Mueller Before Congress, Uproar in Puerto Rico

It’s Mueller Time: Expect fireworks in Washington today.

  Former Special Counsel Robert Mueller is scheduled to start testifying before two congressional committees about his investigation into Russian election meddling and possible coordination with the 2016 Trump campaign.

  It took weeks of negotiations to get the reluctant Mueller to show up and he has publicly said he doesn’t intend to say anything beyond what he said in his 448-page report.

  Rep. Jerrold Nadler, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said on Fox New yesterday, “The president and the attorney general and others have spent the last few months systematically lying to the American people about what the investigation found.  They’ve said they found no collusion, they found no obstruction, that it exonerated a president, all three of those statements are absolute lies.”  

  The NY Timespublished a list of 19 questions they would like to see Mueller answer. Here are a few of them:

– If Mr. Trump were an ordinary citizen, would you have found that there was sufficient evidence to charge him with obstruction of justice?

-You and Attorney General William P. Barr apparently differ on whether you could have, and should have, decided whether the president committed a crime. Mr. Barr has said he was surprised you did not. How do you respond?

-Did you intend for your report to serve as a referral for Congress for possible impeachment proceedings?

– During your investigation, did you see any evidence to support Mr. Barr’s suspicions that federal investigators bent rules to go after Trump?

– Of the 11 episodes involving possible obstruction of justice by the president, which did you consider the most troubling and why?

-Do you believe you got to the bottom of whether the Trump campaign coordinated with WikiLeaks on releasing the emails that Russia stole from Democrats? Would such interactions have been legal? Ethical?

China Syndrome: In an attack that suspiciously bears the signature of the Chinese government, a mob of men with sticks and metal bars targeted antigovernment protesters in Hong Kong near the border with mainland China.

Dozens of people, including reporters and a pro-democracy lawmaker, were injured in the assault in and around a train station. Witnesses said the police did not protect the protesters from the assailants.

PR Nightmare:Facing demonstrations and calls for his resignation after the leak of politically embarrassing email messages, Puerto Rico’s Gov. Ricardo Rosselló  announced that he will not seek re-election in 2020. He said he’s going to finish his current term.

  Many Puerto Ricans have been unhappy with Rosselló, but nearly 900 pages of text messages published by Puerto Rico’s Center for Investigative Journalism revealed a sneering elitism including messages that mocked the troubles of Puerto Ricans after 2017’s Hurricane Maria that caused nearly 3,000 deaths. In one message, Rosselló’s chief financial officer joked about the people who died in the hurricane and the number of bodies that had piled up. 

  More protests calling for Rosselló’s resignation are expected today.

The Obit Page:Robert Morganthau, the patrician New Yorker who was the Manhattan district attorney for 34 years putting away mobsters, street criminals, and financial fraudsters, has died at age 99. He was the face of justice in New York. — Paul Krassner, the former activist in the 1960s counterculture who formed the political prankster group called the “Yippies,” died yesterday in Southern California at age 87. The Yippies, otherwise known as the Youth International Party, included Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman. They once ran a pig for president and threw dollar bills on the  trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

The News Roundup:The credit reporting agency Equifax has agreed to pay $700 million to settle a series of state and federal investigations into a 2017 data breach that exposed the Social Security numbers and credit-card information of 147 million Americans.— Islamic State militants who escaped the defeat of their self-declared caliphate in Syria have been slipping into Iraq, feeding a new low-level insurgency, security analysts say. About 1,000 fighters are reported to have crossed across the border. — The body of former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens lies in repose at the Court today.

The Lincoln Memorial:As President Trump embarks on his 2020 re-election campaign with an agenda of racial division, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote over the weekend about how Trump makes it difficult for her to visit the Lincoln memorial in her home town of Washington.

  She says, “It is a travesty that Donald Trump, 154 years after Lincoln tried to bind the wounds of the nation on race to keep the dream of America viable, is pouring salt into those wounds to keep himself viable.”

  She goes on, “Lincoln tried to wrestle down a clash of civilizations. Trump is ginning one up to get re-elected.”

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It's Been Said

"Christians, get out and vote, just this time. You won't have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what, it will be fixed, it will be fine, you won't have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians. I love you Christians. I'm a Christian. I love you, get out, you gotta get out and vote. In four years, you don't have to vote again, we'll have it fixed so good you're not going to have to vote."

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