Mueller’s team appears to have no doubt that Manafort was lying to them. That means they didn’t really need his testimony, at all. It also means they had no need to keep secrets — they could keep giving Manafort the impression that he was pulling a fast one over the prosecutors, all while reporting misleading information to Trump that he could use to fill out his open book test. Which increases the likelihood that Trump just submitted sworn answers to those questions full of lies.
Walter Shaub doesn’t have time for fun these days.
The former head of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics under President Obama says he’s too busy trying to save the republic.
“Then I roll up my sleeves and go to work at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, where we’re putting up as strong a fight as we possibly can for this republic and for the ethical principles that were once the hallmark of its operations,” he said.
Shaub, once a little-known government bureaucrat, has risen in prominence since he resigned in protest from the Trump administration last summer.
Shortly before his departure and right after the 2016 election, a series of tweets were sent from the OGE’s official Twitter account, applauding then-President-elect Trump’s supposed decision to sell off his business empire’s assets. But Trump hadn’t decided to take such action.
“.@realDonaldTrump Brilliant! Divestiture is good for you, very good for America!” said one of the ethic office’s tweets.
Shaub, 47, was behind the messages. Now serving as a senior adviser at the watchdog group CREW, he’s also behind a slew of legal actions involving everything from the emoluments clause to spending and travel of government officials.
“My hobbies include screaming into the void and banging my head against a table,” Shaub joked yesterday during an interview.
District
of Columbia Circuit Court Judge Brett Kavanaugh, who is Trump’s
second nominee to the Supreme Court, is unlike Trump in that he is a Yale-educated career Republican who is unflaggingly polite to those he considers his social peers.
He is a lot like Trump in that he is so
comprehensively awful that it’s hard to pick a line of attack, and
so shamelessly dishonest that it’s painful to watch someone try to
pin him down on any of it.
But now he’s dangerously close to a lifetime appointment to the most powerful court in the country, so we have to get our bearings on at least a few of the most important ways in which he is awful.
This isn’t going to be fun reading, so just keep in mind that it’s not too late. Yet.
…The author of the anonymous op-ed is hoping to vindicate the reputation of like-minded senior Trump staffers. See, we only look complicit! Actually, we’re the real heroes of the story. But what the author has just done is throw the government of the United States into even more dangerous turmoil. He or she has enflamed the paranoia of the president and empowered the president’s willfulness.
What happens the next time a staffer seeks to dissuade the president from, say, purging the Justice Department to shut down the Mueller investigation? The author of the Times op-ed has explicitly told the president that those who offer such advice do not have the president’s best interests at heart, and are, in fact, actively subverting his best interests as he understands them on behalf of ideas of their own.He’ll grow more defiant, more reckless, more anti-constitutional, and more dangerous.
And those who do not quit or are not fired in the next few days will have to work even more assiduously to prove themselves loyal, obedient, and on the team. Things will be worse after this piece. They will be worse because of this piece…
What would be better?
Speak in your own name. Resign in a way that will count. Present the evidence that will justify an invocation of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, or an impeachment, or at the very least, the first necessary step toward either outcome, a Democratic Congress after the November elections.
Your service in government is valuable. Thank you for it. But it is not so indispensable that it can compensate for the continuing tenure of a president you believe to be amoral, untruthful, irrational, anti-democratic, unpatriotic, and dangerous. Previous generations of Americans have sacrificed fortunes, health, and lives to serve the country. You are asked only to tell the truth aloud and with your name attached.
If anyone knows what Michael Cohen is up against, his lawyer figures it’s John Dean, the former White House counsel who turned on President Richard Nixon and helped run him out of office.
Cohen’s lawyer, Lanny Davis, told The Associated Press on Monday that he’sbeen talking with Dean over the last few months “to hear his wisdom, the lessons that he learned and his reflections on what he saw Michael Cohen going through.”
Hearseeno 