#if he had found evidence he would have exonerated himself - thinking stuff like that

[pheenick]

there's something in me that dreams to write a roleswap au for ace attorney. edgeworth remains a defense attorney because gregory never died, but phoenix—

well, you see. that's where it gets interesting.

phoenix becomes a detective and his hell mentor is damon gant.

[estherdedlock]

And another thing about If We Were Villains...

Oliver’s false confession would have landed way more than just him in a shit-ton of trouble. Meredith had already told the cops that Oliver spent the night in question with her. Now she can be charged with making false statements to the police and possibly obstruction of justice.

That’s assuming that the cops don’t do any digging whatsoever on Oliver’s story...which is possible, I suppose. But we’d have to assume that these are some pretty shitty cops. The fact is that Oliver has an alibi, which Meredith had previously corroborated---she can’t retract that statement without getting in trouble. The book tells us that Meredith refused to testify on James’s behalf: but her earlier statement, while maybe not under oath, is most certainly on the record. And there’s the sticky issue that Meredith is now accusing James of the crime, although she has little to no evidence. Assuming the cops do believe Oliver’s story, Meredith would again be in trouble for trying to pin the murder on James to cover up for the guy that everyone knows is her new boyfriend or at least “friend with benefits.” Not to mention that Meredith’s status as Richard’s ex-girlfriend would have made her look incredibly suspicious now that she appears to have made false statements about Oliver and James and frankly, about herself, if Oliver is telling the cops that Meredith was lying when she said that she and Oliver were together the whole night.

Meanwhile James does not have any alibi that covers the time when Richard was actually killed, unless Filippa has decided to come up with one, unbeknownst to us readers. This seems like a detail too large for any police detective or lawyer to overlook.

But let’s just assume that these are some pretty shitty cops, and lawyers, too, and that everyone just accepts Oliver’s false confession as true. What has he accomplished? He’s in the stir for 10 years, James is wracked with guilt that will eventually drive him to suicide, Meredith is...honestly I don’t know what’s up with Meredith, but she seems pretty pissed off about the whole thing, and I don’t know what any of it was for.

I’d played my part, hadn’t I? I’d followed Meredith upstairs, without thinking what might happen when Richard found out. I’d convinced James to leave Richard in the water when no one else could. I’d made my fair share of tragic mistakes, and I didn’t want exoneration. “Please James,” I said. “Don’t undo what I’ve done.”

His voice emerged scratchy and raw from his throat. “Oliver, I don’t understand,” he said, “Why?”

“You know why.”

I am with James here: I DO NOT KNOW WHY. When Oliver followed Meredith upstairs, I doubt he’d had any idea it would lead to Richard getting clubbed to death with a boathook, so he bears no responsibility for that. He may have had the last word on leaving Richard in the water, but they ALL (with the exception of James) had the same idea...if anyone was pushing the idea hard, it was Alexander who, by the way, is almost entirely absent from the end of the book and from Oliver’s mea culpa complex.

Is this Oliver’s way of telling James he’s in love with him? Fat lot of good that does, because Oliver has clearly destroyed James’s life by taking the rap for him, so much that James might actually have been better off if he’d done the time himself. So it was all for nothing. Drama for the sake of drama.

Still, kind of a fun read though, if you overlook all the dumb stuff. Which clearly, I have a lot of trouble doing.

[livin-in-mementos]

After Some Time (...and a break or two)

Ugh... okay, its here. The big one. Let me preface this by saying I wont be doing a count by count story of what happened, it’s too many hour and headaches that I don’t need to be fair. But I said I’d get to it... and boy howdy has it been swirling in my head since.

The Slazo Situation Revisited

 So small backstory for those who haven’t boarded this crazy train of bullshit and migraines, this story is about a fairly large commentary youtuber by the name of Slazo (Or Micheal) who was caught in a controversy when his ‘Ex-Girlfriend’ exposed him in a Twitlonger for being a manipulative, sexual harasser. DM’s and screenshots of chat logs were shown and it made Slazo look pretty scummy. A few days later Slazo releases his defence video outlining the parts that were true and a lot of points that were fabricated to make him look evil in the eyes of the internet, with added proof and conveniently missing parts of his exes proof that would have exonerated him on the spot in the eyes of the internet courtroom. For opinions sake, yes I do think Slazo is innocent of the more damning accusations that were put against him, no I do not think he was 100% innocent. Of what he was guilty of? maybe being a pretty shitty boyfriend.... though at the age of 15-16... its slap on the back of the head material... not cancellation worthy.

Slazo was pretty much cleared of it all and everybody went on with their day... heck it shouldn’t even be called the Slazo situation, because while his name was brought up a lot, he wasn’t really all that key to what happened next... 

Commentary youtubers from all corners of the internet had an opinion on what Slazo had done and how guilty he was (again, I will not be doing a play by play of every accusation) which boiled down to two camps

1. “Slazo is guilty and here is why... Oh and have a bunch of off-cuff situations I witnessed where Slazo was really creepy that I only just now remember and want to bring up.”

2. “Lotta commentary youtubers being liars, snakes or hypocrites up in here.”

Which in turn brought two youtubers under the microscope themselves, ImAlexx and Hyojin.

Alex first as it’s easier and is the least weird of the two. Alex jumped on the Slazo hate bandwagon pretty quickly and started accusing Slazo of a bunch of things that couldn’t easily be proven, while also completely backing up the story that Chey (the ex) has given in her Twitlonger, despite the fact it had been blown open with so many holes that not even a brain dead goldfish could find logic in it. Alex would later admit he had a part in writing the Twitlonger, as did many other prominent commentary youtubers and friends,outing the Twitlonger as more of a team effort rather than just Chey writing it herself.

After this Alex was accused of a bunch of stuff himself including being a social climber to get more popular since he was a pretty good friend to Slazo before all of this happened, as well as a snake since he supported Chey and the Twitlonger until it was criticised as untrue.... and Alex said the same to cover for himself.

To this day there hasn’t been a clear end point to this, Alex has tried to brush away from it all and has taken the bumps of being called controversial, hoping for it to all die down eventually. (While writing this Alex appeared on the Happy Hour Podcast to give a rundown of the situation to the hosts who admitted they knew nothing of the situation. What’s worse Alex seems to have glazed over many of his own wrongdoings that only escalated the drama further.) Opinion? To be honest, I don’t know... Alex obviously tried to ride the controversy to boost himself, that much is sure, yet when it came back to bite him he tried to hide and wait for it to blow over. It’s sad, It IS snakeworthy and since a proper apology hasn’t been issued... it’s not a good look for him at all.

Hyojin to me was the worst of the two to me. While she didn’t say as much publicly, it was was was happening behind the scenes that just frustrated me.

(Be aware, if you like Hyojin and think she can do no wrong, DO NOT READ PAST THIS POINT. A lot of hot-takes will be thrown out there and a lot of criticism will be put out there too. I WILL be talking about the aftermath at length which is where the support poured in for Hyojin. I will being ripping that apart just as much, if not more for the bullshit that it was.)

Hyojin sucks, and I mean she really sucks. A lot of what was thrown out about Slazo in the Twitlonger allegedly was orchestrated and was the idea of Hyojin herself, taking what Chey was saying and embellishing it with the rest of their friend group. It’s alleged however and won’t be part of the criticism thrown at her.

While the incident was being investigated, Hyojin was too, including her colourful hot takes on Slazo and how creepy he was. Hyojin would never publicly call out Slazo since at the time, anybody who did was getting rinsed by the internet very quickly. So instead she hid on her discord and talked in DM’s about destroying Slazo’s career so he would never recover and deleting messages that challenged how Chey publicly omitted any evidence that made Slazo look like less of a monster. Shady.

During the internet investigations, it was discovered that Hyojin had an old art Twitter where her fictional character was drawn fucking her friends in several positions. The problem was, several of these friends were underage and despite her defence that none of these friends minded.... it was still there for public viewing as was still wrong. One instance even had another youtuber by the name of Kavos in one of these pictures even though he was never asked, nor gave his permission. The irony of all this being that much of what Hyojin criticised Slazo for, she was guilty of herself. Creepy.

Here’s where it gets controversial... probably more for me. Dog dropping rumours aside. (trust me, it was stupid)

Hyojin was getting major flak for everything that was found out about her and it seemed to get too much for her, which is understandable. Her response to all of this was a tweet telling everyone she was going to kill herself. The public response actually became something that confused me, because in the blink of an eye everyone retracted their criticisms and gave out well wishes instead. To make the trend even more sympathetic the youtubers involved in writing the Twitlonger started urging people to give her space and lay off on the nasty comments.

I for one, did not care. Heartless of me? Maybe. But it was all backed up by reasoning. Here was a girl ready to throw the life of a person under the bus for being a slightly shitty boyfriend and lying to make it sound worse. Helping to write up a statement that grossly exaggerated things to such a degree that Slazo was the most hated person on the internet and was blasted by everyone left, right and centre. After he proved to everyone he wasn’t like that, the attention turned on Chey and the friends that helped her and when their dirty laundry was put out there and they were being criticised.... now it was unacceptable? Now it was too much?

YOU TRIED TO OUT A GUY FOR BEING A SEX PEST! Shit that will follow him for life. But people calling out racist remarks you made? the underage porn you had drawn? The toxic behaviour you exhibited to anyone who questioned you?

....yeah that was too much and the line had to be drawn right?

But hey, it’s okay, you can just back to twitter the second the drama blows over and everything is all good now right?

Now this is where I direct it to the people who think that Hyojin is infallible, that she can do no wrong. She messed up bad, real bad. If anything she’s the true villain behind all of this and it’s shocking the lengths people were going to just to defend her. If every racist, abuser or sex pest threatened their life to be let off, this world would be screwed, but the second a darling Tumblr artist with links to popular youtubers does it, it’s a crime to list the irony that she attempted to cancel a guy with far worse repercussions that would lead to life long damage.

The worst part of all of this was that an apology would have cleared all of this. They knew they were wrong but an apology was impossible for them, so instead it’s made bigger, uglier and dirty laundry is shown. If anything, I’m happy it got to where it did since it showed the ugly side of Hyojin for everyone to see. So my opinion of Hyojin?

Fuck Hyojin.

[littledarlinwrites]

My Own Prison

Bucky Barnes x Reader

Word Count: 3920

Author’s note: This was for @coffee-with-bucky‘s writing challenge! My prompt was: “I know who you are. You’re a softie under that tough exterior of yours.”  This is kinda pretty angsty. I had My Own Prison by Creed on repeat while writing this, although I did switch songs to For Blue Skies by Strays Don’t Sleep towards the end, in case anyone wants to listen. Hope y’all enjoy it and let me know what ya think! @marvelpoststuff thank you again for reading it over and for creating the photo edit for my fic! <3

Summary:  Bucky becomes distant during the trials of the crimes he committed as the Winter Soldier. 

You suspected that Bucky would struggle somehow as the trials that would decide to either hold him accountable for his time as the Winter Soldier or exonerate him came, but in a typical Bucky fashion, he remained stoic. You kept a close eye on him, you knew his time in Wakanda healed some of the wounds HYDRA inflicted upon him, but you were worried that his nightmares would come back stronger than ever while having to face evidence of what HYDRA made him do. Nights you usually spent with Bucky you were now spending alone. He came to bed well after you’d fallen asleep waiting for him, and was out of bed before you’d wake. Tonight was another one of those nights. You were reading a book trying to wait up for him, but your eyes were starting to burn with the need to close them and sleep. Before you knew it, the next time you woke it was dawn and the suns rays were just beginning to kiss the New York City skyline. Your hand drifted to Buck’s side of the bed that was still a bit warm. A soft sigh escaped your lips before you decided to get up and face the day. You had hoped that since it was a Saturday you might have been able to wake up with him unlike the past two weekends since the trial had started. Having showered the night before you simply splashed some water on your face and brushed your teeth before throwing on a pair of leggings and one of Bucky’s long-sleeve shirts. You begin to sluggishly walk to the kitchen knowing Bucky has probably already left the house. You begin the process of making coffee before you realize that you are out of coffee grounds. Taking a deep breath, you decide to go to the grocery store since you had put it off to go to the trial this past couple of weeks. Writing Bucky a note that you leave on the counter for him to see, you slip on your shoes and grab your keys and head out.

