"The idea that the acts laid out by Mueller didn’t add up to a ‘prosecutable case’ is ridiculous" Attorney General Bill Barr has still not explained why he concluded that there was not enough evidence to conclude President Donald Trump committed obstruction of justice, despite extensive evidence for the crime on multiple occasions in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report. Barr seems to be worried about his own lack of an explanation, however, as signaled by a new Washington Post report citing an anonymous “senior Justice Department official” offering a defense of the attorney general’s conclusion. In particular, the report discusses the 2017 incident in which Trump ordered his former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, to get then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to curtail the special counsel’s investigation to stop probing the 2016 election and his own actions. Lewandowski never carried out this order, but Mueller argued that the attempt met all the criteria for obstruction of justice (though he declined to make a final prosecutorial decision). Barr effectively disagreed with the case Mueller made.
GOP Watch Keeping an Eye on Republicans for You - Page 27“Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official, save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. It is patriotic to support him insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country. In either event, it is unpatriotic not to tell the truth, whether about the president or anyone else.” ― Theodore Roosevelt
By Daniel Moritz-RabsonRepublican Senator John Kennedy expressed frustration Wednesday that aside from confirming judges, the GOP-led Senate has done "nothing." Kennedy's biting rebuke of Congressional productivity during a speech on the Senate floor came on the same day that President Donald Trump walked out of a meeting on infrastructure with Democratic leaders Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. "We need to do more, by we I mean the United States Congress," he said. "Other than the nominations, which are important, we have done nothing. Zero. Zilch. Nada." Kennedy then went onto specifically criticize the Senate, which has a Republican majority. "We need to do more," he said. "I'm not saying we haven't done anything. We have confirmed some very important nominees to the trump administration. We have confirmed some very fine men and women to the federal judiciary. And I'm very proud of that effort. I'm not saying we've done nothing, I'm saying we need to do more. There are issues where our Democratic friends and my Republican friends have more in common than we don't. We need to bring the bills to the floor of the United States Senate." The senator from Louisiana also reserved criticism for House Democrats, who he said were guilty of passing bills they knew had no chance of passing in the Senate. He also accused them of "harassing" the president. "The House leadership needs to urinate or get off the pot," he said. "The House leadership needs to indict the president of the United States. Impeach him and let us hold a trial. He won’t be convicted. Or they need to go ahead and hold in contempt every single member of the Trump administration so we can move those issues into our court system and get back to doing the people’s business."
Tell me again how loyal you are to the text of the Constitution. The greatest restraint on judges is that they are bound by a written text — or, at least, that they are supposed to be. Members of Congress gain their legitimacy from the will of the people, so they have broad ranging authority to enact laws that, in their opinion, will serve those people. Judges, by contrast, have no democratic legitimacy and far less discretion. Their sole task, at least in theory, is to apply written law to individual cases. Which is why Justice Clarence Thomas’ opinion for the Supreme Court in Franchise Tax Board v. Hyatt is troubling. Hyatt does not simply overrule a longstanding precedent, it does so while admitting that nothing in the text of the Constitution supports such an outcome. Loyalty to constitutional text and loyalty to written precedents are the twin pillars that stabilize our system of law. The Supreme Court just abandoned both of them. The rule Thomas announces in Hyatt, by his own admission, is “not spelled out in the Constitution.” It’s also not spelled out in the Supreme Court’s precedents. Much to the contrary, Hyatt explicitly overrules a 40-year-old decision. The decision was 5-4, along familiar partisan lines.
It took President Trump 601 days to top 5,000 false and misleading claims in The Fact Checker’s database, an average of eight claims a day.But on April 26, just 226 days later, the president crossed the 10,000 mark — an average of nearly 23 claims a day in this seven-month period, which included the many rallies he held before the midterm elections, the partial government shutdown over his promised border wall and the release of the special counsel’s report on Russian interference in the presidential election. This milestone appeared unlikely when The Fact Checker first started this project during his first 100 days. In the first 100 days, Trump averaged less than five claims a day, which would have added up to about 7,000 claims in a four-year presidential term. But the tsunami of untruths just keeps looming larger and larger.
