We're smack dab in the middle of a constitutional crisis as this point.

Let's look at what's happened over the last week (there are even more sub threads inside each one of these news bits, but I don't have time to go through them all) :

1) Mueller has written two letters to Barr, expressing his anger of his lies about the report. Turns out Barr did exactly what I said he was doing. Working as a cover up stooge for our wanna-be-dictator-president. A few people from Mueller's team also expressed outrage over what Barr did.

2) Last I checked, we're up to 700 former federal prosecutors, both Republican and Democrats, who signed a statement asserting that Mueller's conclusions alone would produce felony obstruction charges against Trump if he weren't in the White House.

3) Barr ignored his subpoena to appear before the House Judiciary Committee. Because of this The Judiciary Committee just voted to hold Barr in contempt.

4) The Department of Justice has also ignored a subpoena to provide the un-redacted version of Mueller's work. Trump now claiming executive privilege over the entire report and any associated documents.

5) The White House has ordered their former counsel Donald McGahn not to comply with his subpoena.

6) In a stunning move, the Republican Senate Intelligence Committee has subpoenaed Trump Junior. We know he lied about the Trump Tower meeting for some time, lying to Congress the last time he was questioned. Cohen testified that Junior, at the direction of Trump senior, met at least 10 times to discuss Trump Tower Moscow, during the election. Something they all lied about. Junior's world is about to get considerably shittier. About time...

7) Trump is suing Deutsche bank in order to block subpoenas issued by The House.

8) Mnuchin said he would not turn over the President's tax returns. Ignoring federal law.

(On a side note, and not surprisingly Trump spoke with Putin about a week ago, tweeting about his conversation with Putin and how they discussed the "Russian Hoax." So our president still stands eagerly beside Putin and thumbs his nose at our country and our intelligence agencies.)

Does this sound like an innocent person to you?  A man who first proclaimed the Mueller report cleared him (just like his nitwit supporters celebrated) but now is doing everything he possibly can to stop the report from being reviewed in its pre-redacted form.

As I said, this is a full blown constitutional crisis in my opinion. This is serious and everything this country stands for is in grave danger because of this group of lawless criminals. Trump and his gang are acting as authoritarians, dismissing all checks/balances and violating the principles this country was founded on. The executive branch is not above the other branches of government, period.

People who believe(d) the Mueller report not only cleared Trump, but ended this saga are spectacular in their naivete or willful ignorance. All hell is breaking loose right now and it's only going to accelerate towards what I'm guessing is an explosive and frankly frightening ending.

The Mueller Report Should Shock Our Conscience

I’ve finished reading the entire Mueller report, and I must confess that even as a longtime, quite open critic of Donald Trump, I was surprised at the sheer scope, scale, and brazenness of the lies, falsehoods, and misdirections detailed by the Special Counsel’s Office. We’ve become accustomed to Trump making up his own facts on matters great and small, but to see the extent to which his virus infected his entire political operation is sobering. And the idea that anyone is treating this report as “win” for Trump, given the sheer extent of deceptions exposed (among other things), demonstrates that the bar for his conduct has sunk so low that anything other than outright criminality is too often brushed aside as relatively meaningless.

If I were to list all the important lies in the report, I’d be reproducing much of the report itself. So let’s focus on the most important elements. We already knew that Michael Flynn lied about his communications with Russia, George Papadopolous lied about his contacts with a person he believed to be connected to Russia, Roger Stone lied about his attempts to obtain information from WikiLeaks, Michael Cohen lied about Trump’s continued efforts to negotiate a deal with Trump Tower Moscow, and that Trump had repeatedly misled the American people about those same dealings.

We had previously known that Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman, had lied about his contacts with Konstantin Kilimnik, a person the FBI has assessed as having contacts with Russian intelligence. But now we know the significance of those lies. They included covering up the ongoing transmission of internal Trump polling data to Ukrainians and a Russian oligarch, covering up communications about a proposed Ukrainian “peace plan” that would entail granting Russia a “backdoor” means for Russia to control eastern Ukraine. Moreover, because Manafort deleted messages and sometimes used “encryption applications” when he sent messages, we may never know the full extent of his communications — or his lies.

