United States Congress 5: Still Looking for a Spine

[fraurosena]

You have to wonder what on earth happened. What do they have on him to make him do a complete and utter about-face? Will we ever find out?

 

[Audrey2]

13 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

You have to wonder what on earth happened. What do they have on him to make him do a complete and utter about-face? Will we ever find out?

 

Three words- The magic R. 

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[fraurosena]

46 minutes ago, Audrey2 said:

Three words- The magic R. 

That can't be it though. He had that R behind his name 19 years ago too. He had that R behind his name last year, when he spoke out against the presidunce. And now he's completely and utterly gone full-on BT. So what happened between then and now? What is coercing him?

 

[Audrey2]

2 hours ago, fraurosena said:

That can't be it though. He had that R behind his name 19 years ago too. He had that R behind his name last year, when he spoke out against the presidunce. And now he's completely and utterly gone full-on BT. So what happened between then and now? What is coercing him?

 

I should have been clearer...this President has the magic R. Clinton didn't. No Republican president has ever done anything wrong. Every Democrat has been criminally corrupt. To say different is fake news. - The truth according to Lindsay Graham. 

*Changes to magic party happened after the Civil Rights Act

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[formergothardite]

Not even the Fox news lady seems to be buying what he is selling. 

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[AmazonGrace]

Cillizza on why Duncan is full of shit. Sure it looks like his wife misused campaign funds along with him but he was totally cool with it until charged 

 

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Sasse has been grandstanding  on Cspan before 

 

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[Howl]

Moved this post over the Midterms! 

[47of74]

Senator Joni McCutyernutzoff Ernst is getting a divorce

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Iowa Senator Joni Ernst and her husband Gail are getting a divorce, according to a statement released from the senator's office Monday evening.

"Senator Ernst and her husband, Gail, are in the process of divorcing. They remain committed to their children and family, and ask for respect for their privacy during this difficult time."

Maybe she figures that if she leaves her husband Agent Orange will leave his wife and they can get together then? 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[Cartmann99]

3 hours ago, 47of74 said:

Senator Joni McCutyernutzoff Ernst is getting a divorce

Maybe she figures that if she leaves her husband Agent Orange will leave his wife and they can get together then? 

Uh-oh! Joni's getting out her Barry White CDs and lighting candles!

 

[AnywhereButHere]

7 hours ago, 47of74 said:

Senator Joni McCutyernutzoff Ernst is getting a divorce

Maybe she figures that if she leaves her husband Agent Orange will leave his wife and they can get together then? 

We’ll know she’s on the hunt when she brings out the cammo lingerie. Or is that just everyday wear for her? 

[fraurosena]

Nunes went to London to find dirt on Christopher Steele, but MI5, MI6 and GCHQ didn't play along.

Devin Nunes’s Curious Trip to London

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Earlier this month, as all eyes were on the courtroom dramas unfolding in Virginia—where President Donald Trump’s campaign chairman was just convicted on bank- and tax-fraud charges—and in New York—where the president’s longtime personal lawyer pleaded guilty to campaign-finance violations and implicated Trump in a crime—the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee was in London, seeking out new information about the former British intelligence officer and Trump-Russia dossier author Christopher Steele.

According to two people familiar with his trip across the pond who requested anonymity to discuss the chairman’s travels, Devin Nunes, a California Republican, was investigating, among other things, Steele’s own service record and whether British authorities had known about his repeated contact with a U.S. Justice Department official named Bruce Ohr. To that end, Nunes requested meetings with the heads of three different British agencies—MI5, MI6, and the Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ. (Steele was an MI6 agent until a decade ago, and GCHQ, the United Kingdom’s equivalent of the National Security Agency, was the first foreign-intelligence agency to pick up contacts between Trump associates and Russian agents in 2015, according to The Guardian.)

A U.K. security official, speaking on background, said “it is normal for U.K. intelligence agencies to have meetings with the chairman and members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.” But those meetings did not pan out—Nunes came away meeting only with the U.K.’s deputy national-security adviser, Madeleine Alessandri. The people familiar with his trip told me that officials at MI6, MI5, and GCHQ were wary of entertaining Nunes out of fear that he was “trying to stir up a controversy.” Spokespeople for Alessandri and Nunes did not return requests for comment, and neither did the press offices for MI5 and MI6. GCHQ declined to comment.

