Moar Impeachment!

The embarrassing projection doesn't fall far from the tax cheat. pic.twitter.com/RqTY585VEC

— emptywheel (@emptywheel) January 31, 2022

So I had to take a look at the Breitbart story, which reports:

A criminal IRS investigation into Hunter Biden — President Biden’s son — appears to have convened a grand jury as far back as May 2019, a confidential subpoena served to JPMorgan Chase bank reveals. The subpoena also seeks bank records of James Biden, the president’s brother, which appears to be the first time another Biden family member has surfaced in connection with the investigation.

Actually, this isn't exactly news; it seems to be an investigation we could have known about for quite a while, since December 2020, when Hunter Biden himself found out that his taxes were under investigation, and immediately issued a statement. According to CNN's reporting picked up by Wilmington TV,

For the Record: Waltz of the Inspectors General

Carsington Water, Ashbourne, Derbyshire, with troll, via TripAdvisor.

Senator Grassley has built his reputation on protecting the integrity of the Inspector general process. He runs a committee that could do something about it. But he is strangely silent about these purges. I hope when I get to 86 I'm not afraid of anyone or anything like Trump

— Joe Lockhart (@joelockhart) May 16, 2020

https://t.co/Sm0ikVDWwS

— Obliged Friend (@ObligedFriend) May 16, 2020

worth recalling that Walpin firing followed a unanimous and bipartisan request from the board ( Corporation for National and Community Service) he was IG of? https://t.co/s8cBvniwM6

— Leaves of Yas (@Yastreblyansky) May 16, 2020

Unless...

Tin sign from Desperate Enterprises, $10.56 down from $14.99.

I'm really shaken by this, via NPR:

Americans are split, 49%-46%, on whether they approve of Democrats' impeachment inquiry into President Trump, and independents at this point are not on board, a new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist Poll finds.

But the pollsters warn that the new developments could change public opinion quickly, especially with 7 in 10 saying they are paying attention to the news.

You bet it could. The number favoring has never been anywhere near this close to 50% before, let alone higher than the number opposing. It looks like a really new world, and your congresscritters, who either are or aren't seeing similar developments in their own constituencies, know if it is or isn't. This was taken Wednesday night, after Pelosi announced the formalization of the impeachment inquiry, before the whistleblower complaint was released. It could move very fast indeed.

Or it could be just more statistical noise—one poll never tells you the truth about anything, don't get too excited—but if it's a real phenomenon and sustains itself, I'm seriously starting to imagine we could end up removing Trump from office, in the way I was suggesting last March, a month or so before the Mueller Report arrived, when I discovered this chart:

Infrastructure Week

"We'll always have Infrastructure Week!"

Politico suggested the principals were still hung over from the last Infrastructure Week at the end of April and the current one already was dead, hours before it officially got started (in the Cabinet Room, at 11:15):

WELL, THIS [the three-weeks-ago one] WENT ABOUT AS WELL as any other infrastructure week. The White House is not going to present any plan to pay for rebuilding the nation’s roads and highways.

INSTEAD, the administration will ask DEMOCRATS to make the case for a $2 trillion package. The White House has identified roughly $1 trillion in spending cuts to pay for legislation -- about as realistic a plan as saying this newsletter will fly you to the moon if you say abracadabra.

TO REALLY DRIVE THE NAIL IN THE COFFIN, Trump sent a letter to PELOSI and Senate Minority Leader CHUCK SCHUMER on Tuesday saying they should pass the USMCA before turning to infrastructure. The letter

Heh. Apparently in the end it was more explosive than that, per Peter Baker and Katie Rogers:

The Reprehensible and the Comprehensible

Two separate warnings this morning, from former US attorney Preet Bharara on NPR (doing a book promotion) and Georgetown Law professor and former OLC staffer Martin Lederman in Washington Post (cited in Raw Story): Mueller's report, to the extent there is one, is not going to contain a nicely wrapped case for the indictment of Donald Trump for crimes committed in the collaboration with Russian agents in the 2016 election.

For more than one reason, but the main thing is that it isn't in their remit to do such a thing, given the Justice Department ruling that a sitting president isn't supposed to be indicted, as Lederman concludes:

it would be surprising if it included any express conclusions about whether Trump’s conduct did or did not satisfy the elements of any particular criminal offenses. As long as Trump is in office, it will be up to the committees themselves — and Congress as a whole — to (in the words of the Jaworski road map) “determine what action may be warranted . . . by [the] evidence” presented in Barr’s notification.

That's probably too categorical; they could signal an opinion on his chargeability in indictments of other people, as an unindicted co-conspirator, as they've already done in regard to Michael Cohen and the Paramour Payoffs (can't decide whether that's the first novel in my detective series featuring a troubled metropolitan lawyer or a band name). But that will be ancillary to what I do hope will be an indictment of Donald Junior, if anything. I still believe he would be indicted in a case where his guilt was transparently unarguable—if he really killed that guy on Fifth Avenue—but this isn't one of those cases. The language in which he agreed to the basic bargain of Russia's assistance with the Moscow hotel and US election projects, if Mueller has it (and we know what he has from Cohen, not too damn much, and we know Manafort and Junior have said little and nothing respectively) will be couched in code, like all those mobster communications, and the way he tried to live up to his end by removing sanctions obscured inside a web of plausible deniability, opinions from foreign policy advisers and lawyers that he's entitled to do what he wants so he can argue he was just doing what he was told.

I guess I'm beginning to understand how unlikely it is that our story is going to have any kind of clean ending, where the public gasps, "OMG he did that?" and the president just has to leave.

