Before I get on with the subject matter, apols for not posting since July 2022, the simple reason is that I completely revamped the rugby site around that time and once the season kicked off there wasn’t a lot of online time for anything else. I have tons of things I’d like to do with FPP going forward but little or no opportunity to do it but at very least I’m hoping to get to a stage where I can at least produce one piece of content per week. We’ll see how that goes in a Rugby World Cup year….
No, I don’t actually condone the action being taken above, nor do I condone the Van Gogh soup thing, nor anything similar. No matter how strongly I felt about a particular issue, it’s very unlikely I’d ever go to those lengths.
That said, I do think a bit of perspective is required. Is anyone at least ASKING why people were driven to plan incidents like this? I mean nothing is black or white, nor is it pink, blue, brown, green, yellow or even orange despite this guy’s best efforts.
So what I’ve done is have a quick Google, found a press release from the Just Stop Oil site and copy/pasted it here.
Yes, I know that makes it look like their stunt “worked”, but the ere’s the thing…between the jigs and the reels, damage to a baize cloth or a bit of Campbells chucked on a glass pane in front of a painting doesn’t QUITE match up to the damage being done by the fossil fuel industry and those world leaders it has bought.
So great cause, shame about their methods, but still here’s to faster progress towards better public ownership of valuable resources. JLP
Two supporters of Just Stop Oil have disrupted the World Snooker Championship, climbing onto the snooker tables and throwing paint over one. They are demanding that the government stop all new UK fossil fuel projects and are calling on UK sporting institutions to join in civil resistance against the government’s genocidal policies.
At around 7:20pm, two Just Stop Oil supporters stormed onto the snooker tables at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, interrupting play. The pair proceeded to cover one of the tables in orange powder paint, before being removed by security and arrested.
One of those taking action, Margaret Reid, 52, a former museum professional from Kendal, said:
“I did not take this action lightly, but I cannot remain a passive spectator while our government knowingly pushes us down a path to destruction. They are giving handouts of £236 million per week of our money, to the most profitable industry on earth, during a cost of living crisis. I can no longer justify watching from the side lines.”
“I am angry and heartbroken that I have found myself in a position where taking this sort of disruptive action is the only way to get heard.”
Another of those taking action Eddie Whittingham, 25, a student at Exeter university said:
“I don’t want to be disrupting something that people enjoy, but we’re facing an extremely grave situation. Europe is experiencing its worst drought in 500 years. We’re seeing mass crop failure right now. We’re facing mass starvation, billions of refugees and civilisational collapse if this continues.”
“We can’t continue to sit back and act as if everything’s OK. If you want to do something to prevent the greatest crisis we’ve ever faced, go to juststopoil.org and sign up for a slow march from April 24th in London.”
In moments of emergency, we must stand up and be brave, we must stand up for good over evil, life over death, right over wrong. Just Stop Oil is calling on everyone to pick a side. Either you are actively supporting civil resistance, fighting for life, or you are complicit with genocide.
The time is now. Join us and slow march, while you still can. Our indefinite campaign of civil resistance begins on April 24th and will not end until our government ends new oil and gas.
The “Deconstructed” pod does exactly what it says on the tin and spells out in real terms how industrial relations have gone across the pond over the years.
I have long been interested to know what actually happened in Ballymun – not enough to do extensive research mind you, and one notable sidebar from this thread is that if the were to meet me, his first impression might be to see me as some kind of “Rugby Dad/Newstalk Niall” hybrid, but still I was grateful to him for tweeting this extensive info so I thought I’d share it here. Check out the link at the end to watch the video if the embed isn’t working.
Everything below this line of the post was written or produced by the author in question. JLP
Since Ballymun comes up a lot in discussions of the housing crisis, here's a thread debunking some of the most persistent myths/misconceptions/lies about the community.
(I made a film about this some years ago, but people were largely indifferent, so this is a capsule summary).
— Shut up about your poxy small business (@TurloughADK) April 21, 2021
Since Ballymun comes up a lot in discussions of the housing crisis, here’s a thread debunking some of the most persistent myths/misconceptions/lies about the community.
