Asking the Right – Why Are Republicans Hiding the Evidence of Trump Treason

Been saying for a while that the Russian hacking and collusion treason went far beyond just the Chumph and his merry band of morons and nitwit children.

Here, Digby begins asking the right questions at least.

Russia scandal goes well beyond Trump: GOP leaders definitely knew about hacking — did they benefit too?

Leading Republicans knew about Russian hacking long before Trump’s nomination. They said nothing and did nothing

Despite Europe’s clear disdain for President Trump it seems as though he’s over there every other week. In fact he’s arriving in France on Thursday at the invitation of President Emmanuel Macron to help celebrate Bastille Day and have dinner at the Eiffel Tower. Considering that Trump has implied repeatedly that Paris is nothing but a hellhole these days, it’s a testament to just how desperate he is to get out of Washington. The heat is on and he wants out of the kitchen.

You have certainly heard that Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort met with a Russian lawyer to get some promised dirt on Hillary Clinton that was represented as being part of a Russian government program to help Trump get elected. Now we know their breathless protestations that they didn’t know nothin’ about no Russians were lies, and we also know that this particular tawdry scheme reached into the highest levels of the campaign. We’ll have to wait for the next shoe to drop. There is always another shoe.

There was one new story on Wednesday that added an interesting detail to the saga and points to a possible larger conspiracy. McClatchy reported that House and Senate investigators as well as the Justice Department are looking at the Trump campaign’s digital operation, one of Jared Kushner’s pet projects (financed by big-daddy benefactor Robert Mercer), to determine if it may have worked with Russia’s sophisticated micro-targeting and propaganda program during the 2016 campaign.

McClatchy also reported that the Justice Department is looking into “whether Trump’s campaign pointed Russian cyber operatives to certain voting jurisdictions in key states – areas where Trump’s digital team and Republican operatives were spotting unexpected weakness in voter support for Hillary Clinton.” That’s an issue I’ve written about previously here on Salon, based on some post-election investigative reporting by the New York Times.

This raises once again the question of just what was going on in the Republican Party during this period. After all, it wasn’t just Donald Trump who benefited from Russian hacking. The GOP-dominated House majority was a major beneficiary as well.

Remember, the congressional leadership knew in 2015 that it was happening. Reuters has reported that the so-called Gang of Eight (Republican leaders in Congress) was told that Russian hackers were attacking the Democratic Party but that the information was so top secret they could not share it. As we know, hackers attacked the Democratic National Committee and the personal email of Clinton campaign chair John Podesta. But they also hacked the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and information gleaned from that hack was put to use in some 2016 campaigns for Congress.

Also recall that one month before Donald Trump Jr. took that meeting with the Russian lawyer, House Majority Leader Kevin “loose lips” McCarthy was talking about Trump’s connections to Vladimir Putin in a room full of Republicans:

A month before Donald Trump clinched the Republican nomination, one of his closest allies in Congress — House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy — made a politically explosive assertion in a private conversation on Capitol Hill with his fellow GOP leaders: that Trump could be the beneficiary of payments from Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump,” McCarthy (R-Calif.) said, according to a recording of the June 15, 2016 exchange, which was listened to and verified by The Washington Post. […]

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) immediately interjected, stopping the conversation from further exploring McCarthy’s assertion, and swore the Republicans present to secrecy.

This was the day after news had broken that the Russians had hacked the DNC and Ryan and McCarthy had just come from a meeting with the Ukrainian prime minister, who “had described a Kremlin tactic of financing populist politicians to undercut Eastern European democratic institutions.”

Republican leaders kept this from the public for a year, then lied repeatedly about it when confronted until someone produced an audiotape, at which point McCarthy, Ryan, et al., said it was just a joke. Maybe it was. But we know for sure that this idea about Trump being under Putin’s thumb was in the ether in GOP circles even as the party was getting ready to nominate him as its presidential candidate.

