This will be one of my longer articles – there’s just no way around that…And it has been a bit painful to write.

Yes we are very divided right now, but that is as it should be, because all we are seeing are constantly increasing levels of ‘gas lighting’ and monumental lies, dutifully lapped up and echoed by hypocritical Republican supporters of our “Liar-in-Chief” Donald Trump. And lies always divide from truth. But truth is coming, and it will win the day in exposing all of those Republican supporters of this insane ‘gas lighting’ dishonesty. But that requires us to RAMP UP and DOUBLE DOWN ON THE TRUTH not back down on it!


Susan Page, journalist and Washington bureau chief for USA TODAY, just revealed a powerful revelation in her timely new book on the life of former First Lady Barbara Bush. When Page asked her in 2018 if, in this current Trump era, she still considered herself a Republican, Barbara Bush replied that no, she would have to say she did not.

As painful and traumatizing as this national disgrace continues to be at present, be heartened by the fact that it is only the vocal minority who are “pretending the emperor is wearing clothes” for the temporary hypocritical benefits they can selfishly gain from doing so…

Be heartened by the fact that we who see all of this sick, immoral gas lighting, and all the corruption and culture of lying that has taken over the Republican party, WE ARE THE OVERWHELMING MAJORITY, including more and more ethical, moral-minded Republicans like Barbara Bush, who are doing the right thing and standing with us, not with Trump.

Accordingly, do not listen to anyone who tries to ‘normalize’ any of this from Trump and his dishonest supporters. Don’t listen to anyone in the media who tries to say we need to just “move on”. That is what Trump and Atty General Barr are counting on with all of their gas lighting.

But TRUTH & JUSTICE is much more coordinated and talented at walking and chewing gum than CORRUPTION & DISHONESTY seems to be – And for that matter, in this high tech smart phone age, we’ve learned to do a lot more than just walk and chew gum at the same time, haven’t we?

So of course we can ‘move forward on policy’ as it were, on important legislation like health care for all, job creation and aggressive climate change measures, AND STILL BRING TRUMP AND HIS LYING SUPPORTERS TO JUSTICE, all while simultaneously monitoring 5 or 6 messaging and social media apps! (Hopefully not while we are driving, but we could even do that if we felt it was absolutely necessary:)

OK, on the Mueller report…Obviously we must see it ASAP. The stakes are too high for our country, and the American people deserve for it to be made public. But from what we have gleaned thus far from Attorney General Barr’s questionable, partisan attempt at ‘summarizing’ it, here’s my take:

In a nutshell, by ‘punting’ as it were, and choosing not to bring justice, while at the same time stating unequivocally that his report DOES NOT EXONERATE Trump from criminal behavior, Special Prosecutor Mueller strangely and inexplicably did a great disservice to us all when we needed and were counting on his service the most. I have listened to former prosecutor after former prosecutor interviewed and asked about this, and they all say that such a contradiction was a shock, because it goes against the very fundamental purpose he was appointed to carry out.

When Mueller states such a thing in his report, that Trump is not exonerated, he is absolutely pointing to evidence of guilt. And we didn’t spend so many millions of dollars for him to determine that guilt, only to then decline to act, and by doing so, then allow his report to be so ‘gas lit’ and falsely characterized by Attorney General Barr, who has dishonestly tried to summarize it as clearing the president.

So in the wake of all of this, I’ve been thinking of the best way to spotlight the gross amount of Republican horse sh#t we are witnessing as a nation right now…

The best way to clearly recognize the degree of ‘gas lighting’ by Trump’s appointed Atty General Barr surrounding the release of the Mueller report, is to run an opposite example using the OBama administration instead (who by the way never had a single scandal, NOT EVEN ONE close adviser indicted for felony crimes, with Trump overwhelmed with indictments of several advisers and still facing monumental criminal investigations in several state and federal jurisdictions, many of which were farmed out as a result of the Mueller investigation.)

So, forget all the corruption of Trump for a second, and I want you to try to imagine, as unlikely as it would ever be, that the SAME kind of mind blowing degree of discovered meetings with a corrupt foreign adversary, and the same bewildering degree of lying about those meetings, and the same kind of refusal to cooperate with the special counsel was coming from Barack OBama instead.

All of you Trump supporters, turning a blind eye with your willful ignorance, choosing to pretend the ’emperor is wearing clothes’ when he is completely naked… I guarantee you’d be a living example of the miracle we all love to sing about in the song “Amazing Grace”…’I ONCE WAS BLIND BUT NOW I SEE’…

If Barack OBama had fired the FBI Director, then was caught lying about the reason he initially gave for doing so, and then went on national television and during that interview admitted that he fired him so that he could STOP the investigation into his behavior that pointed to possible secret coordinating with a foreign nation to help him get elected…suddenly you would go from intentional blindness to better than 20/20 vision, PRAISE JESUS!

