Soooo…did they hit a nerve, donnie?
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Your link seems to be blocked unless you are a NYT subscriber or something. Please re-post your comment.
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I will reiterate something I’ve said for a few months now: Trump has until about September, maybe October, to negotiate a deal with Mueller/SDNY to resign in exchange for full cooperation and a plea deal. The resignation would be necessary in order to guarantee that presidential privileges (like executive privilege and DOJ reticence to indict a sitting POTUS) would not interfere with the cooperation.
If Trump does not make such a deal by this fall, neither the Democrats nor Mueller/SDNY will have any interest to deal with him. They would rather see him leave office in handcuffs.
What I think should happen is that Mueller and the SDNY should each seek grand jury indictments of Trump and all associates. The Democrats should open a formal investigation for the purposes of impeachment and look to impeach the motherfucker by around December or January to freeze Pence in his place. Like the Nixon example, the combination of indictments + impeachment will squeeze him and force him out.
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will do.
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What one’s tweets look like as the authorities are squeezing you in a vise.
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The title of the NYT article is worth restating: “FBI Opened Inquiry into Whether Trump Was Secretly Working on Behalf of Russia”.
Ponder this headline. This will be in textbooks in the coming years. One of the most important publications in the US has reported that the FBI had good reason to think Trump was a Russian agent who is doing the bidding of Russia and undermining the US from within. Before Trump, such a story would be considered so fantastical it wouldn’t make it to the big screen unless it was wrapped into some slapstick, cornball comedy. But.this.is.our.reality!!!
In one very big sense, my reaction as a TPMer to this article is ‘What the hell took you guys so long?’ Josh literally had the basic outlines of the Trump-Russia relationship way back in June/July 2016. We knew when DC Leaks and Wikileaks released DNC emails that it was likely the work of the Russians. We knew this in real time. The day that Trump had that press conference in which he trolled us all and asked the Russians to hack Hillary Clinton, the Dems had a barn burner of a convention night, with military figure after figure denouncing Trump and his lack of loyalty to the US or his fitness to hold the office he sought. We knew all of this in real time. When Hillary stood up in the 3rd debate and called Trump, Putin’s puppet, at the time I thought that should’ve been it. She nailed him. He had no real response except that stupid, ‘no…you’re the puppet’ line, but as we know all to painfully well, the media failed us. The FBI failed us. The 3rd party voters and soft Trump supporters failed us.
There is little new ground covered in this article that those of us who are regular readers of TPM don’t already know. All that said, it is utterly stunning that the FBI believed Donald Trump might be a Russian agent and has been investigating him for almost 2 years on that basis.
Here are what I think are the most interesting bits in this article:
Comey’s Firing was the Probable Cause Trigger to Expand the Investigation to Trump Himself.
The article leads with the statement that Trump’s decision to fire Comey and Trump’s conduct afterwards triggered the expansion of the original FBI inquiry to investigate whether Trump had been “working on behalf of Russia against American interests.” That’s a stunning statement right there.
The FBI wrapped in a criminal inquiry (obstruction of justice) into a counterintelligence investigation as to whether Trump’s own actions were a threat to national security and whether he had been working for Russia.
However, the Times also notes that FBI officials had grown suspicious of Trump’s ties to Russia in the 2016 campaign (in particular, the July 2016 ‘Russia, if you’re listening’ press conference). Yet, the FBI was loathe to directly investigate him because of the political sensitivities and the awkwardness of it all. We had never been in such a situation as a country where we literally had a Manchurian Candidate become the POTUS.
The Comey firing and the explosive impact it had within the FBI and the DC national security establishment ended that ambiguity and the FBI finally started focusing on Trump as the subject (and likely target) of the investigation. The people involved in making this determination were all people that Trump ended up driving out of their jobs or putting under great scrutiny through Nunes’ committee, and bending members of the FBI and DOJ to his will to obstruct: Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, James Baker (FBI GC), Lisa Page, among others. I’m reminded of James Baker’s admonition to Comey not to tell Trump that he wasn’t personally being investigated b/c that situation might change. That statement takes on new meaning. The FBI had a lot of stuff on Trump and was sitting on it, waiting for a threshold to be crossed before launching into a full scale investigation.
What is really interesting and somewhat vindicating to know is that the Lester Holt interview and the Oval Office meeting with Kislyak and Lavrov alarmed the FBI as much as it alarmed all of us. Those 2 incidents led to the expansion of the investigation and also the appointment of Robert Mueller. So for all those months where we thought ‘he commits treason out in the open, no one cares and nothing matters’ that turned out not to be true. Someone did care. It did matter. We have these 30+ indictments over 150 charges and an array of convictions and pleas because of decisions that were made in reaction to events that we saw unfold in public view in real time.
Mueller had a Much Bigger Mandate than We Initially Understood. It Probably Explains Why Trump Hasn’t Fired Him…Yet.
When Mueller got on the case, he wasn’t just investigating Russian interference and ties to the Trump campaign. From the beginning, he was also investigating whether Donald Trump was a Russian asset both from a counterintelligence and criminal perspective. That broad mandate is probably why Mueller wasn’t fired. Mueller launched in at the Trump family’s compromised finances and business dealings and that put Trump on the back foot. He knew that Mueller knew about his long, complicated financial dealings with Russia and how it guided and shaped his loyalties. Had Trump fired Mueller, all of it would’ve been exposed and his cover would’ve essentially been blown. Trump personally concluded he could not get away with firing Mueller. So what he did was to turn is attention to everyone who helped to launch the expanded inquiry and to use Nunes and others to harass, browbeat, chase down and fire all those who tried to expose him. He has been pretty successful in that regard, but none of it has stopped Robert Mueller. If Trump were to do anything now, Adam Schiff would immediately hire Mueller as counsel to the HPSCI and issue subpoenas to prevent the Trumpers from destroying any information. He’d also likely make a good deal of it public.
