monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Can a ‘special prosecutor’ or an ‘independent counsel’ be appointed?

No, because the law that created that type of prosecutor expired.

During the Watergate-era’s so-called Saturday Night Massacre, President Richard M. Nixon ordered the firing of the prosecutor running the investigation into his White House. As part of the reforms afterward, Congress created a new type of prosecutor to look into high-level executive branch wrongdoing while shielded from political interference. This position was called a special prosecutor at first and later an independent counsel.

The law set criteria for an attorney general to request a three-judge panel to appoint such a prosecutor, who would be subject to the judges’ supervision and could not be fired by the president or his appointees.

While the Supreme Court upheld the arrangement as constitutional, critics said it permitted a prosecutor to run amok. Republicans learned to hate the arrangement during the Iran-contra investigation into the Reagan administration, and Democrats did, as well, during the Whitewater and Monica Lewinsky investigations into President Bill Clinton. When the law expired in 1999, Congress did not renew it.

What would the appointment of a ‘special counsel’ do?

This position dates to 1999, when the Justice Department issued new regulations to create it after the independent counsel law expired. Special counsels are empowered to run an investigation with greater autonomy than a United States attorney normally enjoys. The regulations say special counsels “shall not be subject to the day-to-day supervision of any official of the department.” A special counsel also generally decides on his or her own “whether and to what extent to inform or consult with the attorney general or others within the department about the conduct of his or her duties and responsibilities.”

But if Mr. Rosenstein were to appoint one, the special counsel would still be ultimately subject to his control — and Mr. Trump’s. That means the special counsel’s decisions could be overruled, and he or she could be fired.

Quote:

And the fact is in the last 137 years the temperature has risen 1.5 degrees...

It's only the beginning, like at the start of a roller coaster ride, when the cars start climbing, climbing, climbing....

The medium is irrelevant.

It’s genuinely rare to be able to say you’re living in a historic moment, one already being compared with some justification to Watergate. But that’s where we find ourselves in the aftermath of President Trump’s stunning dismissal of FBI Director James Comey.

There’s a huge amount to unpack here, but here’s what is perhaps the single most important fact: The president of the United States, whose campaign is under FBI investigation over its potential ties to Russia, just fired the head of the FBI — the person in charge of that very investigation.

Mounting evidence that multiple members of the Trump campaign were in direct contact with Russian intelligence in the runup to the election — and in several cases subsequently lied about it — has been at the center of a simmering scandal that Trump has been unable to shake. His sudden decision to oust Comey ensures that scandal will bedevil the rest of the Trump presidency — and, potentially, bring it to a premature close.

Let’s pause and note that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said that Comey was ousted over his grievous mishandling of the FBI’s Hillary Clinton email probe, a gaffe that may have cost Clinton the presidency and that has been the subject of an ongoing investigation by the Justice Department’s own internal watchdog. Comey drew new criticism earlier Tuesday when the FBI was forced to walk back his false assertions that Clinton aide Huma Abedin had improperly forwarded thousands of emails to her husband, Anthony Weiner.

The FBI chief may have deserved to lose his job over how badly he bungled the Clinton probe — which included breaking with historical precedent and disclosing, just 11 days before the election, that he was reopening the probe into her email servers — but imagine if he had been fired by a President Hillary Clinton. Republicans across Capitol Hill would be making immediate calls for her impeachment.

Initial comments from powerful Republicans like Senate Foreign Relations Chair Bob Corker suggest that the GOP is in a wait-and-see mode and hasn’t yet decided to break with Trump. Still, the Comey firing is already leading to calls for a special prosecutor capable of issuing subpoenas without needing the approval of Republican-led committees in the House and Senate.

We’ve known for months that there is something damaging in the Trump team’s dealings with Moscow. The FBI and the House and Senate intelligence committees are focusing in on three people who worked for, or unofficially advised, the Trump campaign: former campaign chair Paul Manafort, former foreign policy adviser Carter Page, and Republican political operative Roger Stone.

But that’s the tip of the iceberg. Former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn was fired for lying about his contacts with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, and has sought an immunity deal as evidence mounts that he accepted money from the Russian and Turkish governments without properly disclosing it. Senior White House aide — and Trump son-in-law — Jared Kushner held undisclosed meetings with Kislyak during the transition and only made them public months later.