Fast forward to late August when the intelligence community was becoming frantic over the evidence of Russian interference and Director of National Intelligence John Brennan held private classified briefings with eight top congressional leaders, telling then that there was evidence the Russians were helping Donald Trump and that unnamed advisers to the Republican nominee might be working with them. In September, intelligence officials convened a big meeting with the Gang of 12, meaning the House and Senate leadership along with chairmen and ranking members of committees on intelligence and homeland security. It was assumed this would result in a “show of solidarity and bipartisan unity” to protest this threat to the integrity of the American democratic process.

That was an erroneous assumption. The Republicans refused to sign anything that implicated the Russian government, only agreeing to tell state elections officials to beware of “malefactors” attempting to hack election software. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell reportedly said he would consider any effort by the White House to challenge the Russians publicly “an act of partisan politics.” That was that.

Since the election, when Republican officials aren’t actively helping the White House cover up and misdirect, as House Intelligence Committee chair Devin Nunes did, with a few exceptions they still dismiss the scandal, even in the face of documentary evidence like the Donald Trump Jr. emails.

There’s a lot of punditry every day bemoaning the fact that President Trump refuses to admit that the Russian interference in the campaign happened, seeing it as a stubborn (and insulting) rejection of the U.S. intelligence community and a dangerous unwillingness to take needed action to prevent it happening again. But really, why is Trump the only one on the hook? The Republican leadership has turned a blind eye to what was happening since 2015. They knew. They may have even known more about it than Trump did, at least in the beginning. They did nothing about it then and have shown no signs that they plan to do anything in the future.

It’s not all on Donald Trump. He may been the principal beneficiary but the leaders of his party aided and abetted the crime. We may just learn that they benefited from it too. 

 

Sessions Roast – “Americans Are Sick of Stonewalling!”

At least one Senator is sick of the neutron dance around the subject…

 

The Dumbf Blames Democrats for Blocking the 600 Nominations He Hasn’t Made Yet

The mentally unstable Chumph does it again – a pure fiction of his enfeebled mind.

Trump blames Democrats for slow confirmation process

President Donald Trump accused Democrats in the Senate of slowing the confirmation process for his appointees, including foreign ambassadors, even though Senate rules allow Republicans, the chamber’s majority party, to move appointees along without Democratic votes.

“Dems are taking forever to approve my people, including Ambassadors. They are nothing but OBSTRUCTIONISTS! Want approvals,” the president wrote on Twitter, directing his statement to the Fox News morning show “Fox & Friends,” known to be a preferred program of his.

In the Trump administration’s opening weeks, White House officials were quick to loudly complain that the president’s nominees were facing an unprecedented level of scrutiny. Many of Trump’s nominees did indeed face controversy, in one instance prompting Labor Secretary-designate Andrew Puzder to withdraw from consideration and in another prompting Vice President Mike Pence to cast a tie-breaking deciding vote in favor of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

But while Trump has blamed Capitol Hill for the sluggish pace at which appointees have been confirmed, the White House has thus far left dozens of key roles unfilled.

According to a database maintained by the Partnership for Public Service and The Washington Post, the Trump administration has formally nominated just 63 candidates – 39 of which have been approved – for 559 key positions that require Senate confirmation. Overall, there are 1,200 government jobs that require say-so from the Senate to fill.

According to the database jointly maintained by the Partnership for Public Service and the Post, which is not exhaustive but is instead a sampling of confirmation-required jobs, Trump has just five formal ambassadorial nominations pending. Others, like former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman to be ambassador to Russia and New York Jets owner Woody Johnson to be ambassador to the United Kingdom, have been announced but not yet formally submitted.

Other roles for which the Trump administration has yet to put forward a candidate include the administrator for the Transportation Security Administration, the assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s national security division and the deputy director of national intelligence.

 

More Evidence of GOP Collusion With Russian Spies

It wasn’t just the Chumph colluding with the Russians. This collusion was offered as a package which was taken by over 40 Republican candidates.

This is why the GOP is trying so hard to quash the Chumph Treason trial.

GOP operative asked Russian hacker Guccifer 2.0 for help — and got 2.5 gigabytes of stolen documents: report

The Russian hacker who helped President Donald Trump win the 2016 election also allegedly collaborated with a Republican consultant in Florida.

