Because the corporate-owned media have published only partial truths regarding life of the late President George H.W. Bush the Justice Integrity Project is providing what's most important about the rest of the story. The late president, who died on Nov. 30, is shown below left in an official photo used during his term from 1989 to 1993.

The material in this series is excerpted from this reporter's book Presidential Puppetry: Obama, Romney and Their Masters (2015 updated edition).

Presidential Puppetry charted the secret ties of recent presidents to the nation's elite private sector power structure (including major media organizations), which sometimes work collaboratively with the CIA and FBI operational arms.

One of the book's central findings was to document via more than 1,100 endnotes that all recent presidents between President Jimmy Carter and Donald Trump established covert ties to the CIA or FBI before they entered politics.

These professional ties helped enable the chosen aspirants to establish support for their political careers in ways that most of their political competitors and the public would never know, thus undermining the voting process (and implicating the media in a failure to inform).

The book included three chapters about the Bush family. The one about the late president, the focus of this series, was "George H.W. Bush: Poppy's Seed and Bitter Harvest," which draws on the late president's nickname "Poppy."

Immediately before that in Presidential Puppetry is a chapter about Poppy's father, "Prescott Bush: Roots of the Bushes," describing Prescott Bush's path from the Yale's Skull and Bones Society to helping finance Hitler's chief financier, Fritz Thyssen.

Prescott (shown during his college years at Yale) avoided wide exposure for his Hitler ties and won a U.S. Senate seat from Conncticut and becoming one of President Eisenhower's closest friends in Washington. The two are shown together in the White House Oval office, with Prescott at right.

The other Presidential Puppetry chapter picks up from the series below and describes the more recent Bush president, "George W. Bush: Shameless, Heartless and Selected — Not Elected."

From the Chapter: 'George H.W. Bush: Poppy's Seed and Bitter Harvest' (Part 2)

The series, from the Justice Integrity Project:

• Introduction and News Clippings
• Poppy's Progress (This column)
• Texas Politics, Bush-Style
• Deep In the Heart of Washington Intrigue
• Refueling In Houston
• White House Years and Fears
• Iran-Contra
• Deregulation
• Iraq War
• The Rest of the Story
• Poppy’s Progress

The corporate-owned mainstream media have provided only partial truths regarding life of President George H.W. Bush, below left, whose death on Nov. 30 led to days of prominent coverage of his career and positive aspects of its lasting impact. 

Our Justice Integrity Project excerpted prominently on these pages such accolades over the past week. Now it's time for the rest of the story, which draws heavily from the three chapters about the Bush family in our 2013 book Presidential Puppetry: Obama, Romney and Their Masters, which documented the secret ties of America's recent presidents with the power structure.

Excerpted below is the introduction to our chapter "George H.W. Bush: Poppy's Seed and Bitter Harvest," which draws on the late president's nickname "Poppy." Immediately before that in the book is a chapter about his father, "Prescott Bush: Roots of the Bushes," and his son, "George W. Bush: Shameless, Heartless and Selected — Not Elected."

The "Poppy" chapter will be excerpted in several parts here over coming days.

All of efforts at historical understanding are too important to delay or leave to hand-picked courtiers of the powerful whom the major media put before us. Several major national problems afflicting the United States have direct roots to little-known aspects of the Bush dynasty and the 41st president (1989-1993) in particular, as will be seen in the last segment of our multi-part series.

These problems include ongoing Middle Eastern wars, blight in our major cities caused by Iran-Contra smuggling, and that smuggling's contribution to instability in Central America fostering immigration from there to the United States.

Another result traceable to this president and this family is a notable advance in the growing culture of "elite deviance," whereby wealthy, well-connected insiders are spared the consequences of their actions, whether it is Bush family members who helped bring on the multi-billion-dollar Savings and Loan scandal of the 1980s or the Iran-Contra criminals whom the 41st president pardoned with the support of his Attorney General William P. Barr, right, whom Trump has just nominated (doubtless in hope of the same kind of gentle treatment justified by high-sounding legal principles).  

We begin with an introduction from Presidential Puppetry to "Bush 41."

An appendix excerpts major recent stories about the death, drawn primarily from major mainstream print publications but interspersed with a several independent commentaries that largely support our themes in this series. This editor is amplifying these themes also on The Midnight Writer News Show, a radio broadcast from downstate Illinois and hosted by S.T. Patrick. The show scheduled for broadcast next week was recorded as Episode 105 on Dec. 9, 2018.

