If It Walks Like A Criminal Conspiracy & Quacks Like A Criminal Conspiracy . . .

RAW STORY

The notion of what constitutes criminal conspiracy has taken a severe beating as Donald Trump and his sycophancy keep trying to move the Russia scandal goalposts.  First they said there were no meetings between the Trump campaign and Russians.  Then they acknowledged there were meetings, but they were the innocent wanderings of naïve upstarts.  Then they said everybody knew about the meetings, so what's the big deal?  And most recently, they said there couldn't have been a conspiracy because what Trump really wanted was to make a bundle from the Trump Tower Moscow project -- never mind that he kept saying he had nothing to do with Russia, no deals -- and the tower didn't get built. 

So there. 

Marcy Wheeler, whose preeminence as a Russia scandal sleuth with an eye for detail and big-picture logic is landing her much-deserved cable news and op-ed exposure, got right to the point in parting the mists obscuring whether Trump and his Merry Band of Colluders engaged in a criminal conspiracy. 

Writing at emptywheel, Marcy lays it out in language plain enough for even Melania to understand:

If you sign up for a deal and take steps to make good on it — as Don Jr. did on June 9, 2016 and Paul Manafort appears to have done on August 2, 2016 and Mike Flynn appears to have done, on Trump's behalf, on December 29, 2016 -- then it doesn't matter if the partner to that deal fucks you over later in the process.  And, after all, the Russians did continue to supply Trump with a steady supply of dirt on Hillary Clinton all through the election.  They got Trump elected, or at least did what they could to help, even if that payoff wasn’t the one Trump was most interested in.

This is not to say that Special Counsel Robert Mueller will make that case.  Or the Democrat-led House investigations will reach that conclusion.  Because no matter what the outcome is, Vladimir Putin gets a win-win and America gets a loss-loss. 

More Marcy:

Either Trump succeeded in compromising America's rule of law in an effort to squelch any investigation into what happened, robbing the United States of the claim to idealism that so irks the master kleptocrat, or Trump would spend his Administration desperately trying to find a way out, all the while Putin connives Trump into dismantling the alliances that keep Russia in check. . . .  

Putin doesn’t care if Trump benefits from all this -- though he is happy to keep toying with Trump like a cat plays before he eviscerates his mouse.  He cares about whether he and his cronies win.  And there are multiple ways for him to get a win out of this, whether or not Trump manages to eke out any kind of real payoff past the election.  

If there has been a payoff for Trump, I fail to understand what that could be beyond filling a few more rooms at his branded hotels. 

Trump's much-vaunted "base" has become an inert object, kind of like a doorstop, while his lip lock with congressional Republicans is illusory.  This is because his only legislative accomplishment over the last two years was a massive tax cut package for the rich and corporations that was an albatross around the GOP elephant's neck in the 2018 midterm elections, and sufficient numbers of congressional Republicans will cease being his best friends as soon as the big legal pot in which he he has plopped himself reaches a boil and they start getting burned. 

And that reelection bid hinges on Trump doubling down on his many failures by magically turning them into victories. 

Still more Marcy:

There is no Trump Tower in Moscow. But there never had to be.  All that was needed was the promise of a ridiculously lucrative narcissism-stroking deal for the Trump family to agree to shit that would hurt this country.  And all the evidence suggests that they did, and continue to do so. 

Mueller's marching orders from the Justice Department were to investigate "any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump," while the special counsel's so-called speaking indictments have laid bare "an elaborate Russian operation that injected chaos into a U.S. presidential election and tried to help Trump win the White House" and news media stories have revealed over 100 contacts between the campaign and Russians. 

And then there is this: The public record is awash with examples of Trump, his family and businesses committing a staggering array of campaign finance felonies, tax fraud, bank fraud insurance fraud, and suborning perjury.  

Trump can no more resist the lure of the dark side than a meal of Chicken McNuggets washed down with a Diet Coke, be it making millions from a fraudulent telemarketing scheme, a phony university or filling his campaign coffers with contributions from Chinese businessmen with ties to Beijing intelligence agencies who bought access to him at Mar-a-Lago through a South Florida "day spa" madam.  And we're just beginning to scratch the seamy surface of Rub and Tug-Gate, if you will allow me the honor of being the first to call Trump's umpteenth scandal that.   

There is no way in Hell -- and Trump's presidency has been just that as we watch him destroy America -- that a man who has evil where his heart should be did not conspire criminally with Russia.  And continues to do so. 

