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Jeremy Corbyn has said he will not attend the state banquet at Buckingham Palace in honour of Donald Trump.

The Labour leader argued it would be wrong to "roll out the red carpet" for the US president, whom he accused of using "racist and misogynist rhetoric".

The US-UK relationship did not need "the pomp and ceremony" of June's state visit, he added.

Prime Minister Theresa May promised Mr Trump the honour after he was elected in 2016.

Commons Speaker John Bercow and Liberal Democrat leader Sir Vince Cable have already declined to attend the dinner.

In a statement, Mr Corbyn said: "Theresa May should not be rolling out the red carpet for a state visit to honour a president who rips up vital international treaties, backs climate change denial and uses racist and misogynist rhetoric.

"Maintaining an important relationship with the United States does not require the pomp and ceremony of a state visit. It is disappointing that the prime minister has again opted to kowtow to this US administration.

"I would welcome a meeting with President Trump to discuss all matters of interest."

A spokeswoman for Mr Bercow, who has been critical of Mr Trump's record in office, said he had been "invited to the banquet, but he will not be attending".

The SNP's Westminster leader, Ian Blackford is also boycotting the meal, saying Mrs May "should instead be holding meetings to challenge the US administration and raise key issues".

But Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt has said the UK should offer "the best possible welcome" to the president.

And Mrs May's spokesman said the prime minister was "looking forward to welcoming the president here to build on our special relationship".

The banquet is scheduled to take place on the first evening of the state visit, which will last from 3 to 5 June.

About 150 guests are expected to be invited, including political leaders and other public figures with cultural, diplomatic and economic links to the US.

During their visit, the president and First Lady Melania Trump will be guests of the Queen and attend a ceremony in Portsmouth to mark 75 years since the D-Day landings.

Mr Trump will also have official talks with the prime minister at Downing Street, although it is not yet clear whether he will address Parliament - as predecessors Barack Obama and Bill Clinton did - amid opposition from many MPs to the idea.

Last July, Mr Trump's first visit to the UK since he became president in 2017 led to huge protests. He met the Queen and Mrs May hosted a banquet for him at Blenheim Palace.

I find the criticism of the press by Greenwald and others puzzling.

As new questions on Trump’s corruption emerge, his lawless threats escalate

...As Brian Beutler points out, if Democrats end up drifting aimlessly, it will create a “void that Trump will fill with autocratic ambition” and a debate about “jailing Trump’s critics.” This may be more than theoretical: Remember, Barr has validated Trump’s conspiracy theory that “spying” on Trump’s campaign occurred and has said he will reexamine it.

If Democrats let Trump neuter them, even as Trump escalates his pressure on the Justice Department to investigate his political critics — that is, even as Trump adds to the case for an impeachment inquiry — continuing on the current course will represent something close to total capitulation to Trump’s lawlessness.

If the only alternative is total confrontation, which will Democrats choose?

...more like the most ignorant spieler.

NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre says that the gun lobby’s president, Oliver North, is extorting him on behalf of the ad firm that operates NRATV, according to a letter the NRA chief sent to board members on Thursday.

LaPierre claims that North called one of his aides on Wednesday evening, threatening to send a letter containing “a devastating account of our financial status, sexual harassment charges against a staff member, accusations of wardrobe expenses and excessive staff travel expenses.”

The Wall Street Journal first reported the existence of LaPierre’s letter.

North purportedly told a LaPierre assistant that he wouldn’t send the supposedly damaging letter if he resigned his position as head of the organization and called off an April 12 lawsuit filed in Virginia against Ackerman McQueen, the gun lobby’s longtime advertising firm responsible for some of its most hair-raising campaigns.

Ackerman has also, since the 1990s, been accused by some NRA higher-ups of scamming the gun lobbying giant by systematically over-billing for its services.

