The shit MAGAland puts out about CRT

What is West Nova News? And what does it have to do with Ian Prior, the former spokesperson for Attorney General Jeff Sessions? This is where things get interesting.

West Nova News appears to be a standard local news website. It is not. Rather it is part of a massive network of websites linked to "conservative businessman Brian Timpone." There are more than 1300 sites currently in the network, including at least 28 that operate in Virginia.

The sites in Virginia look identical and feature much of the same content. Most of the articles do not have a byline and are automatically generated.

[...]

Journatic was rebranded Locality Labs and is now part of the Metric Media network, which operates the 1300+ local news sites. Metric Media boasts that it produces "over 5 million news articles every month." It has claimed to be "the largest producer of local news in the United States."

  Popular Info

"Producing" local news.  I see what they did there.

Prior and other clients can use the network to launder partisan attacks as "news." Quotes from sites in the Metric Media network can then be used in political mailers or in television ads with the authority of a neutral source.

Right out of the Dick Cheney playbook. You remember Dick Cheney. And how Dick Cheney leaked information to news sources and then quoted those news sources to support his public assertions.

[A Prior ordered article] published in September 2020, is one of the first to claim that Critical Race Theory is infiltrating Virginia schools. It claims that "Loudoun County Public Schools has spent $422,500 in taxpayer funds 'training' staff on critical race theory." This is false. The money was allocated to create an equity plan and provide related services to help implement the plan.

[...]

Neither the contract for the plan nor the plan itself mentions Critical Race Theory. It does talk about strategies to "ensure student growth and success for every child." This includes the "[r]ecruitment and retention of a high performing, diverse workforce." The West Nova News story describes this as "hiring fewer white teachers."

[...]

Asked by Vice to provide an example as to how Critical Race Theory is reflected in Loudoun County instruction, Prior said "his second-grade daughter was taught about Christopher Columbus’ genocidal history."

Do NOT teach our children the truth about our beloved icons.

This year Prior founded Fight for Schools, a group pushing parents to fight Critical Race Theory and organizing recalls of school board members that oppose its agenda. Prior and Fight for Schools are also a member of the American Schools Coalition, which operates the CRT Central website. CRT Central aggregates anti-CRT stories from across the Metric Media network.

[...]

A Popular Information investigation reveals that, in 2021, Metric Media published thousands of articles promoting the notion that Critical Race Theory is taught in Virginia schools. Many, but not all, of these articles are automated.

Nationwide, tens of thousands of articles about Critical Race Theory have been published across the Metric Media network. That number is growing every day.

MAGA messaging is on the warpath.

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

The evil empire: Horowitz (draft) report on child-parent separation

Though [then Attorney General Jeff] Sessions sought to distance himself from the [illegal immigrant child-parent separation] policy, allowing Mr. Trump and Homeland Security Department officials to largely be blamed, he and other top law enforcement officials understood that “zero tolerance” meant that migrant families would be separated and wanted that to happen because they believed it would deter future illegal immigration, Mr. Horowitz wrote.

“The department’s single-minded focus on increasing prosecutions came at the expense of careful and effective implementation of the policy, especially with regard to prosecution of family-unit adults and the resulting child separations,” the draft report said.

[...]

The five U.S. attorneys along the border with Mexico, including three appointed by President Trump, recoiled in May 2018 against an order to prosecute all undocumented immigrants even if it meant separating children from their parents. They told top Justice Department officials they were “deeply concerned” about the children’s welfare.

But [AG] Sessions, made it clear what Mr. Trump wanted on a conference call later that afternoon.

[...]

“We need to take away children,” Mr. Sessions told the prosecutors, according to participants’ notes.

[...]

Rod J. Rosenstein, then the deputy attorney general, went even further in a second call about a week later, telling the five prosecutors that it did not matter how young the children were. He said that government lawyers should not have refused to prosecute two cases simply because the children were barely more than infants.

“Those two cases should not have been declined,” John Bash, the departing U.S. attorney in western Texas, wrote to his staff immediately after the call. Mr. Bash had declined the cases, but Mr. Rosenstein had overruled him. “Per the A.G.’s policy, we should NOT be categorically declining immigration prosecutions of adults in family units because of the age of a child.”

[...]

Mr. Horowitz had been preparing to release his report since late summer, according to a person familiar with the investigation, though the process allowing for responses from current and former department officials whose conduct is under scrutiny is likely to delay its release until after the presidential election.

[...]

Mr. Sessions refused to be interviewed, the report noted. Mr. Rosenstein, who is now a lawyer in private practice, defended himself in his interview with investigators in response to questioning about his role, according to two of the officials. Mr. Rosenstein’s former office submitted a 64-page response to the report.

“If any United States attorney ever charged a defendant they did not personally believe warranted prosecution, they violated their oath of office,” Mr. Rosenstein said in a statement. “I never ordered anyone to prosecute a case.”

[...]

Senior Justice Department officials viewed the welfare of the children as the responsibility of other agencies and their duty as tracking the parents. “I just don’t see that as a D.O.J. equity,” Mr. Rosenstein told the inspector general.