Click HERE for a comprehensive timeline of the Russia scandal

and related developments.

Richard Codor's Cartoon du Jour

MORE HERE.

Pardon The Interruption, But American Democracy Is Dying. Will Anyone Notice?

AXIOS

If it wasn't so self destructive, the tendency of many Americans to walk around with their heads up their asses would, beyond the proctological discomfort, have a certain naïve
charm to it.  We're still the greatest country on God's green earth, right?  

A certain amount of un-reality is un-derstandable when your world doesn't extend beyond the comfy confines of your Barcalounger and your TV remote finger falls on Fox News, or you skip the news altogether because what those brainy kids are saying on "The Big Bang Theory" is all you really need to know.   

Now that I have your attention, you kind of know where my un-reconstructed self is going. 

American democracy is dying a painful death, but because its slow-motion passing won't be broadcast on prime time TV, let alone Fox News, the demagogues who are hastening its demise -- Mitch McConnell, Rupert Murdoch and, of course, Donald Trump leap to mind -- continue to work their dark arts. 

Senate Majority Leader McConnell, who will stay on the president's good side as long as his own power grubbing isn't seriously in jeopardy, won't allow a sweeping package of House-approved proposals to root out political corruption and streamline elections to come to a vote "because I decide what we vote on." 

Fox News owner Murdoch has created a news channel that for all intents and purposes is a U.S. version of Soviet-era state TV, its commentators de facto policy advisers and apologists for Trump, while Rupert himself killed a story about Trump's affair with a porn star just before the 2016 election. 

Then there is Trump, whose (small) hands are un-questionably all over the Russia scandal, which the punditocracy is belatedly finding to be far and away the greatest scandal in American history, yet he remains so firmly entrenched well into his nightmare presidency that he may run for reelection. 

Democracy is indeed "the worst form of government, except for all the others," as Winston Churchill is reputed to have said.   (He didn't, but nobody knows who the guy who did is.)   

It's no coincidence that McConnell and Murdoch are dyed-in-the-wool Republican conservatives and Trump claims to be one because that self-identification was his -- and Vladimir Putin's -- best shot at him becoming president, but American democracy also is chockablock with systemic failures that Democrats have enabled, as well.  (Don't be dopey, libruls.  Democrats have had just as much to do as Republicans with the yawning disparity in income and cementing the monopoly power of corporations in the era of the information economy.) 

Speaking of systemic failures, there's Paul Manafort, a man for whom the word "evil" is grossly un-adequate. 

Democracy was very much in action last August when a single Trump-loving juror refused to join 11 other jurors in convicting Trump's former campaign manager of 10 banking and fraud charges that would land mere mortals like you and I in the slammer for a long time. And again last week when a white-bread federal judge, who hides his prejudices behind a veneer of curmudgeonliness, has the God-playing right to ignore stiff sentencing guidelines and metaphorically wrist slaps Manafort for the charges on which he was found guilty. 

Nicholas Kristof, the crusading longtime New York Times columnist, un-convincingly wrote that American democracy was too resilient for Trump to destroy. Sadly, his applause for the red, white and blue was the sound of one hand clapping. 

Kristof pivoted off the congressional testimony of former Trump consigliere Michael Cohen, who in effect warned of a coup in testifying that "I fear that if he loses the election in 2020 that there will never be a peaceful transition of power," in writing that could never happen. 

"We are seeing a backlash to Trumpian authoritarianism that may ultimately strengthen the rule of law, as happened after Watergate," the hopelessly hopeful Kristof opined.   Given that Trump remains wildly popular among an un-healthy minority of voters, that is so much wishful thinking, and Cohen's warning of a coup -- or an insurrection by Trumpkins, as some others have warned -- would be beyond the pale in an earlier time but today are not to be dismissed. 

While I'm piling on, there is no better example of democracy's death rattle than the demise of the American Dream, even if it was a cliched concept endlessly reworked by Hollywood and Madison Avenue.   

America's middle class is suffocating, we have turned our backs on newcomers and racism is ascendant, the infrastructure is crumbling, that income gap grows and grows, the health-care system is a money-gouging abomination, and the 9/11 attacks -- our last great crisis before the ascendancy of Trump -- was an opportunity not to reaffirm our core values but to undermine them. 

