Mueller Reset

Mueller On Tap:  Mueller’s much anticipated testimony starts this morning at 8:30.  Everybody who’s anybody has weighed in on what he’ll actually say and what, if any, impact his testimony will have on the general public.  It’s unlikely that there will be any Perry Mason moments since the odds are that Mueller won’t stray at all from the contents of his report, but we will know soon enough.  Trump who earlier in the week claimed he wouldn’t even watch the testimony most certainly will.  There’s very little else on his schedule today and contrary to early  inaccurate reports, Fox News will be broadcasting the testimony.  Yesterday it was announced that Mueller is bringing along Aaron Zebley, his former Chief of Staff and long time aide.  Zebley will be sworn in as a witness for the afternoon session before the House Intelligence Committee but will serve only as an adviser to Mueller during the morning portion of his testimony to the Judiciary Committee testimony. As evidenced by his late night tweet stream, Trump is bent out of shape, or at the least pretending to be, about Zebley’s involvement. We know that he’s agitated because he tweeted “So Robert Mueller has now asked for his long time Never Trumper lawyer to sit beside him and help with answers. What’s this all about? His lawyer represented the ‘basement server guy’ who got off free in the Crooked Hillary case. This should NOT be allowed. Rigged Witch Hunt!” Trump’s night time diatribe aside, Zebley is a respected former FBI agent and Federal Attorney whose career included tracking down the bombers who attacked the US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya and working on key components of the 9 11 investigation. Trump of course, gives him no credit for that but is focused on the fact that during one of his stints in private legal practice he represented the guy who set up Hillary Clinton’s email server.  Whatever, that’s just another Trumpian excuse for going on the attack, possibly an indication that Trump is concerned that some of the people who watch Mueller today might actually end the day understanding just how much criminal activity and obstruction took and is continuing to take place.  On the obstruction front, just yesterday Trump sued New York State and the House Ways and Means Committee to prevent them from sharing, and in the case of the Ways and Means committee, getting his tax returns.  As to that criminal behavior, another member of Trump’s transition team,  Bijan Rafiekian, a former business partner of Michael Flynn, was found guilty yesterday on a pair of foreign-agent felony charges related to work the two men did for Turkish interests during the final months of the Trump presidential campaign in 2016.  Notably, Flynn who was supposed to testify against Rafiekian as part of his plea deal with Mueller didn’t on the advise of his new lawyer, the one who sells Trump t-shirts as a sideline. As to the Mueller report, yesterday during his testimony in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, FBI Director Christopher Wray admitted to Senator Diane Feinstein that he hadn’t read the whole report, maybe he should tune in today.  For added entertainment he could join Trump in the White House.  During the same testimony, Wray reported that the FBI has made around 100 “domestic terrorism-related arrests since October” and that the “majority of the domestic terrorism cases that we’ve investigated are motivated by some version of what you might call white supremacist violence.” Sadly, given the example set from the White House that’s not all that surprising.  Flynn also said that despite all of the sanctions the Russians remain intent on interfering in our elections.  Again, not all that surprising given how effective they’ve been so far and Trump’s refusal to firmly tell his good friend Vlad to keep his paws off our electoral system.

Legislative News:  The Senate finally voted to extend the 9 11 fund for first responders.   Only Kentucky’s Senator Rand Paul and Utah’s Senator Mike Lee voted against the compensation program because while voting for a tax cut plan that has ballooned the deficit into the stratosphere was okay by them, voting to ensure health care coverage for those suffering because of their work on or near the 9 11 pit violates their principles, or lack thereof.  To be fair, not that they deserve it, both Senators said that they would have voted for the legislation if certain limitations that they proposed had been passed but when neither of their amendments got anywhere near the needed votes, both voted against the continued funding of the program.  Separately, the House overwhelmingly passed a bipartisan resolution condemning the boycott-Israel movement, part of the Democrats efforts to counter Trump’s assertion that the party is completely anti-Semitic and anti-Israel. Three of the four members of the so-called Democratic “squad” voted against the resolution, but proving that despite Trump’s assertions, the squad isn’t monolithic in its views, the fourth member, Massachusetts Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley voted with the majority. Congresswomen Tlaib and Omar plan to travel to Israel and the West Bank soon.  Despite Israel’s law prohibiting boycott supporters from visiting, Israel’s Ambassador to the US Ron Dermer avoiding feeding further controversy, at least for now, by saying that the two will be allowed in “out of respect for the US Congress and the great alliance between Israel and America, we would not deny entry to any member of Congress into Israel." And lastly, though Congress has previously rejected the Trump administration’s efforts to cut back on who qualifies for the SNAP food stamp program, the Trump administration is now proposing an administrative rule change that would cut around 3 million people from the program, because really why do we need to help the working poor feed their families and why do all those disadvantaged school children need food anyway?  The saved money will help defer some of the billions of dollars in payments that Trump is making to farmers to cushion their losses from the tariffs that he’s imposed on the Chinese. That all makes sense, doesn’t it?