Such research comes from many sources, of course. We recognize as essential for this series those dedicated researchers, law enforcers and whistleblowers who have contributed to book-length portraylals of the late president. Among those recognized below from the independent sphere are:

Texas Tech professor Peter Brewton, a former Houston Post reporter who authored The Mafia, CIA and George Bush. Among others are the following independent-spirited authors;

Russ Baker (Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, The Powerful Forces That Put It In The White House, And What Their Influence Means For America

Daniel Hopsicker, Barry and the Boys: The CIA, The Mob, and America's Secret History);

Robert Parry (Secrecy And Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq;

Kevin Phillips; American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush;

Barbara Honegger (October Surprise: Did the Reagan-Bush election campaign sabotage President Carter's attempts to free the American hostages in Iran?);

Peter Dale Scott (shown at right) (American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan);

Jonathan Marshall, Peter Dale Scott, and Jane Hunter (The Iran Contra Connection: Secret Teams and Covert Operations in the Reagan Era);

Craig Unger (House of Bush / House of Saud: The Secret Relations Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties);

Terry Reed and John Cummings (Compromised: Clinton, Bush and the CIA); and

Webster Griffin Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin (George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography)

Federal prosecutors filed three important pre-sentence reports on Dec. 7, including one regarding the former longtime personal attorney for Donald Trump that they said implicated "Individual 1" in felony money laundering.

Experts said that one filing implicated President Trump by saying that Trump's former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, helped pay hush money of two payments for more than $100,000 each before the 2016 election at the direction of Trump.

Former Playmate of the Year Karen McDougal (shown in a photo at right drawn from YouTube with President Trump), was one of two women, along with Stormy Daniels (shown below left), who have been widely reported as having had affairs with Trump that were covered up in advance of the 2016 election.

The pre-sentence filings included one against Cohen by New York federal prosecutors and two by Special Counsel Robert Mueller III.

One filing describing Cohen's cooperation and another, heavily redacted, asserting that Trump's former 2016 Campaign Manager Paul Manafort deserved a heavy prison sentence because his supposed cooperation was blighted by lying.

The gist is to bring forward new evidence against President Trump.

Trump claimed in a Tweet that the day "totally cleared the president."

One 38-page filing by New York federal prosecutors is a "bombshell," according to U.S. Sen. Dick Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat now a member of the Judiciary Committee and a former U.S. attorney for Connecticut.

Blumenthal, shown below left, told an MSNBC interviewer that the New York filing on Cohen filing essentially names Trump as an unindicted co-conspirator in payoffs via the National Enquirer to hide Trump's adulteries to affect the 2016 election by hiding those facts from the public.

Georgetown Law professor Neal Katyal, right, a former Obama Justice Department solicitor general, also told MSNBC that the filings marked an important juncture.

"What we're looking at today," Katyal said, "is something that very seriously implicates the president in federal felonies."

He noted regarding the Cohen filing: "It's not a filing by Mueller. It's a filing by the Southern District of New York" [that is, by Trump-appointed leaders and career prosecutors in the U.S. Department of Justice].

Shown below are the Justice Integrity Project's roundup of major news and commentaries on the story, as well as other Trump-related, justice-oriented news since Dec. 6. The stories, with hot links to the originals, are arranged in reverse chronological order.

Down With Tyranny! first published this column

Among the remarkable Mueller probe revelations last week was the claim that attorneys for former Trump Campaign Manager Paul Manafort (shown in a mugshot) have been sharing confidential information about the special counsel’s investigation with the legal team of “Individual 1,” aka President Trump.

The New York Times broke the main story electronically on Nov. 27 under the headline, Manafort’s Lawyer Is Said to Have Briefed Trump Team on Mueller Talks. Reporters Michael S. Schmidt, Sharon LaFraniere and Maggie Haberman wrote:

A lawyer for Paul Manafort repeatedly briefed President Trump’s lawyers on his client’s discussions with federal investigators after Mr. Manafort agreed to cooperate with the special counsel, according to one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers and two other people familiar with the conversations.

The arrangement was highly unusual and inflamed tensions with the special counsel’s office when prosecutors discovered it after Mr. Manafort began cooperating two months ago, the people said. Some legal experts speculated that it was a bid by Mr. Manafort for a presidential pardon even as he worked with the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, in hopes of a lighter sentence.