As I have written, Americans always have had an un-justifiably lofty view of their society, which is why they are able to look down their upturned noses as Tutsis beat up on Hutus in Rwanda, Serbs beat up on Croats in the Balkans, Shiites beat up on Sunnis in Iraq and Buddhists beat up on Muslims in Myanmar, to name just a few of the blood-soaked conflicts in recent history.   

We believe we're beyond such tribalism, and indeed the Founding Fathers were determined to build a democracy where the individual was more important than the tribe. 

That failed spectacularly in a little dustup called the Civil War, and the big message underlying the election of Trump is that it is still failing as democracy slowly and perhaps un-extricably slides into dysfunction one ignored principle and one broken promise at a time. 

As much as Trump deserves our animus, he did not make America what it has become. America made Trump because of what it has become.  Pardon the interruption, but that is un-freaking-deniable.    

Richard Codor's Cartoon du Jour

MORE HERE.

Manafort Catches A Big Break, But Still May Spend The Rest Of His Life In Prison

BILL HENNESSY / REUTERS

One shocking sentencing down and one sentencing to go in Paul Manafort's journey toward possibly spending the rest of his life in a federal penitentiary.  Unless Donald Trump pardons his former campaign chairman, in which case it may be a state prison. 

U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis sentenced Manafort to a disgracefully light 47 months in prison after reminding the Alexandria, Virginia courtroom that he was not being sentenced "for having anything to do with colluding with the Russian government" and otherwise "has led an otherwise blameless life."  

I will have plenty of company in arguing that the sentence was outrageously lenient since federal sentencing guidelines call for 19½ to 24 years for the five counts of tax fraud, two counts of bank fraud and one count of failing to disclose a foreign bank account for which a jury returned guilty verdicts against Manafort following a trial in August.   

But the reliably outspoken Ellis, whom The New York Times has described as "A Caesar in his own Rome," called those guidelines "excessive" during the Thursday afternoon sentencing and said the sentence he imposed of just shy of four years was more in line with those of others who had been convicted on similar crimes.     

Manafort also will receive credit for time served -- the nine months since his bail was revoked in June because of witness tampering charges.   

The jury had been unable to reach a verdict on 10 other counts because one juror, who identified herself as a strong Trump supporter, refused to join the other 11 jurors to convict Manafort on 10 additional foreign banking and bank fraud charges.  Prosecutors later dropped those charges. 

That and Ellis's leniency have to be considered a reprieve of a sort for Manafort and a victory for Trump in the nightmarish and deeply distorted world in which he presumes to be president and we struggle.  As well as a timely if deeply discomfiting reminder that the very justice system that he has repeatedly tried to subvert has blatant inequities. 

Manafort's second sentencing is scheduled for March 13.  

His by-now famous $15,000 silk-lined ostrich leather bomber jacket long gone, a wheelchair-bound Manafort was dressed in a green prison jumpsuit with "ALEXANDRIA INMATE" in white block letters on the back as he addressed the court prior to being sentenced. 

The inscrutable Manafort did not apologize for his crimes, but asked Ellis "for compassion," adding that "I know it was my conduct that brought me here." 

"The last two years have been the most difficult years for my family and I," he said from his wheelchair.  "To say that I feel humiliated and ashamed would be a gross understatement." 

Evidence presented at Manafort's trial showed that he hid $55 million in income from his work for pro-Vladimir Putin political parties in Ukraine in more than 30 overseas bank accounts and lied to U.S. banks to obtain millions more in loans to finance his profligate spending on multiple homes and a lavish jet set lifestyle.  

Special Counsel Robert Mueller had charged Manafort and and his longtime deputy Rick Gates in October 2017.  They were the first indictments in what has become a 22-month investigation into what is now widely acknowledged to be the greatest political scandal in U.S. history. 

After securing Gates' cooperation as a witness against Manafort, Mueller's prosecutors split his case in two, putting the more clear-cut financial crimes indictment in Northern Virginia federal court.   

In September, on the eve of Manafort's other trial in District of Columbia federal court, he agreed to cooperate.  This seemed to be a huge score for Mueller because the longtime lobbyist and political operative gone bad was considered the key to unlocking the collusion puzzle as Trump's primary conduit to Russia.   

In a plea deal approved by District Judge Amy Berman Jackson, Manafort pleaded guilty to charges of conspiracy against the U.S. and conspiracy to obstruct justice and forfeited $26 million in personal assets in return for a prison sentence of no more than 10 years, but he welshed on the deal. 

