“Fahgettaboud” No Obstruction. House Probes Will Continue To Vex Trump

Funny thing about the law. One person’s lie to obstruct an investigation can be another’s chivalrous obfuscation to conceal an infidelity. One person’s suggestion that all the evidence is not yet in to prove innocence or guilt can be another’s hand-washing conclusion, “no foul, no crime.”

Perhaps Melania really does love him. Or maybe she loves the bank account that goes with him. Could be she has a forgiving, and forgiving, and forgiving, heart. Or maybe, like so many who cast aside a disapproving eye as they watch their retirement accounts soar with the stock market, Melania is comforted by the growth of her personal fortune. 

The charade has gone on too long for me to assume anything less than her deep-throated complicity. 

What can we expect next? Democrats won’t accept Attorney General William Barr’s and Deputy A.G. Rod Rosenstein’s assessment that no obstruction occurred. They will continue their House investigations. 

Trump will crow daily there was no collusion and no obstruction. By summer’s end, at the very latest by New Year’s Day, he will pardon all whom Mueller indicted: Michael Flynn, Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, Alex van der Zwann, Richard Pinedo and Konstantin Kilimnik, but not George Papadopoulos as it was his loose lips that unleashed the two year-plus investigation into Trump’s campaign and presidency. Only Stone has yet to be convicted or plead guilty. 

You can rest assured Michael Cohen will not receive any clemency. 

One takeaway from the Mueller investigation—lying to a federal official, be it the FBI, a grand jury or Congress, is a crime. Lying to the American people, or your wife, or a reporter, is not. You can go to jail for the former. For the latter, you could lose an election, that is, if the American people have sufficient brain power to care for the sanctity of our nation’s founding principles. 

According to Barr, Special Counsel Robert Mueller reached no conclusion on the question of obstruction of justice. Barr and Rosenstein did, finding no obstruction happened. Perhaps they reasoned that since Mueller found no evidence of collusion with Russia to undermine the 2016 election there could be no obstruction. It is a simple math problem: nothing times something results in nothing.  

In New York lingo, “fahgettaboud” Trump asking FBI Director James Comey to go easy on Flynn, or firing him when he wouldn’t, or firing his successor Andrew McCabe, or continually undermining the credibility of the special counsel and his team. Fahgettaboud Trump openly admitting on television to NBC’s Lester Holt that he fired Comey because of the Russian investigation. 

We cannot say we weren’t warned Barr would take Trump’s side. In a 19-page memo to Justice Department officials prior to his appointment as attorney general, Barr said the Mueller probe was off-base. “Mueller’s core premise―that the President acts ‘corruptly’ if he attempts to influence a proceeding in which his own conduct is being scrutinized―is untenable,” Barr wrote.

These are times of strange judicial doings. There have been a string of not guilty verdicts in cases of policemen shooting, mostly killing, unarmed or non threatening men of color. And just as I was completing this blog prosecutors in Chicago dropped all 16 charges against the actor Jussie Smollett for allegedly faking his own racial and homophobic assault. No reason given for their action. Chicago’s mayor and police chief are justifiably outraged. 

Thoughts on College Admissions, Manafort, Impeachment, Farm Aid and a Cautionary Tale

The audacious scandal of parents of privilege paying a collective millions of dollars to trick the college selection process into accepting their children into prestigious schools evoked memories of how I and many of my high school classmates chose our institution of higher learning. 

During senior year at Yeshivah of Flatbush in Brooklyn my classmates and I met with one of our math teachers, Morris Turetsky, who doubled as the college guidance counselor. Moe, as we called him, was diminutive, balding, cherubic, if such a look can be ascribed to a man who seemed to be in his late sixties or early seventies. He often held index cards below desk level when conducting class, his personal cheat sheets. He spoke in clipped sentences in a street-smart voice. (Years later, after Gilda and I had our children, the rabbi of the synagogue we joined in White Plains was his son, Arnold, a spellbinding orator.)

Like many of my cohorts, I was a first generation American, my parents having emigrated from Poland, my mother in 1921 when she was four, my father at 28 in 1939. Neither attended college. My mother graduated high school. My father probably had no more than a sixth grade education in Poland, though he did earn what may be liberally considered a high school equivalency degree from night school classes in New York.

When meeting individually with Moe, more often than not, his counsel was, “Save your parents’ money. Go to Brooklyn College.” 

At the time, Brooklyn College cost $50 per semester plus books, usually no more than another $50 ($200 for an academic year). BC was a commuter school, so students lived with their parents. By comparison, annual tuition at the University of Pennsylvania cost $1,770 in 1966 with another $1,000 in room and board expenses, $180 for a general fee, $100 for books and $450 in personal expenses. 

Viewed another way, in 2016 inflation adjusted dollars, the cost of attending a full year at Brooklyn College was $1,504; at Penn, $26,303. 

Moe wasn’t wrong. Brooklyn College could save my parents lots of dollars. And at the time, Brooklyn was highly ranked among the nation’s liberal arts colleges. 

His advice did not fall on deaf ears. Of the 110 students in my graduating class, I and 58 others matriculated to Brooklyn College. Another nine enrolled at City University of New York sister colleges. Fourteen chose Ivy League schools; another dozen opted to leave Brooklyn to attend MIT and universities such as Wisconsin, Rochester and Chicago. 

Do I regret not leaving the friendly confines of Brooklyn for the out of town college experience? At times. But it would be hard to regret my years at BC, meeting Gilda and embarking on the career path I took. 

