Atlantic: The FBI Desperately Wants to Let Trump Off the Hook (He Just Won’t Allow It)

Adam Serwer in The Atlantic: “A simple but obvious fact has been lost over the past few years, amid Trump’s direct attacks on the FBI, and liberal defenses of the FBI against those attacks: FBI agents are cops. Law-enforcement officers, including the FBI, have long been disproportionately conservative, but in the past few decades, like the rest of the nation, they have also become far more polarized by party, a reality reflected in the rhetoric and positioning of advocacy groups such as the Fraternal Order of Police. There are liberal and moderate cops, but they are not close to comprising a majority. Simply put, the FBI is full of people who would prefer not to investigate Donald Trump. He remains under federal investigation only because of his own inability to stop criming.”

Trump, Barr Had ‘Animated Talk’ about Horowitz Report on Russia Investigation Origins

Donald Trump and his sycophantic attorney general Bill Barr had an “animated talk” in the Oval Office Thursday night, according to a pool report from the White House Press Corps. Two sources told CNN that the topic of the heated exchange was Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s imminent report on the origins of the FBI’s investigation into Russian support for Trump’s 2016 campaign.

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Watch the Mueller Report: ‘The Investigation: A Search for the Truth in Ten Acts’

Via Deadline.com: The cast for last night’s live-streamed all-star reading (from New York City’s historic Riverside Church) of The Investigation: A Search for the Truth in Ten Acts – playwright Robert Schenkkan’s adaptation of the Mueller Report – included Annette Bening, Kevin Kline, John Lithgow, Frederick Weller, Ben Mckenzie, Michael Shannon, Noah Emmerich, Justin Long, Jason Alexander, Gina Gershon, Wilson Cruz, Joel Grey, Alyssa Milano, Kyra Sedgwick, Alfre Woodard, Piper Perabo, Zachary Quinto, and Aidan Quinn.

But performers who were unable to appear in person – including Sigourney Weaver, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Mark Hamill – joined in this taped segment, outlining 10 possible acts of obstruction of justice committed by Donald Trump. Annette Bening kicks things off, with Hamill, Mark Ruffalo, Louis-Dreyfus and others each tackling a possible obstruction. Bening brings it home at the end.

Trump Presidency: ‘The Greatest Intelligence Operation of Our Time’

In an interview on MSNBC, investigative journalist Craig Unger, author of the new book, House of Putin, House of Trump, described how Donald Trump first gained access to Russian mob money, starting with New York real-estate transactions in the 1980s:

I go back nearly 40 years, and I see essentially the greatest intelligence operation of our times. It started off in 1984 with a man who has ties to the Russian mafia, and he meets with Donald Trump in the Trump Tower, the supreme moment of Donald Trump becoming a master of real estate in the United States — and what we end up seeing is Trump Tower become sort of a cathedral of money laundering.

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Max Boot Adds to the List – Five Trump Atrocities against Democracy in One Week

Amy Siskind tracks the crimes committed by Trump, his family and his administration on a weekly basis at her site, “The Weekly List.” Now Max Boot, one of the thousands (millions?) of Republicans who have left the party in disgust since Trump was elected, has an op-ed up at the Washington Post in which he lists five criminal outrages committed by the so-called president in just the past week.

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