The North Korea Thread

He clearly thinks visiting the WH could hurt him in polling at home.

“Nah dude, I can’t come over, I’m already going to the party at Putin’s house … What, didn’t you get an invite?”

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-northkorea-usa-bombers-idUSKBN17Y067

Two U.S. B-1B bombers were deployed over the Korean peninsula on Monday during a joint drill with South Korea’s air force, South Korea’s ministry said.

South Korean Defense Ministry spokesman Moon Sang-gyun told a briefing that the deployment of U.S. bombers was part of efforts to deter provocation by North Korea and respond to threats posed by the North’s nuclear and missile programs.

Moon did not give any further details.

(Reporting by Ju-min Park and Jack Kim; Editing by Paul Tait)

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-northkorea-usa-trump-conditions-idUSKBN17X26Z

North Korea would need to clear many conditions before a meeting between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un could be contemplated, the White House said on Monday.

After Trump told Bloomberg News he would be honored to meet with Kim, White House spokesman Sean Spicer told reporters the United States would need to see North Korea’s provocative behavior ratcheted down immediately.

“Clearly conditions are not there right now,” Spicer said.

(Reporting by Steve Holland; Editing by James Dalgleish)

Apparently Comey confirmed the existence of multiple grand juries this morning? (Didn’t see it, but that’s what I heard on Twitter).

The source of that rumor was Claude Taylor. Having that be legit gives some credibility that the other things he has said might be correct.

This week he has said that Preet Bahara sent all his files to AG Scheiderman in NY after he was fired. He also said the intelligence community have Trump on tape talking about trying to shutdown the Russia investigation, from an international phone call.

That’s nuts.

I know, right? I want to believe they have the guy dead to rights, but it sounds crazy. This whole thing is insane.

The only reason I even mentioned it is because the other turned out to be true.

It’s starting to look like, at a MINIMUM, we could have a sitting president brought up on charges of obstruction and rackateering, if not collusion/treason.

Or it will all be swept under the rug because of a Republican Congress and Sessions at the Justice Department. Which outcome do you sincerely think is more likely?

I hear you, but I gather the fact that the grand juries have already been seated (possibly since early March for at least one) is significant. Not an expert on this stuff in any way, but my sense is that we might past the point of no return. But who knows?

if a grand jury indicts, Sessions can’t sweep that under the rug.

And to quote something I ready the other day, “A Grand jury would indict a ham sandwich”

Sessions is the boss of the prosecutors who are presenting the case to the grand juries. He is supposed to be recused from the Russia stuff, but If his recusal slipped a little, he could make getting an indictment unlikely.

True, but only if the prosecutors valued their job more than their duty and ethics. Which, of course, is, um, entirely possible, not necessarily a slam dunk, by any means.

I would imagine there are a great deal of Assistant US Attorneys out there that would jump at the chance to ride a case anything like that as far and as high as it could get them. Not saying Sessions isn’t a barrier but a case like that is a career builder, not a career killer.

You’d think, but how did the grand juries get seated in the first place?

It’s unclear to me if Scheiderman is part of either of these. Details are sketchy, but I THINK, his stuff is separate. I think that’s the fallback position.

That’s a good point. An ambitious prosecutor, a juicy case, political intrigue…career advancement AND a Lifetime movie!

… unless that was a cop’s ham sandwich. /stillpissedaboutTamirRiceetal

George Will had interesting column on Trump and reaches the same conclusion that almost all of us having saying.

I> t is urgent for Americans to think and speak clearly about President Trump’s inability to do either. This seems to be not a mere disinclination but a disability. It is not merely the result of intellectual sloth but of an untrained mind bereft of information and married to stratospheric self-confidence.

In February, acknowledging Black History Month, Trump said that “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more, I notice.” Because Trump is syntactically challenged, it was possible and tempting to see this not as a historical howler about a man who died 122 years ago, but as just another of Trump’s verbal fender benders, this one involving verb tenses.

Now, however, he has instructed us that Andrew Jackson was angry about the Civil War that began 16 years after Jackson’s death. Having, let us fancifully imagine, considered and found unconvincing William Seward’s 1858 judgment that the approaching Civil War was “an irrepressible conflict,” Trump says:

“People don’t realize, you know, the Civil War, if you think about it, why? People don’t ask that question, but why was there the Civil War? Why could that one not have been worked out?”

Americans have placed vast military power at the discretion of this mind, a presidential discretion that is largely immune to restraint by the Madisonian system of institutional checks and balances. So, it is up to the public to quarantine this presidency by insistently communicating to its elected representatives a steady, rational fear of this man whose combination of impulsivity and credulity render him uniquely unfit to take the nation into a military conflict.

It is hard to disagree with his recommendations, but how the hell do we go about quarantine the man?
I think Congress needs to get to work now on seriously restraining the power of the President to wage war without Congressional approval. Or perhaps even better, require the approval of the Joint Chiefs and the Sec of Defense.

Great questions. For me, the key problem (beyond the obvious and terrifying one inherent in having this guy’s finger on the button as it were) is our current situation where a distressingly large portion of the population neither recognizes, nor cares about, any of this intellectual inadequacy. People just don’t seem to think it even matters whether you have a basic grasp of our history, institutions, or laws, because they’ve apparently ditched the entire apparatus of liberal democracy, government as a system of principles and laws, and the very idea of any sort of leadership beyond the tribal chieftain level.

It’s pretty scary that he’s already talking about changing basic government rules because he can’t get anything done. He’s going to make a power grab at some point and I don’t really trust the GOP Congress or SCOTUS to stop him.