The Buffalo Who Cried Wolf

A friendly picture. German Federal Government/Jesco Denzel via Associated Press. Not clear what Trump meant by saying it was "put out by us."

David Brooks, "Donald Trump Is Not Playing By Your Rules", praises Trump's approach to international politics:

The core issue in our politics is over how we establish relationship. You can either organize relationship at a high level — based on friendship, shared values, loyalty and affection — or you can organize relationship at a low level, based on mutual selfish interest and a brutal, ends-justify-the-means mentality.

Unlike beastly Nixon and Kissinger, who visited a monstrously murderous, nuclear-armed Asian dictator in a crassly selfish bazaar-haggling spirit, an army of experts at their sides facing off suspiciously over every detail, Trump is open, fresh, ready for anything, "We'll see what happens," and above all trusting, as he told Stephanopoulos:

Starting From a Very High Plane

Well, you know, over my lifetime
I've done a lot of deals
with a lot of people, and sometimes
the people that you most distrust
turn out to be the most honorable ones,
and the people that you do trust
they are not the honorable ones,
so we are starting from a very high plane,
we’re starting from a very good relationship.
This has been a very big day in terms of the world.
I think it’s been, maybe I --
a lot of people have been saying it’s historic.

Haha, just kidding. Brooks thinks Nixon and Kissinger are among the good guys of the happy past, who organized relationship on a high level in creating the postwar order:

Inner Nixon: Update

The story is getting somewhat wild today: Colin Kahl, the Biden national security adviser named in the Guardian story as one of the people being spied on in a Trump-sponsored effort to discredit the Iran deal, initially reported, like Ben Rhodes, that he hadn't noticed anybody spying on him, but then, as he and his wife talked it over, they remembered something kind of untoward (you should read the whole thread):

Last year, my wife was serving on the fundraising committee of my daughter's public charter school in DC. One day, out of the blue, she received an email from someone claiming to represent a socially responsible private equity firm in the UK. 2/10

— Colin Kahl (@ColinKahl) May 6, 2018

The brilliant Middle East expert journalist Laura Rozen (who some older Netizens may remember as blogger Needlenose, one of the most reliable voices on the Iraq War) was struck by a strange echo in Kahl's story of something you'd think was completely different, the story of the persecution of actress Rose McGowan, as reported in Ronan Farrow's New Yorker story on the Harvey Weinstein sexual violence cases; McGowan was spied on by an Israeli private intelligence agency, called Black Cube—

Trump Unleashing His Inner Nixon

Filing Cabinet of Dr. Lewis Fielding, with markings where Hunt, Liddy, Martinez. and the others broke into it in the hopes of finding out something nasty about Daniel Ellsberg, a patient of Dr. Fielding's, in 1971; Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History, via Wikipedia.

Progressives who'd rather we stop talking about Russia Russia Russia and Trump's criminality might take a look at this story, just out in The Guardian, which has nothing to do with Russia: It seems that a year ago, just after Trump's visit to Tel Aviv (when he promised Netanyahu that he would ensure "Iran would never have nuclear weapons"), his people hired a private Israeli intelligence agency to "get dirt" on the personal and political lives of Ben Rhodes, President Obama's deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, and Colin Kahl, former national security adviser to Vice President Biden, which they hoped "would discredit those who were pivotal in selling the deal, making it easier to pull out of it."

Among other things they were looking at personal relationships, any involvement with Iran-friendly lobbyists, and if they had benefited personally or politically from the peace deal.

Investigators were also apparently told to contact prominent Iranian Americans as well as pro-deal journalists – from the New York Times, MSNBC television, the Atlantic, Vox website and Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper among others – who had frequent contact with Rhodes and Kahl in an attempt to establish whether they had violated any protocols by sharing sensitive intelligence. They are believed to have looked at comments made by Rhodes in a 2016 New York Times profile in which he admitted relying on inexperienced reporters to create an “echo chamber” that helped sway public opinion to secure the deal. It is also understood that the smear campaign wanted to establish if Rhodes was among those who backed a request by Susan Rice, Obama’s final national security adviser, to unmask the identities of Trump transition officials caught up in the surveillance of foreign targets.

This is pretty clearly Nixon-level skullduggery, reminiscent of the original Plumbers burglary when they attacked Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office, with the added weirdness of using a foreign agency, and similar to what the Trump people are alleged to have done with Russian agents and a British firm trying to "get dirt" on Hillary Clinton in the campaign period. It's also similar in the tie-in of allowing foreign leaders to dictate US policy—Netanyahu for the Iran deal, Putin for the Ukrainian and Syrian issues, not to mention old Flynn offering US cooperation to the Turkish authoritarian president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

Crime and coverup

A Watergate salad, involving, according to RealHousemoms, "sweet pineapple, creamy whipped topping, mini marshmallows, crunchy walnuts and green pistachio flavored pudding! I like to add maraschino cherries to mine too." Speaking of coverups that are crimes.

Can everybody please stop saying "The coverup is worse than the crime because Watergate was a third-rate burglary"?

That characterization, coined by the late Ron Ziegler (he died in 2003, just as the Iraq war was about to begin and Ari "Palm Beach County is a Pat Buchanan stronghold" Fleischer was ready to take over his old title as history's most mendacious press secretary, though he himself only survived in the job a few months after that), became "inoperative", as Ziegler put it, on April 17 1973, when Nixon informed the gasping world that he had personally investigated the Watergate burglary himself, or that poor John Dean had, and concluded that some White House officials might have been involved.