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anexplanationofunfortunateevents · 7 years

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investigations: an investigation

Having trouble keeping the different Trump investigations straight? TRICK QUESTION, everyone is! So here’s a primer.

The federal government, like the different state governments, is divided into three branches: the executive (the president, or the governor at the state level, and the various agencies), the legislative (Congress), and the courts. There are (tragically belated) investigations into Trump at each level.

There are two houses of Congress, the Senate and the House of Representatives. Both of those houses are divided up into committees which focus on different aspects of running the government. All committees contain members of both parties, but the chair of the committee and a majority of its members are controlled by the majority party. When you hear about the “ranking members” of a committee, it’s referring to the chairperson and the senior member of the minority party.

Among other powers, committees have broad powers of investigation. These investigations are not criminal. Law enforcement can open up a case based on something a congressional committee discovers, but the purpose is to learn more so that the government can serve the public better.

Russiagate has enough different angles that there are a few committees which could investigate it. Because both houses are run by Republicans, all the relevant committees are run by Republicans. That means some of the committees have formally taken a pass, and the committees which are ostensibly investigating it are mostly whiffing. Here are the ones you want to keep an eye on:

House Intelligence Committee: oversees the various spy agencies and other national security matters. This committee was responsible for the public hearing where the FBI director publicly confirmed that there was an investigation into whether the Trump campaign participated in the Russian attack on the 2016 election. That investigation came to a screeching halt when the Chairman Devin Nunes clowned himself over the “wiretapp” tweet. Nunes, who was also a part of the Trump transition clusterfuck, has stepped aside from this investigation. It is now, supposedly, back on track, under the leadership of the similarly boneheaded Trumper Representative Mike Conaway. The ranking Democrat is Adam Schiff, and I recommend paying attention if you get a chance to listen to an interview with him. He’s very precise, level-headed, and good at explaining this stuff.

Senate Intelligence Committee (abbreviated SSCI, jsyk): put on a charming little bipartisan cabaret last month. However, it’s recently been reported that Chairman Dick Richard Burr, also of the Trump transition team, has been starving it out behind the scenes.

Senate Judiciary Committee: oversees the justice system, including the Department of Justice and specifically the FBI. Its Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism says it will interview former acting attorney general Sally Yates on May 8th, though who knows.

Committees which could get off their asses on this but haven’t yet include the House and Senate Armed Forces Committees and the House Oversight Committee.

Democrats, and a (very small) handful of Republicans, have called for an independent commission modeled after the 9/11 commission. It hasn’t happened because an independent commission has to be created by a law, meaning it would have to be passed by the Republicans who are obstructing any investigation and then signed into law by the person whose campaign they are investigating, or with 2/3 of both houses overruling his veto.

BTW, this is why anyone currently pushing the “primary the imperfectly progressive Democrats!!” line is garbage. A frustrating red state Dem is still a vote to get the Democratic Party some real power to put the brakes on Trump, so we need to lay off and let them maximize their incumbency advantage in 2018.

In the executive branch, the FBI is investigating Russiagate. Right off the bat, this is of questionable value, given that FBI Director Comey threw the election to the person he’s investigating because he was afraid the intellectual luminaries at Red State would be mean to him. We just have to hope the ego trip of being the cop who brought down a president will appeal to Comey’s insatiable self-regard.

There are two tracks of investigation at the FBI. One is criminal. The other is counterintelligence – spyhunters. (That might sound like CIA stuff, but they work abroad. The FBI has to do the investigations into American citizens.) They don’t usually work together, but both are represented on a Trump-Russia task force.

Officially, the most we know about this investigation is what Director Comey told the House Intelligence Committee in March: this is a counterintelligence investigation which may uncover criminal activity. That said, a lot of commentary about this topic takes it for granted that crimes have been committed. Some terms you might see referenced occasionally:

The Logan Act prevents citizens from undermining American foreign policy by negotiating with foreign governments without authorization from the US government. This comes up in reference to General Michael Flynn’s attempt last December to undermine the sanctions the Obama Administration placed on Russia. You may also see the Logan Act referenced in regards to Junior having met with representatives of the Putin-backed Syrian dictator Assad during the campaign or a “back channel” meeting in early January between shadowy Trump associate Erik Prince and equally shadowy Russian representatives; however, as far as we know, these weren’t explicit negotiations with officials, so the Logan Act wouldn’t seem to apply. Nobody has ever been prosecuted under the Logan Act.