Perhaps most alarmingly, Attorney General Jeff Sessions lied to the Senate, under oath, during his confirmation hearings. He told lawmakers he’d had no interactions with the Russian government; it turned out that he’d held conversations with Kislyak. Sessions promised to recuse himself from the FBI investigation into Trump. Sessions is also the man who just recommended that Trump fire the head of the FBI, a recommendation Trump accepted.

The Comey firing is sure to spark waves of new hearings on Capitol Hill, each of which will give Democrats and some Republicans the chance to ask the questions on the minds of many Americans: Was the Comey firing part of a White House cover-up? And if so, what is the administration trying to hide?

How we got here

Here's what we know for sure.

In July 2016, the FBI launched an investigation into the various ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. The bureau soon acquired a warrant to spy on Carter Page, a Trump foreign policy adviser with longstanding financial ties to the Kremlin. After Trump’s election, the investigation took on considerably more urgency — with Comey personally approving more scrutiny, according to the Guardian.

In December, Sen. John McCain personally handed Comey a dossier from a former British spy, Christopher Steele, alleging that the Russians had compromising material on Trump and that the Trump campaign actively coordinated with Russian hackers targeting Clinton. By early January, the FBI had confirmed that Steele’s sources were credible and its contents could not be dismissed, forcing them to brief both President Obama and President-elect Trump on its contents.

The FBI’s investigations took on new urgency after Trump took office, and the Trump administration kept stepping on rakes when it came to Russia. That’s when the Flynn-Kislyak scandal broke and when Sessions lied under oath about his own contacts with the ambassador during the campaign, which forced him to recuse himself from supervising the Russia investigation in early March.

Both the House and Senate Intelligence Committees had, at this point, started their own investigations into Russian involvement in the 2016 election. On March 20, Comey was called to testify before the House Intelligence Committee — chaired by Rep. Devin Nunes — about the status of the FBI’s investigation. That’s when he dropped his biggest bombshell yet.

“[The FBI is] investigating the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia’s efforts,” Comey said.



After this announcement, it became impossible — regardless of what Trump said in Tuesday’s letter — to separate the FBI’s investigation into Russia from an investigation into the president. Clearly, Director Comey had given consent and support for an investigation into the Trump campaign’s links to Russia. You simply can’t look into whether close Trump associates had improper contact with Russia without looking into the question of whether the president approved their actions. It would also come back to the core issue from Watergate: “What did the president know, and when did he know it?”

Two days after Comey’s testimony, it became clear that the FBI’s investigation was extremely serious. CNN reported that “the FBI has information that indicates associates of President Donald Trump communicated with suspected Russian operatives to possibly coordinate the release of information damaging to Hillary Clinton's campaign.” This information came from “human intelligence, travel, business and phone records, and accounts of in-person meetings.”

The information, CNN’s reporters cautioned, “was not conclusive.” But the point is that it was already pointing in a direction that could implicate Trump officials. If that happened — if the FBI actually uncovered hard proof that the Trump campaign had coordinated with the Russians — it would end up being the kind of scandal that topples a presidency.

By early April, the FBI investigation into Russia had gotten so massive that the bureau had to form a special unit for it in Washington. Meanwhile, the House investigation had stalled out due to Nunes’s weird insistence on backing up Trump’s wild claims about Obama spying on Trump Tower (which would eventually force Nunes to recuse himself). The Senate investigation, only given limited funding and staff, was proceeding slowly — to the point where senators were publicly complaining about the pace.

The point of all of this is simple: The FBI was conducting by far the most serious investigation into Trump and Russia in the country, one that simply couldn’t be matched by Congress or by journalists. The bureau had the money, the trained investigators, and the access to powerful surveillance tools. Perhaps most importantly, it also had a director who seemed to be entirely behind the investigation.

And then Trump and Sessions fired him.

Democrats are comparing this to Watergate. They have good reason to.

