Badass Judge Tells Idiot Trump DOJ To FORK OVER The EVERYTHING

Oh yes, also the impeachment inquiry is real, despite what you might have heard from Trump and Republicans.

Something very big has happened! No, not Trump golfing while the US military killed a big bad terrorist, and then staging a photo op to make it look like he personally shot the big bad terrorist in the middle of 5th Avenue. This big thing is a beautiful court ruling, a perfect court ruling, everybody who has seen it says it's perfect, telling Donald Trump he is full of shit and demanding that his servile Department of Justice hand over the 6(e) grand jury information from the Mueller Report. Also it calls Trump's Justice Department a total fuckin' idiot multiple times, in the most judicial language possible.

You love to see it.

The ruling came from DC District Court Judge Beryl Howell, and obviously it will be appealed, but it lays down some serious markers. Like for instance, it states definitively that yes , the impeachment inquiry is real, and it is a "judicial proceeding," despite White House lawyer Pat Cipollone's hilarious idiot letter and Republicans in Congress weeping and gnashing their teeth and calling it fake. Howell says in response to a brief filed by GOP "Hee-Haw" idiot Rep. Doug Collins, ranking member on the House Judiciary Committee, that "A House resolution has never, in fact, been required" to make an impeachment proceeding real, and calls arguments to the contrary "fatally flawed" and "cherry-picked." She further notes that " every other court to have considered releasing grand jury material to Congress in connection with an impeachment investigation has authorized such disclosure." So have fun with your appeal, dudes!

She calls Bill Barr's Justice Department a dumbass for the first time on the second page:

The Department of Justice ("DOJ") claims that existing law bars disclosure to the Congress of grand jury information. [...] DOJ is wrong.

DOJ. IS. WRONG.

Y'ALL. ARE. DUMB. ASSHOLES.

Elsewhere Howell refers to DOJ's arguments as "unpersuasive," says they are "strain[ing]," and even says they "misread" the cases they cite to try to make their dumb unpersuasive straining arguments about how Nixon got a raw deal. 

Howell writes, "Congress need not redo the nearly two years of effort spent on the Special Counsel's investigation, nor risk being misled by witnesses, who may have provided information to the grand jury and the Special Counsel that varies from what they tell [the House Judiciary Committee]." And she seems not very amused by the Trump administration's lack of cooperation with Congress, saying, "The reality is that DOJ and the White House have been openly stonewalling the House's efforts to get information by subpoena and by agreement, and the White House has flatly stated that the Administration will not cooperate with congressional requests for information."

So cough it up, fuckers.

And what, specifically, do they need to cough up? Well, if you refer to your pocket copy of the Mueller Report that you carry alongside your pocket Constitution, you'll see that there is some serious redacted grand jury stuff involving some major episodes that we still don't fully understand.

Quoting directly from the ruling:

• "discussion of the Trump Tower meeting"

• "then-candidate Trump's discussion with associates about releases of hacked documents"

• "Manafort's contacts with [Konstantin] Kilimnik"

In other words, there are grand jury redactions involving Donald Trump Jr.'s Trump Tower Russian treason meeting; about Trump's foreknowledge of WikiLeaks releasing documents Russia hacked and stole for the benefit of Donald Trump; and about why the hell Paul Manafort was passing internal Trump campaign Rust Belt polling data to his associate Konstantin Kilimnik, who has been assessed to have links with Russian intelligence, in order to pass that info to various Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs, who were doing (STILL UNCLEAR BUT PROBABLY STEALING AN ELECTION) with it.

If you'll recall, these are some of the precise areas where it mattered that Paul Manafort was pretending to cooperate with the investigation, but actually was just lying to Mueller the whole time. Howell notes that according to Robert Mueller, some folks (MANAFORT, for example, and also Erik Prince) were particularly bad about deleting their secret communications about the episodes in question, which rendered Mueller unable to reach a full conclusion on just exactly how Russia conspired with certain Trump folks (MANAFORT, for example!) to steal an American election. Or as Mueller put it, he couldn't "rule out the possibility that the unavailable information would shed additional light on (or cast in a new light) the events described in the report."

There are also grand jury redactions about Donald Trump's answers to Mueller's written questions, some of which were lies, and also Trump campaign foreign policy idiot Carter Page's trips to Moscow.

Another interesting thing Judge Howell made sure to write down in her ruling is that, though Robert Mueller obeyed the dumb memo from DOJ that says you can't indict a sitting president, it's not like that is actually a law or in the Constitution or anything: "This OLC conclusion has never been adopted, sanctioned, or in any way approved by a court." She is just saying. (Meanwhile, Trump's lawyers are literally arguing that if he shot a baby on 5th Avenue, the cops couldn't even intervene to make him stop shooting babies.)

In summary and in conclusion, Judge Beryl Howell gives the Department of Justice until October 30 to cough it all the fuck up, and signs off by saying "CONSTITUTION!" and "SHUT UP YOUR FACE" and "GIVE IT," just kidding, that is what Wonkette would say if we were a federal judge, and that is possibly a contributing factor for why we are not a federal judge.

She might have been thinking it, though.

[ Howell ruling ]

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