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FOCUS: White House as Crime Scene: How Robert Mueller Is Closing in on Trump |
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Saturday, 05 August 2017 10:48 |
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Borger writes: “The legal net around Donald Trump’s beleaguered presidency tightened dramatically this week with news that a grand jury has been established a few hundred yards from the White House, to pursue evidence of collusion with the Kremlin.”
Donald Trump and Steve Bannon in the Oval Office. (photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
White House as Crime Scene: How Robert Mueller Is Closing in on Trump
By Julian Borger, Guardian UK
05 August 17
There is a grand jury in Washington DC. The special counsel’s team is full of experts in financial crime. On Russia, the president can feel the net closing
 he legal net around Donald Trump’s beleaguered presidency tightened dramatically this week with news that a grand jury has been established a few hundred yards from the White House, to pursue evidence of collusion with the Kremlin.
It is a troubling development for the president, for several reasons. In the US legal system, a grand jury has broad powers to issue subpoenas, and ultimately indictments, at the request of prosecutors.
The special counsel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 US election, former FBI chief Robert Mueller, had been using a sitting grand jury in Virginia to authorise his team’s demands for documents and witnesses. The convening of a separate grand jury in Washington suggests the Mueller team – working in a suite of offices a few blocks’ walk from where the 20-odd jurors sit – is going to be making extensive use of it. It will not be hospitable terrain for the president. Trump won only 4% of the vote in the District of Columbia.
“This sets the scene of action for criminal trials, where charges will be laid, in the worst possible jurisdiction for Trump,” said Scott Horton, a lecturer at Columbia Law School. “Compared to Virginia, Republicans in DC are few and far between.”
The grand jury is also clear evidence that the inquiry is widening, not tapering off. It suggests that the special counsel is exploring possible crimes committed inside the District of Columbia.
Mueller’s investigators are reported by the New York Times to have asked the White House for documents related to the administration’s first, short-lived national security advisor, Michael Flynn, who resigned after being found to have concealed the full nature of his contacts with the Russian ambassador to Washington, and who is also under scrutiny for his lobbying work for Turkey during the campaign.
Meanwhile, a report from Vox that senior FBI officials have been told to consider themselves potential witnesses in an investigation of Trump for obstruction of justice. The former FBI director James Comey, Mueller’s successor in the post, has testified that Trump tried to put pressure on him to drop the Flynn investigation.
After Comey rebuffed the pressure and refused to swear personal loyalty to Trump, he was fired, on May 9. Trump denies trying to coerce Comey into dropping the case but this is not simply one man’s word against another’s. Comey made extensive notes and kept an inner circle of top FBI aides informed of daily developments.
In the investigation into the obstruction of justice, the White House is the potential crime scene. That is where Trump contrived to be alone on two occasions with Comey and where the alleged arm-twisting took place.
In the Watergate scandal, to which the Russian influence affair is drawing inevitable comparisons, it was the cover-up that ultimately proved fatal to Richard Nixon’s presidency. It is increasingly possible the same fate could befall Trump. On Tuesday, after adamant denials from Trump’s lawyer, the White House admitted that Trump had “weighed in as any father would” in drafting a misleading statement about his son’s June 2016 meeting with a Russian lawyer with strong Kremlin and intelligence links. The statement said the meeting was about adoptions of Russian children by US nationals. An email exchange released later by Donald Trump Jr showed that the Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya was in fact offering damaging material on Hillary Clinton.
Reuters has reported that the grand jury in Washington had already issued subpoenas connected to that meeting at Trump Tower in New York, another sign that the investigation is closing in on the Trump family. Trump Jr’s rapid emailed response to the Russian offer of dirt on Clinton – “If it’s what you say I love it” – suggests at least an appetite for collusion, like his father’s own call a month later, in July 2016, for Russia to find thousands of Clinton’s “missing” emails. The Trump campaign later denied that public appeal represented an encouragement for Moscow to hack his opponent’s private server. Trump Jr has claimed nothing came of the June meeting with Veselnitskaya.
Grand jury subpoenas could oblige the president’s son and other participants at the meeting, including Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and his former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, to testify under oath about what really happened in Trump Tower.
Manafort, who ran the campaign for three months in the summer of 2016, has been widely reported to be a focal point of the Mueller inquiry and the FBI investigation before that. Having worked as an adviser to Moscow-backed figures in Ukraine, he represents one of the links between Trump and Moscow. CNN reported on Friday that investigators had found intercepts of Russian operatives referring to conversations with Manafort about coordinating the release of information damaging to Clinton possibly hacked from the Democratic National Committee.
