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For the first time since former FBI Director Mueller was appointed Special Counsel looking into Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia, House Speaker Paul Ryan will take questions from an eager press. Tune in below for the fireworks.
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Just a few short days after receiving a subpoena from the Senate Intelligence Committee, requesting documents relevant to the Committee's investigation into Russian interference with the 2016 election, AP reports that Senator Burr, the top Republican on the committee, says that Michael Flynn's lawyers say he will not honor subpoena.
Last week, in a joint statement from Commttee chair Richard Burr (R-N.C.) and ranking member Mark Warner (D-Va.) the committee disclosed that it had first requested the documents in an April 28 letter to Flynn, but he "declined" to cooperate with the request.
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence today issued a subpoena for former National Security Advisor Lieutenant General Michael Flynn. The subpoena requests documents relevant to the Committee's investigation into Russian interference with the 2016 election. The Committee first requested these documents in an April 28, 2017 letter to Lieutenant General Flynn, but he declined, through counsel, to cooperate with the Committee's request.
CNN also reported that the FBI had also issued subpoenas relating to Flynn's business records, so the ousted National Security Adviser is now at at the center of both investigations, although as disclosed, he did not comply with the committee's earlier request.
And today we get confirmation from Senator Burr, via AP, that Michael Flynn's lawyers say he will not honor subpoena.
This is perhaps not entirely surprising given Yahoo's reporting that late last month, fired National Security Adviser Michael Flynn—under investigation by federal prosecutors, with his lawyer seeking immunity for him to testify to Congress–met with a small group of loyalists at a restaurant in the northern Virginia suburbs.
Saddled with steep legal bills, Flynn wanted to reconnect with old friends and talk about potential future business opportunities. But one overriding question among those present were his views on the president who had fired him as national security advisor. Flynn left little doubt about the answer. Not only did he remain loyal to President Trump, he indicated he and the president were still in communication. “I just got a message from the president to stay strong,” Flynn said after the meal was over, according to two sources who are close to Flynn and are familiar with the conversation, which took place on April 25.
We are sure Democratic leadership will have some great soundbites soon (oi course, forgeting Hillary's obfuscations of various government subpoenas during the election campaign).
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Juat a month after comments that he had begun exploring employment possibilities outside of Congress, Politico reports Rep. Jason Chaffetz is expected announce today that he is resigning before the end of this congressional term, according to three sources familiar with his plans.
As Politico details, Chaffetz did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday evening or Thursday morning.
Multiple sources say he will leave Congress on June 30.
Chaffetz, 50, is chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, the top investigative body in the chamber.
He recently subpoenaed James Comey’s memos, and invited the fired FBI director to testify next week before his panel.
Additionally, the U.S. prosecutor overseeing price-fixing probes is said to step-down…(via Bloomberg)
Brent Snyder, the head of criminal enforcement at the U.S. Justice Department’s antitrust division, is stepping down, according to two people familiar with the matter.
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Below looks at the Brazil ETF (EWZ) over the last decade. The rally over the past year has it facing a critical level, from a Power of the Pattern perspective.
CLICK ON CHART TO ENLARGE
EWZ is facing dual resistance at (1), while in a 9-year down trend of lower highs and lower lows. The counter trend rally over the past 17-months has it testing key falling resistance. Did the counter trend reflation rally just end at dual resistance???
If EWZ breaks support at (1), it should attract selling pressure. If it falls hard, the decline could well put the hurts to Emerging markets (EEM) and potentially ripple into the stock market in the states!!!
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As Peter Suderman eloquently noted yesterday, Donald Trump has destroyed (what was left of) the credibility of the president’s office. He is a natural authoritarian whose first instinct is to stack the administration with mini-authoritarians who are so attracted to his draconian policies that they are willing to overlook his mental afflictions and pledge fealty. He’s got his own little axis of evil going with:
Jeff Sessions, who wants to double down on America’s worst policy disasters of the 20th Century, the War on Drugs and the War on Immigration, helming the Justice Department
Kris Kobach, the notorious immigration warrior who was the brains behind such liberty-busting policies as Arizona’s “your paper’s please” monstrosity,” second in command of the Voting Rights Commission that Trump created through executive order to gin up Pravda-style propaganda against vote fraud, an issue that literally every study has shown exists only in the fevered imagination of Republicans
Steve Bannon, the head of the fakest of fake news websites Breitbart and the grand-daddy of the alt-right, as a senior advisor.
This is all serious shit that ought to alarm libertarians. But it is not impeachable. However, Trump has done plenty in his first four months in office that is. In fact, I note in my column at The Week, one does not have to be a Democratic partisan to see that the case for impeachment against Trump is over-determined at this stage. Bill Clinton was (wrongly) impeached for far less.
So what’s the difference? Trump has his own party occupying Capitol Hill and Clinton had to contend with Republicans. And Republicans can’t (and actually shouldn’t) ignore the base that digs this president. Had Democrats won Congress in November and we had divided government, it might have been a different story. Trump would have had to shape up (which does not seem possible for this paranoid man-child consumed with a sense of victimhood) or ship out.
Trump is so out of control because Republicans are in control in Congress, and that’s a tragedy for this country.
Go here to read the piece.
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Laura Kipnis, the Northwestern University professor who faced down a Title IX investigation after writing an essay about sexual relationships between students and professors, is now being sued for defamation.
Her new book, Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus, discusses at great length the Title IX proceedings against Kipnis’s colleague Peter Ludlow, who was accused of sexual harassment and assault by a female graduate student. Kipnis defended Ludlow in an essay for The Chronicle Review, which led the student to file a Title IX complaint against Kipnis as well, on grounds that Kipnis was retaliating against the student. Kipnis was eventually cleared of wrongdoing by the university.
But now the book has drawn a complaint of its own—from the same student, “Jane Doe,” who accuses Kipnis of falsely representing details of Doe’s relationship with Ludlow.
“[Kipnis and publisher HarperCollins] recklessly pursued fame and profit without regard for the harm their actions would cause to Plaintiff, a young and promising graduate student who—rather than being on a mission to end Ludlow’s career (as Kipnis suggests)—in fact only very reluctantly came forward to disclose his conduct after she learned of other allegations of inappropriate sexual conduct with students,” according to the lawsuit.
The lawsuit provides Doe’s version of the events: she claims Ludlow singled her out, even before she enrolled at Northwestern, and then aggressively pursued a romantic relationship with her. Doe was reluctant to turn Ludlow down completely since he was an important academic in her area of study, so she gradually grew closer to him. Eventually, after a night of heavy drinking, she woke up in bed with him—a sexual encounter she described as nonconsensual. Eventually, she filed a Title IX complaint against Ludlow after learning of his allegedly nonconsensual sexual relationship with another student.
Kipnis has defended Ludlow, and described the Title IX proceedings against him as “like watching a person be burned at the stake in slow motion.” According to her version of events—which is supported by the massive volume of text messages sent between Doe and Ludlow—the relationship was consensual.
“What would it mean to not consent to sending a thousand text messages?” Kipnis writes in the book.
Doe’s lawsuit accuses Kipnis of defaming her with actual malice, publicizing private facts about Doe, and inflicting negative emotional stress. Complicating this charge is the fact that Kipnis did not actually use Doe’s name in the book—she used a pseudonym, albeit one that resembles Doe’s real name, according to the lawsuit.
Before publishing the book, HarperCollins would have subjected it to a rigorous legal review, which makes me doubtful that the lawsuit has much chance of succeeding, unless it’s revealed that the publisher was employing Rolling Stone‘s fact-checker.
But if this is a she-said, she-said—or, perhaps, a she-said, she-said-he-said—it’s one in which a whole lot of evidence seems to be on Kipnis’s side. The text of the lawsuit, which presents Doe’s side in the best light possible, doesn’t actually do a very good job of proving her case. For instance, the lawsuit contends that Kipnis’s book misrepresents Doe as “litigious.” But how is that a misrepresentation? Doe has used both the Title IX process, and a lawsuit, to adjudicate her dispute with Kipnis.
Part of the lawsuit rests on the idea that Title IX proceedings should be closed, and that Kipnis did not have the right to call attention to the Ludlow case (paradoxically, many claim that Title IX actually prohibits discussion of Title IX cases). But it will be difficult to establish that Kipnis was wrong to publish facts, unless Doe can do a better job than this of showing that the facts were actually wrong.
And while Doe claims that Kipnis published her text messages out of context, as KC Johnson notes, the lawsuit fails to specify a single example of this.
“Lawsuit makes Kipnis look even more sympathetic,” writes Johnson.
Indeed, there’s a sense in which this lawsuit actually proves the central ideas of Kipnis’s book—that sexual paranoia pervades the modern university campus, where messy relationships are treated like assault, women are presumed to lack agency when it comes to consent, and tribunals are seen as the solution to every dispute.
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You know it's bad when the police are rioting against the new austerity measures assigned from Brussels…
As KeepTalkingGreece reports, tension between protesters from police, fire brigades and coast guard on one side and riot police on the other side broke out shortly after 8 o’ clock in the evening on Wednesday when the angry protesters tried to break the police cordon and enter the Greek Parliament.
Riot policemen and protesters pushed and shouted at each other, with protesters shouting “Disgrace! Disgrace!”
Members of of the Greek Police, the Fire Brigades and the Coast Guard marched to the Parliament on the general strike day protesting the new austerity package that will be voted on Thursday at the Parliament.
