Nunes and Mueller subpoena Steve Bannon

[_MeDotOrg]

At the House Committee hearing today, Bannon refused to answer questions based upon executive privilege. Devin Nunes and Robert Mueller both subpoenaed Bannon.

Bannon refused to answer questions about his conversations with the President about the firing of James Comey. He said he was following White House Instructions. When Comey testified, Trump did not use executive privilege to block Comey's testimony. On June 5th, Sarah Huckabee Sanders said that the President favored a swift and thorough examination of the facts.

Today Sarah Sanders offered a slightly massaged message:

At the White House, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said "no one" had encouraged Bannon not to be transparent during questioning but there's a "process of what that looks like."

So the process of having a "swift and thorough examination of the facts" is the same process that allows Comey to testify without executive privilege, but allows Bannon to claim it?

Yes, this is what 'the process' looks like. The process of obfuscation.

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

Well. I don't think Trump is going to fare well against Mueller's team:

https://np.reddit.com/r/politics/commen ... n/dsrsow7/

James Quarles:[5]

Quarles worked as an assistant special prosecutor on the Watergate Special Prosecution Force. He came with Mueller from the law firm WilmerHale.

Andrew Weissmann:[6]

Weissmann served as the chief of the Justice Department’s fraud section, where he oversaw corruption investigations, including the probe into cheating by Volkswagen on diesel emissions tests.

Greg Andres:[7]

Andres is a white-collar criminal defense attorney at the Davis Polk firm. He had worked previously in the Justice Department's criminal division as a deputy assistant attorney general.

Andrew D. Goldstein:[8]

Goldstein headed the public corruption unit in the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Southern District of New York. He had worked there under Preet Bharara, whom President Trump fired as U.S. attorney after he refused to resign.

Elizabeth Prelogar:[9]

Prelogar is a lawyer in the solicitor general’s office.

Rush Atkinson:[10]

Atkinson is a trial attorney in the Justice Department's fraud section.

Aaron Zebley:[11]

Zebley is a former assistant U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia and served as Mueller’s chief of staff when Mueller was FBI director. He came with Mueller from WilmerHale.

Michael Dreeben:[12]

Dreeben is a Justice Department deputy solicitor general who has argued more than 100 cases before the Supreme Court.

Adam Jed:[13]

Jed is an appellate lawyer from the Justice Department’s civil division.

Aaron Zelinsky:[14]

Zelinsky is an assistant U.S. attorney in Maryland.

Kyle Freeney[15]

Freeney is an attorney on detail from the Criminal Division’s Money Laundering and Asset Recovery Section. In 2016, she was part of a Department of Justice team seeking to recover over $1 billion from an alleged corrupt Malaysian sovereign wealth fund.

Zainab Ahmad:[16]

Ahmad is an assistant U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of New York who specializes in counterterrorism cases. She was recently profiled in the New Yorker, which reported she had successfully prosecuted 13 terrorism cases since 2009 without a single loss.

Jeannie Rhee:[17]

Rhee is a former deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel and assistant U.S. attorney in D.C. She also came from WilmerHale.

Brandon Van Grack:[18]

Van Grack is a Justice Department national security division prosecutor.

From the same post:

Yup. The attorneys on Special Counsel Mueller's team are some of the best in their respective fields. He's assembled a real life Justice League. The sheer magnitude of this investigation will be a political scandal the size of which we have never seen in America. Ever since I read about the attorneys on Special Counsel Mueller's team I have always believed this. His team is incredible, their methodology and experience is unmatched.[1] They are the equivalent of a Justice League.[2] And they have to be, democracy itself is at risk.[3] Here are the people investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 election[4]. They include an attorney who has over 100 supreme court cases under his belt and is finding loopholes in Presidential pardons, an attorney who took down Enron and previously flipped a Russian who helped President Trump win the election, an attorney who has never lost a Supreme Court case, an attorney who worked under Supreme Court Justice Ginsberg and is fluent in Russian, an attorney who was an assistant special prosecutor on the Watergate investigation, an attorney who has prosecuted counter-espionage cases and gone after hackers, attorneys who have investigated white collar crime and money laundering, I could go on. I will include citations on each individual as there is too much information about each attorney, if I were to include the details I would exceed the character limit on Reddit.

- Doc

[_MeDotOrg]

We are certainly getting into some creative defenses. Bannon claimed that executive privilege includes the transition period, between the election and Trump's inauguration.

According to this logic, we could have two people (Obama and Trump) claiming executive privilege at the same time. While that is an interesting interpretation, I'm pretty sure that United States requires that we have only one Chief Executive at a time.

It is also curious because other White House personnel testified about their activities, both in the transition period and while servicing in the executive branch without claiming executive privilege.

[Guest]

We are certainly getting into some creative defenses. Bannon claimed that executive privilege includes the transition period, between the election and Trump's inauguration.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say the judiciary isn't going allow the Executive branch to use that as an excuse. The can of worms that would open up would essentially make the President, all Presidents in fact (and the entire branch), beyond the law not only in the run-up to being President, but quite possibly after being President, too.

