Those were the two points he hammered home in a political theater performance, a show to which he summoned the media to attend as his audience, and just as audiences do not participate in the performance, Mueller barred them from questioning him. Just be stenographers, you propagandists. Or political theater reviewers.
Just as he did when helping justify aggression against Iraq by the Bush regime, by falsely testifying to Congress, pretending to know that Iraq had prohibited weapons plus ties to Al-Qaeda, once again Mueller spewed lies designed to further a covert yet obvious political agenda. Back then it was furthering the campaign to create the warlike atmosphere to enable the invasion of Iraq. This time it's perpetuating the Big Lie that Russia mounted a major assault on U.S. democracy. (Leave aside the fact that the existence of U.S. "democracy" is itself a myth. The U.S. is a corporate oligarchy, a bourgeois class dictatorship, with a secret police state that is more powerful than the legislature, a legislature that exists to do the bidding of big corporations and rich plutocrats, and that is monopolized by a two-party political cartel.) [1]
Mueller had it both ways about Trump's guilt. Playing it coy, he claimed the reason he didn't accuse Trump of any crimes was because Department of "Justice" policy (set by fiat by itself) is that a sitting president of the U.S. cannot be indicted. (Which flies directly in the face of the oft-repeated political slogan that "no one is above the law, including the president," but that contradiction is NEVER mentions by ANY corporate media propagandist, establishment politician, or state apparatchik, so you're not supposed to THINK the most obvious thing, once again.) Talking out of the other side of his mouth, he pointedly said that wasn't an exoneration either. So guilty as NOT charged, I guess. He was miffed that Trump's hand-picked Attorney General, William "Maximum Authoritarianism" Barr, spun the Mueller report as exoneration of Trump. But the U.S. Constitution does not bar indictment of a president. It provides the mechanism of impeachment on the obvious presumption that a president would be able to block his own prosecution by the executive branch he controls. And Kenneth Starr, another special prosecutor and a GOP hitman, had no problem accusing President Bill Clinton of crimes in his report, which he turned over to Congress where the GOP-controlled House of Representatives duly impeached Clinton. (The Senate fell short of the 2/3rds majority needed to convict and remove Clinton from office.)
Mueller disingenuously said it would be "unfair" to Trump to accuse him of crimes without Trump having the option to legally clear himself. As if the report was an indictment, which it is NOT. He would have been perfectly free to accuse Trump of crimes in a report that isn't an indictment without violating DO"J" absurd Can't Indict A President policy. As for Trump somehow being unable to "clear" himself, perhaps it has escaped Mueller's notice, but Trump has the biggest bully pulpit in the nation (indeed in the world) and uses Twitter several times a day as a mega-bullhorn, the noise of which is amplified daily by U.S. media quoting it. So Trump is hardly prevented from replying to anything in the Mueller report.
Speaking of people who will never have a chance to clear themselves, and how unfair that is, what about the Russian spam farm people Mueller indicted? Seeing how adept U.S. courts are in political frame-ups, and seeing the legal crucifixions of Viktor Bout and Maria Buttina, it is obvious that the U.S. can convict anyone it targets (Julian Assange is next!) so that the Russian defendants have no choice but to stay in Russia instead of subjecting themselves to a U.S.kangaroo political court with a foregone conclusion. By the way, Mueller dropped that indictment like a bomb on the eve of Trump meeting with Putin, with obvious political intent to affect the meeting. But "Bob" Mueller is a "straight arrow!" Just ask anyone in the power elite!
Mueller could have written that Trump broke the law, or there was evidence of crimes, but he was barred by DO"J" policy from indicting the president. Instead he's playing to both sides, the Republicans and the Democrats. Both are taking what they want from the Mueller report and from Mueller's stunt performance. And both have a real basis for doing so, thanks to Mueller's deliberately mealy-mouthed evasions and obliqueness. He didn't accuse Trump of any crimes, even though the point of the two-year-long exercise was to determine that one way or the other. On the other hand, he says he didn't exonerate Trump. Instead he persecuted a couple of dozen marginal figures who had brief ties to Trump, destroyed Paul Manafort, and most consequentially bolstered the Big Lie of "massive Russian election meddling."
EVERYONE in the U.S. political establishment agrees that there was MASSIVE Russian "interference" in the 2016 election, a whopping Big Lie that rivals any Big Lie in world history. This lie will continue to mold U.S. policy towards Russia for years, perhaps decades to come. And only ill will come of the U.S. pretending to be victimized by Russia. The reality is the reverse, of course, with the U.S. constantly punishing Russia with more and more sanctions, and waging economic warfare, for example by trying to sabotage Germany's agreement with Russia for a gas pipeline to carry Russian natural gas to Europe.
