He's not confused, he's ignorant

President Donald Trump on Thursday morning revealed some profound confusion about the Constitution he’s sworn to preserve, protect, and defend — particularly the parts that detail how a commander in chief can be removed from office.

Asked during a Q&A session with reporters whether he’s concerned about getting impeached, Trump said, “I can’t imagine the courts allowing it.”

[...]

As Lawfare’s Quinta Jurecic explained last month when Trump posted tweets suggesting he’d appeal his impeachment to the Supreme Court, the courts have nothing to do with it. Impeachment is a congressional process.

  Vox

Sad!

Also on Thursday morning...

Watch that clip.  What he's saying is worse than Aaron's comment.

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

Wow

[John Dowd, a] lawyer for President Donald Trump asked for a “heads up” from former national Security Advisor Michael Flynn’s attorney as Flynn was poised to enter a cooperation agreement with prosecutors from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office, according to a transcript of the message made available Friday.

[...]

The message, much of which is included in Mueller’s report, is one of the most concrete examples yet of how people close to the president apparently sought to influence those in contact with Mueller.

“This is clearly a baseless, political document designed to smear and damage the reputation of counsel and innocent people,” Dowd said in an emailed statement following the release of the transcript.

  Bloomberg

What the hell is he talking about? The document "designed to smear and damge the reputation..." is a transcript of a voicemail he left for Flynn's attorney.

U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan ordered prosecutors earlier this month to make public a transcript of the voice recording, as well as transcripts of other recordings of Flynn, including conversations he had with Russian officials. Sullivan also asked prosecutors to provide portions the Mueller report that relate to Flynn -- in full, without Justice Department redactions.

Prosecutors didn’t provide any unredacted portions of the report, saying there were none that were relevant to the judge’s order.

They also said they aren’t releasing any other transcripts. They said they didn’t rely on any other recordings to establish Flynn’s guilt.

If the judge really asked for transcripts of all Flynn conversations with Russians, it probably wasn't wise to say in essence, he doesn't need them. But I'm not a lawyer.*

Flynn is awaiting sentencing in Sullivan’s court after pleading guilty to lying to investigators about his contacts with former Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak.

About a hundred years ago, it seems.

A partial transcript of the [Dowd] voicemail was previously made public in Mueller’s report, which described it as part of a “sequence of events could have had the potential to affect Flynn’s decision to cooperate, as well as the extent of that cooperation.”

[...]

It was left on Nov. 22, 2017, days before Flynn formally entered his plea deal with Mueller and after Flynn’s lawyers informed the President’s legal team they could no longer have confidential conversations due to Flynn’s cooperation.

[...]

Dowd, in his statement Friday, called the obstruction section of Mueller’s report “a baseless, political document designed to smear and damage the reputation of counsel and innocent people.”

  TPM

Dowd statement excerpt:

Glad to get that cleared up. He wasn't calling his own voicemail baseless.  This is the problem reading articles that quote pieces of things without clearly tying them to their proper references.

He claimed that Mueller “knows and his March 2019 report reflects there was no conflict of interest between counsel for the President and LtGen Flynn involving the matters under investigation as reflected in the unprecedented cooperation by the President with all Special Counsel requests including materials and testimony describing LtGen Flynn and his resignation from office.”

Unprecedented cooperation. Like refusing to be intereviewed? Declining to even answer some written questions? That kind of cooperation?

UPDATE:

*UPDATE:

Trumpism

As it turned out, Memorial Day came and went without President Trump deciding to pardon a bunch of soldiers convicted or accused of horrifying war crimes by the U.S. military, which is something he apparently wants to do, despite the objections of every credible leader in uniform.

[...]

[P]erhaps Trump has just decided to wait until the July 4 holiday, which he intends to rebrand this year as Trump Independence Day. The president is pushing to deliver a nationally televised address — more like a campaign rally with military flourishes — from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, displacing the usual fireworks with a display of flammable oratory.

[...]