- Doc

[_EAllusion]

Yup. The attorneys on Special Counsel Mueller's team are some of the best in their respective fields. He's assembled a real life Justice League. The sheer magnitude of this investigation will be a political scandal the size of which we have never seen in America. Ever since I read about the attorneys on Special Counsel Mueller's team I have always believed this.

We already have information out in public that reaches scandal as bad as pr on par with the worst examples in American history and it's not having that kind of impact on pop culture. It hasn't even reached the level of what Republicans were able to gin up against Hillary Clinton.

We don't know to what extent people, media figures especially, are mentally shelving their reaction until Mueller's full report comes out. We also don't know just how bad that report might get. But I think it's wise to prepare yourself for underreaction.

In related news, the FBI's investigation appears to have expanded to looking into whether Kremlin figures were funding the Trump campaign by laundering dark money through the NRA:

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation- ... 31139.html

[_EAllusion]

Remember when Democrats effectively killed ACORN, a major voter registration organization that disproportionately helped their voters become registered? They did that after relenting to a series of dishonest claims of widespread fraud by Republicans capped off by a misleading James O'Keefe hidden-camera affair that achieved the level of national scandal. ACORN so effectively helped poor, minority communities with voting access that it was effectively an arm of Democratic electioneering strategy. That is why it drew Republican ire in the first place, and Democrats smashed it again the rocks at the first sign of trouble.

If there's even a whiff of that story regarding the NRA being true, and you have to wonder what facts gave probable cause to look into it, it's already worse than ACORN. So it's worth watching how the reaction is totally different.

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

Remember when Democrats effectively killed ACORN, a major voter registration organization that disproportionately helped their voters become registered? They did that after relenting to a series of dishonest claims of widespread fraud by Republicans capped off by a misleading James O'Keefe hidden-camera affair that achieved the level of national scandal. ACORN so effectively helped poor, minority communities with voting access that it was effectively an arm of Democratic electioneering strategy. That is why it true Republican ire in the first place, and Democrats smashed it again the rocks at the first sign of trouble.

If there's even a whiff of that story regarding the NRA being true, and you have to wonder what facts gave probable cause to look into it, it's already worse than ACORN. So it's worth watching how the reaction is totally different.

Well, if Trump and the modern GOP has proved anything is that having values, ethics, and being worried what the other side thinks is pointless. I think the Democrats, outside of colluding with foreign powers and within legal reason, ought to just do what they think they need to do to secure political power.

We literally have a President who “F” ed a prostitute while married to a raunchy model and no one cares enough to do anything about it. I'm sure we can thank internet access to pornography for desensitizing the masses on that one. It's a Brave New World.

So. There you go. This is our new reality. “F” it. Time to change up how we play the game.

- Doc

[_EAllusion]

Remember when Democrats effectively killed ACORN, a major voter registration organization that disproportionately helped their voters become registered? They did that after relenting to a series of dishonest claims of widespread fraud by Republicans capped off by a misleading James O'Keefe hidden-camera affair that achieved the level of national scandal. ACORN so effectively helped poor, minority communities with voting access that it was effectively an arm of Democratic electioneering strategy. That is why it true Republican ire in the first place, and Democrats smashed it again the rocks at the first sign of trouble.

If there's even a whiff of that story regarding the NRA being true, and you have to wonder what facts gave probable cause to look into it, it's already worse than ACORN. So it's worth watching how the reaction is totally different.

Well, if Trump and the modern GOP has proved anything is that having values, ethics, and being worried what the other side thinks is pointless. I think the Democrats, outside of colluding with foreign powers and within legal reason, ought to just do what they think they need to do to secure political power.

We literally have a President who “F” ed a prostitute while married to a raunchy model and no one cares enough to do anything about it. I'm sure we can thank internet access to pornography for desensitizing the masses on that one. It's a Brave New World.

So. There you go. This is our new reality. “F” it. Time to change up how we play the game.

- Doc

I doubt more social acceptance of pornography that is the main driver of the reaction. If Obama was credibly accused of paying hush money to a porn star he had an affair with a month out from election, it would be a supernova level scandal. I have zero doubt. Hillary Clinton was crushed, crushed, for dubious stories surrounding impropriety with her charitable foundation best known for fighting the spread of AIDS. I think we can safely assume that Obama would be crucified by the public if this was a story about him. Even if you ignore the salacious angle, this is also a story about presidential vulnerability to blackmail.

It's not in the case of Trump, I suspect, for a few reasons:

1) Trump has so many scandals to report on at any given moment, that media attention is divided. People just can't keep up and they lose track.

2) Journalists already believe that Trump is a sleazebag, so him doing something that is keeping with that stereotype doesn't motivate coverage as much. Call it the, "That's Trump for 'ya" effect.

3) Mainstream press is obsessed with balancing its coverage with "conservative" perspectives, and since right-wing media is just straight propaganda, the result is a consistent tempering of bad stories for Republican politicians relative to their full potential. There's no real equivalent of this phenomenon on the left, because center-left people aren't as drawn into the partisan equivalent of state media.