When asked about the Trump team’s contacts with Russia, key members of his campaign staff and administration responded with blatantly false statements. These statements may not have been deliberate (they could have believed internal lies and repeated them innocently), but they were nevertheless completely and totally wrong. Hope Hicks said, “It never happened. There was no communication between the campaign and any foreign entity during the campaign.” When asked about any “contact or coordination” between the campaign and Russia, Reince Priebus said, “Even this question is insane. Of course we didn’t interface with the Russians.”

The campaign did, indeed, interface with the Russians — including in Trump Tower, when Donald Jr., Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner met with a Russian lawyer in the explicit hope of gaining dirt on Hillary Clinton.

Moreover, as the Russian investigation continued, the lies multiplied. One of the most banal and petty came from Sarah Sanders, who simply made up claims to help justify Trump’s termination of James Comey:

After FBI Director James Comey was fired, Sarah Sanders told reporters "countless members of the FBI" didn't support Comey and has lost confidence in him.

She later told Mueller's team the remarks were "a slip of the tongue." https://t.co/JB5cvZpAge pic.twitter.com/vC2VpGkbD7

— NPR Politics (@nprpolitics) April 18, 2019

Trump himself of course got in the act. He famously edited Donald Jr.’s draft statement disclosing his Trump Tower meeting to disguise his real purpose, and — even more significantly — tried to order Don McGahn to lie to the public about McGahn’s claims that Trump had directed him to fire Robert Mueller:

Mueller: After telling McGahn to get the special counsel fired, Trump told McGahn to deny reports that he had done so.

McGahn also told Mueller that Trump scolded him for taking notes, saying, "Lawyers don't take notes. I never had a lawyer who took notes." pic.twitter.com/4cdVfcm0ik

— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) April 18, 2019

These lies have multiple consequences. First and most obviously, they demonstrate that the president’s word simply can’t be trusted. Yes, I know that there are readers who will immediately respond that “we already knew that” or that his dishonesty is already “priced in.” But don’t forget — as recently as last year, 76 percent of Republicans still believed that Trump told the truth “all or most of the time.” I personally know many people who believe that Trump’s ability to “tell it like it is” is one of his chief appeals.

Second, the extent of the lying across the Trump team shows that Trump’s lies can’t be contained to Trump. Even honest people who believe and repeat Trump’s words or the words of key members of his team can find themselves deceiving the public. Those who resist Trump’s efforts to deceive can find themselves overruled and publicly shamed. It was to Donald Jr.’s credit that his instinct — after news of the Trump Tower meeting started to leak — was to be transparent. It is Trump’s shame that he forced his own son to put out a misleading statement instead.

Third, the lies help demonstrate why the underlying investigation was so very necessary. When our intelligence agencies are aware of Russian efforts to interfere in the election and tilt it toward Trump, they know Trump officials are in contact with Russians, and they know that Trump officials are lying about those contacts, then it makes cries of “witch hunt” sound hollow indeed — especially when the actual results of the investigation demonstrate that the special counsel declined to prosecute multiple individuals who had Russian contacts, including members of Trump’s own family.

I’m old enough to remember the closing days of the 1996 campaign, when the Clinton administration was already beset by an avalanche of scandals. Bob Dole looked into the cameras and asked a pointed question — “Where is the outrage?” The same question applies today, but to a different audience. The lies are simply too much to bear. No Republican should tolerate such dishonesty.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/t … onscience/

(Don't expect an answer)

They'll show back up once a Democrat is elected and their base won't even bat an eye.

Only one of those is an option I'd imagine...

I was a Trump transition staffer, and I’ve seen enough. It’s time for impeachment.

Let’s start at the end of this story. This weekend, I read Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report twice, and realized that enough was enough—I needed to do something. I’ve worked on every Republican presidential transition team for the past 10 years and recently served as counsel to the Republican-led House Financial Services Committee. My permanent job is as a law professor at the George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School, which is not political, but where my colleagues have held many prime spots in Republican administrations.

If you think calling for the impeachment of a sitting Republican president would constitute career suicide for someone like me, you may end up being right. But I did exactly that this weekend, tweeting that it’s time to begin impeachment proceedings.

