In the end it really doesnt matter. Comey said it himself : given the current spirit of the FBI, Trump could sack Rosenstein, Mueller and 99% of the leadership, and it wouldn't stop them from continuing the investigation.

I guess I really dont get american politics and optics, but shouldnt this be the exact type of things the reps should avoid doing? Couldnt this very well be ingerence into Justice affairs?

Yes, but it plays well with their base. That's all they care about here.

The commentary in the fake media NY Times, Washington Post, The Daily Beast And Slate - all available online, although some pay-walled - provides plenty of background. The really short version is that the Trump candicacy, and now Presidency, has been a never-ending series of final straws - things that Trump has said or done that ought to have disbarred him from office at the very beginning. Plenty of people have said from the very beginning, ‘that’s it, now he’s really gone too far’ - and yet, there he is, doing it again. And just when you think it couldn’t get any worse, it gets worse.

Now it’s entered a totally surreal phase, where Trump can stand in front of the international media and thunder ‘there is no collusion with Russia’ while he’s colluding with the President of Russia. Or he will casually give a newspaper interview in which he grossly insults and undermines the PM of Great Britain, whilst a guest in that country, and then deny at another international media conference two days later that he did any such thing, never mind that the whole thing has been recorded.

Honestly, Trump’s mendacity has reached such a staggering level of brazenness that it’s become completely surreal. He doesn’t even have to pretend to be telling the truth, or to care about what it is. Yet apparently there are enough ‘supporters’ in the US electoral system to insulate him from the consequences. It would be funny, if it weren’t diabolical.

I think that the aim is to nurture a particular kind of posturing. Hence ‘trolling’ and ‘owning the libs’. It’s signalling to supporters a certain sort of ironic cynicism that refuses to believe in anything, no matter how well proven, demonstrated or established. The purpose of lying en masse is not to negate this or that truth but to re-order the sense in which people cope with the real world. It’s an assault on our capacity to meaningfully discuss the distinction between truth and reality, not an attempt to convince an audience that any particular falsehood is true.

(FN: This is me pretty much paraphrasing Arendt.)

I've been following the house debates for some time and therefore watched the arguments consisting of frustrations some are having with regard to getting documents they have legally requested and are legally entitled to see.

A little background, this goes back to January:

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2018/01/03/jim-jordan-has-these-question-for-the-fbi-n2429649

"Last week the Justice Department and FBI blew threw a deadline to turn over documents to the House Intelligence Committee about the infamous Russian dossier. That dossier was compiled by Fusion GPS and paid for by the Clinton campaign. Officials have until the end of today to comply with subpoena requests from Chairman Devin Nunes, who has threatened them with contempt.

But as the stonewalling continues, the more questions arise about the dossier: its origination, how it was used, who else pitched in to pay for it, etc.

Republican Congressman Jim Jordan has a few things he wants answered:

All of these questions remain unanswered as the Special Counsel investigation continues, along with investigations on Capitol Hill."

And this to December 2017:

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2017/12/29/doj-blows-past-deadline-to-turn-over-document-to-congress-on-dossier-n2427812

My, my.

Creative writing skills on show here today.

I'm getting first hand information as to what is meant by "Trump Derangement Syndrome" on this thread.

Keep things up. Hollywood is calling.

Give us a break, about two seconds after talking about Stalin and Gulags, you were supporting the impeachment of Rosenstein on the basis of nothing, no evidence. Now you dredge up two conservative opinion pieces saying Rosenstein missed a deadline. Are you serious? So, what? Again, if this is all it takes for you to support impeachment just have a look at the twenty or thirty links I provided earlier in the discussion with regard to Trump's links to Russians and possible money laundering. So, you'd support impeachment proceedings against him for the sake of transparency, right?

Now it’s entered a totally surreal phase, where Trump can stand in front of the international media and thunder ‘there is no collusion with Russia’ while he’s colluding with the President of Russia — Wayfarer

Rosenstein himself has said Trump, or any other American, has not been shown to collude with the Russian government on the matter of supposed influence of the 2016 US election.

He, and the currently employed senior personal of the "intelligence communities", have also stated that election results were not shown to have been affected by some Russian person's facebook ads or any other media forms.

