The point is that Mueller can't prosecute Trump or anyone that he doesn't want prosecuted. That is the meaning of the OLC memos saying, in essence, that a sitting president is above the law. As an employee of the DOJ, Mueller is bound by that policy, even if it is wrong and idiotic. You don't need to infer anything on this question: He's forbidden from doing charging Donald Trump with a crime unless that policy is first disavowed by the Attorney General.

The OLC policy is what it is. No prosecutions. Period. What kind of "dead-man's switch" could he possibly have in place? What do you think our allies could do to remove Trump from office? Short of turning themselves into a Praetorian Guard, assassinating Trump and installing a new president in his place, I don't see what the intelligence agencies can do about Trump.

This is an entirely unforeseen problem. And the unforeseen problem isn't Trump— it's the modern Republican Party, a minority party that holds power through ruthlessness, utter disregard of law and norms, and with the assistance of a foreign enemy. The Constitution is riddled with provisions that enhance the power of a rural, conservative minority; originally it was a minor imbalance but now it's a death sentence for the republic.

I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit and I’m really very confused. At the most meta level, it makes no difference to Trump whether Manafort cooperates or not, has incriminating dirt on the Family Trump or not since it seems to be almost universally accepted at this point that Meuller will not prosecute Trump but will instead send a scathing report to Congress—which is pretty much like Elliot Ness sending the Mafia Commission a report condemning Al Capone and expecting them to expel Capone from their ranks because he’s connected to organized crime.

The thing that’s keeping Trump out of jail is the DOJ’s extremely misguided attachment to the idea that presidents are above the law And the combination of the Republican Party’s utter ruthlessness and complete lack of scruples will keep Trump in the White House for at least two terms.

Yet, at a more granular level, the White House seems genuinely to be very worried about Manafort’s testimony at a trial or perhaps before Congress. Yet we know that unless Sessions approves of it, there will be no trial. And the result of Congressional action seems a foregone conclusion. (As an aside, we’re obviously dealing with actual testimony and not Manafort telling what he knows, since that ship surely must have sailed in a proffer session before Mueller would’ve approved the deal).

Presumably, the government would have given Manafort a drop dead offer—flip now or no deal ever, no matter what—and his lawyers would surely have told Rudy that their client couldn’t go through another trial (to stretch things out past the midterms) so it was now or never for the pardon that Trump and Rudy have been dangling. But Trump didn’t deliver and Manafort flipped.

So, here a question : what’s going on with these people ? Why not just pardon everyone, especially since Rudy’s on the tevee every day openly imploring Manafort to stall his promised cooperation until after the midterms when Trump will restore his freedom and his estates? What am I missing?

Unless, as seems to be the case, god’s just trolling us on Trump’s behalf.

Not a scientific study but I looked at Federal, Winchester, and Gold Dot for handgun and rifle ammo and they said “power”. Shotgun and people who selll stuff for reloading all said “power” except for one that sold “smokeless power”.

I have seen “propellent” used in ballistics reports and autopsy reports so maybe smokeless gunpowder is simply expressed differently, using different descriptive words, by different fields.

I'm a little confused because I thought the modern powers were called "smokeless gunpowder" and, evidently, I'm not the only person who thinks this:
https://www.ammunitiondepot.com/blog/the-inventio...

I'm pretty sure that I would very easily be able to give completely truthful answers about my relationships with Russian spies and whether I was a Russian spy myself. Not hard at all.

My impression is that he or she is saying that the coup was for the purposes of making sure that traditional conservative economic and foreign policy preferences would be enforced.

We don’t really know that Trump actually won the election. Official information about the Russian intervention in the 2016 election has come out in drips and drabs and only in response to leaks. I can’t help noticing that official Washington has been dragged kicking and screaming from nothing got hacked to, basically, everything got hacked but no votes were changed. My impression is that if Reality Winner hadn’t sacrificed herself to tell us as much of the truth as she knew, the government would still be denying everything.

It doesn’t seem crazy or paranoid to worry that, in fact, critical votes were changed and Trump didn’t actually win the election.

Papadopoulos was being interrogated about his relationships with specific people suspected of being Russian spies or members of organized crime. He wasn’t be questioned about his porn viewing habits or whether he ate someone’s poptarts from the office fridge. If he didn’t know they were Russian spies and gangsters, he shouldn’t have had the slightest difficulty answering the FBI’s questions truthfully.

Perhaps I’m being judgmental but if he knew these people were enemy spies or gangsters (as I think he obviously did) and choose to lie to the FBI to give at least one of them the opportunity to escape being arrested, he doesn’t deserve the benefit of such a rule.

My inference from recent developments is that Mueller isn't working from the ground up to effectuate a Gambino Family-style roll-up. Mueller's operation has resolutely steered clear of everyone in the Trump Family and seems to be disinterested in pursuing charges against ay of them. Similarly, the SDNY seems to have very studiously avoided every opportunity to penetrate the Trump Family; the most recent example of which is that people who were in a position to testify against high-ranking family members, and perhaps even the Donald himself, were given immunity to testify against Cohen but they don't seem to have testified against Donald and actually my sense is that they were in a position to reassure Donald that they would not be expected to provide information against him but only against Cohen (whom Donald considers to be a "rat" and a traitor to the family).

From my perspective, the significance of this is that many of the same people who were involved in the election rigging also are associated with the Trump Organization which many experts have described as a money laundering operation specializing in washing Russian dark and black money (a conclusion with which I agree). If the DOJ is avoiding embarrassing discoveries about Trump and money laundering, it's difficult to see them being able to seriously address the Russian intelligence operation directed at the election.

This is particularly true when, as I said here before, the guy inside the Trump Organization they immunized to almost certainly not testify against anyone in the Trump Family is widely believed to be the central figure in dealing with Russian and other Eastern European money sources. Similarly, the one person that Cohen doesn't seem to be being squeezed about is his father-in-law, who is an important conduit for that Russian and Eastern Europe money to the Trump Organization..

Consequently, my guess is that that prosecutors would indeed appear to have made a conscious decision to grant the big fish impunity on the election and the money laundering and to focus exclusively on the small fish. I would be happy to be proven wrong but that's how recent events look to me.