...Betsy Reed, the editor-in-chief of the Intercept, recently told me that “Glenn has a core of incredibly passionate and dedicated followers.” But, she added, she is wary of “a kind of pale imitation of Glenn—people who may be partly inspired by him, but don’t have the nuance or intelligence that he has.” She was referring to Russia skeptics of the left, on Twitter and elsewhere, “who are so convinced that they are being lied to all the time that anything that the intelligence community says can’t possibly be true.” Reed’s view is that, at this point, “it’s not helpful to the left and to all the candidates and causes we favor to continue to doubt the existence of some kind of relationship between Russia and the Trump campaign. We know some basic contours of it now, thanks to Mueller, but I think we may learn more. And we can’t refuse to see what’s in front of us.”

Chomsky and Greenwald have described the Trump Presidency differently. In a recent television interview, Chomsky said that Trump is an agent of American élites more than he is an offense to them. He also recognized a stark moral line between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, arguing that the G.O.P.’s opposition to addressing climate change has made it “the most dangerous organization in human history.”

Glenn has been one of the few progressives that have been constant in that regard and didn't let his disdain for Trump cloud his insight.

Also he sifted through all the WikiLeaks government spying programs which would add a healthy bit of skepticism to an already smart critical thinker.

For Donald Trump, perhaps the most chilling moment in the Mueller report occurs on page 446, where the special counsel reveals that he has referred a total of 14 potential cases to other prosecutors. Because while Robert Mueller was given a limited mandate to investigate the Trump-Russia affair, special counsel investigations have a habit of unearthing other, unrelated criminality in the process. Perhaps that is why, when Trump first learned that Mueller had been appointed, according to the report, he slumped back in his chair and exclaimed, “I’m fucked.”

What flashed through Trump’s mind in that moment—his sprawling business empire, his byzantine taxes, his hush-money payments to a porn star—is unknown. Indeed, 12 of the 14 referrals that Mueller outsourced were redacted and remain shrouded in secrecy. (The two public referred cases involve Michael Cohen, the president’s former fixer, and a false-statement case against Democratic attorney and lobbyist Gregory Craig.) But, with investigations churning in Congress, in New York, and in Washington, D.C., it is clear that Trump’s nightmare is just beginning. Below is an accounting of the known legal threats Trumpworld has yet to grapple with.

The Southern District and the Hush-Money Payments

As previously noted, Mueller referred the criminal case against Cohen to the Southern District of New York. Among a series of charges related to financial fraud and lying to Congress, S.D.N.Y. also prosecuted the former Trump lawyer for violations of campaign-finance laws stemming from a hush-money payment he made to Stormy Daniels. Prosecutors said in court documents that Cohen acted “in coordination with and at the direction of Individual-1”—Donald J. Trump.

With top Trump Organization officials under scrutiny and the president’s role in the payment scheme well-documented, Trump and his associates are hardly clear of potential legal risk—especially after the president leaves office, and is no longer protected from prosecution. As a Republican close to the White House recently told my colleague Gabriel Sherman, “The time bomb has never been Mueller. It’s the S.D.N.Y.”

New York State and Trump’s Taxes

Since at least July of last year, the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance has been investigating the now defunct Trump Foundation, the president’s eponymous charity, reportedly for potential violations of Empire State tax regulations. Following a deep dive by The New York Times into the Trump family’s tax history last fall, the department announced it was also taking a closer look at various claims made in the article. “The Tax Department is reviewing the allegations in the N.Y.T. article and is vigorously pursuing all appropriate avenues of investigation,” a spokesman for the agency said.

New York Attorney General and Trump

New York Attorney General Letitia James, who took office in January, has continued to pursue her office’s lawsuit against the Trump Foundation for allegations of violating state and federal charity laws. But she’s also taken an aggressive stance toward the Trump Organization. In response to allegations Cohen made while testifying in front of the House Oversight committee that Trump inflated and deflated the value of his assets to suit his bottom line, James’s office subpoenaed financial records from Deutsche Bank and Investors Bank relating to a series of Trump Organization real-estate projects and the president’s failed attempt to buy the Buffalo Bills football team.

