BY BRIAN BEUTLER, PRIYANKA ARIBINDI

& CROOKED MEDIA

Thursday, April 4, 2019

—Nancy Pelosi on President Trump saying wind turbine noise causes cancer

MULL-OVER IT

Members of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team of prosecutors and investigators have broken their silence after running a completely leak-proof operation for more than two years. They say Attorney General William Barr has misrepresented their conclusions, which are extremely damaging to President Trump, and may be engaged in a coverup. Weird! That doesn’t sound like this president!

The Mueller team has still not spoken to the press directly, but members have told associates of theirs that they are unhappy with Barr for several reasons:

• Barr has reportedly misrepresented what the Washington Post describes as “alarming and significant” evidence Mueller’s team collected that Trump obstructed justice.

• His disclosure that Mueller did not establish a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia glosses over the fact that the report, “contains detailed accounts of Trump campaign contacts with Russia [and] paint[s] a picture of a campaign whose members were manipulated by a sophisticated Russian intelligence operation.” To be fair, Don Jr. could probably be manipulated by an email from a Nigerian prince.

• Most significantly, they prepared section-by-section summaries of the report for Barr that they vetted for public disclosure, but which Barr has withheld.

That last bullet point is the most significant revelation, because it suggests Barr may be engaged in a coverup. We knew the report contained damning evidence of obstruction, because Barr’s first letter to Congress acknowledged that Mueller found enough such evidence that he couldn’t exonerate the president. We also knew that Trump campaign officials had many contacts with Russians, and lied about them for years.

We didn’t know that when Barr wrote that letter, he was sitting on completed summaries Mueller and his team had compiled themselves. Barr said his purpose in writing was to “summarize the principal conclusions reached by the Special Counsel and the results of his investigation.” It turns out, those summaries were prewritten for him, and he disregarded them to make Trump look as innocent as possible in his own words. It’s like getting sent to the principal's office, but the principal is your new step-dad who wants you to be okay with him kissing your mom.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler has called on Barr to explain this discrepancy, and turn over "all communications between the Special Counsel’s office and the Department regarding the report." It took three months for Democrats to authorize their first subpoenas of a historically dishonest and uncooperative administration. They should waste no time going forward.  

A Justice Department investigation has found that prisons in Alabama “routinely” violate inmates’ Eighth Amendment rights against cruel and unusual punishment by creating an environment that fosters violent attacks, sexual abuse, and drug use.

Prisons around the country are generally awful, but federal authorities have singled out Alabama’s for having the highest homicide rate in the country—eight times the national average. The report notes the prisons there also fail to properly classify violent deaths, meaning that the actual rate could be even higher, have discounted claims of sexual assault and rape for homophobic reasons, and classified claims of sexual assault by gay inmates as consensual incidents, implying a view that gay men cannot be raped.

The report ties the horrifying conditions to a severe lack of staffing and resources, and says that though the state has been aware of the issues for years, it has failed to act. If the state fails to address the issues in the report within 49 days, the DOJ may sue.

Donald Trump's prison-bound fixer-turned-government-witness Michael Cohen claims he has discovered more evidence that incriminates the president. He has asked Congress to request leniency and a sentencing delay on his behalf to reflect his cooperation, and so that he has enough time before his May 6 incarceration date to brief investigators on his discovery.

The House has joined the Senate in voting to end U.S. involvement in Yemen’s civil war, and will send the legislation to the White House, where Trump is expected to veto it.

Trump has backed off his threat to shut down the southern border (and cause an economic crisis), saying he’ll give Mexico a “one-year warning” to stop the drug trade, and that he’ll impose auto tariffs before closing it. So set a calendar reminder right now to see where this lands in one year. Bet Trump remembers all about it!

House Democrats will sue the Trump administration to block his national-emergency declaration and stop unauthorized border-wall construction, arguing that Trump has violated the Constitution’s Appropriations Clause, which vests the power to spend money in Congress.

Trump is reportedly set to nominate a second crony to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors: Herman Cain, the grifting, conspiratorial pizza executive who had to drop out of the 2012 Republican presidential primary after multiple women accused him of sexually assaulting them. We got 9-9-9 reasons why this pick is dumb.

The Trump administration will shift responsibility for meat-safety inspections from the Department of Agriculture to the pork industry itself as early as May, when it will replace 40 percent of federal inspectors with plant employees, whose training would be at the discretion of plant owners. Sounds like as good of an idea as that time we transferred aircraft-safety oversight to Boeing. There’s gotta be a joke about pigs flying here, but we are afraid to make it because nothing is safe anymore.

JP Morgan’s profits soared soared $3.7 billion thanks to Trump’s corporate tax cuts. On a completely unrelated note, here’s a Dan Pfeiffer article about why Democratic organizations and donors should be running ads about stuff like this. Guess it wasn’t a completely unrelated note.  

Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH) joined the Democratic presidential primary today, while Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) is expected to announce next week, and Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO) shared that he is fighting prostate cancer, but still hopes to run for president as well. Are you exhausted? We’re exhausted.

Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos, the richest former couple in the world, have agreed to divorce terms. MacKenzie will keep 25 percent of the couple’s Amazon stock, with a value of $35 billion, while Jeff will retain voting control over the shares, and his interest in the Washington Post. Jeff must really love his alive girl to part with that much cash!

Your new favorite sneaker brand: Straight out of Rio, Cariuma’s sneakers are classic, comfortable, versatile and made in a better way – perfect for work, trekking around the city, meetings or hitting the bar. Get your new favorite sneakers here.

“Saudi Arabia is within months of completing its first nuclear reactor, new satellite images show, but it has yet to show any readiness to abide by safeguards that would prevent it [from] making a bomb,” the Guardian reports, and Democrats suspect that President Trump and Jared Kushner (who flunked his security-clearance review) quietly circumvented Congress to facilitate the construction so that the Saudis could get it built without first agreeing to International Atomic Energy Agency inspections.

Correction: In last night’s What A Day, we wrote that Chicago’s new mayor-elect Lori Lightfoot is the first openly LGBTQ person to serve as the mayor of a major U.S. city. While her election makes Chicago the largest city to have an openly gay mayor, it’s not the first—our apologies!

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