A Wall Street Journal report published on Thursday revealed that Republican operative Aaron Nevins made a plea last year to Guccifer 2.0, the same hacker who is accused of helping Trump by revealing stolen Democratic National Committee emails.

According to the Journal:

Learning that hacker “Guccifer 2.0” had tapped into a Democratic committee that helps House candidates, Mr. Nevins wrote to the hacker to say: “Feel free to send any Florida based information.”

Ten days later, Mr. Nevins received 2.5 gigabytes of Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee documents, some of which he posted on a blog called HelloFLA.com that he ran using a pseudonym.

The report said that the hacker then sent Trump ally Roger Stone a link to the blog post.

During conversations with the Guccifer 2.0, Nevins observed that the documents were “probably worth millions of dollars.”

“Hmmm,” the hacker replied, “ok u owe me a million :)”

In an interview with the paper, Nevins defended his actions as standard political practice.

“I just threw an arrow in the dark,” Nevins explained, noting that when he analyzed the documents, he “realized it was a lot more than even Guccifer knew that he had.”

“If your interests align,” the operative concluded, “never shut any doors in politics.”

 

Why the Evil Cabal of Rethugs Have to Go – NC Senate Cuts Funding to Democrat District Schools

Rethughy Majority in North Carolina goes after the children in Democrat Districts…

 

Why “Going Nuclear” By Senate Republicans May Be Catastropic

Republicans decided today to end the Democrat filibuster of Putin’s Bitch selection for the Supreme Court.

They just waltzed their way into a Constitutional crisis.

The Chumph is going to be impeached. The most likely reason is his collusion with Putin to submarine the election.

Ergo – Putin’s Bitch illegally “won” the election.

If (or when) that happens, everything done by Putin’s Bitch is illegitimate. It is the “Fruit of the Poisoned Tree”, meaning every executive order, law signed by the Chumph, or move made in terms of the Executive Branch gets reset to the day Obama left office.

Gorsuch’s nomination is illegitimate.

And that’s where things get really messy.

The issue being, how do you remove him?

Senate GOP goes ‘nuclear’ on Supreme Court filibuster

The historic move paves the way for Neil Gorsuch to be confirmed.

Senate Republicans invoked the “nuclear option” to gut the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees Thursday, a historic move that paves the way for Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation and ensures that future high court nominees can advance in the Senate without clearing a 60-vote threshold.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell moved to change the Senate rules after Democrats blocked Gorsuch’s nomination minutes before, 55-45. All 52 Republicans then supported the vote to go nuclear, and Gorsuch subsequently advanced to a final confirmation vote with a simple majority.

 

The Senate May Go Nuclear Over Supreme Court Pick

Despite several defections, Democrats have enough votes to filibuster the confirmation of the Chumph’s pick to replace Scalia, Neil Gorsuch.

Republicans created this mess by refusing to vote on Obama’s pick, Garland Merrick for nearly a year.

Democrats Have The Votes To Filibuster Neil Gorsuch

Republicans will have to blow up Senate rules to confirm Trump’s Supreme Court nominee. It’s getting ugly.

Democrats have locked in the votes to block Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch, meaning Republicans will have to take the extreme step of blowing up Senate rules to confirm him.

Democratic lawmakers have been vowing for weeks to deny a vote to President Donald Trump’s court pick, and have been inching closer to the 41 members they need to filibuster him. They hit the magic number on Monday when Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) announced he will join the blockade.

“I will be voting against cloture,” Coons said, using technical terms to mean he will join the Democratic filibuster, “unless we are able, as a body, to finally sit down and find a way to … ensure the process to fill the next vacancy on the court is not a narrowly partisan process.”

The news means Republicans have a choice: cave to Democrats’ demands that Trump put forward a different nominee (highly unlikely) or unilaterally change the rules so they can confirm Gorsuch without Democrats (likely). It currently takes 60 votes to advance a Supreme Court nominee. Republicans appear ready to use a procedural maneuver to lower that threshold to 51 votes.