Rudolph W. Giuliani, one of the president’s personal lawyers, acknowledged the arrangement on Tuesday and defended it as a source of valuable insights into the special counsel’s inquiry and where it was headed.

A number of prominent legal pundits soon warned that such cooperation was not only rare but could be regarded as criminally illegal and / or unethical, thereby triggering potential liability for President Trump, Manafort and the lawyers involved.

Potential problems could include obstruction of justice (under the theory that the actions could have the intent and effect of undermining the special counsel’s investigation). The conduct also could provide grounds for impeachment of Trump and potential bar sanctions against attorneys involved.

More importantly, the controversy illustrates continuing tension between the federal enforcement “community” and the opportunists (or worse) who operate within the justice system or on its fringes. Such conflicts are especially important and outrageous as the Trump administration draws upon some of the very worst Bush administration attorneys.

Among the many such shocking situations, this column focuses on three such officials who have become extremely prominent and otherwise newsworthy, in part because of their ties to President Trump and his team.

• Manafort’s lead defense attorney, Kevin Downing (right), is a former senior litigator within the Justice Department’s tax fraud section, which missed a series of colossal tax frauds, including by Downing’s future client Manafort. Downing reportedly is also one of the attorneys involved in the liaison with the Trump White House that the New York Times reported last week;

• U.S. Secretary of Labor Alexander Acosta as U.S. attorney for Miami in the Bush administration was involved both in major tax fraud cover-ups and also in whitewashing the federal-state prosecution of billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein is a Trump friend and neighbor who is back in the news this week with the beginning of a major defamation trial in West Palm Beach, Florida; and

• Our third Bush-era former Justice Department official is Matthew Whitaker, whom Trump named as acting attorney general after Whitaker tried out for the job by arguing on cable news shows that Mueller’s investigation are excessive and unwarranted. Whitaker’s career includes a stint as a Bush-appointed U.S. attorney for southern Iowa, where he vigorously prosecuted one of his political enemies whom a jury acquitted in just two hours.

An Overview

Let’s provide some context before exploring more thoroughly the abusive conduct of these three officials-- and the utter failure of watchdog mechanisms, whether in the Justice Department, courts, Congress or the media, to do much about these problems, at least so far.

The problem of rogue officials using their powers within the U.S. Justice Department for political purposes exploded into the national consciousness in late 2006 and early 2007 with the so-called “U.S. Attorney firing scandal.” Bush administration forced the resignation of nine (by some counts eight) of the nation’s 93 powerful regional U.S. attorneys.

A federal judge on Friday set Dec. 7 as a key date for prosecutors to submit their reportedly explosive evidence of recent wrongdoing by the corrupt former Trump 2016 Campaign Chair Paul J. Manafort.

As evidence mounted of a conspiracy by President Trump's former aides to advance his business and election interests with the help of Russians, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson also set March 5 as a tentative sentencing date for Manafort. He pleaded guilty in September before Jackson, right, to extensive bank and tax fraud charges brought by Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III.

Our Justice Integrity Project covered Manafort's earlier trial in Virginia before another federal judge. A jury sitting in Alexandria convicted Manafort of massive tax and bank frauds that occurred for the most part before he joined the Trump campaign in March 2016. The evidence showed that he obtained more than $60 million in income, declared just $13 million, and obtained more than $21 million in fraudulent loans during the Trump presidential campaign.

Manafort, shown in a mug shot, pleaded guilty just before a second trial in Washington, DC of criminal charges based largely on his actions during the presidential campaign. Manafort, who is being held in a federal cell in Virginia pending sentencing, was reported this fall to be cooperating with authorities, seeking leniency.

But prosecutors accused him early last week of lying to them. Then Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani created another surprise by telling New York Times reporters last week that Manafort was coooperating with other defendants by sharing information through his attorneys even after his guilty plea. Commentators said they have rarely if ever heard of such actions, which could create legal problems for defense attorneys.

In sum, this is the week that the public could first see that the Mueller probe has transitioned to one targeting the president, his family and their finances with a ith a "laser" focus by Mueller's team, according to Georgetown law professor Paul Butler, who was speaking to an MSNBC host on Nov. 30.

"The President is in considerable legal jeopardy," continued Butler, a frequent MSNBC contributor who earlier in the day had sat next to this reporter in the public gallery of Judge Jackson's courtroom. The crimes committed by president, Butler said in summarizing the week's disclosures, might include obstruction of justice, fraud and campaign finance violations.