There are press conferences. And then there are press conferences put on by notorious dirty tricksters in their home’s driveway, featuring grainy video and loud planes overhead. Pro-Trump operatives Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman were left scrambling yet again Wednesday, this time in an attempt to salvage their failed sexual assault smear against Democratic presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg. Burkman and Wohl had promised to reveal plenty of video and documentary evidence proving that Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, had committed sexual assault. Instead, the two hosted a bizarre press conference in the driveway of Burkman’s Arlington, Va. home, while being frequently interrupted by noise from nearby garbage trucks. Much of the event—the portion audible over the trucks—was focused on Wohl closely analyzing some grainy, inconclusive video of a fake Buttigieg victim, Hunter Kelly. Kelly had travelled from Michigan to Virginia as part of a scheme to frame the South Bend mayor. But he got cold feet while staying in Burkman’s home (where the video was shot) and has since denounced the allegation, saying Wohl and Burkman coerced him into making it up.
The Florida Bar on Wednesday said it will move forward with an investigation into Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) regarding his tweet about President Trump's former lawyer Michael Cohen. The case is advancing to the the Grievance Committee, which will determine if there is probable cause that Gaetz, a licensed attorney in the state, violated Florida Bar rules. If probable cause is established, a complaint will be filed with the Florida Supreme Court, according to the Tampa Bay Times. The investigation follows a February tweet that Gaetz, a Trump ally, sent ahead of Cohen's testimony before Congress. The tweet was widely criticized, with some characterizing it as witness intimidation. “Do your wife & father-in-law know about your girlfriends? Maybe tonight would be a good time for that chat. I wonder if she’ll remain faithful when you’re in prison. She’s about to learn a lot...” Gaetz wrote at the time. He has since deleted the tweet and apologized.
On Tuesday, Georgia Republican Gov. Brian Kemp signed a “fetal heartbeat” bill that seeks to outlaw abortion after about six weeks. The measure, HB 481, is the most extreme abortion ban in the country—not just because it would impose severe limitations on women’s reproductive rights, but also because it would subject women who get illegal abortions to life imprisonment and the death penalty. The primary purpose of HB 481 is to prohibit doctors from terminating any pregnancy after they can detect “embryonic or fetal cardiac activity,” which typically occurs at six weeks’ gestation. But the bill does far more than that. In one sweeping provision, it declares that “unborn children are a class of living, distinct person” that deserves “full legal recognition.” Thus, Georgia law must “recognize unborn children as natural persons”—not just for the purposes of abortion, but as a legal rule.
A popular meme purportedly pits the 2016 Graham against the 2019 version of the senator. - Republicans are hypocrites many of them had said bad things about Trump. Republicans want to investigate anyone except Republicans who has said some bad thigs about Trump. How many Republicans are calling for investigations into Republicans who have said bad things about Trump? None, there are no calls to investigate Republicans who have said bad things about Trump.
The network also cut into Lindsey Graham's opening remarks to rebuke his claims that the Mueller report found ‘no collusion.’ During its live coverage of Attorney General William Barr’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, MSNBC cut into the the hearing multiple times to call the attorney general a liar and claim Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Lindsey Graham is nothing more than a “human shield” for President Trump. Using his opening remarks Wednesday morning to assert that Special Counsel Robert Mueller was allowed to conduct his investigation without any interference, Graham—a one-time Trump critic turned loyalist—parroted President Trump’s oft-repeated mantra that there was “no collusion.” Almost immediately, MSNBC anchor Brian Williams broke into the coverage to push back against Graham, citing the Mueller report itself. “We’re reluctant to do this, we rarely do, but the chairman of the Judiciary Committee just said that Mueller found there was no collusion,” Williams said. “That is not correct.” Turning to fellow MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace, Williams noted that “the report says collusion is not a thing they considered” and “it doesn’t exist in the federal code.”