Trump’s grand plan for the Fourth provokes some deeper questions about what it means to be patriotic in the Trump era. Specifically, it gets to the issue of whether we think the country’s greatness arises from a common culture, on one hand, or from the principles that underlie our government on the other.

That Trump’s design hinges on the Lincoln Memorial is not a small thing. For almost a century, that hallowed space on the western edge of the Mall has acted as a kind of national town hall, a symbol of our commitment to free expression and peaceful dissent. It’s where the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s came to be heard.

[...]

American presidents have been careful about treading on this turf, and other sacred spaces like it.

[...]

Barack Obama spoke at the memorial to mark the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s seminal speech there, which seemed appropriate for the first black president. In other circumstances, though, our presidents have decided that using national shrines for political theater is what despots do.

[...]

Now comes Trump, marching up the steps of the memorial — assuming he gets his way — to a very different drumbeat. To Trump, and to his most ardent lackeys, America’s greatness lies in a shared cultural identity. And all of this other stuff, about tolerance and free expression and whatnot, is just a bunch of ideas that the educated elite have used to distort and obscure that commonality.

[...]

To him, a nation lost in the technicalities of law has forgotten how to be a nation with a recognized culture and language and social hierarchy.

And so Trump bullies judges, mocks congressional authority, slams the door on immigrants (legal and illegal). He would put murdering soldiers above the law, as long as they didn’t murder Americans, and change the libel laws to shut down dissent.

He sides with lying despots against his leading analysts and our longest-serving politicians. He has no use for a governing class that chooses the sterility of law over the visceral pull of tribalism.

[...]

All over Europe, too, and in other parts of the world, societies have been reacting to the twin threats of globalism and terrorism with a kind of ethnic retrenching.

But we’re the only country that was founded in opposition to this idea — that has, from the very beginning, defined patriotism expressly as fealty to a series of principles, rather than to a monarch or a common identity.

[...]

[H]aving lost control of their party and fearing for their seats, governing Republicans seem to have decided that it’s better to be quiet and wait for Trump’s time to pass, because eventually things will get back to normal.

They’re not big history readers, these Republicans.

[...]

Democrats, of course, are appalled by the idea of a rallying cry to the nation, complete with military trappings, which they think harks back to old newsreels of Mussolini.

[...]

On balance, though, unseemly as it is, I really don’t mind Trump doing his nationalist strongman act at the memorial, and that’s because I still have faith that Lincoln’s vision will prevail.

At bottom, despite a very loud minority, I really don’t think most Americans buy the argument that our greatness lies more in our cultural history than in our Constitution.

[...]

Confronted by the image of an American president using our most revered space and our military to champion nationalism and berate critics, a lot of Americans, I think, will recoil.

[...]

If they don’t, then I guess the words on that memorial have already lost a lot of their meaning, with or without the fireworks.

  Matt Taibbi

He'll have a bunch of paid cheerleaders in tow. It will look like a third world Dear Leader event to, hopefully, most people. But it will further embolden and prop up the Trumpaloes.

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

Because they can't win if they don't cheat

Thomas B. Hofeller achieved near-mythic status in the Republican Party as the Michelangelo of gerrymandering, the architect of partisan political maps that cemented the party’s dominance across the country.

But after he died last summer, his estranged daughter discovered hard drives in her father’s home that revealed something else: Mr. Hofeller had played a crucial role in the Trump administration’s decision to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census.

Files on those drives showed that he wrote a study in 2015 concluding that adding a citizenship question to the census would allow Republicans to draft even more extreme gerrymandered maps to stymie Democrats.

  NYT

Exactly what Dems and all honest people said it was about.

Ms. Hofeller said her decision to open her father’s files to his opponents was a bid for transparency, devoid of personal or political animus. Although she believed he was undermining American democracy, she said, their estrangement stemmed not from partisan differences, but a family dispute that ended up in court. Ms. Hofeller described herself as a political progressive who despises Republican partisanship, but also has scant respect for Democrats.