An hour later you bring the groceries inside and putting them away. You finish making the coffee you had started this morning and you notice that Bucky still isn’t home yet. You curl up on the sofa with your cup of coffee on the coffee table and a book before draping a blanket over your lap. Mentally exhausted, it doesn’t take long before you’re asleep on the couch. Half an hour later, Bucky walks in, seeing your sleeping form with the book you were reading open in your lap. He knew you were worried about him, about how the trials would affect him. He would be the first to admit that you not only had every right to be worried, but that your worries weren’t unfounded. He had been avoiding you lately, and the guilt ate him up inside. However, the guilt of what he had done as the Winter Soldier was obliterating him. He felt as if he didn’t deserve you, and he was waiting for you to realize that, with every day that the trial dragged on, with every name and face that he had affected, he was waiting for you to look at him with disgust in your eyes and leave. He certainly wouldn’t have blamed you. That wasn’t the only reason he was avoiding you though, mainly at night. Every day that the trial went on the prosecutor would mention another name and show another face belonging to someone that no longer existed because of him, because of what HYDRA made him do as Steve would remind him. With that, his nightmares also returned. Even though it was unhealthy, and you would be sure to scold him the second you found out, he figured if he didn’t sleep, or slept as little as possible, he couldn’t have a nightmare. So he would work out for hours at night before he would go to sleep, climbing into bed long after you had passed out waiting for him, and he would wake up before you to workout, effectively tiring himself out enough that when he would sleep it would be deep enough that he wouldn’t be able to dream and wouldn’t wake you from his nightmares. Looking at you now he felt terrible for avoiding you, neglecting you. You showed up every single day of this trial to support him, and never complained that you went to bed and woke up without him. He knew this was taking its toll on you. You slept more often and seemed to only consume coffee with maybe one actual meal a day, Bucky had wanted to be strong for the both of you, but now he realized all he had managed to do was neglect you and isolate himself within his own mental prison. He decided he would shower before he’d make you something to eat for when you woke up.

You had taken one of the longest naps you had probably ever taken. The sun was low in the winter sky, eclipsed by the buildings. You stretched before smelling something cooking in the kitchen. You nearly panicked before you realized that you hadn’t started cooking anything before you had fallen asleep, and that meant that it must be Bucky cooking. You slowly got up and walked towards Bucky in the kitchen, he was humming something to himself that you didn’t recognize and stirring something in front of him. Wrapping your arms around his middle from behind, you rested your forehead against the center of his back between his shoulder blades. He tensed up for a millisecond before relaxing, but you had noticed the uncharacteristic action.

“Whatever your cooking smells delicious,” you say with a groggy voice before you clear your throat.

“Is that so? I made your favorite, broccoli cheese soup. The rolls are in the oven should be done in a few minutes.”

“Mmmm. Sounds good.” A smile is now plastered on your face. Maybe, just maybe, you have your Bucky back. You squeeze your arms around him to show your appreciation.

“Good. D’you wanna grab some bowls and stuff for us? I think the soup is done and I’m gonna take a look at the rolls.”

You nod your head yes against his back before letting go of him, immediately missing his warmth. He missed your arms wrapped around him just as quickly. Walking over to the cupboard you get out all the things you would need before leaning against the counter and looking at Bucky. You noted how his long-sleeved shirt was more snug on him than it had been before, his sweatpants were hung low on his waist, and his hair was pulled back into a bun against the nap of his neck. It felt like this was the first time you were seeing him in weeks, and in a way you were. The Bucky standing before you now was a much more honest version than the one you saw in court for the last few weeks. He pulled the rolls out of the oven and set them on the stove to cool before making his way over to you, it was now that you got a good look at his face. A straight on view. You could see the dark half-moon circles beneath his eyes. His hands gripped your waist and your hands rested on his chest. He looked into your eyes before glancing down at your lips and looking back into your eyes again. Bucky slowly lowered his lips to yours, nearly groaning at the feeling of your lips on his. His hands made their way from your waist to the back of your thighs. Tapping his hands on the back of them was your cue to jump and wrap them around his waist. He had been able to tell when his hands were at your waist that you had lost weight, but it still shocked him how much lighter you felt to him. He still found you as beautiful as the day he met you, but he felt even more guilt that you hadn’t been properly taking care of yourself. You were stressed out and worried about him. He poured as much love as he could into the kiss. He missed your touch, the way that it would make his heart race. He missed the taste of your chapstick on your lips, peppermint. He missed the scent of your body wash, something floral, but not overpowering, soft like you. He kissed you at that moment as if he were repenting for every single sin he had ever committed. He kissed you until you were both breathless. Your foreheads rested against each other as you gathered your breaths.

“The, uh, rolls are done.” Bucky is the first to speak, his voice a bit gravely.

You let out a chuckle before capturing his lips in one more kiss, a soft and sweet one.

“Join me? I’m not going to be able to eat that all by myself. We could watch a movie or something if you want.” You say hopefully, a little scared that he’ll bolt. You know this is usually the time he goes out for his run before heading into the gym a couple floors down in the tower. You can see that part of him wants to decline, but he steels himself for a split second.

“Yeah, go pick a movie and get it started, I’ll dish out dinner.” He spoke softly. You walked over to the stack of DVD’s and picked out one of the romantic comedies that you both loved before popping it into the DVD player. Bucky sat the plates that your bowls and rolls sat on onto the table before taking a seat on the couch. You sat down beside him before turning and setting your legs across his lap and tossing the blanket over the both of you. Bucky handed you your dinner before picking his up and you both ate in companionable silence while watching the movie. As the credits roll at the end of the movie you could see Bucky fighting sleep.You get up which seems to stir him from his half-asleep state and take his hands in yours to lead him to your shared bedroom. You go to the dressed and pull out your pyjamas and when you turn around you notice that he’s pulling out his gym clothes.

“Buck, what are you doing?” You ask him, a bit of exasperation leaking into your voice.

“Just gonna hit the gym for a little bit,” he says with his eyes to the floor. “Don’t wanna get soft on ya. Besides, I’ll be back before you can miss me.” He says as he shuts the bedroom door behind you. It isn’t until your front door closes that you release your thought to the now empty room..

“That’s the problem Bucky, I already do.” You feel your eyes begin to burn with tears that want to flow down your cheeks, releasing pent up frustration. The lump in your throat thick. You make your way to the bathroom and decide to take a long hot shower. You play music from your phone that matches your mood and turn on the bluetooth speaker before stepping into the steaming shower. Your tears finally break free and sobs begin to escape you. You know that Bucky is the kind of person to be strong for everyone else, to bottle up his emotions, but you couldn’t help but feel like you were failing him. Old insecurities were bubbling their way to the surface and you worried that you were being too clingy and pushing him away and that maybe he just needed space, or that he was falling out of love with you, but then you remembered that kiss from earlier. You knew these thoughts were illogical, but that didn’t stop them from making you freak out. When the water began to cool down you quickly washed your body and hair before getting out of the shower. You felt tired after letting out the pent-up-emotion. Instead of putting on the pajamas you had gotten out earlier you grabbed a fresh pair of panties and another shirt of Bucky’s before drying off and putting them on. You crawled into bed, and for the first time, you didn’t wait for Bucky to join you.

Bucky felt terrible when he left the bedroom he shared with you, but he also knew that if he didn’t go workout, especially after the accidental nap, he would be waking you with one of his nightmares and he couldn’t risk hurting you or stressing you out further because of them. So he headed a couple floors down in the tower to the gym. He made his way to the treadmill putting on his headphones and turning his music up. He ran twenty-five miles before he made his way over to the punching bag. With the skin on his knuckles broken like the punching bag in front of him, Bucky heads to the showers before making his way back upstairs. He lets the water run over his face and down his back as he moves his head forward. He quickly showers as he remembers the sound of your voice earlier. You were annoyed. You had every right to be. You deserved a man that would wrap you in his arms every night. A man that wasn’t still terrified of his own mind, of what he could potentially do to you when coming out of a nightmare. A man that would allow himself to be vulnerable with you like you were hoping he would be. With guilt and disappointment in himself, he gets out of the shower and gets dressed before making his way back to your shared apartment. He makes his way into the dark bedroom. He realizes that you didn’t even try waiting up for him this time. Tears threaten to spill as the salty water burns his eyes. He quietly makes his way to the dresser and pulls out his plaid pajama pants and changes into them before climbing into bed carefully not to wake you up.

You open your eyes confused as to what woke you up. You notice it is still dark out, no sign of dawn in sight and then you hear it. A whimper. You look towards Bucky’s side of the bed and see in the moonlight that his face is contorted in pain or fear. He’s gripping the sheets so tightly that his knuckles are white except for the spots of intense crimson where they had broken open earlier.

“No. No, no, no, no, no, no.” Bucky pleads to no one in the room. You quickly realize that he’s deep within a nightmare. You lay a gentle hand on his chest while keeping the rest of you to the side of him in case he bolted forward.

“Bucky. Bucky, baby, wake up.” You say to him gently, but loud enough to try and rouse him. Except he lets out a guttural scream that makes you jump a little from the unexpectedness of it. It had never got this bad before. The scream he let out was so loud you were a little worried that Steve heard it from his floor above you. Even though you know that it was probably ill-advised, you moved so that you had a leg on either side of Bucky’s hips. Both hands lightly on his chest to steady yourself you move them to his upper arms, gripping them just enough that if he moved you wouldn’t go flying anywhere but he could still move.

“Bucky, c’mon, c'mon wake up for me. Please!” You receive no response but his head continues moving back and forth.

“James!” You nearly shout.

At this he bolts forward. His metal hand around your throat. His eyes scan the room before he really comes to. He gasps as he realizes his hand is around your throat because you had tried to wake him from a bad night terror. He scrambles backwards his eyes wide and his chest is rapidly rising and falling.

You give him a minute to collect himself before you reach out to him. You see him flinch as if your touch would burn him and you stop for a minute and switch tactics.

“You didn’t hurt me.” You speak softly. I see him close his eye tightly before he speaks.

“I had my hand wrapped around your throat.” He takes deep breaths to calm himself, whether it’s from the night terror still or from annoyance at your comment, you have no idea.

You look him over and see that his knuckles were bleeding. With a sigh, you get up from the foot of the bed and stand in front of him before brushing your fingers against his. His eyes shoot wide open, but he doesn’t move.

“Let me clean up your knuckles at least. Please.” You plead him, your fingertips just a hair above his, aching to be laced within his. He gulps before nodding his head. You move your way towards the bathroom, Bucky following behind you. You have Bucky lean against the bathroom sink as you grab the first aid kit from the cupboard and move to stand with his right leg between yours. You pull out an antiseptic wipe and begin dabbing at his knuckles. Bucky hisses from the sting at the first contact.

“Sorry,” you say, barely above a whisper.

“S’okay,” he mutters in return.

You continue cleaning his knuckles until the wipe is a pale pink color and his knuckles are clean. You grab some ointment from the first aid kit and carefully dab it onto the broken skin before you bandage his knuckles so the ointment doesn’t get all over the place. You then wrap your arms around him and lay your head directly over his heart, listening to the steady thump.

“I don’t deserve you,” Buck, mumbles, almost quietly enough for you not to hear him.

“What?” You say shocked taking a step back, your hands remaining on his waist, and your eyebrows scrunched together in confusion.

“I don’t deserve you. I’m a monster. I could have accidentally killed you tonight.”

“You wouldn’t though.”

“God, you don’t know that for sure (Y/N)! I couldn’t live with myself if I hurt you, let alone get you killed because I can’t keep my shit together.”

“You wouldn’t hurt me. HYDRA made you hurt innocent people, but it wasn’t you because if you had a choice in the matter you would have told them to get bent. Besides, I knew that it probably wasn’t the best idea of how to wake you up but I couldn’t stand hearing you in pain like that.”

“But it was me!”

“Would you think that if it were me in your position and you in mine?”

“Wha- no!”

“Then why is it any different for you? If it was you, then nothing would have changed after you were out from under their control. If it were you, Steve wouldn’t be alive right now. If it were you, I would be dead right now and we wouldn’t be having this conversation. It was not you.” You had stepped closer to him and you could feel his breath across your face. You stared straight into his ocean blue eyes that were beginning to brim with tears.

“I just keep waiting for the moment that you see me as a monster like they do, as I do. The moment that you’ll wisen up and leave for your own safety. I’m terrified to lose you, Doll, and every day I just keep seeing more victims that are dead from my hands. A-and you see it, the pictures and videos, and you listen to the details, and I don’t understand why you stay. I knew that I’d probably get nightmares from it all again so I started going to bed late, getting up early, and working out because if I’m too tired to dream then you wouldn’t have to deal with that at least. But then I noticed that you’re hardly eating from all the stress of the case and trying to take care of me and I felt terrible for that. Then I would feel even more terrible because you would try and wait up for me every night, but you’d fall asleep before I’d get to bed because you were so tired. And, God, I missed you. I missed holding you, the smell of your shampoo, your lips on mine, but I just felt like I didn’t deserve it, and God, I’m just so sorry for hurting you. I never wanted to hurt you.” Bucky says breathless breaking down into sobs. You wrap your arms tightly around him as if you could hold the broken pieces of him together. Rubbing your hand up and down his back trying to do anything soothing to help him.

