For the Record: Bad Boyfriend

Hahaha Kevin https://t.co/hfeEQVyOOE

— 🔻Cookin With Yas🔻 (@Yastreblyansky) July 25, 2020

It's so pathetic. House Republican Congressional Committee is begging Trump campaign for a few dollars, out of the $295 million the campaign and the Republican National Committee are sitting on, and Kushner, who apparently "oversees such decisions and has a greater say than RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel", just says no.

According to one anonymus,

Give Me Little Sign

Here's something curious from David F. Brooks ("The Lawyers Who Did Not Break"):

The S.D.N.Y. investigation seems to be zeroing in on the $107 million Trump inauguration extravaganza. From the hints dropped by the subpoenas, one gets the impression that the inauguration was a shambolic grabfest in which people with money tried to turn it into power and people who suddenly had power tried to turn it into money.

Some legal experts believe the inauguration is being aggressively probed as a racketeering operation — a continuing criminal enterprise, complete with mail fraud, wire fraud, money laundering and the rest.

So why aren’t the legal authorities wilting? One explanation: institutions and character. The legal institutions instill codes of excellence that are strong enough to take the heat.

I guess the obvious Big Thing here is the acknowledgment of a nexus of criminality in Trumplandia that really deserves investigation, like there's something bad about that. Last May ("Donald Trump's Lizard Wisdom"), Brooks was asking  us to consider the bright side of Trump's mob connections:

Riposte

Uncredited photo via BinsBox

Longtime commenter Procopius writes with reference to yesterday's post:

I'm hampered here, because my initial reaction to the initial accusations of Russian interference being so effective that it caused Hillary to lose the eledtion was, "Are you kidding me?" Since then I've felt gaslighted since, for example, the advertisements FaceBook identified as examples of "Russian Influence" were mostly purchased after the election and were mostly trivial click-bait. I've said so, so please don't think I'm trying to be disingenuous when I pull out your

Junior's cheerful acceptance of the Russian offer of stolen documents "as part of Russia and its government's support for the Trump campaign" (whoever drafted that expression for Goldstone might as well have been working to incriminate Junior, as if they were planning to use it as kompromat), is unquestionably a crime

OK, we're talking about many different possible crimes, and I applaud your even-handedness in this article. Since there are at least 5,000 felonies defined in the United States Code, many of which are only prosecuted when a prosecutor gets really obsessive about a particular defendant, and so most of us routinely commit a couple of felonies every day without realizing it, just what crime is this unquestionably? A violation of election finance laws?

This is an openly partisan blog, so you can spare me the sarcasm about "evenhandedness".

I'm not familiar with whatever you're citing on the FaceBook manipulation, so I can't really argue with it, but I was under the impression that the ads bought by Internet Research Agency trolls weren't meant to persuade anybody but to gather the volunteer army of reposters who shared the unpaid material posted from bot accounts, from anti-Semitic memes of Hillary and Soros to the "Pizzagate" scandal, that was actually effective:

Crime and Puzzlement

Somebody's Twitter avi.

An unusual take from National Review's legal beagle Andrew C. McCarthy ("Robert Mueller's Plan") on the Mueller investigation: that they're not building up a criminal case, because

No prosecutor builds a case the way Mueller is going about it. What prosecutor says, “Here’s our witness line-up: Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos, Alex van der Zwaan, Rick Gates, Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen. And what is it that they have in common, ladies and gentlemen of the jury? Bingo! They’re all convicted liars.”?

This proves that the litigation documents Mueller files from time to time, such as indictments and statements of guilt, are not addressed to a jury, which shows McCarthy that there is no crime, which demonstrates that the special counsel's behavior is very reprehensible: