The Digger

 Source: Reporting by Matt Taibbi Revenge of the Money Launderers The "FinCen Files" story reveals: getting caught not only doesn’t stop the world's biggest banks from moving dirty money, it may encourage them Matt Taibbi 10 min 6 1 On December 11, 2012, U.S. Justice Department officials called a press conference in Brooklyn. The key players were once and future bank lawyer Lanny Breuer (disguised at the time as Barack Obama’s Assistant Attorney General in charge of the DOJ’s Criminal Division), and Loretta Lynch, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, and future Attorney General. The duo revealed that HSBC, the largest bank in Europe, had agreed to a $ 1.9 billion settlement  for years of money-laundering offenses. An alphabet soup of regulatory agencies was represented that day, from the Justice Department, to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the U.S. Treasury, the New York County District Attorney, and the Office of the Comptroller of the Cur...

  The Official 2020 Democratic National Convention Drinking Game No one gets out of this thing sober Matt Taibbi 25 min 56 12 Imagine a four-day Zoom meeting in which the likes of John Kasich, Michael Bloomberg, and Nancy Pelosi warn you for the fifty through sixty millionth times about the “existential threat” of Donald Trump, and you come close to envisioning both hell on earth and what we’re all in for this week with the  Democratic Party’s Biden/Harris virtual coronation . The alternative is to start drinking early. The 2020 DNC represents the culmination of one of the most exhausting, repetitive, and depressing primary races America has seen. It was extreme both by number of candidates – the official count seems to be  29  – and by sheer quantity of identical-sounding rhetoric. The race from the start was itself like a giant drinking game, in which candidates were rewarded in polls for delivering the most pleasing versions of oft-repeated terms like “kids in cag...

"Donald Trump couldn’t have asked for a juicier 2020 campaign issue" On Sunday,  Attorney General William Barr sent a letter to Congress , summarizing the findings of Special Counsel  Robert Mueller ’s  Russia  investigation. The most telling section, quoted directly from Mueller’s report,  read : “[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.” That one sentence should end a roughly  33-month  national ordeal (the first Russiagate stories date back to July 2016) in which the public was encouraged, both by officials and the press, to believe  Donald Trump  was a compromised foreign agent. After the 2016 election, the storyline instantly became that Trump was an illegitimate president, a foreign operative who’d cheated his way into office and would therefore need to be removed ahead of schedule. There were...

I've been hanging out on Twitter a bit where the narcissist Joshua Frank, co-editor at Counterpunch, has been sounding off quasi-centrist fumes while Russiavapping. Link:   To Celebrate or to Not? The Mueller Question Finally, it’s over. Well, sort of, anyway. Late Sunday afternoon, Attorney General Bill Barr released his much-anticipated  summary  of Bob Mueller’s Russia investigation. The big news, of course, was that nobody in Trump’s orbit “knowingly” coordinated with Russian efforts to disrupt the 2016 election. Trump won’t be charged with obstruction of justice and not a single American was indicted for conspiracy. To the delight of Russiagate skeptics, it was a complete vindication. To the dismay of the liberal establishment and MSDNC — who all cashed in on the chaos — it was an enormous letdown. Much of the celebration, however, took on a twisted form. Matt Taibbi was the most contorted, writing in a  column  that, “WMD was a pimple compared t...