(I made a film about this some years ago, but people were largely indifferent, so this is a capsule summary).
Rugby dads, professional gentrifiers and Newstalk Nialls generally reference Ballymun as a “knee-jerk response” to a housing crisis (mostly false), a utopian project (totally false) and a failed housing model (also false).
The truth is, Ballymun was the Irish state doing what it does “best” – the bare minimum of public provision it can get away with. There was no failure of utopian planning because there was no utopian planning. Promises of cinemas, bowling alleys and amenities were always false.
That said, the blocks themselves were built to a French system and were generally sound, bright and spacious.
Ours had a large living room with private balcony, a large bedroom, two smaller bedrooms, a bathroom with bath and constant hot water, and a decent-sized kitchen.
But it swiftly became apparent that Dublin Corporation (now Dublin City Council) – whose senior officials always resented the fact that the National Building Agency had been entrusted with the lucrative project – had no intention of providing even basic services or maintenance.
In the early years, the community itself plugged this gap. Communal areas were scrupulously maintained by residents. To the best of its ability, an impoverished community stood in for the absent state. It built structures of mutual support and recreation that endured for decades.
Eventually, however, successive economic crises overwhelmed residents. From the 80s onwards, several waves of heroin addiction swept over the area, on the heels of a prescriptions drugs epidemic.
A beleaguered community lost the ability to do the Corpo’s job for it.
While the plethora of community organisations rallied and survived, the area deteriorated physically and economically.
Ballymunners made numerous earnest attempts to engage the state over the heads of the Corpo, which had by now largely abandoned the area to its fate.
These heroic efforts kept the community above water, until, in the late 90s, government finally yielded to pressure and announced a Regeneration project (an earlier attempt in the early 90s having been abandoned at about 10% completion).
This was to be enacted by a new limited company wholly owned by Dublin Corporation – Ballymun Regeneration Limited (BRL).
Inspired by Blairite thinking/models from the UK (and shipping over some of the same personnel), BRL swiftly decided on total demolition of the high rises
It should be explained here that outright gentrification (displacement and replacement of the community by more affluent residents) was off the table for a variety of reasons; chiefly, the fact that the community itself had forced the state’s hand and had to be won over.
While BRL carried out an elaborate pantomime of consultation (within already-defined parameters), its mission became clear:
Since the area couldn’t be gentrified, an attempt would be made to gentrify its people instead.
This would entail the forcible destruction, not just of the physical infrastructure of the community (tower blocks, green spaces, centralised shopping areas, community centres etc), but of all communal experiences of life in Ballymun.
BRL was quite explicit about this. The purpose of the Regeneration was to liquidate the existing community of Ballymun, with its communal forms of solidarity, and to allow residents to be reborn as responsible, market-oriented individual consumers.
The hodge-podge of architectural styles (sidenote: between 1997 and 2014, BRL spent €98.7m on professional fees alone) were all designed to achieve this.
Gone were the sweeping open spaces and the central meeting places that had fostered a community.
In their place – isolated developments that encouraged, and enforced, suspicion and exclusion of all but one’s immediate neighbours.
Ballymun’s vast network of community organisations – from football clubs to legal aid to tenants’ associations – was systematically dismantled.
These relics of non-market community identity (as BRL saw them) were brought under the banner of a BRL-run Neighbourhood Council, which was run into the ground and dissolved within a couple of years.
A tangent before the conclusion – it is shameful that anyone still parrots BRL’s mantra of “mixed income housing”.
The thinking here (explicitly stated in Ballymun) is that well-adjusted middle-class residents act as role models for their feckless working-class neighbours – vile
The Regeneration was, by every metric except BRL’s own, an abject failure. Estimates of its cost vary from €1bn-€2bn.
Ballymun was destroyed – socially, economically and culturally. The private sector investment on which BRL had based its Blairite fantasies never materialised.
The moral of the story:
When you see planners, politicians and pundits warn of “creating new Ballymuns”, always remember that they, and people who think like them, were given 20 years and a blank cheque to “fix” Ballymun according to their own ideology.
They utterly failed.
