Yesterday’s nomination of Brett ("A president is above the law") Kavanaugh is clearly part of a desperate attempt by President Trump to try to use SCOTUS as a line of defense from being taken down in the Mueller probe. To this Wisconsinite, it bears a lot of resemblance to Scott Walker using a bought-off Wisconsin Supreme Court to get off the hook in the John Doe money-laundering scheme that he pulled in our state.
Sticking with the connection between Robert Mueller’s probe and Wisconsin, get a load of these comments from over the weekend from Our Dumb Senator- Ron Johnson.
President Trump and U.S. lawmakers should consider revising sanctions targeting Russia so they focus more on Russian oligarchs, a senior Republican lawmaker suggested after participating in a congressional delegation visit to Moscow.
“You do something and nobody ever sits back and analyzes, 'Well, is it working?’” Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., told the Washington Examiner. “And I think you'd be hard-pressed to say that sanctions against Russia are really working all that well.”
Johnson said he's worried that Congress over-reacted to Russia's election interference, which resulted in legislation that tied Trump’s hands with mandatory sanctions.
“I've been pretty upfront that the election interference — as serious as that was, and unacceptable — is not the greatest threat to our democracy,” he said. “We've blown it way out of proportion — [as if it's] the greatest threat to democracy ... We need to really honestly assess what actually happened, what effect did it have, and what effect are our sanctions actually having, positively and negatively.”
Oh, then if it’s not a big deal, then I imagine the Chair of the Senate’s Homeland Security Committee could do a hearing on the subject and clear the air on what was done with the interference was and how it’s being fixed. The Chair of that committee is…Ron Johnson. And he's not calling a hearing.
Johnson’s silence is especially odd since we now know that Russian interests targeted Wisconsin as a place to focus their propaganda efforts on Facebook and other social media. And few people knew more about these Russian propaganda efforts before the election than Ron Johnson. Let’s go back to Bruce Murphy’s excellent rundown from January 2017 in Urban Milwaukee where he asked “Ron Johnson Asleep on Russian Hacking?”
As chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Johnson was one the so-called “Gang of 12,” the top 12 congressional leaders, who were invited to the meeting. (House Speaker Paul Ryanalso attended the meeting.) Johnson later confirmed to Politico that he participated in the briefing.
“In a secure room in the Capitol used for briefings involving classified information, administration officials broadly laid out the evidence U.S. spy agencies had collected, showing Russia’s role in cyber-intrusions in at least two states and in hacking the emails of the Democratic organizations and individuals,” the Post reported….
Johnson, in short, had an opportunity to be a patriot and condemn the fact that Russia was now engaged in such activities in the United States. But he issued no resolutions — in fact, not one word — on Russian’s cyber attacks on America.
Worse, he has engaged in his own pattern of misinformation on the subject. After the CIA publicly released a report in January concluding that Russia meddled in the presidential election to help Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump win the election, Johnson issued a statement to the Wisconsin State Journal saying he would “would need more definitive information before drawing further conclusions.” Johnson did not reveal that he had been informed back in September this was happening.
Johnson went on to complain to CNBC that the CIA refused to brief him on Russian hacking, saying “I have not seen the evidence that it actually was Russia,” while failing to note the CIA report’s echoed the briefing he’d received from other intelligence leaders in September.
So why did Ronnie agree with McConnell to bury this information before a 2016 election where neither he nor Trump were expected to win in Wisconsin, but both did with a boost from outside messages from the Russians and the NRA?
And yes, the Russians and the NRA seem to be connected, as McClatchy told us last month.
[Legal experts] say it would be routine for Justice Department Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigators, who are looking at the NRA’s funding as part of a broader inquiry into Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. elections, to secretly gain access to the NRA’s tax returns from the Internal Revenue Service.
On the returns, the group was required to identify its so-called “dark money” donors -- companies and wealthy individuals who financed $21 million of the group’s publicly disclosed pro-Trump spending, as well as its multimillion-dollar efforts to heighten voter turnout. The NRA’s nonprofit status allows it to shield those donors’ names from the public, but not the IRS.
A central question for Mueller’s office is whether any of the confidential donors’ names hold clues that could enable investigators to trace a donation camouflaged to hide its Russian origins – such as a shell company that might be the end point in a chain of offshore transactions.
It is illegal for foreign funds to be spent to influence U.S. elections
It sure puts Ron Johnson’s complaints about the Mueller investigation and his underplaying of the Russians’ role in a different light, doesn’t it? Almost like he doesn’t want people to know the full story about how he and other Republicans really won in 2016.
Now there’s an easy way for me to be proven wrong on this hypothesis, and to wrap up the Mueller investigation at a quicker pace. Just have Homeland Security Committee Chair Ron Johnson hold an open hearing frankly discussing what he and the rest of the Homeland Security people know, why the Russians had such an interest in getting involved in our elections, and why they seem to have been so successful in reaching persuadable voters in states like Wisconsin in 2016.
But Ron Johnson isn’t doing that, and you put that inaction together with Ron Johnson’s 4th of July trip to Russia, and it seems a lot like a “thank you” visit.
I also note that Johnson was saying last night that he wants the Senate to “[move] expeditiously through the confirmation process” to put Kavanaugh on the bench before the November elections. I’m becoming pretty confident that Donald Trump isn’t the only Republican that would want GOP hack Brett Kavanaugh installed on the Supreme Court to cover up his crimes, and one of those compromised crooks might be Our Dumb Senator.