25,000 on 66 airplane flights.

    See https://www.worldtribune.com/aoc-worked-138-feet-from-no-7-line-but-spent-large-on-ubers-airlines/

14. Sorry, posted to the wrong thread.

15. A memorable passage from Melville’s Moby Dick paraphrased;

    all evil, to those crazed by TDS, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Donald. They piled upon the whale’s orange hump the sum of all their general rage and all the hate that they felt toward all the ‘deplorables’ from Ishmael* down; and then, as if their chests were mortars, burst their hot heart’s shell upon it.

    * “He will be a wild donkey of a man; his hand will be against everyone and everyone’s hand against him, and he will live in hostility toward all his brothers.” Genesis 16:12 NIV

16. Sessions’ dewy-eyed recusal opened the door for a great deal of malicious activity.

    Sessions was rolled, and rather easily, the wrong man for the job. In his defense, I expect few realized just how deeply corrupted the FBI, CIA, and DOJ had become. Someday I’d also like to learn what happened to the invisible Huber.

17. The question might also be just how much the broad middle is paying attention to events. It might just be those on the fringe, and yes most bloggers and commenters are on the fringe of the broad middle. Both sides of the middle.

18. Yep, them Democrats: raising “disgusting” to a new level.

    Key question:
    In the upcoming feeding frenzy, will the Democrats manage to gut themselves before they get a chance to gut the USA?

    (To be sure, the carnaval to come will give the MSM an unsurpassed opportunity to shred whatever sliver of reliability they have left….)

19. So…
    As I understand it- some Democrats think that Donald Trump Jr. has done a crime.

    And- they’re using Trump Jr.’s crime as an excuse to tell the Government to investigate president Trump, because,

    “investigating this crime[s] might uncover crimes done by President Trump.”

    When the Govt. or police investigate someone, without any evidence of a crime, I think that’s called:

    injustice, and UNFAIR.

    P.S.- when I mentioned Trump Jr.’s [crimes], above, I mean: alleged crimes, or crimes that he is suspected of doing.

20. I love how the Dems simply define away their failures (or Mueller’s failure) to find crimes. “Collusion” originally was used to mean working together with the Russians to interfere with the election. It now means being willing to meet with a Russian lawyer who a third-rate British rock and roll publicist says has some dirt on Hillary. “Hacking the election” meant directly being involved in breaking into election computers to vary election results. Now it means trying to find out, or bragging about finding out, whether Wikileaks was going to release dirt on Hillary even though Wikileaks had publicly announced they were going to do so the month before. “Emolument” originally meant a gift or payment from a foreign king, prince, or state. Now it means leaving your business open — albeit under another’s control — when some foreign king, prince, or state might use it. This would have been a surprise to Washington and Jefferson, as both men’s plantations remained operating during their presidencies, and both of whom sold agricultural products to the British!

21. A pattern (shockingly!) emerges(?):

    AOC: They criticize me because I’m a woman (and very pretty at that!)
    https://pluralist.com/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-conservatives-hate-her-because-pretty/

    Ilhan Omar: They hate me because I’m a Muslim:
    https://www.timesofisrael.com/rep-omar-says-critics-call-her-an-anti-semite-because-shes-muslim/

    Rashida Tlaib: [Editor’s note] We’re waiting for input (ETA any moment now). She has been keeping her cards close to her chest. This perhaps because she’s been way too busy calling the President colorful names and referring to him and a fellow white legislator as out-and-out racists, all of which demands a lot of time, attention and effort (and, needless to say, love). But it shouldn’t be too long before she chimes in.
    In the meantime:
    https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/424083-shocked-by-rep-tlaibs-hateful-political-language-we-shouldnt-be

22. Oops…wrong thread. (Moved up.)

23. As I understand it- some Democrats think that Donald Trump Jr. has done a crime.

    The Jr thing is that Mueller hasn’t interviewed him. Ergo, he’s going to be indicted. How does that make sense?

    Jr organized the Trump Tower meeting…after Russian operatives informed him of their governments support for his father. So why no interview?

    DOJ doesn’t interview targets. So people speculate that Jr is about to be indicted or is already the defendant in a sealed indictment.

24. Manju:

    ‘DOJ doesn’t interview targets.” Police don’t arrest suspects. Lawyers don’t represent clients. Journalists don’t talk to sources (if they aren’t imaginary). Any other “don’ts ” we should know about?

    Has the DOJ interviewed you? If not, you are probably a “target.”

    Oh, bless your heart.

25. om, according to a former federal prosecutor: “Federal prosecutors rarely interview targets of an investigation…Instead, they build the case around them, with documents, emails, public admissions and other witnesses.”

26. Manju:

    Have you been interviewed yet? Show me the man I’ll show you the crime.

    And of course one federal investigator’s opinion is the rule for all cases.

    You are precious, bless your heart.

27. Snow on Pine on March 4, 2019 at 9:46 pm at 9:46 pm said:

    Thus, you would think that AOC would make every effort she possibly could to reduce her “carbon footprint”.
    * * *
    AOC is getting while the getting is good – before she is indicted (but not interviewed) for campaign finance fraud.

    Barry & Snow – it’s hard to keep the threads straight, as they all together make the same tangled tapestry.

28. A lotta that ol’ amnesia goin’ ’round.

    You may remember that a couple of months ago former FBI Director Comey reportedly answered “I don’t remember,” “I don’t recall,” or “I don’t know” to close to 250 separate questions put to him in a recent closed door Congressional hearing; questions about things which, as the Director, he could reasonably be expected to know about.

    Now, I note a story out today, reporting that when called before a closed door Congressional committee hearing former Attorney General Loretta Lynch claimed “not to remember” and that she “didn’t recall” anything about the FISA warrants the DOJ would have had to have reviewed, and which Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates and FBI Director Comey–among other high ranking FBI personnel–signed off on.