“It’s okay, baby, I forgive you. I know you never meant to hurt me. You would never intentionally hurt me. I love you. I love you so much. Nothing some dumb prosecutor says is gonna change that, okay? They could present all the evidence in the world, but I know the kind of person you are Bucky. I know who you are. You’re a softie under that tough exterior of yours. I’m in this for the long haul, and I knew what I was getting into when we started this. I’m not gonna run at the first sign of trouble, but I do think we need to talk a bit more about the things that worry us. I was stressed, and I was stressed because I was worried about you. I was worried whether you would start having nightmares again, and then I was worried that I never saw you. I should have handled the stress a bit better than I did though. I knew that I should have stopped replacing meals with coffee, I just elected to ignore it, and that was my bad. And I missed you too. That’s why I tried waiting up for you. Bucky, you deserve the world. I don’t know a single person that would make it through what you’ve been through. You have. Healing isn’t linear though, you’re gonna have bad days, but you’ve gotta let me in a little bit on those bad days, okay? Even if it’s just saying that it’s a bad day. ‘Cause I wanna be here for you through all of it. I love you, Bucky Barnes. I love you so much, and we’re gonna get through this together, but if you need to hear right now, then I forgive you.”

At your speech, Bucky pulls you down to the bathroom floor and you cry in each other’s arms. You both sit there for about an hour whispering “I love you’s” to each other, occasionally kissing each other, soft and sweet. You both stay there until your tears begin to dry up, both of your faces blotchy, and your eyes bloodshot from the sudden onslaught of sobs and pent up emotion trying to remain strong for the other. Eventually, you start to shiver from the cold bathroom floor, and with ease, Bucky picks you up bridal style and carries you to the bed where he holds you through the night. You never have to wait up for him to go to bed after that.

[drumpfwatch]

The Mueller Report: A Prelude

Robert Mueller came out with his report, and naturally it's what we’re going to talk about today.

While we never got to see the actual report - yet - we do have Attorney General Barr’s summary, and what it says - and how Barr responded to it - it is very telling.

The first part, and what I think is the most telling for where this is going next, is that Mueller did not exonerate Trump of obstruction of justice. He apparently made it very clear that while he doesn’t have enough evidence to feel comfortable putting forward a conviction on Trump, he doesn’t think it’s something that should be ignored - he is certainly not exonerating him.

So what did Barr do? He exonerated Trump on the charge of obstruction of justice. It is no surprise that a man hired to be Attorney General specifically because he was willing to tow the Trump Line would proceed to go and tow the Trump Line.

This is especially ridiculous when we have Trump on camera saying “I fired Comey to stop the Russia investigation.”

That said, the report did say something Republicans wanted to hear, and that I can’t entirely deny. While Muller was able to prove Russia meddled in the American elections in 2016, he could not prove in any capacity that Trump was involved.

I’d like to know how he explains away all the links we’ve found, like the Russia meeting, but that’s another story. Honestly, I trust Mueller as a man who is interested in doing his job correctly. That is the very reason he spent all that time digging this up.

That said it was sort of irritating to hear the majority of his conclusions are a shrug. I remember seeing a video of Trevor Noah humorously exploding at this, and I have to sort of agree. WE PAID YOU TO GIVE US ANSWERS MAN, WE THOUGHT YOU HAD THEM.

It’s unfortunate the Mueller Investigation has been the subject of the central conceit of this “Is Trump a Criminal?” thing. He obviously is, there’s no doubt about that now with what’s come forward from, of all, people, Michael Cohen.

Further, and most important, so I’m going to put this in big bold letters THIS DOES NOT MEAN TRUMP DIDN’T DO ILLEGAL STUFF WITH RUSSIA. He obviously had business dealings of some sort in regards to Trump Tower, and whatever those dealings are he tried his best to bury them and keep them out of the investigatorial magnifying glass. This is usually a massive blinky sign post saying “LOOK HERE FOR BAD STUFF” and it’s a shame Mueller didn’t look into that himself, apparently.

Another thing to note is the small scope of Mueller’s work. Mueller was asked to look into coordination about the election, and anything else that arose from that, sending his data to investigators as needed. He didn’t find collusion in regards to the election, which doesn’t mean it didn’t happen (though at this point I’m actually convinced it didn’t, but could be convinced otherwise), but does mean that for the time, that book is closed.

There’s still all the other naughty stuff he did. A part of me is getting that conspiratorial itch that maybe Mueller didn’t do the job to the best of his ability, and maybe he’s in on it too, because it just seems too much like that, but he knows more than I do on the matter, and apparently conceded that he was interested in other people coming to the conclusions with the information he gathered. Claiming obstruction of justice without very clear evidence, especially when the person you’re accusing is the President of the United States, is a very heavy burden to shoulder and I can’t entirely blame him for not wanting to lift that wait.

Sadly, without the actual report being fully released to the public, there isn’t much more I can say. I think it’s telling that the Trump lackies don’t want that happening.

PS: You don’t have to have committed a crime to be guilty of obstruction of justice. Just saying.

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Welcome to a special, extra edition of FiveThirtyEight’s weekly politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

sarahf (Sarah Frostenson, politics editor): At long last, we have special counsel Robert Mueller’s report into Russian interference in the 2016 election. And compared with Attorney General William Barr’s summary of the report, which he sent to Congress last month, it paints a murkier picture of whether President Trump might have obstructed justice; for example, the report includes details of the president attempting to fire the special counsel.

Ultimately, though, Mueller’s team wrote that it did not have the confidence to clearly state that the president either did or did not obstruct justice and that “while this report does not conclude that the president committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”

So, tell me … now that we have the report, is it a BFD?

ameliatd (Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux, senior writer): The obstruction findings were a BFD, to me, because I was surprised by how clear Mueller was in suggesting that Trump had corrupt intent when he took various actions around the Russia investigation (such as firing FBI Director James Comey). That was a big deal, for Mueller to paint such a dark picture of Trump and his White House.

Mueller essentially told the story of a president who’s willing to intervene in ongoing criminal investigations to serve his own ends, and I wasn’t expecting Mueller to do that so directly.

Whether anything will come of that is another question, though, since Mueller himself didn’t actually come to a conclusion on obstruction.

clare.malone (Clare Malone, senior political writer): “Our analysis led us to conclude that the obstruction-of-justice statutes can validly prohibit a president’s corrupt efforts to use his official powers to curtail, end, or interfere with an investigation.”

That line from the report really stood out to me in contrast to what we’d been hearing from Barr over the past few weeks.

perry (Perry Bacon Jr., senior writer): There was a whole, whole lot of obstruction documented here. Like 95 on a scale of 1-100, to me. And it sounds like Mueller didn’t conclude that Trump obstructed justice largely because Justice Department guidelines are viewed as not allowing a president to be charged with a crime. Mueller all but said Trump obstructed repeatedly.

ameliatd: There were a lot of things that were pretty different from what we heard from Barr, both in his summary and in his press conference today — it will be interesting to see what happens if Mueller does testify before Congress. I will be curious to hear what he thinks about how Barr handled this.

clare.malone: I agree, Amelia. I sort of wonder if he’ll unburden himself in a lawyerly way.

ameliatd: I am sure that he’ll do some expert hair-splitting. But still. It will have to be hair-splitting to explain some of the discrepancies between how Barr characterized the report/Mueller’s analysis and what we can read in the actual report.

sarahf: Let’s dive into those discrepancies a bit.

What do we think are the key ways in which Barr’s summary and comments in the press conference on Thursday differed from Mueller’s team’s conclusions?

ameliatd: Well, Barr said on Thursday that Mueller’s decision not to come down on obstruction was not driven by an opinion from the Justice Department saying that a sitting president can’t be indicted. And that was important in the wake of the Barr summary because it raised the question — OK, so is Mueller not coming down on this because there just isn’t enough evidence to support obstruction charges?.

Reading Mueller’s report, it is very clear that he started from the position that he couldn’t indict the president and then charted his path from there.

perry: Barr, to me, implied that Mueller couldn’t reach a conclusion on obstruction, like it was a 50-50 call or something, based on the evidence. It looks like Mueller saw obstruction and the question was should he indict based on that or defer to Congress.

clare.malone: I was going to say what Amelia and Perry said. Barr really seemed to have been misleading.

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): I’ve mostly read Volume 1 so far — i.e., the collusion/conspiracy part — and there are some discrepancies there as well. Namely, Barr downplays the extent to which people in the Trump campaign were sometimes receptive to efforts to coordinate with Russia. (Although they rebuffed them at other times.)

From the report:

And from Barr’s letter:

perry: Also, Barr in his press conference today implied that Trump was annoyed by the investigation because it was hurting his presidency and the media coverage was bothering him. The report suggests that Trump was worried where the investigation might lead and wanted to stop it by any means necessary.

sarahf: Right. That’s the part of the report that hasn’t gotten as much attention — Mueller’s team wrote that “while the investigation identified numerous links between individuals with ties to the Russian government and individuals associated with the Trump Campaign, the evidence was not sufficient to support criminal charges.”

ameliatd: Barr’s summary also seemed to imply that the fact that there wasn’t an underlying crime (i.e., nobody within the Trump campaign was ultimately charged with coordinating with Russia) had an impact on whether Trump could have obstructed justice. Mueller said very pointedly that you can charge obstruction without an underlying crime.

perry: Mueller’s team also notes that the collusion/conspiracy/coordination investigation was hampered by Trump allies lying about what happened.

clare.malone: More to the Russia side of things, not obstruction?

I think there’s still the question of why Trump was so into being pro-Russia or accepting help. You could maybe extrapolate that he had business interests …

natesilver: But “evidence not sufficient to support criminal charges” is a lot different than “no evidence” or “no effort to coordinate.” For instance, the stuff about former Trump campaign Chairman Paul Manafort sharing internal polling data with Konstantin Kilimnik (a Russian political operative with suspected ties to Russian intelligence) — including the emphasis the Trump campaign would go on to place on Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania! — isn’t great for Trump. And Mueller isn’t sure what happened to that data, in part because Manafort isn’t a reliable witness so everything about what he did is murky.

perry: Right, there is “no evidence to support criminal charges” on the collusion part is just way different than nothing happened.

clare.malone: Yeah, especially given the narrow definition that Mueller gave to “collusion.” And we should note that there are a lot of other criminal referrals that came from this investigation, so there’s still some story left to tell.

ameliatd: Clare, to your point, it’s also relevant that Mueller focused very narrowly on 2016 election interference. We don’t know what he found and turned over to other investigators.

One other big unanswered question on the Russia side: Why were all of these people making false statements about their ties to Russia?

natesilver: Maybe because (i) there’s a lot of “smoke,” enough for them to be paranoid even if it all doesn’t amount to a criminal conspiracy to interfere with 2016; and/or (ii) nobody actually is quite sure what happened or what didn’t because the campaign was such a shitshow; and/or (iii) they’re people who lie habitually?

And for the most part, the report confirms media reporting, as well as material uncovered in earlier indictments that Mueller issued.

ameliatd: I genuinely don’t know, Nate. I think the explanation could be any of the above, all of the above or none of the above. It’s just so puzzling. It’s also puzzling that Trump saw the Russia investigation as such a serious threat, and ultimately we’re left with something that’s not so dramatic.

natesilver: The one thing Mueller really seems to go out of his way to bat down is the idea that Russia interfered to change the GOP platform on Ukraine — he seems pretty confident that there’s an innocent-enough explanation for that, which is that Trump had already taken a position on Ukraine on the campaign trail and the campaign/Republicans didn’t want the GOP platform to contradict it.

perry: And he also downplays the idea that former Attorney General Jeff Sessions was involved in much of anything during the campaign.

natesilver: Yeah, he bats down the Sessions stuff too.

clare.malone: One thing that does come across in the report is that a lot of this obstruction stuff was self-inflicted. So, it could be just the idea of Trump being habituated to the “deny, deny, deny” theory of PR. Which, when you’re president, leads you down a pretty dangerous road.

perry: I think I get why he wants to end the investigation. Volume 1 documents:

Trump going around telling former national security advisor Michael Flynn to get Hillary Clinton’s emails.