What really stuck in their craw about Ballymun was not the widespread, visible poverty (after all, these people have created a city strewn with the tents of the homeless), but the forms of solidarity and resistance to market ideology which Ballymunners carved out for themselves.
So yeah, if a politician, planner or developer arrives in your town with a “regeneration masterplan”, run them out of there before it’s too late.
The U.S. Attorney who former U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions tasked with investigating Hillary Clinton, the Clinton Foundation and the Uranium One deal, and the FBI’s inquiry into Clinton’s use of a private email server as secretary of state has reportedly found “nothing worth pursuing.”
All the tweets calling her “Crooked Hillary”, all the rallies where he encouraged his followers to mindlessly chant “lock her up”, all the insinuations on Fox News…and it seems they have found nothing.
So when it was the Mueller investigation, it was the Democrats wasting taxpayers money for the #RussiaHoax. And nowadays we apparently have more taxpayers money wasted for the #ImpeachmentHoax.
So using that logic, that means that Trump has been wasting taxpayers money for what can only be called the #UraniumHoax???
Despite being a congresswoman for just a few months, both major US political parties are pushing a narrative that Representative Ilhan Omar from Minnesota is unworthy of her position.
“You have to wonder if she is an American first”
Brian Kilmeade, Fox News
I’m sharing this Young Turks video not to highlight the actions of Fox News, more to point out that it is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to elite opposition to Congresswoman Omar.
Nobody who has watched Fox News with a critical eye will be surprised by the blatant spin presented in the above video – Omar’s words are taken wildly out of context.
The Washington Post also did a good job in this video putting her words into the proper context…
But Rupert Murdoch’s right wing spin factory is not the only source of this misrepresentation, and her statement referenced here is far from the only example.
She was recently attacked for remarks she made that referenced AIPAC, a powerful lobby group that represents the Jewish-American community.
Again, whatever side of the issue you might be on, we have to wonder why her words were so blatantly taken out of context, not only by Fox News and Republican politicians, but also by the leadership of the Democrat Party and most significantly, the mainstream media.
It’s not as though the CNNs and MSNBCs are normally shy when it comes to playing clips of quotes when it suits them. For example, how many times has Trump’s infamous ‘grab them by the pussy’ line been given airtime? Seems to be at least once or twice a week even now.
Yet Congresswoman Omar’s quote, in which she clearly referred to herself when the entire passage is taken in context, was frequently branded as ‘Anti Semitic’ on political panels without her actual statement being played.
It took a comedienne to do what the broadcasters couldn’t…
Why the widespread revulsion against Omar?
Is it because she is Muslim? Is it because the Washington establishment is genuinely concerned that she does not put ‘America first’? Is it because they really do believe she is anti-Semitic?
None of the above, as far as I’m concerned. I believe the push against is all about one of her first appearances on the House Foreign Relations Committee.
One of the principle consequences of the 2018 Midterms was that although the House was won back by the Democrats, the Progressive caucus was so strong that Nancy Pelosi had to make several concessions to guarantee that she returned to the Speaker role.
Among those concessions was the placement of prominent Progressives on key House committees like Intelligence, Judiciary, Ways and Means and in Omar’s case, Foreign Relations.
When she had one of her first opportunities to ask questions at a hearing, it was to none other than Elliott Abrams, who was involved in many questionable foreign incursions by the US in the past, and has now been appointed as President Trump’s ‘special envoy’ for Venezuela.
OMAR: On February 8, 1982, you testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about U.S. policy in El Salvador. In that hearing, you dismissed as communist propaganda reports about the massacre at El Mozote in which more than 800 civilians, including children as young as 2 years old, were brutally murdered by U.S.-trained troops. During that massacre, some of those troops bragged about raping a 12-year-old girl, girls, before they killed them. You later said that the U.S. policy in El Salvador was a “fabulous achievement.” Yes or no, do you still think so?
I haven’t taken the time to check all of the congressional records since 1982 (or mainstream media interviews for that matter) but I’ll bet anything that Abrams hasn’t asked a question like this publicly in that time.
That is why Omar is being so blatantly smeared; the ‘Military Industrial Complex’, a major donor for prominent politicians from both parties, do not want questions like that asked in a public forum. In fact, the President himself gave the game away in one of his attacks on her “She should resign from Congress, or at least from the committee.” (paraphrase).