Steele, who authored a collection of memos sourced to Kremlin and campaign insiders alleging a conspiracy between Trump’s campaign and Moscow to win the 2016 election, has been a fixation for Nunes ever since the document was published slightly more than two weeks before Trump’s inauguration. Last summer, two of Nunes’s staffers, Kash Patel and Doug Presley, traveled to London—without the knowledge of the U.S. Embassy or British government—in search of Steele, whose lawyer denied the staffers access to his client. This time, Nunes sought a work-around, I’m told. His trip to London at such a precarious moment for the president, and the intelligence agencies’ decision to decline him a meeting, is emblematic of the political island on which Nunes finds himself—along with a handful of other Trump allies in Congress and the media—as he continues his search for wrongdoing by the Justice Department.

Nunes, who served on Trump’s transition team, has been conducting a parallel investigation into the FBI and the DOJ since March 2017, when he first began examining whether top officials improperly “unmasked” and then leaked the names of Trump associates who surfaced in intelligence reports during the transition period. The unmasking scandal lost steam as Nunes shifted his attention to alleged surveillance abuses by the DOJ—a probe that Democrats said they did not approve and had no control over, but to which a group of House Republicans were privy. Earlier this year, Nunes alleged in a memo that the FBI had used intelligence passed to them by Steele to bolster the bureau’s application for a surveillance warrant targeting an early Trump campaign adviser, Carter Page, while failing to disclose “the political origins” of Steele’s research to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. A copy of the FBI’s warrant application, however, directly contradicts that claim.

Ohr, a high-level Justice Department official whose wife works for the opposition-research firm Fusion GPS—the firm that hired Steele to research Trump’s Russia ties—has landed on Nunes’s radar, too. In an interview with the Fox News host Sean Hannity last month, Nunes said that Ohr “is at the heart” of the FBI’s alleged misconduct “because his wife was working for Fusion GPS.” There is no evidence that his wife’s work influenced his own, however. Ohr, who is scheduled to testify before the House Oversight and Judiciary Committee panels on Tuesday, has known Steele since 2007, when Steele was still in MI6, according to The New York Times. With the FBI’s knowledge and approval, Ohr met with Steele repeatedly from late 2016 to early 2017 to debrief him on any new intelligence he may have obtained about the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. Steele, a 20-year MI6 veteran whose work focused mostly on Russia, has worked with the FBI on and off for years, offering valuable intelligence on Russian organized crime.

Still, both Steele and Ohr—along with former FBI high-ranking officials such as Peter Strzok, Andrew McCabe, and James Comey, all of whom have been fired in the past year—have been targeted by the president and his allies, who have characterized the Russia investigation currently being led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller as a “witch hunt” that was launched because of the dossier. As the Times has documented, however, it was a young Trump campaign aide’s drunken disclosure that the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton that led the FBI to investigate the campaign’s Russia ties. There is much to investigate in London, including the trail left there by the mysterious Maltese professor Joseph Mifsud who told George Papadopoulos about the Russian dirt to begin with. Nunes, however, continues to focus his attention on the investigators themselves—all in the name, many argue, of protecting the president at all costs.

 

[47of74]

5 hours ago, AnywhereButHere said:

We’ll know she’s on the hunt when she brings out the cammo lingerie. Or is that just everyday wear for her? 

It's probably everyday wear for her.  Especially when she goes to the gun range to film more campaign ads about targeting people who she doesn't lile.

[Cartmann99]

5 hours ago, 47of74 said:

It's probably everyday wear for her.  Especially when she goes to the gun range to film more campaign ads about targeting people who she doesn't lile.

Does she take bacon with her to the gun range?

Rufus, I'm begging you to help us defeat Lyin' Ted in November.

[AmazonGrace]

 

[fraurosena]

Good op-ed by Dana Milbank:

Rest in peace, Lindsey Graham

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We lost two mavericks within a week.

On Saturday, we lost the legendary John McCain.

On Tuesday, we lost his loyal sidekick, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham.

Graham remains alive and well, but after serving for two decades as Robin to McCain’s Batman, Graham buried whatever remained of his own reputation for iconoclasm even before his partner’s funeral.

