Scope of FBI Inquiry

This now seems to be the issue. See my favourite man Michael Avenatti at

https://www.msnbc.com/am-joy/watch/brett-kavanaugh-now-under-fbi-investigation-will-avenatti-client-be-interviewed-1332793411741?v=railb&

where  Amjoy’s panel are all ladies, and distinguished mostly lawyers at that.

The new ugly term for us to assimilate is ‘train rape’, work it out. This is alleged at a party with Brett Kavanaugh present. One of the panel describes the POTUS decision to order this ‘limited’ FBI investigation as a result of Trump’s hands “being tied”. In other words the senate vote was not going to go his way, and now he can see that.

A little ray of light in all this darkness is the old fashioned ‘reaching out’ exhibited by republican Senator Jeff Flake to Democrats on the committee which has resulted in this kinda compromise. There are so many divisions in the US, such polarisation of views and politicisation that any indication of reaching for understanding is to be welcomed.

Will this be a meaningful investigation? And I deliberately use the same word which applies in our own Brexit debate and eventual parliamentary vote.

Well well well

And all is well, well it is weller than it was as now an FBI investigation – if rather perfunctory at one week – will take place. The incredible challenge hundreds of protesting women (including senators) posed in the corridors of the Senate and outside the elevator, before the committee vote, really seems to have shifted the debate. “We believe survivors” was chanted

Take a look at https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show .

Already there are commentators saying it cannot be done, witnesses and participants from 35 years ago must be traced and persuaded to participate. Also Kavanaugh may have shot himself in the foot with his exhibition of ugly intemperance and even paranoia, certainly his political partisanship was on show. None of that is fitting for the Supreme Court job.

New allegation

One allegation is a big problem. Two or more become deadly, because there’s always the threat of yet another accusation. And now another woman is accusing Brett Kavanaugh, up for nomination to the Supreme Court, of sexual assault.

There is a “higher standard” for Supreme Court nominees — with the Senate Judiciary Committee set to hear from Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford on Thursday. These aren’t allegations against a sitting U.S. senator or someone running for office whom voters can reject. They’re against someone picked for a lifetime appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Given that higher standard, it’s increasingly likely that Kavanaugh’s chances of getting 51 votes are over. We just don’t know how this ends. Does Kavanaugh withdraw? Does Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell signal that the votes aren’t there — to give Trump and the GOP enough time to name a new nominee? Or is there enough time.

THE TRUMP WHITE HOUSE STANDS BEHIND KAVANAUGH

A White House official tells NBC’s Kristen Welker that there are no plans to withdraw Kavanaugh’s nomination. This official says President Trump finds decades-old uncorroborated allegations to be something that the White House and Kavanaugh should fight back against. Well they would wouldn’t they.

Bombs exploding

Maybe its me in boring autumnal old Britain, all constipated with Brexit, and too accustomed to level headed BBC reporting that finds the unremitting news detonations of old and new issues around POTUS quite stunning.

Today we have revelations in the NYT that the Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein talked a year ago of bugging, ie secretly recording POTUS. He regarded him as so unfit to continue in office he talked of invoking the 25^th amendment to remove him. Bang!

Then there is the wizzbang accusation of sexual assault against Kavanaugh, the Trump nominee for SCOTUS, from Dr Christine Blaise Ford resulting in delay to the committee hearings.

More muffled and delayed blasts reverberate from former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen apparently singing away to Mueller about collusion with Russia, and the same with former campaign manager Paul Manafort.

Bang a bang bang

There are three inquiries into POTUS’ affairs or rather Trump’s. The New York Attorney-General ie chief court prosecutor, The New York Southern District, SOVNY, another aggressive prosecutor of malign misbehaviour in big business and mafia, and of course the FBI under Mueller. All are co-operating and sharing information. I hope I have that straight, I am open to correction.

For decades, the New York attorney general’s office had been little more than a glorified consumer-protection bureau, targeting shady landlords and businesses for abusive practices. In the early 2000s, the hard-charging new man Spitzer raised the profile of the office—and himself—by going aggressively after New York City’s banking industry. He earned himself the moniker the “Sheriff of Wall Street” by forcing major financial firms to shell out billions in fines for defrauding investors.

Newly appointed, but very experienced, Democratic Attorney General Barbara Underwood, filed a lawsuit in June, claiming the Trump Foundation, his charity “was little more than a checkbook for payments from Mr. Trump or his businesses to nonprofits, regardless of their purpose or legality.” The suit seeks $2.8 million in restitution and the foundation’s disbandment. Trump family members are caught up in this.

