jeebus. they will just throw any old shit at the wall hoping it will stick wont they?

how the hell is nadler even entertaining this crap?

seeing what sticks. In other words D-E-L-A-Y!

Eliminate or severely restrict executive privilege.

Then we can change it in a lame duck session to hamstring the republis.


Outflank those bastards!

That's Cheeto must tell Melania every time she asks him what he was doing with Ivanka.

Concocted by a Coward!

Without his testimony on the entirety of the report, in public, progress is stalled indefinitely. His stance is tentative and reserved. He acts like a man restrained. We’ll see...

I first heard of this term when Nixon dreamed it up to try to defend himself against Watergate. I don't know of any legal or Constitutional basis for such a privilege, but I am not a lawyer.

Is there any legal basis for this, or is this a custom basically started by Nixon?

I believe it's the privilege of Congress to decide what is legislatively appropriate and to subpoena documents and testimony.

==========

The special counsel regulations are set up to allow that, for this very situation.

that Comey had started? That would be separate from a US criminal investigation.

It is so easy to spin what someone says or to misunderstand him.

Anyway, there's nothing in the "Mueller Report" about the counter intelligence investigation.

There were counterintelligence FBI agents embedded with the Mueller team, but they were not under Mueller. That was a very dismaying thing to gleen from the Report. Mueller just acted as a prosecutor. He did not take over the counterintelligence investigation, which began well before he was appointed. The Mueller Report says nothing about the status, let alone the findings, of the counterintelligence investigation, nor whether it is even still ongoing. Trump may have shut it down for all we know.

Adam Schiff has requested to be briefed on the status of the counterintelligence investigation, but so far has been ignored.

Headline 2 days ago at WaPo:

What happened to the Trump counterintelligence investigation? House investigators don’t know. But not for lack of asking.
https://beta.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/05/15/what-happened-trump-counterintelligence-investigation-house-investigators-dont-know/?outputType=amp

He could have been working on the criminal investigation and also assisting the FBI with counter-intelligence matters.

It was the embedded FBI counterintelligence agents who were doing the counterintelligence investigation, not Mueller.

Mueller is done, he purports to have completed his mandate and unequivocally stated be will not bring any more indictments.

If he is now helping counterintelligence officers, that would appear to be outside his mandate. I can't imagine Barr letting him just carry on like that. It really is odd that he is still there, and not saying a word.

Because I haven't seen anything that precludes his involvement assisting the FBI in its counter-intelligence investigation.

He IS done with the criminal investigation, yes.

How would any of us know whether he ALSO had a mandate from Rosenstein on the counter-intelligence side? Counter-Intelligence work is normally kept secret.

 "At the conclusion of the Special Counsel's work, he or she shall provide the Attorney General with a confidential report explaining the prosecution or declination decisions reached by the Special Counsel." https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/28/600.8

I'm saying we don't know whether he ALSO, under a different assignment, assisted with a counter-intelligence investigation.

But we do know he's doing something for the DOJ still. And one thing that's still going on is that "mystery" investigation involving some foreign company, which was secretly acted on b the Supreme Court. My bet's on that.

And if that's part of a counter-intelligence investigation, it may never get unsealed -- or we might have to wait for decades.

he exceeded his allowed testimony under executive privilege, if that crap move stands.

Remember that Trump fired one fellow just before his plan would have been fully vested in another really shitty move.

before he was fired.

How would we know?

The Mueller investigation was a criminal probe, not a counterintelligence investigation.

From the Atlantic:

It was not a counterintelligence probe. Mueller both says this directly and also describes how the counterintelligence equities were handled. Here’s how Mueller describes his investigation: “Like a U.S. Attorney’s Office, the Special Counsel’s Office considered a range of classified and unclassified information available to the FBI in the course of the Office’s Russia investigation, and the Office structured that work around evidence for possible use in prosecutions of federal crimes.” A counterintelligence investigation is not structured around evidence for possible use in prosecutions of federal crimes.

Mueller then answers the question of what happened to the counterintelligence components of the investigation: The FBI took responsibility for them. “From its inception,” Mueller writes, “the Office recognized that its investigation could identify foreign intelligence and counterintelligence information relevant to the FBI’s broader national security mission. FBI personnel who assisted the Office established procedures to identify and convey such information to the FBI.”

The special counsel’s office and the FBI Counterintelligence Division had regular meetings to facilitate this transfer of information. “For more than the past year,” Mueller goes on, “the FBI also embedded personnel at the Office who did not work on the Special Counsel’s investigation, but whose purpose was to review the results of the investigation and to send—in writing—summaries of foreign intelligence and counterintelligence information to FBIHQ and FBI Field Offices.” The report deals only, Mueller says, with “information necessary to account for the Special Counsel’s prosecution and declination decisions and to describe the investigation’s main factual results.”

In other words, the Mueller investigation was a criminal probe only. It had embedded FBI personnel sending back to the FBI material germane to the FBI’s counterintelligence mission. But Mueller does not appear to have taken on the counterintelligence investigative function himself.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/04/ben-wittes-five-conclusions-mueller-report/588259/

It only means that the criminal and counterintelligence probes were separate.

He was only assisting them to the extent they were embedded with his team and the Mueller team was passing info to them. The Mueller team is now disbanded.

might be on the counter-intelligence side, which has never been made public and probably never will be.

The criminal investigation team has now been disbanded.That doesn't tell us about whether Mueller is still involved in assisting on the counter-intelligence side.

All we know is that he is still working there, doing SOMETHING.

...that the more he pulls this shit, the more guilty he looks.

and go to war with the trump admin on everything

the whole enchilada in your hands. (the un-redacted enchilada)

That it was confiscated, along with all of his notes.

But what is the penalty for "violating" executive privilege? That he loses his pension? House of Reps holds the purse, can't they re-instate it?

that the bulk of what was being investigated happened BEFORE the inauguration in January 2017. IOW, Obama was still President, not Drumpf. So how can any claim of "Executive Privilege" apply here?

(unless they are referring trying to claim "Executive Privilege" over all the obstruction that happened DURING the investigation itself)

in the hearts and minds of Donald Trump and William Barr.
Others, as well.

Executive privilege does not apply.