Just as he did when helping justify aggression against Iraq by the Bush regime, by falsely testifying to Congress, pretending to know that Iraq had prohibited weapons plus ties to Al-Qaeda, once again Mueller spewed lies designed to further a covert yet obvious political agenda. Back then it was furthering the campaign to create the warlike atmosphere to enable the invasion of Iraq. This time it's perpetuating the Big Lie that Russia mounted a major assault on U.S. democracy. (Leave aside the fact that the existence of U.S. "democracy" is itself a myth. The U.S. is a corporate oligarchy, a bourgeois class dictatorship, with a secret police state that is more powerful than the legislature, a legislature that exists to do the bidding of big corporations and rich plutocrats, and that is monopolized by a two-party political cartel.) [1]
Mueller had it both ways about Trump's guilt. Playing it coy, he claimed the reason he didn't accuse Trump of any crimes was because Department of "Justice" policy (set by fiat by itself) is that a sitting president of the U.S. cannot be indicted. (Which flies directly in the face of the oft-repeated political slogan that "no one is above the law, including the president," but that contradiction is NEVER mentions by ANY corporate media propagandist, establishment politician, or state apparatchik, so you're not supposed to THINK the most obvious thing, once again.) Talking out of the other side of his mouth, he pointedly said that wasn't an exoneration either. So guilty as NOT charged, I guess. He was miffed that Trump's hand-picked Attorney General, William "Maximum Authoritarianism" Barr, spun the Mueller report as exoneration of Trump. But the U.S. Constitution does not bar indictment of a president. It provides the mechanism of impeachment on the obvious presumption that a president would be able to block his own prosecution by the executive branch he controls. And Kenneth Starr, another special prosecutor and a GOP hitman, had no problem accusing President Bill Clinton of crimes in his report, which he turned over to Congress where the GOP-controlled House of Representatives duly impeached Clinton. (The Senate fell short of the 2/3rds majority needed to convict and remove Clinton from office.)
Mueller disingenuously said it would be "unfair" to Trump to accuse him of crimes without Trump having the option to legally clear himself. As if the report was an indictment, which it is NOT. He would have been perfectly free to accuse Trump of crimes in a report that isn't an indictment without violating DO"J" absurd Can't Indict A President policy. As for Trump somehow being unable to "clear" himself, perhaps it has escaped Mueller's notice, but Trump has the biggest bully pulpit in the nation (indeed in the world) and uses Twitter several times a day as a mega-bullhorn, the noise of which is amplified daily by U.S. media quoting it. So Trump is hardly prevented from replying to anything in the Mueller report.
Speaking of people who will never have a chance to clear themselves, and how unfair that is, what about the Russian spam farm people Mueller indicted? Seeing how adept U.S. courts are in political frame-ups, and seeing the legal crucifixions of Viktor Bout and Maria Buttina, it is obvious that the U.S. can convict anyone it targets (Julian Assange is next!) so that the Russian defendants have no choice but to stay in Russia instead of subjecting themselves to a U.S.kangaroo political court with a foregone conclusion. By the way, Mueller dropped that indictment like a bomb on the eve of Trump meeting with Putin, with obvious political intent to affect the meeting. But "Bob" Mueller is a "straight arrow!" Just ask anyone in the power elite!
Mueller could have written that Trump broke the law, or there was evidence of crimes, but he was barred by DO"J" policy from indicting the president. Instead he's playing to both sides, the Republicans and the Democrats. Both are taking what they want from the Mueller report and from Mueller's stunt performance. And both have a real basis for doing so, thanks to Mueller's deliberately mealy-mouthed evasions and obliqueness. He didn't accuse Trump of any crimes, even though the point of the two-year-long exercise was to determine that one way or the other. On the other hand, he says he didn't exonerate Trump. Instead he persecuted a couple of dozen marginal figures who had brief ties to Trump, destroyed Paul Manafort, and most consequentially bolstered the Big Lie of "massive Russian election meddling."
EVERYONE in the U.S. political establishment agrees that there was MASSIVE Russian "interference" in the 2016 election, a whopping Big Lie that rivals any Big Lie in world history. This lie will continue to mold U.S. policy towards Russia for years, perhaps decades to come. And only ill will come of the U.S. pretending to be victimized by Russia. The reality is the reverse, of course, with the U.S. constantly punishing Russia with more and more sanctions, and waging economic warfare, for example by trying to sabotage Germany's agreement with Russia for a gas pipeline to carry Russian natural gas to Europe.
What Mueller did was rather craven but perfectly reflects the political crosscurrents. He positioned his "report" and himself to protect himself from attack by either faction of the two-party political cartel, and artfully gave each faction, Republican and Democratic, something they could seize on. Mueller, who rose to the top of the Deep State apparatus as FBI secret police chief, is a consummate political animal. [2]
Numerous U.S. presidents have broken U.S. laws countless times. And forget about international law. The U.S. has contempt for that. except when it can cynically use it to beat an adversary nation over the head with it. So U.S. presidents are not merely "above" the law, they are virtually immune, with only rare exceptions.
