Voice Messaging

Flynn’s Back: Despite Trump and Attorney General Barr’s best efforts, the Russia investigation is still alive and kicking, kicking up dirt that is.  Yesterday, we learned some more about what Michael Flynn, Trump’s one time national security advisor, told Special Counsel Mueller about his conversations with Russians and about the efforts that a few people from the Trump team made to keep him quiet.  That last part should be of concern to a few of those Trumpkins as it appears that Flynn told Mueller that shortly after his legal team advised Trump’s team that he had decided to cooperate with Mueller, Trump’s personal lawyer called one of Flynn’s lawyers, leaving a voicemail message asking him to inform Flynn that Trump was really fond of him but that those kind feelings would disappear if Flynn went rogue, because what lawyer doesn’t engage in witness intimidation and obstruction on behalf of his client by voicemail especially when his client is the president?   Though the lawyer who left that voicemail message wasn’t named yesterday, given the timing of the call it, the assumption is that it was John Dowd, who subsequently resigned. Not surprisingly, when contacted yesterday neither Dowd, nor Jay Sekulow, who is still one of Trump’s lawyers, responded to questions about the call.  Flynn also told Mueller’s team that a member of Congress made a similar effort to try to convince him not to cooperate with Mueller.   We don’t yet know who that “member of Congress” is though the twitterverse is pointing to the devious Devon Nunes with the brown nosing Lindsey Graham their second choice. US District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan, the judge presiding over Flynn’s case, ordered that transcripts of the lawyer voicemail as well as another call that Flynn had with the Russian Ambassador be posted on the court website for all to access by the end of May.  Judge Sullivan also ordered that still-redacted portions of the Mueller report that relate to Flynn be given to the court and made public.  As to the rest of the unredacted Mueller report, the White House and Justice Department continue to stonewall Congress, so far refusing to share it with either the House Judiciary or House Intelligence Committees despite the insistence of Chairmen Nadler and Schiff.  Schiff’s committee is also trying to get their hands on anything and everything related to the counter intelligence investigation into Russian election interference, something his committee is entitled to see given its mandate.  The White House is stonewalling them on that too. Though Barr insists that Mueller will be allowed to testify in front of Congress at some point in the near or maybe far future, the Justice Department is slow walking that request and may be trying to impose limitations on what Mueller will be allowed to address. As to that Russian interference, we now know that Trump friendly Washington County in the Florida Panhandle was one of the counties whose data base was breached by the Russians in 2016.  The other county has not yet been named, but reports are that it was a mid-sized county on the state’s south eastern coastline.  

2020:  It’s unclear why, but New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio has thrown his hat into the presidential ring. During his last run for mayor he promised New Yorkers that he wouldn’t run for president, however, the delusional De Blasio has been interested in the job for a while now so his entrance into the race wasn’t unexpected.  Additionally, how could he ignore all the attention being given to South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg.  To be fair, like him or not De Blasio, has a point.  NYC has a population of 8.6 million, South Bend’s 102,000 pales in comparison.  That said, few in NYC understand De Blasio’s decision, which isn’t to say that we wouldn’t mind shipping him to Washington, it’s just that we don’t understand why anyone would want him there.  Then again few of us understand why anyone wanted that other New Yorker, the one who currently resides at 1600 Pennsylvania, or at least resides there when he isn’t in Palm Beach.  Former VP Joe Biden appears to be having a good week, polls indicate that, at least for now, he’s running circles around his competition and despite efforts by Trump’s fixer/lawyer, ex-NYC Mayor Giuliani to say that he had engaged in dirty politics in Ukraine, the country’s prosecutor general Yuriy Lutsenko said that his government has no plans to investigate Biden or his son Hunter because, despite Giuliani’s assertion,  there’s no evidence that either of them did anything wrong.  So much for that conspiracy theory, no doubt Giuliani and his dear leader Trump will find another one to propagate shortly.  As to Trump, though we still don’t have his tax returns he has filed his required annual financial disclosure information.  Those forms indicate that he had revenues of $434 million, but that’s revenue, not net revenue so the numbers don’t reveal much.  He also appears to be highly leveraged, again no surprise, and given that the forms require little specificity even that information is fairly vague.  

Abortion Politics:  The competition to get an abortion case to the “Trump” Supreme Court continues.  Missouri, where former Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill lost her seat largely because of her pro-choice stance and vote against Brett Kavanaugh’s court confirmation, is closing in on passing legislation that is just a tiny bit less onerous than the legislation passed in Alabama in that it would ban abortions after eight weeks rather than the six week limit included in the Alabama law.  Missouri will become the eighth state to pass prohibitive restrictions against abortions this year.  In addition to Alabama, the others include Georgia, Kentucky Mississippi and Ohio each of which have passed so-called heartbeat bills and Utah and Arkansas, states which have voted to limit abortions to the middle of the second trimester.  In comparison Roe, the case that each of these states hopes to overturn, permits abortions until viability, somewhere around 24 to 28 weeks.    

Immigration Wars:  Trump took to the Rose Garden to announce his new immigration plan, a plan that will most certainly be dead on arrival in Congress, largely because it provides no solution for the millions of undocumented citizens already here nor does it address the DACA problem; most Democrats and even a few Republicans won’t like it because of that and the anti-immigrant Republicans won’t be all that happy that it actually lets any immigrants in.  Trump isn’t all that concerned that it won’t get Congressional approval because the real objective of his speech was to try to appear as if he’s doing something, shifting the blame for the problem back to those obstructive left wing Democratic wingnuts, a better election strategy for him especially since he is trying to recapture the hearts of those suburban women turned off by the caging of kids and other such things.  Anyway, as expected Trump’s plan would create a system that favors applicants who are highly skilled, well-educated and speak English, as well as have potential employment over family-based immigration.  In other words, it’s a good thing that Melania’s parents have already made it through the door.  In other news, Trump reiterated that despite his national security advisor John Bolton’s saber rattling, he doesn’t want a war with Iran, instead he just wants someone over there to agree to talk with him in one of his favored one on one meetings preferably at Mar a Lago or at another Trump location.