The growing pressures on Trump include those from his former longtime personal attorney Michael Cohen, now a government witness. Prosecutors announced on Thursday an additional guilty plea by Cohen, whose confession implicated both Trump and an unidentified member of the president's family in Russian-linked business planning during the presidential campaign. Cohen's legal team released the next day on Nov. 30 a memo arguing that his cooperation has been so extensive that he should receive leniency.

Trump as reacted to growing pressure by prosecutors and their witnesses by denouncing the Mueller probe and failure of the U.S. Justice Department to imprison Trump's own political enemies.

Trump retweeted this week, for example, the adjoining graphic by conservative commentators portraying as criminals former Presidents Obama and Clinton, and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, among others.

The targets shown behind bars included Mueller and Deputy Attorney Gen. Rod Rosenstein, both of whom are Republicans and career prosecutors who won their current posts under Trump's own administration.

As noted by CNN in Donald Trump, Internet troll, the president's message to his tens of millions of Twitter followers seemingly endorsed the argument "Now that Russia's collusion is a proven lie, when do the trials for treason begin?"

Meanwhile, Trump denounced "McCarthyite" tactics by prosecutors. Trump failed to note that his late mentor, fixer and attorney Roy Cohn had previously served during the early 1950s as the chief counsel of Sen. Joe McCarthy (R-WI), with Cohn using his acknowledged legal skills in such a nasty, vindicative and demogagic manner as to help make term "McCarthyite" notorious at least as much as its namesake.

As president, Trump has complained that he needs a "Roy Cohn" to attack his enemies in the Justice Department, a stance that further undermines Trump's attempt to play the victim of appointees under his own administration.

Such actions and the accumulating evidence against Trump and his inner-circle paint an appalling portrait of the administration's corruption, incompetence and anti-American conduct. The scope is without parallel at high levels of government in recent decades, including the Watergate scandals.

That evidence is fast accumulating in the public eye following a hiatus from mid-September to early November. Justice Department policy discourages politically sensitive indictments shortly before federal elections. But the absence of new disclosures during that period does not mean no evidence exists.

Right after the election, Trump tried to assert new control over Mueller by appointing a new acting attorney general, Matthew Whitaker. But critics promptly challenged Trump's ability under the Constitution to appoint a Cabinet secretary without Senate confirmation in a non-emergency situation, especially one involved in so many conflicts of interest and scandals as Whitaker.

The Justice Integrity Project excerpts each day major news articles and commentaries about the Mueller probe for placement on a special subsite here. Shown below this column in an appendix are selected recent news items from that site.

Last week's major developments included continuing revelations regarding Cohen's disclosures against the Trump team and about Whitaker's oft-stated opposition to Mueller and Democrats — and Whitaker's own vulnerability to challenges on both his legal status as an unconfirmed nominee and a director previously of a scam company that the Federal Trade Commission fined $26 million. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Whitaker is now under criminal investigation by the FBI that he ostensibly directs.

President Trump's replacement of the U.S. attorney general on Nov. 7 has generated a storm of well-merited criticism regarding the appointment's constitutionality, ethics, politics and potential criminality.

For these reasons, the Justice Integrity Project strongly opposes the appointment of Matthew Whitaker, right. The project was founded in 2010 to report on abuses by the Justice Department, courts and those who appoint such officials. That remains the core of our mission even though our reporting has expanded to include news of the U.S. and global consequences of injustice.

Whitaker is a "lackey" of Trump in ways that undermine the independent role of the Justice Department, as many expert commentators have stated recently. Vox also reported Trump loyalist Matthew Whitaker was counseling the White House on investigating Clinton.

Scandal and other criticism of Whitaker arose quickly after his appointment. Trump tried to pretend on Nov. 9 that he did not even know his appointee, as the New York Times reported in Trump Says ‘I Don’t Know Matt Whitaker,’ Despite Several Oval Office Visits. Last month, Trump had even praised Whitaker by name as "a good guy."

Update: Whitaker's conflicts and other scandals and pressures surrounding his appointment appear to have limited Whitaker's ability and/or willingness to interfere with Mueller's investigation. Many commentaries on this point, including one dated on Nov. 20 Opinion: Stick a fork in Matt Whitaker, are excerpted in an appendix below. 

By all appearances, Whitaker won his job from Trump by showing as a cable television pundit that he opposes anything but a narrow agenda for Special Counsel Robert Mueller III's ongoing probe of the Trump campaign. Whitaker now supervises that probe because he is not recused, as was his predecessor Jeff Sessions.

