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2. This is one way Mueller is trying to get rid of Donald Trump -- this and the blackmail opportunity his investigation of Trump's finances will inevitably offer.And thanks to Democrats, who opposed these tactics when used against Clinton's presidency, and now cheer their use against Trump's, we see that:
3. These techniques have now been "blessed" (legitimized) by both parties and the mainstream press, and...
Do you think a President Sanders would be any more loved, or any less hated, by the DC and press Establishment than Donald Trump is? Imagine a Sanders-like presidency. Remember MSNBC's behavior to Sanders during the 2016 primary. Remember the Party's behavior during that time. What do you think would be done to "delegitimize" him, or anyone like him, by both parties and the press, with both parties' consent?
What if he adopted a federal jobs guarantee proposal? Such a program, properly executed, would force wages to rise through the entire private sector and affect the bottom line of every corporation with employees in the U.S. What if he starts such a program under current executive power? Now imagine that the program has huge popular support, which means it represents a real legislative threat to our decades-old, comfortable, bipartisan neoliberal Establishment.
Would such a program be allowed by that Establishment to go forward? What if it could not be stopped in any other way than by bringing down ("delegitimizing") the Sanders presidency itself?
Anyone who attempts to overturn four decades of Establishment neoliberal rule would not be treated kindly by anyone in DC. The bipartisan takedown of a President Sanders would look different than the takedown of Trump, but all of the same actors would participate and all the same tools would be in play.
Please, as you cheer the takedown of President Trump (if you do), keep a president like Sanders in mind.
The NSA Already Knows the Answers to Mueller's Collusion Questions
Back to Mueller's questions for Donald Trump. The dirty little secret -- which is only "secret" because everyone in the country is pretending it isn't so -- is that the NSA already knows all or most of what Mueller reportedly wants to find out in his questions for Donald Trump.
Ex-intelligence officers Ray McGovern and William Binney wrote about this at Robert Parry's Consortium News (h/t email correspondent Kevin Fathi for the link; emphasis added):
"Mueller does not need to send his team off on a 'broad quest' with 'open-ended' queries on an 'exhaustive array of subjects.' If there were any tangible evidence of Trump campaign-Russia collusion, Mueller would almost certainly have known where to look and, in today's world of blanket surveillance, would have found it by now. It beggars belief that he would have failed, in the course of his year-old investigation, to use all the levers at his disposal -- the levers Edward Snowden called 'turnkey tyranny' -- to 'get the goods' on Trump.And yes, the NSA does indeed spy on everyone, with the help and connivance of Barack Obama:
"Here's what the 'mainstream' media keeps from most Americans: The National Security Agency (NSA) collects everything: all email, telephone calls, texts, faxes -- everything, and stores it in giant databases. OK; we know that boggles the mind, but the technical capability is available, and the policy is to 'collect it all.' All is collected and stored in vast warehouses. (The tools to properly analyze/evaluate this flood of information do not match the miraculous state of the art of collection, so the haystack keeps growing and the needles get harder and harder to find. But that is another story.)
"How did collection go on steroids? You've heard it a thousand times -- 'After 9/11 everything changed.' In short, when Vice President Dick Cheney told NSA Director and Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden to disregard the Fourth Amendment, Hayden saluted sharply. [James Comey, hero of the #Resistance, saluted sharply too, except for that one little time when he asked for changed first.]
"And so, after 9/11, NSA's erstwhile super-strict First Commandment, 'Thou Shalt Not Collect Information on Americans Without a Court Warrant,' went the way of the Fourth Amendment. (When this became public, former NSA Director Adm. Bobby Ray Inman stated openly that Hayden violated the law, and former NSA Director Army Gen. William Odom said Hayden ought to be court-martialed. The timorous 'mainstream' media suppressed what Inman and Odom said.)"
"On January 17, 2014, when President Barack Obama directed the intelligence community to limit their warrantless data searches for analysis/evaluation to two 'hops,' either he did not understand what he was authorizing or he was bowing, as was his custom, to what the intelligence community claimed was needed (lest anyone call him soft on terrorism)."Collect it all," NSA chief Keith Alexander famously said. And if whistle-blower Russell Tice is to be believed, the NSA's been doing just that since 2001, including getting wiretaps of Barack Obama in 2004, just as he was emerging onto the national political scene. Tice once claimed in an interview to have held those orders in his hand. He also claimed that similar orders applied to all important judges, including FISA judges, and all Pentagon officers of three-star rank and above. (For conspiracy fans, note that this would have included General Patraeus.)
"Intelligence directors were quite happy with his decision because, basically, it authorized them to spy on anyone on the planet."
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