Please Don't Fling Me in Dat Russiagate Briar Patch!

It seems that the President, and AG Barr are not holding up SC Mueller from testifying to the house. CNN, Special counsel's team hesitant about Mueller testifying publicly, part of hold up securing testimony.

Special counsel Robert Mueller's team has expressed reluctance to him testifying publicly in front of the House Judiciary Committee, according to sources familiar with the matter.

The special counsel's team has conveyed the notion that Mueller does not want to appear political after staying behind the scenes for two years and not speaking as he conducted his investigation into President Donald Trump. One option is to have him testify behind closed doors. But the notion that Mueller would only answer questions in private has become a sticking point, according to a source, as Democrats believe the public needs to hear directly from the special counsel.

Capt Ed at Hot Air, Mueller To Congress: I’ll Pass On Being Politicized, Thanks Just The Same and Ace, Mueller: I Don't Want to Testify Before Jerry Nadler and His Enormous Man-gunt. Come on, Nads, subpoena him, I double dog dare you!

A twitter user commenting on this made a halfway decent speculation: Mueller may be essentially asking to be subpoenaed, so he can claim he resisted being "political" to the utmost. Then, having been subpoenaed, he can go in there and be suuuuuper political -- but hey, he was forced to, right?

If Nadler doesn't subpoena him, that's going to look pretty strange, given his threats and bluster -- and subpeona! -- to Don McGahn.

LMT online, Confidential draft IRS memo says tax returns must be given to Congress unless president invokes executive privilege. So much for "confidential."

From Sundance at CTH, White House Responds to Nadler Subpoena for Counsel Don McGahn…



Capt. Ed again, Nadler, We’re Going To Charge McGahn With Contempt, But … "This whole exercise is unserious, and Nadler’s hysterics make it border on the ridiculous. If Nadler wanted a serious exercise in challenging executive privilege claims, former federal prosecutor William Hughes explains exactly how Nadler would proceed. . ." AP, Democratic impeachment calls swell as McGahn defies subpoena . John Sexton at Hot Air, Rep. Yarmuth: There’s A Growing Sense ‘Impeachment Is Inevitable’ As Brer Rabbit would say; "Please don't fling me in dat briar patch!".

At WaPoo, (secret link) Megan McArdle, Here’s why you shouldn’t expect impeachment anytime soon.

Axios: House Judiciary Committee subpoenas Hope Hicks. She's much better looking than Don McGahn anyway. Nadler will look really good trying to beat her up.

 The subpoena requests that Hicks produce documents by June 4 and appear before the committee on June 19. The committee also subpoenaed former White House counsel Don McGahn's chief of staff Annie Donaldson, whose notes are prominently featured in the Mueller report, to appear on June 24.

A fine collection of links from the Wombat in In The Mailbox: 05.21.19, EBL: Comey & Lynch Accuse Each Other Of Lying, American Greatness: Why Did Obama Allow Comey To Brief Trump On The Russian Prostitute Story?, Joe For America: Never-Trump Romney Says He Read The Whole Mueller Report, No Evidence Of Obstruction, Legal Insurrection: Loretta Lynch Denies Telling Comey To Call Hillary Investigation A “Matter”, Power Line: Comey Vs. The World, also, Emails Show Deep State Conspiring Against Trump and Victory Girls: AG Barr Tells Critics My Job Is To Protect The Presidency, Not The Officeholder and Mark Steyn, The Mark Steyn Show with George Papadopoulos, part two



Related, Sundance at CTH, Devin Nunes Challenges FBI to Prove Joseph Mifsud is Russian Operative…



Continuing with "Spygate", Sundance, Comey and Brennan Contradict Each Other on “Crown Material” (ie. Dossier)…  from American Greatness, Was the Steele Dossier a Crown Operation?. It's pretty clear the Brits and Aussies were at least partners in the scheme.  Sundance at CTH, Mark Meadows Discusses Covert FBI Recording and Transcripts of George Papadopoulos….



Twitchy, Under the bus: Loretta Lynch denies telling James Comey to call Clinton investigation a ‘matter’  Ace, Released Documents: Loretta Lynch Essentially Called James Comey a Liar, Claimed She Never Told Him to Refer to Clinton Email Investigation as Merely a "Matter"

Put them both under oath and make them testify again.

First prize is, you get to walk away.

Second prize is prison for perjury.

Fake News: James Comey Did NOT Vote Communist While Cold War Was Raging, No, it's worse; he voted for Jimmy Carter. At least Gus Hall had no chance of winning. Judge Jeanine: James Comey is the head of his own crime family

The National Sentinel, Attkisson: ‘FBI FISA abuses routine’ before deep state spying on Trump over ‘panic’ he would really ‘drain the swamp’

Asked by Huckabee why there wasn’t an uproar from the so-called “mainstream” media after Attkisson discovered the Obama administration had infiltrated her computers, she said:

I will postulate something to the people watching. The 2016 shenanigans by the intelligence community was not about 2016. It was not about they hated Donald Trump out of the blue. According to sources I have and reporting that had already been done, they were panicked at the notion of a Donald Trump coming in outside the establishment with [then-retired U.S. Army] Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who used to head the Defense Intelligence Agency, and it was known — they were gonna clean house of some of these surveillance abuses that’d been going on a long time.

 At Sara Carter, Mark Meadows: ‘Declassification is right around the corner’ “I think declassification is right around the corner and hopefully the American people will be able to judge for themselves,”  Ed at Hot Air has doubts in Meadows: Gowdy’s Right — Americans Will Be “Astonished” By “Game Changing” Russiagate Material About To Be Declassified

Color me somewhat skeptical on the potential for “game changing” information. If it truly would have that impact, why hasn’t Trump already declassified it? Even during the Mueller investigation, Trump had the authority to do so, and it would have been very difficult to characterize de-classification as an obstructive act. And now the Mueller probe has been over for two months, perhaps much longer on the Volume I issues of Russia-collusion.

In fact, one would think that the House Democrats’ push for wide-ranging subpoenas on this subject would have pushed Trump even more to declassify such material. If it flips the collusion hypothesis into a politicized-counterintelligence narrative, the sooner that happens the better. The fight over subpoenas has its own political momentum, one that will eventually erode Trump’s standing as well as Democrats’. Why not nip that in the bud right from the start?

Could the Donald be saving it for the impeachment? Liz Shield at PJ Media The Morning Briefing: Rep. Doug Collins Dumps Testimony Transcripts

Last night, Rep. Doug Collins (R-Ga.) released a boatload of closed-door testimony transcripts.

“The American people deserve transparency,” Collins said in a statement Monday. “They deserve to know what transpired in the highest levels of the FBI at the origin of the probe of President Trump’s campaign.”

“Out of an abundance of caution, these transcripts have a limited number of narrowly tailored redactions, relating only to confidential sources and methods, non-public information about ongoing investigations and non-material personal information,” Collins said.

Here are all the transcripts if you want to read them for yourselves, I haven't read them all yet.

I started reading the Loretta Lynch transcript and she denies telling Twitter personality and fired FBI Director James Comey to call the Hillary Clinton investigation a "matter." Remember that? Who is the liar here?

Also reported: It was Andrew McCabe who fired Peter Strzok from the Mueller team, according to McCabe's testimony. Curiously, Strzok did not mention it was McCabe who fired him when he testified.

More on that last at Hot Air, McCabe: You’re Darned Right I Ordered The Code Red On Strzok

Huh? The record thus far shows that special counsel Robert Mueller removed Peter Strzok from his investigatory team after learning about texts between them demonstrating hostility toward Donald Trump. Mueller’s

However, former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe told Congress eighteen months ago that it was he who pulled Strzok off his special-counsel assignment:
. . .
Note that nowhere does McCabe mention Mueller in this process, which seems unusual, to say the least. Don’t forget that Strzok ended up in human resources, which gives an indication of the regard McCabe and other FBI leaders held Strzok after hearing from the IG. McCabe made the decision all on his own to reassign Strzok after hearing from the IG after consulting other FBI “fellow leaders” on where to put him, even though Strzok was working for a special counsel in an autonomous capacity? And Mueller didn’t even get consulted on how Strzok ended up researching job applications? Come on, man.

At the time of McCabe’s testimony, it was widely reported that Mueller himself removed Strzok and sent him packing. Here’s the New York Times report from almost three weeks prior to McCabe’s testimony, in which Mueller’s office publicly took responsibility for removing Strzok . . .

Not a game changer, but a bit of WTF?  Certainly, as his immediate boss (Strzok was on "loan" to Mueller, not permanently assigned) should have had a role in his removal from "the team" and subsequent assignment to the HR basement.