You Will Anyway: Grassley finds his balls

Tuesday, March 5, 2019

Grassley finds his balls

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) on Monday demanded the Treasury Department explain why it did not provide Congress with certain bank records sought in an investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

“Withholding information from congressional inquiries while leaking that same type of information to the media cannot be tolerated,” Grassley said in a statement.

In 2017, when Grassley was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he had asked the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network for documents about Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) pertaining to certain individuals, as part of the panel’s investigation into Russian influence in the 2016 election.

[...]

Treasury provided Grassley with documents, and said that it provided him with all of the records relevant to his request.

[...]

However, Grassley said that a BuzzFeed article published last month, about a Russian-born lobbyist who was at a controversial June 2016 Trump Tower meeting, “referenced hundreds of thousands of dollars transferred among individuals and entities” mentioned in Grassley’s document request to Treasury.

Grassley asked Treasury to provide him with the documents mentioned in the BuzzFeed article and an explanation of why the documents were withheld earlier.

The Hill

On the other hand, maybe he didn't find a spine, but only felt embarrassed....

Separately, Grassley sent a letter to the IRS last week asking the agency what it is doing to prevent leaks of sensitive information, after the Justice Department announced it has charged an IRS analyst who allegedly disclosed SARs relating to President Trump's former attorney, Michael Cohen.

[...]

“Sensitive banking information should be kept under lock and key to protect Americans’ personal privacy, and access should be limited to official investigative matters,” Grassley said in his statement Monday. “The reckless treatment of this information and investigative inquiries jeopardizes that privacy and risks undermining ongoing investigations.”

And Congressmen who are complicit with banksters and Trump.

...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

"There is no inverse relationship between freedom and security. Less of one does not lead to more of the other. People with no rights are not safe from terrorist attack." ~ Molly Ivins

"The brain of our species is, as we know, made up largely of potassium, phosphorus, propaganda, and politics, with the result that how not to understand what should be clearer is becoming easier and easier for all of us." ~ James Thurber

"The highest patriotism is not a blind acceptance of official policy, but a love of one's country deep enough to call her to a higher plane....When you hold up your arm and swear to uphold the Constitution, you don’t say, 'Except in wartime.'" -- George McGovern

"I’ll believe that corporations are people when Texas executes one." ~ Bill Moyers

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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.