  NYT

The more you know about Rod Rosenstein, the more disgusted you become.

Gene Hamilton, a top lawyer and ally of Stephen Miller, the architect of the president’s assault on immigration, argued in a 32-page response that Justice Department officials merely took direction from the president. Mr. Hamilton cited an April 3, 2018, meeting with Mr. Sessions; the homeland security secretary at the time, Kirstjen Nielsen; and others in which the president “ranted” and was on “a tirade,” demanding as many prosecutions as possible.

[...]

“The draft report relied on for this article contains numerous factual errors and inaccuracies,” [Alexa Vance, a spokeswoman for the Justice Department,] said. “While D.O.J. is responsible for the prosecutions of defendants, it had no role in tracking or providing custodial care to the children of defendants. Finally, both the timing and misleading content of this leak raise troubling questions about the motivations of those responsible for it.”

Always shift the focus to the messenger.

The fact that this policy was abhorrent is borne out by the fact that everybody is trying to shift the blame for it onto someone other than himself.

Government prosecutors reacted with alarm at the separation of children from their parents during a secret 2017 pilot program along the Mexican border in Texas. “We have now heard of us taking breastfeeding defendant moms away from their infants,” one government prosecutor wrote to his superiors. “I did not believe this until I looked at the duty log.”

Border Patrol officers missed serious felony cases because they were stretched too thin by the zero-tolerance policy requiring them to detain and prosecute all of the misdemeanor illegal entry cases.

[...]

The failure to inform the U.S. Marshals Service before announcing the zero-tolerance policy led to serious overcrowding and budget overruns. The marshals were forced to cut back on serving warrants in other cases, saying that “when you take away manpower, you can’t make a safe arrest.”

[...]

After the pilot program in Texas ended, the report asserted, Mr. Sessions, Mr. Hamilton and Mr. Rosenstein pushed aggressively to expand the practice across the entire southwestern border, with help from prosecutors.

[...]

Mr. Rosenstein told the inspector general that Mr. Sessions “understood what the consequences were.”

“The A.G.’s goal,” he said, “was to create a more effective deterrent so that everybody would believe that they had a risk of being prosecuted.”

[...]

The decision roiled the prosecutors along the border. In Arizona, Elizabeth Strange, the acting U.S. attorney, led a minor rebellion, temporarily declining six cases, citing concern about the children.

[...]

Justice Department officials have repeatedly claimed that they thought the adults would be prosecuted and reunited with their children within hours of being separated. But the inspector general found a memo informing top officials that sentences for adults ranged from three to 14 days, making it all but certain that children would be sent to the custody of officials at the Health and Human Services Department for long periods of time.

UPDATE:

Speaking of Rosenstein...

What the everloving fuck? What is Rosenstein smoking?

UPDATE:

Preet Bharara and Anne Milgram (justifiably) ream Rod Rosenstein.

A show of hands

Eleven of President Trump’s most senior advisers met in the White House Situation Room in early May 2018 and were asked to vote on family separations, two officials in attendance told NBC News. The meeting was led by senior advisor Stephen Miller, who reportedly expressed anger toward then-Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen.

[...]

The meeting came about a month after the Trump administration instituted the “zero tolerance” policy.

During the meeting, Nielsen reportedly said there weren't enough resources to separate parents, prosecute them and reunite them with their children quickly.

[...]

Miller alleged Nielsen was stalling before he called for the show-of-hands vote. Most voted in favor of family separations, though Nielsen did not, officials told NBC News.

No adviser argued in the meeting that the action would be immoral, as those claims “fell on deaf ears” in the White House, one official said.

[...]

An invitation list for the meeting with the vote obtained by NBC News included then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Nielsen, Miller, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar, ex-Under Secretary of Defense John Rood, then-White House chief of staff John Kelly, White House deputy chief of staff Chris Liddell, then-White House counsel Don McGahn and Marc Short, who at the time was White House director of legislative affairs.

[...]

Days after the meeting, Nielsen signed a memo instructing Homeland Security Department employees to prosecute all immigrants who crossed the border illegally, including parents with children.

[...]

A federal judge ordered the families to be reunited, but there was no plan to track the children or reunite the families, the two former officials said. As a result, it took months to reunite some families, and some parents were deported without their children.

[...]

White House spokesman Judd Deere said told The Hill in a statement that the show-of-hands vote “is absolutely not true and did not happen.”

Health and Human Services Department spokesman Michael Caputo told NBC News, “This never happened.”

  The Hill

I have no doubt it did happen. Trump is all about taking names.

Jeff Sessions' final (we hope) humiliation

Trounced, actually.  

Trump doesn't joke.

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

Feud!

Is Jeff hinting that he would have had something incriminating to reveal had he not recused himself?

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

UPDATE:

Nasty man with a grudge

"Loyally gets appointed."

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

Looks like Alabama could use some Democrats

We've seen Tommy T before...