Manafort continued to lie to prosecutors, possibly because he was angling for a presidential pardon, while one of his lawyers provided backchannel reports to Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani about the scope of the questions prosecutors were asking him to aid in the president's defense against what, despite 37 indictments and 199 criminal charges involving a rogues gallery of perps, Trump still ridiculously calls a "witch hunt."

Jackson will be required to follow the plea-agreed 10-year maximum in her March 13 sentencing.  Prosecutors did not recommend a specific punishment, but urged her to make sure Manafort never walks free again.   

She has indicated that she may impose the second sentence to run consecutively after the first sentence, which effectively means that Manafort -- who turns 70 on April 1 -- still is looking at the possibility of over 13 years in prison even with Ellis's considerably lighter than expected sentence.   

And just to stir in the inevitable element of irony that seems to shadow Russia scandal developments (the mother of them all being Trump ending up with Mueller because he fired James Comey), Manafort could be looking at even less prison time if he hadn't kept lying and royally pissed off Jackson.   

While Manafort's value as a cooperating witness who could provide prosecutors with an insider's account of links between Trump Tower and the Kremlin was not realized, there are contemporaneous accounts of his activities as an intermediary from Gates and likely others.  This includes Manafort's many interactions with Konstantin Kilimnik, a suspected GRU-trained spy and longtime associate.   

In one of the instances in which prosecutors said Manafort broke his plea agreement, he lied about a meeting with Kilimnik and Gates at an upscale Manhattan cigar bar on August 2, 2016 where he is believed to have shared with Kilimnik detailed campaign polling data to be used by Russian trolls in targeting voters through social media in the ongoing cyberesabotage of Hillary Clinton's campaign.  The men also discussed a so-called Ukrainian "peace plan," which was code for relief of crippling Obama administration-imposed Russia sanctions should Trump be elected.  

Meanwhile, I have believed that Trump, as unpredictably foolish as he can be, realizes that a pardon of Manafort would not be worth the heat he would take. 

Mueller and newly empowered House Democrats are bearing down on him through multiple investigations, his domestic and foreign agendas are tanking, and there are signs of panic among the Republican faithful as an increasing number of commentators wake up to the reality that Trump sold out America's interests to her greatest enemy. 

No matter.  The office of Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance is preparing state criminal charges against Manafort in an effort to ensure he still will face prison time even if he is pardoned for his federal crimes.  

The New York state charges would be based on millions of dollars of loans Manafort fraudulently received from two banks.  Those loans were also the subject of some of the counts in the federal indictment that led to his conviction after his August 2018 trial, but state prosecutors deferred their inquiry in order not to interfere with Mueller’s investigation.  

Click HERE for a comprehensive timeline of the Russia scandal

and related developments.

Richard Codor's Cartoon du Jour

MORE HERE.

Looking Under Trump's Rock At The Judiciary Committee's 'Undesirables List'

SALON

"We gave the supreme prize and ultimate compliment — leadership of the most powerful nation on earth — to a man who wouldn’t know the truth if it raced toward him with sirens blaring, ran over him, then backed up and did it again," writes Frank Bruni in The New York Times in one of the better op-ed eviscerations of Donald Trump in the days since the House Democratic leadership went on the offensive.    

"A man whose loyalties stand as firm as a strand of overcooked linguine," continues Bruni.  "Whose vanity makes Narcissus look like a mere pretender; and who will sacrifice whatever and whomever he must on the altar of his own spurious magnificence.  What he lacks in moral fiber he makes up for in gilt.  It sufficed to bring him his treasure and, for 72 years and counting, spare him his reckoning."   

The big question of course -- far and away the biggest since a comparatively rank amateur by the name of Richard Nixon faced his own reckoning over a third-rate burglary gone bad -- is whether it is indeed Trump's time in the barrel, to borrow Roger Stone's freighted phrase.  

The big answer is yes. 

That, unfortunately, does not translate into Trump purchasing a one-way ticket back to his Fifth Avenue penthouse in the sky anytime soon.  But it  -- and in particular the House Judiciary Committee's Undesirables List -- does take us closer to that moment when those Democrats commence impeachment proceedings. 

Remember when you were a kid and looked under a rock to see all the creepy crawlies running from the sunlight?   

That's the Undesirables List, a compendium of 81 individuals, entities and agencies who were served this week with requests for documents relevant to the committee's investigation into obstruction of justice, public corruption and other abuses of power by Trump, his associates and members of his administration. 

The list is a mind blower. 

