You Will Anyway: What documents? What pardons?

Saturday, February 9, 2019

What documents? What pardons?

I wouldn't call it the most important, but it certainly leaves us wondering.

Escobar: Did you ever create, direct the creation of, see, or become aware of, the existence of any documents relating to pardons of any individual?

Whitaker: Uh, I am aware of documents relating to pardons of individuals, yes.
Admittedly, his response lacked any of his big “tells,” (such as drinking water or sneering or gritting his jaw), so this could be an answer pertaining to the normal role of the Attorney General in pardons (and Trump hasn’t pardoned all that many people, in any case). But it was an interesting exchange in any case.
Emptywheel

He's not going to have tattled on Trump. So the question is, when Whitaker says he's aware of documents relating to pardons, who is he talking about? When Rep Veronica Escobar gets his answer, Nadler says her time is up. (Actually, just as she started the question he said it was up, but he let her ask it.) Then he goes back to a question about asylum seekers. And then the hearing was over. What's going on?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

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"Terrorism is the willingness to kill large numbers of people for some presumably good cause.” -- Howard Zinn

"What we have is a foreign policy which is essentially a marketing strategy for selling weapons." -- Jill Stein

"We should always remember that the danger to societies from security services is not that they will spontaneously decide to embrace [Stasi style] mustache twirling and jackboots to bear us bodily into dark places, but that the slowly shifting foundation of policy will make it such that mustaches and jackboots are discovered to prove an operational advantage toward a necessary purpose.” ~ Edward Snowden

"America: just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable." ~ Hunter S. Thompson

"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws." ~ Mayer Rothschild

"News is what somebody does not want you to print. All the rest is advertising." ~ LACUNA

"What matters in journalism isn't politics, which are as universal and inescapable as breathing. What matters -- along with a fundamentally adversarial attitude toward government, without which "journalism" is simply public relations -- is integrity, transparency, evidence, coherence, and principle. These are the principles on which we should evaluate the quality of journalism, and their absence is why some journalists are so desperate to get you to focus on something else." ~ Barry Eisler

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Life, as Explained in "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead"

GUILDENSTERN: What a fine persecution---to be kept intrigued without ever quite being enlightened.

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ROSENCRANTZ : The only thing that makes it bearable is the irrational belief that somebody interesting will come on in a minute.

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GUILDENSTERN: But for God's sake what are we supposed to do?!

PLAYER: Relax. Respond. That's what people do. You can't go through life questioning your situation at every turn.

GUILDENSTERN: But we don't know what's going on, or what to do with ourselves. We don't know how to act.

PLAYER: Act natural. You know why you're here at least.

GUILDENSTERN: We only know what we're told, and that's little enough. And for all we know it isn't even true.

PLAYER: For all anyone knows, nothing is. Everything has to be taken on trust; truth is only that which is taken to be true. It's the currency of living. There may be nothing behind it, but it doesn't make any difference so long as it is honoured. One acts on assumptions.

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GUILDENSTERN : We act on scraps of information... sifting half-remembered directions that we can hardly separate from instinct.

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PLAYER: Life is a gamble, at terrible odds-if it was a bet you wouldn't take it.