If I were Mueller, I would go for the people propping up Trump and then let Trump collapse under his own weight.
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I tell my students there is a reason I teach math. I have the same relationship with grammar that most people have with quadratic equations.
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If you think very conservative special counsel Robert Mueller is going to prosecute or even issue a full report on Trump, then you must believe in the Easter Bunny and the tooth fairy. Mueller is dragging his feet…he has piles of evidence on several law braking activities of Trump and yet he is not issuing any subpoenas on Trump in two years!
The special counsel should always be from the opposing political party. Republicans would never allow Hillary to be investigated by a Democratic special counsel if she was in Trump’s shoes…never. Why aren’t the Democrats (Schumer and Pelosi) putting pressure on Mueller to act and act NOW!
Mueller needs to stop dragging this our…prosecute. No one is above the law…PROVE IT!
I’m sure Robert Mueller would cave to pressure from Schumer and Pelosi. Probably ducking their phone calls right now.
It will be a day or two before the laughter subsides, then they can get down to business.
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Unfortunately for literally everyone, the remaining people doing that are his family. Even though his children are grown, it will be written about as Mueller prosecuting his children in a witch hunt. My guess is that more than anything is what kept Mueller from indicting Don Jr. before he went quiet prior to the election. Don Jr. is very publicly already admitted he’s the one that broke the law, but he isn’t the true target. He’s just as much a bag man as everyone else in his father’s orbit.
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Several of Trump’s answers have been leaked. Questions 11-24 were all answered with text and a detailed diagram, as follows:
“Jared did it.”
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But Donald made sure everyone knew he answered these questions by himself. He took credit for “his own hard work.”
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I’ll take the over on Option B, Monty.
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Not to self:
Buy a packet of pins and send to SC for Christmas
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Exactly. All of this is about getting more obstruction on record. The very format of written answers will work against Trump, even more inescapably than waffling “well, I don’t have my glasses” testimony.
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That’s how you roll the Mob.
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let’s hope it’s not terminal.
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Curious- is this a reference to Claude Taylor? He’s part of the twitter Louise Mensch group, and early in these dark times he kept saying there was already a sealed indictment of Trump (and others). A few times he said that the feds were gathering en masse to deliver these indictments, and he kept using the phrase “Let slip the dogs of war!”
Of course nothing of the sort happened. And then I called him a huckster and he blocked me.
Mueller didn’t need these written responses, and as I understand it Trump has simply refused to answer questions about the transition (among the most legally problematic areas for him). The answer for Mueller is simple: indict. Follow the Watergate Grand Jury model and just indict.
I said it for a long time, but the Watergate Grand Jury roadmap confirms it: impeachment is a useless remedy. It did not factor one iota into the Grand Jury’s thinking or into Nixon’s thinking. Nixon only cared about staying out of jail. He didn’t care if he was removed from office once the evidence amassed by prosecutors had exceeded a certain threshold and he knew he had liability exposure. Indict. That’s the thing that will get Trump (and possibly Pence) out of office.
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“While it helps Trump avoid the pressures and quick thinking in-person follow-ups demand, it also binds him to testimony just as legally binding as if he gave it to Mueller directly.”
This sums up why Trump will never respond to a subpoena to testify directly, in person.
This is the guy who apparently quite honestly believes that raking the forests, like everyone knows they do in Finland, is the secret to preventing forest fires. My point is that statements such as these have to spring from sincere and honest conviction, as there is no manipulative agenda you can put behind telling this sort of fairy tale. Yes, much of the counter-factual stuff Trump says is manipulative BS, but much of what he says is just straight up the confabulation of a demented mind.
The written answers were crafted by his lawyers to minimize his culpability. No matter how carefully they brief him before he goes in for any in-person testimony about what line he has to stick to to avoid inculpating himself in the matters under investigation, he simply won’t be able to stick to the alibi. And worse, much worse, he will misremember and garble key points in the line the lawyers try to prep him to stay with. The big problems that dementia causes aren’t so much its tendency to subtract from what the patient can remember, it’s the need all of us have to make sense of our world that causes the dementia sufferer to confabulate new, nonexistent content to cover the gaps. That business about raking the forest floor in Finland came from somewhere, from something the Finnish president told him that he misremembered, then brought back to create a comic book simple explanation for why we have forest fires, because of course there has to be a comic book simple answer to everything in Trump’s mind.
The more the lawyers coach Trump on the line he has to stick to at his in-person testimony to avoid contradicting the written testimony, the more they insure that he will misremember some bit of what they say and bring it back up for Mueller as something as wild and probably inculpating as raking the forests. Let Trump loose at deposition, and before it’s over he will inculpate himself in a dozen felonies, six of which never happened.
Competent counsel will never, ever, let him do any sort of in-person testimony, especially now that there is a written version out there that Trump would have to avoid contradicting. If the handlers ever let that happen, it will be because they have decided to end it all as Dog Day Afternoon ends. The handlers will have decided, like the Pacino character, that Trump, the Cazale character, is not going to make it out of the hostage situation alive anyway, but if they help walk him out to where the FBI can take him down, maybe everybody else involved will just go to prison or something.
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There is an open question of the ability of a sitting president to be indicted. And I have zero faith in 5/9ths of the SC to rule against him.
But… he should absolutely try if he has the proof.
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+5 geezer points for the Cheers reference
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You can find all the evidence that’s sufficient for an obstruction conviction simply by watching TV. Trump’s behavior is governed by the assumption that he will not be charged, so he says and does what he wants. Remember, Nixon wasn’t cashing in on a hotel a few blocks from the White House, getting loans from the Chinese Government, lining his pockets with Saudi Money, providing a tax haven for Russian crooks, etc ad nauseum.
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And here I thought I was quoting Churchill, but alas: https://brians.wsu.edu/2016/11/14/churchill-on-prepositions/
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