Yesterday, Common Cause filed a complaint with the Justice Department calling for an investigation of Trump’s attorney’s payment of $130,000 in hush money to porn star, Stormy Daniels as an unreported campaign contribution.  It makes sense, since the payment was made to help Trump win the election.  I think I start popping popcorn.

Paul Manafort, former Trump campaign chair and friend to Russian strongmen, has filed suit against Robert Mueller, Rob Rosentstein, and the Justice Department claiming that Mueller’s investigation is illegal.  Yep, that’s what they’re wasting time on today.

Understatement of the day comes from white collar crime attorney Sol Wisenberg, who told CNBC, “I think it’s going to be an uphill battle.  These kinds of things usually don’t prevail.”

Manafort has pulled out all the stops.  We’re popping popcorn right now.

Today in the NY Times, Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch of Fusion GPS hit back at congressional Republicans attacking them and selectively leaking their testimony to far right propaganda outlets.   Who’s Fusion GPS?  They are a political research firm who engaged former British spy Christopher Steele to research Trump’s business ties.  The principals of this firm have become the punching bag of right wing media and congressional Republicans, and they’ve now had enough of it.  In their op-ed today, Simpson and Fritsch are demanding that Congress release their testimony to the public.

In the piece, they talk about how they testified that Steele ran across multiple occasions of Trump’s ties to dubious Russian characters that likely involved money laundering.  They also talk about how Congress has ignored their advice to subpoena Deutschbank records of Trump’s transactions, but the only bank records that have been subpoenaed are their own.  Congress has done nothing to advance an investigation of Trump and have only sought to shoot the messenger, seek to discredit Fusion GPS.

They claim their testimony to Congress included details of Paul Manafort’s cozy relationship with the Russians and evidence they discovered of the Trump campaign’s coordination with Russian to get His Orangeness elected as president.  The fact that the Republican controlled houses of Congress have not released this testimony is all you need to know about the content of those transcripts.

Republicans have been actively covering up the reality of Trump’s collusion with the Russians and clear corruption.  Clearly they are putting party and self-interest before the needs of the American people, and their actions have destabilized our own government and damaged our reputation worldwide.

Congress must release these transcripts immediately.  Our democracy, or what’s left of it, hangs in the balance.

Wanna know why Trump lawyers went off the deep end this weekend with the panicked letter to Congress?  Wanna know whey they wrote Congress instead of Mueller?  How about why Trump’s lawyers didn’t file a lawsuit stopping Mueller from using the GSA provided emails?

Welp, here ya’ go.  Trump provided transition team emails to Mueller.  They just didn’t provide ALL of them.  That’s a crime.  Being reported this morning, it appears the famous leaked email of KT McFarland’s claiming that Russia threw the election to Trump was withheld by the Trump team, and acquired from another source.

Tick, Tick, Tick

Steve Curtis, hate radio talker and former chair of the Colorado state GOP, regularly accuses Democrats of all kinds of malfeasance, including voter fraud.  Welp, this week, in a clear case of Karma is a Bitch, Curtis was convicted of…wait for it…voter fraud.  In 2016, ol’ Steve somehow thought it was a good idea to forge his ex-wife’s signature on a mail-in ballot and send it in.  Said ex-wife had moved to South Carolina and discovered the fraud when, upon requesting a mail in ballot for that state, was informed that she had already voted – in Colorado.

Steve’s defense?  He forged her name during a diabetic episode, and then accidentally mailed it in the next day.  The jury didn’t buy the story.  I wonder; why is it that the guys who scream the loudest about wrongdoing and voter fraud are generally the ones guilty of just that?

Last night we posted about the Washington Post catching a Project Veritas operative lying to them in one of its more clumsy “sting” operations.  The story gets better –  a lot better.  None other than DJT donated $10,000 to Veritas in 2015; in 2016, they leaked another false story about Hillary supporters supposedly paying protestors to disrupt Trump campaign events.  This silly “sting” operation is yet another sorry attempt to smear anyone who opposes conservative politicians.

Even more shocking, O’Keefe’s merry band of propagandists are getting serious dollars from somebody; so far, we haven’t found the full 2016 Form 990, and the 2015 we found had the donor names redacted.  However, if you look at the screen shot below, O’Keefe has scooped up over $12 million since 2012, AND he pays himself and his cronies nice hefty salaries.

More important, though, is how in the hell did a 100% partisan political organization get non-profit charitable status from the IRS?  O’Keefe is a self-confessed political operative.  As far as we know, he’s never done any project through Project Veritas that wasn’t racially partisan and sometimes illegal.  The fact that he gets away with it while purporting to be charitable is pretty blatant.

We’ll continue to follow this story.