The Trump Inaugural Committee

President Trump’s inaugural committee has drawn the scrutiny of the S.D.N.Y. and U.S. attorneys offices in Brooklyn, Los Angeles, New Jersey, and Washington, D.C. Investigators are probing whether foreign money was routed through the committee, along with allegations of influence peddling. At least one plea deal from Sam Patten, an American lobbyist, has stemmed from the inquiries into the inauguration. Patten pleaded guilty to violating the Foreign Agent Registration Act. And as my colleague Emily Jane Fox has reported, the Trump family was involved in planning the event.

Congressional Inquiries

While the Mueller investigation has reached its conclusion, intelligence committees in the House and the Senate continue to probe Russian interference in the 2016 election and contacts between the Trump campaign and the Russians. And since Democrats won the House, they have opened numerous inquiries into the president’s behavior, his family’s business dealings, his finances, White House procedures, and the administration’s foreign policy. Already, subpoena fights loom over the White House security-clearance process, with a specific focus on the clearances of Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and his daughter Ivanka; Trump’s tax returns, which he has refused to release; the Trump Organization’s finances; and private conversations between Trump officials and the foreign governments of Russia and Saudi Arabia.

In an interview with The New York Times in 2017, shortly after Mueller was appointed, Trump answered in the affirmative when asked whether Mueller investigating his family finances would cross a “red line.” At the time, Trump wouldn’t say how he might respond in such a case, because “I don't think it’s going to happen.” Now, with multiple prosecutors looking beyond Mueller’s remit, the president may soon be held to account for whatever those investigations find.

The redacted Mueller report has been out for 10 days, and yet misinformation persists. Whether because of partisanship, the length of the report, unfamiliarity with legal concepts, or straight-up lies, many false claims keep popping up again and again.

Let’s run through and correct some of them.

1. It said ‘no collusion,’ period

For many Trump supporters, the report vindicated President Trump’s long-standing “no collusion” mantra.

It certainly bolstered the Trump team’s case that there wasn’t some large-scale effort to work with Russia to throw an election. But as has been reported, including by The Washington Post’s Philip Bump, the report doesn’t address collusion, because collusion is not a legal concept. Instead, the report was more narrow in its conclusions, finding there was no “conspiracy” or “coordination” between the Trump campaign and Russian government officials.

Here’s the key section:

In evaluating whether evidence about collective action of multiple individuals constituted a crime, we applied the framework of conspiracy law, not the concept of “collusion.” ... The Office’s focus in analyzing questions of joint criminal liability was on conspiracy as defined in federal law. In connection with that analysis, we addressed the factual question whether members of the Trump Campaign “coordinat[ed]” — a term that appears in the appointment order — with Russian election interference activities. Like collusion, ‘coordination’ does not have a settled definition in federal criminal law. We understood coordination to require an agreement — tacit or express — between the Trump Campaign and the Russian government on election interference.

In short, it’s possible to have colluded in some way — depending upon how you define the nebulous term “collusion” — without there having been an actual agreement or an arrangement that meets the legal definition of conspiracy.

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III dealt with the legal question, which was his purview and responsibility. Politically speaking, though, even if something like the Trump Tower meeting might not have crossed a legal threshold, it’s possible to still regard it as being problematic.

2. Mueller decided he couldn’t decide on obstruction

One of the many ways in which Attorney General William P. Barr seemed to pre-spin the Mueller report in a positive direction for Trump was on obstruction of justice.

In his initial letter summarizing the report, he said Mueller came to no conclusion on obstruction of justice, neither accusing nor exonerating Trump. But he didn’t elaborate as to why. At his news conference just before the report’s release, Barr was asked whether that was because Mueller was conflicted or because of Justice Department policy, and he talked around it.

Turns out it was the latter, but people are still mischaracterizing Mueller’s obstruction decision.

