Month: May 2018

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

The Hill, what Capitol staffers read on the john when they are done reading Politico, should be ashamed of itself for publishing the complete and total bullshit article “Stopping Robert Mueller to protect us all.” This article, written weirdly by former Clintonite Mark Penn, is obviously a stalking horse for the current political strategy of Trump and his demon spawn Rudy Giuliani. It is embarrassing to read something that is so comical in its effort to make us believe that the evil “Deep State” is “desperate” to bring down Trump. Penn writes:

With this report on the way and congressional investigators beginning to zero in on the lack of hard, verified evidence for starting the Trump probe, current and former intelligence and Justice Department officials are dumping everything they can think of to save their reputations.

A quick Google search belies this dumb accusation. If anything, Mueller has been quite successful in the last year and he has plenty of reason to keep going in the days, weeks and, if need be, years ahead.

Here’s some more.

But it is backfiring. They started by telling the story of Alexander Downer, an Australian diplomat, as having remembered a bar conversation with George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign. But how did the FBI know they should talk to him? That’s left out of their narrative. Downer’s signature appears on a $25 million contribution to the Clinton Foundation. You don’t need much imagination to figure that he was close with Clinton Foundation operatives who relayed information to the State Department, which then called the FBI to complete the loop. This wasn’t intelligence. It was likely opposition research from the start.

To quote Hillary Clinton during the Bengazhi hearings, “What difference does it make?”

So what if it was oppo. That doesn’t change the fact that Trump may have colluded with a hostile foreign power to rig a presidential election. It makes me apoplectic that this trash that was spewed out of the FOX News Bullshit Mountain even got written. This is all part of a concerted effort on the part of the Trump – Giuliani nexus to prepare us all for God-only-knows-what.

Even more bullshit:

Time and time again, investigators came up empty. Even several sting operations with an FBI spy we just learned about failed to produce a Delorean-like video with cash on the table. But rather than close the probe, the deep state just expanded it. All they had were a few isolated contacts with Russians and absolutely nothing related to Trump himself, yet they pressed forward. Egged on by Steele, they simply believed Trump and his team must be dirty. They just needed to dig deep enough.

If the fate of the Republic wasn’t at stake, I would laugh. But the time for us to laugh about Trump’s corruption and obstruction is very much over. What’s weird to me is people are willing to engulf themselves in the flames of the Trump pier for, what? Access to power? I mean, really, it’s not like VP Mike Pence is going to really change anything. In fact, if you’re all that concerned about “owning libs,” Pence has an actual ideology that Trump lacks. As Jim Comey confidant Benjamin Wittes famously quipped Trump is “malevolence mitigated only by his incompetence.” Pence is competent and would have an ideology beyond whatever he happened to spew in a tweet that morning.

Here more from the piece that leaves me astonished at its tone-deafness.

This process must now be stopped, preferably long before a vote in the Senate. Rather than a fair, limited and impartial investigation, the Mueller investigation became a partisan, open-ended inquisition that, by its precedent, is a threat to all those who ever want to participate in a national campaign or an administration again.

I am not the type of person to protest. But I can tell you for a fact that if “this….process…stopped” in the guise of Trump firing Robert Mueller without cause I will hit the streets. I would like to think other like-minded people would join me. I am not so naive as to think it would really matter in the end — even well-heeled people are apologists for Trump and the system is so broken that the book The Plot Against America is starting to look more like a documentary as opposed to a counter-factual novel. But this bullshit by Penn doesn’t exactly help the situation.

This part is spews so directly from the dark recesses of the surreal bullshit factory that runs the country right now that I feel astonished it was published.

The president’s lawyers need to extend their new aggressiveness from words to action, filing complaints with Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility on the failure of Mueller and Rosenstein to recuse themselves, and going into court to question the tactics of the special counsel, from selective prosecutions on unrelated matters, illegally seizing Government Services Administration emails, covering up the phone texts of FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, and operating without a scope approved by the attorney general. (The regulations call for the attorney general to recuse himself from the investigation but appear to still leave him responsible for the scope.)

The emails between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page are widely seen as a non-issue by anyone who hasn’t drunk the Trump Koolaide and it’s embarrassing that The Hill would allow a writer to even mention it. Maybe the “secret society” was off the day they decided to publish it.

Mueller has done more than enough in the last year to prove he has earned the right to be left alone for the foreseeable future. Let’s just see where this leads. If we are still a Republic and not a “managed democracy” like they have in Russia, we have to do that. Trump may want to be an American Caligula, but I’d like to think we haven’t reached that point yet. I still have hope that America’s over two centuries of experimenting in self-rule hasn’t failed yet.

If we follow Penn’s advice, we are little more than a banana republic where rules and laws change at the whim of the Dear Leader. So, if anything, we have to protect Robert Mueller to protect ourselves, not the opposite.

Shelton Bumgarner is a writer and photographer living in Richmond, Va. He can be reached at migukin (at) gmail (dot) com.