Although there were a mere handful of names with which this Russia scandal hand was unfamiliar -- and I'm a guy who has been well aware longer than most people of the vastness of the crap and corruption arrayed around Trump like the icy asteroids in the Kuiper Belt  -- seeing them laid out still was mind blowing.  

Marcy Wheeler slices and dices the list over at emptywheel, and while her categorizations include a fair amount of overlap, that vastness thing grabs you by the throat. 

Here are the 12 categories and number of document requests:

Contacts With Russians (18) 

Trump-Putin Meetings (16) 

June 9, 2016 Meeting (7) 

Trump Tower Moscow (10) 

Sanctions Relief (14) 

Cambridge Analytica-Polling (12) 

Peter Smith Effort (4) 

Hush Payment/Catch-and-Kill (11) 

Corrupt Business Interests (22) 

Obstruction of Justice (14) 

Presidential Pardons (4) 

WikiLeaks Contacts (8) 

There are so many creepy crawlies running from the sunlight. 

Not surprisingly, Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner appears in seven of the 12 categories, while Michael Cohen appears in five, Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort and Erik Prince in four each, and Michael Flynn and Jeff Sessions in three each.  Ivanka Trump did not make the list.    

(Peter Smith, not exactly a household name, was a wealthy right-wing Republican opposition researcher who, 10 days before his apparent suicide, told the Wall Street Journal that he was working to find the mythic "missing" Hillary Clinton emails for Flynn, whom he said was working with Russian hackers.) 

Most intriguing of all the document requests, to me anyway, is Cambridge Analytica. 

These requests suggest that investigators are trying to connect the disgraced and defunct British company, which micro-targeted voters with data mined from social media, to Manafort, Trump's former campaign manager and a key intermediary between Trump Tower and the Kremlin.   

Cambridge used the data to build its so-called psychographic modeling techniques, which former CEO Alexander Nix called "our secret sauce" and underpinned its work for the campaign.  More intriguing still, the document requests sent to former Cambridge employees are limited to contacts with WikiLeaks. 

It is easy to read too much into the list no matter how you parse it.  For example, the appearance of longtime Trump executive assistant Rhona Graff doesn't necessarily mean she was a conspirator while the absence of Ivanka Trump certainly does not mean she isn't a conspirator. 

The danger is not reading enough into it.  And to forget that the House Intelligence Committee under Republican control concluded, after refusing to allow Democratic input, that there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, a temporary if pyrrhic victory for Trump even as the truth raced toward him with sirens blaring. 

The president's vow on Monday "to publicly cooperate" with the Judiciary Committee's document requests meant exactly the opposite, and less than 24 hours later he had walked that back after rebuffing another House committee seeking information on how the White House grants security clearances in the wake of reports that Trump demanded that Kushner receive a top-secret clearance over the objections of his intelligence chiefs and New York state regulators subpoenaed his insurance broker following testimony from Cohen that Trump had exaggerated his income.

Meanwhile, The New York Times reported on Wednesday that Trump or his trust signed 11 separate checks to lawyer-fixer Cohen, most of them for $35,000, who had made hush payments to prevent his sexual misconduct from being exposed before the 2016 presidential election.  Six were signed by Trump himself after he became president.  

While many of the Judiciary Committee document requests went to individuals and organizations who are indicating that they will cooperate and not the White House and government agencies, those requests will be fought tooth and nail, triggering months of subpoenas, hearings and court challenges. 

This is because the Undesirables List is nothing less than a roadmap to what's under that rock -- Trump's heart of darkness. 

Click HERE for a comprehensive timeline of the Russia scandal

and related developments. 

Richard Codor's Cartoon du Jour

MORE HERE.

America Is In Crisis & Repubs In Denial: The Dems Must Impeach Trump Now

THE CONSERVATIVE TREEHOUSE

There is an existential crisis gripping America.  It is the increasingly unhinged presidency of Donald Trump and the argy-bargy notion of the newly empowered Democratic congressional leadership of waiting for Special Counsel Robert Mueller's final report on the Russia scandal before beginning the long and vastly difficult process of impeaching Trump.  Republicans goose-stepping to Trump's side and sieg heiling him with reassurances that his presidency will lumber on although they know full well that he is a kook and a crook are taking that crisis even deeper into unexplored territory. 

Oversight and Accountability might as well be quaint villages on the Kansas prairie for Republicans, not their sworn duty.