On Tuesday, Graham took a seat on the couch of “Fox & Friends,” President Trump’s favorite show, and sealed his transition from apostate to Trump apparatchik.

“Word of caution to the public,” he said. “A lot of people try to convict President Trump. Don’t be so fast. I have seen no evidence of collusion after two years.” Having echoed Trump’s no-collusion line (as if that were the lone issue), Graham, a former military lawyer, picked up Trump’s attack on the justice system: “Plenty of corruption at the Department of Justice and the FBI. Should be stunning. Not one Democrat seems to care.”

From there, the South Carolina Republican echoed all of Trump’s attacks against the Russia investigation: “They had a bias against Trump for [Hillary] Clinton . . . They gave a politically corrupt document to get a warrant . . . Christopher Steele was on the payroll of the Democratic Party.” He parroted Trump’s line that Russian President Vladimir Putin tried to help Clinton, not Trump: “Russia was involved in our election . . . in terms of developing this dossier.”

Incredibly, Graham even joined the “lock her up” movement. “No American would get the same treatment she did. If you were charged or suspected of this kind of misconduct, you would be in jail now.”

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, could not have said it better.

This came after Graham abandoned his previous support of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, whom Trump wants to fire as a likely precursor to ending special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s Russia investigation. A year ago, Graham declared himself “100 percent behind Jeff Sessions” and vowed “holy hell” if Sessions was fired.

But now, Graham says “we need an attorney general that can work with the president.” This week, he even alleged on CBS News that Sessions “blindsided” Trump with “zero-tolerance” family separations — as though that policy wasn’t a Trump signature.

Graham previously described Trump as a “jackass” and “unfit for office.” He began his pivot after the election, but intensified his embrace of Trump as illness kept McCain from Washington. “If you don’t like me working with President Trump to make the world a better place, I don’t give a shit,” he said on CNN in June. This week, he demurred on renaming a Senate building for his friend, and though displeased by Trump’s posthumous insults of McCain, he said it is the president’s right “to feel any way he’d like.”

No longer protected by McCain, he seems to have lost that famous McCain courage. It is difficult to avoid the impression that, since McCain’s illness, he has found a new patron. “I never did anything politically of consequence without John,” Graham acknowledged thisweek. “I mean all of the big stuff, campaign finance, climate change, Iraq, you name it. I was by John’s side. I was his wingman.”

Yet, now, he is serving as wingman to a president who takes the opposite view on each of those issues.

McCain’s years as a prisoner of war gave him a righteousness perhaps nobody can match. He never forgot that political opponents are not his enemies, and that there are things more important than winning elections. But perhaps Graham could show a little backbone? When CNN’s Dana Bash asked him to name new “wingmen or women,” Graham mentioned Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) — the fierce partisan who blew up Graham’s immigration deal, was patently dishonest about Trump’s “shithole countries” meeting and was dubbed the “Steve King of the Senate” by Graham for his anti-immigrant views, in reference to the ultraconservative Iowa representative.

Graham’s rationale for courting Trump? “ To be relevant.” But on the main policy Graham sought to influence — immigration — he got nothing. I asked Graham’s office for presidential actions attributable to Graham’s influence. The response listed items — Supreme Court appointments, the fight against Islamic State and increased defense spending — that were all Trump priorities independent of Graham.

It seems more likely Graham’s friendship with Trump has to do with Graham’s reelection in 2020. That’s understandable. Even McCain had to be delicate about Trump during a 2016 primary challenge. But what happened to cause-greater-than-self?

“I believe there is a little John McCain in all of us,” Graham said in his touching eulogy on the Senate floor. I saw a lot of McCain in the Graham I met on the Straight Talk Express two decades ago. I saw it again earlier this year when Graham lamented Trump’s sudden shift that killed the immigration compromise. “I don’t know where that guy went,” Graham said of the Trump who, briefly, offered to compromise. “I want him back.”

I don’t know where that Graham went. I want him back.

 

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[AmazonGrace]

The Congress is ready to hold the movie industry accountable: 

 

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Lindsey Graham, Still Looking for a Spine

 

[fraurosena]

3 hours ago, AmazonGrace said:

The Congress is ready to hold the movie industry accountable: 

 

Rubio was completely owned by this response.