Donald Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner meeting with Russians to get dirt on Clinton.

The various things Manafort was doing that would all look bad for Trump.

So all of that stuff in total looks pretty bad.

natesilver: For the most part, though, if you were one of those people who, from the Barr memo, characterized the media’s entire Trump-Russia coverage as a gigantic fail … well, the Mueller report itself makes you look pretty dumb. All of the stuff that people were expecting to be in there is pretty much in there. And some of it is reasonably serious! But does it amount to a criminal conspiracy? Mueller thinks not.

perry: Like Volume 2 (obstruction) is worse for Trump than Volume 1 (collusion), but if Trump knew most of what is detailed in Volume 1, I can see why he wanted to stop the investigation.

clare.malone: Volume 2 just lays out a lot of Keystone Kops scenarios: Trump giving different orders to different people, mismanaged responses to media stories dropping, etc.

natesilver: And also, to the extent that his efforts to obstruct the probe were pretty serious, maybe Mueller didn’t find out everything he could have in Volume 1.

The report actually says that at some point, and it seems particularly relevant for the Manafort-related stuff.

I'm not an expert on this stuff, but this seems like an interesting part on page 18 of the PDF that I haven't seen other people point out, where Mueller says his conclusions could conceivably be different if not for witnesses lying, invoking privilege, etc. pic.twitter.com/nRm85Ec4zj

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) April 18, 2019

ameliatd: It does seem pretty clear that Mueller was frustrated with his inability to get reliable information out of Manafort. I wonder now that the report is out whether we’ll actually see any pardons.

That’s been hanging over the investigation this whole time, and it would actually be unusual, from a historical perspective, if no one implicated in the Mueller investigation ended up being pardoned.

natesilver: I mean, that would be a very risky move for the White House politically.

ameliatd: Right. There’s a reason why presidents wait until they’re on their way out the door to pardon people.

clare.malone: Who do we think the most likely candidates for a pardon are?

ameliatd: Manafort.

clare.malone: Yeah.

ameliatd: Maybe someone like George Papadopoulos, who was a relatively minor figure.

natesilver: But maybe Trump would do it. You sometimes get the sense that the whole way the White House played it was more to soothe Trump’s ego than to necessarily win the battle of public opinion. The press conference this morning didn’t help the White House at all, I don’t think.

perry: Well, the report suggests that Manafort stayed loyal to Trump. But the report also says he was involved in some of the stuff that looks most collusion-like (meeting with Russian officials and discussing poll numbers).

Pardoning Manafort would be a really stupid political move.

But he might do it anyway.

ameliatd: If this report has taught me anything it is that Trump does not think about risk in a way that I understand.

clare.malone: I feel like Trump definitely misses the forest for the trees. ALL THE TIME.

perry: Well, it appears Trump is always trying to get deputies to actually carry out the legally dubious actions.

So I suppose that is smart.

sarahf: OK, on the question of obstruction of justice, though, what did we learn that was particularly damning or mischaracterized by Barr’s interpretation that made it a big deal?

After all, there were some examples in which Mueller’s team said that the president had the prerogative to, say, fire Comey because it didn’t prevent the FBI from continuing its investigation.

But in other instances, Trump was arguably saved from complicated legal issues only because someone in his administration intervened.

ameliatd: It would have been huge if Trump had actually managed to fire Mueller.

clare.malone: Well, the Comey thing is more complicated, though. It’s within Trump’s power to fire the FBI director, but the way he went about it and the reasons given could tilt it more toward obstruction.

perry: The actual activities had been reported — trying to get Mueller fired, firing Comey. But Mueller provided new details that suggest Trump really was behaving in nefarious ways — like deciding to fire Comey but then trying to get Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to say he came up with the idea is pretty bold. And trying to get former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowki to tell Sessions to basically un-recuse himself from the Russia probe and stop parts of the investigation.

ameliatd: And Barr was making it seem like maybe the evidence wasn’t there, when in fact Mueller said he couldn’t charge Trump but he could, in theory, clear him of wrongdoing. Then Mueller explicitly said he could not exonerate Trump, which suggests Mueller does think the evidence was at least somewhat compelling.

perry: The report shows Trump being deeply involved in the details of trying to stop the investigation and obscure his role in stopping the investigation.

ameliatd: Which makes it pretty clear that Mueller found this evidence at the very least compelling, in terms of obstruction. And he didn’t buy arguments from the president’s defenders that Trump couldn’t obstruct justice by firing Comey because it’s one of his constitutional powers, regardless of his motivation.

perry: Right.

ameliatd: I also just want to note that Mueller said explicitly that a president could be charged with obstruction after leaving office. And Barr just closed that door!

natesilver: Are y’all surprised at how wantonly Barr was willing to spin?

clare.malone: No, Nate — I guess not?

natesilver: I mean, I guess I thought that, say, if the actual report were a 5 out of 10 for Trump (on a scale where 0 is terrible and 10 is great), he’d be willing to spin it to a 6 or a 6.5. Instead he tried to spin it to an 8.

ameliatd: I am surprised, if only because it seemed so ill-advised. Eventually, much of the report was going to go to Congress and the public, right? So why be so misleading?

clare.malone: To play to Trump?

perry: I think Nate suggested this in the podcast, but the report would have basically met my expectations if it came out pre-Barr’s summary. But the White House took the Barr letter and framed it as an exoneration. So that made the report even more damning — I expected it to be not that bad, and it was, on the merits, really bad for Trump.

sarahf: So to that point about expectations — how much of the Mueller report did we already have?

ameliatd: I don’t think there’s much of the report that is genuinely new, but there’s a lot we hadn’t heard from Mueller before.

natesilver: Let’s keep in mind: If you’re willing to work for Trump — at, frankly, a lot of risk to your reputation and maybe also some legal risk — then maybe you’re a True Believer after all.

sarahf: But do we really think this is bad for Trump? For example, what do we think Congress actually does next? Or will it be advantageous for Democrats to use this in 2020?

natesilver: It’s not that bad for Trump. It’s a 5 out of 10, relative to pre-Barr letter expectations. But it feels a lot worse because of Barr’s clumsy attempts at spin.

clare.malone: I think Democrats are going to:

Want Mueller to testify.

Face a struggle between leadership (which has resisted impeachment efforts) and a renewed push to start impeachment hearings.

And fundraise off making the full Mueller report available!

perry: The report portrays Trump very negatively. And a report can be bad in a legal sense that is separate from its electoral impact.

ameliatd: One of the main takeaways for me is that the report has given Democrats ammunition to drag this fight out without necessarily calling for impeachment. Instead, they can call Mueller to testify, call Barr to testify, and use what’s in the report to support more investigations.

clare.malone: We’re already seeing Trump campaign emails and videos out today pushing the line that the tables need to be turned and the investigators investigated. We’re already seeing the playbook for how the Mueller report will play out in the campaign: Trump running with the idea that he was persecuted, and Democrats running with the whole “can you believe this guy?” line.

natesilver: The report is bad, but it’s roughly in line with what people would have expected, as Amelia and Perry said. Keep in mind that only 42 percent of the public approves of Trump, and that’s in a really good economy! They don’t think he’s honest about Russia or other things. They also didn’t necessarily expect there to be a smoking gun about collusion/conspiracy. The public was way smarter than the media on this stuff, I think.

ameliatd: Barr’s little intro to obstruction of justice in the press conference, saying that Trump was facing all of these investigations and scrutiny and there was ultimately no collusion, seems like it will be very useful for Trump and his defenders.

perry: So earlier today, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer made this “no impeachment” statement. And as you can see the tweet referring to it was ratioed:

“Based on what we have seen to date, going forward on impeachment is not worthwhile at this point. Very frankly, there is an election in 18 months and the American people will make a judgement,” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer told @DanaBashCNN .

— Manu Raju (@mkraju) April 18, 2019

natesilver: But Hoyer is right on the politics of this. Impeachment is not a popular option. As Amelia said, call Mueller to testify. Call Barr to testify. Call other people to testify. So you can have a drip, drip, drip against Trump, mostly to satisfy partisans and keep him off balance. But impeachment? Not popular.

clare.malone: The ultimate “Twitter is not the Democratic base” stance!

natesilver: It’s also Trump’s first term. The Nixon/Clinton impeachment efforts both came in the second term, when those presidents were lame ducks and there wasn’t any recourse from the public.

ameliatd: I’m not sure this gives Democrats much fodder for more investigations because the obstruction stuff was so clear and there don’t seem to be many more avenues to explore the 2016 election. Maybe it helps them get momentum to look into Trump’s finances for ties to Russia?

natesilver: Also, if Trump were unpopular enough that he could be not only impeached but also removed by the Senate — which would mean that his approval rating with Republicans would have to be way down — wouldn’t you rather run against him anyway?

That would probably imply he had like a 29 percent approval rating or something, in which case the Democratic nominee in 2020 would be on track to win in an epic landslide and maybe pick up some huge congressional majorities too.

clare.malone: But what does it take for him to slide to that point? And is that a realistic expectation given our political environment, Nate? That just seems to be a pretty unlikely thing to happen.

natesilver: No, I’m not saying that at all.

I’m saying that impeachment won’t actually result in his removal from office unless he’s fallen to like 30 percent.

But if he’s fallen to 30 percent, Democrats don’t want to impeach him because then they’re basically guaranteed a landslide victory in 2020!

ameliatd: And if they impeach him, they risk turning him into a martyr.

sarahf: OK, to wrap … We have the report. And the evidence that Mueller had on the question of obstruction justice was a bigger deal than Barr indicated in his initial summary. But what does the report’s release actually change? Is it a question of who wins the political narrative?

ameliatd: This is the tricky thing about special counsel investigations! If they don’t come to a conclusive result, it’s hard to know what to do with the findings politically.

clare.malone: Basically, Democrats have to keep their base on board with the long-term plan of winning back the White House and not the short-term impulse to impeach.

perry: The question, I think, that is on the table is: What is the non-impeachment remedy for a president who appears to be at least somewhat open to violating norms and/or laws?

natesilver: What does it change going forward? I dunno. The Barr memo didn’t do much to shift public opinion in Trump’s favor, so Occam’s razor is that the Mueller report won’t do much to shift public opinion against him.

I do think it will make the press more skeptical of Barr and any efforts the White House makes to normalize its conduct.

ameliatd: And it does mean we’re going to keep hearing about the investigation, which could be good for Democrats because people are so fired up about it.

natesilver: It certainly describes a White House and a campaign that’s in total disarray. In the end, as Perry said earlier, I think it brings us back to where we were a month ago, where “the Russia stuff” is a negative for Trump and one of the reasons his approval rating is so low but not an acute crisis for him or the first (or second or third or fourth) thing that voters are thinking about.

From ABC News:

[cutsliceddiced]

New top story from Time: ‘This Is Very Good.’ How Trump Beat the Mueller Investigation

President Donald Trump had finished a round of Sunday golf and repaired to his private quarters at his Palm Beach, Fla., club when the news arrived. After 22 months, the findings of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation were in.

Moments before, around 3 p.m. on March 24, Trump’s White House lawyer Emmet Flood received a call from Attorney General William Barr’s chief of staff, Brian Rabbitt. The Department of Justice official said that after more than 2,800 subpoenas, nearly 500 search warrants and a similar number of witness interviews, Mueller had not established that the Trump campaign or its associates conspired with Russia during the 2016 election. In addition, Mueller declined to draw a conclusion about whether Trump had obstructed justice in the aftermath. Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein immediately cleared the President.

Aides were elated. “This is very good,” Trump said, according to an official present. Back at the White House, staff crowded into press secretary Sarah Sanders’ office to toast the result with a bottle of sparkling wine. Within hours, Trump’s 2020 campaign was making money off the news, texting supporters that Democrats had “raised millions off a lie.” Greeting reporters on a Florida tarmac, Trump claimed “complete and total exoneration.”

It was one of the biggest victories of the Trump presidency. No collusion, no obstruction–just as Trump had vowed. A special-counsel investigation of this ilk might have proven fatal to Trump’s predecessors, yet the President survived it, stiff-arming Mueller’s demands for an in-person interview and attacking the legitimacy of the special counsel to stir up his supporters. By the time Trump sat down for a chicken piccata lunch with GOP Senators on March 26, he was also savoring the victory. Trump was “exuberant,” recalled Republican Senator Mike Braun of Indiana. “It’s apparent that it’s a big weight lifted.”

