Details

Categorie: Media (502)

Gepubliceerd: 31 mei 2019

Mueller Speaks

(Door Hugo Kijne te Hoboken USA)

This week Trump was supposed to go on the offensive against the deep state traitors in the FBI, the CIA and the Department of Justice who had by now perpetrated the Russia hoax for over two years, undermining the legitimacy of his presidency by suggesting that his campaign had conspired with the Kremlin to get him elected and that he had obstructed the investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller into that conspiracy.  After Attorney General Barr had publicly concluded that the alleged crimes never occurred the president had given Barr carte blanche to declassify all relevant information that showed how his enemies had been plotting against him, weaponizing the Justice Department and risking international intelligence collaboration.   For weeks Trump went around the country screaming ‘no collusion, no obstruction’ at his rallies, putting all his trust in Barr, in spite of the fact that Mueller showed that there had been plenty of collusion but also explicitly stated that conspiracy could not be proven, before listing ten instances of obstruction of justice by Trump in the second part of his report.

So Trump was in a good mood when he spent Memorial Day weekend in Japan, playing golf with his friend Shinzo Abe but not getting a trade agreement done, dining with the Emperor, handing out a preposterous trophy at a Sumo wrestling match, downplaying the importance of a short range missile test by North Korea and restating his faith in Kim Jong-un, whose assessment of Joe Biden as a ‘low-IQ’ person he shared.  Just so that the party would not be spoiled from beyond the grave the name ‘John S. McCain’ on a US destroyer was covered and the sailors of that ship were not invited for the Memorial Day celebration because Trump wouldn’t want to see their patches.  And then it all started to fall apart.  On Wednesday Mueller decided to speak, and in a nine minute, carefully prepared statement, delivered in a halting way, he told his audience that his boss and onetime friend, the Attorney General, had misrepresented the findings in his report, and that the only reason why he had not been able to determine that the president had committed a crime was that a Department of Justice policy precluded him to do so.

Trump’s initial reaction to Mueller’s presser showed how the Special Counsel had thrown him off his game.  He tweeted that he had nothing to do with Russia helping him to get elected, and it took him some time to realize his mistake and go out on the South Lawn to declare that only he was responsible for his election.  Seizing the moment he called Mueller a highly conflicted never-Trumper and stated that he didn’t see how the courts would allow impeachment, ‘a dirty, filthy, disgusting word’ out of the US Constitution.

While Trump gave evidence that he doesn’t understand that the courts have nothing to do with impeachment William Barr decided to muddy the legal waters a bit more than he had already done by saying that Mueller could have found proof of criminal activity by the president, but that since there was no clear conclusion to that effect in Mueller’s report he and Rod Rosenstein felt compelled to conclude that no crime was committed.

With Trump raging about Mueller’s ‘vendetta’ and Barr continuing to obscure Mueller’s statement that if his team had found that the president had not committed a crime it would have said so, the Democrats are slowly marching towards impeachment.  The idea that Trump wants to be impeached is no longer tenable, it scares the hell out of him.

Ga HIER naar toe voor alle afleveringen

Details

Categorie: Media (502)

Gepubliceerd: 26 mei 2019

'De meest invloedrijke man van Nederland'

In 1990 hield ik een opmerkelijk marathoninterview met G.A. (Gerrit Abram) Wagner, oud president-directeur van Shell. Opmerkelijk, omdat het hier ging om iemand, die onder andere tijdens de oliecrisis van 1973 een bedrijf had geleid in een rumoerige periode, waarin de multinational langdurig onder zware publieke en politieke druk stond.  
      Bijvoorbeeld vanwege Shell's activiteiten in Zuid-Afrika, waar toen nog het apartheidsregiem aan de macht was. Er werd opgeroepen om Shell-producten te boycotten en later werden doelgerichte acties gevoerd op Shell benzinepompen, waarbij ondermeer slangen werden doorgesneden. 
      Ik sprak vooraf met tal van mensen.

Wagner heeft Shell uitstekend geleid. Vriend & vijand waren het daar over eens.
      Bovendien was hij voorzitter van de stichting Premium Erasmianum, die tegen de zin van de regering de Erasmusprijs wilde verlenen aan de Tsjchoslawaakse beweging Charta '77. 
      Toen besloten werd om de prijs dan maar te geven aan Vaclav Havel, mocht zijn lezing die hij opgestuurd had aanvankelijk niet worden voorgelezen. De Koninklijke familie kon daar volgens CDA-minister Hans van den Broek niet mee geconfronteerd worden. Wagner hield zijn poot stijf, kreeg publiciteit en zorgde ervoor dat de lezing gewoon werd voorgedragen.

Na zijn Shell-periode kreeg hij grote bekendheid als voorzitter van de commissie Wagner, die de regering adviseerde over het industriebeleid. (Een nieuw industrieel elan) 
       Hij werd regelmatig de meest invloedrijke man van Nederland genoemd.

U kunt HIER naar het interview luisteren

In 2007 werd ik voor de site van de VPRO hierover geinterviewd.
Het resultaat:

Details

Categorie: Media (502)

Gepubliceerd: 24 mei 2019

Nancy is Praying

(Door Hugo Kijne te Hoboken USA)

At the beginning of the week the White House introduced an organic definition of the presidency to justify Donald Trump’s instructing Don McGahn not to testify before the House Judiciary Committee.  According to his lawyers the president enjoys total immunity from congressional investigations as do his current and former staffers, who should be looked at as the limbs – if not the tentacles – of the presidency.  Implied by these legal acrobatics is that everybody who ever worked for Trump during his first term would be above the law, but committee chairman Nadler wouldn’t have any of it and held McGahn in contempt while he subpoenaed his former Chief of Staff, Annie Donaldson, and Hope Hicks, Trump’s former Communications Director.  It was only the beginning of a rollout of bad news for the president during the rest of the week.  First it was revealed that within Deutsche Bank several ‘suspicious activity’ reports had been generated concerning the possibility that both Trump and Jared Kushner had been involved in money laundering.  For reasons unknown the reports never made it to the Treasury, where they belonged.