Just to be clear, I’m not 100% aware of Omar’s politics, but when anyone is taken so wildly out of context it needs to be pointed out.
“Every person I spoke to all assumed Trump was going to pick a man.”
This clip is Fox News at its best. Well, I really should say ‘worst’ but since they get such good ratings I suppose you could spin it as a positive.
In what is quite possibly the most unscientific vox pop ever put on the airwaves, a young guy goes on the streets of New York (probably not far from Fox News studio) and clearly gets the answers he wants from random people, with the ‘Students hate the SCOTUS pick that Trump hasn’t made yet’ narrative more than likely determined before he ever set foot on the sidewalk.
The premise of the narrative, of course, is highly disingenuous. It is widely known that the shortlist for Trump’s Supreme Court choice was taken from a longer list drawn up by the ultra conservative Federalist Society (think Iona Institute and you’re in the ballpark) so no matter which judge Trump goes for, anyone of a progressive or ‘liberal’ mindset would be inclined to oppose the nomination. For example, there isn’t a single judge on that list which would fail the ‘I will help abolish Roe vs Wade’ litmus test.
But why ruin a good narrative with the facts? The already-brainwashed Fox News viewership don’t need much of a push to support the stereotype they have already been fed of ‘students’. Once the answers from the vox-pop are selectively chosen and they spend more time in the studio mansplaining the responses than actually airing them (assuming the overall sample was actually bigger than the one they put on air that is), it only takes a clip of less than three minutes to get the ‘job’ done.
As I always say about entities like Fox News, it’s not its existence that is downright scary, it’s the fact that so many people actually believe content that is so blatantly skewed towards the Republican agenda. And it has only gotten more blatant under this president. JLP
The resignation during the past week of SCOTUS justice Anthony Kennedy allows President Trump to appoint a young, healthy, cons replacement who could guarantee pro-corporate and anti-sivil rights rulings for decades to come.
Article by Adam Liptak and Maggie Haberman in New York Times on June 28, 2018
As he made his way out of the chamber, Mr. Trump paused to chat with the justice.
“Say hello to your boy,” Mr. Trump said. “Special guy.”
Mr. Trump was apparently referring to Justice Kennedy’s son, Justin.
A popular refrain whenever a new revelation emerges about ConManDon is : “What would he be saying if Obama did the same thing?” This could be the most important one of all.
To my question in the title, ‘another’ refers to the fact that when Justice Scalia passed away in February 2016, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to hold a vote on confirming Obama’s pick as successor on the grounds that it was ‘too close to the election and the American people should decide’. While this decision certainly did not break any laws, norms or protocols, it certainly established a new one.
Yet despite the fact that Kennedy has resigned much closer to a big election, namely the Midterms, it seems that Senator McConnell is suddenly much less concerned about whether or not the American people should weigh in. Trump plans to have Kennedy’s successor nominated by the end of the week.
As you can see by the NYT article, there is much evidence that the Trump administration has gone to great lengths to prepare for Kennedy’s resignation, like rewarding all the justice’s clerks with appointments to district courts, and indeed two of his most favoured clerks are front runners to succeed him.
But of all the revelations in the article, the one that takes the biscuit is the fact that Kennedy’s son runs a division of the only bank that would loan money to Trump for property deals after he was turned down by other financial institutions due to his many failed business practices.
Oh and did I mention that Deutsche Bank is considered to be one of the ‘go-to’ banks for Russian oligarchs for money-laundering?
But of course it’s the ‘Failing New York Times’ after all, so I must be all ‘Fake News’. To be fair though, the article itself doesn’t suggest that any seat has been ‘stolen’, those words are mine. I still stand by them though. JLP
Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee are insisting that the FBI and Department of Justice hand over documents relating to the Mueller probe into Russian meddling in US elections, knowing full well it can’t be done because it would mean essentially handing over evidence to Trump who is himself being investigated. Yet despite knowing this, they still they choose to make it look as though they are hiding something so it can be used as a pretext for the President to end the investigation.