Three squads of riot police were deployed outside the Parliament to prevent their colleagues to enter the House.
It was due to the intervention of the coolest among the people form both sides that the situation did not get out of control.
Protesters were furious at Defense Minister Panos Kammenos, who had promised that there would be no wage cuts in the special payrolls. Kammenos had also promised them they would be paid retrospectively the wages cuts they had suffered due to the previous bailout agreements. The Supreme Court had ruled that they should be exempted from the cuts.
They chanted slogans against the Defense ?inister.
A day earlier, the Police Union had warned that the government will find them on the opposite side. According to Greek media, the government considers to add some last minutes modifications in the 4.90-billion euro omnibus bill to exempt the Armed Forces from further cuts in wages, pensions and some benefits.
On wonders, when police officers occupy a public building, what should the average unemployed, the low-pensioner and the mother in need do?
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With the dollar index dribbling higher…
It appears someone is more than happy to dump safe-havens like gold and silver (-2%) and buy-the-dip in WTI and RBOB this morning…
Gold and Silver dumped -because everything's awesome again?
And WTI and RBOB bid, because growth?
Whether this is macro-fund shakeout from yesterday is unclear but the moves are chaotic to say the least.
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Fun-durr-mentals?
Get back to work Mr.Kuroda…
It appears the modest drop in Trump impeachment odds has sparked some dip-buying with momentum ignited by a sudden interest in selling Yen.
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Authored by Charles Hugh-Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,
Central planning based on central-bank inflated debt-asset bubbles works until it doesn't.
A media mini-industry touts Scandinavia's "happiness" as the result of its high-tax, generous welfare state-capitalism. This mini-industry conveniently fails to report the soft underbelly of Scandinavia's "High-Tax Happy-Capitalism": The high-tax, generous welfare model is just as dependent on unsustainable credit bubbles as every other version of state-capitalism.
The glossy surface story goes like this: state-capitalism creates a happy, secure society if taxes are high enough to fund generous social welfare benefits for everyone. People are happy to pay the higher taxes because they value the generous benefits they receive.
The story has an implicit message: every state-capitalist society could become happy if only taxes were raised high enough to fund generous social welfare for all. There are many versions of this narrative, for example, the appealing (but financially impractical) "tax the robots" funded Universal Basic Income (UBI) that I have repeatedly debunked.
Put another way: state-managed capitalism works just great if high earners and companies pay high enough taxes to fund a rebalancing of wealth and income via social welfare transfers.
The reality is quite different from this glossy PR narrative. The Scandinavian economies have pursued the same unsustainable debt-bubble "fix" for their structural insolvency as other state-managed nations.
As the charts below reveal, the "happy" Scandinavian nations are now dependent on unprecedented debt/housing bubbles inflated by extreme monetary stimulus. The script is the same as in every other monetary "experiment" intended to create the illusion of solvency in an insolvent system: lower interest rates to zero (or below-zero if you're really desperate), juice the financial system with liquidity/ easy credit, and base your measures of financial "health" on housing bubbles and other debt-based gimmicks. (Charts courtesy of the Acting Man blog)
Also left unmentioned is the Scandinavian reliance on export sectors for national income. This is of course the German model: make your money exporting to other nations that are over-borrowing to fund consumption.
So what happens when consumption in the importing nations crashes when debt bubbles pop? The economies of the export-dependent nations also implode. This is the inconvenient consequence of having an export-dependent economy.
Also left unsaid is the imperialist wealth amassed by the mini-empires of Denmark and Sweden. Denmark and Sweden had smaller but no less imperialist interests as the larger imperial powers, and ownership of foreign assets remains a hidden mainstay of their national incomes.
Put another way: if you want to be rich, start out rich.
Norway is a special case in two ways. Norway only won its full political independence from Denmark and then Sweden in 1905. Its current wealth is the direct result of a depleting resource: North Sea oil and gas. While Norway has amassed a large sovereign-wealth fund, it has already started to draw upon this fund.
The fund is of course largely invested in the usual debt-bubble-dependent "assets" that are doomed to implode along with the fiat currencies they prop up.
Does this explosion in Norway's M2 money supply look healthy or sustainable to you? If so–what are you high on?
Does Sweden's insane real estate bubble look healthy or sustainable to you? If so–what are you high on?
Does Denmark's unprecedented levels of household debt look healthy or sustainable to you? If so–what are you high on?
Take away these unsustainable bubbles, and how "happy" will these economies (or their suddenly impoverished residents) be? Central planning based on central-bank inflated debt-asset bubbles works until it doesn't. The day of reckoning draws ever nearer in every economy that's created the illusion of solvency with debt/asset bubbles and export-dependent economies.
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