This is what ethical and moral bankruptcy look like

According to Rudy Giuiliani:

“There’s nothing wrong with taking information from Russians,” Mr. Giuliani said on CNN’s “State of the Union,” adding that he would have argued against using it, “out of excess of caution.”

Guiliani would have argued against it "out of an excess of caution"? Sorry, Rudy, your ass is still very much uncovered and hanging out in the wind.

To the statement, "There's nothing wrong with taking information from Russians", there is but one answer:

In the context of a campaign, yes, there fucking well is!

That you and your client won't acknowledge that, Rudy, is merely the latest proof that you and he are bereft of a moral compass. There is no "wrongdoing" in your world view except that which defies your client's will.

It is absolutely farcical that you and he bleat on about "exoneration" when there is ample hard evidence — hundreds of pages' worth in Mr. Mueller's report and in your client's own innumerable public statements — that the only thing your client didn't do was to come to a formal agreement with Russia's intelligence services to work together.

That you and he do not comprehend how appalling it was to accept any kind of foreign aid for his campaign, especially foreign aid that came in the form of illegal penetration of computer systems, loudly proclaims how indifferent you both are to the rule of law and how unfit he is to hold high office.

A lawyer indifferent to the rule of law at the very least must be disbarred.

A president indifferent to the rule of law at the very least must be turfed out of office.

Whether you each should also serve prison sentences is an excellent question.

It's not about Trump, it's about our elections

I haven't had a chance to read the Mueller report yet. However, based on the glosses I've heard from cable news (I know, such a reliable source), what's clear to me is that Don Trumpone's possibly criminal actions are a secondary matter for us citizens.

The most important thing Congress has to do for us is to prevent Russia or anybody else from messing around in our elections.

I'm not saying Don Trumpone didn't commit crimes. However, if we have to choose between pursuing him or safeguarding our elections, I regret to say that there is no choice. It will do us no good to punish Don Trumpone if Russia or North Korea or somebody else can screw us over in the 2020 election.

And unfortunately, Don Trumpone's endless emission of lies and inflammatory rhetoric coupled with his multitude of corrupt actions in and out of office have created a myriad of possible investigative trails — so many that Congress might well be unable to pursue them all in any real way.

Clearly Don Trumpone himself is not going to lift a stubby finger to prevent foreign interference. If anybody is going to act in defense of our elections, it will have to be Congress, and possibly just Democrats in Congress, I regret to say.

That defense must be Congress' priority.

Billy and Donnie, sittin' in a tree...

The Justice Department has discussed the Mueller report with the White House, per the New York Times.

Justice Department officials have had numerous conversations with White House lawyers about the conclusions made by Mr. Mueller, the special counsel, in recent days, according to people with knowledge of the discussions. The talks have aided the president’s legal team as it prepares a rebuttal to the report and strategizes for the coming public war over its findings.

As Neal Katyal reminded us on Maddow tonight, Don Trumpone was a subject of the investigation. What in the hell is the Attorney General doing, sharing an investigation's findings with its subject?

Oh, but Donnie was exonerated, his defenders say. Well, that was only Barr's interpretation of the report. Nobody else has read it!

Oh, but Barr is an honorable man, Trumpers say. Really? That's not what the record indicates. Just Security has a fascinating look at an eerily similar fiasco centered on Barr during Bush 41's administration. At that time Barr announced a startling new DOJ policy permitting the FBI to conduct extraterritorial arrests. Congress wanted to look at the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) memo Barr had authored justifying the new policy. Barr refused, citing what he claimed was a long history of keeping OLC memoranda secret. (He was wrong, to make the kindest possible interpretation.) He offered to summarize the memo instead.

Congress was dissatisfied with the summary and subpoenaed the original memo. It eventually was released, of course, at which point everyone discovered that Barr's summary misrepresented the original memo.

Doesn't give me warm, fuzzy feelings about Barr's truthfulness or honor. Especially since Barr got his job in no small part because he wrote a memo, before being nominated for the AG job, decrying Mueller's investigation as illegitimate.

Barr is behaving as the sycophantic crony Don Trumpone always wanted in the AG job, a crony who will do everything he can to defend the boss, justice and his oath of office (to the Constitution, remember) be damned.

I don't know what Barr sees in Don Trumpone. I wonder if Barr stands to gain materially in a way no one yet sees. I otherwise cannot understand why he has torched his reputation with a majority of the public. And yes, if my own reaction is representative of those outside Don Trumpone's base, that's exactly what Barr has done to himself.

Congress requires the unexpurgated report, Mr. Barr

The highly redacted version of Robert Mueller's vaunted report is slated for release Thursday, according to the Justice Department.

I want the whole damned report. So do a lot of others. Unfortunately, we're not entitled to it.

The problem is that William Barr, who as AG ultimately oversees bowdlerizing — excuse me, redacting sensitive material in the report, has declared that Congress isn't entitled to the redacted material, either.

