It will be good when this finally does reach SCOTUS. They can then decree Trump is in fact above the law and we can all dispense with the futile hope the Republic can be salvaged.
Gee, we really need to thank Rudy for filling us in on all the good stuff we have been missing up to now.
Well, except when PeeBrain’s thumbs start itching and he can’t hold back the confessional tweets.
Giuliani is going to prepare Spanky for the interview. WOW. After Spanky, he is be the most ill-informed, arrogant, and stupid person in the world. It will be like Beavis and Butthead studying for a quantum physics exam.
Doesn’t precedence weigh in here? Didn’t Clinton and Nixon have to comply with the subpoenas?
God, I hope you are SO wrong about that one.
Just tossing this in from Josh’s post the other day about the timeline:
I want to follow up on a point I made over the weekend: the Trump Family’s decisive turn to paying cash as opposed to financing their projects with debt starting in 2006 isn’t just an odd and hard to explain in itself. The shift also dovetails almost perfectly with his shift to reliance on money from Russia and Ukraine. 2006 is also the year when Michael Cohen went to work for the President. It’s also the year the Trump Soho development project got underway.
He married Melania January 22, 2005. He divorced Marla in June of 1999 but was already pursuing Melania. I would not be the least bit surprised if Melania is a honey pot.
SCOTUS is empowered to ignore precedence and create new precedents. They’ll vote 5-4 to essentially tell to Mueller to piss off. Regardless, if Trump’s back is to the wall he’ll plead the 5th. The ensuing rending of garmets will spike his approval ratings 10 points, the GOP will salvage the midterms, 200 more Wingnut judges will stock the bench, and 66 million people will re-elect Trump in 2020. If all the above doesn’t occur my faith in the idiocy of the citizens of the nation will be shaken. But I’m putting my money on a bet we’ve reached a point of no return. The steering wheel has been tossed out the window and all that’s left is that first hairpin turn near a cliff to finish the job.
It seems reasonable for an attorney to want to wait until after the meeting with NK, but this isn’t a reasonable time. How many times will the meeting with NK be postponed? It seems like they have lots of incentives for that now: Mueller interview, NK reminding them that they can’t count on anything from them, and…vaca! There are way too many golf balls to be hit into the rough or into water traps for POTUS to be able to prep for a silly interview. Those score cards aren’t going to falsify themselves.
It’s odd the administration is OK with pushing this closer to the midterms. Despite some voiced fantasies Mueller will suspend his efforts in the interest of not swaying the elections I think he just plows ahead. Trump’s MO would suggest he thinks he can weather most storms, with various furors and outrages giving way to new bullshit and receding into a dim memory mere weeks later.
The most plausible explanation is Trump is just introspective enough to know he cannot sit and tell the truth for several hours before eventually painting himself into a corner with a bucket full of lies.
5AM here on the West coast. Thanks for starting my day with an exquisitely depressing message.
May he Tweet the answers?
Not sure he can write.
If’ Giuliani’s such a lawyer maybe he can explain how you can be innocent and competent enough to lead a superpower but not be capable of answering questions about your actions without getting into trouble. This was always the problem Trump was going to run into. Life is not pure PR. Sometimes you actually have to be trustworthy and competent enough to perform responsibly, and he’s nowhere near being that. And no amount of blustering or hiding under the bed is going to change it.
Many profess confidence our nation is too resiliant for any one man or movement to permanently disrupt some sort of timeless march towards greater freedom and refinement of this experiment in democracy. As if we’re exempt from experiencing failure on a grand scale. The United States is not touched by some God, it isn’t pre-ordained we’ll always right the ship. Where the hell is it written it just can’t hit an iceberg and sink? Hubris reigns, cautions ignored, ship sinks to the bottom and experiment is over? Face it, we can fuck this up.
That isn’t going well, btw. They only got through 2 questions in 4 hours.
“In an informal, four-hour practice session, Mr. Trump’s lawyers were only able to walk him through two questions, given the frequent interruptions on national-security matters along with Mr. Trump’s loquaciousness, one person familiar with the matter said.”
It’s not like Trump is going to be spending time preparing for a “summit” with Kim Jong Un.
I’ll believe that when he stops traveling to Mar-A-Lago and speaking at rallies, and doesn’t play golf for 2 weeks straight. He’s not going to answer questions in an interview. They’re just delaying. I hear they’re going to reveal the decision on an interview on May 17, the anniversary of Mueller being appointed. More TV cliffhanger bullshit.
Send the subpoena no later than the 18th. Let’s get this fight started.
PR is what Trump lives and breathes, however. And its been that way pretty much his entire adult life (including with the help of Maggie the Fluffer’s mom’s PR firm. Something she always forgets to mention).
They’ve treated this entire investigation like a giant PR issue and not a legal matter. Sekulow, for instance, wasn’t brought on to be a defense attorney, he was brought up to do PR for the “legal team”. Hiring Guiliani is completely consistent with that approach. Guliani loves to get in front of the cameras and blabber.
Indeed, its quite shocking that right now…assuming Flood is going to become White House Counsel, Trump has no actual defense attorneys working on his case. Sekulow is the only one remaining, as far as I can tell.
The idea of Trump “answering the questions in writing” is risible.
Of course all Mueller would get is BS crafted by his team of deplorable misfits.
Trump himself would likely not even be consulted.
I think Trump should be allowed to write his answers. Put him in a room alone, with no ear bud, no outside connection, give him a pencil and pad and allow him to physically answer the questions. I am sure his responses will be great literature. Ha.
The president’s legal team has signaled that [“in writing”] would be their preferred format for a possible interview, since it helps protect Mr. Trump from the possibility of lying or misleading investigators, which is a criminal offense.
No one – no Republican, no voter, no one – should be allowed to forget what this means.
I’ve always trusted it didn’t escape the notice of the actual investigators that Trump has made no effort I can think of to put forward one serious fact or rational argument in favor of his innocence in all this. On the one hand, you have the mountains of evidence, the grim-faced hints from the intelligence community, the guilty pleas, the obvious quid pro quos. On the other—what? Is there one difficult-to-explain exculpatory bit of fact? Is there one? I can’t think of any.