Therein lies the shameful hypocrisy on the part of all of you who have enabled this corrupt con artist from the beginning, and now are foolishly celebrating as though Atty General Barr’s 4 page, carefully crafted PARTISAN MISCHARACTERIZATION of Mueller’s report ‘exonerates’ Trump.

Senator Blumenthal described Barr’s carefully worded, dutifully cherry picked summary of Mueller’s lengthy report very appropriately…He called it “elegantly deceitful”.

I want you all to imagine a similar scenario…Let’s say hypothetically that Barack OBama and key advisers of his campaign, including his campaign manager, had many secret meetings with Saudi Arabian nationals and Saudi intelligence officials…And they not only held those secret meetings, but REPEATEDLY AND CONSISTENTLY LIED ABOUT THOSE MEETINGS to cover them up.

Then, when they were all caught after lying to cover them up, what would their lies reveal to you? That is of course, provided you are not of a very, very low IQ and therefore unable to comprehend corrupt ’cause and effect’ evidence. I mean, if you are mentally challenged to a significant degree, we can’t expect you to see such corruption or understand the definition of words like ‘coordination’, etc.

But I have to believe that at least most of you willfully blind Trump supporters are not more mentally challenged than Forest Gump.

So for most of you, there is no doubt that if you witnessed Barack OBama attack and ultimately fire an atty general who had recused himself from a similar such investigation, and then appointed one that he felt was ‘loyal’ to him…then when the special prosecutor releases a scathing report that at a minimum specifically states it DOES NOT EXONERATE the president of obstruction, such loyal Atty General then crafts a deceitful synopsis trying to say that that OBama WAS exonerated…OH MY GOD, you all would be surrounding the White House, some of you in your white sheets probably, calling for things way beyond just impeachment.

Why is that? At a minimum because you had seen and heard the proof of those meetings they lied to cover up, with your miraculously healed vision and hearing, PRAISE JESUS, right?…

Because you saw the evidence that the rest of the world saw…For example the discovered email to Trump Jr. promising ‘dirt’ on Hillary Clinton, that said it was on behalf of the Russian government, and then Trump Jr.’s email reply saying ‘I LOVE IT…especially closer to the election’, followed by their agreed upon plans for that Trump tower meeting that Trump Jr. and Manafort dutifully organized with not one, not two but EIGHT Russian’s!

If Barack OBama had been caught lying about a similar email exchange and a similar meeting, in my hypothetical using the Saudi Arabian nationals instead of the Russians, would you be turning your “Trump supporting blind eyes” to that?

Would you willfully ignore the obvious quid pro quo nature of that relationship? Of course we all know the answer to that is HELL NO you would not! Again, herein lies the massive hypocrisy at the root of this national shame many of you Republicans are enabling.

Then of course we have the now proven dishonest statement that Trump deceitfully crafted on Air Force One, writing it on behalf of Trump Jr., to try to cover up the nature of that Trump Tower meeting.

If it was exposed that Barack OBama had written such a false account to cover up the nature of a similar meeting with Saudi Nationals, would you be so blind to that obstruction of justice?

For yet another of several examples of blatant coordination with the Russians by the Trump campaign…We learned from Andrew Weissmann, one of Mueller’s chief prosecutors during the sentencing phase of Paul Manafort, that Manafort (Trump’s early CAMPAIGN MANAGER for 5 months) had met with and TURNED OVER SENSITIVE CAMPAIGN POLLING DATA to now indicted Russian Konstantin Kilimnick in a cigar bar just down the block from Trump Tower in New York. Konstantin Kilimnick is known by the FBI as having ties to Russian intelligence. He is one of the Russians that Mueller has indicted in the Russian interference probe.

Now, using my parallel hypothetical example, how would all of you willfully blind Trump supporters react if Barack OBama’s campaign manager had met with a member of Saudi intelligence during his initial campaign, and had been caught giving him campaign polling data? NO COLLUSION??

Again, we are stipulating that in this example, you are not mentally challenged to some degree. Would you be unable to see the mind blowing degree of corruption and betrayal of America’s fundamental democratic process in such behavior?

I’m skipping over using an OBama parallel example of Trump’s exposed criminal campaign finance fraud to pay off multiple porn stars, just because it is too absurd for even Republicans to try to imagine OBama cheating on Michelle with a porn star…It’s absurd to imagine any of this being done by the OBama administration, but that would be a leap too far, and asking too much of anyone’s imagination of OBama.

But let’s not forget Trump’s longstanding lies to cover up his Trump Tower Moscow project. How many times was he asked, and how many times did he tell us all that he had ZERO business contacts or deal making efforts with Russia?