Her father, she said, was a brilliant cartographer who was deeply committed to traditional conservative principles like free will and limited government. As a child, she said, she was schooled in those same principles, but every successive gerrymandered map he created only solidified her conviction that he had abandoned them in a quest to entrench his party in permanent control.

[...]

[M]onths after urging President Trump’s transition team to tack the question onto the census, [Hofeller] wrote the key portion of a draft Justice Department letter claiming the question was needed to enforce the 1965 Voting Rights Act — the rationale the administration later used to justify its decision.

Too bad he died and had a democratically minded daughter who let the cat out of the bag.

Those documents, cited in a federal court filing Thursday by opponents seeking to block the citizenship question, have emerged only weeks before the Supreme Court is expected to rule on the legality of the citizenship question.

And they're going to be unable to hide their true colors if they rule in favor of it.

In Supreme Court arguments in April over the legality of the decision, the Trump administration argued that the benefits of obtaining more accurate citizenship data offset any damage stemming from the likely depressed response to the census by minority groups and noncitizens. And it dismissed charges that the Commerce Department had simply invented a justification for adding the question to the census as unsupported by the evidence.

[...]

In a statement issued on Thursday evening, the Justice Department said the accusations in the filing were baseless and amounted to “a last-ditch effort to derail the Supreme Court’s consideration of this case.” It said Mr. Hofeller’s 2015 study had “played no role in the department’s December 2017 request to reinstate a citizenship question to the 2020 decennial census.”

Looks like the Brooklyn Bridge might be up for sale again.

Opponents said that the Justice Department’s rationale for seeking to add a citizenship question to the census was baldly contrived, a conclusion shared by federal judges in all three lawsuits opposing the administration’s action.

But a majority of the Supreme Court justices seemed inclined to accept the department’s explanation the question was needed to enforce the Voting Rights Act, and appeared ready to uphold the administration’s authority to alter census questions as it sees fit. The justices are expected to issue a final ruling before the court’s term ends in late June.

[...]

In nearly 230 years, the census has never asked all respondents whether they are American citizens. But while adding such a question might appear uncontroversial on its face, opponents have argued that it is actually central to a Republican strategy to skew political boundaries to their advantage when redistricting begins in 2021.

They just got a big boost for their argument.

UPDATE 9/7:  The New Yorker has an excellent, eye-opening, and infuriating article on Thomas Hofeller's secret files.

He wants to burn it all down

Trump doesn't care about trade negotiations.  He uses tariffs as a form of punishment.  And he doesn't care about any collateral damage, either.



Do they not know any better than to leave "Tariff Man" alone?

Such brilliant timing, too.  When his fabulous USMCA, or whatever he's calling his redo of NFTA, is up for ratification by the three participating countries, Mexico being one.  He doesn't give a shit.  Now we see yet another indicator of why the great dealer, very smart and very stable genius ran all his companies into the ground.

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

UPDATE:

League of Women Voters should still be in charge of debates

The DNC - party leaders - have too much control over what the public gets to hear.

The new polling and donation requirements to make the third and fourth Democratic primary debates could winnow the field dramatically.

The Democratic National Committee’s stricter new requirements for presidential contenders to appear in party debates this fall triggered swift backlash Wednesday from Democratic candidates, many of whom are now in danger of being cut from the showcase events in September and October.

Some campaigns have already been struggling to reach the 65,000-donor threshold — or secure one percent in three qualified polls — to gain access to the first debates in June and July. But the DNC’s new criteria for the next round of debates — support from 130,000 unique donors as well as at least 2 percent support in four polls — is set to winnow out senators, governors and a number of other Democratic candidates who are not on a trajectory to hit the polling requirement and could have particular trouble hitting the donor requirement absent a viral moment or another future campaign-shaking event.

“The DNC is playing a gatekeeping function and they’re creating a filter to determine which candidates can make their arguments to the American people,” former Rep. John Delaney, who is largely self-funding his presidential campaign, said in an interview with POLITICO after sending a letter to the DNC to request more information on how the requirements were set. “A lot of very consequential rules are being created by the DNC, and we don’t know what goes into them.”

