Today Is Robert Mueller’s Merrick Garland Day

/54 Comments/in , , /by

As I laid out last week, I provided information to the FBI on issues related to the Mueller investigation, so I’m going to include disclosure statements on Mueller investigation posts from here on out. I will include the disclosure whether or not the stuff I shared with the FBI pertains to the subject of the post. 

Last month, Mitch McConnell started bitching about how long the Robert Mueller investigation has been going on.

What I think about the Mueller investigation is, they ought to wrap it up. It’s gone on seemingly forever and I don’t know how much more they think they can find out.

In response, I started tracking a different kind of forever: how long Mitch McConnell kept open Antonin Scalia’s SCOTUS seat to place Neil Gorsuch, rather than Merick Garland, in it.

Scalia passed away on February 13, 2016.

Gorsuch was sworn in on April 10, 2017.

By my math, Mitch McConnell kept that seat open for 422 days.

Robert Mueller was appointed on May 17, 2017.

By my math, 422 days after May 17, 2017 is July 13, 2018. (Do check my math on this–it has been decades since I have done anything resembling real math.)

In other words, today is Robert Mueller’s Merrick Garland day, the first day on which he has been working as long as Mitch McConnell kept a Supreme Court seat open to make sure a conservative ideologue rather than a centrist judge would occupy that lifetime appointed seat.

Mitch? We haven’t gotten close to forever yet.

image_print
54 replies
    • Bob Conyers says:

      My hope is that’s about Trump-Russia related, but something nobody on the outside had any inkling was being investigated. Earth shaking would be great, but at a minimum something that suggests the scope is reaching into unexplored territory, and with buttoned up in a way that reinforces that Mueller isn’t leaking or politicizing.

      Of course it will probably be something completely unrelated, like a Portuguese Fentanyl prcursor importer gang bust.

  2. Trent says:

    The lack of conscience, self-awareness and perceived immunity from hypocrisy prevents any of these trumplican fiends for money and power draped in christianism and sactimony from seeing reality outside of their evil parallel universe.

    Where is he/she anyway?

    T-

    • Charlie says:

      HERE in the UK, God help us all. Up to his usual antics – denying what he’d said to the tabloids within 24hours.

  4. orionATL says:

    this is the kind of throw it back in their teeth reporting there needs to be more of.

    it is a twin to emptywheel’s observation of the ascerbic and questioning comments by senator lyndsey graham and senator cruz regarding trump’s fitness for the presidency which put in context the hysteria of numerous republican congressmen playing the drama queen over fbi counter-intelligence expert peter strozok’s comments about candidate trump’s fitness for the presidency,

  5. harpie says:

    How many people have ever voted for fcking Mitch McConnell?
    And yet he has SO MUCH POWER over every aspect of ALL of our lives.
    It’s fcking infuriating!

      • Greenhouse says:

        Bingo VG!

        I went home with a waitress the way I always do / How was I to know she was with the Russians, too? / I was gambling in Havana, I took a little risk / Send lawyers, guns, and money / Dad, get me out of this”

  9. Mulder says:

    What did Mitch know and when did he know it?
    Back in Feb. 2016 here’s what John Oliver had to say.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnpO_RTSNmQ
    I remember being in the fetal position by the end of the show. And not because I had a shattering orgasm.

    Why, in September 2016 after being briefed by FBI director James Comey, DHS Secretary Jeh Johnston, and White House counterterrorism and homeland security advisor Lisa Monaco, wouldn’t Mitch sign off on the Gang of 12 bipartisan rebuke of Russian interference as Obama wanted?

    To me it was an extraordinary gamble that HRC was going to lose and the SCOTUS pick would be his.

    What did Mitch know and when did he know it?

    • harpie says:

      Exactly…”What did Mitch know and when did he know it?“, and, furthermore, what was his reimbursement for services provided? 

  10. Trip says:

    Huh? @Marcy

     

    “There is no allegation in the indictment that any American was a knowing participant in the alleged unlawful activity or knew they were communicating with Russian intelligence officers. There is no allegation in the indictment that the charged conduct altered the vote count or changed the outcome of the 2016 election”

    https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Dh_2LROXUAApigu.jpg

    • harpie says:

      Just guessing, [maybe just wishful thinking] but, just because there is no such allegation in THIS indictment, doesn’t mean any such allegation will not be made in the future.