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

He's baaaaaaaaaack

A new poll shows a tight race between Republicans seeking to unseat Sen. Doug Jones (D-Ala.).

The poll from Mason-Dixon Polling and Strategy published in the Alabama Daily News on Wednesday shows former Attorney General Jeff Sessions at 31 percent followed by former Auburn football coach Tommy Tuberville at 29 percent and Rep. Bradley Byrne at 17 percent. Former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, who Jones beat in 2017, polled at 5 percent.

“Sessions is facing a much tougher fight to win the Republican nomination than most political insiders likely anticipated,” Brad Coker of Mason-Dixon Polling and Strategy told the Daily News.

The poll also showed Jones trailing Sessions, Tuberville and Byrne in hypothetical head-to-head matchups.

  The Hill

Doug Jones was a possible vote against removing Trump from office. He may be in danger of losing his seat because he voted courageously instead. If you have any extra dollars, you might want to send a few his way. Democrats need the Senate in 2020.

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

UPDATE:  Holy shit, if this is his opposition:

Re: Bill Barr

Ken White:  "Bill Barr is the answer to the question: Is it possible to miss Jeff Sessions."

Everything is connected: Nunes in the web

Well, well, well. Look where we find Devin Nunes.

Joseph A. Bondy, the attorney for Lev Parnas [an indicted associate of Rudy Giuliani], told CNN that [a] Ukrainian official told his client about [a] meeting with Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, in which the GOP lawmaker sought to find dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden.

"Mr. Parnas learned from former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Victor Shokin that Nunes had met with Shokin in Vienna last December," Bondy said.

  The Hill

Hearsay! will shout Nunes and Company. And Nunes immediately filed another one of his sure-to-lose lawsuits against CNN for printing the story! (AND one against The Daily Beast for a story it published on the same thing.) He's also suing two parody twitter accounts for making fun of him.

Dein Nunes' cow...

And Devin Nunes' Mom...

He'll have even less of a chance to win against major news organizations than parody Twitter accounts. He must have deep pockets.

Bondy told CNN that Parnas put Nunes in touch with Ukrainians to help Nunes get damaging information on Biden, one of the president’s chief political rivals.

Giuliani has previously discussed his conversations with Shokin and Parnas as part of his work on behalf of the president. However, Bondy’s discussions with CNN mark the first time Nunes has been implicated in the effort to dig up dirt on Biden.

We know Nunes was in Vienna last December.

CNN claims that they began to ask Nunes questions about his Vienna trip on November 14, to which Nunes responded to CNN: “I don’t talk to you in this lifetime or the next lifetime. At any time. On any question.”

CNN asked Nunes about the trip again on Thursday, to which Nunes responded: “To be perfectly clear, I don’t acknowledge any questions from you in this lifetime or the next lifetime. I don’t acknowledge any question from you ever.”

  Daily Wire

You may remember that Vienna is where Dmytro Firtash is hiding out avoiding extradition to the US.

Imagine that. Kind of gives more clarity to why Nunes' performance in the impeachment hearings has been so over-the-top disgusting and ridiculous.

And, by the way, regarding Firtash, even Republicans are wondering WTF? This SHOULD be where Republicans grow some balls and accept the reality.

Firtash was indicted in 2014 for what federal prosecutors in the Northern District of Illinois allege was his role in bribing Indian officials in order to get a lucrative mining deal to sell titanium to Boeing. He was arrested in Vienna in March 2014, released on $174 million bail, and has been contesting his extradition to the U.S. ever since.

[...]

A U.S. senator's office says that after 18 months it has still received no answer from the Justice Department about why a Ukrainian oligarch linked to Paul Manafort and two men who work with Rudolph Giuliani has not been extradited to the U.S. to face federal bribery charges.

A spokesperson for Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., said, "We have not received a response" to a 2018 letter about Dmytro Firtash.

  NBC

You're mighty patient, sir.

On June 25, Austria approved the extradition of Firtash, who has been living in Vienna since his 2014 arrest, but Firtash has asked that the case be reopened.

Sen. Wicker sent a letter to then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions in April 2018 asking about the status of Firtash's extradition. NBC News exclusively obtained that letter through Freedom of Information Act litigation with the Justice Department.

This administration is pure rot through and through.

Wicker alleged in the letter that Firtash, who has also been linked to Russian organized crime, had made "hundreds of millions" in "illicit profits" while fighting extradition to the U.S.

How much of that went into Nunes' pockets?

"This corruption undermines Ukrainian reform efforts that the United States strongly supports," Wicker wrote to Sessions. He asked Sessions about the status of Firtash's extradition case.

[...]

Rudolph Giuliani has denied any involvement with Firtash and says he has never met him. One of the two Ukrainian-American Giuliani associates who was arrested at Dulles airport before boarding a flight to Vienna last week worked for the Firtash legal team as a translator. Giuliani had planned a trip to Vienna at the same time but said he was not planning to meet with Firtash.

Whatever, Rudy.

