So much for Bill Barr's Justice Department getting to the bottom of things:
"Justice Department winds down Clinton-related inquiry once championed by Trump" by Devlin Barrett and Matt Zapotosky Washington Post, January 10, 2020
WASHINGTON — A Justice Department inquiry launched more than two years ago to mollify conservatives clamoring for more investigations of Hillary Clinton has effectively ended with no tangible results, and current and former law enforcement officials said they never expected the effort to produce much of anything.
John Huber, the US attorney in Utah, was tapped in November 2017 by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to look into concerns raised by President Trump and his allies in Congress that the FBI had not fully pursued cases of possible corruption at the Clinton Foundation and during her time as secretary of state, when the US government decided not to block the sale of a company called Uranium One.
Here is what we have been told about the Uranium One deal that is now no big deal.
As a part of his review, Huber examined documents and conferred with federal law enforcement officials in Little Rock who were handling a meandering probe into the Clinton Foundation, people familiar with the matter said. Current and former officials said that Huber has largely finished and found nothing worth pursuing.
It's called a cover-up as the DoJ protects important people who are above the law -- unlike the state DCF.
The effective conclusion of his investigation with no criminal charges or other known impacts is likely to roil some in the GOP who had hoped the prosecutor would vindicate their long-held suspicions about a political rival. Trump, though, has largely shifted his focus to a different federal prosecutor tapped to do a separate, special investigation: US Attorney in Connecticut John Durham, who Attorney General William Barr assigned last year to explore the origins of the FBI’s 2016 probe into possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia.
I wouldn't expect anything from Durham at this point. These investigations are meant to cover up such things, not reveal them.
That FBI investigation was being supervised by special counsel Robert Mueller III in late 2017 when Trump and his supporters were pressuring senior law enforcement officials to appoint a second special counsel to pursue Clinton.
‘‘Everybody is asking why the Justice Department (and FBI) isn’t looking into all of the dishonesty going on with Crooked Hillary and the Dems,’’ the president tweeted at the time.
Sessions weeks later sent a letter to Huber telling him to ‘‘review’’ a wide array of issues related to Clinton. They included the Clinton Foundation and Uranium One matters, along with the FBI’s handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server while she was secretary of state and alleged leaks by then-FBI Director James Comey. At the time, the attorney general was facing persistent public and private criticism from Trump, who was upset over his recusal from the Russia probe, but from the start, senior officials inside the Justice Department viewed Huber’s task as unlikely to lead to anything of significance beyond appeasing those angry lawmakers and the president.....
Makes you want to scream, doesn't it?
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Meanwhile, the front page brings you this:
"Pelosi alerts House to be ready to send impeachment articles next week" by Nicholas Fandos New York Times, January 10, 2020
WASHINGTON — Speaker Nancy Pelosi had asked for Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell to share the precise rules for a Senate trial so she could select her prosecutorial team. He declined, and the speaker decided Friday to move ahead anyway without a concession.
Despite winning no commitment from McConnell, Democrats argue that the strategy did have payoffs. During the intervening three weeks between the House vote and Pelosi’s announcement, relevant new documents that Trump suppressed have come to light, suggesting that there is additional evidence to support the charges the House brought, and this week, a pivotal witness who declined to cooperate in the House impeachment inquiry, former national security adviser John Bolton, said he would be willing to testify at the trial if senators subpoenaed him.
Hit the White House like a Bolton of Lightning it did.
Asked Friday if he would invoke executive privilege to block Bolton’s testimony, Trump said, “Well I think you have to for the sake of the office.’’
Representative Lee Zeldin, a New York Republican who is a top defender of Trump, said Democrats argued for months that ‘‘this had to be done, there was an urgent need to remove the president from office, and it steps all over that message to then stall for so long afterwards.’’ The gambit, he said, probably only frustrated independent voters who want to see Congress work with the president.....
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Looks like Sanders is going to be the nominee now, and at least Iran is off the front pages:
"On day US forces killed Soleimani, they launched another secret operation targeting senior Iranian official in Yemen" by John Hudson, Missy Ryan and Josh Dawsey Washington Post, January 10, 2020
WASHINGTON — On the day the US military killed a top Iranian commander in Baghdad, US forces carried out another top secret mission against a senior Iranian military official in Yemen, according to US officials.
The strike targeting Abdul Reza Shahlai, a financier and key commander of Iran’s elite Quds Force who has been active in Yemen, did not result in his death, according to four US officials familiar with the matter.
The unsuccessful operation may indicate that the Trump administration’s killing of Major General Qassem Soleimani last week was part of a broader operation than previously explained, raising questions about whether the mission was designed to cripple the leadership of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps or solely to prevent an imminent attack on Americans as originally stated.
Oh, we were not only lied to about the imminent attacks as Soleimani was on a peace mission, we now find out the extrajudicial assassinations were not limited to one strike.