Let’s go back to the beginning. In August 2016, I interviewed to join the pre-transition team of Donald Trump. Since 2012, every presidential election stands up a pre-transition team for both candidates, so that the real transition will have had a six-month head start when the election is decided. I participated in a similar effort for Mitt Romney, and despite our defeat, it was a thrilling and rewarding experience. I walked into a conference room at Jones Day that Don McGahn had graciously arranged to lend to the folks interviewing for the transition team.

The question I feared inevitably opened the interview: “How do you feel about Donald Trump?” I could not honestly say I admired him. While working on Senator Marco Rubio’s primary campaign, I had watched Trump throw schoolyard nicknames at him. I gave the only honest answer I could: “I admire the advisers he’s chosen, like Larry Kudlow and David Malpass, and I admire his choice of VP.” That did the trick. I got the impression they’d heard that one before. I was one of the first 16 members of Trump’s transition team, as deputy director of economic policy.

In time, my work for the transition became awkward. I disagreed with Trump’s rhetoric on immigration and trade. I also had strong concerns about his policies in my area of financial regulation. The hostility to Russian sanctions from the policy team, particularly from those members picked by Paul Manafort, was even more unsettling.

I wasn’t very good at hiding my distaste. We parted ways in October amicably; I wasn’t the right fit. I wished many of my friends who worked on the transition well, and I respected their decision to stay on after Trump won. A few of them even arranged offers for policy jobs in the White House, which I nearly accepted but ultimately turned down, as I knew I’d be no better fit there than I had been on the transition.

I never considered joining the Never Trump Republican efforts. Their criticisms of President Trump’s lack of character and unfitness for office were spot-on, of course, but they didn’t seem very pragmatic. There was no avoiding the fact that he’d won, and like many others, I felt the focus should be on guiding his policy decisions in a constructive direction. The man whom I most admire in that regard is McGahn, Trump’s first White House counsel, who guided the president toward some amazing nominees for regulatory agencies and the judiciary.

I wanted to share my experience transitioning from Trump team member to pragmatist about Trump to advocate for his impeachment, because I think many other Republicans are starting a similar transition. Politics is a team sport, and if you actively work within a political party, there is some expectation that you will follow orders and rally behind the leader, even when you disagree. There is a point, though, at which that expectation turns from a mix of loyalty and pragmatism into something more sinister, a blind devotion that serves to enable criminal conduct.

The Mueller report was that tipping point for me, and it should be for Republican and independent voters, and for Republicans in Congress. In the face of a Department of Justice policy that prohibited him from indicting a sitting president, Mueller drafted what any reasonable reader would see as a referral to Congress to commence impeachment hearings.

Depending on how you count, roughly a dozen separate instances of obstruction of justice are contained in the Mueller report. The president dangled pardons in front of witnesses to encourage them to lie to the special counsel, and directly ordered people to lie to throw the special counsel off the scent.

This elaborate pattern of obstruction may have successfully impeded the Mueller investigation from uncovering a conspiracy to commit more serious crimes. At a minimum, there’s enough here to get the impeachment process started. In impeachment proceedings, the House serves as a sort of grand jury and the Senate conducts the trial. There is enough in the Mueller report to commence the Constitution’s version of a grand-jury investigation in the form of impeachment proceedings.

The Founders knew that impeachment would be, in part, a political exercise. They decided that the legislative branch would operate as the best check on the president by channeling the people’s will. Congress has an opportunity to shape that public sentiment with the hearings ahead. As sentiments shift, more and more Republicans in Congress will feel emboldened to stand up to the president. The nation has been through this drama before, with more than a year of hearings in the Richard Nixon scandal, which ultimately forced his resignation.

Republicans who stand up to Trump today may face some friendly fire. Today’s Republican electorate seems spellbound by the sound bites of Twitter and cable news, for which Trump is a born wizard. Yet, in time, we can help rebuild the Republican Party, enabling it to rise from the ashes of the post-Trump apocalypse into a party with renewed commitment to principles of liberty, opportunity, and the rule of law.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archi … nt/587785/