Tuesday News Barrage: Sorry folks, but all this is really important

By Robert A. Vella

As we’re waiting on the criminal sentencing for President Trump’s former national security advisor Michael Flynn (who has been cooperating with the Mueller investigation), there’s a barrage of other important news stories today which I must share with readers.  I’ll do so as concisely as possible.

Legal experts, including George Conway (the husband of White House counselor Kellyanne Conway), are asserting that President Trump’s endless tweets about the Mueller investigation now constitute obstruction of justice and witness tampering which are by definition criminal and impeachable acts.  Yesterday, a federal judge granted authority for lawyers to issue subpoenas in a lawsuit accusing President Trump of violating the U.S. Constitution’s emoluments clause by using his luxury hotel in Washington D.C. to profit from his political office.  The number of criminal investigations Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen is cooperating with has grown to four:  the Mueller investigation, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, the N.Y. state Attorney General, and the N.Y. Department of Taxation and Finance.  A new public opinion poll shows strong support for the pending Democratic-controlled U.S. House of Representatives to acquire and release Donald Trump’s tax returns.  Lawmakers are demanding an investigation into Trump’s Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta (also rumored to permanently replace Jeff Sessions as Attorney General) who brokered a questionable plea deal in 2007 for millionaire Jeffrey Epstein who was facing a life sentence for engaging in the sex trafficking of underage girls.  In a move which supports my speculation posted yesterday, Russian officials have announced that Putin’s planned trip to Washington D.C. to meet with President Trump is now “out of [the] question.”

Remember when Trump and his Republican allies were crying “voter fraud!” during the 2018 midterms?  They falsely claimed that Democratic voters were changing their clothes and repeatedly voting under different assumed names in order to sway the elections against them.  Not only were these specific claims completely made-up, but study after study has revealed that such incidents of voter fraud are so rare as to be statistically irrelevant.  However, the mind of a criminal often sees criminality in others even if it is nonexistent.  In North Carolina’s 9th congressional district, which had been apparently won by Republican Mark Harris by about 900 votes, has now been invalidated by the state’s election board and a criminal investigation of election fraud is underway examining reports of paid Republican operatives gathering absentee ballots in predominantly minority communities (which is illegal) and either filling out the ballots themselves or not turning the ballots in to be counted (which is also illegal).  Meanwhile, Republicans in Wisconsin and Michigan are pushing ahead with their unconstitutional plans to wrest political power away from the state offices (e.g. governor and attorney general) which they lost in the 2018 midterm elections.  You see, if Republicans can’t have political power then no one else can either.