This was a rough week, and it made me want to add a feature to this list to remind all of us of who we are as human beings, and that there is more good in the world than evil. This incredibly inspiring story is about a police officer who answered a robbery call and found a pregnant heroin addict. When he told her, “You’re going to kill your baby,” the woman began to sob, and the officer said he learned how badly she wanted her child to go to a good family—so he adopted the baby when she was born a month later, as well as helping the birth mother with rehabilitation. This story is about a homeless man who used his own $20 to help a woman who had broken down by the side of the road…and as a gesture of gratitude she started a GoFundMe campaign and has raised $300,000 for him to date. There are so many good and decent people out there. That’s why we keep fighting.
Now on to the battlefront. On the Russia front, Robert Mueller—or, as some like to call him, Our Lord and Savior—has subpoenaed Donald’s Deutsche Bank banking records. Deutsche Bank, you may recall, has been petitioned by Democrats for months to release information about the $300 million in loans it made to Donald to determine whether any of the loans were tied to Russia.
Michael Flynn’s charges of lying to the FBI in testimony about his contacts with Russia have thrown into question testimony by Donald’s former deputy national security adviser (K.T. McFarland, but why would you remember that with the ever-revolving door of White House staff?) that she was unaware of such contact, after emails revealed she most certainly was aware of at least one phone call between Flynn and then-Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak.
Beleaguered (and indicted) former Donald campaign chairman Paul Manafort cowrote an op-ed with an associate who has been assessed to have ties to Russian intelligence, a potentially incriminating move (and one that may inadvertently demonstrate the level of Manafort’s his own intelligence). Mueller has issued 15 search warrants related to Manafort’s financial dealings, and has obtained over 116,000 pages of financial records.
Donald’s defense for his incriminating tweet suggesting that he knew Michael Flynn had lied to the FBI—before he asked Comey to let his investigation of Flynn go—seems to be that a president can’t obstruct justice, a perspective refuted—on the record—in the past by sixteen GOP senators, as well as Donald’s own attorney general, Jeff Sessions.
In Don Jr.’s seven-hour testimony to House Intelligence Committee, and following his father’s school of questionable legal justifications, he cited attorney-client privilege as his excuse for refusing to answer questions about a phone call he had with Donny Sr. about how to handle his gaffe with the meeting with the Russian lawyer where he eagerly sought dirt on Hillary Clinton: because their lawyers were present for the call…despite that at the time there was no legal matter at issue that would actually invoke attorney-client privilege.
Rep. Devin Nunes spoke with Blackwater founder Erik Prince about the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation into the FBI’s unmasking of identities in U.S. intelligence reports—problematic given that Nunes had been forced to recuse himself from that committee’s investigation after briefing Donald and the press on classified intelligence without telling the rest of his committee, and because Prince was a witness in that investigation.
Billy Bush and seven other witnesses refute Donald’s alleged claim that his pussy-grabbing comments were not his voice.
Senator Jeff Flake—a Republican—donated $100 to Democrat Doug Jones’s Senate campaign in Alabama against twice-removed former judge (and current accused child molester) Roy Moore.
The Supreme Court is preparing to hear one of the several partisan gerrymandering cases brought by states recently, this one by Maryland.
Finally, take heart—according to the Pew Research Center, a majority of Americans (59%) believe it likely that Donald and his minions had improper campaign contacts with Russia, and most are at least somewhat confident in the fairness of Robert Mueller and his investigation. And there are still people in the GOP who haven’t abdicated their values for the party agenda (well, actually I guess in this case who used to be in the GOP…). In the war between good and evil, love trumps hate every time–we just have to stay in the battle.