    How can people be allowed to get away with lying like this?

    Talk about two separate systems of justice!

    If you or I pulled this shit, we would be charged with obstruction and/or perjury, have been tried, and be on our way to jail.

    There should be some a presumption that, if you answered a certain number of questions that you could reasonably be expected to know with “I don’t know” or “I don’t recall” more than a few times, the presumption should be that you are deliberately obstructing justice, lying, and perjuring yourself.

    And you should be charged with those crimes.

29. Snow:

    The DOJ isn’t interviewing these folks either so they must (using the Manju rule) be under investigation. crickets ….

30. Manju: Have you been interviewed yet?

    Why? Did Putin’s operatives come to me with information that was part of their campaign to harm the United States by electing Donald Trump President?

31. Manju:

    You are precious, so I’ll stop after this final question.

    How do we know Putin’s operatives didn’t come to you? Has that been confirmed in a DOJ interview?

32. I haven’t figured out Manju yet. Is he: a) really that ignorant and irrational; b) a conservative pretending to be that ignorant and irrational to add a little humor to our lives; or c) a being from that parallel universe in which lefties dwell?

    On the assumption (hope?) that it’s c), I will relate to Manju what happened in our universe. (Explanatory comments in italics.)

    1. A third-rate British publicist, Bob Goldstone, for an Azerbaijani popstar (seriously!) that Donald Trump Jr. knew from the Trump Organization’s putting on the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow in 2013 e-mailed him saying that the Russian government had dirt on Hillary. (In his testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee, Goldstone testified that his statement in his first e-mail to Don requesting the meeting, about damaging information about Hillary coming from the Russian Crown [sic] Prosecutor was “hyperbolic language,” “publicist puff,” and “artistic license “ https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Goldstone%201%20Transcript_redacted.pdf, p.229 ln. 16 – p 231, ln. 8.)

    2. The meeting was set for the date when Natalia Vladimirovna Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer well-known in the U.S. for lobbying against the Magnitsky Act, was in the U.S. to meet with Fusion GPS (yes, that Fusion GPS!) about another case. Veselnitskaya is a very well-connected Moscow lawyer, sort of a Russian Lanny Davis or Clark Clifford, who has represented many high ranking former Russian officials, both in Russia and in the U.S.

    3. The Magnitsky Act imposed sanctions on Russia after Sergei Magnitsky was eaten to death in a Russian jail. In response, Putin banned Americans from adopting Russian children.

    4. In the famous June 9, 2016 Trump Tower meeting, Veselnitskaya (wait for it) lobbied against the Magnitsky Act! (Quelle surprise!) She told Don Jr. about how unfair it was that children who would otherwise be adopted didn’t have the opportunity to do so because of the Magnitsky Act. The meeting, as was testified by Goldstone and all others, was about the Magnitsky Act and adoptions. Goldstone Transcript, supra, p. 49, ln 7 – p. 51, ln. 20, p. 63, ln. 14 – ln. 25, and passim.

    5. Goldstone and all other witnesses to the meeting’s testimony that it was about the Magnitsky Act and adoptions has never been rebutted, let alone refuted. (Apparently Comrades Beria and Dzerzhinsky, excuse me, Congressmen Nadler and Wyden, have forgotten that.)

    In summary Manju, in our universe, no one in the Trump Organization or the Trump campaign has ever been approached by “Putin’s operatives . . .with information that was part of their campaign to harm the United States by electing Donald Trump President.”

33. We’ve been told that “no one actually knows when the “Mueller Report” will be released,” yet, according to a story out today, Amazon is advertising that you can order an advance copy that will be available for sale on March 26th.

    See https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2019/03/amazon-is-already-selling-advance-copies-of-mueller-report-available-on-march-26th/

34. In summary Manju, in our universe, no one in the Trump Organization or the Trump campaign has ever been approached by “Putin’s operatives . . .with information that was part of their campaign to harm the United States by electing Donald Trump President.”

    Well, there’s an email in Jr’s inbox saying as much:

    This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.

    This leaves only the “Putin Operatives” side of the equation in dispute.

35. A “Putin Operative” is whatever Manju and the DNC needs it to be. Sort of like the one “federal prosecutor” who sets the standard of investigations for the whole DOJ.

    Bless your heart, you are a precious child.

36. Manju’s clearly a visitor from another universe. I give him a link to Rob Goldstone testifying, unchallenged by the Senate Intelligence Committee counsel, that the line “very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump” was “hyperbolic language,” “publicist puff,” and “artistic license.“ And his answer is simply to repeat the Goldstone e-mail. In his universe, the link probably goes to Adam Schiff’s Secret Store of Sneaky Collusion.

    Please Manju, go back to your universe — the one where Spock has a goatee!

37. Richard,

    Ok. I see now that when you say no one in Trump campaign has ever been approached with the information in question, you actually mean they were indeed approached in such a manner but the approachee didn’t really mean it.

    In your telling, they instead discussed the “Magnitsky Act and adoptions“. And this “has never been rebutted, let alone refuted”

    1. The fact that they discussed the Magnitsky act doesn’t help you. Magnitsky is about sanctions…the very sanctions that the Trump admin is violating right now. Any investigator worth his salt is going to see a potential quid pro quo here. Putin hates sanctions. In return for lifting them he’s offering help in winning the election.

    2. More importantly, for our purposes, your evidence comes from an interview with Rob Goldstone. Obviously, any investigator is going to interview everyone who was at that meeting.

    Yet Mueller has not done so. Why? Because federal prosecutors generally do not interview targets. The fact that Jr has not been interviewed is evidence that he will be indicted.

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