The Firtash legal team includes Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing, the pro-Trump husband and wife attorneys who Fox News reported were "working off the books" with Giuliani as part of his Ukrainian venture, in which he was seeking information about Joe and Hunter Biden and about the Ukrainian gas industry.

"So, Firtash, I know nothing about," Giuliani told NBC News. "I'm not going to answer any questions about because I'm probably going to get it wrong, and you can ask them."

Whatever, Rudy.

Giuliani said the two men arrested at Dulles on Oct. 9 for campaign finance violations, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, "help me find people," and that he also represents their company as a lawyer.

"Help me find people." That doesn't sound very mobbish, does it? I would think the normal phrase would be "work as private investigators."

Parnas is employed by Firtash's legal team, according to Mark Corallo, spokesperson for diGenova and Toensing.

Sen. Wicker's 2018 letter alleges that prior to 2014, Firtash acted as a "direct agent of the Kremlin" during a separate scheme to skim money from natural gas transfers between Russia's Gazprom and Ukraine.

I don't know how separate that is, because Rudy has been connected to dealings with Ukraine's national gas company Naftogaz.*

"By manipulating natural gas prices," the Wicker letter says, "the Kremlin used RosUkrEnergo as a tool to keep [Kiev] dependent on Moscow." According to the court documents, RosUkrEnergo was a firm created by Firtash and Gazprom, which is majority owned by the Russian government, to skim money.

"Despite his arrest" in 2014, Wicker wrote, "Firtash continues to engage in corruption in Ukraine, reaping hundreds of millions of dollars in illicit profits." His letter estimated the gross amount earned since Firtash's arrest at $1.5 billion.

[...]

In a statement, Rick VanMeter, a spokesperson for Wicker, said, "As the co-chair of the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, Senator Wicker regularly meets with foreign delegations. He has a deep interest in Ukraine and a strong record of opposing Vladimir Putin's aggression in the region. He stands firmly with the people of Ukraine fighting for freedom and reform. The letter was an inquiry from Senator Wicker to the U.S. administration seeking updates on efforts to extradite Mr. Firtash — widely known for his corruption and connection with the Kremlin and organized crime. The letter was written after considering a range of credible sources, including meetings with foreign delegations, publicly available data, and non-public information."

So Roger Wicker should be seriuosly considering his vote in the Trump impeachment Senate trial. I bet he's being watched very, very closely.

Firtash, 54, owns a valuable portfolio of chemical, real estate and energy businesses. He is perhaps best known in the U.S. as a one-time associate of former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort, who is now in federal prison.

And I have no doubt soon-to-be-ex-Energy Secretary Rick Perry has fingerprints all over this business.

One of the other partners working with Manafort on the deal was Brad Zackson, the former exclusive broker for the properties of President Donald Trump's late father, Fred Trump.

[...]

According to a December 2008 State Department cable posted by WikiLeaks, Firtash told U.S. Ambassador William Taylor during a meeting at the U.S. Embassy in Kiev that he got his start in business with the permission of one of Russia's most well-known organized crime bosses, Semion Mogilevich.

Mogilevich was once on the FBI's top 10 most wanted list and has an Interpol Red Notice out for his arrest. The FBI alleges that he is "involved in weapons trafficking, contract murders, extortion, drug trafficking, and prostitution on an international scale."

[...]

"[Firtash] was adamant that he had not committed a single crime when building his business empire," the cable says, and "argued that outsiders still failed to understand the period of lawlessness that reigned in Ukraine after the collapse of the Soviet Union."

*Regarding Rudy and Ukrainian gas...this is out today:

The CEO of Ukrainian state gas company Naftogaz told Time he is ready to give evidence to U.S. federal prosecutors probing the business dealings of President Trump's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani. “I will with a high likelihood be invited to testify in this case,” Andriy Kobolyev said, adding that he “would be willing to come and testify” if he were summoned. Naftogaz is reportedly connected to Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, two men who allegedly worked with Giuliani to pressure Ukraine into investigating former Vice President Joe Biden and his son. Parnas and Fruman allegedly tried to use their political connections to replace the leadership at Naftogaz, which resisted the two men's efforts for a gas deal.

Kobolyev said he would be willing to give prosecutors information on Parnas, Fruman, and Giuliani because, as he said, “everything is connected.”

  Daily Beast

Everything.

And, another Nunes lawsuit:  one against Esquire for a story about the farm he has in Iowa titled “Devin Nunes’s Family Farm Is Hiding a Politically Explosive Secret.”  In that article we learn he also has suits against Twitter and McClatchy newspapers.

If you'd like to keep track of Devin Nunes' cow, click this graphic...

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

UPDATE:

It just got clearer.

UPDATE:

UPDATE:

Always the dick

President Donald Trump said Friday that he won’t campaign against Jeff Sessions in his bid for his previously held Senate seat, despite their tense and rocky relationship during Sessions' tenure as attorney general.

"No, I won’t,” the president told reporters on the White House lawn when asked if he would campaign against Sessions. “I'll see how it all goes. We'll see what happens. He's got tough competition."

