monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Two Saudi oil tankers were the targets of a "sabotage attack" off the coast of the United Arab Emirates on Sunday, Saudi Arabia's energy minister says.

The incident near Fujairah port caused "significant damage" to the vessels, Khalid al-Falih said in a statement.

The UAE said four ships of various nationalities had been hit. There were no injuries or deaths.

The Iranian foreign ministry said the incidents were "worrisome and dreadful" and called for a full investigation.

"Two Saudi oil tankers were subjected to a sabotage attack in the exclusive economic zone of the United Arab Emirates, off the coast of the Emirate of Fujairah, while on their way to cross into the Arabian Gulf," Mr Falih said in a statement quoted by the official Saudi Press Agency.

"One of the two vessels was on its way to be loaded with Saudi crude oil from the port of Ras Tanura, to be delivered to Saudi Aramco's customers in the United States."

There were no injuries reported but the two tankers suffered significant damage to their structures, he added.

"The international community has a joint responsibility to protect the safety of maritime navigation and the security of oil tankers," Mr Falih said.

On Sunday, the government of the emirate of Fujairah, which is part of the UAE, denied media reports that there had been explosions at its port.

US maritime authorities have urged caution when travelling in the area.

Tensions are high in the area, through which about a fifth of oil that is consumed globally passes.

The US has deployed additional warships there in recent days to counter what it called "clear indications" of threats from Iran to its forces and maritime traffic in the region. Iran dismissed the allegation as nonsense.

President Trump has taken comfort in and Democrats have been tempered by polls showing that impeachment is unpopular with the American people. It’s easy to believe that what is true now will continue, but what if events play a significant role in how Americans perceive impeachment? Might they become convinced that Trump is a menace and that Vice President Pence would be a far superior incumbent who would not, as his boss does, risk dragging them all down to defeat?

A new poll suggests opinion on impeachment may be malleable. Reuters reports, “The number of Americans who said President Donald Trump should be impeached rose 5 percentage points to 45 percent since mid-April.”

In the weeks since the redacted report came out, several developments may have affected voters’ thinking. At least voters outside the Fox News bubble know that far from exonerating Trump, special counsel Robert S. Mueller III found substantial evidence of obstruction of justice. Hundreds upon hundreds of prosecutors have weighed in, affirming they would have brought charges if not for the Office of Legal Counsel memo. And Attorney General William P. Barr has performed dreadfully at a pair of hearings, evading and double-talking his way around the actual findings in the report.
Now imagine if Mueller and then former White House counsel Donald McGahn testi fy, reaffirming the mountain of evidence that Trump tried to influence witnesses, sought to fire Mueller and tried to curtail the investigation. Surely that would be gripping TV.

Moreover, as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has said, Trump’s continued conduct blocking Barr and McGahn from testifying adds to the impression that he is obstructing investigation of his wrongdoing and hiding incriminating information.

Indeed at his news conference following the contempt vote, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) suggested the White House is not stonewalling merely on the Russia probe:

If Trump has indeed ordered agencies to do what he has said publicly — oppose all subpoenas — he is engaged in an unprecedented, across-the-board assault on the Constitution. If he intends to raise bad faith claims of executive privilege to avoid responding to any subpoenas — even on topics unrelated to Russia — he has gone one step further than Richard M. Nixon. (Pelosi reiterated this at her Thursday news conference: “And now we’re not even talking about isolated situations. We’re talking about a cumulative effect of obstruction that the administration is engaged in and the president declaring that he is not going to honor any subpoenas from the Congress.”)
Perhaps this behavior will impress the public, making the case that he not only has something (or some things) to hide but also is willing to shred the Constitution to stay in power.

In taking Trump to court, pressing methodically ahead, calling key witnesses (e.g., McGahn, Mueller) and obtaining the entire special counsel report Congress is following precisely the same process as it did in Watergate. Just as in Watergate when Sen. Sam Ervin (D-N.C.) led the Watergate committee from May 17, 1973, until its report was issued on June 27, 1974, hearings in the House Judiciary and other House committees can gather facts to determine if the House should proceed to consider impeachment. (The House Judiciary Committee under Rep. Peter Rodino commenced on May 9, 1974, and voted to pass three of five articles of impeachment in late July 1974.)

Pelosi’s determination to take this step by step preserves the House’s option to later institute impeachment hearings, gives the American people a tutorial in Trump’s misconduct and, as it turns out, is pushing Trump to undertake even more outlandish (and more impeachable) actions. Pelosi told reporters, “I think that what we want to do is get the facts. We want to do it in a way that is the least divisive to our country and the most productive. We’re asking in the constitutional way for the administration to comply.” She added, “We still have more opportunities. We’ll see if Mueller will testify, and that will make a big difference in terms of where we go from here.”

After all of that, we’ll see where public opinion settles. For now, Trump continues to be his own worst enemy.

Americans may be persuadable on impeachment

Americans may be persuadable on impeachment

Tracking 29 Investigations Related to Trump
By LARRY BUCHANAN and KAREN YOURISH MAY 13, 2019

Federal, state and congressional authorities are scrutinizing many aspects of Donald J. Trump’s life through investigations related to his businesses, campaign, inauguration and presidency. We’ll be tracking them here. According to reporting by The New York Times, there are currently at least:

10 FEDERAL CRIMINAL INVESTIGATIONS
8 STATE AND LOCAL INVESTIGATIONS
11 CONGRESSIONAL INVESTIGATIONS

According to reporting by The New York Times,

More than 450 former federal prosecutors who worked in Republican and Democratic administrations have signed on to a statement asserting special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s findings would have produced obstruction charges against President Trump — if not for the office he holds.

The reaction to Special Counsel Robert Mueller‘s report continues. While Democrats have mainly been the only ones calling for President Donald Trump‘s impeachment, a group of conservative and libertarian lawyers co-founded by Trump nemesis George Conway released a statement on Tuesday saying that the framers of the U.S. Constitution would believe there was evidence of impeachable offenses.

The Checks and Balances group, as Law&Crime noted before, was started to “protect constitutional principles that are being undermined by the statements and actions of this president,” namely the rule of law. Jonathan H. Adler, Donald B. Ayer, John B. Bellinger, III, George T. Conway III, Carrie F. Cordero, Stuart M. Gerson, Peter D. Keisler, Marisa C. Maleck, Alan Charles Raul, Paul Rosenzweig, J.W. Verret all signed their names on a statement that said Mueller’s report was a “significant milestone in the civic life of the country.”

After addressing the national security and intelligence concerns raised by the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, attention turned to the obstruction portion of Mueller’s report.

They said that the “pattern of behavior” revealed therein is “starkly inconsistent with the President’s constitutional duty to ‘take care that the laws be faithfully executed.'”

Conway, the husband of White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, basically made the same criticism earlier Tuesday.

“Impeachment isn’t merely about whether a president committed crimes—though this one did—it covers dereliction of a president’s high duties,” he said. “A president who tries to sabotage an investigation into a foreign hostile power’s attack on our nation surely fits that bill.”

The lawyers agreed that it doesn’t matter if Trump wasn’t charged with a crime.

“The facts contained in the report reveal that the President engaged in persistent conduct intended to derail, undermine and obstruct ongoing federal investigations,” they said. “In light of the longstanding Department of Justice legal opinion that a sitting President cannot be indicted, we view it as irrelevant whether there is a prosecutorial recommendation that the crime of obstruction has been committed.”

They said it was made clear that Trump is “willing to abuse presidential authority to pressure or remove Senate-confirmed officials for purposes that undermine lawful functioning of government and to direct subordinates to falsify the record on matters he knew were or likely were under investigation.”

They further said that, in addition to what the report had to say, they remain otherwise concerned about an “existing body of information already in the public domain documenting the President’s violations of his oath, including but not limited to his denigration of the free press, verbal attacks on members of the judiciary, encouragement of law enforcement officers to violate the law, and incessant lying to the American people.”

In closing, they said that it is their sincere belief that the framers of the U.S. Constitution would agree that there is evidence of impeachable offenses.

“We believe the framers of the Constitution would have viewed the totality of this conduct as evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors,” the statement said. “Accordingly, Congress, which carries its own constitutional oversight responsibilities, should conduct further investigation.”

WaPo from May 6.

Republican and Democratic administrations

Nice try WP, no cigar.

The WP didn't sign that letter.

We are former federal prosecutors. We served under both Republican and Democratic administrations at different levels of the federal system: as line attorneys, supervisors, special prosecutors, United States Attorneys, and senior officials at the Department of Justice. The offices in which we served were small, medium, and large; urban, suburban, and rural; and located in all parts of our country.

Many mainstream media newspapers have joined The New York Times in shilling for the Muslim Brotherhood — claiming that the movement gave up violence years ago and such a designation stems merely from Islamophobia — yet few are looking at the Qatar connection.

In a particularly disingenuous article, The Washington Post ran an op-ed authored by human rights lawyer and Muslim personality Arsalan Iftikhar titled “Calling the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization will scapegoat all Muslims.” The article postulates that “Nearly 7 million American Muslims would become the primary domestic target of such a designation.”

Qatar uses its vast wealth to wage “information warfare” by lavishly financing a colossal web of lobbyists, media outlets, think tanks and hackers.The sums of money involved in carefully manipulating perceptions and narratives are so vast that it is impossible to even know the true extent of Qatar’s meddling in U.S. policy and it’s influence on American public opinion.

Qatar has a surreptitious relationship with the Democratic Party. In 2016, Wikileaks revealed that both Saudi Arabia and Qatar are large donors to the Clinton Foundation. Both countries subscribe to the literal Wahhabi/Salafi interpretations of Islam. The Brotherhood has served to be a perfect way to export this ideology across the globe. According to The Wall Street Journal, Qatar targeted 250 Trump “influencers” to change U.S. policy and has quadrupled it’s spending on U.S. lobbying.

Qatar further extends its tendrils of control over young minds by donating tens of millions to American and European schools, colleges and universities, making the rich country the largest foreign donor to American universities.

now that the Mueller investigation has yielded no basis for prosecution for any supposed crime

Nearly all of the investigations listed are just as politically motivated

as was the now discredited origin of the Mueller probe.