On a related issue of even more historic importance, if possible, he opposes also the U.S. Supreme Court's 1803 holding in Marbury v. Madison, establishing judicial review power to monitor unconstitutional and other excesses within the Executive and Congressional Branches.

Aside from such policy views, the circumstances of Whitaker's appointment without confirmation by the U.S. senate and during a crucial phase of Mueller's investigation raise serious constitutional and other concerns, as described in a Nov. 9 New York Times oped Trump’s Appointment of the Acting Attorney General Is Unconstitutional.

This is particularly so because efforts by Whitaker to limit Mueller's probe, particularly further investigation of Trump and the president's relatives, could be construed as obstruction of justice by Whitaker and Trump.

As precedent, President Nixon's attorney general John Mitchell, shown at left in a file photo, served a prison term on obstruction charges for conspiring to hide details of the 1972 Watergate break-in. Obstruction was also one of the three impeachment charges that the House Judiciary Committee approved against Nixon in 1974 shortly before he resigned rather than face the charges before the full House.

Also prompting criticism is Whitaker's involvement during recent years with lobbying for a dark money group called the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust (FACT).

Even more seriously, he was a director of World Patent Marketing (WPM), a scam company recently forced to pay a $26 million fine after an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission, an agency located a block from the Justice Department headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue and with overlapping jurisdiction in some cases of fraud and consumer protection.

The Wall Street Journal reported late Nov. 9 in its electronic edition: FBI Is Investigating Florida Company Where Whitaker Was Advisory-Board Member. The Guardian reported also, Trump's acting attorney general involved in firm that scammed veterans out of life savings.

Regarding Whitaker's relatively brief stints in federal law enforcement:

President George W. Bush appointed Whitaker as U.S. attorney for the Southern district of Iowa, where he brought a controversial corruption prosecution against a prominent gay Democrat, whom a jury promptly acquitted in a case summarized this way on Wikipedia: "From 2005 to 2007, he was responsible for the unsuccessful investigation and prosecution of Iowa State Sen. Matt McCoy, a liberal Democrat, on charges of attempting to extort $2,000. The jury took less than two hours to return a not guilty verdict.

CNN reported this week recounted the tale in more detail in Whitaker's controversial prosecution of a gay Democrat: When Iowa state Sen. Matt McCoy learned Donald Trump had appointed Matthew Whitaker to be acting attorney general of the United States, he was aghast — he believes Whitaker was behind a politically motivated prosecution that was personally "devastating" to him.

It started in 2007, when McCoy was a rising Democrat in state politics, and the state's first openly gay lawmaker. Whitaker was the US attorney for Iowa's Southern District at the time.

A grand jury indictment accused McCoy, right, of using his elected office to try to extort $2,000 from a Des Moines home security company where McCoy was a consultant. The charges came after an elaborate undercover investigation in which the FBI had McCoy's business partner wear a recording device. McCoy demanded money he says he was owed for his consulting work.

The trial lasted more than a week, with prosecutors trying to prove the business partner never agreed to pay McCoy for his consulting and the defense torpedoing the partner's testimony because he couldn't recall many details and admitted he had trouble with sobriety, according to Des Moines Register articles on the trial.In the end, the jury reached a not guilty verdict in an hour and a half, including time for lunch, according to the Des Moines Register.

"I believe it was a political prosecution, there's no doubt in mind, I'm 100% certain that it was," McCoy said, adding he believes he was targeted not just because he's a Democrat, but also because he's gay. "As US attorney (Whitaker) spoke at Christian Coalition events and would often refer to bringing God into his decision-making process and being guided by God's hand," McCoy said, "and so I believe that he was very much resentful of my lifestyle and I believe that played a factor in it."

Whitaker has long been active in partisan politics, raising other concerns. In 2012, Whitaker served as campaign manager for Samuel Clovis, left, later a Trump campaign official and a witness in the Mueller inquiry who was forced to leave his Trump administration post under a cloud.

In an unsuccessful race for the U.S. Senate representing Iowa, Whitaker argued that he would not "support ‘secular’ judicial nominees and courts should be ‘inferior branch."

Shown below are excerpts and hot links to a number of these and other news reports and commentaries on these issues.

As these revelations unfold, the Justice Department's ethics office, congressional leaders and ordinary members of the public must continue to speak out — and demand that the Justice Department's vital functions be run by a proper appointee vetted in a constitutional and otherwise appropriate manner.