  Politico

When I read that a couple days ago, I immediately thought, "No, he'll just make snide comments on Twitter." I don't know if he has, because I'm boycotting his Twitter account (unless I see something on another page that quotes something he's posted that I find particularly noteworthy). I think I'm healthier for it, if less informed about his latest diarrhetic flow.

But, if he hasn't yet said anything about Sessions, he's still in effect campaigning against him.

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

Dear God, No

Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions officially announced a bid for his old Alabama Senate seat on Thursday, entering a crowded primary in the race to challenge vulnerable Sen. Doug Jones (D-Ala.).

  The Hill

I have a feeling he's going to be humiliated.

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

The blame it on Unkraine conspiracy

Notes from an FBI interview were released on Saturday after lawsuits by BuzzFeed News and CNN led to public access to hundreds of pages of documents from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. The documents included summaries of interviews with other figures from the Mueller investigation, including Trump’s former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen.

Information related to Ukraine took on renewed interest after calls for impeachment based on efforts by the president and his administration to pressure Ukraine to investigate the Democrat Joe Biden. Trump, speaking with Ukraine’s new president in July, asked about the DNC servers in the same phone call in which he pushed for an investigation into Biden.

  The Guardian

The "perfect" phone call.

Manafort speculated about Ukraine’s responsibility as the campaign sought to capitalize on DNC email disclosures and as Trump associates discussed how they could get hold of the material themselves, deputy campaign chairman Rick Gates told investigators, according to a summary of one of his interviews.

Gates said Manafort’s assertion that Ukraine might have done it echoed the position of Konstantin Kilimnik, a Manafort business associate who had also speculated that the hack could have been carried out by Russian operatives in Ukraine.

Even if that were true, how do you equate Russian operatives in Ukraine to the Ukrainian government? Only if you're trying to find a way to move the blame from Russia and you leave out the "Russian operatives" part.

US authorities have assessed that Kilimnik, who was also charged in Mueller’s investigation, has ties to Russian intelligence. American intelligence agencies have determined that Russia was behind the hack, and Mueller’s team indicted 12 Russian agents in connection with the intrusion.

Gates also said the campaign believed that Michael Flynn, who became Trump’s first national security adviser, would be in the best position to obtain Hillary Clinton’s missing emails because of his Russia connections.

Flynn said he could use his intelligence sources to obtain the emails and was “adamant that Russians did not carry out the hack” because he believed that the US intelligence community couldn’t have figured out the source, according to the agent’s notes. Flynn later pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with the Russian ambassador.

[...]

Gates worked with Manafort in a lucrative international political consulting business that included Ukraine and later testified against him. Gates pleaded guilty last year in Mueller’s investigation and has been one of the government’s key cooperators. He has yet to be sentenced as he continues working with investigators. Manafort was sentenced to more than seven years in prison, in part for financial crimes arising from his Ukraine work.

[...]

During his interviews with investigators, Gates said Donald Trump Jr would ask where the hacked emails were during family meetings in the summer of 2016. Gates recalled that other key campaign aides, including future attorney general Jeff Sessions, Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner and Flynn, also “expressed interest in obtaining the emails as well”, according to an agent’s written summary of one interview.

The identity of one of the people who expressed interest in the emails is blanked out.

Interesting.

One time on the campaign aircraft, Gates told the FBI, Donald Trump said “get the emails”. Gates also said that another point, Trump told him more leaks were coming, though the heavily redacted documents do not indicate how Trump knew that.

Also interesting, and I wonder if that is because those blacked out names are still (or were at the time) under investigation in some other agency.

Gates also described conversations with the chairman of the Republican National Committee, Reince Priebus, who entered the White House as chief of staff. Gates described the RNC as energized by the emails and said that though Trump and Kushner were initially skeptical about cooperating with the RNC, “the WikiLeaks issue was a turning point”, the FBI notes show. WikiLeaks was the website that published the stolen emails in the weeks before the election.

The campaign was also very pleased by the releases, though Trump was advised not to react to it but rather to let it all play out, according to the interview summaries.

Too bad Trump doesn't take advice.

The RNC would put out press releases to amplify the emails’ release, Gates told the FBI.

“The RNC also indicated they knew the timing of the upcoming releases,” though Gates didn’t specify who at the RNC had that information. “Gates said the only non-public information the RNC had was related to the timing of the releases.”

Manafort, meanwhile, was trying to advise the Trump campaign even after severing ties, causing alarm among some of the candidate’s most senior advisers.Manafort emailed Kushner on 5 November 2016, just days before the election, saying he was feeling good about the prospect of a Trump presidency. In the email, Manafort said he was “focusing on preserving the victory” and that he had sent a memo to Priebus and had briefed Gates and Fox News host Sean Hannity.

[...]

Kushner sent Manafort’s email to Trump adviser Steve Bannon, who replied: “We need to avoid this guy like the plague.”

Again, too bad Trump doesn't take advice.

“Paul is nice guy but can’t let word get out he is advising us.”