As Mueller explained, his decision not to accuse or exonerate Trump on obstruction of justice was all about the fact that the Justice Department doesn’t charge sitting presidents with crimes:

The evidence we obtained about the President’s actions and intent presents difficult issues that would need to be resolved if we were making a traditional prosecutorial judgment. At the same time, if we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the president clearly did not commit obstruction of justice we would so state.

So no matter how damaging the evidence, Mueller decided it wasn’t his place to accuse the president of crimes; he could only clear him of crimes.

And if you look more closely, there are five different events on which Mueller seems to have found evidence of the three key criteria required for an obstruction charge.

3. Trump fully cooperated

Speaking of areas in which Barr has gone to bat for Trump in a misleading way: He said at his news conference that “the White House fully cooperated with the Special Counsel’s investigation."

Trump added Thursday night in an interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity: “I was totally transparent. I didn’t tell anybody you can’t go [interview with Mueller]. I could have. I could have said, ‘You are not going to testify. Nobody is going to testify.’

The narrative is that Mueller had everything he needed, and he couldn’t provide the goods.

Except Trump did not fully cooperate. The White House did hand over lots and lots of documents and allow people such as White House counsel Donald McGahn to cooperate, yes, but its cooperation fell short in one massive way: Trump wouldn’t testify.

Mueller clearly wanted it, but there was a months-long standoff. Eventually, as Mueller detailed in his report, he basically decided issuing a subpoena would prolong things too much.

Trump gave written answers to some of Mueller’s questions, but an in-person interview would undoubtedly have helped Mueller — especially when it comes to determining Trump’s intent on some of the 10 areas he examined for obstruction.

4. There is no underlying crime

Part of Barr’s rationale for exonerating Trump on obstruction, even though Mueller hadn’t, was that Mueller had cleared Trump of conspiracy.

“In making this determination, we noted that the Special Counsel recognized that 'the evidence does not establish that the President was involved in an underlying crime related to Russian election interference,’ and that, while not determinative, the absence of such evidence bears upon the President’s intent with respect to obstruction,” Barr wrote in his initial summary.

It’s correct that the lack of an underlying crime can be a mitigating circumstance when it comes to obstruction; if you don’t have something to cover up, after all, it suggests your intent wasn’t so corrupt.

But in this case, there were underlying crimes — lots of them. Trump’s own aides pleaded guilty to lying at various junctures. His campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, was convicted of a series of crimes, as was his lawyer/fixer Michael Cohen. And Trump has even been implicated in crimes — campaign finance violations — in the Cohen case that was related to the Mueller probe.

Trump also rather obviously didn’t like the story line that Russia made the difference in electing him, so he also had a political motive to want to hamper the investigation. When the special counsel was appointed, Mueller reported, Trump said he was “f-----” and that it was the “end of my presidency.”

So the idea that Trump had nothing to hide — including crimes — by obstructing the investigation is pretty far-fetched.

5. Trump has been accused of a crime in the Cohen case

An offshoot of the above is the argument that not only are there underlying crimes, but also that Trump himself has been accused of one. But that’s just not true.

Trump has indeed been named by the Southern District of New York as a participant in Cohen’s campaign finance violations, which relate to the hush-money payments made to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal. But being named as part of a scheme isn’t the same as being accused of a crime. Trump has argued that he didn’t direct Cohen to do anything illegal and trusted him not to, even as he tasked Cohen with handling the situations.

As it was with Mueller, it’s not clear whether the SDNY isn’t accusing Trump of a crime because he’s a sitting president or because it hasn’t established that his conduct was criminal. And as with Mueller, it’s possible the SDNY thinks Trump committed a crime but just can’t or won’t say so.

But we simply don’t know at this point, so to say Trump has been accused of a crime is wrong. To say he’s been implicated in one is more accurate.

I wonder if the Southern District of New York will also look into the Clinton Foundation.

Quote:

I wonder if the Southern District of New York will also look into the Clinton Foundation.

If charges haven't been filed why would they?