In the immediate aftermath of the Comey firing, leading Democrats were quick to compare the move to the biggest political scandal in American history: Watergate. And they were quick to issue calls to create the position that ultimately led to the downfall of Richard Nixon: a special prosecutor with broad investigative powers and the freedom to follow evidence without needing congressional approval.

Take this, from New York Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand: “No more excuses. We need an independent special prosecutor to investigate the Trump Administration’s ties to Russia.”

Or this, from Hawaii Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz: “The arguments against establishing a Special Prosecutor were weak in the first place. They have now evaporated.”

But to get a real sense of where the public narrative over the firing is already headed, there is no better example than this comment from Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Edward Markey. The Comey firing, he said, was "disturbingly reminiscent of the Saturday Night Massacre during the Watergate scandal & the national turmoil that it caused."

Donald Trump says he is firing James Comey because of the way Comey mishandled the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server. Donald Trump is also, rather obviously, lying.

Trump expressed no qualms about Comey at the time of the alleged misconduct, or during the transition. Nor did he take the opportunity of his first 100 days in office to make any gestures of bipartisan outreach on this — or any other — topic. Indeed, back in January, Trump went out of his way to specifically ask Comey to stay on for six more years, and Comey agreed.

The bad faith involved in this move is both palpable and obvious. Anyone maintaining focus on the “irony” that the very Democrats who were critical of Comey’s handling of the emails are now defending him is trying to pull the wool over your eyes and evade the main issue. Trump is lying. Again.

Trump lies all the time

Beyond the specific implausibility of Trump’s official story, there is the more general fact that Trump is a notorious liar. For years, he called New York tabloids using a fake name. He claimed that climate change was a Chinese hoax, and then, during a debate, he claimed that he’d never claimed that. He lied about his wealth, and he obtained that wealth in part by lying to students at his fake university. He promised to get behind a health care bill that covered everyone, lowered deductibles, and avoided cuts to Medicaid — he was lying on all three points.

He said Ted Cruz’s father was involved in the JFK assassination. During the second presidential debate, he interrupted Clinton to deny telling America to "check out [the] sex tape" of former Miss Universe Alicia Machado. During the third debate, the interruption was to deny that he'd mocked a reporter with a disability.

Yet he had. The first two were on Twitter; the third had been circulated widely as a video clip. It was stupidly easy to track down the proof. He lies. All the time.

This is known and widely reported, and yet the knowledge that it’s true rarely seems to suffuse the reporting. I have friends who are notorious for being late all the time. When I make plans with them, I simply assume they will be late.

America has a president who lies all the time. If we had a different kind of president, it would make sense to give him the benefit of the doubt on something like this. But we have President Donald Trump. If he says something that seems implausible, that’s probably because he’s lying.

Trump is covering something up

The easy presumption is that the real reason for firing Comey has something to do with the ongoing Russia investigation. We don’t, however, really know that.

Over the years, Trump seems to have been mixed up with the Mafia, and his casinos have paid civil fines for evading money laundering rules. He’s been involved in empty-box tax scams, and his shenanigans with the Trump Foundation may have constituted criminal tax evasion.

Still, as Edward Ericson Jr. details, he’s never faced a serious criminal investigation despite repeatedly bumping up against one.

An FBI inquiry that started with a hard look at Trump associates’ possible ties to the Russian government could easily have turned up some totally unrelated criminal misconduct. By the same token, it’s entirely possible that whatever it is Trump might be covering up by refusing to release his tax returns has nothing to do with Russian bribes or blackmail.

But what we know from the tax return saga is that Trump appears to be covering something up. Something big and important. And anyone with half a brain can see that sacking Comey appears to be, likewise, part of covering something up. Maybe something to do with Russia and maybe something else. But it sure looks like something.

The Republican Party is playing a dangerous game

Democrats are out with statements calling for special prosecutors or for Comey to testify before Congress. Everyone is demanding that the next FBI director be someone who’s impartial and independent. That’s all well and good, and it’s all important, but it’s also all irrelevant beside the basic attitude of the Republican Party.

When Marine Le Pen entered the second round of the French presidential election as a Russia-backed far-right, xenophobic candidate, she met a wall of opposition from establishment center-right political figures who all endorsed her center-left opponent. Republicans, by contrast, spent the 2016 campaign being supportive of Trump and have spent the post-election era being sycophantic toward him.