A spokesman for Manafort, Jason Maloni, rejected the report. “Paul Manafort did not collude with the Russian government to undermine the 2016 election or to hack the DNC,” Maloni said in an email to the Guardian. “Other than that comment, we aren’t going to respond to anonymous officials illegally peddling secondhand conspiracy theories. But the Justice Department, and the courts if necessary, should hold someone to account for the flood of unlawful government leaks targeting Mr Manafort.”
‘This is a wood chipper’
It is evident, however, that the scrutiny of Manafort, the now infamous Trump Tower meeting and the obstruction of justice issue are just fragments of a far bigger inquiry. Almost all the 16 lawyers now on Mueller’s team are specialists in money-laundering and other financial crimes, suggesting that the investigation will spend much of its time unwinding the complexities of the Trump and Kushner real estate empires, looking for where the money has come from to keep them afloat. The latest hire, Greg Andres, is a former deputy assistant attorney general who used to run a unit that targeted foreign bribery.
“The Mueller dream-team now has the top 14 financial crimes prosecutors in America,” said Malcolm Nance, a former US intelligence officer and the author of a book on Moscow’s role in the 2016 US election, The Plot to Hack America. Nance predicted that the Mueller investigation would look into every corner of Trump and Kushner’s past business dealings.
“The wheels of justice grind finely and slow but this is a wood chipper, and all these various items and going to get fed into it – Flynn, [Jared] Kushner, Trump, Manafort and anyone who has been assigned to the White House over this period,” Nance said. “Their entire lives are going to be subjected to scrutiny. No one is getting out unscathed. That’s why Trump is so terrified.”
In a New York Times interview last month, Trump appeared to suggest that a probe of his financial dealings beyond direct links with Russia would represent a “violation”, a possible red line which Mueller should not cross. He would not be drawn on whether he would seek to have the special counsel sacked in that eventuality, “because I don’t think it’s going to happen”.
Firing Mueller would come at a high price, triggering uproar in Washington, alienating some Republicans in Congress. Two bipartisan bills were drafted this week aimed at blocking Trump from doing just that.
Even if the president managed to rid himself of the troublesome special counsel, he would have no guarantee that he could kill off the investigation. The work of other members of the team and of the grand juries would continue.
Trump has also been reported to be exploring the possibility of issuing pardons to family members and other associates found to have broken the law, including even pardoning himself, a stretch of executive prerogative into uncharted territory.
For now, his strategy is to seek to drain the legitimacy of the special counsel and the FBI, ridiculing the investigation as a witch hunt. His supporters are counter-investigating the Mueller team, looking for weaknesses and points of leverage and portraying the investigators as operatives of an amorphous “deep state”.
“They can’t beat us at the voting booths, so they’re trying to cheat you out of the future and the future that you want,” Trump told a rally in West Virginia on Thursday, fueling the mood of paranoia among his most committed supporters.
That strategy looks ahead to an endgame in which the Mueller investigation comes into its conclusion, next year or possibly even later than that. The grand juries could issue indictments of Trump associates along the way, but when it comes to the president himself, Mueller’s judgment will most likely come in the form of a report to Congress.
It will then be up to the House of Representatives whether to proceed with impeachment and then the Senate to decide his guilt. Those will be political judgements. Until now, only a few Republicans have broken ranks openly against Trump.
The president’s general approval ratings have slid to the mid-30s, but they are still high among his core supporters in battleground states, who believe fervently in “deep state” conspiracies. Any Republicans voting for impeachment would have to watch their back. The unfolding investigation could topple a president, or it could just as easily divide and wound the country even more grievously that it is now.
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Saturday, 05 August 2017 08:38 |
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Cole writes: “Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller has empaneled a grand jury in the investigation of Trump’s ties to Russia. The Grand Jury in turn has already issued a subpoena with regard to the meeting of Don Trump Jr.”
Robert S. Mueller. (photo: Getty Images)
Trump’s Worst Nightmare: Mueller’s Grand Jury Subpoenas Russia Documents
By Juan Cole, Informed Comment
05 August 17
 pecial Prosecutor Robert Mueller has empaneled a grand jury in the investigation of Trump’s ties to Russia. The Grand Jury in turn has already issued a subpoena with regard to the meeting of Don Trump Jr. and other senior Trump advisors June 9 of 2016 with Natalia Veselnitskaya. Trump is clearly under investigation for obstruction with regard to the latter meeting, since he allegedly wrote a statement for Don Jr. to be read out for the public, in which he had his son deny that the meeting was campaign oriented, saying it was about adoption.