Lapel-pin patriot John Cornyn slipped on his traitor's coat with great flourish on Saturday after Trump delivered a rambling, morally vacuous, hypocrisy and lie-filled two-hour diatribe at the Wingnut Woodstock --the annual Conservative Political Action Conference -- in which he said investigations into his criminality were "bullshit" and mocked onetime associates like Michael Cohen, for 12 years his consigliere, who have become cooperating witnesses.  

"We're not going to turn on our own and make the Democrats happy.  We don't see any benefit in fracturing, but we do see a lot to lose," said Cornyn, a senator from Texas, as he stood before a backdrop of propaganda-styled art declaring that Trump had been "chosen by God." 

This followed a week in which a contrite Cohen testified to just a few of his former boss's many lies (and some of his own), Trump held a foreshortened summit with Kim Jung Un in Vietnam for which he obviously was unprepared, a disaster compounded by his shameful about-face and betrayal of Otto Warmbier, and scruples-free son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner slipped away to Saudi Arabia where he is suspected of discussing U.S. help for a Saudi nuclear program that could be used to make nuclear weapons even as Trump was ostensibly trying to persuade Kim to scrap North Korea's nuclear program.   

Kushner, of course, is the guy who got a top-secret security clearance at Trump's insistence although his intelligence chiefs believe that Kushner is dangerously compromised because he is beholden to Saudi Arabia and other foreign governments with whom he has sought financial relief for his family's struggling real-estate empire.  

But what really brought me to my senses was the lemming-like capitulation of Republicans and their increasingly bizarre rationalizations for backing their kook-crook.   

Sayeth Rick Santorum: "The president doesn't tell the truth about a lot of things fairly consistently.  And so the fact that he's not telling the truth about Russia fairly consistently . . . why is that any different?  I mean, it's not like he's doing something out of character with the Russia investigation that he’s not doing in any other areas." 

In devising a strategy predicated to taking nibbles rather than a big bite in going after Trump, Democratic congressional leaders say they're holding off on initiating impeachment proceedings until Mueller sings because to do otherwise would roil the country and energize Republicans.  In the meantime, they'll keep the heat on the president through investigations into his multiple crimes, which they say is the most effective way to damage him. 

The Democratic strategy would seem to have merit even if the gratification that the onset of impeachment proceedings would bring for so many of us would remain on hold.   

That is, until you consider that:

Mueller may not complete his investigation and submit a final report to Attorney General William Barr anytime soon. 

Despite the evidence of Trump being in the Russia collusion loop, there is no assurance that the final Mueller report will reflect that. 

Nor is there any assurance that Barr will make the report public, let alone share it with Congress.  

Impeachment will roil the country and be a Republican call to arms no matter when proceedings are initiated. 

Leaving the heavy lifting to Mueller is a betrayal of voters who expected Democrats to act swiftly on impeachment. 

That betrayal is enormous because every day that Trump remains in office is another day that the country is being destroyed.

"Yes, we have unambiguous evidence that the president has committed a crime at this point, I think," says Representative Jerrold Nadler, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, which would get the impeachment ball rolling.  "Do we have unambiguous evidence he has done impeachable offenses?  We've got a ways to go yet." 

In private, Nadler would surely acknowledge that this is horse hockey, as Colonel Potter liked to say on M*A*S*H when confronted by the obvious gussied up as something else.  (And not that cross-dressing Corporal Klinger.) 

Beyond being a party to collusion, Trump has repeatedly sought to obstruct justice, which should be the primary article of impeachment, as well as undermine the Justice Department, intimidate witnesses, and perjure himself many times over.  Then there's that emoluments thing -- using the Oval Office as a profit center for the businesses he never bothered to divest himself from after Putin gifted him the presidency. 

House Intelligence Committee member Mike Quigley is only slightly less disingenuous than Nadler. 

"[Impeachment] should be the last thing on members' minds," he says.   "You have to be patient and you have to be practical.  You don't stop a criminal investigation when you have enough.  You stop when you have learned everything there is to be learned." 

Which could take years. 

Nadler also has said that he would not even consider initiating impeachment proceedings without "significant" Republican backing.  After the lock-step Republican condemnation of Michael Cohen last week and the likelihood of similar receptions for other Trump associates who have flipped when they testify, expect the next Ice Age to commence before that happens. 

Meanwhile, Tom Steyer, a billionaire who has dipped into his personal fortune to underwrite national advertising and town hall meetings in crusading for impeachment, tells it like it is: 

"There are only two questions left: How deep is the corruption and what do you want to do about it?" 