It would be child’s play for a Republican Party that cared about the integrity of American government institutions to force Trump to comply with some basic ethics guidelines and undertake meaningful financial disclosures. Instead, Ivanka Trump is hawking a book from inside the West Wing and nobody has any idea what kind of sweetheart deals corporations or foreign governments with business before the US government are striking with the Trump Organization.

In exchange for turning a blind eye to Trump’s corruption, Republicans are getting a slate of conservative judges, a solid roster of business-friendly regulators, and, if they’re lucky, a giant tax cut for the rich and millions of people cut off from Medicaid benefits. The price, however, is obvious. The deeper you get in bed with Trump, the more tightly your fate is entwined with his. Some Republicans will decide they are overcommitted to Trump at this point, and they’ll fight on the lie that Comey was fired over emails.

For others, one hopes, this will be a wake-up call that Trump is a profoundly dishonest person but also a rather clever one. The comeback from the financial wreckage of his Atlantic City casino empire was incredibly slimy but involved a bravura display of low cunning. The fake rationale for firing Comey is, similarly, somewhat inspired. But sane Republicans should see the real meaning of this. Trump isn’t a policy savant, but he’s also not a dummy whom they are going to manipulate. He’s a snake whom they’ve taken into their home, and the sooner they do something about it, the better off we’ll all be.

what do you need to know what the weathers going to be like 2 weeks down the pike. They bake yer donuts rain or shine.

What's pathetic is your capacity to be deluded.

There's some approximative thinking peddled in your blog entry, for instance: "The reason that logging is so bad for the climate is that when trees are felled they release the carbon they are storing into the atmosphere"... Except of course when they don't, like when the wood is used for timber, paper or anything else. Besides, even in a pristine rain forest all trees ultimately die and release their carbon in the atmosphere via decomposition.

It's a fairly complex issue, and quite a few people including your blogger do not understand it very well, but by and large it's not that important. The key to reducing global warming is to reduce our industrial and domestic emissions of methane and carbon dioxyde. Trees won't save us.

Days Before He Was Fired, Comey Asked for Money for Russia Investigation

James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, asked the Justice Department for a significant increase in money and personnel for the bureau’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the presidential election, according to three officials with knowledge of his request.

Mr. Comey asked for the resources during a meeting last week with Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general who wrote the Justice Department’s memo that was used to justify the firing of the F.B.I. director this week.
Mr. Comey then briefed members of Congress on the meeting in recent days.

An online petition has been launched by residents of the town of Benson in the US state of Arizona against a radio station which broadcast advice late at night on how to hide child pornography.

Statements aired by the station over a two-year period gave tips on how to disguise viewing such images.

The petition accuses the station of broadcasting "a sickening message".

Cave 97.7 FM owner Paul Lotsof has publicly stated he disagrees with Arizona's laws on child pornography.

He told KVOA News 4 Tucson that he had performed a public service by broadcasting the advice, which recently has been taken off air.

Quote:

Days Before He Was Fired, Comey Asked for Money for Russia Investigation

James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, asked the Justice Department for a significant increase in money and personnel for the bureau’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the presidential election, according to three officials with knowledge of his request.

Mr. Comey asked for the resources during a meeting last week with Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general who wrote the Justice Department’s memo that was used to justify the firing of the F.B.I. director this week.
Mr. Comey then briefed members of Congress on the meeting in recent days.

NYT

The issue regarding the firing of FBI Director James Comey is not complicated. For a number of years, Russia has been undermining democracies around the world through increasingly sophisticated cyber-warfare. There is no question that they played a significant role in the 2016 U.S. elections in helping to elect Trump. In a bi-partisan approach, members of Congress have demanded to know whether the Trump campaign may have colluded with the Russians in that effort. Last week, Comey made it clear that there was an ongoing investigation into that question. The New York Times reported today that days before he was fired he requested a significant increase in resources to pursue that investigation. He was scheduled to appear before the Senate Intelligence Committee tomorrow. And yesterday he was fired. The key question is: What is Trump afraid of? Why did he want to torpedo Comey's investigation? We need an independently appointed special counsel to tell us that.