On that, they managed to hold out. Which is how Manafort got away with having his defense attorneys share information with Trump when he was supposed to be cooperating with the Feds.

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

TheBuzzfeed report

"Don't Beauregard that joint"

Rolling papers.

h/t Aaron Rupar

Should you be  too young to know the reference:

From the great 1969 movie "Easy Rider" starring Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, and newcomer Jack Nicholson.

More from the McCabe tell-all

Regarding Jeff Sessions (and good riddance):

He didn’t read intelligence reports and mixed up classified material with what he had seen in newspaper clips. He seemed confused about the structure and purpose of organizations and became overwhelmed when meetings covered multiple subjects. He blamed immigrants for nearly every societal problem and uttered racist sentiments with shocking callousness.

[...]

The FBI was better off when “you all only hired Irishmen,” Sessions said in one diatribe about the bureau’s workforce. “They were drunks but they could be trusted. Not like all those new people with nose rings and tattoos — who knows what they’re doing?”

[...]

McCabe’s disdain for Trump is rivaled only by his contempt for Sessions. He questions the former attorney general’s mental faculties, saying that he had “trouble focusing, particularly when topics of conversation strayed from a small number of issues.”

Logs on the electronic tablets used to deliver the President’s Daily Brief to Sessions came back with no indication he had ever punched in the passcode. The attorney general’s views on race and religion are described as reprehensible.

Sessions “believed that Islam — inherently — advocated extremism” and ceaselessly sought to draw connections between crime and immigration. “Where’s he from?” was his first question about a suspect. The next: “Where are his parents from?”

[...]

McCabe’s is an important voice because of his position at the top of the bureau during a critical series of events, including the firing of FBI chief James Comey, the appointment of special counsel Robert S. Mueller, and the ensuing scorched-earth effort by Trump and his Republican allies to discredit the Russia probe and destroy public confidence in the nation’s top law enforcement agency. The work is insightful and occasionally provocative. The subtitle, “How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump,” all but equates the danger posed by al-Qaeda and the Islamic State to that of the current president.

But overall, the book isn’t the comprehensive account McCabe was presumably capable of delivering. He seems reluctant to reveal details about his role in conflicts at key moments, rarely adding meaningful new illumination to areas of the Trump-Russia-FBI timeline established by Mueller, news organizations and previous authors.


[...]

He describes how Trump arranges Oval Office encounters so that his advisers are forced to sit before him in “little schoolboy chairs” across the Resolute Desk. Prior presidents met with aides on couches in the center of the room, but Trump is always angling to make others feel smaller.

[...]

[McCabe] documents the president’s attempts to impair the Russia probe and incessant attacks on the institution, describing the stakes in sweeping, convincing language.

“Between the world of chaos and the world of order stands the rule of law,” McCabe writes. “Yet now the rule of law is under attack, including from the president himself.”

[...]

During an Oval Office briefing in July 2017, Trump refused to believe U.S. intelligence reports that North Korea had test-fired an intercontinental ballistic missile — a test that Kim Jong Un had called a Fourth of July “gift” to “the arrogant Americans.”

Trump dismissed the missile launch as a “hoax,” McCabe writes. “He thought that North Korea did not have the capability to launch such missiles. He said he knew this because Vladimir Putin had told him so.”

[...]

But for all of the understandable alarm and indignation that McCabe registers, he seems, like other Trump dissidents, never to have found reason or opportunity to stand up to the president. There are paragraphs in “The Threat” that recount in detail McCabe’s inner outrage — but no indication that those thoughts escaped his lips in the presence of Trump.

[...]

At one point, McCabe puts his odds of getting the FBI director’s position at “one-in-ten-million,” but he goes through a job interview with Trump that feels like a charade from the outset.

[...]

What is it that makes otherwise proud public servants, Comey included, willing to subject themselves to Trump-inflicted indignities?
  WaPo

Some of it, I think, is the game men play with each other for power, and then defer to the guy at the top of the ladder, because that's the rules of the game - to the victor go the spoils.

McCabe skims over the conduct of two of his FBI subordinates, Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, whose text exchanges during an illicit affair included disparaging remarks about Trump and, when they were later revealed, fueled doubts about the organization’s impartiality.

When first confronted with the details of the Page-Strzok texts, McCabe was asked by the inspector general whether he knew that Page — his closest legal adviser — had had interactions with the press. McCabe said he didn’t, though in fact he had authorized those contacts. In the book, he downplays that false testimony as a momentary mental lapse during a confusing conversation — which sounds a lot like the excuses offered by countless defendants who find themselves being prosecuted by the FBI for lying.

[...]

There is one area, however, in which he is considerably more forthcoming than Comey. He acknowledges that the bureau made major miscalculations in its handling of the Clinton probe in 2016 and its decision to discuss it publicly.

“As a matter of policy, the FBI does everything possible not to influence elections,” he writes. “In 2016, it seems we did.”

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

Speaking of the Keebler elf's dismissal

On Wednesday, the attorney general received the call everyone in Washington knew was coming some day soon.

John Kelly, the White House chief of staff, asked Sessions to submit his resignation, according to multiple sources briefed on the call. Sessions agreed to comply, but he wanted a few more days before the resignation would become effective. Kelly said he'd consult the President.

Soon, the sources say, top Justice officials convened on the 5th floor suite of offices for the attorney general. Eventually, there were two huddles in separate offices. Among those in Sessions' office was Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, his deputy Ed O'Callaghan, Solicitor General Noel Francisco and Steven Engel, who heads the Office of Legal Counsel.

A few yards away, Whitaker strategized with other aides, including Gary Barnett, now his chief of staff.

[...]

A source close to Sessions says that the former attorney general realized that Whitaker was "self-dealing" after reports surfaced in September that Whitaker had spoken with Kelly and had discussed plans to become the No. 2 at the Justice Department if Rosenstein was forced to resign.

In recent months, with his relationship with the President at a new low, Sessions skipped several so-called principals meetings that he was slated to attend as a key member of the Cabinet. A source close to Sessions says that neither the attorney general nor Trump thought it was a good idea for Sessions to be at the White House, so he sent surrogates. Whitaker was one of them.

But Sessions did not realize Whitaker was having conversations with the White House about his future until the news broke in late September about Rosenstein.

  CNN

Apparently Ole Jeff didn't have a posse.

The fact that Whitaker would become acting attorney general, passing over Rosenstein suddenly raised concerns about the impact on the most high-profile investigation in the Justice Department, the Russia probe led by Mueller.

[...]

Rosenstein and O'Callaghan, the highest-ranked officials handling day-to-day oversight of Mueller's investigation, urged Sessions to delay the effective date of his resignation.

Soon, Whitaker strode into Sessions' office and asked to speak one-on-one to the attorney general; the others left the two men alone. It was a brief conversation. Shortly after, Sessions told his huddle that his resignation would be effective that day.

[...]

Sessions never heard in person from the President -- the man who gained television fame for his catch-phrase "You're fired" doesn't actually like such confrontation and prefers to have others do the firing, people close to the President say. Kelly called Sessions a second time to tell him the President had rejected his request for a delay.

[...]

Whitaker and Sessions didn't have a prior relationship before Sessions -- at the urging of the White House -- accepted Whitaker as his chief of staff.

And anybody with a brain would have guessed right then that something was afoot. If Sessions was surprised that Whitaker was meeting with the president behind his back, it's because Sessions is slow on the uptake.

Sessions was the first US senator to endorse Trump at a time when establishment Republicans were still staying away, and he left his safe Alabama Senate seat to take the attorney general job.

Several members of his staff also joined the President's team, helping to craft some of the harsh immigration policies that Sessions often preached from Capitol Hill and which have become a cornerstone of stump speeches that Trump regularly uses to excite his political base.

[...]

More recently, Sessions appeared at peace with the prospect of being ousted from office. He made a series of valedictory visits with law enforcement around the country, seeking to underline what he believes will be his legacy of strong support for law enforcement and efforts to reduce crime.

Sessions spent Election Day on Tuesday surrounded by what he loves: cops and sweets.

Child.

[W]hen he arrived in the cafeteria for lunch, a room full of FBI personnel and local police officers training in the National Academy rose to their feet as he entered the room. He went around from table to table, shaking hands, posing for pictures -- soaking up the moment and capping it off with vanilla ice cream with sprinkles.

Roughly 24 hours later, he was out of a job.

With sprinkles.

Still more Whitaker slime

It just keeps oozing out.

Matthew Whitaker, whom President Donald Trump named as his acting attorney general on Wednesday, privately provided advice to the president last year on how the White House might be able to pressure the Justice Department to investigate the president’s political adversaries, Vox has learned.

[...]

Sessions, Rosenstein, and other senior department officials believed that if they agreed to Trump’s wishes, doing so would constitute an improper politicization of the department that would set a dangerous precedent for Trump — or any future president — to exploit the powerful apparatus of the DOJ and FBI to investigate their political adversaries. Those efforts, in turn, coincided with the president’s campaign to undermine Mueller’s investigation into whether the president’s campaign aides, White House advisers, and members of his own family colluded with Russian to help Trump win the 2016 election.

During this period of time, Whitaker was the chief of staff to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and in that role was advising Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein on how to counter the president’s demands. But according to one former and one current administration official, Whitaker was simultaneously counseling the White House on how the president and his aides might successfully pressure Sessions and Rosenstein to give in to Trump’s demands.

[...]

Whitaker, in his conversations with the president, presented himself as a vigorous supporter of Trump’s position and “committed to extract as much as he could from the Justice Department on the president’s behalf.”

  Vox

Precisely why Trump would want to replace Sessions with Whitaker.

One administration official with knowledge of the matter told me: “Whitaker let it be known [in the White House] that he was on a team, and that was the president’s team.”