Felix Sater, a known former member of the Russian mob, who only avoided criminal prosecution by agreeing to become a “rat” (as Trump likes to call witnesses) for the FBI, became a close friend and adviser to Trump, eventually being given a lucrative office in Trump Tower. It has now been exposed that Felix Sater was one of the key intermediaries between Trump and Putin in the plans to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.

There has even been a powerfully damning email discovered from Felix Sater sent to Trump’s longtime personal attorney Michael Cohen, describing Sater’s close personal ties to Vladimir Putin, and stating that part of the result of such a Trump Tower Moscow deal would be that with the help of Putin, ‘we will get Trump elected President’.

Here’s an excerpt of this as reported in the New York Times:

“WASHINGTON — A business associate of President Trump promised in 2015 to engineer a real estate deal with the aid of the president of Russia, Vladimir V. Putin, that he said would help Mr. Trump win the presidency”

(Continuing from the article)
“The associate, Felix Sater, wrote a series of emails to Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, in which he boasted about his ties to Mr. Putin. He predicted that building a Trump Tower in Moscow would highlight Mr. Trump’s savvy negotiating skills and be a political boon to his candidacy.”

(Continuing from the article)
“Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it,” Mr. Sater wrote in an email. “I will get all of Putins team to buy in on this, I will manage this process.”

Revealing that Ivanka, Trump’s daughter, had made a special trip to Moscow during plans for the Moscow Trump Tower project, The New York Times also included the following text from Felix Sater’s email: “I arranged for Ivanka to sit in Putin’s private chair at his desk and office at the Kremlin. I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected.”

Now using my hypothetical example, if all of you willfully blind Trump supporters found out that Barack OBama had so repeatedly and boldly lied during his campaign, in order to cover up such an effort to coordinate such a lucrative business deal with the Saudi’s, would you scoff at any fellow Republicans who saw that as a major corrupt betrayal of Americans’ trust, and an undermining of our democratic process with a foreign nation?

PLEASE!! The whole ‘birther’ movement would appear as small as a “Penn and Teller” fan club meeting by comparison!

And how would all of you willfully blind Trump supporters react if, in my hypothetical example, OBama’s self appointed Atty General tried to hold back most, if not all of the report, and took it upon himself to then summarize the special prosecutor’s findings as ‘exonerating’ him of wrongdoing, when in fact the special prosecutor went out of his way to state that his report DOES NOT EXONERATE the president?

Again, miraculously, your blindess would be healed, PRAISE THE LORD, RIGHT?

Mueller’s report, as Sen. Blumenthal aptly stated, has been mischaracterized by Atty General Barr in an ‘elegantly deceitful’ way, further turning up the hallmark of gas lighting by the Trump administration. And this has become a shame beyond belief for the party that has lost its former reputation for being a diligent and trusted watchdog against Russia and the known dangerous human rights violator and adversary of our democracy, Vladimir Putin.

Trump and all of his supporters have zero to celebrate. As always, dishonesty is at the root of their celebration, as the truth of Mueller’s report is being both hidden and distorted. (Not to mention the fact that serious lifelong patterns of criminal behavior are soon going to finally catch up to Donald Trump and his kids, from the other investigations that are much wider in scope currently continuing in the southern district of New York, Virginia and elsewhere.

In closing, if my hypothetical OBama example had happened, would it be obvious that the special prosecutor’s report was meant for Congress to use, not the Atty General, to make the ultimate decision on obstruction and grounds for possible impeachment? OF COURSE.

Would it also be obvious that the special prosecutor’s report MUST be made public? OF COURSE it would.

Would it be just as obvious that the special prosecutor MUST come before Congress to help them understand his findings and reasons for his lack of action while simultaneously stating his report does NOT exonerate the president? Yes, if you are honest, you know that would obviously need to happen.

At some point soon, the gas lighting will inevitably run out of gas, and the spotlighting of truth will replace it, revealing all of the dishonest hypocrites who have behaved with such a lying double standard, in creating this shameful time for our nation.

Trump may appear to be ‘celebrating’, but truth be known he is running very scared…He knows that truth and justice is catching up to his career of corruption and con-artistry.

His self appointed ‘lap dog’ Atty Gen Barr was one of his last resorts to try to muddy the waters and buy him some time. It may have bought him a year or so, but that time is running out fast. Once we see the Mueller report, the damning evidence will become crystal clear, and it will become obvious that Special Prosecutor Mueller’s intent was to refer appropriate punitive action to Congress, not to Atty Gen. Barr.

So no, we DON’T back down or ‘move on’ now, like weak-minded, conforming sheep…

I have news for Trump: It’s only going to get MUCH WORSE for you from here on out, because NOW IT IS WE WHO ARE DOUBLING DOWN IN THE NAME OF TRUTH AND JUSTICE FOR ALL.

Connie Bryan

(Connie Bryan is a writer in Sacramento, CA…Check out all of her material on her website and blog at www.conniebryan.com)