US military operations in Yemen, where a civil war has created the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, are shrouded in secrecy. US officials said the operation against Shahlai remains highly classified, and many declined to offer details other than to say it was not successful.
Officials at the Pentagon and in Florida were monitoring both strikes and had discussed announcing them together, had they gone well, officials said.
‘‘If we had killed him, we’d be bragging about it that same night,’’ a senior US official said, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a classified military operation.
Another senior official said the two strikes were authorized around the same time and that the United States did not disclose the Shahlai mission because it did not go according to plan. The official said Shahlai may be targeted in the future, though both countries have signaled an interest in deescalating the crisis.
The rationale for the Trump administration’s decision to kill Soleimani has come under scrutiny in Congress, with House lawmakers approving a resolution on Thursday to restrict the president’s authority to strike Iran without congressional approval.
They had such a resolution in the $738 billion war bill they sent him but stripped it out before sending it to him for signature.
Defense and State Department officials said the strike against Soleimani saved ‘‘dozens’’ if not ‘‘hundreds’’ of American lives under imminent threat. The strike against Shahlai potentially complicates that argument.
‘‘This suggests a mission with a longer planning horizon and a larger objective, and it really does call into question why there was an attempt to explain this publicly on the basis of an imminent threat,’’ said Suzanne Maloney, an Iran scholar at the Brookings Institution.
The Trump administration views Shahlai as a particularly potent adversary.
Commander Rebecca Rebarich, Pentagon spokeswoman, said the Defense Department does not discuss ‘‘alleged operations’’ in the Middle East.....
Uh-huh.
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Fortunately, the State Department will discuss them:
"US says it won’t discuss withdrawing troops from Iraq" by Edward Wong and Megan Specia New York Times, January 10, 2020
WASHINGTON — The State Department on Friday rebuffed the Iraqi government’s request to begin discussions on pulling out troops, saying that any US officials going to Baghdad during a state of heightened tensions would not discuss a “troop withdrawal,” as the Iraqi prime minister had requested. Instead, discussions would be about the “appropriate force posture in the Middle East.”
So much for the image of altruistic empire that doesn't stay where it is not wanted.
The statement from Washington was a direct rebuttal to Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi of Iraq and was certain to add to the friction between the two nations.
The prime minister said earlier Friday that he had asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to send a delegation from the United States to discuss steps for the withdrawal of the approximately 5,200 US troops from his country, in the aftermath of a deadly US military strike ordered by President Trump that many Iraqis say violated their country’s sovereignty.
“We are happy to continue the conversation with the Iraqis about what the right structure is,” Pompeo said at a news conference after the State Department had made its announcement. He stressed that the mission of the United States in Iraq was to train Iraqi forces to fight the Islamic State group, and “we’re going to continue that mission.”
Related: Europeans shift troops from Iraq, warn fight against Islamic State is imperiled because of U.S. actions
Also see: Putin meets with Syria’s Assad with the Middle East on edge
I'm told they were planning attacks on US troops and that the Trump administration isn’t fighting back.
Pompeo and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin also announced new sanctions on Iranian officials and on a few companies, including two in China, involved in the production and export of Iranian steel and other metals.
The US drone strike that killed 10 people in a two-car convoy caused widespread outrage in Iraq, where neighboring Iran has great influence, and its consequences continue to ripple across the Middle East. Iraqi officials said the United States had violated the sovereignty of their nation, both with that attack and with airstrikes on Dec. 29 on five sites in Iraq and Syria that left at least 25 members of the militia dead and at least 50 wounded. US officials say those strikes were in response to the death of an American interpreter in Iraq in a Dec. 27 rocket attack by the Iran-backed militia led by al-Muhandis, called Kataib Hezbollah, though the militia denied responsibility.....
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Also see: Iran announces its military ‘unintentionally’ shot down Ukrainian jetliner
Related:
"US employers added 145,000 jobs in December and the unemployment rate held steady at 3.5 percent, signaling that the job market remains strong at the start of 2020 even if hiring and wage gains have slowed somewhat more than a decade into an economic expansion. The state of the job market has become a pivotal division between President Trump and his Democratic challengers. Trump can campaign on the low unemployment rate and job growth as he seeks a second term. Democrats, seeking to oust him, will point to wages that have not taken off in a meaningful way for many Americans coping with high costs for medical care and higher education. This is the last jobs report before the Iowa caucus in February that will serve as a first step for choosing the Democratic presidential nominee. The picture of a slowly but steadily improving economy — plus low inflation — probably gives the Federal Reserve comfort in keeping interest rates low, which has been a boon to stock markets -- even as US stocks fell from their record heights on Friday after a report showed hiring was a touch weaker than expected last month."
Tired of the lies and mixed me$$ages yet?
I know I am.