The mention of adoption is a tell. When Congress enacted a law permitting the sanctioning of high Russian officials around Vladimir Putin (the Magnitsky Act) in 2012, Putin’s response was to forbid Americans from adopting Russian babies. When Trump senior had his son say the meeting was about adoption, he was revealing that it was in part about the repeal of the Magnitsky Act. The Russians who set up the meeting, the Agalarovs, promised Trump Jr dirt on Hillary Clinton (presumably gathered by hackers, whom Putin once called “patriotic.”)
It now seems clear that Don Jr. released the email chain around that meeting in order to protect himself from going to jail, since his father had been imposing on him press releases about the meeting that distorted what happened and so may have involved obstruction of justice.
The Emoluments clause of the Constitution forbids politicians to accept anything of value from a foreign power. Some legal analysts have suggested that if the Trump campaign did receive significant help from Russia, even in the form of information, it could meet the definition of an emolument.
Mueller appears to think there is something to the story of Trump’s collusion with Russia during the campaign. The Veselnitskaya meeting alone is pretty strong evidence in this regard. But Mueller is also investigating Trump’s finances, including the possibility that Trump used his New York real Estate holdings for money laundering for Russian concerns. For Mueller to zero in on Trump’s business affairs is The Donald’s worst nightmare, and he tried to make it a red line, to no avail.
Ironically, Trump was just forced by Congress to sign new tough sanctions on Russia into law. The Putin team seem to have been hurt and confused. It is almost as though they knew nothing about the separation of powers and expected Trump to erase the Magnitsky Act by presidential fiat.
According to Interfax/ BBC Monitoring, Igor Sechin, the head of the Russian oil corporation Rosneft, complained, “Even the US president has said that the bill [on sanctions] is wrong. He objects it but signs it. What else can I add? Of course, the law is wrong, they understand it themselves,” Rosneft and Sechin are both under US sanctions.
Russian prime minister Dmitry Medvedev lamented this state of affairs on Facebook [BBC Monitoring]:
“the Trump administration has demonstrated complete impotence, handing over executive powers to Congress in a most humiliating manner. This changes the balance of forces in US political circles.”
“What does this mean for them? The American establishment has comprehensively outplayed Trump. The president is not happy over the new sanctions, but he could not not sign off the law. The new sanctions move is, above all, yet another way of reining in Trump. There will be more moves, the ultimate purpose of which is his removal from office.”
So Medvedev is putting his money on Mueller to dig up the kind of dirt that will get Trump impeached. And there is something guilty about his performance.
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Saturday, 05 August 2017 08:18 |
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Funes writes: “On July 27, 2016, the Standing Rock Sioux filed a lawsuit against the Army Corps of Engineers for authorizing the construction of the 1,172-mile Dakota Access pipeline. Just over a year later, the project has been completed and carries crude oil from North Dakota’s Bakken oil fields to an export terminal in Illinois. The case is still pending, and continues to be the tribe’s last hope to protect its water and land.”
The water protectors holding their ground, fearless. (photo: Standing Rock Rising/Facebook)
The Standing Rock Lawsuit Started a Year Ago. Here’s Where We Are Now
By Yessenia Funes, Yes! Magazine
05 August 17
A recent victory has sent the Army Corps of Engineers back to analyze the environmental justice effects of the Dakota Access pipeline.
 n July 27, 2016, the Standing Rock Sioux filed a lawsuit against the Army Corps of Engineers for authorizing the construction of the 1,172-mile Dakota Access pipeline. Just over a year later, the project has been completed and carries crude oil from North Dakota’s Bakken oil fields to an export terminal in Illinois. The case is still pending, and continues to be the tribe’s last hope to protect its water and land.
The lawsuit alleged that authorization of the pipeline violated the Clean Water Act, Rivers and Harbors Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act by failing to adequately conduct an efficient environmental assessment and skipping an environmental impact statement (EIS) altogether.
“If history is to repeat itself, it doesn’t look good for us,” says Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Chairman Dave Archambault II. “But that doesn’t mean we don’t have hope.”
The lawsuit has now been joined by the Cheyenne River Sioux and the Yankton and Oglala Sioux tribes, but at its heart, the case remains the same since its initial filing, said lead attorney Jan Hasselman, who represents the Standing Rock Sioux on behalf of nonprofit environmental law firm Earthjustice. He’s been arguing that the $3.8 billion energy project ignores treaty rights and needs further environmental review. The goal is that U.S. District Court Judge James E. Boasberg will rule in favor of an EIS and pause pipeline operations indefinitely, and, ultimately, stop them completely.
In December, pipeline opponents almost secured the EIS under former President Barack Obama when the Army Corps of Engineers announced it would prepare the statement and not permit the pipeline to cross beneath the Lake Oahe crossing on the Missouri River, an area of cultural, religious, and spiritual significance to the tribe.