       

      • Trip says:

        Yeah, harpie, but so far, it’s the same shit. Imagine if Trump and co. walk. He will be worse than ever before.

        Now, is he still going to have his super-duper friendship and good cheer meeting with ‘competitor’ Putin? Bygones and whatnot?

        • orionATL says:

          trip –

          “if trump and company walk, it will be all for naught.”

          no, no, a thousand times, no :)

          from my viewpoint, this is all about discovery, i mean legal discovery. discovery is the gold.

          discovery will give us as a nation the facts of the matter, what actually happened in the 2016 elections. even trump’s gargantuan capacity for lying to manipulate fools is unsustainable overv time.

          once we have the facts, historians and even some intrepid journalists ( :)) will begin to write up the history of donald trump’s (and subsequently the republican party’s) betrayal of his nation. the matter of motive is not the most important, but i’m willing to bet that, trump being trump, he betrayed us for money rather than for power.

          all power to discovery!!

      • pseudonymous in nc says:

        Given the shoddiness of state election systems and the refusal of GOP-run states to do any kind of audit, it’s probably easier for Mueller’s team to pin down the activities of the GRU than to pin down deliberate interference in the actual casting of votes.

        But I now think that’s where we’ll end up. And the reason why you get these “in this indictment” disclaimers for the troll factory and the GRU hackers is because once that no longer applies it’s thermonuclear and the US has zero-zilch-nada constitutional recourse to nullify a presidential election.

      • orionATL says:

        from my point of view, what emptywheel wrote in her first post about the unnamed journalist and her experience with fbi/doj implies strongly that either the russians or the trump campaign (or both cooperatively) would have had to try hard to manipulate the final vote in the 2016 presidential election in order to insure that the deals(s) struck before the election could be consummated in a trump presidency.

        thus wisconsin, michigan, and penn vote totals would have had to have been manipulated, otherwise all that scheming wouuld have been for naught.

  11. pseudonymous in nc says:

    Looks like DCCC/DNC docs were zipped up and copied out via X-Tunnel to US-based servers, which blows up the USB-stick insider / “datestamps don’t fit transfer speeds” theory. Which is what I presumed anyway.

    The September/October stuff is new info — using commodity cloud hosting to clone servers! — and while it’d be harsh to blame CrowdStrike for not locking that shit down, it feels like the FBI should have been more hands-on and brought in CI resources after June. Thanks, Mitch. You fucker.

    • Trip says:

      What does this say about Craig Murray? Didn’t he assert that he received the data by hand in a clandestine meeting in a US park, before handing it over to Assange?

      • orionATL says:

        it was dark. the bag was heavy. a cold rain had started. craig was told for sure it was the dnc goods. it would have been impolite to insist on checking.

    • Trip says:

      And what about Roger Stone knowing he was talking to Russians? Smith went on the dark web SPECIFICALLY to look for Russian hackers.

      • harpie says:

        It is Roger Stone’s time in the barrel…and read Matt Tait on Wikileaks, here.

         / […] / Organization 1 is Wikileaks / DMs between Wikileaks and Guccifer 2. Shows the mechanism by which hacked emails went from one to the other, that Wikileaks was actively soliciting emails, not merely passively in receipt of them, and that it had an overtly political agenda in doing so. 

        • harpie says:

          Christopher Ingraham [WaPo data reporter]:  https://twitter.com/_cingraham/status/1017813203256930304

          July 27, 2016, Trump: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.”

          Indictment: [screenshot Count 22 p.7] […on or about July 27, 2016] That evening, Russian operatives targeted Clinton campaign emails “for the first time.”

           

    • orionATL says:

      para 1: thanks for this info. alternative (conspiracy) theories DIE HARD!

      any speculation available on the implications of how data was transfered out and to what account?

      para 2: the fbi now knows it should have done more. it knew that by late 2016 at the latest. comey played hamlet; the fbi played the violin (nero); mitch played the little dutch boy.