[...]

“Whether it’s hiring organizers, staffing, polling, any normal things that you do to build an operation — all has to get readjusted and cut because you now have to run Facebook ads,” said one Democratic presidential aide, granted anonymity to discuss the issue candidly. “You’re not building a movement that way.

“They are decimating the field,” the aide continued.

[...]

“For the debates to be meaningful, they have to winnow down the participants,” said Patti Solis Doyle, who managed Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign. “This is the uncomfortable reality both the DNC and the candidates have to face.”

DNC communications director Xochitl Hinojosa defended the DNC’s debate qualifications as “fair, transparent and appropriate for each phase of the primary season,” she said in a statement. “We are confident that the two sets of criteria we have announced thus far achieve those goals, and have been communicated to candidates months before each debate."

[...]

“I don’t think they should be winnowing the field,” Sen. Michael Bennet, who only jumped into the presidential race this month, told reporters in New Hampshire on Wednesday. “I certainly don’t think the DNC should be favoring national fundraising and cable television over the early states like New Hampshire.”

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand has echoed that criticism, arguing that the criteria aren’t a measure of success, electability or candidate quality. Gillibrand, who was one of the premier online fundraisers in the Democratic Party in 2017 and 2018, is still striving to hit the 65,000-donor criteria for the first debates, though she has qualified via polling.

[...]

“It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to look at that criteria and know who's going to get kicked out,” said Jess Morales Rocketto, a Democratic strategist who worked on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential run. “It’s easy to see that the debates in the fall are going to be a bunch of white men and, if that’s the case, that’s a big misstep.”

Four candidates have already publicly said they have crossed the new, higher donor threshold: Buttigieg, Harris, Sanders and Warren. O'Rourke and Biden each got roughly 100,000 individual donors on their campaign launch days, meaning they could have passed the 130,000 threshold by now.

Seven others have publicly said they’ve hit the halfway mark to 130,000: Booker, Castro, Gabbard, Inslee, Klobuchar, Williamson and Yang. (Yang tweeted he needed another “20,000 or so” donors to hit the new threshold on Wednesday, calling it “very doable.”) Among the candidates scrambling to catch up: Montana Gov. Steve Bullock, the only candidate running who has carried a Trump state.

In early polling, just eight candidates have crossed the modest 2 percent threshold in four qualifying polls: Biden, Sanders, Warren, Harris, Klobuchar, Booker, Buttiigeg and O’Rourke. None of these early polls will count toward qualifying for the later debates; only polls publicly released after the first debate in June will count in the criteria for the fall debates.

  Politico

No, Virginia, there still has not been any new border wall construction

A federal judge on Thursday rejected the Trump administration's request to start using diverted military funds to build a wall on the southern border while officials appeal the judge's prior ruling blocking them from using those funds for wall construction.

California U.S. District Court Judge Haywood Gilliam, an Obama appointee, had on Friday issued a preliminary injunction that stopped President Trump from using some diverted Department of Defense funding. On Thursday Gilliam again decided against administration officials who sought to pause his previous ruling.

Gilliam made Thursday's ruling in a written order, and did not issue an opinion along with it.

[...]

“The Constitution is clear that the president has no power to spend taxpayer money without Congressional authorization," ACLU staff attorney Dror Ladin said in a statement after Gilliam's order on Thursday. "It is not surprising the court upheld this bedrock principle of our democracy — as courts have for centuries.”

[...]

Administration officials had in a filing on Wednesday requested the stay while they appeal Gilliam's ruling, asking that the judge either immediately reject their request or make a ruling by June 5.

The officials said that they will appeals their case to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

  The Hill

The 9th, eh? The one Trump hates.

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

What happened to Chuck?

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) condemned President Trump's new tariffs on Mexico late Thursday, calling the move a "misuse" of presidential tariff authority and cautioning the levies could derail passage of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA).

