Of Mice and Mountains

We’re Being Punked: After almost two years of waiting, followed by a few weeks of Trump spinning,  we finally got to see most of a fairly damning report about Russian election interference, the Trump teams willingness to playball and Trump’s over the top efforts at obstruction.  Special Counsel Mueller found lots of collusion, indicted and convicted a number of bad players and provided details about the Trump team’s efforts but concluded only that there wasn’t enough evidence to move forward with charges of criminal conspiracy, in part because the laws about accepting help from nefarious foreign players are vague and haven’t kept up with technology and in part because the Trump team members were inept conspiracists . On the obstruction front, despite Trump and AG Barr’s assertions, Mueller didn’t exonerate.  With his hands tied by Justice Department practice, he instead tossed the ball back to Congress.  He also left open the possibility of Trump being indicted at some future date, assuming he’s out of office before the statue of limitations on his crimes expires, something that Trump seems to fully understand.  For a while now, Trump who really admires all of those world leaders like China’s Xi and Turkey’s Erdogan who’ve come up with ways to extend their terms of office, has been saying at his rallies that if the outcome of the 2020 elections doesn’t go his way, he’ll declare the results unfair and stick around anyway.  He’s said that enough times that even Speaker Pelosi is getting concerned about his intent.  This weekend she told her crowd that they should coalesce around a center left position because that’s what it will take to win, and that winning won’t be enough, they are going to have to win bigly because otherwise we’ll all face the risk that Trump will refuse to leave the White House.   Think about that, Democratic leadership is concerned that the president of the United States will refuse to acknowledge the results of a legitimate election if it doesn’t go his way.  That should sound crazy but crazy is Trump’s currency and now with the help of some of his most loyal supporters, he’s even suggesting that his first term should be lengthened, not so coincidentally by enough time to get him get past the statute of limitations for the campaign finance violations that he has already been implicated in.  To that end, after Trump supporter Jerry Falwell, Jr tweeted “I now support reparations — Trump should have 2 yrs added to his 1st term as pay back for time stolen by this corrupt failed coup,” and by coup, he's referring to the Mueller investigation, Trump retweeted the Falwell tweet and then doubled down tweeting “Despite the tremendous success that I have had as President, including perhaps the greatest ECONOMY and most successful first two years of any President in history, they have stollen two years of my (our) Presidency (Collusion Delusion) that we will never be able to get back,” adding The Witch Hunt is over but we will never forget. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”  Falwell is a frighteningly influential dude with segments of Trump’s base, but his powers go only so far, so Trump also took it upon himself to make it clear to his good friend Vladimir Putin, that his 2016  efforts were appreciated and that some more help going forward would be okay too.  So just one week after Rudy Giuliani stated that getting help from a hostile foreign government was and is kosher, Trump called Putin to amplify that message.  During a one and a half hour call the two agreed that the whole Mueller investigation was much ado about nothing, just an effort to make a “mountain out of a mouse” which must be one of those folksy Russian expressions coined by Stalin while he was murdering political enemies.  Though Trump’s team insists that the call took place on an ordinary phone, maybe that nifty red one in the Oval Office, Trump reported that he saw Putin smile.  And Putin probably was smiling because except for a few words about that mousy Mueller report, Trump didn’t didn’t push back against future meddling, took Putin’s word when he said that the Russians weren’t helping Venezuela’s Maduro stay in power and assured him that all would be fine on the North Korea front.  As to those last two items, both Secretary of State Pompeo and national security advisor John Bolton are on record saying that the Russians are interfering in Venezuela and both are persona non grata with North Korean dictator Kim Jung un because he doesn’t like that they don’t kowtow to him the way Trump does. Late last week while Trump was organizing his weekend foursome, the Little Rocket Man was busy shooting off missiles, but Trump wants us all to know that there really isn’t anything to worry about so after some reflection and by reflection, think time in front of his mirror fixing his spray tan and adjusting his locks, he tweeted   “Anything in this very interesting world is possible, but I believe that Kim Jong Un fully realizes the great economic potential of North Korea, & will do nothing to interfere or end it. He also knows that I am with him & does not want to break his promise to me. Deal will happen!”   