Mueller’s verdict was not nearly as definitive as the President and his allies would claim. He did not clear Trump of obstruction, according to a summary of the report Barr sent to Congress. Mueller laid out evidence on both sides, noted the “difficult issues” involved and declined to render a judgment, instead leaving the decision to DOJ brass. As Barr wrote, “The Special Counsel states that ‘while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.'” (Indeed, that fact irked Trump when he first heard it, according to a White House official.)

Mueller found that Russia had mounted an unprecedented campaign to influence the 2016 election, spreading disinformation on social media, hacking Democratic computers and engineering the release of damaging emails in an effort to sow discord and help Trump win. The special counsel indicted 34 people and won seven convictions or guilty pleas, including from Trump’s former campaign chairman, his deputy campaign manager, his White House National Security Adviser and his longtime personal lawyer. By any historical measure, the Trump presidency remains extraordinarily scandal-scarred.

Which is why the most important result of the Mueller report may be to politically inoculate Trump against the many probes still looming. America has now seen Trump weather a massive investigation led by a widely respected prosecutor. Somehow, Trump turned what might have been a catastrophe to any other President–a sweeping inquiry into potential collusion with a foreign power to undermine U.S. democracy–into a rebuttal against whatever comes next. “The politics of what’s happened over the last few days just places the President in a much better political position than he probably could have imagined,” says Russell Riley, professor of presidential studies at the University of Virginia.

Cliff Owen—APAfter a 22-month probe, Mueller did not find that any Trump campaign officials or associates coordinated with Russia

Mueller’s findings matter in no small part because of what his investigation came to represent. For Democrats and many disenchanted Republicans, the special counsel evolved into a symbol of the rule of law itself. His investigation dominated social media and cable news, and his likeness spawned a cottage industry, with Trump’s opponents snapping up prayer candles, action figures and mugs emblazoned with the words it’s MUELLER TIME.

The former FBI director’s reputation was one reason congressional Democrats were willing to pin so much on the outcome of his investigation. When asked about the Russia investigation, Democrats typically said they would reserve judgment until Mueller completed his work. Now that he has, it’s harder for Democrats to quibble with the conclusions. “You can’t on the one hand defer to Mueller,” says Stanley Brand, former counsel for the House of Representatives under Democratic Speaker Tip O’Neill, “and say, Now that we have it, we want to replow that ground.”

Some of the Democrats calling for Trump’s impeachment have long been wary of staking too much on Mueller’s findings. Tom Steyer, the liberal California billionaire who has committed nearly $100 million toward a pro-impeachment campaign, says he never thought the report would actually move the needle. Waiting for the report, Steyer told TIME in February, would be “a very ill-considered and mistaken idea.”

While Democrats were building up the import of the Russia investigation, Trump, after months of cooperation, decided to aggressively criticize Mueller last year. Those rants showed Trump following his instinct to lash out when he feels under attack. “I’m not going to begrudge Donald Trump for defending himself against a witch hunt and a hoax that was proven to be so,” says White House spokesperson Hogan Gidley. “He’s a counterpuncher.”

Once he started, Trump hammered at the investigation’s legitimacy incessantly. (In total, he’s tweeted 181 times that the probe was a “witch hunt.”) Many of the President’s detractors snorted at the broadsides, dismissing them as the ravings of a cornered man. But there was power in the mayhem. The President’s campaign to discredit the decorated former Marine and lifelong Republican as a rogue prosecutor seems to have had a real effect. Over time, Trump was able to convince supporters that a meticulous inquiry was politically motivated, and the public’s views became more and more entrenched along party lines.

Trump’s criticism will continue to pay off as the 2020 election nears, predicts former White House deputy press secretary Raj Shah. “On a wide range of issues–whether it’s the economy, whether it’s national security–you’re going to have critics fairly or unfairly criticizing the President,” Shah says. “And he’s going to be able to say on the biggest, most prominent issue, they were dead wrong, I was dead right, you should believe me. And I think that’s going to sell.”

The fog of the Mueller report transcended pure partisanship. By the end, many Americans had no idea what to make of the sprawling investigation. Some grew convinced that no matter what Mueller found, the outcome wouldn’t matter. In the days before Barr released his summary of Mueller’s conclusions, TIME was given access to a series of focus-group sessions, convened in Des Moines, Iowa, by the Democratic polling firm GBAO on behalf of a group called Protect the Investigation. The researchers sought to study “soft partisans,” people who scored relatively low on an assessment of party loyalty. One panel was made up of college-educated Republicans, one of college-educated independents and one of Democrats without college degrees.

The similarities were striking. The groups shared a sense that the investigation was merited, the matters were serious, and it was important that justice be done. They were troubled by the idea that politicians and the privileged might get away with things regular people wouldn’t. And yet many of the allegations against Trump didn’t strike the participants as a big deal. The prevailing view was that there was a lot of funny business going on around Trump–but that the President had likely found a way to keep his hands clean. “I do think he probably did some stuff, but I’m pretty sure he did a good job insulating himself,” a 35-year-old Republican man said.

Strikingly, none of the focus-group participants expected the Mueller report to be a game changer. “There may be a lot of pistols, but there probably isn’t going to be a smoking gun,” a 69-year-old man in the independents’ group said. Few said the report was likely to alter their opinion of the President.

Which appears to be the case for many Americans: In a national Fox News poll conducted the week before the report’s release, 70% said there was no chance or only a small chance the report would change their views. A poll by Morning Consult and Politico conducted in the two days following the release of Barr’s summary found the President’s support was essentially unchanged from a week earlier.

Hours after Barr revealed Mueller’s findings, Trump and his top aides watched television news coverage in his office on Air Force One. Soon they began to stew. “The mood fluctuated from happiness to righteous anger,” recalls Gidley. “There was a lot of relief, but there were definitely a lot of questions.”

White House officials are hungry to press ahead. They want to use the momentum to push Trump’s policy agenda forward, with legislative initiatives on health care, trade and infrastructure, according to two West Wing aides. Trump’s liaisons to Capitol Hill say they hope to work with House Democrats on key committees willing to work with them, especially on legislation to repair the country’s aging network of highways and bridges.

Yet the White House knows there’s little chance of major bipartisan legislation getting through. “There were Democrats who wanted to work with us and Democrats who didn’t,” says a top White House official, “and I don’t think that’s really changed.”

How lasting Trump’s victory proves will depend on a host of factors, including how much of Mueller’s actual report sees the light of day. Trump campaign officials believe the end of the investigation creates an opening with independent voters. Yet so far Trump has focused more on exacting vengeance against Democrats and the media than on any attempt at reconciliation.

As his attention shifts to the 2020 election, aides say Trump plans to campaign on his Administration’s achievements, from low unemployment rates to prison-reform legislation to confirming conservative judges and gains against the Islamic State. “We will be running on that,” says Tim Murtaugh, communications director for Trump’s re-election campaign. On the other hand, he adds, “I think a little righteous indignation is warranted.”

Mueller’s conclusions have tamped down talk of impeachment among Democratic leaders, who were already wary of publicly embracing the idea. But House Democrats have no plans to let up on their probes of the President, his Administration, his family members or their business dealings with foreign powers. They are already pushing Barr for the release of the full Mueller report and its underlying documents, as well as to continue investigating other Trump controversies.

At the same time, Democrats have been careful to balance their investigative efforts with a renewed emphasis on legislative priorities. For them, the silver lining in the Mueller outcome may be that they can now zero in on issues like lowering health care costs. Within a day of Barr releasing his summary of the Mueller report, the Trump Administration handed Democrats an apparent political gift, telling the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans that it supports the complete invalidation of the Affordable Care Act. Focusing on kitchen-table issues like health care helped Democrats win the House in 2018, and it is the strategy presidential hopefuls plan to use in 2020. “This campaign can’t be about [Trump],” said South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg, in an MSNBC interview. “I think part of how we lost our way in 2016 was it was much too much about him, and it left a lot of people back home saying, ‘O.K., but nobody is talking about me.'”

The outcome of Robert Mueller’s investigation was as disappointing for Democrats as it was buoying for Republicans. But in the end, it may have been a boon for U.S. democracy. For nearly two years, the fate of the Trump presidency has been bound up in a rare and opaque legal limbo. Mueller may have punted the question of whether Trump had obstructed justice to the President’s handpicked Attorney General. But in the process, he returned the power to render a verdict on the Trump presidency to American voters. The final report will come at the ballot box, on Nov. 3, 2020.

With reporting by Alana Abramson, Molly Ball and Tessa Berenson/Washington and Charlotte Alter/New York

This appears in the April 08, 2019 issue of TIME. via https://cutslicedanddiced.wordpress.com/2018/01/24/how-to-prevent-food-from-going-to-waste

[shoutatthadevil]

Watch "devils knot" on Netflix, I believe the WM3 are innocent

Thanks but I don’t need to. I’ve seen all three paradise lost documentaries and once believed they were innocent too. However like most documentaries, it was biased, and left out incredible amounts of evidence that did not go along with what they were trying to prove (their innocence). Let’s look at that evidence. This first section is taken from Reddit user luckyballandchain. Everything he posts is sourced straight from court documents and evidence:

No substantial evidence? Excuse me

Damien has never come up with an Alibi for where he was during the murders. Well, actually he has, per Damien: > “At the time the police say the murders took place I was actually on the phone with three different people. The problem was, my attorneys never called them to the stand.” - Damien Echols (source)

Really? Lets examine these three (actually four) other peoples testimony, shall we? Do they exonerate him like he suggests? In a word, no. They weren’t called because they exposed Damien’s alibi for the total lie it was.

Holly George - Damien claimed he talked to Holly George on May 5th, 1993. Holly told police she didn’t talk to Damien that evening. She said she spoke with him much earlier in the afternoon, around 3:00pm or 4:00pm. (source)

Heather Cliett - Damien claimed he spoke with Heather Cliett on the evening of May 5th, 1993. Cliett said she’d been unable to reach Echols until 10:30pm. She also mentioned that Holly George told her that Echols had been “out walking around” on May 5th, 1993. (source)

Domini Teer - Damien’s girlfriend, Domini Teer, said she last saw Damien around 5:00-5:30pm on May 5th, 1993. She said she did not speak with him again until Damien called her around 10:00pm that night. (source)

Jennifer Bearden - The one Damien misses out because it’s most damaging. Bearden told police in a 9/10/93 statement that she called Jason’s house between 4:15pm and 5:30pm on May 5th, 1993. She says Jason answered the phone and she talked to Jason and Damien for about 20 minutes. Damien told her he and Jason were “going somewhere” and to call him back at 8:00pm. When Bearden called Damien’s house at 8:00pm his grandmother answered. Damien’s grandmother told Bearden that Damien “wasn’t there.” In her police statement, Bearden says she finally reached Damien around 9:20pm. (source)

So where were Damien and co for four to five hours that happen to coincide with the time of the murders? Well we don’t know. Damien told Jennifer that Jason’s mom had driven them somewhere… which was a lie because she was at work til 11pm (source). It’s strange that he can’t come up with an alibi that holds up isn’t it? Surely if he’s innocent, he just needs to tell us where he was? So why doesn’t he?

Jessie Misskelley has no alibi either. I know, you’re about to say he was in a karate tournament, but he wasn’t. The so-called photos depict a different event a month prior, and the “witnesses” all gave conflicting testimony. This alibi only emerged after a previous alibi (he was at a party with 12 other people) fell apart (source)

And nor does Jason Baldwin, after an attempt to get his brother and a friend (Ken Watkins) to lie for him, he stopped trying to construct one; to the point that in 2008 his lawyer stood up in court and said he couldn’t find a reliable alibi witness for Jason. (source). It’s really weird that three totally innocent men all tried to fabricate alibis for the same period of time that just happens to correspond with a murder they’re suspected of. Really weird that.

Blue wax found on the bodies matched wax found in Damien’s room and a candle belonging to his girlfriend (Photo of candle taken during search)

The Knife - multiple people testified it was Damien’s knife, including his ex-girlfriend Deanna Holcomb (source). She said Damien’s knife stood out because it had a compass, and the knife manufacturer testified that the knife found was missing a compass (source)

But it doesn’t end there. The so called “bitemark” on Stevie Branch (photo) perfectly matches the diameter of the compass slot, complete with central wound for the pin (picture of knife with compass to compare). It’s shocking that an innocent man’s knife would match not just the knife wounds, but other contusions on the body too.