"Trade policy and border security are separate issues. This is a misuse of presidential tariff authority and counter to congressional intent," Grassley said in a statement.

  The Hill

Misuse of presidential tariff authority. Sounds like a possible impeachable offense to me.

Careful there, Chuck. You'll find yourself on the wrong end of a tweet.

Trump announced he would impose the tariffs to pressure Mexico to stop the flow of migrants into the U.S. via the southern border.

[...]

[Grassley] cautioned that following through on Trump's tariff threat "would seriously jeopardize passage of USMCA," a revision of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

"I support nearly every one of President Trump’s immigration policies, but this is not one of them," he added.

[...]

Dow futures plummeted more than 200 points on Thursday evening after the president announced the new tariffs.

Grassley had previously threatened to derail Trump's central trade achievement over continued steel and aluminum tariffs. Last week, Trump hinted that he had reached a deal to drop those tariffs, paving the way for the USMCA in the Senate.

Even with Grassley's approval, Trump will face a hurdle passing the agreement in the House, where Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has insisted on labor and enforcement improvements to the deal.

Earlier Thursday, Trump formally kicked off the approval process for the deal, setting off a timeline for its passage in Congress.

Pelosi derided the decision, meant to pressure Congress to pass the deal, saying it “indicates a lack of knowledge on the part of the administration on the policy and process to pass a trade agreement.”

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

Border Patrol still holding children beyond legal time limit

Many of the nearly 2,000 unaccompanied migrant children being held in overcrowded U.S. Border Patrol facilities have been there beyond legally allowed time limits, including some who are 12 or younger, according to new government data obtained by The Washington Post.

Federal law and court orders require that children in Border Patrol custody be transferred to more-hospitable shelters no longer than 72 hours after they are apprehended. But some unaccompanied children are spending longer than a week in Border Patrol stations and processing centers, according to two Customs and Border Protection officials and two other government officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the unreleased data. One government official said about half of the children in custody — 1,000 — have been with the Border Patrol for longer than 72 hours, and another official said that more than 250 children 12 or younger have been in custody for an average of six days.

[...]

“I don’t have any beds, because we’re meant to be short-term processing — not even holding,” one CBP official said of the agency’s facilities here in the Rio Grande Valley, at which some children are sleeping on mats on the floor. “I have stools and benches, but I have no beds. . . . Our facilities are not built for long-term holding, and they’re certainly not built to house children for very long at all.”

[...]

The Washington Post this week made a rare visit inside the [McAllen (Texas) Border Patrol station], where adults and their toddler children were packed into concrete holding cells, many of them sleeping head-to-foot on the floor and along the wall-length benches, as they awaited processing at a sparsely staffed circle of computers known as “the bubble.” Hallways and offices previously designated for photocopying and other tasks now held crates and boxes of bread, juice, animal crackers, baby formula and diapers. One cell held adolescent boys, many of whom stood in the small space, peering out through a glass wall. One stood urinating behind the low wall that obscured the toilet in back. In the adjacent cell, several boys who appeared to be of elementary school age slept curled up on concrete benches, a few clutching Mylar emergency blankets. Outside in the parking lot, a chain-link fence enclosure held dozens of women and children, many of them eschewing the air-conditioned tents to lie on the pavement.

[...]

Border officials said the immigration system is so overwhelmed that the normal conduits meant to funnel children out of Border Patrol custody and into Department of Health and Human Services shelters have broken down. Migrants are arriving faster than Customs and Border Protection can process them.

[...]

Border Patrol has apprehended nearly 45,000 unaccompanied children since October, according to government data. A spokesman for HHS, whose Office of Refugee Resettlement is tasked with providing longer-term shelters for those children, said border authorities had referred approximately 40,800 unaccompanied children to its custody as of the end of April. That marked a 57 percent increase from the previous year, and HHS said it is on pace to care for the largest number of unaccompanied minors in the program’s history this fiscal year.

