Orange Goblins

Trick or Treat:  Yesterday a lot of superheroes, rock stars, witches and monsters of all ages were out walking the streets of New York City but sadly the orange haired goblin who used to live here but is now running the country didn’t even try to be anything other than his real self, he didn’t even try to be president.  Instead he sent out two videos, one turning what was supposed to be a solemn visit to Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life mourners into a campaign moment and another demonizing all immigrants by equating them to an illegal alien who had committed murder, truly heinous but not typical of most undocumented immigrants who are statistically more law abiding than the rest of us.  On the Pittsburgh front he labeled reports that he had not been warmly welcomed by the community as fake news and then lied again by insisting that there had been very few protesters suggesting that those who were there had been brought in solely to make him look bad.  On the migrant front, he told ABC’s Washington Correspondent Jonathan Karl that he would soon send 15,000 troops to the border to protect the mainland from the incoming hordes of violent migrants, especially those young children in diapers because they can be really, really stinky.  To be sure, he’s not sending 15,000 troops to the border, that’s a number that he pulled out of thin air so that he could rant it out to his base later in the evening during his campaign run to Florida, part of a plan to distract them from the wall that he never built, the one that was going to be funded by Mexico.  During the same ABC interview he then told a particularly ironic bigly whopper saying  "I always want to tell the truth. When I can, I tell the truth. And sometimes it turns out to be where something happens that’s different or there’s a change, but I always like to be truthful."  Trump also doubled down on his promise to eliminate birthright citizenship, slapping back at House Speaker Paul Ryan for saying that such citizenship couldn’t be eliminated by executive action.  Specifically Trump announced that Ryan "knows nothing about birthright citizenship” and "should be focusing on holding the Majority" in the House of Representatives "rather than giving his opinions" on the issue.  Though Trump insists that revoking birthright citizenship is much less complex than people think, conservative lawyer George Conway who turned down the opportunity to become his solicitor general and Neil Katyal the more liberal lawyer who served as acting Solicitor General under Obama co-authored an op-ed on the subject in the Washington Post.  Together they wrote “Sometimes the Constitution’s text is plain as day and bars what politicians want to do.  That’s the case with”  Trump’s “proposal to end birthright citizenship through an executive order.  Such a move would be unconstitutional and would certainly be challenged and would undoubtably win.” That didn’t stop George’s wife Kellyanne from saying that many Constitutional experts agree with Trump.  That Kellyanne, she can always be relied upon to state an alternative fact upon command from the goblin in chief.  As to Kellyanne, Politico reports that as a result of her husband’s op-ed and stream of Trump critical tweets her name may now be on the long list of Trumpsters likely to depart, voluntarily or not, after next week’s election.  That list includes AG Sessions, Acting AG Rosenstein, Defense Secretary Mattis, Treasury Secretary Mnuchin whose wife wants out of DC,  and Interior Secretary Zinke who was recently referred by the Interior Department’s Inspector General, the one he tried to oust, to the Justice Department for his unethical and possibly illegal actions.  Surprisingly, Chief of Staff Kelly has fallen off the get out of town list in part because Ivanka now thinks that he is doing a good job or possibly because no one else would be willing to fill his shoes.    

Mueller Time:  While all eyes are focused on next weeks all important mid term elections, Mueller continues to toil away.  A number of news outlets report that his team interviewed once and probably future Trump advisor Steve Bannon for the third time last week.  Also, yesterday Politico Magazine published an article written by attorney Nelson Cunningham, a former Southern District of NY Federal prosecutor who once served as counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee under then Senator Biden.  Based on a reading of recent court filings, he has concluded that it is highly likely that Mueller has spent some of his post Labor Day “quiet period” secretly litigating against Trump for the right to throw him in front of the grand jury.  He says that the evidence for this “lies in obscure docket entries at the clerk’s office for the DC Circuit,” adding that a sealed grand jury case was initiated in the DC federal district court, that the court issued a ruling and that five days later one of the parties appealed it. Based on some sleuthing he believes that Mueller prevailed in the District court and that the presumptive grand jury witness who he asserts is Trump has “frantically appealed that order and sought special treatment from the judges of the DC Circuit—often referred to as the “second-most important court in the land.”  He argues that the quick turnaround for the various appeals provides evidence that this is a really important hot potato and again that the hot potato is Trump himself.  Cunningham goes on to say that “If Mueller were going to subpoena” Trump, “and there’s every reason why a careful and thorough prosecutor would want the central figure on the record on critical questions regarding his knowledge and intent, this is just the way we would expect him to do so. Quietly, expeditiously, and refusing to waste the lull in public action demanded by the midterm elections. It all fits.”  To no one’s surprise, when asked about this yesterday both Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow and Trump himself denied that he’s been subpoenaed, but then again they wouldn’t admit it if it was, so who knows?

Elections!?!  Its nail biting time.  Nancy Pelosi is having a hard time repressing her glee, Chuck Schumer not so much. So many key Senatorial and Gubernatorial polls seem to be in the too close to call, statistically irrelevant range.  Though most pundits predict that the odds of the Democrats winning the House are growing daily, a number of the seats they need to win are also in that questionable range and as we have all learned the hard way, there is still enough time left between now and next Tuesday for election moving weird and sad things to happen, so keep your fingers crossed and more importantly vote.