Clip by PBS News in YouTube on June 28, 2018
“…have we conducted any oversight at all on election security; on the family separation crisis; on the Administration’s failure to protect Dreamers; on the Justice Department’s radical decision not to defend the Affordable Care Act; on the Supreme Court’s recent decisions to undermine voting rights and workers’ rights; on the President’s ongoing conflicts of interest and violations of the Emoluments Clause; or on the myriad other pressing issues within our Committee’s jurisdiction?
No, as with so many issues, this Committee has stayed silent.”
“But on Hillary Clinton’s emails? Sound the alarms.
All the headlines from this committee hearing came from the aggressive grilling of Assistant Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and FBI Direct Christopher Wray by Republican congressmen Trey Gowdy and Jim Jordan, and it’s true, the exchanges were far more compelling viewing than anything going on in the World Cup at the same time (and I normally like soccer).
For me the most illuminating exchange came in the opening remarks. Sure, it wouldn’t make the ‘news cycle’ because that is what all the shouting from Gowdy and Jordan was for, but it was in the opening statements by the ranking members of the two main US parties [House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte and Congressman Jerrold Nadler] that the real differences between the two parties’ attitudes towards the Mueller investigation can be seen.
Just as a reminder, I’m not a 100% loyal Democrat supporter and I certainly wouldn’t automatically agree with everything said by their so-called leadership, but the contrast between the two statements lays bare the sheer mental gymnastics, assuming there are any mental faculties being used at all, required to accept the Republican party line.
Both statements are in the YouTube clip but I have also cpoy/pasted them below. JLP
#IANWAE
GOODLATTE STATEMENT:
The Church Committee was established on a bipartisan basis and chaired by Democratic Senator Frank Church in 1975 to review CIA, FBI, and NSA surveillance abuses, including the improper surveillance of an American icon, Martin Luther King, Jr., and other prominent individuals. The Committee also conducted a review of the insidious monitoring of political activities of citizens exercising their First Amendment rights. The Church Committee’s findings resulted in passage three years later of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. FISA attempts to balance the need for secrecy in conducting surveillance against foreign agents with the protection of Americans’ time-honored civil liberties.
This history shows we have already found ourselves, once before, in a situation where the FBI and other intelligence agencies violated their oaths to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States. In monitoring citizens’ political activity, the agencies exercised their responsibilities in a manner unworthy of U.S. officials. The abuses of that bygone era, and really of any era, often happen because of power – power to influence political currents, power to collect sensitive information, and power to wield surveillance tools in improper ways to achieve improper purposes. That power can and has been abused in the past, by individuals at the highest and lowest levels of our government.
Fortunately, the power of our intelligence agencies is overwhelmingly used to protect us from those wishing to do our country harm. That is the conundrum. We need our intelligence agencies to have the necessary tools and techniques to safeguard our nation, and we have to be constantly vigilant to ensure these tools are not manipulated by unscrupulous actors.
The recent Inspector General’s report revealed bias in the top echelons of the FBI during a hotly-contested presidential election. It revealed that FBI agents, lawyers, and analysts held profound biases against then-candidate Donald Trump and in favor of his opponent, Hillary Clinton. While those on the other side of the aisle continue to exclaim that these biases are only personal political predilections that had no effect on the operation of one of the biggest investigations in our nation’s history, I wonder whether these same Members would say the same if text messages had turned up to the tune of “Hillary is a disaster,” or “We’ll stop” her, or cursing her with all manner of expletives, or smugly stating that particular parts of the country “smell of Hillary supporters.”
These types of comments were originating from people who were the fact-finders in the investigation. These profoundly inappropriate comments were coming from the individuals who were making decisions on whether to provide immunity to people who had already lied to investigators, and whether subjects of an investigation could sit in on interviews with other subjects of the same investigation. These were individuals who were plainly in positions of great power with the opportunity to place greater, lesser, or even no emphasis on certain facts or interpretations of law. These actions led to complete legal exoneration of everyone involved in sending Top Secret emails over personal servers and unsecured emails- and setting up a server for the explicit purpose of doing this. These actions even led to exposing at least one classified email to a foreign party that risked serious damage to our national security. Amazingly, considering their overwhelming biases, these people were also the very same people who were assigned to investigate the man that they hated: then-candidate Donald Trump.