[...]

Border Patrol officials say there are 6,400 people in custody in the Rio Grande Valley, including 931 unaccompanied children. The facilities are so overcrowded that officials say roughly 40 percent of the sector’s 3,100 Border Patrol agents are working on processing new migrant detainees at any given time.

That has left fewer agents out in the vast and wild tangle of brush that stretches for hundreds of miles along the twisting Rio Grande.

[...]

“It’s a daily battle,” said one agent who spoke on the condition of anonymity to comment candidly about the work at the border. “You catch a thousand people a day, and then you can only process 750 a day. The agents are working their tails off trying to get this squared away, but it’s a daily struggle with the amount of people we’re encountering.”

  WaPo

Perhaps we need more processing personnel on the job?

HHS officials said that the agency is aware that 2,000 children are detained and awaiting transfer and that it has space for them — but they said the agency’s responsibility for the minors begins only once they are delivered to the department’s custody. DHS officials at multiple agencies said HHS is not placing children in shelters fast enough.

Or finger-pointing. Finger-pointing usually gets things done, right?

Six children — five from Guatemala and one from El Salvador — have died after being taken into federal custody at the border since September. A teenager who had contracted the flu died last week in the Rio Grande Valley while in Border Patrol custody, leading agents to identify a small-scale flu outbreak.

UPDATE:

Mueller must testify on TV

And Barr should be impeached for misleading Congress and the American public, for overriding the Special Counsel's report, and for being a dick.

I'm going to surmise that this latest round of attacks on Mueller by Bill Barr are because he knows Mueller's televised statement actually refuted what Barr is trying to sell, even though Mueller didn't expressly say so. In fact, he even said he believed Barr was acting in good faith when he decided to release the report, leaving many to hear that as a cover for all of Barr's actions.

Meanwhile, Barr continues to throw Mueller under the bus.

Mueller said this week that he could not indict Trump because of a Justice Department policy that prohibits indicting a sitting president, and was not even willing to conclude if a crime was committed out of fairness to the president.

But Barr, a Trump appointee who oversaw the final stages of the Russia investigation, gave a starkly different opinion to Mueller's - saying the special counsel could have made a judgment call even if he could not indict the president.

[...]

Barr and former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein [...] later concluded on their own that the report lacked ample evidence to charge Trump with obstruction.

[...]

"I personally felt he could've reached a decision," Barr said, according to an excerpt released on Thursday from an interview with CBS' This Morning.

"The opinion says you cannot indict a president while he is in office, but he could've reached a decision as to whether it was criminal activity," Barr added.

"But he had his reasons for not doing it, which he explained and I am not going to, you know, argue about those reasons."

  Guardian

You just did.

In his first public comments since starting the investigation in May 2017, Mueller appeared to indicate that Congress could take the matter of deciding whether Trump had committed obstruction of justice into its own hands.

Barr, when asked about this on CBS, said he was not sure what Mueller was referring to with that comment.

"The Department of Justice doesn't use our powers of investigating crimes as an adjunct to Congress," Barr said.

Barr, like everyone else, knows exactly what Mueller was referring to.




 

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

It takes a worried man to sing a worried song

Exceeding his role?  He's bent over backward NOT to exceed his role.  In fact, even Trump's butt boy AG Barr complained that Mueller didn't FULFILL his role by not making a recommendation for how the DOJ should proceed.

And, gee, whatever happened to "he totally exonerated" Trump?

Pretty sure Old LardAss won't be impeached for a crime the Democrats committed.  Don't think that's going to be a consideration.  The witch has been found.  Indeed, a whole coven.

Andrew Yang

The Democratic primaries stand to be very interesting.  Check out Preet Bharara's interview with candidate Andrew Yang (after a short discussion with Ann Milgram about the Mueller statement) at Stay Tuned.

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

Wrong

Wrong.

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

Hey, tariffs are working so well, let's have more!

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

Deconstructing America

Also, at 47:00, discussion of Nancy Pelosi.