It was a near victory. With the EIS secured, the court shelved the lawsuit, but there was more bubbling beneath the surface. Dakota Access launched a counter lawsuit once the Obama administration requested the EIS, and Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration loomed on the horizon. The lawyers, the tribe, and even the court knew the situation could change drastically.
“The court was pretty explicit that this could be undone,” Hasselman said. And it was.
Trump rescinded the EIS and issued the final easement across Lake Oahe in February. Immediately, the attorneys amended their initial complaint to include the final easement. Things moved along quickly from there, Hasselman explained. For the first time, the tribe had something concrete to contest, not something they were asking the courts to prevent.
“We were finally able to put those environmental review issues and treaty issues up front and center,” Hasselman said. Until then, the case was essentially in “pause mode.”
Then in June, Judge Boasberg found that the Corps had not sufficiently considered the pipeline’s environmental effects or environmental justice impacts when issuing its permit, and remanded the case back to the EIS process to reconsider its analysis. This is the first time Earthjustice is aware of such an environmental justice ruling.
Boasberg’s recent decision offers DAPL’s opponents hope, but a favorable outcome is anything but assured. A pipeline has never before been stopped with a lawsuit, Hasselman said. “The legal and regulatory infrastructure is badly broken. You just don’t have the big overarching federal permits for a crude oil pipeline that you have in a lot of other contexts.” Unlike natural gas pipelines, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission regulates a pipeline’s terms and conditions of transport, but not its actual construction and operation.
Earthjustice didn’t take up the case because it believed the court held the answer but, rather, because it recognized the political power such a case could build. To that end, it has surpassed expectations.
“What I had in mind was substantially more modest than what happened,” Hasselman said. He had hoped that 50 people would show up to court and they’d end up on the evening news. He wasn’t expecting the iconic fight for indigenous sovereignty that Standing Rock has become.
The Dakota Access pipeline is now a matter of global interest. More than 380 tribes around the world—from New Zealand’s M?ori to the Ecuadorian Amazon’s Kichwa—came forward to stand with the water protectors. “That’s a very significant time in history: when the tribes come together collectively and unite and say, Enough is enough,” Archambault said.
The tribe’s effort became a movement with the support of spirit and prayer camps outside the reservation—including the Sacred Stone and Oceti Sakowin camps—and a 1,500-mile run to Washington, D.C., in which about 30 Native American youth delivered a petition with more than 140,000 signatures to the Army Corps headquarters demanding it halt the pipeline’s construction.
Although this attention hasn’t influenced the lawsuit, Hasselman said, it legitimized the movement. Once the world set its eyes on Standing Rock, it could no longer ignore that the historic violent treatment of indigenous people isn’t a thing of the past—it continues today.
Now? Hasselman thinks they have a shot. “We have an uphill struggle in persuading the court to shut down the pipeline while the remand process is underway, and we have an uphill struggle persuading the Army Corps to do a legitimate and appropriate analysis on remand, but we’re all working 24/7 to make that happen,” he said.
Judge Boasberg is set to decide in September whether to pause pipeline operations while the Corps continues its review, and court proceedings are ongoing as both parties make their arguments. Until then, the tribe will see its challengers in court.
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Black August and the Unmasking of the US Police State |
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Friday, 04 August 2017 14:08 |
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Ball writes: "Much like a credit card that finances a lifestyle far beyond our means, prison has long been central to maintaining a certain racial, social and class structure in the United States and masking social contradictions."
Black Lives Matter protesters. (photo: Kena Netancur/Getty)
Black August and the Unmasking of the US Police State
By Jared A. Ball, teleSUR
04 August 17
Black August, paradoxically, shines a light on the contradictions of a country that never was, yet must always be.
 uch like a credit card that finances a lifestyle far beyond our means, prison has long been central to maintaining a certain racial, social and class structure in the United States and masking social contradictions. Mass incarceration helps to obscure stagnant wages for labor, and enormous profits for bosses and owners and a low-wage, captive workforce — quite literally — that answers our customer service calls, produces our furniture and clothing and, with their ancillary associates in policing and the courts, exists as fodder for TV cop dramas, sitcoms, movies and documentaries.
All of that product makes a ton of money for the prison, media, and other industries, and, just as importantly, helps sharpen the cultural narratives which defines who is “good,” and who is “innocent” and who is “guilty” just by their mere presence.
Black August refers to the coordinated efforts of U.S. political prisoners — or more accurately prisoners of war — to “unmask” their jailers and the interests on whose behalf they toil, and to commemorate, study and learn from the history of Black liberation struggles in this country. Specifically, as recounted in the history of Black August by the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement:
Black August originated in the concentration camps of California to honor fallen Freedom Fighters, Jonathan Jackson, George Jackson, William Christmas, James McClain and Khatari Gaulden. Jonathan Jackson was gunned down outside the Marin County California courthouse on August 7, 1970 as he attempted to liberate three imprisoned Black Liberation Fighters: James McClain, William Christmas and Ruchell Magee.
It is a time to fast, train, study and reflect on the importance of past examples of struggle that may inform the present. It can also be a time to recalibrate standards by which we assess both our progress and our peril. Black August challenges the very nature of the state and its claim on human beings as colonial subjects, and its insistence, in word and deed, that this, is the natural, almost divine order of things.
For this reason, Black August is all that the state abhors; humanity, dignity, principle and adherence to so many of the state’s hated isms; pan-Africanism, socialism, communism, intercommunalism. To a ruling elite, Black August is an uncomfortable, repressed memory of the traditions, militancy and robust responses to injustice and oppression–and therefore a reminder of their depravity– in a state that insists on only sanctioned forms of resistance.
All the evidence we need can be found in the continued repression, imprisonment and exile of U.S. political prisoners, so many of whom come out of this Black August tradition: Assata Shakur, Mutulu Shakur, Sundiata Acoli, Imam Jamil al-Amin (H. Rap Brown), Mumia Abu-Jamal, Leonard Peltier and Russell Maroon Shoatz, to name a few.
Last August, we experienced a unique electoral moment in the United States. The nominal “Left” defended their indefensible candidate as “not Donald Trump,” which would seem to be the very definition of damning with faint praise. Moreover, it signaled that this neoliberal, hawkish femme is no friend to the people’s struggle. Hillary Clinton represents the interests of what has been affectionately called the “liberal wing of the ruling elite.” But she, like her political party, is skilled at masking their allegiance to power and posing as a representative of the majority of citizens who have been abandoned by the super white and male Republicans.
One particularly egregious and pernicious example of this occurred when the former Secretary of State proudly proclaimed her intent to repair the country’s tarnished image by exporting hip-hop and sending Black rappers around the world as cultural ambassadors. Many of these artists are indeed radical and consequently are seldom, if ever, heard or seen in commercial U.S. media. But Clinton’s gesture was intended only to help redeem the “War on Terror” by improving “poor perceptions” as part of what she described as a “complex game” of “cultural diplomacy,” or, as she explained, "multidimensional chess.” When asked if hip-hop would be a “chess piece,” Clinton said, “Absolutely!”
Of course, this is better understood as cultural warfare, itself an extension of policies long engaged by this — and arguably every — state looking to maintain a particular social order.
Far from conspiratorial fantasy there is a long and documented trail of cultural abuse and distortion meant to coincide with equally devolving material conditions.
Last year, Clinton apologized for describing Black youths as “super predators” and accepting campaign donations from private prison operators.
Her apology rang hollow, particularly when Damon Hininger, CEO of Corrections Corporation of America, CCA, said that "being around 30 years and being in operation in many, many states, and also doing work with the federal government going back to the 1980s, where you had Clinton White House, you had a Bush White House, you had Obama White House, we’ve done very, very well.
Clinton’s plan to cleanse her country’s reputation with hip-hop was also significant because as emcee and writer Homeboy Sandman has made clear the largest investor in CCA, the Vanguard Group Incorporated, is also a major investor in Time Warner and Viacom. While one industry sends Blacks to prison, the other reinforces their image as deserving of their imprisonment.
And this is also why the roll call of political prisoners is incomplete without a roster of hip-hop artists who support their release, if not an end to mass incarceration on the whole. There are, but for a few examples, the wonderfully documented work of MXGM and its hip-hop Black August project by Dream Hampton highlighting the work of artists like Dead Prez, The Roots, Common and Talib Kweli. There is Rebel Diaz, Lah Tere, Invicible, The Cornel West Theory, Head-Roc, Tef Poe, Marcel P. Black and those appearing in our George Jackson: Releasing the Dragon Video Mixtape; Slangston Hughes, Laini Mataka, Umar bin-Hasan, Malcolm and Son of Nun.
Black August reminds us that too little has changed in the lived experience of African people in this or any hemisphere. It is, as Bob Marley once sang, a call to “Want More!” Our expectations have been unacceptably downsized. Want More!
Black August reminds us that we do, and we will have it!
Venceremos!
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n a matter of days the White House has gone through its latest purge. Gone are stalwarts of the GOP. Men like journalist Sean Spicer and former Republican National Committee chief Reince Priebus, Trump's former press secretary and chief of staff, respectively.