Exactly.

Click HERE for a comprehensive timeline of the Russia scandal

and related developments.

The Core Principle Of Republicans Has Become Fighting Against The Truth

PINTEREST

It is glaringly apparent in the wake of Michael Cohen's congressional testimony this week about the many crimes of Donald Trump that the core principle of Republicans is no longer tax cuts for the rich and crumbs for the poor.  It is fighting against the truth, which is to say that anyone -- from Special Counsel Robert Mueller to Cohen himself -- who dares question the ruthless actions of the man who has done so much to accelerate the corruption of this once proud party is to be relentlessly attacked. 

Sad. 

A lot of people ranging from Jeff Sessions and John Kelly to Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn have learned the hard way that if you fall into Trump's orbit you will be diminished and then burned.  Or perhaps end up in deep legal doo-doo.  Some Republicans surely understand this, and there are the modest beginnings of a revolt against the president within the party, but most are oblivious to a central fact of their lives: Once the GOP embraced Trump, his corruption became theirs. 

Not that the Democrats on the House Oversight and Reform Committee did a particularly great job of questioning Cohen.  They were content to draw out Trump's longtime consigliere on his prepared remarks rather than break new ground.   

But committee Republicans were pathetic.   

They did not dare contest the substance of Cohen's testimony because they would have dug an even deeper hole for their beleaguered leader.  So they attacked Cohen, asserting that he was merely a disgruntled employee who didn't get a White House job and is angling for a lucrative book deal.   

They impugned Cohen's character because they couldn't impugn the incriminating documents he produced, and they got especially huffy about his characterization of Trump as a racist, a subject of which interrogator-stunt man Mark Meadows and too many other Republicans are especially knowledgeable because they themselves more than qualify for that vile label.  Do I need to add that people voted for Trump precisely because he was a racist?.  

Sad. 

At one point, Cohen said that in all his years of groveling at Trump's feet he never once heard him "say anything in private that led me to believe that he loved our nation or wanted to make it better."   

It was a ginormous opening for Republicans to rush in with examples of why that was blasphemous, but they offered nothing.  They similarly were struck mute when Cohen said he feared "that if [Trump] loses the election in 2020, that there will never be a peaceful transition of power." 

Meanwhile, the rationales that tumbled from the mouths and pens of pundits of the Republican persuasion in the wake of Cohen's day on Capitol Hill were pathetic, although none quite so bizarre as that offered by CNN senior analyst and onetime presidential wannabe Rick Santorum. 

"The president doesn't tell the truth about a lot of things fairly consistently," Santorum noted.  "And so the fact that he's not telling the truth about Russia fairly consistently, at least in the eyes of people around here, why is that any different?" 

"I mean, it's not like he's doing something out of character with the Russia investigation that he’s not doing in any other areas."       

Sad. 

The midterm election Blue Wave victories by Democrats was a repudiation of everything Republicanism has become, including the reality that the GOP forgot how to govern long ago as it turned its sights to destroying Obamacare, if not Obama himself.  Had the Democrats not retaken the House, there would have been no Cohen appearance, only more hearings over Hillary Clinton's emails and that fantastic deep-state plot engineered by Mueller and the FBI to undermine the Trump presidency by seeking revenge for his "victory" over Clinton.

If Watergate was a "third-rate burglary," the Russia scandal is a general-alarm fire. 

But the GOP -- long the party of national security -- has been deaf, dumb and blind as Trump alienates America's closest allies, threatens to withdraw from NATO, starts unnecessary trade wars, coddles authoritarians like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jung Un and repeatedly shows his cluelessness when it comes to statecraft as the self-proclaimed deal maker registers one diplomatic failure after another.   

Most recently it was the foreshortened summit with Kim in Vietnam, for which Trump obviously was unprepared and compounded by his shameful about-face on Otto Warmbier, whom North Korea had imprisoned and possibly tortured prior to his release and death shortly after he returned to the U.S.   

The one area where Republicans are acting on national security is a big fake: Their embrace of Trump's extralegal national emergency declaration in a last-gasp effort to get his unneeded and unwanted border wall built.

How ironic that by his own admission, Cohen squandered his integrity in the service of a deeply corrupt master and now the Republican Party has squandered its political and institutional integrity by doing the same thing. 

Then there's this: Cohen was Trump's longtime fixer.  Now it's the Republican Party.  

Very sad.