A necklace was found (too late to be included in trial evidence) in Damien’s possession that was covered with blood. Tests proved that the DNA on it was consistent with Damien, Jason and… Stevie Branch. (source)

The three boys were tied with three, distinct, unique knots. This usually points to three distinct killers and is almost unheard of in cases involving just one suspect (source)

Paradise Lost claims “there was no blood at the crime scene” which is… wrong. Completely. Here are the Luminol test results. “It lit up like a Christmas tree […] there was a lot of blood there”

Damien was seen, by a family that knew him very well near the crime scene on the night of the murders. The Hollingsworth Family, who correctly described Damien’s clothes, thought they saw him with his girlfriend. They have never retracted this statement and gained nothing by coming forward, except to have their credibility attacked again and again by WM3 researchers looking to discount their sighting. Despite this, one of the key reasons Narlene Hollingsworth was called to testify was her reputation for brutal honesty, even when it came to her own children. (more info on The Hollingsworth Sighting)

Green Fibres found at the crime scene matched a shirt in Damien’s home (source). Red fibres that the police suspected were from a bathrobe in Misskelley’s home but stressed that they couldn’t match them, were retested by the defense in 2008 and found not to match. It’s odd that they would retest the fibres known to not be a match, but not the ones that were a match, isn’t it? What’s even odder is that they neglected to mention that owing to evidence decay, most crime labs refused to retest for the defense, saying that after all this time they would have decayed too much and that “any findings, would be deeply suspect - no matter which side they favored”. Odd that they forgot to mention this.

Damien is a liar. Straight up. He lies to his supporters to make his innocence seem more compelling and lies to make himself seem more of a martyr. A few examples:

“I lived 15 miles away from West Memphis and the crime scene” (2010 interview, Larry King interview). He lived in a trailer park in West Memphis, less than two miles away from the crime scene.“I never went to West Memphis… Hardly at all” (2010 interview). He was known for walking around West Memphis constantly, and testified in 1994: “I walk around frequently… there’s not much to do”“I wasn’t familiar with Robin Hood Hills before the murders… it was a residential area, and I only went to West Memphis to go to Walmart and stuff” (2010). In 1994, in response to the question “how often do you go to Robin Hood Hills?” Damien responded “two, three times a week? Probably more”.He literally agreed with the prosecutor on the stand that he was moving events around depending on what time he needed to cover. You see him cover for this in Paradise Lost by saying he was “Daydreaming”In his book “Almost Home” Damien claims he “barely” knew Jessie Misskelley. The testimony of Domini Teer, Jim McNease, Jason Crosby, Deanna Holcomb, and about 15 others testifies to a friendship between the two, with everyone mentioning them walking around town together, attending events, turning up at people’s houses together and so on. It’s a total lie, and a poor one.Claimed Marc Gardner “raped” him in prison. He later retracted the whole thing after investigation proved he hadn’t. The prison at the time said he retracted the claims after he was told a report would be published that called him “a manipulative pathological liar”. He was concerned about the effect this would have on his supporters.Claims his mom and sister never visited him in prison (“maybe one or two times… but not often.. my sister only came twice and stopped coming after”). Prison records prove he’s lying and that his mother visited weekly, while his sister came fortnightly or once a month when she was busy.He told Piers Morgan that the prison forced him to “eat with his hands”. “I had to learn to use a fork again”, a claim that is demonstrably bullshit.Odd that an innocent man lies enough to be called a “manipulative pathological liar”.

Misskelley and Echols failed their polygraph tests (Echols’ results | Misskelley’s results). Not conclusive, but interesting.

It’s frequently claimed that Jodee Medford and the Softball Girls (the girls who heard Damien brag about the murders) have recanted their stories. They haven’t. It’s based on a misunderstanding of a declaration by Medford’s mother and ascribing her words to Jodee: http://callahan.8k.com/wm3/d_medford_declaration.html

The Confessions - Jessie didn’t confess “once” after hours of questioning. That’s another lie.May 6th 1993 - The day after the murders, Jessie told his friend Buddy Lucas that he’d “hurt some boys” the day before. He then cried and gave Buddy a pair of sneakers (source)May - June 1993 - Jessie is heard crying, praying and apologizing in his room. He would later be diagnosed with PTSD, after witnessing a “traumatic event” that people still think he completely made up.June 3, 1993 - Jessie arrived with his father for questioning and confesses. This is where people imply he was questioned for 12 hours. He wasn’t. He arrived at 10am and confessed at 2:20pm. Only two hours of that time was interrogation (source)June 11, 1993 - Jessie confesses to his attorneys (source)August 19, 1993 - Jessie Misskelley met with his attorney, Dan Stidham, at the Clay County Detention Center and confessed again (source)February 4, 1994 - On the day he was sentenced, Jessie confessed to the officers driving him to the prison (source)February 8, 1994- Jessie put his hand on a Bible and swore to his attorney (Dan Stidham) that he, Damien, and Jason committed the murders. As proof, he told Stidham that he was drunk on Evan Williams whiskey during the murders and the broken bottle could be found where he threw it on the ground under a bridge in West Memphis. Stidham told prosecutors he would be force to believe his client’s confession if he could find that bottle. So Stidham, WMPD, and the prosecutors drove to West Memphis to look for it. They found a broken Evan Williams bottle in the exact area that Jessie said it would be. (source)February 17, 1994 - Jessie confesses again, this time to the prosecutors. His attorneys begged him not to give this confession, but he gave it anyway (source)October 24, 1994 - Jessie’s cell mate wrote to the prosecutors begging him to keep the WM3 in prison, saying Jessie had repeatedly confessed to the crime in detail and describing it as “awful” and “cold”. He had no reason to do this, it was no benefit to him.. he was simply disturbed by the campaign to release the WM3 after what Jessie had said (source)1994 - Present Day - Jessie continued to confess, possibly to prison counselors (heavily rumored and hinted at by his own attorney and said to be the reason Damien Echols fell out with him) but definitely to fans, most notably one known as TrueRomance, who as a result of what Jessie told her switched from one of their most vocal supporters to the total opposite and her story can be read here

Oh let’s finish on my absolute favorite one: Satanic Panic.

Worried that the case would be branded an example of “Satanic Panic” the trial was moved over an hour away to Jonesboro (Echols and Baldwin) and Corning (Misskelley) in order to give the defendants a better shot at seating fair, unbiased juries. All those “damning” stories in the West Memphis papers? The jury never saw them. All those damning rumors? The jury never heard them. The jury was mostly under 30, with very little religious influence (Jonesboro is a college town, and it was thought the younger Jury pool would favor the WM3, to the point that the state was accused of bias against the prosecution…)

During his initial police interview, Echols stated that the killer probably urinated in one or more of the boys’ mouths, apropos of nothing.

Urine was later found in the stomachs of 2 of the victims, but that information was given by phone only to Gitchell, and not before May 16th, 1993. There is no possible way Damien Echols could have had case- specific information unless he was there or knew someone that was that told him what occurred, as the detective interviewing him at the time was clueless to that fact during the interview. At the time Damien mentioned this detail, no one would have known about this, except those directly involved with the crime. Damien attempted to explain this away by saying he was “thinking about what I would have done if I was the killer”.

Source: https://amp.reddit.com/r/UnresolvedMysteries/comments/4mw5nl/what_case_has_kept_you_up_at_nightdoesnt_sit_well/d41kjxq

The above link contains every source link that’s missing above, I’m just too lazy to source it myself.

Also there is this website, the owner has literally combed through every piece of evidence, read Damiens books, transcribed his interviews, etc

https://thewm3revelations.wordpress.com/author/wm3revelations/

I totally suggest looking through that website. Most people I know who think they are guilty were at one point convinced that they were innocent due to the movies and documentaries. It doesn’t have to change your opinion but you’re doing yourself an injustice by only knowing one side.

[the10dollar-blog]

The Reynolds Pamphlet, Part 1: The Spirit of Jacobinism

The Reynolds Pamphlet. Have you read this?

BECAUSE I HAVE. AND I WANT TO SHARE SOME STUFF.

Basically, I feel like there are a lot of misconceptions about this thing, and I want to cover what I think are the most important things in and about it. I’m going to split it into thematic sections. This one’s about political slander~

FIRST, people call it the Reynolds Pamphlet, but it was published under the title  Observations on Certain Documents Contained in No. V & VI of "The History of the United States for the Year 1796," In which the Charge of Speculation Against Alexander Hamilton, Late Secretary of the Treasury, is Fully Refuted.

And I think that’s fairly widely known, but for some reason people think that the Reynolds Pamphlet is what made Hamilton’s affair with Mrs. Reynolds public. In fact, two pamphlets, V and VI of “The History of the United States for the Year 1796″ edited by James Thomas Callender. 

Callender is mostly known for being a muckraker these days. His argument was that the American people have a right to know about the moral character of public figures. He’s best known for alleging that Thomas Jefferson fathered Sally Hemings’ children. I’m personally a little conflicted about him, because freedom of the press is important, but he did spread some under-researched stuff, especially in the case of Hamilton, since evidence was readily available.

Anyway, the point here is that the Reynolds Pamphlet was written in response to another document. I’ll admit that I’ve only skimmed that text, but it’s readily available here (V and VI). The basic idea is that Hamilton was paying James Reynolds to speculate on his behalf and was making a bunch of money off of it. Part VI includes Hamilton’s claim to Muhlenberg, Monroe, and Venable that he gave his own money to Reynolds due to his affair with Mrs. Reynolds, not speculation. It also includes a quote from Mrs. Reynolds where she claims Hamilton had fabricated the affair to cover his connection with her husband. (In his pamphlet, Hamilton says of Mrs. Reynolds’ quote: “The plain answer is, that Mrs. Reynolds’ own letters contradict this artful explanation of hers; if indeed she ever made it.”)

The opening paragraphs of the Reynolds Pamphlet directly address what Hamilton sees as the problem with Callender and people like him, calling their behavior in “the spirit of jacobinism” (the first four words of the pamphlet).  This is basically a reference to the radical republican movement in France during their revolution. His argument is that people like Callender, who spread rumors with political motives, create an atmosphere of “calumny” (slander) which is detrimental to the nation.

‘Incessantly busied in undermining all the props of public security and private happiness, it seems to threaten the political and moral world with a complete overthrow. A principle engine, by which [the spirit  of jacobinism] endeavours to accomplish its purposes is that of calumny. [...] Lies often detected and refuted are still revived and repeated, in the hope that the refutation may have been forgotten or that the frequency and boldness of accusation may supply the place of truth and proof. [...] If, luckily for the conspirators against honest fame, any little foible or folly can be traced out in one, whom they desire to persecute, it becomes at once in their hands a two-edged sword, by which to wound the public character and stab the private felicity of the person. With such men, nothing is sacred. Even the peace of an unoffending and amiable wife is a welcome repast to their insatiate fury against the husband. [...]

So, according to Hamilton Jacobinism seeks to overthrow the “political and moral world” by repeating scandalous allegations so that the repetition itself makes it seem true. When they find a real fault, they use it to bolster their false claims, regardless of what innocent people are harmed.

It’s all actually really similar to the topic of “fake news” that’s so popular right now. Gossip gets repeated and sources aren’t necessary for people to believe it.

This portion also includes a very important theme in the pamphlet, and a theme that Hamilton was very aware of in some of his earliest writings: that of a person in society’s public good vs. their private interests. But since I’m probably going to devote an entire post to that topic, I’ll move on for now.

Another point Hamilton makes in these first paragraphs is that the slander is motivated by politics, claiming that pamphlets like History are “full freighted with misrepresentation and falshood, artfully calculated to hold up the opponents of the Faction to the jealousy and distrust of the present generation and if possible, to transmit their names with dishonor to posterity.”

Here, Hamilton argues that Anti-Federalists print slander about Federalists to undermine their political power. 

As Hamilton begins to go into specifics, he further clarifies why he believes he’s been chosen as a target for slander, aside from being simply a Federalist. He describes a few other occasions when he was accused of mishandling government funds and was found totally innocent. But, returning to the idea that repeated accusations carry weight with public opinion even when proven false, he adds:

Was it not to have been expected that these repeated demonstrations of the injustice of the accusations hazarded against me would have abashed the enterprise of my calumniators? However natural such an expectation may seem, it would betray an ignorance of the true character of the Jacobin system. It is a maxim deeply ingrafted in that dark system, that no character, however upright, is a match for constantly reiterated attacks, however false. It is well understood by its disciples, that every calumny makes some [converts] and even retains some; since justification seldom circulates as rapidly and as widely as slander.[...]

Relying upon this weakness of human nature, the Jacobin Scandal-Club though often defeated constantly return to the charge. Old calumnies are served up a-fresh and every pretext is seized to add to the catalogue. 

He goes on to say...

The business of accusation would soon become in such a case, a regular trade, and men’s reputations would be bought and sold like any marketable commodity.