My reference to the Church Committee is apropos because it not only reviewed abuses by individuals, including the FBI Director himself, but focused in on surveillance abuses. Here, we now face the same allegations, yet in manner that goes to the heart of our democracy. It is right out of a novel with salacious, unverified dossiers, reports of informants that appear more like spies for the U.S. government, and application of the aforementioned surveillance powers to collect on a U.S. person once associated with President Trump’s political campaign. But it’s not a novel; it is real life and we are here today to understand a little bit more about why we now must review how our intelligence and law enforcement agencies engaged in activity that appears not only wrong, but potentially illegal.
All of which brings me to this body’s Constitutional oversight mandate and responsibilities. Our responsibility to the American people is to conduct robust oversight of agencies within this Committee’s jurisdiction, to ensure that taxpayer-funded agencies operate lawfully. Our oversight, though, is only as good as the information we are provided. This Committee’s oversight has been hampered by both the FBI and DOJ’s lack of consistent and vigorous production of the documents we need to hold the agencies accountable. While this production has significantly improved recently, it has felt like pulling teeth much of the time to obtain and review relevant documents. Moreover, we just recently learned that some documents the Inspector General received to conduct his investigation of the 2016 election have been interpreted by the Department of Justice to fall outside the first subpoena I ever issued as Chairman of this Committee. Shockingly, emails and communications of DOJ officials have not been produced at all. Therefore, we have not received any emails between prosecutors working the Clinton case.
Said differently, we are not receiving and have not received potentially enlightening communications between prosecutors themselves, between prosecutors and DOJ management including former Attorney General Lynch, or even communications between DOJ officials and those with the Obama White House. This is unacceptable, particularly when we had long before issuing the subpoena requested all documents provided to the Inspector General other than certain ones pertaining to grand jury material.
The Department of Justice and the FBI are not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution. The President and Congress are. Our Constitutional oversight necessitates that institutions like the FBI and DOJ yield to Congress’ constitutional mandate. This is non-negotiable because we must assure the American people that the agencies under our jurisdiction operate fairly, treating all equally under the law.
This hearing emphasizes the importance of transparency in helping to regain both the perception and reality of impartiality of our law enforcement system. Damage to the FBI and DOJ’s reputations is not something any of us desire. But now that both agencies have been on the front pages for so long, we must all work to ensure that those stories are able to focus once again on the great men and women performing admirable and often heroic jobs to protect our country.
We expect to hear today how the FBI and DOJ will hold people accountable and prevent this from happening again. Thank you and I look forward to hearing from both Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein and Director Wray.
NADLER STATEMENT :
“Mr. Chairman, the events that have led up to this hearing are totally unacceptable.
“On Monday of this week, you notified us of this hearing without the seven-day notice required by the rules.
“On Tuesday, you started our Committee markup more than an hour late, without notice to the Minority. Then you allowed Mr. Jordan to offer an amendment to a resolution of inquiry that was patently non-germane—and then you stood out of view of the cameras, in the hallway just off the hearing room, while the Majority voted to overturn the ruling of their own Chair that the amendment was not germane.
“On Wednesday, you dropped all Committee business to interview Peter Strzok, who had already volunteered to come in for an interview before you threatened him with a subpoena.
“Today, we meet so that the Majority can criticize the Deputy Attorney General to his face, largely about documents that you know he cannot produce. We will take a break so that we can go to the floor and vote on a so-called “resolution of insistence” based on the Jordan amendment from earlier this week—a measure that is without precedent, without the force of law, and clearly a pretext for a move against Mr. Rosenstein that the Majority already has planned.
“And what is the great emergency that justifies this last-minute hearing? Why has the Majority abandoned the rules and traditions that govern civility in the House? The tired story of Hillary Clinton’s emails, of course, plus a few conspiracy theories about the Special Counsel.
“When President Trump and his Administration were actively separating families at the border—ripping children out of the arms of their parents, and causing untold suffering to thousands of families—that did not merit an emergency hearing.
