President Bush granted Scooter Libby clemency so he didn't have to go to prison. Today, Donald Trump granted him a pardon.

Trump sounds like he knows nothing about the Scooter Libby case.

“I don’t know Mr. Libby,” Trump said in a White House statement, “but for years I have heard that he has been treated unfairly. Hopefully, this full pardon will help rectify a very sad portion of his life.”

He's deciding pardons based on what he hears? Has he read any of the case filings, read the trial transcripts? I attended the trial as credentialed media and I didn't think he was treated unfairly. How is this a "very sad" situation? Because he has a felony conviction and can't practice law? When was the last time he practiced law?

Trump is sending a message to Republicans. What is it? [more...]

I think I'm having time management issues. I just realized our last open thread is full, and I'm still catching up with the news.

Paul Ryan isn't running for re-election.

James Comey compares Trump to a "mob boss" in an interview with 20/20 to air Sunday night.(promoting his book).

Bill Cosby, 80 and legally blind, is being retried for drugging and assaulting Andrea Constand. The defense, led by Tom Mesereau, presented its opening argument today, calling Constand a con artist who was out for money.

“Andrea Constand was 30 years old” when she met Cosby, defense attorney Tom Mesereau said in a 50-minute opening argument. “Mr. Cosby was in his 60s. She said she was not attracted to him. She said, ‘He’s older than my father.’ But she was madly in love with his fame and money.”

...“She knew exactly what she was doing and, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, she’s now a multimillionaire because she pulled it off,” he said. “She’s a con artist. Well prove it.”

The defense team has 7 members who are exasperating the Judge with all their motions. [More...]

Trump Attorney Michael Cohen was the subject of an FBI raid at his offices today. They took material related to Story Daniels, and the Russia investigation.

Mueller referred the raid to prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, which implies to me that this is more about money laundering than Russia, although it may involve Trump.

Cohen's lawyer said he and Cohen had already turned over Russia-related stuff and the warrant isn't necessary. Trump called it unfair.,

The F.B.I. also seized emails, tax documents and business records, the person said. The seized records include communications between Mr. Trump and Mr. Cohen, which would likely require a special team of agents to review because conversations between lawyers and clients are protected from scrutiny in most instances.

Sounds like Mueller is going the extrea mile by appointing a Taint Team to review the seized material, so Cohen has less to cry foul about in terms of breach of attorney client privilege. [More...] [More...]

The New York Times has conducted an intensive investigation of files ISIS left behind in Iraq. What did it find? Among other things, that ISIS was self-financed, and its biggest income producer was not oil and gas, but tax revenue.

How did a group whose spectacles of violence galvanized the world against it hold onto so much land for so long? Part of the answer can be found in more than 15,000 pages of internal Islamic State documents I recovered during five trips to Iraq over more than a year. [More...]

Yesterday I was all caught up on the news. Today, I'm not. But we do need a new open thread until I find some blogging time, so here it is, all topics welcome.

The DEA is putting out bids for equipment to unlock iphones, including the new iPhone X

Grayshift, the company behind GrayKey, provides two different versions of the product: an online model for $15,000 which provides 300 unlocks, and an offline version for $30,000 with unlimited uses. The DEA is looking for the latter, according to the listing.

The Judge in El Chapo's case has unsealed (over the objection of the government) the letter El Chapo wanted to read to the court at his latest court hearing.

Vicente Zambada-Niebla is finally going to get sentenced in December. He'll have 6 years in good time. (One awaiting extradition in MX and 8 here.) He's likely to get a 10 year sentence, which means time served. Assuming he testifies against El Chapo, which many media reports and pleadings suggest, how can he go home to Mexico safely? He can't. In his plea agreement, the U.S. agreed to make efforts to allow him and his family to stay in the U.S.[More...]

Update: The New York Times says Trump's personal legal team on Russia is down to one lawyer, and explains why the rest left and others have turned down his overtures.

Joe DiGenova and his partner/wife Victoria Toensing won't be representing Donald Trump regarding Russia after all. They are conflicted out.

The president is disappointed that conflicts prevent Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing from joining the president’s special counsel legal team,” Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, Jay Sekulow, said in a statement on Sunday morning. “However, those conflicts do not prevent them from assisting the president in other legal matters. The president looks forward to working with them.”

Victoria represents Mark Corallo, who was spokesman for Trump lawyer Marc Kasowitz and Trump's legal team when Trump, Hicks and others drafted a reply to the NY Times disclosure of Trump Jr.'s Russia meeting, also attended by Manafort, Kushner, Russian lawyer Natalia V. Veselnitskaya, Rob Goldstone and others. The initial media disclosure by the New York Times is here.

No one saw the conflict before this? Toensing's representation of Corallo in relation to the Russia investigation was widely publicized -- as was his reported meeting with Mueller. [More...]

Stormy Daniels is interviewed by CBS "60 Minutes" tonight.

Daniels talks to Anderson Cooper about the relationship she says she had with Mr. Trump in 2006 and 2007, revealing details that bring her story up to the present.

Trump has denied the affair. From the CBS description, it sounds like the line of questioning will concern the payment. Her lawyer seems as much her fanboy as her lawyer on his twitter feed. The accolades for her go on and on.

Here is a February, 2018 interview with Stormy in which she "tells all" and says she can describe "Trump's junk" perfectly. What more do we need to know? The sad truth is that Trump's supporters don't care about his alleged past infidelity. They didn't care about the Billy Bush tape and they won't care about this.

Today is Gun control Rally day across America. More than 800 rallies are planned. The sponsor is March for Your Lives, formed in the wake of the shootings in Parkland, FL. Photos are here. The NY Times reports (no link due to autoplay video)

On Saturday, the White House said in a statement, “We applaud the many courageous young Americans exercising their First Amendment rights today.”

Huge rallies are good catalysts for change. Those who participate feel the strength that comes with numbers. They believe change is possible and they are right. But they must convince Congress to act, and to do that, they have to stay dedicated and register to vote, and then follow-through by actually voting, particularly in the mid-term elections this year. [More...]

The New York Times has obtained new surveillance camera videos of Stephen Paddock's last days at the Mandalay Bay before carrying out the Las Vegas shootings.

The videos add nothing to deciphering Paddock's motives. He acts normal, his interactions with staff are normal, even when he's alone in the elevator the cameras don't capture anything odd.

The Times labels the videos:

"unnerving because it ends in the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history.

That may be, but they are not the deadliest mass killings in modern American history. More than 3,000 people died in the 9/11 attacks. As for domestic killings, more than 168 people died in the OKC bombing and more than 500 were injured.

Congress could disregard the Second Amendment entirely and outlaw the possession and purchase of all guns and rifles and we'd be no safer. Bombs can kill more people than guns. [More...]

Jefferson Sessions has issued a memo to U.S. Attorneys on when to charge the death penalty in drug cases. He actually is undercutting Trump's argument for more death-eligible drug crimes because it shows how many are already on the books (thanks in large part to Joe Biden, who sheperded the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act through the Senate, that among other horrible things, expanded death-penalty eligible crimes.)

Biden’s bill put over 100,000 new cops on the street and spent $9.7 billion on the construction of new prisons. The wide-ranging bill implemented a host of liberal policies, including an assault weapon ban and the Violence Against Women Act. But it also expanded the number of crimes that qualify as death penalty cases, encouraged states to keep inmates locked in jail*, criminalized gang membership, eliminated Pell Grants for inmates, and put in place mandatory drug testing for people on supervised release. States had to implement policies that greatly reduced opportunities for parole in order to qualify for the new prison funding.

...During the 1980s he was a staunch advocate for ramping up the war on drugs. Biden devised the national “drug czar” position and worked alongside Republicans during the Ronald Reagan years to craft oppressive anti-drug laws, including co-sponsoring the law that instituted far longer prison terms for possession of crack cocaine than of powder cocaine. In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander called Biden “one of the Senate’s most strident drug warriors.”

[More...]