So, Hamilton's basic argument against publications like Callender’s is that known lies are repeated and can be used against men of any character, good or bad, for political purposes. In such an environment, anyone in the public eye is in danger. In fact, there’s not even need to come up with new lies, because each repetition of an old lie gains more believers, and it’s human nature to be more interested in scandal than in factual evidence.

A particular section of History that Hamilton points out as being particularly bothersome to him was a quote from Monroe:

We left him under an impression our suspicions were removed.

As Hamilton says, “the appearance of duplicity incensed” him, but without pointing it out directly, he acts in accordance with the values he’s set forth of requiring evidence before buying into possibly false claims by these pamphlets and confronts Monroe directly. It’s after that confrontation, during which Monroe is evasive, that Hamilton decides to publish their correspondences. 

Finally, Hamilton lists a few other specific pieces of evidence that are put forth in History which are purported to prove him guilty. The most important of these to this discussion is evidence given by Mrs. Reynolds and Jacob Clingman, a former accomplice of Mr. Reynolds and the new husband of Mrs. Reynolds. This is where Hamilton most clearly explains his purpose in writing the pamphlet when the question of why he didn’t produce further evidence to vindicate him sooner:

As to Clingman it was not pretended that he knew any thing of what was charged upon me, otherwise than by the notes which he produced, and the information of Reynolds and his wife. As to Mrs. Reynolds, she in fact appears by Clingman’s last story to have remained, and to have been accessible through him, by the gentlemen who had undertaken the inquiry. If they supposed it necessary to the elucidation of the affair, why did not they bring her forward? [...]  But could it be expected, that I should so debase myself as to think it necessary to my vindication to be confronted with a person such as [Mr.] Reynolds? Could I have borne to suffer my veracity to be exposed to the humiliating competition?

For what?—why, it is said, to tear up the last twig of jealousy—but when I knew that I possessed written documents which were decisive, how could I foresee that any twig of jealousy would remain? When the proofs I did produce to the gentlemen were admitted by them to be completely satisfactory, and by some of them to be more than sufficient, how could I dream of the expediency of producing more—how could I imagine that every twig of jealousy was not plucked up?

And later...

Thus has my desire to destroy this slander, completely, led me to a more copious and particular examination of it, than I am sure was necessary.

There is the mistaken idea that Hamilton, in publishing the Reynolds Pamphlet, produced more evidence than was necessary without a thought to how it would affect his family. The reality of the situation is that rumors were circulating, as well as pamphlets which questioned the behavior of the first Secretary of the Treasury of a newly established government. He had been given the impression by Monroe et al. that his explanation in private had satisfied them, but after the publication of History he felt the only way to exonerate himself, the Federalists in general, and the new government was to thoroughly explain the situation with sufficient evidence.

He ends the pamphlet explaining how the slander has affected his political pursuits:

To unfold more clearly the malicious intent, by which the present revival of the affair must have been influenced—I shall annex an affidavit of Mr. Webster tending to confirm my declaration of the utter falsehood of the assertion, that a menace of publishing the papers which have been published had arrested the progress of an attempt to hold me up as a candidate for the office of President.

So, the “spirit of Jacobinism” in the publication of unverified slander for political means is something that has personally cost Hamilton, but he also argues that it is doing damage to the nation, and particularly its politics, as a whole. This serves as the central theme of the pamphlet. I’ll be looking at other themes in future posts. Because apparently I have a lot to say about this thing.

[oysterchalk72-blog]

Krasner: “We’d Like to Get to the Truth” About Cop at Center of Meek Mill Case

City

In a new interview, Philly’s DA says that his office hasn’t “rendered a judgment” on whether retired narcotics officer Reggie Graham is actually guilty of corruption allegations that were cited in Mill’s bid for a new trial.

Left: Meek Mill (Matt Rourke/AP). Right: DA Larry Krasner.

The Year of Meek Mill was packed with drama, featuring a rapper wronged by the criminal justice system and a gripping tale of dirty cops faking evidence, beating suspects, and lying on the witness stand. But the cop at the center of the drama, Reginald Graham — a retired narcotics officer accused of corruption — might yet emerge with his reputation intact.

“I never lied, I never stole, and I never said I did,” said Graham last June, in his only interview on the subject thus far. That interview sparked an investigation and the uncovering of multiple documents suggesting Graham was the furthest thing from a corrupt cop: He was, instead, a whistleblower.

Today, even Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner declares himself unconvinced that Graham was a bad guy. “We’ve never charged Reggie Graham with a criminal act,” says Krasner, in a new interview with Philadelphia magazine, “and we never rendered a judgment that he was unquestionably unethical.”

The situation surrounding Graham, says Krasner, is murky, and “we’d like to get to the truth.”

The DA’s words add yet another twist to a story loaded with fateful turns. In November 2017, Mill was sentenced to jail by Judge Genece E. Brinkley for technical violations of his probation, sparking a massive public outcry for justice reform. Come April 2018, however, he was free on bail after private investigators working on his behalf uncovered damaging information about Graham, the lead officer who arrested Mill on gun- and drug-related charges.

Krasner’s predecessor in the DA’s office, they discovered, had placed Graham on a list of witnesses who could not be called to testify without the permission of a supervisor — his credibility undermined by earlier accusations, in 2013, of theft and lying to federal investigators. Though Graham was never charged with a crime, the Philadelphia Police Department of Internal Affairs hit him with disciplinary charges of theft and conduct unbecoming an officer, and a police board found him guilty. Graham had even supposedly admitted he’d lied, making it easy for heavyweight media outlets like Rolling Stone and Dateline NBC to depict him in villainous terms. Still-new DA Larry Krasner had even seemed to sign off on Graham’s guilt, supporting Meek Mill’s bid for a new trial — and it is this appearance against which Krasner is offering some pushback now.

“Our position was that Mill deserved a new trial based on the information about Graham,” says Krasner. “As a legal issue, this information should have been passed on to the defense by the prior administration, but … it was not a judgment of Graham.”

As victories go, this one is highly qualified. Krasner is not exonerating the ex-cop at this point. But it is another big step toward understanding the cop’s story — and the role he might actually play in the narrative of the Philadelphia police narcotics department, which public defender Brad Bridge describes, artfully and accurately, as offering up some “new scandal every five years … so regularly you can set your watch by them.”

The chief reason for this slow shift in Graham’s fortunes is that the paperwork appears to back him up. Law enforcement documents, including interview notes discovered from FBI and Internal Affairs investigations, reveal that Graham never did admit to lying or stealing. In fact, he’d acted as a whistleblower, even a would-be hero, who provided information to various members of law enforcement about corruption in his squad and faced retribution as a result.

That version of events is further bolstered by retired federal prosecutor Curtis Douglas, who said Graham had told him of corruption in his squad all the way back in 2003; and by Mill’s judge, Brinkley, who wrote last summer in a legal opinion denying the rapper’s bid for a new trial that the evidence points to Graham’s “truthfulness in dealing with a difficult atmosphere of corruption in his immediate work environment.”

In that June filing, Brinkley also went after the DA’s office — hard. The DA’s office agreed with Mill’s attorneys that the rapper deserved a new trial, she concluded, without conducting any investigation of the allegations against Graham. She even quoted her own exchange with assistant district attorney Liam Riley, who admitted to her that the commonwealth hadn’t reached out to any sources who might credibly speak to Graham’s guilt or innocence. These omissions included Douglas, the federal prosecutor, and police officer Alphonso Jett, who’d given a statement to federal investigators that exonerated Graham of the chief allegation of theft he faced. For a new DA whose entire career and political platform rested on the belief that his predecessors and the police require reform, his sudden willingness to accept the findings of these offices without further scrutiny appears particularly off-brand.

Today, Krasner declines to talk about “any investigation we might have done” since, but it isn’t hard to find a key political supporter of his who also believes in Graham. Rochelle Bilal is president of the Guardian Civic League, which represents 2,000 police officers and endorsed Krasner last June in his run for district attorney. Bilal says she spoke to Krasner directly about Graham. “When a cop has gone bad,” she told me in an interview this summer, “other police hear about them for years before anything happens to them, before they get arrested or get in trouble,” she says. “And in my position, I hear these things. But I had never heard a bad word about Reggie Graham, so these accusations about him never really made any sense to me.”

Krasner acknowledges that the Philadelphia Police Department sometimes punishes whistleblowers. That history, in fact, runs deep: Norman A. Carter Jr., Philadelphia police sergeant Tyrone Cook, and, pointedly, Guardian Civic League members in the narcotics department have all come forward with stories of retaliation for their attempts to address corruption in the department.

Now it appears to be Graham’s turn — and his accusers do boast dubious records. Police officer Jerold Gibson, who offered an affidavit contradicting Graham’s account of Mill’s arrest, was himself arrested, jailed and dismissed from the force over a theft charge. And Jeffrey Walker, Graham’s central accuser, who claimed Graham engaged in theft, has admitted to engaging in systemic and long-term corruption in the narcotics department. In fact, it was Walker himself, among other cops, that Graham had been blowing the whistle about years earlier. And so Krasner appears wise to adopt this careful public stance.

“I think it is obvious that there are people in the past who’ve said, ‘Hey, look at these guys, they’re corrupt’ to set up a means of defending himself later in case the shit ever hit the fan,” he says. But he also allows that the affidavits filed about Graham by Gibson and Walker are “of uncertain truthfulness.”

Where this leaves us is still fixed in story’s middle and not its end.

Mill remains free on bail while his attempts to win a new trial wind through the courts. He appears to have warmed to his role as a spokesman for criminal justice reform quite nicely, turning up every month or so with a new single or statement designed to get America woke. But the fact is, if his bid for a new trial fails, he could yet be sent back to prison.

Graham, on the other hand, has been hit with two federal suits in the wake of his public downfall, both curiously absent of detail. “I had a hard time,” says Carlton Johnson, the attorney defending Graham against the suits, “discerning what, if anything, my client is accused of doing.”

The suits look, to Johnson, like a “transparent money grab,” designed to eke some settlement out of the city. The result is that Graham, though beaten up for months in the media, appears to be notching some small but meaningful wins. And as the months pass, he looms as a potentially big figure in the Philadelphia police department — a whistleblower who might yet get brought into court to tell his story. And if that ever happens, Larry Krasner would like to hear him out. “We’d love to talk,” says Krasner, “… if he or his attorney ever wants to get in touch.”

On its face, that sounds good. But there are people they could contact on their own, including a former narcotics supervisor who worked with Graham and Walker.

“There were just none of the red flags with Reggie that there were with Walker” and other corrupt cops, the former supervisor says.

Corrupt narcotics cops brought far more cases and at a hyper-fast pace, suggesting to this supervisor, who requested anonymity because interviews must be cleared with the department, that they were “just making stuff up … because that doesn’t take any time.”

Graham, by contrast, brought fewer cases because he was methodical and actually taking the time to gather real information “on real cases.”

Further, corrupt cops often use the same confidential informants to an extreme degree, but Graham’s roster of informants didn’t appear, Zelig-like, in case after case. And finally, he never faced a high volume of civilian complaints. “I do take a high number of complaints as a red flag,” says this former supervisor.

There’s more, too, but it all points in the same direction: “When his name emerged,” says the supervisor, “everyone who worked with him was just stunned because these kinds of allegations don’t come out of the blue. But we had never heard a bad word when it came to Reggie.”

Source: https://www.phillymag.com/news/2018/12/20/krasner-meek-mill-reggie-graham/

[theconservativebrief]

A secretly recorded tape of Trump talking to Michael Cohen, released to CNN Tuesday night, is the most momentous revelation yet from the falling-out between the president and his former lawyer.

In the September 2016 tape, Cohen alludes to a hush-money deal involving former Playboy model Karen McDougal, who claimed she had an affair with Trump a decade earlier. The National Enquirer’s parent company had reached a deal to purchase McDougal’s story. The company, American Media Inc., is run by a friend of Trump, and bought the story specifically so they could prevent it from getting out.

So Cohen suggests creating a shell company to pay AMI, and Trump seems to approve. Cohen says he’s already spoken to the CFO of the Trump Organization about financing the deal. Then, as Trump and Cohen discuss the financing, the recording cuts off. (Trump’s team has denied the deal ended up happening.)

The tape — recorded by Cohen without Trump’s knowledge, and seized by the FBI during raids on Cohen’s residence and office in April — is part of into a larger investigation by the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.

The full scope of the investigation is not yet clear, and no one has yet been charged. But it appears to relate to several efforts by Trump’s allies to hush up scandals that could damage him during the campaign — sometimes by paying large sums of money, potentially in violation of campaign finance law. The tape connects Trump to Cohen’s actions directly.