Whitaker’s open sympathizing with Trump’s frequent complaints about the Mueller investigation resulted in an unusually close relationship between a president and a staffer of his level. The president met with Whitaker in the White House, often in the Oval Office, at least 10 times, a former senior administration official told me. On most of those occasions, Sessions was also present, but it’s unclear if that was always the case.

During this period, Whitaker frequently spoke by phone with both Trump and Chief of Staff John Kelly, this same official told me.

But, but...the president says he didn't know Whitaker.

On many of those phone calls, nobody else was on the phone except for the president and Whitaker, or only Kelly and Whitaker. As one senior law enforcement official told me, “Nobody else knew what was said on those calls except what Whitaker decided to tell others, and if he did, whether he was telling the truth. Who ever heard of a president barely speaking to his attorney general but on the phone constantly with a staff-level person?”

Well, it couldn't possibly be they were talking about the Mueller investigation. Trump said so.

Whitaker also counseled the president in private on how the White House might be able to pressure the Justice Department to name a special counsel to investigate not only allegations of FBI wrongdoing but also Hillary Clinton.

I fully expect that to be coming soon. According to this article, Trump had tried twice before to get the DOJ to investigate the FBI and Hillary Clinton, and they managed to skirt what they knew was a political move with no actual evidence that would justify investigations. Now, he's got Whitaker.

A long-time Justice Department trial attorney told me, “This is the first time, perhaps since Watergate, that the department has been asked to review old, closed files about a president’s political opponents. It’s not right that it should have been done at all.

[...]

Before he became Sessions’s chief of staff, Whitaker was one of the staunchest critics of Mueller’s investigation. In a July 2017 appearance on CNN, for example, Whitaker spoke of various ways the White House might sabotage Mueller’s probe. Whitaker suggested that if Sessions were to resign or be fired, his replacement might be able to curtail the investigation by simply refusing to fund it further.

“I could see a scenario where Jeff Sessions is replaced with a recess appointment and that attorney general doesn’t fire Bob Mueller, but he just reduces his budget to so low that his investigation grinds to almost a halt,” Whitaker said.

The previous month, Whitaker, appearing on a conservative radio show, said he was sure that the president and his men did nothing wrong: “The truth is there was no collusion with the Russians and the Trump campaign,” he declared.

[...]

The president’s relationship with Sessions and Rosenstein has famously been largely one of animosity and disdain. But in Whitaker, the president found a reliable and compliant friend. As the New York Times reported, “The president has long regarded Mr. Whitaker as his eyes and ears inside a department that he considers an enemy institution.” The Washington Post similarly reported, “As Sessions’s chief of staff, Whitaker met with the president in the Oval Office more than a dozen times, normally accompanying the attorney general. ... When Trump complained about the Mueller investigation, Whitaker often smiled knowingly and nodded in assent.”

The best people.

This whole Whitaker debacle reminds me of nothing more than the Bernard Kerik debacle.  (Perhaps its bolstered the physical look.)  Maybe Whitker will get lucky and not end up the same way.



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

UPDATE 11/19: Speak of the devil...



(Poor Papadop: two whole weeks!)

On his way out, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions struck one last blow

Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, in one of his final acts as the nation’s top cop, curtailed the ability of law enforcement officials to use court-enforced agreements to create change within local police departments accused of civil rights violations.

Consent decrees are often used to enforce an agreement between the Justice Department and a local police department to address a violation of law.

[...]

The memorandum lists three requirements for consent decrees, including that political appointees (rather than lawyers) must sign off on the deals, defendants must provide evidence of violations beyond constitutional behavior and the order must have an expiration date instead of being terminated when the department in question shows improvement.

The decision reflects President Trump and Sessions’ belief that law enforcement agencies are unjustly hamstrung by civil rights lawyers and ‘political correctness.’

  The Hill

In the courts...

A federal appellate court panel on Friday ordered Robert Mueller as well as attorneys trying to knock the special counsel out of his job to file new legal briefs that explain how this week’s shake-up atop the Justice Department could influence their case.

In a one-paragraph order, the three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit told Mueller and lawyers for a former aide to Roger Stone that they have until Nov. 19 to turn in briefs that sift through Wednesday’s firing of Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the legal reaction it may have created.

[...]

The Whitaker-Sessions shake-up came up briefly Thursday during oral arguments in the D.C. Circuit courtroom as it considered the case between Mueller and Andrew Miller, the former Stone aide who is challenging the special counsel’s appointment on constitutional grounds.

There, Judge Karen Henderson said the judges would set aside Sessions’ departure for the hearing but likely would ask for supplemental briefing to address the legal issues tied to the handover from Rosenstein to Whitaker.

[...]

The court’s order came less than 24 hours later and instructed Mueller and Miller’s attorney to turn in briefs limited to 10 pages that address “what, if any, effect the November 7, 2018 designation of an acting Attorney General different from the official who appointed Special Counsel Mueller has on this case.”

  Politico

Preet Bharara, former US AG for the Southern District of New York,  and Anne Milgram, former New Jersey AG, discuss this "controversial" move on CAFE Insider.

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

The emperor