I understand this information is not necessarily an adequate cure for various forms and outbreaks of Trump Derangement Syndrome but it is usually always the case that the sick first has to realize their sickness.

So, you'd support impeachment proceedings against him for the sake of transparency, righ — Baden

I will be following everything that plays out.

Yes, I will support a process being attempted to impeach Trump and then see where it may lead.
I don't know if it can get off the ground and neither do I know if this Rosenstein thing will go any further......but I think Rosey is a fraud and I think Trump is many things that I would not be friends with, but I do not go along with the Russia, Russia BS narrative.

Yes, I will support a process being attempted to impeach Trump and then see where it may lead. — raza

Good to hear. It is likely to eventually happen and it will be interesting to see where it does lead. But there is not enough evidence yet to justify it. And that applies even more so to Rosenstein.

I think Rosey is a fraud — raza

I have no idea why you think this.

I have no idea why you think this. — Baden

"Fraud" is mild.

OK, on the basis of what? Where is your evidence he is a fraud? I presume you found some now and are not just making random unsubstantiated claims. So, let's see it.

His Clinton Foundation connections, his HSBC bank connections (at the time HSBC were doing what they were eventually caught doing).

He is tied in with the biggest financial frauds that have taken place in US history. He is "swampy" in the extreme.

So how believable are these statements? — raza

Not particularly interested in gossip, no. — raza

insert your evidence here >……………< — raza

That is dumb, tho. You dont impeach someone for missing a legal deadline, or else there would not be a single attorney practicing. You just get in court and set another date.

And it isnt like there is already a trial going. No ones defence is even affected by this.

It is as petty as it is stupid. The last weeks have shown Mueller and Rosenstein to be machines. They wouldnt be affected by these theatrics.

That is dumb, tho. You dont impeach someone for missing a legal deadline, — Akanthinos

The argument is not that legal deadlines were not met but why they were not met.

The last weeks have shown Mueller and Rosenstein to be machines. — Akanthinos

Programmed machines.

Well, that is really for discovery to determine in a court, not Congress.

They should impeach Trump for missing that Russia sanctions deadline.

Again, its just dumb. If Rosenstein somehow contaminated the evidence, didnt recuse himself, introduced a vice of procedure, went to trial, and the Reps knew about it...

WTF ARE THEY DOING?

They have the whole thing wrapped up. They go to trial and humiliate the life out of the FBI. They close both the Stormy Daniels and the Russian connection story in one go.

Instead, they prefer to project to anyone and everyone listening that they are terrified of Rosenstein and Mueller actually going for prosecution.

Well, that is really for discovery to determine in a court, not Congress — Akanthinos

I suppose it starts somewhere. Particular members of congress are the ones currently frustrated by what they are not getting to see. Maybe court is their next avenue. I don't know.

Some reading material:

July 24, 2018, 12:05 am

George Neumayr

He (Mueller) inherited a hopelessly biased probe and has made it worse.
The civil libertarians of the press — those card-carrying ACLU members who toss and turn at night worrying about the diminution of “privacy” — all rushed to the defense of the FBI after the release of its disgracefully flimsy FISA warrant on Carter Page. The hypocrisy of it all takes one’s breath away, as reporters and commentators, normally so censorious of privacy violations, coldly cheered the government’s harassment of Page.

The evidentiary basis for the warrant was nil. It rested upon nothing more than Hillary’s opposition research and partisan articles in the press, some of which were fed to the reporters by Hillary’s opposition researcher. Were anyone other than a Trump campaign associate the target of such an outrageously unfounded and biased warrant, the media would be crying McCarthyism. Instead, anchors continue to shill for the smears, doubling and tripling down on surveillance that yielded no charges. Taking victim-shaming and nativist paranoia to new heights, they are saying to Page essentially: Well, it serves you right for talking to foreigners.

Did you know that “bragging” about talking to foreigners entitles the government to subject every inch of your life to surveillance? So say those citizens of the world in the press, who cited approvingly Marco Rubio’s idiotic comment about Page’s “bragging,” as if that constituted a form of evidence itself. “Little” Marco has never seemed so little.

That the FBI could ransack Page’s communications on the basis of such sophomoric dreck should scare everyone. The partisan hacks who assembled the FISA application — note that the liberal activist Sally Yates signed it — even made use of an opinion piece asserting falsely that the GOP had weakened its platform position on Russia. This is hackery on a staggering scale, and it is impossible to explain apart from the arrogance of the Obama administration, whose sense of entitlement grew in proportion to the media’s protection of it.

This farcical FISA warrant is one more withered branch on Mueller’s poisoned tree. He inherited a hopelessly biased investigation and has managed to make it worse. His “collusion” probe is looking at everything but collusion. The careerist weasel Rod Rosenstein, who is the Dr. Frankenstein in this political horror show, created a monster in Mueller and that monster is now rampaging through Manhattan, looking for the black books of madams and the filched phone calls of crooked lawyers.

Mueller’s supposedly impeccable reputation is a joke. He is just a garden-variety abusive prosecutor, whom Rosenstein hired to give official Washington what it wanted, an unfolding coup against a reviled outsider. As the ruling class’s battering ram against Trump, Mueller is working feverishly to magnify Trump’s political mistakes into quasi-impeachable offenses. But that tack won’t work. The tree that Mueller is plucking, weakened by too much poison in its roots, will collapse in the end on top of him.

His probe will peter out in a pathetic political food-fight. Does anybody really think that Trump would quit before Congress reached the incredibly high bar necessary for impeachment and conviction, if things even got to that? In the end, this is all just empty noise — a hobbling political problem for the Trump presidency, to be sure, but not its final chapter.

Trump, after all, is adept at driving the stake through monsters and has been poking Mueller with it for months. By treating his probe as an open-ended search for dirt of any kind on Trump, Mueller has conformed perfectly to Trump’s description of him as a partisan witch-hunter. That Mueller is giving immunity to John Podesta’s brother, while nailing Paul Manafort for identical offenses, sums up the shamelessly one-sided character of his probe. It is obvious that Mueller has picked up some very bad prosecutorial habits over the years, exhibiting the special arrogance and obtuseness of a canonized mandarin. Such figures in Washington could once count on a docile public. Not anymore. The rise of Trump has exposed Washington’s entitled frauds, whose hurled boomerangs now fly back at them.

What Trump once said to the media now applies to all of official Washington: “No one believes you anymore.” From Strzok to Brennan, from Yates to Comey, from Rosenstein to Mueller, they all assume that the day of reckoning approaches. What they don’t realize is that the wrath will befall them. A public fed up with phony FISA warrants and partisanship that masquerades as “professionalism” will not see Trump as the villain in this sorry tale but its victim.

The evidentiary basis for the warrant was nil. It rested upon nothing more than Hillary’s opposition research and partisan articles in the press, some of which were fed to the reporters by Hillary’s opposition researcher. — raza

False and misleading. Misleading in that “Hillary’s opposition research” is actually the professional findings of a credible ex-MI6 operative who specialised in matters involving Russia and who has a history of providing reliable information to the FBI. False in that, according to Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, “there was a lot of reasons unrelated to the dossier for why they wanted to look at Carter Page.”

The SIC chairman, Richard Burr (R-NC), has also said that there were “sound reasons” for the judges (all Republican appointees, FYI) to approve the warrant.

Oh, I had forgotten that anyone currently working for an intelligence agency, whether MI6 or FBI or CIA in automatically as pure as driven snow.

And that former employess come whistleblowers were all the actual dirty ones.

Excuse me while watch some other forms , but with better cinematic values, of fictional stories.

None of what you said there addressed the substance of my criticism of your article’s false and misleading claims. It’s just deflection.

Your "claim" was opinion.

Your "criticism", I should say.

Your opinion is that Steele is and was unscrupulous.

No, my criticism is that the article misleadingly referred to it with the disparaging term “Hillary’s opposition research” and falsely claimed that it was all the warrant had as evidence.

No, my criticism is that the article misleadingly referred to it with the disparaging term “Hillary’s opposition research” and falsely claimed that it was all the warrant had as evidence — Michael

It was what the warrant WAS not what it HAD. A FISA warrant. The process by which it was obtained.

That is what is under particular scrutiny.

And yes, Hillary funded to Steele's operation.