President Donald Trump has proposed the introduction of a fee for migrants seeking asylum in the US, outlining the policy in a memorandum released Monday. The White House said the president issued the memorandum to the acting secretary of homeland security, Kevin McAleenan, to ensure that "legitimate asylum seekers can access asylum while more efficiently processing and removing illegal migrants who are not eligible and do not qualify." Among the series of new measures the president lays out in the memorandum is the imposition of "fees for asylum applications and work permit applications." Monday's memorandum did not outline how much migrants might be charged to claim asylum. Other proposals include setting a time limit of 180 days to process all asylum applications and barring migrants from working if they entered the US illegally. Officials have 90 days to shape the directives into workable regulations.
One difficulty about a career in politics is that the longer you’re in the business, the longer a track record of quotes and video your opponents can scour to undercut you. It’s something former vice president Joe Biden is contending with as he enters the Democratic primary, and it’s an obstacle his old Senate colleague Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) has run into in the wake of the Mueller report.
Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina continued his stalwart defense of President Trump's conduct, saying the president, unlike former President Bill Clinton, did "nothing wrong" that would warrant his impeachment and removal from office. "What President Clinton did was interfere in a lawsuit against him by Paula Jones and others, hide the evidence, encouraged people to lie. So, to me, he took the legal system and turned it upside down. But it doesn't have to technically be a crime," Graham said on "Face the Nation" Sunday. "What President Trump did here was completely cooperate in an investigation, a million documents, let everybody that the special counsel wanted to talk to be interviewed." "I believe the president did nothing wrong. Whether you like him or not, I'll leave that up to you," he added. Graham, who has become one of the White House's strongest allies in Congress, was one of the leading Republican lawmakers advocating for Clinton's impeachment and conviction in the wake of independent counsel Ken Starr's report, which said the president lied during a sworn deposition about an extramarital affair he had with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. - Sorry Lindsey Graham you are wrong 10 cases of obstruction of justice are 10 reasons to impeach Trump.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey O. Graham on Sunday pushed back against White House senior adviser Jared Kushner’s recent downplaying of Russian interference in the 2016 election, calling Moscow’s actions a “big deal” deserving of new sanctions immediately. Still, the South Carolina Republican insisted President Trump had done nothing wrong, citing special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s refusal to charge Trump with either conspiracy or obstruction of justice in the Russia probe. “I think the idea that this president obstructed justice is absurd,” Graham, a fierce Trump ally, said on CBS News’s “Face the Nation.” “I can’t think of one thing that President Trump did to stop Mueller from doing his job. . . . I’ve heard all I need to really know.” During the interview, however, Graham challenged the assertion by Trump’s son-in-law in a Time magazine interview on Tuesday that Russia’s bid to sway the 2016 election in Trump’s favor amounted to a “couple of Facebook ads” — and that Mueller’s investigation was more damaging to the country than the Russian effort.
Sen. Lindsey Graham on Sunday said he doesn't care if President Donald Trump told then-White House counsel Don McGahn to fire special counsel Robert Mueller — the Mueller investigation is over. "It's all theater — it doesn't matter," the South Carolina Republican told "Face the Nation" host Margaret Brennan. "I don't care what he said to Don McGahn — it's what he did. The president never obstructed." "It doesn't matter to you that the president is changing a version of events and some would say lying?" Brennan asked. In a redacted version of Mueller's report, McGahn is reported to have said he refused to fire Mueller when ordered to do so by Trump. The president has denied he told anyone to fire McGahn, tweeting that if he had wanted to fire Mueller, he could have done it himself.
Senator Lindsey Graham, a close ally of President Donald Trump’s, once said that a president's refusal to comply with congressional oversight was an impeachable offense. In a video unearthed from December 1998 circulating on Twitter on Friday, the South Carolina legislator passionately states that Richard Nixon could have been impeached for failing to comply with subpoenas from Congress. "The day Richard Nixon failed to answer that subpoena is the day he was subject to impeachment because he took the power from Congress over the impeachment process away from Congress, and he became the judge and jury," Graham said two decades ago. At the time, then-Representative Graham was a member of the House Judiciary Committee, and subsequently served as a manager in the unsuccessful impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton. President Trump said earlier this week that he would not comply with Congressional attempts to question administration officials. "We’re fighting all the subpoenas," Trump told reporters on Wednesday. "These aren’t, like, impartial people. The Democrats are trying to win 2020."
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