Cohen has appeared to be in serious legal jeopardy since the raids, and his team has repeatedly floated the prospect that he might strike a plea deal with prosecutors and “flip” on Trump. No such deal has yet materialized, but it was Cohen’s own attorney Lanny Davis who provided the tape to CNN and who suggested Cohen would no longer defend Trump, adding that there’s “more to come.”

But the tape is plenty dramatic on its own — and plenty revealing about how Trump and Cohen operated.

It confirms that Trump was well aware of Cohen’s involvement in the McDougal payoff. And since the two men use vague shorthand to describe it, Trump was likely very much in the loop on Cohen’s other legally questionable activities on his behalf as well. The ultimate legal implications, though, remain unclear.

Michael Cohen is a longtime lawyer and employee of Trump who’s called himself Trump’s “fix-it guy” — “If somebody does something Mr. Trump doesn’t like, I do everything in my power to resolve it to Mr. Trump’s benefit,” he’s said. This role included trying to suppress scandalous stories that could damage Trump during the presidential campaign. By the time the tape was recorded, Cohen was already infamous for making profane, violent-sounding threats to reporters and others.

An important ally in this effort was American Media Inc. — the parent company of the National Enquirer, the famed supermarket tabloid, as well as other gossip outlets. The company’s chair, David Pecker, was a longtime personal friend of Trump. Trump himself was a frequent source for Enquirer stories, and the magazine would in return cover him positively — as it did, while savaging his opponents, during the 2016 campaign.

But that’s not all AMI did for Trump. The New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow has reported that the company was known to sometimes use a tabloid industry practice called “catch and kill” for major celebrity scandal stories. They would pay for exclusive rights to a source’s story about a scandal, and deliberately never publish it — as either part of a favor-trading relationship or an effort to gain leverage over the celebrity.

And in November 2015, AMI did that for Trump: the company paid a former Trump Tower doorman $30,000 for exclusive rights to his story that Trump had fathered a child with one of his employees, and never ran it.

Enter Karen McDougal. McDougal has said she had an affair with Trump from about June 2006 to April 2007, which began when they met at a party at the Playboy mansion (she was a Playboy model) and included multiple other encounters. As Trump’s presidential campaign heated up in 2016, McDougal tried to see if she could make some money from her decade-old experience.

A contact in the adult film industry put McDougal in touch with Keith Davidson (the same lawyer who later represented Stormy Daniels for a similar transaction). Davidson then opened discussions with AMI, the National Enquirer’s parent company. Eventually, on August 6, 2016, McDougal signed a contract to sell the exclusive rights to her story about her affair with Trump to AMI, in exchange for $150,000 and the promise of numerous columns and two cover features at AMI magazines. (AMI then, of course, didn’t run the affair story.)

During this process, it turns out that Davidson and AMI were in contact with Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen. Davidson, in fact, promptly informed Cohen when the deal was completed — raising some questions about who he was really working for. And, on the September 2016 tape, Cohen discussed the matter with Trump.

Full audio: Presidential candidate Trump is heard on tape discussing with his attorney Michael Cohen how they would buy the rights to a Playboy model’s story about an alleged affair Trump had with her years earlier, according to the audio recording “https://t.co/YmC0QuDqTx pic.twitter.com/fBbq7r1Lq9

— Cuomo Prime Time (@CuomoPrimeTime) July 25, 2018

The two-minute tape (for which the Washington Post made an annotated transcript) begins when we hear Trump’s side of a phone conversation with an unknown person (who some think is Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi). After Trump hangs up, he and Cohen briefly chat about several topics:

A “great poll” that just came out

A controversy around Mark Burns, a black pastor who supported Trump (initially there’s some confusion about whether Trump means Pastor Darrell Scott, another black pastor who supported Trump)

A lawsuit from the New York Times to try to get Donald and Ivana Trump’s divorce papers unsealed. “They should never be able to get that,” Trump says. “You have a woman that doesn’t want them unsealed. Who you’ve been handling.” “Yes,” Cohen answers. (The papers reportedly include some very nasty allegations, but ultimately, they weren’t unsealed.)

Cohen then says, “Told you about Charleston.” (Trump had just mentioned “the Charleston thing” on the phone. It’s not clear what this is, though it could be just a campaign event.)

Then the most important, and legally problematic, part of the exchange begins.

COHEN: Um, I need to open up a company for the transfer of all of that info regarding our friend, David, you know, so that — I’m going to do that right away. I’ve actually come up and I’ve spoken —

“Our friend David” is David Pecker, who chairs AMI and oversees the National Enquirer. “The transfer of all of that info” refers to Karen McDougal’s affair story, which AMI bought the rights to. Cohen wants to set up a new company to, it seems, send money to AMI.

TRUMP: Give it to me and get me a [UNINTELLIGIBLE].

COHEN: And, I’ve spoken to Allen Weisselberg about how to set the whole thing up with…

Allen Weisselberg is the CFO of the Trump Organization, which implies that Trump’s company was involved in Cohen’s hush money efforts.

TRUMP: So, what do we got to pay for this? One-fifty?

AMI paid McDougal $150,000 for her story, a fact Trump appears to remember without prompting. Here Trump seems to be discussing paying AMI back for it.

COHEN: … Funding . . . Yes. Um, and it’s all the stuff.

TRUMP: Yeah, I was thinking about that.

COHEN: All the stuff. Because — here, you never know where that company — you never know what he’s —

TRUMP: Maybe he gets hit by a truck.

COHEN: Correct.

Here Cohen alludes to buying “all the stuff” from AMI — which appears to mean that the company has other negative stories about Trump they’ve bought and buried, that Cohen wants to buy the rights to.

Cohen says this would be a good idea because you never know what might happen with that company. Trump agrees, saying his friend David Pecker could get “hit by a truck” one day, meaning somebody else would be in charge of all the Trump dirt.

Then there’s an exchange that’s a bit difficult to parse and has been disputed. Here’s the Post’s version of the transcript:

COHEN: So, I’m all over that. And, I spoke to Allen about it, when it comes time for the financing, which will be —

TRUMP: Wait a sec, what financing?

COHEN: Well, I’ll have to pay him something.

TRUMP: [UNINTELLIGIBLE] pay with cash.

COHEN: No, no, no, no, no. I got it.

TRUMP: …check.

Cohen’s allies now claim Trump was saying that he should “pay with cash.” Trump’s allies dispute that and say the recording’s not clear there and in any case wouldn’t refer to actual stacks of cash, but rather a fully-paid cash transaction like a real estate deal.

But that dispute seems a minor matter — the bigger picture is that Trump and his lawyer were discussing a very large payment to try to keep a scandalous story about him from coming out during the campaign.

The recording then ends abruptly, even though the conversation doesn’t seem to be over. (Trump claims the rest of the tape would exonerate him.)

What kind of a lawyer would tape a client? So sad! Is this a first, never heard of it before? Why was the tape so abruptly terminated (cut) while I was presumably saying positive things? I hear there are other clients and many reporters that are taped – can this be so? Too bad!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 25, 2018

No evidence has emerged that Trump and Cohen ended up striking a deal to pay AMI, or to buy the scandalous stories about Trump from the company.

In October 2016, however, McDougal’s lawyer Keith Davidson found a new client with another sex story about Trump — Stormy Daniels. This time, he went to Cohen directly to cut a deal rather than going through AMI. Cohen started a new company, Essential Consultants LLC, for the transaction, and agreed to pay Daniels $130,000 in exchange for her silence.

Meanwhile, news of AMI’s payment for McDougal’s story actually broke a few days before the election, on November 4, 2016, in the Wall Street Journal. But it got little attention at the time — Trump’s team denied knowing anything about it, and AMI denied paying to bury stories for Trump.

It took more than another year, until the January 2018 Journal report revealing Cohen’s payment to Stormy Daniels, for the story to really explode. Then, in March, McDougal sued to be released from her deal with AMI, arguing that she had been misled — and got AMI to let her out of the contract.

But the true game-changer was the FBI’s raids on Michael Cohen’s residence and office in April 2018, which revealed there was a very serious investigation into these topics — and has ended up turning Trump and Cohen against each other.

It’s not yet completely clear. No one has been indicted in relation to this probe yet, and the Justice Department hasn’t explained what it’s about or whether Cohen is even the main target. We do, however, know a few things.

First off, the information that initiated this was originally found in special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. But even though Mueller is continuing to investigate Cohen, this investigation was handed off to the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) instead, for unknown reasons. (Perhaps Mueller and/or Rosenstein decided the topic was too far afield from Russia, or perhaps it was a question of resources and manpower, or of making it harder for Trump to retaliate with firings.)

Second, the Cohen investigation is being run out of SDNY’s “Public Corruption Unit,” which investigates crimes committed by public officials as well as individuals or companies doing business with the government.

Additionally, the warrant that used for the Cohen raids listed several things the government was seeking:

Except for the taxi stuff, all of these are about efforts to hush up scandals for Trump before the election, some of which involved big payouts. The warrant specifically named bank fraud, wire fraud, and campaign finance laws as the potential crimes being investigated. Finally, AMI executives were subpoenaed this spring for the probe.

Putting all this together, it seems that the investigation focuses on a major, off-the-books, potentially illegal operation aimed at making problems for Donald Trump’s campaign go away — with Cohen and AMI, and perhaps the Trump Organization and even Trump himself under scrutiny.

Rather than a smoking gun, the tape is probably most significant as a piece of a larger puzzle about an apparent hush money and scandal suppression operation for Trump. What we learned specifically from the tape is Trump was well aware of Cohen’s involvement with AMI and David Pecker in hushing up McDougal.

The specific thing Trump and Cohen discuss doing in the tape is themselves paying AMI. There’s no evidence yet that they actually ended up doing this. So if the tape was in fact merely a brief hypothetical discussion for something that didn’t happen, it could be difficult to charge someone.

One problem looming over all this, though, is that money spent to help a candidate for federal office is supposed to be reported under campaign finance law.

None of these payments — from Cohen to Daniels, AMI to McDougal, or AMI to others — were reported. That puts all parties involved in legal jeopardy. The Trump Organization, too, could be in trouble, since Cohen explains that its CFO, Allen Weisselberg, was helping him out.

Trump allies’ best chance of defending themselves is probably to argue that the payments weren’t truly campaign-related. Trump, for instance, could argue that he is a celebrity and that such payments are common among celebrities dealing with the tabloids. AMI, too, could try to argue that this was a standard practice for them in their celebrity coverage. But the evidence could well contradict these claims.

The Washington Post reported in April that Cohen was known in Trumpworld to have a habit of taping some of his conversations with people and then playing the tapes for others — apparently as an effort to brag that he “had something” on them.

Court filings have made clear that several other Cohen tapes were seized by the government in the raids, but it’s not clear who they’re about or how important they are, or how many involve Trump.

Cohen’s lawyer Lanny Davis told Axios that “there are more tapes” but added, “I’m not saying there are more tapes as telling as [this] one.”

Almost immediately after the raids, intense speculation began over whether Cohen would “flip” on Trump, and provide damaging information to prosecutors as part of a plea deal.

Instead, Cohen filed a lawsuit attempting to assert attorney-client privilege over as much of the seized material as possible, and prevent the government from seeing it. The Trump Organization joined the suit too, in an attempt to assert its own privilege. A federal judge in New York appointed a special master to adjudicate these claims.

After months, that process is now winding down, and the result has been that the government is getting the vast majority of the material the FBI seized from Cohen — out of more than 4 million files seized, around 3,000 have been deemed privileged or partially privileged by the special master so far.

Cohen’s allies, meanwhile, have been repeatedly dropping hints in the press that he’s thinking of cutting a deal with prosecutors rather than fighting expected charges against him. He publicly implied that in an interview with ABC, and then hired Lanny Davis, a longtime ally of the Clintons, to join his legal team (and manage his PR strategy).

There have also been a few hints that Cohen’s true desire was for Trump to agree to pay his expensive legal bills (or perhaps, to get a pardon) — though if that was the case, it does not seem to be working.

Still, there’s been no word of Cohen actually entering into talks with prosecutors about a plea deal just yet. But both sides may have been waiting for the special master’s review to conclude, to get a better idea of what the government actually had on Cohen.

In any case, Cohen certainly appears to be more antagonistic to Trump than ever, as seen in not just his leak of the tape but his leak of to CNN — the network so loathed by the president. So expect more revelations to come.

Original Source -> The Trump-Cohen tape, explained

via The Conservative Brief