Rosenstein is Key
So who shaped Mueller’s mandate and hid the true scope from Trump? Rod Rosenstein. If you look at the actual mandate granted to Mueller, it’s expressly broadly written to say…‘and btw investigate whether Trump is a Russian agent’. Mueller would have to weave in the ‘Trump is a Russian agent’ through the broad statement, “any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation”, and 28 C.F.R. § 600.4(a) which allows the AG (in this case the Deputy AG) expansion of the Special Counsel’s jurisdiction. The longer memo he wrote on August 2, 2017 may have contained such references, but if so those aspects were redacted.
As you’ll note, however, the NYT article states that Mueller was investigating Trump personally for being a possible Russian agent on Day 1. Rosenstein expanded that mandate without putting it expressly in the original order. Rosenstein provided cover to Mueller and expanded the mandate in the follow-up redacted memos. If Bob Barr had been the AG at the time, he would’ve stifled Mueller.
Rosenstein had another key role to play in the pivotal decision to expand the investigation to Trump personally. When Trump fired Comey, he wanted to make a big point of the Russia matter. Rosenstein advised against it. Trump directed him to add it and he refused. Trump then added a reference to the Russia investigation thanking Comey for telling him 3 times that he was not under investigation. Rosenstein likely testified as to the sequence and series of events that transpired. Rosenstein was brought in by Sessions and McGahn to keep Trump from breaking the law, because that’s the daily task of anyone who works for him. Rosenstein was somewhat duped into coming up with an alternative cover story to fire Comey. His point was you could fire Comey without having to resort to this Russia stuff (and he was right about that). However, where Rosenstein got into a legal grey area is when he insisted on that more legal justification for firing Comey, because it operated effectively as a false cover story for the firing. That memo was itself used by Trump’s handlers to obstruct justice. Had Trump not blown his own cover in the Lester Holt interview, that cover story would’ve prevented the FBI from expanding the investigation (well…there’s that the matter of sharing national security secrets with the Russians in the Oval Office…so…). In fact, I think McGahn, Sessions and Pence (who was present) should be indicted for conspiracy to obstruct justice for coming up with the idea of using Rosenstein to provide a false cover story that could pass legal muster and obscure the true reasons expressed by Trump and Stephen Miller. Afterwards, Rosenstein felt used by Trump and sought his revenge through the appointment of Mueller.
Obstruction is part of Treason
There’s an article out there by Benjamin Wittes with a headline 'What if Obstruction was the Collusion?" I haven’t read the article yet, but the title itself is misleading, and is an intellectually lazy click-bait headline. Obstruction was a part of the conspiracy, but more than that it was a part of the treason itself. The obstruction began the day that Trump signed the Trump Tower Moscow Hotel memorandum of understanding and then concealed it from the public and the US government. That’s the day Trump became a Russian agent, the day he became Putin’s Sith apprentice, if you will. Once you’re owned, you’re owned. You can never go back. Once Trump signed that MOU, the very knowledge of it, if exposed, would’ve likely killed his Presidential ambitions and his value to Putin. If Trump didn’t do what Putin wanted, Putin would’ve exposed him. Putin then used that leverage point to up the ante and add more carrots and sticks to their relationship. He saw an opportunity, through Trump’s success through the GOP primary, to accelerate and use a short cut to achieve his plans of undermining the US through electing Trump. Trump obliged.
The FBI (particularly its GC James Baker) saw the attempt to fire Comey to stop the Russia investigation as both obstruction and a national security issue because it would literally frustrate the FBI’s ability to learn the extent of the Russian attack on the US. It is possibly at least 2 crimes (obstruction and conspiracy against the US) and a national security concern.
Now that this blockbuster is out there, the question is what do we do about it? Every major foreign policy action and policy on immigration (including this shutdown) must be viewed from the standpoint of serving Russian interests. Russia not only wants certain policies changed, it wants to weaken the US from within. We will need to find out what Trump did in Helsinki, but we’re going to have to accelerate the impeachment track and impeach the motherf***er. We need to do it to put pressure on Trump to resign and face trial.
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I’m glad I’ve never been as worried about anything as this guy obviously is.
I think it must be because of some National Emergency or something.
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Excellent work and summary…
I agree, the Dotard better cut a deal or he will be perp walked out of the Oval Office…
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What can you say? It’s all been said over and over about this goon.
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I am willing to bet his bowels liquified as the article was read to him…
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Somebody’s stool was severely impacted this morning. Over an hour on the First Toilet?
lol he seems calm and not panicking at all
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Once you’re owned, you’re owned. You can never go back.
Have you ever considered a literary career…? 
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Hopefully, the Oval Trailer maid has hidden the nuclear football…
Oh wait, federal employee. Never mind.
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If the government is shut down how is it Trump still has access to a cell phone?
I am so sick of this thing we have in our White House.
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Since he had such a strong response I would believe that he is as guilty as heck. The louder he cries the more he feels he is in a corner.
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Frankly, this report just solidifies one of the questions I’ve had since 1/20/17. Who has the real nuclear football? One would hope the intelligence community swapped it out.
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Short version: Are you a Russian agent, bro? You act like a Russian agent.
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Amos 5:24 "But let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream."
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