Back to Mueller:  The Republican clown team was out in full force on various Fox programs this weekend pushing back against Mueller and his team of 18 angry Democrats and questioning the origination of the whole Russia investigation.  To that end they got a little help from the NY Times via an article the paper published last week about the FBI’s efforts to find out more about George Papadopoulos and his Russia related activities.  Apparently the FBI sent one of it’s agents, who is now being described as a blonde bombshell to hang with Papadopoulos in order to find out more about what he was up to, they did that after they got reports from Australia about his night of drunken assertions about the Russians and their purloined emails.  To most of us the dispatching of the “blonde bombshell” agent seems like the kind of thing that the FBI should be doing but to the Trump team, especially guys like Congressmen Devon Nunes and Jim Jordan that’s proof that the FBI and the Brits were engaging in illegal “spying” activities on Trump.  In any case, we might learn more about all this alleged “spying” in the not so distant future after the FBI Inspector General Michael Horowitz releases his long awaited report on the FBI’s activities.  Attorney General Barr, another guy who likes to liberally use the word spying to describe the investigations into Trump team members, testified last week that he would have no trouble with Special Counsel Mueller being called before either the House or the Senate to answer questions about his report.  Apparently, he didn’t run that one by Trump, or maybe he did, but Trump has now had a change of opinion on the subject so shortly after it was reported that Mueller had agreed to testify in front of the House Judiciary Committee on May 15 Trump tweeted  “After spending more than $35,000,000 over a two year period, interviewing 500 people, using 18 Trump Hating Angry Democrats & 49 FBI Agents - all culminating in a more than 400 page Report showing NO COLLUSION - why would the Democrats in Congress now need Robert Mueller to testify.”  And to confuse matters more, Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham who earlier said that he was done and that he didn’t plan to invite Mueller to testify in front of his committee, sent Mueller a missive asking him to  "Please inform the Committee if you would like to provide testimony regarding any misrepresentation by the attorney general of the substance of that phone call." The phone call in question is the one in which Mueller is thought to have told Barr that his summary of his Mueller was garbage but that where Barr said that he was just complaining about the press coverage of the report summary.  Despite Trump’s protestations, odds are that Mueller will testify, soon hopefully.  On the House front, today we should also learn if House Democrats are all that serious about any of their deadlines.  Judiciary Chair Nadler has given Barr until 9 AM today to produce the full Mueller report and underlying material, or else whatever that means.  And we are still waiting for Secretary of the Treasury Mnuchin to release Trump’s tax returns.  Ha!

Other News:  Facebook has banned a number of right wing conspiracists and other hatemongers including Infowars’ Alex Jones, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, and former Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos.  Trump isn’t all that happy about that, or at least isn’t all that happy about the banning of everyone but Farrakhan.  He believes that their banning is an indication that its getting “worse and worse” for conservatives to use social media.  He also isn’t all that happy about the results of the Kentucky Derby, and on that front he probably is joined by a lot of disappointed bettors.  In his view the decision to overturn Maximum Security’s victory is just another example of political correctness, kind of like saying that sexual harassment is bad or that everyone regardless of race or any of those other things should be treated fairly, you know, the kind of thing that forced him to finally give up on Stephen Moore another one of his Federal Reserve candidates.   After a weekend of lots of missiles and deaths on both sides of the border because that’s what happens when missiles fly, Israel and Hamas leaders in Gaza have declared one of their truces. In case you are wondering Jared Kushner is still working on his peace plan, the one that probably won’t be well received because achieving Middle East peace isn’t all that easy even for someone as “talented” as Jared.  One last thing, expect a rocky day in the markets.  Trump is once again threatening more tariffs on Chinese goods because trade negotiations with the Chinese haven’t been going according to his plan.