Go home, Nancy

And stay home.

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

Dishonest Don doesn't know which way to turn

One day Mueller totally exonerates him; the next he's a complete loser.  Back and forth.



That's some serious spin.

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

LOfuckingL

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

Behind the scenes at the USS John McCain debacle

Navy denial update

 [...]



Excerpts from the referenced article:

A senior Navy official confirmed he was aware that someone at the White House sent a message to service officials in the Pacific requesting that the USS John McCain be kept out of the picture while the president was there. That led to photographs taken Friday of a tarp obscuring the McCain name, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation.

When senior Navy officials grasped what was happening, they directed Navy personnel who were present to stop, the senior official said. The tarp was removed on Saturday, before Trump’s visit, he added.

[...]

The Journal reported that acting defense secretary Patrick Shanahan knew of the White House’s concerns and approved military officials’ efforts to obscure it from view. But Shanahan, speaking to reporters Thursday in Indonesia, denied that account.

“What I read this morning was the first I heard about it,” he said.

[...]

The crew of the McCain also was not invited to Trump’s visit, which occurred on the USS Wasp. But a Navy official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said it was because the crew was released from duty for the long holiday weekend, along with sailors from another ship, the USS Stethem.

A senior White House official also confirmed that they did not want the destroyer with the McCain name seen in photographs. The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, said the president was not involved in the planning, but the request was made to keep Trump from being upset during the visit.

[...]

Cmdr. Nate Christensen, a Navy spokesman, said that images of the tarp covering the ship are from Friday, and it was taken down Saturday.

“All ships remained in normal configuration during the President’s visit,” he said in an email, challenging the suggestion that a barge was moved to block it.

  WaPo

Jesus.

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

UPDATE:



UPDATE:

UPDATE:

Sad!

UPDATE 6/1:  The Navy finally admits the truth.

About that Navy denial...

President Trump on Thursday defended the reported decision by military officials to obscure the USS McCain during his trip to Japan, saying whoever made the order was "well meaning."

  The Hill

It was ham-handed and disrespectful to the ship's personnel, Senator John McCain, and the US Military, is what it was.

Officials were aware of the concern about the USS John McCain and approved measures so it would be hidden during Trump's state visit, an official told the Journal.

The Washington Post and New York Times later confirmed The Journal's reporting. None of the outlets reported that Trump was involved in making the request, and he has denied knowledge of the decision.

But, as Michael Cohen has said, he makes his desires known without issuing orders.

UPDATE:



The article he refers to.

UPDATE:



UPDATE:



Wrong.

Russia, Russia, Russia!

What did Mueller say?

"As set forth in the report, after the investigation, if we had confidence that
the president did not clearly commit a crime, we would have said so."

Also...

The Justice Department policy prohibiting the indictment of a sitting president meant that "charging the president with a crime was therefore not an option we could consider," Mueller said, adding that the Constitution requires a "process other than the criminal justice system" to address wrongdoing by a president.

  CBS

Mueller's report listed ten instances of potential obstruction of justice - instances = charges that can be brought, but by Congress.

Perhaps most explosively, Mueller said in the report that Trump’s “efforts to influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful, but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the President declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests.”

  Vox

Also, "unlimited access"?  He refused to be interviewed.

I do believe that's an admission that Russia helped get him elected.  He just had nothing to do with it. That's a new tune for him.

Ten instances.

Mueller needs to be televised repeating them.

UPDATE:

We haven't heard from Rick Perry in a while

Also, "molecules of U.S. freedom."

MAGA

American values. 

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

Who the fuck knows anything any more?

Well, Trump believed it was.  He tweeted he had nothing to do with it.

Also...



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

UPDATE:  He's now saying the act was well meaning.  So, I guess it happened, Navy Chief of Information.  (Both the Washington Post and New York Times confirmed the report by the Wall Street Journal.)

UPDATE 6/1:  The Navy finally admits the truth of it.

UPDATE 6/4: