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BY BRIAN BEUTLER & CROOKED MEDIA Wednesday, June 26, 2019 |
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| ALL ABOUT BOB |
| House Democrats have finally subpoenaed Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who will testify on Capitol Hill next month.
Here’s what to expect, and what it all means.
What happened? After it became clear Mueller would not appear voluntarily, the chairmen of the House Judiciary and intelligence committees each subpoenaed him to testify publicly, and he agreed.
When’s it all going down? Circle July 17 on your calendar. Mueller will testify before both committees, in different hearings, on the same day. Members of his team will brief lawmakers behind closed doors the same day on sensitive issues (classified information, etc) that can’t be aired publicly.
Why’d it take so long? That’s a great fucking question! A lot of Democrats are scared of impeachment, and to accommodate them, Democrats have engaged in low-energy oversight. It’s really frustrating.
How’d Trump take it? Well, he called it “Presidential Harassment!” then slept a few hours before ranting on the phone to Fox News about Mueller “terminating’ some emails, and finally complained about Megan Rapinoe of the U.S. Women’s National Team on Twitter. So, exactly as you’d expect. Very stable genius.
Impeach him, maybe? That’s only going to happen if the testimony creates so much political pressure on vulnerable Democrats that they crack. And it’s not out of the question. Mueller will testify to really damning things. The better Democratic questioners will elicit things we didn’t know from him. He’ll breathe life into his report and the investigation that 400 pages of reading never could.
But it’s also unlikely. Mueller will try to avoid making too much news because he’s worried about coming off as too political. And some Democratic leaders, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, are still opposed to impeaching Trump. After July, Congress takes the month of August off, and then it’s campaign season. It’s getting late, and if you’re upset that some Democrats have tried to run out the clock on impeachment, call them and let them know. |
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| Nearly the entire senior leadership of the National Rifle Association, including its top lobbyist and political hand Chrisopher Cox, has left the organization, which will also shudder its propaganda arm NRATV, all stemming from an effort by its recently-ousted president, Oliver North, to mount a coup against its chief executive, Wayne LaPierre. Cox organized the NRA’s efforts to help Donald Trump win the 2016 election—which included spending over $30 million.
You hate to see it happen, you know? |
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| Did you hear? The first Democratic presidential primary debate begins in like an hour. So here’s the deal: We’re not going live after the debates, and the next episode of Pod Save America won’t come out until Friday. BUT, we’ll be streaming Jon, Jon, Tommy, and Dan’s group chat during the debate both nights. That means all the takes, reactions, and gifs LIVE! Watch here. For a post-debate newsletter, pledgister to vote at votesaveamerica.com and you'll receive our What A Debate email.
President Trump claimed German Chancellor Angela Merkel “hates the United States perhaps worse than any person I've ever met.” A guy who loves Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un says what?
Oregon Republicans have successfully nullified a Democratic climate change bill by literally leaving town (making it impossible under the Oregon Senate’s quorum rules for the chamber to vote) and then threatening violent retaliation against state police officers dispatched to retrieve them. This is bullshit, and if Democrats don’t figure out how to get this bill through, it’s a template Republicans will replicate across the country wherever they can, whenever they’re out of power.
The House oversight committee issued a subpoena to Trump adviser/notorious liar Kellyanne Conway, who refused to appear at a hearing today with the administration’s ethics watchdog about her flagrant, serial violations of the Hatch Act, which prohibits government employees like her from electioneering on the job.
The Trump administration’s effort to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census faces a new legal threat thanks to black-and-white evidence that the purpose of the question was to discriminate against minorities.The Justice Department thus asked the Supreme Court, which hasn’t even heard arguments about whether the citizenship question process was unconstitutionally discriminatory, to declare that it was all fine. Outrageous.
A (warning) extremely disturbing picture of a migrant man and his 23 month old daughter, drowned in the Rio Grande river with the U.S. border in sight, has brought the consequences of Trump’s vicious hostility to immigrants home to millions of people. The administration has limited the number of migrants who can claim asylum each day at legal ports of entry—a policy called “metering”—which leaves desperate migrants south of the border a choice between waiting endlessly in awful conditions or risking their lives to cross illegally and claim asylum after turning themselves in. Beto O’Rourke said “Trump is responsible for these deaths,” and he’s right.
A legend cocktail bar employee in Chicago spit on Eric Trump and got detained.
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| Elizabeth Warren today became the first of multiple presidential candidates to visit Homestead, a for-profit facility in Florida where over 2,000 migrant children who have been transferred into the custody of the Department of Health and Human Services are stuck in detention. The facility denied Warren entry, but she got a look over the fence from atop a ladder and described what she saw: “There weren’t children playing. There weren’t children laughing the way children usually do when they’re moving from one place to another,” Warren told reporters. “These were children who were being marched like little soldiers―like little prisoners―from one place to another. This is not what we should be doing as a country.” |
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| Before President Trump canceled the nationwide ICE raids he’d scheduled for this week, Bernie Sanders’s campaign used his huge email list to send warnings to everyone within 20 miles of the 10 cities ICE planned to target, including “know your rights” pamphlets in English and Spanish.
Primaries can get ugly, the horserace can be exhausting, and Trump is awful, but most Democratic candidates care about the people they seek to represent, and want to help them. |
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