      • pseudonymous in nc says:

        The indictment states it plainly: the GRU team (APT 28) spearphished credentials, installed monitoring software controlled from a leased server in Arizona to steal more credentials and cover their tracks, zipped up the docs they wanted and used a custom tool called X-Tunnel (presumably a SSH tunneling utility of some sort) to shift them to a leased server in Illinois. They piggybacked from the DCCC to the DNC by stealing the credentials of someone with authorization on both networks.

        Oh, and on the same day King Idiot asked Russia to find Hillary’s missing emails, they sent out spearphishing emails to a bunch of Clinton campaign staff “for the very first time.”

        • orionATL says:

          i am reminded of what michael caputo said after being interrviewed by the osc team, to whit:

          “the house and senate intelligence committees are fishing with nets.
          the office of special counsel is spear fishing.”

        • pseudonymous in nc says:

          Quick correction: the “first time” was spearphishing towards people in Clinton’s personal office, not campaign staff.

  12. Rapier says:

    I’ve said it before and I will say it again. The GOP wants to give those Russians the Congressional Medal of Honor. They got it symbolically two weeks ago when the 7 Senators went to Moscow for their talks, some secret they say. I take no stock in any story that the meetings were substantive. Cripes, nothing is substantive with Trump’s act in the center ring. No, it was a symbolic meeting. To me it symbolized US Senators licking the boots of a foreign governments functionaries, for no particular reason, on the 4th of fucking July. To them and the GOP base who knows what it means. I can’t figure it out.

  13. Trip says:

    Rosenstein: ‘I briefed President Trump about these allegations earlier this week. The President is fully aware of today’s actions by the Department.’

    So, how in the fuck does he ramble on and say “Putin is fine”? You know, if he’s not IN ON IT?

  16. orionATL says:

    the appropriate headline or crawl for tomorrow’s mainstream media regarding the office of special counsel’s indictment announced today:

    RUSSIAN MILITARY ATTACKS UNITED STATES

    Washington July 13, 2018

    Special Counsel Robert Mueller unveiled an indictment today that revealed that a unit of the russian military intelligence (the GRU) attacked the United States and specifically its federal and state electoral systems repeatedly during the 2016 electoral year…. ”

    a report of this attack might continue in this vein:

    ” The attack, which began in 2015 and focused on President Barack Obama’s Democratic Party, is believed to be related to american diplomatic and economic sanctions activity on the Russian Federation as a consequence of Rusdian military activity, including coverg activity, in the ukraine beginning in 2014…”

    continuing with selected quotes from the indictment indicating the frequency and depth into the american state and national political and voting sydtems.

    • orionATL says:

      say what? the russian military attacked the united states’ election systems?

      why would they care?

      i’ve suggested above that the american (obama) government’s thwarting of russian military activity in the ukraine in 2014 ff could be a motive.

      one can also infer, based on emptywheel’s july 3 post “putting a face…”, that the prospect of u. s. cooperation with the russian federation on a syria policy under a trump administration might unify the motives to intervene of both the russian military and the russian civilian government as articulated quite plainly by ambassador kislylak:

      “… The substance of the text — that the Trump team started focusing on Syria right after the election — has been corroborated and tied to their discussions with Russia at least twice since then. Most importantly, in his statement to Congress, Jared Kushner explained his request for a back channel with the Russians by describing an effort to cooperate on Syria.

      The Ambassador [Sergei Kislyak] expressed similar sentiments about relations, and then said he especially wanted to address U.S. policy in Syria, and that he wanted to convey information from what he called his “generals.”…. ”

      ukkrain? syria?

      if you are a chess-playing russian military leader what’s not to like? two-fer-one, right?

      well, getting caught for one. for another, having your nation indelibly imprinted, once again, on the historical memory of citizens of the world’s major militariy power as “untrustworthy and evil”.

      in the end, this very clumsy effort at cyber intervention by the russian military has been exposed and is going to cost the russian federation dearly in world esteem. the only political force at present that can prevent the entire sordid story from unfolding is the u. s. house of representatives under the leadership of speaker paul ryan.

Comments are closed.