Subsequently a federal judge in DC made public that there had been attempts to affect both Michael Flynn’s willingness to cooperate with the Mueller probe and the completeness of that cooperation, information supported by voicemail messages left by one of Trump’s lawyers.  As if that was not enough to bring the president’s blood to a boil another judge in DC ruled that Mazars USA, Trump’s tax preparer, can share information with Congress, handing the Trump family its first defeat in court.  Out of the IRS leaked the news that an internal memo had been drafted arguing that Trump’s tax returns should be handed over to Congress, but that it had been squatted by the IRS Commissioner, who was hand-picked by the president exactly for that  purpose.  Next, a judge in New York City decided that Deutsche Bank and Capital One can share information about the Trump organization’s finances with Congress, and William Barr decided that he cannot keep information away from the House Intelligence Committee.  To cap it off the New York State legislature decided to make Trump’s state tax returns available to Congress.

So it was understandable that the president was not his charming self when Wednesday morning he got ready to talk with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer about a $2 trillion infrastructure plan and heard Pelosi say on TV that he was involved in a cover-up.  Adding to his plight was that he didn’t have $2 trillion, because he had given $1.5 trillion to the rich and US corporations in  tax cuts, and that he didn’t have an infrastructure plan either.  Knowing that Pelosi and Schumer would have a plan and would expect money to implement it he decided not to meet with them.

He kept them waiting for 15 minutes while his staff set up a podium in the Rose Garden with posters containing two lies, ‘NO collusion’ and ‘NO obstruction,’ and then walked into the Cabinet Room to tell the Democrats that he would not work with them until all investigations had been halted.   Following his walk-out Trump declared in the Rose Garden ‘I don’t do cover-ups,’ and called himself ‘the most transparent president ever,’ forgetting how he had just silenced all of his current and former staffers.

It was the beginning of a public exchange with Pelosi, who questioned the president’s mental health and said that she hoped his family or staff would stage ‘an intervention’ while she was praying for him.   Trump responded by calling her ‘crazy’ and retweeting a doctored video in which the Speaker appeared to be drunk and slur her words.   Stay  tuned if you think we’ve seen the lowest point of this presidency yet.

Ga HIER naar toe voor alle afleveringen

Details

Categorie: Media (502)

Gepubliceerd: 17 mei 2019

King Donald

(Door Hugo Kijne te Hoboken USA)

On Wednesday the White House Counsel sent a letter to the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee informing him that Congress has no right to a ‘do-over’ of the Mueller investigation and that therefore all access to records and testimony by current and former White House staffers will be denied.  The ‘legal’ foundation of this stance appears to be that Congress is not a law enforcement agency and does not have a legitimate purpose to pursue its investigations, an argument that was also used by Trump’s lawyers who are trying to quell subpoenas for documents from Trump’s tax preparer and Deutsche Bank.  With the letter the White House’s reasoning has reached a new low.  Since the Special Counsel could not charge Trump with obstruction of justice  because according to the Department of Justice a sitting president cannot be indicted, he left it to Congress to draw conclusions from his probe, as part of its constitutional oversight function.  If Trump cannot be indicted and cannot be investigated by Congress he is effectively above the law, and could indeed shoot someone on 5^th Avenue and get away with it.

The letter came on top of a series of absurd statements by Trump, who had no qualms about suggesting that the Department of Justice should investigate Joe Biden, declared that Don McGahn had been more likely to be fired than Mueller, and said that FBI Director Wray had protected conspirators involved in a ‘coup’ attempt.  Meanwhile Attorney General Barr commissioned a third investigation of the origins of the Mueller probe next to two ongoing investigations, in an attempt to break the Benghazi record and with almost certainly a similar lack of success.  Especially the president’s attacks on McGahn are puzzling, since the former White House Counsel is tentatively scheduled to testify in the House next Tuesday and unlike Barr will want to avoid being held in contempt of Congress, because unlike the AG he still has other ambitions than licking Trump’s boots. The president was mystified as to why Don Jr. was subpoenaed to testify once more in the Senate, because his son had already testified at least 20 hours, but he overlooked that junior had probably lied under oath and that the record needed to be set straight.

The level of lawlessness in Trump’s circles was illustrated by Lindsey Graham, the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who encouraged Don Jr. to ignore the subpoena.   Additionally it was revealed that Trump’s lawyers drafted Michael Cohen’s initial lies to Congress, while the Department of Justice is challenging a lawsuit concerning the president’s financially benefitting from foreign governments via his businesses.  In the meantime the Democrats are still hoping for Mueller’s testimony.

The president is still trying to get his head around the fact that not China but American consumers pay his tariffs, making them effectively a consumer tax.   He is now facing crises on four continents, in US relationships with China, Iran, North-Korea and Venezuela, but in spite of John Bolton’s war mongering Trump has told his Defense Secretary that he doesn’t want to go to war with Iran, until he changes his mind of course.

And while Trump and Jared Kushner yesterday blew the roll-out of a new immigration policy by sending contradictory messages to the press and to Congress Trump is already eyeing the July 4th celebration, changing the location and including an ‘imperatorial’ speech and possibly a military parade, making it all about him and not about the country.

Ga HIER naar toe voor alle afleveringen