BY BRIAN "TWO CAN PLAY THIS GAME, PRIYANKA" BEUTLER 
& CROOKED MEDIA

Thursday, August 23rd, 2018

—Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), profile in courage, on whether “flipping” witnesses should be illegal

DONNIE BRASC-NOPE

President Trump is publicly promoting mafia values to protect himself from multiple criminal investigations. And it may be working.

In a Fox News interview that aired Thursday morning, Trump said he thinks “it almost ought to be illegal” for prosecutors to pressure suspects and convicts to “flip,” which involves helping investigators build cases against more important criminal targets, in exchange for leniency. This is a tactic all prosecutors use, and that both Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the U.S. Attorneys Office for the Southern District of New York are deploying against Trump.

Trump has been portraying Mueller’s team as corrupt, and his convicted former campaign chairman Paul Manafort as a victim, for weeks. We saw how this plays with some Trump supporters on Wednesday night, when one of the MAGA-hat wearing jurors in Manafort’s trial appeared on Fox News and made multiple revealing admissions:

• She was biased at the outset of the trial in Manafort’s favor, and only concluded he was guilty of all the charges against him reluctantly.
• A single, stubborn juror (other than her) caused the jury to hang on 10 of the 18 charges.
• Part of her sympathy for Manafort stemmed from the fact that, in her words, he got swept up in a “witch hunt to try to find Russian collusion.”

From Brian: This juror did the right thing, and should be commended for it, but it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that, in a case about “Russian collusion,” or any case that reached Trump directly, prosecutors will have a hard time securing a completely untainted jury. More than half of all Trump supporters already believe Trump is the victim of a Justice Department conspiracy, and it only takes one committed Trump supporter out of 12 to spoil a case. (One nearly spoiled Manafort’s!) Even in heavily Democratic precincts like Washington, DC and New York City, Trump’s odds are pretty good—so long as his supporters continue to embrace his conspiracy theories and his gangster ethics.

Read →

President Trump has directed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to “closely study” whether the government in South Africa is killing white farmers and stealing their land, a conspiracy theory that’s popular among neo-Nazis and other white supremacists. From Tucker’s lips to Trump’s tweets.

David Pecker, the CEO of the company that owns National Enquirer, who conspired with Trump and Michael Cohen to buy and bury scandalous stories about Trump’s affairs with porn star Stormy Daniels and Playboy Playmate Karen McDougal, has been granted immunity by federal prosecutors in exchange for evidence of what the Wall Street Journal describes as “Mr. Trump’s knowledge of the deals.” Also, the Associated Press reports that Pecker kept a safe filled with damaging Trump stories and hush money documents in the run up to the 2016 election.

Amid Trump’s latest tirade about how Attorney General Jeff Sessions never “took control” of the Justice Department and should be loyal to him instead of the Constitution, Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC)—the leading Republicans on the Judiciary Committee—are laying the groundwork for Trump to fire Sessions after the midterms and replace him with somebody who will shut down the Mueller and SDNY investigations. Sessions responded: “While I am Attorney General, the actions of DOJ will not be improperly influenced by political considerations.”

For some reason that no one at Crooked Media can comprehend, vulnerable Republicans may take a harder line than vulnerable Democrats against Trump’s corruption on the campaign trail. From Brian: Democrats should read Crooked contributor Tim Miller.

Speaking of corruption, Trump has turned to his personal criminal defense lawyers for advice on whether or not to pardon Paul Manafort. In case it wasn’t obvious enough that he views pardons as a means of obstructing investigations of himself.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos wants allow states to raid federal grants to arm teachers. Fuck all of this.

Reality Winner, the NSA contractor who leaked documents suggesting the Russian government engaged in far more election hacking than the U.S. government has acknowledged, has been sentenced to more than five years in prison—what prosecutors describe as a record-breaking term for a crime involving a leak to the media. (Whispers: Donald Trump “leaked” extraordinarily sensitive Israeli intelligence to Russian spies he invited into the Oval Office and Republicans didn’t hold a single hearing.)

Sen. Doug Jones (D-AL) has joined his colleagues in calling on Republicans to delay Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearing until the Senate has had a chance to review all of his public-service documents. See, Joe Manchin, it’s not that hard!

Lebron James has endorsed Beto O’Rourke’s message in that viral video, which we showed you yesterday, and which you definitely watched.

On Hysteria: Join Erin, Grace, and Kiran as they journey through ups and downs of this wild week of news, get into the state of #MeToo, and discuss how hard it is to get a film made without a white guy. Then, stick around to find out how abortion-themed ice cream tastes.

Listen →

Ammar Campa-Najjar, the 29-year-old, half-Mexican, half-Arabic, progressive Democrat running in a conservative district against recently indicted Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA), is facing (despicable) Republican attacks because his grandfather (whom he never met, and has disavowed) helped organize the Palestinian hostage-taking and murder of Israeli olympians in Munich, Germany in 1972.

Campa-Najjar has the perfect retort: “If Hunter has to go back three generations to attack me, that must mean I’m a pretty clean candidate, I can go back two days ago and tell you an indictment he had.”

Read →

“Broken Windows” policing has little to do with actual broken windows and a lot to do with harassing (disproportionately black) people who commit petty crimes. The theory is that taking a hard line against minor offenses will deter people contemplating more serious crimes. But what if instead of trying to nab turn-style jumpers, cities deployed resources to clean up blight in the neighborhoods where “broken windows” policing is most common?

“[Researchers were] surprised by the findings from their first study, published in the American Journal of Public Health, which showed a thirty-nine-per-cent reduction in gun violence in and around remediated abandoned buildings and a smaller—but still meaningful—five-per-cent reduction in gun violence in and around remediated lots…. Equally powerful…was that there was no evidence that the violence had simply shifted to nearby places. The declines were real. And they lasted from one to nearly four years.”

Read →

Let me guess—right now you’re exhausted from another exhausting day of news and exhausting day of work.

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Punditry so bad it reeks! An unnamed MSNBC host apparently has “such a terrible case of flatulence that guests are running for the doors after appearing live on the cable host’s show.

Show yourself, farting coward!

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