They’ll get the most beautiful cake with the most beautiful file in it!

From BUSINESS INSIDER:

Speculation is mounting that President Donald Trump could issue a pardon to members of his family and close associates who are suspected of colluding with Russia in the 2016 campaign.

…snip…

The June 2016 meeting of Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner and Russian go-betweens promising dirt about Hillary Clinton raises the specter of criminal liability under campaign finance laws.

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(Don’t strain your dear little eyes, Raisinettes. That’s Paul Manafort in the top floor cell and Michael Flynn in the bottom. The guard with the gun is Robert Mueller.)

Gee, Gordon’s Giddy!

From MEDIA MATTERS:

Advancing the conspiracy theory that President Obama lacks a valid birth certificate and is therefore ineligible to be president, radio host G. Gordon Liddy falsely claimed during the July 23 edition of MSNBC’s Hardball that there is “a deposition, which is a sworn statement, from the stepgrandmother, who says, ‘I was present and saw [Obama] born in Mombasa, Kenya.’ ” In fact, while the conservative news website WorldNetDaily claims to be “in possession” of affidavits from Anabaptist minister Ron McRae and Rev. Kweli Shuhubia, two individuals who purportedly took part in a telephone interview with the president’s stepgrandmother, McRae’s and Shuhubia’s accounts have been discredited, and even WorldNetDaily does not claim to have a “sworn statement” from the stepgrandmother herself.

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(That’s Lou Dobbs in the upper right corner, if you were wondering.)

Dirty Tricks from Dirty Dick

From THE SCOTSMAN:

ALLEGATIONS that former US vice-president Dick Cheney ran a secret “black ops” unit inside the CIA for eight years without informing Congress have increased pressure on the White House for a full investigation of alleged abuses of power by the Bush administration.

The unit was so secret that even the former CIA director George Tenet did not control its activities, according to reports yesterday.

You know what that means, kids! It’s time to play…

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Troll Model

From The New York Times:

Dick Cheney, Role Model

In all the talk about the vice-presidential debate, there was an issue that did not get much attention but kept nagging at us: Sarah Palin’s description of the role and the responsibilities of the office for which she is running, vice president of the United States.

In Thursday night’s debate, Ms. Palin was asked about the vice president’s role in government. She said she agreed with Dick Cheney that “we have a lot of flexibility in there” under the Constitution. And she declared that she was “thankful that the Constitution would allow a bit more authority given to the vice president also, if that vice president so chose to exert it.”

It is hard to tell from Ms. Palin’s remarks whether she understands how profoundly Dick Cheney has reshaped the vice presidency — as part of a larger drive to free the executive branch from all checks and balances. Nor did she seem to understand how much damage that has done to American democracy.

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The Ugly Truth

From Richard Cohen at The Washington Post (You might just want to skip this and click over there to read the entire article, kids):

The Ugly New McCain
Following his loss to George W. Bush in the 2000 South Carolina primary, John McCain did something extraordinary: He confessed to lying about how he felt about the Confederate battle flag, which he actually abhorred. “I broke my promise to always tell the truth,” McCain said. Now he has broken that promise so completely that the John McCain of old is unrecognizable. He has become the sort of politician he once despised.

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Gonzogate Meets Watergate

From Politico:

Lawyers for the House Judiciary Committee compared President Bush to the late President Richard Nixon in a legal motion filed today in federal court, as part of their civil contempt lawsuit against White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten and former White House Counsel Harriet Miers for failing to comply with panel subpoenas. The subpoenas were issued as part of the committee’s probe into the firing of nine U.S. attorneys in 2006.

“Not since the days of Watergate have the Congress and the federal courts been confronted with such an expansive view of executive privilege as the one asserted by the current presidential administration and the individual Defendants in this case,’ said House General Counsel Irv Nathan and other House lawyers in their 45-page motion.

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Let’s call this Executive-privilege-claim-doesn’t-hold-watergate.

Attorney-at-Flaw

WASHINGTON (AFP) — Alberto Gonzales spent much of 2007 fighting in vain his ouster as US attorney general, but that has earned him a consolation prize: a top law magazine named him on Wednesday its “Lawyer of the Year.”

I’ll wait until you stop laughing.

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It’s All Geek to Me!

From ChannelWeb Network:

A top Bush administration official in charge of probing Karl Rove’s White House political activities is alleged to have improperly deleted all of the data on his office PC by means of a “seven-level wipe” conducted by a 1-800-905-GEEK technician.

Scott Bloch heads the Office of Special Counsel, which is investigating possible Hatch Act violations by Karl Rove when the ex-deputy White House chief of staff served in the Bush administration. Bloch himself is under investigation for various alleged improprieties by the federal Office of Personnel Management, whose investigators say Bloch “erased all the files on his office personal computer late last year,” according to a Wall Street Journal report published Tuesday.

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