“And now that thousands of children are still separated from their parents, with no clear plan from this Administration for reuniting these families, where is the emergency hearing on that issue?
“We know that Russia, after successfully interfering with the 2016 elections, is actively working to disrupt the upcoming elections as well. The former National Security Advisor testified that our intelligence agencies have received no instructions from the White House to protect the integrity of our election system. Have we scheduled an emergency hearing on that issue?
“For that matter, have we conducted any oversight at all on election security; on the family separation crisis; on the Administration’s failure to protect Dreamers; on the Justice Department’s radical decision not to defend the Affordable Care Act; on the Supreme Court’s recent decisions to undermine voting rights and workers’ rights; on the President’s ongoing conflicts of interest and violations of the Emoluments Clause; or on the myriad other pressing issues within our Committee’s jurisdiction? No, as with so many issues, this Committee has stayed silent.
“But on Hillary Clinton’s emails? Sound the alarms.
“Despite an Inspector General’s report that, in more than 500 exhaustive pages, demonstrates conclusively that the outcome of the Clinton investigation was not affected by any improper bias, political or otherwise, we are wasting precious Committee time to chase Hillary Clinton.
“The Republicans seems desperate to prove that there was some sort of pro-Clinton and anti-Trump conspiracy within the FBI when, in fact, the overwhelming evidence shows exactly the opposite. Virtually every action criticized in the Inspector General’s report—Director Comey’s July announcement, his disparate treatment of the Clinton and Trump investigations, and his October decision to announce the discovery of additional emails—ultimately harmed the candidacy of Secretary Clinton, and inured to the benefit of Donald Trump.
“But I guess we shouldn’t let facts stand in the way of a good manufactured emergency.
“According to the Republican memo for today’s hearing, today is also an opportunity for Members to consider “the Justice Department’s compliance with the committee’s March 22 subpoena,” a subpoena that was not issued in compliance with House Rules and, therefore, cannot be enforced.
“Even if it were a properly issued subpoena, the fight over document production seems to have boiled down to certain documents that the Republicans know the Department of Justice cannot turn over—much of it evidence related to an ongoing criminal investigation, the scoping documents outlining specific lines of inquiry in an ongoing criminal investigation, and the identities of confidential human sources still working undercover in the field.
“And that, of course, is the whole point. As part of their coordinated and determined effort to undermine the Special Counsel’s investigation, Republicans are requesting documents they know they cannot have.
“If they somehow find themselves in possession of sensitive documents that go to the core of the Special Counsel’s investigation, and if past practice holds, those documents will end up in the possession of the subject of the investigation—namely, President Trump.
“And if the Majority is rightly denied, they will do their best to undermine the credibility of the Department of Justice, the credibility of the Deputy Attorney General—and, by extension, the credibility of the Special Counsel.
“They will likely try to hold Mr. Rosenstein in contempt. Some have even threatened him with impeachment. They may argue that he must be removed his oversight role over the Special Counsel’s investigation.
“This is an investigation, I might remind my Republican colleagues, that has already yielded five guilty pleas, and that has led to the indictment of 20 people so far. The President and some of his closest advisors are under investigation for having participated in a criminal conspiracy with a foreign power against the United States.
“That is an emergency.
“The President practically confessed to Lester Holt on television that he obstructed the investigation into that conspiracy when he said that he fired former FBI Director Comey because of “this Russia stuff, with Trump and Russia.”
“That is an emergency.
“But is that the subject of today’s emergency hearing? No. Or of any emergency hearing? No it is not.
“I know that this has been a hard week for the Majority. I know that it must be tempting to change the subject and rally the base with cries of “lock her up!”
“But we do not have the luxury of hiding or voting present at this critical juncture in our democracy.
“We cannot hide from our responsibilities. We cannot hide from our obligation to conduct oversight of a corrupt Administration. We cannot hide from our constitutional duty to protect our elections from foreign interference, or to stand up for the rules, and for our democratic institutions, and for the rule of law.
“I ask my colleagues to consider this question as we proceed: when the Special Counsel’s work is complete, when the enormity of what he finds has been laid bare, how will the American people judge your actions today?
First Person Plural 