Mueller Who?

Gone But Not Forgotten:  Special Counsel Mueller really is closing up shop but that doesn’t mean that his investigations have ended.  Yesterday, a judicial watchdog group requested that the federal judge overseeing the Mueller initiated case involving the “mystery” foreign sovereign-owned company authorize the release of details about the case and the identity of the company to the public arguing that since the Mueller Report had been delivered the case must be over.  When queried about this, the prosecutor handling the case told the judge that the case was active and that the Mueller grand jury is “continuing robustly.” So though Mueller is hitting the exits and his team is going back to their previous day jobs, others in Justice are picking up the slack and the investigations roll on.  As to the Mueller report, no one outside of Attorney General Barr, the soon to depart Deputy AG Rosenstein and their  minions have seen it, or at least that’s what we’ve been told, but Democratic leadership continues to press for its release.  Even the length of the report appears to be a secret.  House Judiciary Committee Chair Nadler says that Barr told him the length, but that he had to swear an oath of “Omerta” to even learn that much about it so he couldn’t share that information, he did leave the impression that it’s length was somewhere between 700 to 999 pages. The secrecy behind the report’s contents has led many to conclude or at least hope that there’s something or possibly many things in the report that Barr and Trump, despite his assertions to the contrary, don’t want the public to see.  That secret stuff, may reveal that while there wasn’t enough evidence to lead to criminal indictments of conspiracy or collusion or whatever you want to call it, there was a lot of truly odd behavior that walked right up to the line and that the evidence for Trump obstruction was on, or even crossed that line.  While we wait for those details, or at least the details that we’ll be allowed to see, Vanity Fair reported yesterday that former Trump lawyer/fixer Michael Cohen, who is due to start his sentence in a few weeks, was telling the truth when he told Congress that Ivanka’s lawyer Abbe Lowell had whitewashed his testimony to make it seem that Ivanka had little to do with the Moscow Tower project.  For his part, the “fully exonerated” Trump seems determined to do his best to ruin the lives and careers of all those treasonous people, FBI types, Democratic legislators and “liberal” reporters he holds responsible for the investigation to insure that no other president ever gets treated the way he’s been treated because he seems to have forgotten his own attack on all things Obama and Clinton and anyway, he never lies and always holds himself to the highest standards, right? That threat doesn’t seem to be doing much to deter Maxine Waters, the Democratic Chair of the House Financial Services Committee.  She reports that Deutsche Bank, the bank with a questionable history of lending Trump Inc lots of money has shifted into a cooperative stance and is now sharing the relevant Trump related  financial records that her committee previously requested.   

Shifting the Spotlight:  Instead of taking a few weeks to enjoy the glow of the Barr spin of the Mueller Report, Trump has jumped right into the thorny thicket of health care politics leaving Republican leadership in a tizzy. Trump insists that the Republicans have an Obamacare replacement plan waiting in the wings, he even has some of his surrogates out claiming that one exists, but there isn’t one so he’s told Republican leadership, the same group of geniuses who couldn’t come up with a viable alternative last time around, to come up with a plan pronto, or at least by the time that the lawsuit challenging Obamacare makes it out of the courts.  Despite their efforts to get him off of the health care cliff, he remains fixated.  To the extent that the courts rule against the red states attorneys generals challenge and overrule what is widely viewed as a bad decision by the Texas lower court judge who ruled that Obamacare is unconstitutional, no replacement plan will be necessary but if the case makes it to the Supreme Court and if SCOTUS rules against Obamacare, Republicans will face the specter of running for reelection just as 20 million or so Americans lose their insurance.  Speaker Pelosi, who has got to be happy about this shift in focus, isn’t sitting on her hands.  On Tuesday, House Democrats unveiled legislation to shore up the Affordable Care Act and expand enrollment to millions more people.  She also has her crowd focused on climate change.  To that end yesterday she unveiled another bill called the Climate Action Now Act which aims to block Trump from pulling out of the Paris climate agreement. Under the bill, Trump would also have to submit a new plan to Congress outlining how the U.S. will continue to meet the goals established in the Paris agreement.  In all likelihood, neither of these bills will see the light of day in the Republican controlled Senate where the turtle like Senate Majority Leader McConnell will do his best, which is frequently more than enough, to hide them in his shell.  On the budget front, the Defense Department has redirected $1 billion of its funding from last year to Trump’s vanity border wall project. Democratic appropriators are furious and have notified Acting Defense Secretary Shanahan that there will be consequences, they plan to strip the Defense Department of its right to reprogram funds in the future. The frustrated Shanahan’s appears as frustrated as they are, he says that he had no choice but to shift the money to WALL because he is just following the orders of his Commander in Chief.  Health Secretary DeVos is still defending her decision to defund the Special Olympics however, her argument is going nowhere on either side of the aisle.  Republican and Democratic legislators plan to override her request, in fact they plan to fund all the Special Olympics projects and may even include an bump up in program funding, a serious slap back at DeVos and by extension Trump’s attempts to cover his “tax reform” generated shortfalls with social program cutbacks.     

International Update: Reuters reports that Energy Secretary Rick Perry has approved six secret authorizations for US companies to sell nuclear power technology and assistance to Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia plans to build at least two nuclear power plants and several countries including the United States, South Korea and Russia are in competition for that deal.  Though these authorizations relate to power plans, Saudi Arabian officials have previously said that if Iran builds nuclear weapons they will too. Another nuclear race, this one with Jared Kushner’s good buddy, the vindictive Khashoggi killer Crown Prince  Mohammed bin Salmon in the driver’s seat, what could go wrong?  Egypt is trying to broker a ceasefire between Israel and Gaza to defuse the increase in hostilities that resulted after Israel responded to Hamas missile attacks on its civilians with a missile barrage of its own. To the extent that Egypt is unsuccessful, Hamas is expected to follow-up with another march of demonstrators to the Gaza border fence, an action that is likely to lead to escalating violence. All of this is taking place in the run up to Israeli elections which are scheduled to take place on April 9. With deadlines looming, a resolution to the British Brexit catastrophe remains out of reach. Parliament’s efforts to pass any plan continue to fall short with the stoic but desperate Prime Minster May saying that she’ll step down as soon as something passes, her way of saying, pass something, anything so that I can get out of here.