Does Manafort Have Any Regrets? One wonders if Paul Manafort has any regrets now that he has been sentenced to serve seven and a half years for a variety of federal crimes. Keep in mind he cannot appeal his punishment as he pleaded guilty to the crimes and was at the mercy of the two judges who sentenced him in separate courtrooms. 

Mercy was exactly what he was seeking, appearing as he did in a wheelchair both times, a complication of his alleged gout. Gout is often cast as a rich person’s ailment, commonly brought about by indulging in foods such as shrimp, lobster and red meats. 

Doubtful Manafort will enjoy such tasty fare in any federal lockup (assuming he is not pardoned by Trump), but here’s an interesting tidbit from lobster history. An abundance of lobsters in Colonial times caused the crustaceans to be considered a poor man’s food. “The meat was so reviled that indentured servants in one Massachusetts town successfully sued their owners to feed it to them three times a week at most,” according to gizmodo.com. You decide if you believe it or not.

Smoking Gun: Trump has latched onto an assertion by one of Manafort’s judges that his trial had nothing to do with collusion with Russia. Trump is braying, “No collusion,” as justification for ending any investigations into his 2016 campaign and administration, and certainly no reason to consider impeachment.

I’m with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi on this one. Without “smoking gun” evidence, impeachment hearings would further divide the country and almost certainly solidify and possibly expand Trump’s base. Without, and maybe even with, a smoking gun the Republican controlled Senate would not convict. 

So we’re stuck with Trump for his full term. But I am all for extensive congressional investigation of Trump’s actions, his campaign, his businesses, his taxes, indeed, anything Trump, as a counter-balance to his authoritarian style of governing. A constant drumbeat of Trump’s duplicitous dealings exposed will undermine his legitimacy.  

Farm Aid: Farmers are said to be among Trump’s most ardent supporters. Yet, they have not been rewarded for their loyalty (another example of Trump’s one-way loyalty street). 

Here’s an article from Bloomberg News outlining Trump’s budget plans for farmers: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-11/trump-to-farmers-love-you-but-still-cutting-your-subsidies.

Cautionary Tale: Wealth does not protect one from mishaps, including medical mistakes. Ego apparently led to the untimely death of a billionaire diamond trader intent on reversing his undercompensated manhood: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6777961/Billionaire-diamond-trader-65-dies-penis-enlargement-surgery.html

Someone Get Me Rewrite!

Sometimes you need a good editor to make your writing better. I was a good editor, but it’s not easy improving your own text, ergo the thankful acknowledgment by many a revered author to his or her editor. That’s a longwinded way of saying I just realized that a cutesy paraphrase of a biblical saying included in a posting two weeks ago could have been sharpened by an editor. 

Concerning the controversy over the status of monuments to Confederate generals and soldiers, Columbus and other notables, I wrote, “In a variation on what Jesus said, let he who is without sin be memorialized with a statue.” 

Reading that line today I believe it would have been better if I had written, “In a variation on what Jesus said, let he who is without sin be cast in stone.” 

Behind the Scenes: Now that Paul Manafort and Rick Gates have been indicted in a federal probe linked to the election of Donald Trump, I was wondering, why is it that just those two were named in a scheme to launder foreign money and evade taxes? Are we to believe that Manafort and Gates had the smarts and wherewithal to hide their activities without the aid of lawyers, accountants, bankers and others, perhaps a few real estate agents, who might have provided counsel on how to circumvent without detection federal law? 

I know, you’re probably saying they were caught, so it proves, or at least strongly suggests, they acted alone. I think not. I am waiting to see who else might be entangled in their web of deceit.

Meanwhile, for an eerily revealing behind the scenes look at the dynamics of Manafort, his family, and his alliance with Trump, there’s hardly any more enlightening read than the emails his daughter, 31-year-old Andrea Manafort Shand, exchanged with friends from March through August 2016: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/paul-manafort-daughter-trump-texts_us_59f748b6e4b03cd20b832fe0.

Kelly Turns Green, as in spoiled or rotten. There are few better feelings for a journalist than to be proven correct in an assessment of a character. I feel good that my repudiation of John F. Kelly, Trump’s chief of staff and by many accounts the White House executive looked to as ballast to Trump’s excesses, is being confirmed by Kelly’s own actions.  

Having been shown to be a dissembler of truth when it came to the controversy involving the death in Niger of Sgt. La David T. Johnson and Trump’s condolence call to his widow, Kelly’s appearance Monday night on the Laura Ingraham show on Fox News reinforced his jaundiced view of history. Asked about removing plaques of George Washington and Robert E. Lee from a church in Alexandria, Va., Kelly said,

“I would tell you that Robert E. Lee was an honorable man. He was a man that gave up his country to fight for his state, which 150 years ago was more important than country. It was always loyalty to state first back in those days. Now it’s different today. But the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War, and men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had them make their stand.”

Historians have excoriated Kelly for his depiction of followers of the Confederacy and the idea that failure to compromise resulted in war. Here’s a sample:  http://wapo.st/2gRznMq?tid=ss_tw-bottom&utm_term=.b8f3e02ab210. 

Let’s look at his evaluation of current loyalties, specifically his comment that “It was always loyalty to state first back in those days. Now it’s different today.” 

Has Kelly been asleep during the repeated assault by states, almost always Republican controlled, to push back against federal laws and regulations in the interests of “states’ rights”? Individual states have fought against the legalization of abortion rights, environmental safeguards, worker benefits, national parks and monuments, voting rights, gender equality and civil rights.

Indeed, a central plank of Trumpism is a dissolution of federal power in favor of state authority. 

Retired Marine Corps general John F. Kelly may have been a solid leader of men in battle but he is a flawed advisor and gatekeeper to the equally if not more flawed leader of our country.