The aggressive Underwood has continued the inflammatory rhetoric stating publicly “that she considers her battles with the President `the most important work [she] has ever done’ and has vowed that such `work will continue.”‘

The hot news however is the Kavanaugh supreme court nomination, the vectors and pressures over this issue coil around so swiftly any comment is immediately redundant.

Women have the vote

Justice Kavanaugh and all republicans beware.

This staggering news is now playing hard in American politics. Agreement on the facts of the alleged attack by him on a very young Christine Ford 36 years ago is unlikely, but the optics (the latest shorthand for how stuff is seen) of bullying older republican judiciary committee men browbeating her is just awful coming before the mid-term elections. It is scheduled for next Monday.

The ‘me-too’ women’s movement speaking up for victims of male assaults stretches from Hollywood elites through the well-off suburbs and into poor communities. Repeated TV and video loops of her cross examination will be played all through local election broadcasts on the democratic side, dynamite indeed and a kinda fact in our post-fact era.

The ugly demolition of Anita Hill in an eerily parallel hearing 27 years ago cannot be repeated. After that event women were roused, used their votes, and now occupy positions of power, certainly on the democratic side of the committee. Too many,  too often, have kept quiet about their own victimisation and now demand responses from men acknowledging women’s pain.

Will Kavanaugh project how he understands this? Will older republican men? Can a hearing even take place, be allowed to? Ford ‘s lawyers are demanding an FBI investigation should take place first.

The Uncoiling of Manafort

This reptile is so much of a snake in the grass his ‘flip’ from defending POTUS in anticipation of an eventual presidential pardon to becoming a co-perating FBI informant is explosive and astounding, though not unexpected. At 69 and presently in jail he is desperate about not spending the rest of his – formerly luxurious – life in the same Spartan way. It is clear he no longer trusts Trump.

On Friday morning, this former Trump campaign chairman agreed to cooperate with special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian influence and interference by the Russian government in the 2016 presidential election. He is Mr Russia- the linkman.

So boom goes the dynamite.

This plea deal, which comes on the heels of Manafort’s conviction on eight felony counts of financial wrongdoing during a Virginia trial and on the verge of a second trial in Washington on similar charges, is a massive development that brings Mueller ever closer to President Donald Trump and his innermost circle. Especially Donald Trump Jr., and son in law Jared Kushner who attended the crucial Russia meeting in Trump Tower

Despite Trump’s repeated assertions that Manafort was with his campaign for a very short time, the facts are these: Manafort ran the Trump campaign for an extremely critical period of time — from April 2016, when he was brought in to fend off a possible delegate fight until after the party’s national convention in which Trump was formally nominated as the Republican presidential nominee.

During that period, Manafort was one of three senior Trump officials to participate in a June 2016 meeting with a handful of Russian officials — a meeting that was premised on the promise of dirt (hacked e-mails) on Hillary Clinton being provided by the Russians to the Trump campaign. According to Donald Trump Jr., the President’s eldest son who helped organize the meeting and who was in attendance, there was no actual information on Clinton provided to them. It was merely a cover to get the Trump campaign brass in a room and lobby them about the Magnitsky Act.

The latter being the sanctions on Putin’s close oligarch associates which really hurt and the end of them may well be what he really wants from Trump.

The most worried man should be Donald Trump Jr. BA-BOOM!

Coiling Inside and Uncoiling Outside

Locally, here in the old fenland you occasionally bump into folks that others describe as cracked, sometimes as crackpots. It may not be a refined term from psychological theory but its essential descriptive metaphor is of a useful piece of crockery, a cookpot or storage vessel, becoming totally useless because of a nearly invisible flaw.

Trump the person, shows all the traditional signs of being cracked, flawed and no longer whole or able to function purposefully, especially when heat is applied. That heat is now multiplied exponentially as his legal hazards build with disloyalty from his former lieutenants, such as his former campaign manager Paul Manafort, now a co-operating witness working for the government under Mueller. He will be spilling the beans on the Russia interference during the election, and much more. He is uncoiling around POTUS as we watch, straightening and revealing, recoiling we might say.

For me a most telling piece of video is POTUS in stubborn sulky baby mode sitting square on a couch refusing questions from a gaggle of WH journos asking him to comment on the demise of the highly honoured and honourable Senator John McCain. Tight-lipped, grim visage, seething at the effrontery as he sees it and adamantly negating McCain’s importance and value to America by folding his arms while ostentatiously dumb.

A delightful Americanism popped up in a lawyers comment on team Trump wrongly claiming Manafort’s criminal conduct was years ago and irrelevant.

“That dog won’t hunt”.