Wednesday, January 10, 2018

A major point in the dossier discussions

The transcript reads in chapters, which alternate hour by hour from questioning by Grassley’s counsel to questions by Feinstein’s and back. It is somewhat tedious, but extremely revealing, to reorder the transcript after first reading, and consume the Grassley half and the Feinstein half as separate, continuous wholes.

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[The Grassley] half is a monument to Republican complicity in Trump’s jaw-dropping misconduct.

By my count, over the course of about five hours, Chuck Grassley’s lawyers asked Simpson literally zero questions designed to increase their own understanding of Russian efforts to disrupt the election. They likewise asked no questions aimed at establishing Simpsons’ level of confidence in the information in the dossier, or in documentary evidence he compiled of Trump’s involvement in money laundering and his ties to organized crime.

They spent their hours instead trying without much success to impeach Simpson’s credibility and paint him as a partisan. They were particularly interested in skewing the composition of Simpsons’ client base to make it seem tilted to Democrats (it isn’t), and in getting Simpson to testify that he had a financial interest in triggering an FBI investigation of the Trump campaign (he didn’t). Confronted with the allegation that the Trump campaign was complicit in a criminal plot to sabotage the Clinton campaign, Grassley’s representatives wanted to know why Simpson had the nerve to try to alert the public, through the media.

Grassley doesn’t work for Trump and neither do his aides, but their conduct blends seamlessly into the obstructive behavior Trump and his advisers exhibited during the campaign and after, and thus represents a total abdication of their Constitutional roles.

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The special counsel’s investigation of the Trump campaign continues, so Grassley has devoted himself to proving that it is the fruit of poisonous partisanship. First, they hoped Simpson would melt and confess to being a high-rent version of Roger Stone. When they failed to discredit Simpson, Steele, and the dossier, or to establish that the dossier triggered the FBI’s investigation, Grassley tried to bury the testimony, and then to discredit the dossier by proxy with a baseless accusation that Steele is a criminal.

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[O]ur power as reporters and citizens to hold the guilty accountable now turns on our ability and willingness to sort good faith from bad.

  Brian Beutler @ Crooked
Republicans have tried to discredit Mueller and end his probe. Two particularly Bannnonesque Republicans, Mark Meadows, and Jim Jordan, published an op-ed on Thursday putting forth a flimsy pretext for firing Attorney General Jeff Sessions, so that he can be replaced with a new Attorney General who will fire Mueller. With Paul Ryan’s blessing, the House Intelligence Committee is now fully dedicated to running counter-ops against Mueller and the FBI, and has breached their investigation.

[...]

Party leaders view allegations of legal wrongdoing against Trump not as a potential problem for their party and the country, but as a kind of betrayal of Trump himself. If and when full documentation of his crimes emerges, they will go to great lengths to make sure he faces no repercussions.

  Brian Beutler

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