All You Need To Know About The Robert Mueller Hearings, Aside From MAYBE YOU SHOULD READ HIS F*CKING REPORT
Gonna be a shitshow, y'all!
Hooray, Robert Mueller is testifying before Congress on Wednesday! Have you decided what you're wearing? (Alan Dershowitz, we already know your answer is NOT PANTIES, so you don't have to weigh in here.)
In advance of the hearing, we are getting all kinds of reporting about what to expect and what Congress is doing to get ready. Did you know that, according to CNN, the Judiciary Committee is going to focus on Trump's obstruction of justice, whereas the Intel Committee is going to focus on Trump and Russia? That's quite a surprise to anybody who doesn't have the foggiest idea what either of those committees does for a living! Meanwhile, the Republicans will be playing with their poo on live television and trying to get Mueller to admit that Hillary Benghazi Secret FBI Lovers Unmasking Seth Rich Comey Deep State Dossier Whitewater Travelgate Pizzagate Devin Nunes Is Smart.
Or something. Here's Mark Meadows, with a witty retort from Yr Wonkette:
@RepMarkMeadows Hey Mark, if the conspiracy theories you found in Nunes’s butt are real, I’m sure Mueller would be… https: //t.co/zHFGqOlnQ5
— Evan Hurst (@Evan Hurst) 1563657281.0
OK, Mark.
CNN reports that large-faced GOP moron Rep. Matt Gaetz says Robert Mueller is the "LeBron James of using 300 words to say absolutely nothing," which says more about young Matthew's difficulty with comprehension than it does about Mueller. Meanwhile, Devin Nunes is very worried Mueller is going to try to "embellish," so we guess Nunes is going to make loud mooing sounds as much as possible, to prevent Mueller from "embellishing."
The Democrats, thank God, appear to have a plan, and have been studying A LOT for this test:
Lawmakers are re-reading the Mueller report and watching his past congressional appearances, while committee staff are working to divide up the questions for lawmakers in a way that will be logical to millions of television viewers unlikely to have read the 448-page Mueller report . [...]
Democrats on both committees are preparing a carefully tailored script to split up questions among their members to try to present a cohesive narrative illuminating the details, though there is nervousness among some Democrats that their colleagues could go off script.
DON'T GO OFF SCRIPT, ASSWADS.
Rep. Steve Cohen, a Tennessee Democrat, said he was working with the committee but also had his own questions. "There will be a question or two that will be Steve Cohen and not the team," he said.
STEVE? WHAT DID WE JUST SAY?
We are of course kidding our own personal congressman, who is on the Judiciary Committee. (OR ARE WE?)
For the Judiciary Committee, the focus will reportedly be on five of the 18,000 instances of criminal obstruction Donald Trump committed in order to interfere with the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and his campaign's embrace of it, as laid out in Volume II of the Mueller Report. We should hear a lot about Trump's witness tampering (Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen, Michael Flynn, and so forth), and all his attempts to end the investigation by firing James Comey and trying to make Corey Lewandowski (a private citizen) and former White House counsel Don McGahn fire Jeff Sessions (and then asking McGahn to lie about it). It would probably be good for them to also spend some time on the fact that Trump blatantly lied in his written answers to the take-home test Mueller gave him. Oh yeah, and it would be great if they ask some questions about the ongoing obstruction of justice being committed by Attorney General Bill Barr, whose constant lies about the contents of the Mueller Report have made this hearing necessary.
The Intel Committee, meanwhile, will focus on all kinds of Russia shit, from the improper contacts to the WikiLeaks to the Trump Tower Treason meeting -- basically everything in Volume I. We'll have more on this tomorrow, but if they're smart, they will really try to nail Mueller down on what was happening with Paul Manafort as the investigation came to a close, as Manafort broke his plea agreement, and so on. We are fairly certain that if Manafort hadn't obstructed the investigation so much, there would have been a conspiracy charge. A big one. ERIC SWALWELL IF YOU'RE LISTENING AND WE KNOW YOU ARE BECAUSE YOU FOLLOW US ON TWITTER.
Oh yeah, and Intel ought to also ask about the counter-intel findings that came out of Mueller's investigations, the ones Bill Barr has so resolutely tried to hide from the committee, findings that were not in the Mueller Report. You know, questions like "Is Donald Trump a literal actual Russian agent, or does he just play one on TV?" Committee chair Adam Schiff seemed to suggest at the Aspen Security Forum last week that questions like that won't be off the table.
Of course, as astute readers know, the important thing in the Mueller hearing won't be whether he breaks new news that's not in his report. He might, but he's signaled that he intends to stay within the boundaries of his report, not to conceal, but because he says he put everything that's important in the damn document, so why don't you fuckin' read it already? But as Schiff pointed out on "Face The Nation" this weekend, and as Wonkette has noted many times before, what's important here is that Mueller is going to bring his report to life by speaking to what's in it, for an America that is better at watching "The Voice" than it is at reading words. And as Schiff noted, America needs to hear it from Mueller precisely because Bill Barr, Donald Trump, most of the other elected Republicans in Washington, and the glue-munchers on Fox News and talk radio have been lying about what's in the report, saying NO COLLUSION, NO OBSTRUCTION, when the report found many instances of obstruction and a veritable kilo-fuck of collusion and improper contacts.
Or as House Judiciary Committee Chair Jerry Nadler put it on Fox News this weekend:
"We think it's very important for the American people to hear directly what the facts are because this is a President who has violated the law six ways from Sunday," Nadler told Fox News host Chris Wallace. "If anyone else had been accused of what the report finds the President had done, they would have been indicted."
Join us on Wednesday for liveblogging! No matter what happens, it should be a day of gladness and joy!
[ CNN / Talking Points Memo ]
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All You Need To Know About The Robert Mueller Hearings, Aside From MAYBE YOU SHOULD READ HIS F*CKING REPORT
Great to see that the Dems are working together on their questions. Now if they could get their committee counsel and other legally trained staffers to do the questioning.
During Watergate, Sam Dash’s and Fred Thompson’s questions did not make Senator Sam Ervin or Senator Howard Baker look weak. Instead, their professional incisive questions played a key role in making the hearings a success, which in turn made these Senators into legendary figures to this day. Giving it to lawyer staffers actually could reveal the House members’ wisdom and lower some of their own political risks, and most importantly, the expert lawyers just might get Mueller to correct some of his errors, fix some of the loopholes, and reveal something that changes the trajectory of the report from dud to bombshell.
The House Democrats can treat the hearing like a campaign event, making sure they each have their five minutes of airtime, with all the risks of that format falling flat. Or they have a chance to be remembered more like the Watergate committees: as wise and effective public servants who stepped back when it mattered for the country.
https://www.politico.com/ma...
I can only hope it will bring joy. I feel like we're going to get another rat fucking all over again.