The Documents cases: When taking your work home for good reasons can be a bad thing

 The main blog story today is here:

 ...While we wait for justice to catch up to Trump, let's see that Bill Barr gets his just rewards...

The Documents cases: When taking your work home for good reasons can be a bad thing

By Hal Brown

In learning about the FBI was searching yet another Biden residence (update: none were found) it occurred to me that another huge difference between the reasons Trump took confidential documents home and why Biden and Pence did hasn't been reported on, at least not that I've seen.

This is that both Biden and Pence, I am quite sure, took documents home to work on them. As public servants working overtime, whether from home or at the office, this is frequently considered part of the job. Except for Trump who probably never worked a 40 hour week unless you consider golfing and frittering his time away watching TV and tweeting as work, public servants often work in excess of the time they are getting paid for.

Most people, with the possible exception of the spouses of those who feel their husbands or wives are workaholics and are both taking time away from family activities and/or jeordailzing their mental or physical health, consider this to be an admirable example of dedication to their job.

Some people do this for money. I visited a high school friend in New York who was a top executive at a major investment company who not only worked from the office but was up in the wee hours of the night working from his home office following stock market exchanges around the world. This earned him a Park Avenue apartment but I don't know what it did to his personal life.

Others do it as a public service.

Biden and Pence took documents home as a public service. There was just not enough time spent physically in the office to do their job. There's no time clock for senators, vice presidents, and presidents to log in and out on.

Nobody know why Trump took documents home, secret or otherwise. What we can be sure of with a high degree of confidence is that the notoriously lazy, ill-informed, and reading adverse president didn't take documents to any of his residents to actually work on them.

I believe that the motivations for Biden and Pence taking secret documents home to work on were laudable, but to put it bluntly were worse than ill-considered. They were, to use a three letter word, bad. 

While we wait for justice to catch up to Trump, let's see that Bill Barr gets his just rewards

 While we wait for justice to catch up to Trump, let's see that Bill Barr gets his just rewards

By Hal Brown

Yesterday I wrote about the legal jeopardy Trump faces posting a blog in the morning:

Click above to read blog

By the end of the day I added the links shown below to Raw Story articles plus one more:

Click above to enlarge

Today there are new stories, like this one about the Stormy Daniels hush money case, being published and reported about on TV,another, one about the NYC grand jury probe coming closer to Trump, and yet another one about his replacing one of his lawyers again.

This morning one of my favorite columnists, Heather Digby Parton, wrote the article about Bill Barr shown above for Salon.

Durham investigation goes bust: Bill Barr blew up mission to expose the deep state — to save Trump 

The Durham investigation was Bill Barr's personal project and it turns out that it was a monstrous abuse of power

This was the lead story on Salon:

My take on the revelations coming out about what Barr did, and especially didn't do (which of course is a form of doing - deliberate inaction is an action) is that while we wait and anticipate the legal downfall of Donald Trump the most powerful enabler of the former president, Bill Barr, deserves to get his just rewards. 

I like the word "just" in this context because in these instances it relates directly to legal justice. 

People can die, or go stark raving mad and end up in the chronic ward of a psychiatric hospital not knowing which way is up, but true justice means that they go through the actual justice system.

If you believe in an all powerful deity who metes out justice, "God" if you're one of the 81% of American believers, "Divine" intervention isn't sufficient.  

People like Trump and Barr should be punished by the same justice system that determined the fate of everyone from Al Capone to Joe Blow who robbed a bodega.

For the present I'd like to see Bill Barr take Donald Trump's place in the illustration I used for yesterday's blog:

Click above to enlarge

I found Trump in Medieval painting of legal Hell

  I found Trump in Medieval painting of legal Hell

By Hal Brown

Okay, that's a lie. I added a stylized version of Trump (made by using BeFunky) putting him in Hell, legal Hell. Above is a detail of a detail from a fresco in the medieval church of St Nicholas in Raduil, Bulgaria which is part of the Wikipedia entry on Hell.

I noticed that in the upper left corner of this painting the Scales of Justice were drawn. They are being held by a hand coming out of the clouds. Presumably this is the Hand of God. Also coming out of the cloud, I think it represents Heaven, is a flume of fire with a dark demon, perhaps meant to be the Devil himself, which would fit with God casting him out of Heaven.

Of all the paintings of Hell I could find online this was the only one with the Scales of Justice even though Hell is where people who break the law in egregious ways are supposed to go.

I was inspired to look for a depiction of Hell thinking I might blog about this article from Raw Story this morning:

There's no sense to bullet point the tally here, but to be reminded you can just glance at the article or click below to enlarge the photos I took when "Morning Joe" re-aired the segment this morning:

Mika, after describing all the legal jeopardy and entanglements facing Trump, concludes with a  personal message to Trump who, it has been reported, sometimes watches the show: 

"That's a lot of law stuff happening there, Donald, just something to think about."

Then there's this:

... and this:

the goodies keep coming...

Did I mention that if Stormy in the leak in the Trump ship that starts to sink him it would be poetic justice?

Raw Story is getting very raw for The Donald:

I mean, really raw:

This is getting repetitious:

The more stress Trump is under the more likely he will make mistakes...

This is cray-cray... supper time but juts on last article:

The trout was delicious. Thank you Fred Meyers.One last look before bedtime:

Okay, closing out the day, here's a tweet from Stormy Daniels. Note that Trump infamously referred to Daniels as "horse face" after her allegations against him became public, to which Daniels responded by mocking the size of Trump's genitalia.

For your entertainment, The King: Jailhouse Rock:

More recent version.

By chance there are two definitions of the word don (among a few others) which are applicable here. One is the proper name which is short for Donald and the other lower case is what the head of a Mafia family is called. 

For decades Trump's Teflon has been like a coating of incredibly slippery mercury, his version was gold rather than silver colored, but just as difficult to hold onto as the real chemical element which is used in thermometers and other devices. It also happens to be poisonous.

As all this is happening we have the extraordinary case of the former FBI agent Charles McGonigal who had been in charge of the New York City office who was arrested for being basically a Russian spy. As this case moves forward we may find that Trump's fake Russian conspiracy was a more successful Russian espionage case of an American double agent than that involving Aldridge Ames.

Here a some images that I put together to illustrate previous blogs. The following could end up to be more than fantasies: