MSNBC reported yesterday that Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) sent a letter to our new Attorney General Merrick Garland. The letter ended with a short handwritten note to Garland offering him congratulations and best regards on his new job. He's going to need some good will, given what he has to do. A whole lot of republicans are going to hate his guts, to say the least. One can already feel the flames of hate and lies starting to bubble up in the bowels of Fox News, Breitbart and all the other fascist right propaganda and lies sources.
The Whitehouse letter asks Garland to investigate several fishy incidents that occurred under the last administration. The incidents include circumstances surrounding the apparent whitewash of the FBI investigation (fake investigation?) of sexual assaults on women by Brett Kavanaugh. That is a big, important plie of sleaze to look into. Kavanaugh is probably unfit to be a Supreme Court justice, but a thorough FBI investigation would have been necessary to show that.
Whitehouse is also asking for investigations into (i) California fuel emission-agreements for antitrust violations, (ii) possible civil fraud by the fossil fuel industry, and (iii) the old Nixon-era justice department memo that says the DoJ cannot indict a sitting president. That ridiculous memo was the excuse the previously corrupted and subverted DoJ used to not prosecute the ex-president for his crimes.
Godspeed to Whitehouse and Garland. They're going to need all the help they can get. The daggers are already being drawn and the character assassins are creeping out from under the rocks they hide under.
In other encouraging news, the New York Times reported on a declassified US intelligence assessment of the 2020 election. Not surprisingly, Russia did its best to help the ex-president get re-elected and to smear Biden. The NYT writes:
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia authorized extensive efforts to hurt the candidacy of Joseph R. Biden Jr. during the election last year, including by mounting covert operations to influence people close to President Donald J. Trump, according to a declassified intelligence report released on Tuesday.
The report did not name those people but seemed to refer to the work of Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, who relentlessly pushed accusations of corruption about Mr. Biden and his family involving Ukraine.
“Russian state and proxy actors who all serve the Kremlin’s interests worked to affect U.S. public perceptions,” the report said.
A companion report by the Justice and Homeland Security Departments also rejected false accusations promoted by Mr. Trump’s allies in the weeks after the vote that Venezuela or other countries had defrauded the election.
The reports, compiled by career officials, amounted to a repudiation of Mr. Trump, his allies and some of his top administration officials. They reaffirmed the intelligence agencies’ conclusions about Russia’s interference in 2016 on behalf of Mr. Trump and said that the Kremlin favored his re-election. And they categorically dismissed allegations of foreign-fed voter fraud, cast doubt on Republican accusations of Chinese intervention on behalf of Democrats and undermined claims that Mr. Trump and his allies had spread about the Biden family’s work in Ukraine.
The report also named Konstantin V. Kilimnik, a former colleague of Mr. Trump’s onetime campaign manager Paul Manafort, as a Russian influence agent. Mr. Kilimnik took steps throughout the 2020 election cycle to hurt Mr. Biden and his candidacy, the report said, helping pushed a false narrative that Ukraine, not Russia, was responsible for interfering in American politics.
During the 2016 campaign, Mr. Manafort shared inside information about the presidential race with Mr. Kilimnik and the Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs whom he served, according to a bipartisan report last year by the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Some former officials appointed by the ex-president are already disputing some of the content of the intelligence assessment. The lies are already starting to flow. It would be great if felons like Manafort are forced to spill their guts in court[1] about Russian collusion with the 2016 campaign. Let no one forget that the ex-president quietly killed the FBI collusion investigation and that is the basis the ex-president's supporters use to say there is no evidence of collusion. That deflection masks the fact that the evidence is limited because there was no investigation. That is another steaming pile of sleaze that deserves a whole lot of very bright sunshine. Now that the republican swamp creatures are driven out, the clouds are clearing and the light is getting brighter.
Mr. Garland is going to be a very busy boy for the next four years. So let's get on with it, amputations, less rejards, skeletons in the closet and all. Inquiring minds want to know.
Skeletons in the closet, where the ex-president hid them
Footnote:
1. My understanding is that Manafort, and all the other felons, crooks, liars, thugs and traitors the ex-president pardoned, cannot refuse to answer prosecutor's questions under oath. If they lie, they can be prosecuted for perjury. If they refuse to answer questions, they can be jailed for contempt. They have no place to run to (lies) and no rock to hide under (no 5th Amendment for them).
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