Just a few examples of outrageous presidential criminality: Trump's "favorite president," Andrew Jackson, ignored a Supreme Court ruling upholding the treaty rights of Native Americans in the Southeast and sent 16,000 men, women, and children on a death march, killing 4,000 of them on the so-called Trail of Tears, as they were forced to walk from Florida and Georgia to Oklahoma, a trek of about 1,500 miles. And the second president, John Adams, had laws, the Alien and Sedition acts, which turned the Bill of Rights into useless verbiage, imprisoning publishers of newspapers who criticized him.
Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon (and John Kennedy too) waged undeclared war on Vietnam (and Laos and Cambodia, which were "secretly" bombed- i.e. U.S., but not foreign media, refused to report it- thus "secret" from the duped American public who get their "news" from corporate propaganda organs.
Ronald Reagan and his henchmen broke various laws in the Iran-Contra scheme, by which they funded international terrorism against Nicaragua.
There are too many more examples to cite.
Mueller's other big theme was making it clear he would add nothing to what was already in the report and that therefore the Democrats shouldn't bother getting him to testify to House Committees. Everything he has to say was already in the report, he insisted. Which is ridiculous. Of COURSE there are questions to ask! Like how he arrived at his various decisions. And the evidentiary basis for the reports "findings." Trump's handpicked Attorney General William Barr refuses to provide Congress with an uncensored version of the report and the supporting documentation. (They hate saying "censored," so they say "redacted," just an evasive way of saying "censored," like "enhanced interrogation technique" obfuscates "torture.")
The Democrats, instead of focusing on the awful policies of Trump, instead are still angling to unseat him in the 2020 election with this ginned up "Russian collusion" campaign. One irony is that Clinton paid for the "Steele Dossier," a fantastical piece of disinformation by a former MI6 British secret policeman which cites as sources Kremlin officials! So WHO got help from Russia! And this dossier was fraudulently used by the FBI to obtain a FISA warrant to start a so-called foreign counterintelligence investigation targeting Trump campaign people like Carter Page. The secret police dripped factoids to undermine Trump in the media. And despite their proven hostility and adversarial posture towards Trump, media propagandists and Democratic political hacks regularly attack him for "siding with Putin" (or others) "against his own intelligence agencies."
They are hardly "his own" agencies. They're his enemies! Not to defend Trump: a pox on ALL their venal houses!
The reason the Democrats DON'T criticize Trump for his actual evil policies (excepting the persecution of Hispanic migrant issue, which the Democrats are using ONLY to curry favor with Hispanic voters- Trump's policies are merely an intensification of Obama's, and the Democrats haven't made much of the murders of migrant children by medical neglect and indifference), is that they FAVOR those policies. They don't really mind gargantuan tax cuts for corporations and the rich, who are their real constituents. They are enthusiastically beating the drums for the U.S. coup effort in Venezuela. They are indifferent to the destructiveness of Trump's anti-environment policies. However on foreign policy they want him to be even more hostile to Russia- apparently words matter more than actions to the Democrats. The fact is that Trump's actions have been highly hostile to Russia. I already cited the matter of the gas pipeline project with Germany, which Trump's ambassador has been aggressively trying to kill. There was the mass expulsion of Russian diplomats. The ratcheting up of sanctions. Sending lethal military aid to the Kiev cabal in Ukraine, something Obama refrained from doing. Supporting opposite sites in the Syrian civil war. And now on opposite sides in Venezuela. Trump has actually done nothing FOR Russia, except be verbally polite to Putin and accept Putin's denial of election "meddling." (The "meddling" was so inconsequential as to not be worth mentioning. But the U.S. politico-media system has inflated a nothingburger into a gigantic propaganda balloon. The universe hasn't seen such a huge expansion from nothingness since the Big Bang that created the universe!)
Like this guy below, who insists that the fabricated Russian "hack" of the DNC server was JUST LIKE THE JAPANESE ATTACK ON PEARL HARBOR! He's Democratic Congressman Jerrold Nadler, a "liberal" from New York City (a fanatical enemy of the Palestinian people, by the way). You'll read more about him in the footnotes below.
Nadler interpreted Mueller's little speech thusly: "Mueller told us that Russia attacked our political system." And that "Trump welcomed it." "The president is lying about Mueller's conclusions" of no collusion or obstruction. [No he's not. Mueller didn't SAY Trump obstructed "justice," and he definitively concluded the Trump campaign did NOT conspire with Russia or Russians.] Nadler went on to take a swipe at lifelong GOP apparatchik William Barr: "The Attorney General is lying about that too."
Well Jerry, I got news for you. You, your party, the "intelligence community," and the GOP are all FULL OF IT. The Great Russiagate Hoax is just that. Once in a blue moon Trump is right about something.