RICO is the racketeering law that was used to round up the mafia. People can be prosecuted or sued for RICO violations. Trump U was also a RICO case, with the victims suing for damages.

Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA): Americans who do political work for foreign governments have to register that job with the DOJ. Flynn and Manafort have “retroactively registered,” ie, are in hot water on this one.

Collusion is not a legal term or a term that the intelligence community uses. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use it! IMO it’s actually better to stay away from more technical terms until a legal case or authoritative report makes it official.

Treason is a legal term. It’s actually the only crime specified in the US Constitution. As fair as it is as a moral term, it’s hard to see how it would apply here, because we’re not at war with Russia.

Espionage is a crime which may or may not apply.

The Hatch Act forbids government employees from using their position to interfere with elections. Okay, not directly related to Trump-Russia, but worth remembering that we’re here because the person with ultimate authority over this investigation plays fast and loose with the law if it looks like Sean Hannity might hurt his fee-fees. (Snowflake.)

Who would bring a case to court is unclear. The Department of Justice is supposed to represent the people in these cases, but right now it’s run by racist cartoon villain Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who’s deep in this himself. Sessions (then senator from Alabama) was an early and important supporter of Trump, back to the primaries. On its own, that would just be evidence that he’s a rotten person. But – after his confirmation was forced through the Senate – it came out that he’d met with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, which he had explicitly denied during his confirmation hearing. That testimony is given under oath, which means that he committed perjury in front of the Senate, which is a violation of the federal laws he’s supposed to be enforcing. The meeting itself wouldn’t matter – it’s unusual for foreign ambassadors to meet with campaign staff, but not illegal – except Kislyak is also someone the CIA thinks is a spy. (Because there’s an open-and-shut case about a crime he committed on live television, Sessions has to realize that he’s first one in the dock if this house of cards does fall.)

There also isn’t anyone at the DOJ who can go over his head, because on March 10, all of the US district attorneys were told to pack their things. This is seriously abnormal, but it’s not illegal – unless it happened because someone was getting too close to a crime committed by someone high up the ladder, in which case, it’s obstruction of justice.

This is, arguably, why we have more than one set of authorities in the US. The Trumps are all New York residents. Trump Tower is in Manhattan, and the Trump companies are incorporated in New York. And New York hates Trump. He got walloped there in November by 20 points. He hasn’t been back to Trump Tower since Inauguration Day. New York also loves Hillary Clinton: after sending her to the Senate twice, they voted for her for president three times by a double digit margin. Nobody wants payback for last year more than New Yorkers.

New Yorkers also get to elect their state attorney general. Their current AG, Eric Schneiderman, has been hounding Trump for years. Days after Sessions cleared out the US attorneys, Schneiderman hired a New York assistant district attorney who specialized in corruption cases.

There’s a limit to what the state can do. National security is the federal government’s area, and Orange Julius himself can’t be brought up on state criminal charges. But Javanka, Junior, and Buster can, as can Manafort and the whole crew. Whatever seediness they’ve been up to is leverage to make them turn on each other. More importantly to Trump, all of his assets are in New York State. Money laundering, tax fraud, shady real estate deals ….all of these can get roped into NY’s state equivalent of RICO. (If you’re interested in these cases, @Khanoisseur on Twitter does some impressive open-source reporting.)

The courts don’t get involved until someone is arrested or files a lawsuit. There are plenty of lawsuits that are what you’d expect. An additional thing that’s new to a lot of people is the Emoluments Clause of the US Constitution, which says that the president can’t accept payments from foreign governments. Ethics watchdog groups have a pretty good case that Trump Hotels, which foreign diplomats can use as a way to curry favor, is a violation of this.

#us politics #us government #trump russia

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hollywoodjuliorivas · 6 years

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Go Ahead, Millennials, Destroy Us

By TIM KREIDERMARCH 2, 2018

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As with all historic tipping points, it seems inevitable in retrospect: Of course it was the young people, the actual victims of the slaughter, who have finally begun to turn the tide against guns in this country. Kids don’t have money and can’t vote, and until now burying a few dozen a year has apparently been a price that lots of Americans were willing to pay to hold onto the props of their pathetic role-playing fantasies. But they forgot what adults always forget: that our children grow up, and remember everything, and forgive nothing.

Those kids have suddenly understood how little their lives were ever worth to the people in power. And they’ll soon begin to realize how efficient and endless are the mechanisms of governance intended to deflect their appeals, exhaust their energy, deplete their passion and defeat them. But anyone who has ever tried to argue with adolescents knows that in the end they will have a thousand times more energy for that fight than you and a bottomless reservoir of moral rage that you burned out long ago.

