Blue Mass Group

On impeachment, there are good arguments on both sides.

Allowing him to win an impeachment trial to then be set loose to run around the country campaigning, saying, “I’ve been totally cleared. I care about you, the Democrats only care about getting Trump,” is inept politics.

Yet it’s a terrible precedent not to impeach when there are ten clear criminal obstruction counts laid out by Mueller.

It’s a very tough one. I now fall on the side of impeachment, because 18 months is a lot more danger to endure, to both our national security and our democracy.

But I’ll trust the judgment of Nancy Pelosi, whatever she decides after this plays out over the next month.

I still believe in the wisdom of banding together and following an ethical and wise leader. We are not going to prevail if we do not coalesce around a shared strategy.

Haven’t seen anything about this here, nor Moulton’s looming presidential aspirations.

From Stephanie Murray’s Politico MA Playbook:

“Belsito worked as a legislative analyst in Washington, D.C. before moving to Brooklyn. She moved back to Massachusetts in the early 2000s. Belsito was appointed a trustee of her alma mater, Salem State University, and also a commissioner for the state Ellen Story Postpartum Commission.”

I am not familiar with her, but a cursory search seems to show a career of meaningful advocacy. Curious on people’s thoughts about her challenge, or Moulton’s standing now we are several months removed from the spanking Pelosi delivered him.

 

 

The reason I continue to believe that people are being far too deferential to Robert Mueller, is that his treatment of the other players in the Trump-Russia conspiracy bears no resemblance to how ordinary people are treated in my courts every day on issues of both obstruction AND conspiracy.

Mueller decided not only to stick to the DOJ rule against indicting a sitting president -despite everything that Trump is openly doing to undermine the rule of law – but also to treat Trump, Jr. and Kushner with kid gloves compared to the treatment ordinary people receive in our courts, and then to be silent on that outrageous contrast. Kushner and Trump, Jr. are not, to my knowledge, presidents of the United States.

I understand that Mueller is a stickler and that he carefully explained his standards that viewed as his legal restraints, but even highly intelligent non-lawyers can not be expected to immediately understand or know just how distant Trump’s treatment is from that of everyday people. So let me tell you.

And when when I refer to “treatment” ordinary people receive in our courts, I am referring to two particular things:

1. Prosecutors prove the existence of conspiracies every single day in our courts through circumstantial evidence and through inference and common sense about what they contend had to have been in the minds of conspirators.

So for Mueller to insist that anything short of direct proof of actual knowledge by Trump, Jr. and Kushner of their own criminality at the time of their conduct at Trump Tower is not sufficient to demonstrate a conspiracy, is applying a kid-gloves standard that the rest of us do not get in court; and

2. Every day in our courts prosecutors go forward with cases against people when a case meets a probable cause standard (50%+ likelihood) but it is not clear whether a jury or judge will decide it meets a beyond a reasonable doubt standard.

So even if Mueller has (inexplicably in my view) decided that he’s constrained to slavishly adhere to this internal DOJ rule because of either respect for internal DOJ norms or traditions or because of constraints of the Special Counsel statute with regard to Donald J. Trump, why on earth is he not treating Trump, Jr. and Kushner the way the rest of us would be treated?

Some surprises still may coming in terms of prosecutions, but on balance it appears that Mueller may not have applied his full ability to view his role in full historic context nor lived up to his obligations to our nation and to the preservation of the rule of law against corruption.

Mueller has to have known that he would be played by Barr. He knows him well. He knows of his ‘Job Application Memo’ regarding his wild views of the powers of the president. He knows why Barr was hired. Yet he allowed two years of work to be distorted in the public mind for weeks on end.

Will Mueller surprise us when he testifies? Will he surprise us in the prosecution cases that have been farmed out to other federal prosecution offices?

Time will tell. It’s not over. But it does not look good from the perspective of one lowly defense lawyer who is familiar with how corruption works around the world.

In the spirit of a public broadcasting fund-raising drive, I’d like to offer a more constructive proposal growing out of the widespread criticism of the avalanche of cash donated by the world’s uber-wealthy towards the restoration of Notre Dame.

I propose that the Vatican commit to match every dollar given towards Notre Dame with a dollar given by the Vatican to France’s poorest people.

Billionaire Francois-Henri Pinault announced a gift of $112M. His
net worth a year ago was about $25.5B. This donation was therefore about 0.4% of his net worth — approximately the same as the minute-to-minute noise of the value of his portfolio on world markets.

Not to be outdone, fellow billionaire Bernard Arnault immediate pledged twice that amount. His 2018 net worth was about $92B. He therefore dug deep to find 0.2% of his portfolio — about the same as the second-to-second noise.

America’s wealthiest people are, of course, following suit.

All told, the world’s wealthiest families quickly pledged more than a BILLION dollars to restore and rebuild Notre Dame. Each of these families donated a few seconds worth of earnings from their respective portfolios — about the time it takes to flush a toilet after use.

I offer these examples to demonstrate just how extreme our wealth concentration has become. I, at least, find it helpful to remind myself that these “large” donations are a vanishingly small portion of the portfolio from which they are given. When these uber-wealthy donors complain that their taxes are “too high”, I think we should bear these comparisons in mind.

The minimum wage law being phased in here in Massachusetts because it is SO “expensive” for employers results in an annual wage of $30,000. The amount tossed towards the Notre Dame disaster would pay the FULL annual wages of about 33,000 Massachusetts workers at the full $15/hr rate.

I must ask on this Maundy Thursday how any of us who profess to be a Christian — and especially any Roman Catholic, because Notre Dame is owned by the Vatican (it does not host a local parish) — how we reconcile this ostentatious display of wealth with the commands of the Jesus of the Gospels.

It therefore leads me to offer this proposal.

I’d like to see the Vatican make a public commitment to match every dollar given to the restoration of Notre Dame with a dollar given by the Vatican to France’s most poor and hungry.