I'm not buying that, Mr. Barr.

Barr has identified a few categories of evidence that he insists must be redacted from Mueller's final report:

• Evidence provided to the grand jury
• Sensitive intelligence
• Information concerning still-pending investigations
• Information that might hurt the reputations of people investigated but not indicted

Let's take these in order.

Ordinarily, if a grand jury doesn't vote to indict, that sends the message that those accused of wrongdoing were not guilty of that wrongdoing, in spite of whatever suggestive or inflammatory evidence was available. Sealing the evidence provided to that grand jury protects the accused from being found guilty in the court of public opinion.

However, Justice Department policy strongly discourages indicting a sitting president. Thus a grand jury hearing about possible malfeasance by the sitting president is participating in an exercise that almost certainly will not result in charges being filed, no matter what the evidence would warrant if the subject weren't the sitting president.

The Watergate grand jury recognized this conundrum. Guided, I assume, by its collective sense of morality, that grand jury asked the judge to release the evidence it saw to Congress, reasoning that since Congress was given the power of impeaching the president, Congress should weigh the evidence against him. That precedent was followed in subsequent cases like Ken Starr's investigation into Bill Clinton.

Why not release the Mueller grand jury evidence to Congress? Isn't that the natural destination for evidence of wrongdoing by a sitting president?

Somebody has to ask a judge to release grand jury testimony. In addition to Barr, who already has told Congress he will not ask, the Mueller grand jury itself could ask, just as the Watergate grand jury did. Why hasn't it? Did the Mueller grand jury decide the evidence it saw should not be released? Did it not know it had that power? Did the idea never even arise?

Now, as to sensitive intelligence, it's clear the public is not entitled to such information. Congress, however, routinely reviews such intelligence. The relevant committees have well-established procedures to safeguard it. They have to have all possible intelligence information in order to know how best to safeguard the country, after all.

Why is Barr refusing to provide the House Intelligence Committee with the relevant underlying evidence found by Mueller's investigators?

I'll give Barr a pass on material relevant to ongoing investigations. As far as I know, Congress doesn't routinely get such information.

The fourth category of redacted information, material that might affect the reputations of unindicted persons, seems fishy. After all, one person we know the Justice Department would be unlikely to indict is the president himself. To use the pretext that he wasn't indicted as an excuse to conceal damaging evidence about him is perverse. At the very least, Congress has to evaluate the evidence for itself to decide whether impeachment is warranted.

Even if you believe that people other than the sitting president ought to be protected from disclosure of damaging information, you come back to the problem that AG Barr is fatally compromised as a trustworthy overseer of the redaction effort. His pre-appointment memo dismissing the validity of the Special Counsel's investigation ought to have prompted him to recuse himself from oversight of the investigation, including its release. We simply cannot trust AG Barr to redact anything without suspecting the redactions will protect this president.

The public will have to wait for decades to see the unredacted report, I suspect. Congress, however, must see it now. It's why the public elects representatives — they have to have access to material the rest of us can't be trusted to see.

You have no fig leaf, AG Barr. You're stonewalling on behalf of the most corrupt president in modern history. You're complicit in his corruption and his criminality.

The admissions scam in novella form

Caitlin Flanagan of The Atlantic penned a splendid recounting of the college-admissions bribery scam — you know, the one that ensnared Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin, among others — entitled, "They Had It Coming".

Flanagan informs the piece with her own experience as a teacher and guidance counselor at a tony Los Angeles prep school thirty years ago. She could see the Huffman/Loughlin scandal coming, not because she knew either of them but because she knew the type of parent they represent. That kind of parent existed back then, too.

We may yet find that the allegations are overblown or even unsupported. I doubt that, but anything's possible, especially when a case involves celebrities: both sides have a lot of incentive to distort reality.

Even so, the truths Flanagan finds resonate in these times. She tells an old-fashioned type of tale, the morality play, stylishly and well.

The stupidest robocall tactic

CNN's headline is "It's not just any call. It's from your number".

The article is about robocalls that use numbers of people in your phone's address book to get around our understandable refusal to answer if we don't recognize the originating number.

Using my friends' and family's numbers would indeed be a heinous step up from the often badly chosen fake numbers used by the useless parasites of the world today.

But your own number? That's a different story.

The article's writer picked up the call out of sheer curiosity. What was she expecting, that her phone was calling to see how she was? Of course it was a scammer.

The easiest fake call to spot is the one that purports to come from your own number.

Now, the geniuses who pursue this line of moneymaking haven't all figured this out: at least one of them has tried it on me. The attempt was amusing, I'll admit. Yet even the dimmest bulb will eventually realize what a stupid tactic it is.

In the long run, better gear up for your "friends" and "family" to be threatening you with jail for unpaid taxes that can conveniently be paid off with prepaid debit cards.