Will Trump get rid of Mueller? Plus: Far right subversion

There's a lot of talk going around that Trump will get rid of Mueller. If that happen, here's what you should do.

Many say that Trump can't fire Mueller because doing so would be political suicide. But if Trump is guilty, then not firing Mueller would be legal suicide. A cornered rat's gonna do what a cornered rat's gonna do. Congress can rectify the situation, but only if they feel a certain degree of "street heat" -- and by "a certain degree," I mean thermonuclear.

Hit that link. Sign up for the event in your area. You don't need to divulge anything except for an email address and a name.

Trump goes Iran-contra. Read this important piece by Charles Pierce on the "private" intel/covert ops group Amyntor, founded by the notorious Dewey Clarridge. (A little history. Some more history.) The president can order up a plausibly deniable off-the-books covert operation against anyone he chooses, foreign or domestic.

If you hit that list link, you'll read about Clarridge's role in killing Barry Seal.

Oliver North speaking to Jeb Bush and Dewey Clarridge in the 1980's: "Well, we haven't decided how we will rule his demise yet - whether it will be accident, natural causes, or suicide."

What's past is present. There's more than one way to get rid of an investigator you don't like. If anything happens to Mueller, don't buy the cover story (no matter how plausible it sounds) and bring on the street heat.

The Claremont Institute. Speaking of the Iran-contra days: Older readers will recall that free weekly newspapers like the L.A. Weekly led the fight against Reagan's cover wars in Central America. If not for the efforts of these valiant progressive publications, Reagan would have had the support needed to send in ground troops -- something he clearly longed to do.

That's why I consider this tweet by April Wolfe so disturbing.

Well, isn’t this interesting? Brian Calle, who’s running LA Weekly now, worked for years and was an officer at the Claremont Institute. Their mission statement lays out exactly how they want their people to infiltrate civic life & “defeat progressivism.” Maybe thru a newspaper??

LA Weekly editor/publisher Brian Calle is also tied to anti-choice Family Action PAC. And if you dig through his history of writing and affiliations, one thing becomes increasingly clear: He hates women.

For more on the purchase of this once-progressive publication, go here. From one of Wolfe's readers:

You do know Brian Calle is tied to #TrumpRussia right? Also, look up one of the new owners, Makarechian, and his organization called GenNext: here's a sampling of what they do (spoiler alert: they're shadow brokers):

The tweet then links to this important AlterNet story from 2015 on the Quilliam Foundation. How does this tie in with the L.A. Weekly? Follow the trail...

Corporate records reveal that the Quilliam Foundation, an influential independent London-based "counter-extremism" think-tank, has received nearly a million dollars from a US political network with close links to the neoconservative wing of the Republican Party since 2011. The network, which includes former Bush administration officials behind the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, overlaps with far-right anti-Muslim leaders who inspired Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik.

For an anti-extremist group, they seem pretty damned extreme. Lots of ties to white supremacists. Lots of ties to Islamophobes. And yet...

Yet the Quilliam Foundation’s own filings with the US Treasury’s Internal Revenue Service show that its current and former US-based directors are connected to powerful financial and political entities in authoritarian regimes, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, including a bank founded by one of Osama bin Laden’s "Golden Chain" al-Qaeda financiers.

And here's the tie-in with the purchase of the L.A. Weekly...

Quilliam’s main nonprofit corporate patron in the US, Gen Next, is founded by Paul Makarechian, CEO and president of Makar Properties. Makarechian’s father, Hadi, who is chairman of Makar Properties, is an Iranian-born billionaire who escaped to the US in the wake of the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran.

Any Angeleno of my generation must be astonished to see the Weekly fall into the hands of an out-and-out libertarian like Calle. Here's a piece he wrote with Arthur Laffer -- of "Laffer Curve" ill-fame -- in praise of Putin.

Few would argue that it makes economic sense to purchase a print publication in the internet age. Therefore, one must presume that these purchases have some other motive.

For more on Qulliam, go here and here. Bottom line: We're talking about a nexus of wealthy libertarians with a neo-con edge.

As for Claremont: Wikipedia holds that they often spar with the Ludwig von Mises Institute. The main point of disagreement is rather disturbing...

The two differ radically in their opinions about Abraham Lincoln and have engaged debates about whether Lincoln should be embraced or shunned by conservatives. This controversy over Lincoln's significance to conservatives predates both think tanks, and encompasses Jaffa's debates on the subject with National Review editor Frank Meyer and scholar M.E. Bradford.

That's the world we live in today. Real power is a contest between rabid rightwingers who think that Abraham Lincoln was Evil Incarnate and slightly-less-rabid rightwingers who still consider it polite to give lip service to the ideals that Lincoln stood for -- ideals like "slavery is bad" and "the union is good."

A final note: Teevee pundits keep telling us that the Logan Act does not really count, since the law is very, very old. Well, guess what? So's the Constitution.

The statute applies squarely to Mr. Flynn. According to court filings, a “very senior member” of the Trump transition team told Mr. Flynn on or about Dec. 22, 2016, to contact officials from Russia and other foreign governments regarding a resolution pending before the United Nations Security Council that condemned Israeli settlement activity. Mr. Flynn then asked the Russian ambassador, Sergey I. Kislyak, to delay a vote on the resolution or use Russia’s veto to prevent it from passing.

The conversation between Mr. Flynn and Mr. Kislyak about the Security Council resolution clearly falls within the Logan Act’s scope. The Obama administration, frustrated with Israeli settlement activity, had chosen not to use its veto to block the measure. Mr. Flynn’s overture to Russia was thus an attempt to countermand the current administration’s decision regarding a highly sensitive foreign policy subject.

Please explain to me why this is not a violation of the law.