Like most people in middle age, I regard young people with suspicion. The young — and the young at mind — tend to be uncompromising absolutists. They haven’t yet faced life’s heartless compromises and forfeitures, its countless trials by boredom and ethical Kobayashi Marus, or glumly watched themselves do everything they ever disapproved of.

I am creeped out by the increasing dogmatism and intolerance of millennials on the left; I felt a generational divide open up under me last year when everyone under 40 seemed to agree that Dana Schutz’s painting of Emmett Till in his coffin should be removed from the Whitney Biennial. When I was young it seemed the natural order of things that conservatives were the prudes and scolds who wanted books banned and exhibitions closed, while we liberals got to be the gadflies and iconoclasts. I know that whenever you disapprove of young people, you’re in the wrong, because you’re going to die and they’ll get to write history, but I just can’t help noticing that the liberal side isn’t much fun to be on anymore.

Yet this uprising of the young against the ossified, monolithic power of the National Rifle Association has reminded me that the flaws of youth — its ignorance, naïveté and passionate, Manichaean idealism — are also its strengths. Young people have only just learned that the world is an unfair hierarchy of cruelty and greed, and it still shocks and outrages them. They don’t understand how vast and intractable the forces that have shaped this world really are and still think they can change it. Revolutions have always been driven by the young.

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Ever since Columbine, almost 20 years ago, I’ve absorbed the news of more mass shootings than I can count with an ulcerating rage that gradually scabbed over into deadened cynicism. To those of us who have lived with certain grim realities our whole adult lives — the widening moat between the rich and the rest of us, the sclerotic influence of money on politics, the N.R.A.’s unassailable coalition of greed and fear — they seem like facts of life as unalterable as death itself.

I’d come to the conclusion that America has always been a violent nation, from our founding genocide to the slave labor that built the country to the arsenal, unprecedented in human history, that maintains our empire. We spend $60 billion a year on pets but won’t go to any inconvenience to keep second graders from getting slaughtered. Despite all our competitive parenting and mommy machismo and trophy kids, we don’t really give a damn about our children — by which I mean, about one another’s. When a race stops caring for its young, its extinction is not only imminent but well deserved. But maybe my bitter complacence about our civilization’s irreversible decline is just a projection of my feelings about my own.

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Power is like money: imaginary, entirely dependent upon belief. Most of the power of institutions lies in the faith people have in them. And cynicism is also a kind of faith: the faith that nothing can change, that those institutions are corrupt beyond all accountability, immune to intimidation or appeal. Harvey Weinstein ultimately wasn’t the one enforcing the code of silence around his predations: It was all the agents and managers and friends and colleagues who warned actresses that he was too powerful to accuse.

Once people stopped believing in his invulnerability, his destruction was as instantaneous as the middle school queen being made a pariah. Watch: As soon as the first N.R.A. A-rated congressman loses an election, other politicians’ deeply held convictions about Second Amendment rights will start rapidly evolving.

The students of Parkland are like veterans coming home from the bloody front of the N.R.A.’s de facto war on children. They’ve seen their friends, teachers and coaches gunned down in the halls. To them, powerful Washington lobbyists and United States senators suddenly look like what they are: cheesy TV spokesmodels for murder weapons. It has been inspiring and thrilling to watch furious, cleareyed teenagers shame and vilify gutless politicians and soul-dead lobbyists for their complicity in the murders of their friends. Last week Wayne LaPierre was reduced to gibbering like Gen. Jack D. Ripper in “Dr. Strangelove” about a “socialist” takeover and “hardening” our schools. You could see the whites all around his irises. That look is fear.

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One of my students once asked me, when I was teaching the writing of political op-ed essays, why adults should listen to anything young people had to say about the world. My answer: because they’re afraid of you. They don’t understand you. And they know you’re going to replace them.

My message, as an aging Gen X-er to millennials and those coming after them, is: Go get us. Take us down — all those cringing provincials who still think climate change is a hoax, that being transgender is a fad or that “socialism” means purges and re-education camps. Rid the world of all our outmoded opinions, vestigial prejudices and rotten institutions. Gender roles as disfiguring as foot-binding, the moribund and vampiric two-party system, the savage theology of capitalism — rip it all to the ground. I for one can’t wait till we’re gone. I just wish I could live to see the world without us.

Tim Kreider is the author of the essay collections “I Wrote This Book Because I Love You” and “We Learn Nothing.”

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