This is one of those rare times.
Self-Styled Grand Inquisitor Jerrold Nadler
Donald J. Trump. He's so innocent, says he! (And his stooges, flunkies, and flacks all agree!)
1] I don't want to go off on too long of a tangent, so for now I'll just briefly illustrate how exiguous the Russian "effort" to "elect Trump" was. It consisted of the false claim that they gave damning Democratic emails to WikiLeaks, exposing Hillary Clinton's mendacity by revealing just what she said in her secret speech to Goldman Sachs that she had refused to release, and how the Democratic National Committee (DNC) under the control of Clinton agent Debbie Wasserman Schultz, used underhanded methods to tilt the primaries for Clinton and against Senator Bernard Sanders. Those emails made the American electorate better informed! So far from being an "attack on our democracy," it made for BETTER democracy, such as it even exists in the U.S. Unless you understand "our democracy" in the way "La Cosa Nostra" is understood, "Our Thing." "Our democracy" means the criminal system of power in which a two-party political cartel maintains monopoly political power for the benefit of themselves, their corporate masters, the military-industrial complex, and the Deep State secret police agencies. But career NSA technical experts (now retired) William Binney and Kurt Wiebe have proven that the DNC emails were NOT downloaded over the Internet, but were copied to a flash drive. Nor has any evidence at all ever been presented by the "intelligence community," establishment politicians, or the pseudo-journalists who act as conduits for secret police disinformation and Democratic Party propaganda to substantiate their CLAIM that this occurred. Instead it is assumed a priori as a fact, and anyone who so much as asks for evidence is smeared as a Russian agent, pawn, or stooge.
As for the effect of those emails on the outcome, they apparently had none. They were released in July 2016. In October 2016 Clinton was ahead in the polls by a comfortable 14%. Then in late October, then-FBI secret police chief James Comey announced that the investigation into the Clinton private server scandal was alive again because the FBI found more State Department emails, this time on a device belonging to officially disgraced and ridiculed former Congressman Anthony Weiner of New York City. (Weiner had an irresistible compulsion to send women photos of his genitalia via the Internet.) The emails turned out to be mere copies of previously examined ones, but the effect on Clinton's poll numbers was startling- dropping her to a lead of only 3.5% (same as the typical polling margin of error) to dead even with Trump. On Election Day ten days later in November, she won by 2.9 million votes, but lost because of the absurd and archaic U.S. electoral college. (There is good evidence the GOP stole the states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.)
Instead of blaming Comey, the Electoral College, GOP voter suppression and cheating, the Democrats decided to falsely blame the Russians. The GOP has obvious reasons to go along with this. And the corporate propaganda, which also wants to preserve the reactionary Electoral College system and hide GOP election malfeasance, is happy to scapegoat Russia.
The other evidence that can be adduced to claim extensive Russian "meddling" in sacred U.S. "democracy" was $50,000 spent on Facebook ads before the election, and $4,700 spent on all Google platform, including youtube. This according to the testimony of Google's CEO to Nadler's Judiciary Committee, when Nadler himself asked. So that's something. When weighed against the combined $1 BILLION ($1,000,000,000) spent by the Clinton and Trump campaigns, plus additional gargantuan sums spent by other U.S. persons and entities, plus the estimates $2 BILLION worth of free air time that "the" media bestowed on Trump, so fascinating did and do they find him, it is extremely risible to be squealing about "massive" Russian "interference."
In light of all this, you can see how cynical, farcical, and just plain demented is the insistence that Russia is "undermining our democracy." It would be a bad joke if they weren't so serious and persistent in perpetuating this Big Lie.
2] Trump and his lackeys reiterated the "no collusion no conspiracy" theme. Trump himself said no charge equals innocence. (If he'd been acquitted at trial- or if the Democrats impeach him and the Senate doesn't convict, and it is impossible to imagine the necessary two/thirds of Senators voting to convict, especially with a Republican majority in the Senate- that would be a verdict of "not guilty." Whether "not guilty" equals "innocent" is a semi-Talmudic question.
The Democrats continued to interpret this latest manifestation of Muellerism their way, both in regards to Trump and the frame-up of Russia as guilty of "attacking" so-called "American democracy." For example, one of the worst Russiagaters, who has said the mythical Russian "hack" of the DNC computer server was the same thing as the Japanese bombing Pearl Harbor (!), the screwball political hack Democrat Jerrold Nadler of New York City, who now sits as chair of the House Judiciary Committee, hysterically opined after The Mueller Show that "Mueller told us that Russia attacked our political system."
I'll tell you a country attacking another nation's political system: the U.S. attacking the Venezuelan government, trying to overturn the result of the last election there by force, violence, and economic warfare. Oh, and the U.S. does that sort of thing all the time. With Nadler's full-throated support.
No comments:
Post a Comment