What is the over/under on how long Emmet Flood lasts?
āFasten your seat belts folks. Itās war. I know Emmetāin fact, he briefed me during the Bush to Obama transition when I was coming in as special counsel & he was headed out. Heās one of the very best. This will be a fight for the ages.ā
Ya but those were rational people
Unless you lock Donnie in a room and take away his phone , the orange idiot will sink any advantage Flood might have .
Sorry Flood, you will leave frustrated and embarrassed like all before you . He doesnāt just set himself up but drags down all who come near
3 weeks or the first twitterstorm directly contradicting what Flood says .
Whichever comes first
He will be gone by Labor Day, it wouldnāt surprise me if he is gone by Memorial Day,
In Scaramucci time? Maybe 3 to 4.
Is there some indication that DT will cooperate with his lawyer this time? This is the reason the ābest peopleā wonāt have anything to do with him. Rex T. summed it up pretty well.
Or Trump doesnāt pay Floodās first bill. Or Flood says something nice about Hillary.
Sadly, Flood will be representing the Office of the President, not Current Occupant personally (Ghouliani is among his collection of personal attorneys). That means Flood gets paid by taxpayers, not Spanky, so no worries for him on the payment side.
Starting the pool, Iām guessing Flood last about four months before he calls it quits because of Donnie being a PR nightmare
Well done piece, Tierney, as we all take a deep breath and count the number of seat rows to the nearest exit door.
If Flood didnāt insist on $5M up front he is a frigginā bonehead.
ETA: he may be paid by taxpayers but I canāt believe heād do this work for only senior exec service type pay.
He wonāt be subsisting on a GS salary: heās a partner at Williams & Connolly, which apparently has the highest starting salary for new associates, so heās making mega-$$$ from that. This is just an assignment ā but one which would bring both the law firm and him personally incredible recognition (had you heard of him before this? I hadnātā¦). As partner, he gets more $$$ when the law firm brings in new, well-padded clients because of his visibility. Plus his own hourly rate increases through such stuff. This is a rain-making move for him.
ETA: oh, yeah, and itās a no-brainer for him basically: 1) heās fighting for the office, not the occupant (distance from Spanky), 2) if he gets fed up with Spankyās volatility and leaves, nobody is going to blame him because Spanky, and 3) his visibility just shot up through the roof and that aināt going to go away any time soonā¦
While it would be entertaining if yet another āsensible personā jumped ship, is it possible that Flood would sign on to this if he thought it was broadly more important to be part of a case that could potentially help define the boundaries of executive power/privilege? Based on Tierneyās piece it seems like thatās a possibility here (not to mean for Flood in particular, but for the potential āconstitutional crisisā in general).
I dunno, but just thinking that Floodās obligation is to the office, not the man.
What happens when the man is in conflict with the office that he holds? Flood may resign, but otherwise this becomes an interesting conflict.
The defense strategy here is just to play for time. If nothing else, the five year statute of limitations is running, so past conduct is becoming barred with each passing day.
the seismic activity on the political Richter scale of the president of the United States asserting the Fifth Amendment in a criminal case ā I canāt even imagine it,ā said Andy Wright, who served as counsel for President Obama and for Vice President Al Gore.
This is wishful thinking. Trump is a cult leader. He daily destroys norms and rules applicable to any other president. The sheer frequency and gravity and brazenness of his misdeeds acts as his own protection. Seismicity is his whole thing. Only days ago we learned that he authorized a goon squad to forcibly trespass upon and steal his medical records from his doctorāwho, we learned, heād conspired with to perpetrate a shocking fraud on the public about his health. It is literally a case of daylight robbery. People laughed and forgot about it within 48 hours. No consequences. So presumably Trump will fight the subpoenas and, if he loses that battle, heāll take the Fifth (although I suspect that taking the Fifth is Trumpās least favorite option). Berlusconi did that stuff for years.
Mueller will steam ahead in any case. Presumably heāll report his findings on obstruction and Trump-Russia irrespective of any failure on Trumpās part to explain himself. He wonāt wait for the legal battle to play out. He may even not go down the road of fighting a battle over subpoenas, for the simple reason that he already has enough. Trumpās obstruction of justice has been plain and obvious for a long time. Of course Trump fired Comey to get the FBI off his back. He said so himself.
But even if Mueller formally reports that there is a strong prima facie case of obstruction that would ordinarily give rise to a prosecution, it may not matter. Itās not as if Trump has shot anyone in the street or burgled his own doctor or run a fraudulent university. (Oh.) And the GOP is now basically a corrupt and semi-criminal organization with no idealistic attachment to the rule of law. The GOP base wonāt give a shit, and neither will their electeds.
Russia is a different matter. Thatās pretty serious and substantive on any view. But it would have to be a smoking cannon of conspiracy for Trump to go down in flames. Already weāre being told that mere electoral collusion (ādirtā) is hardly the end of the world.
Finally thereās money laundering and any other crimes arising from the Cohen connection. Mueller seems to have let the NY prosecutors deal with that. That could be very big. Cohen and Trump are career criminals.
The point is that the ālegal warā mooted by this piece is likely to be consuming but beside the point. The most effective way to defeat Trump is to vote him and the GOP out. I personally think that from a purely electoral point of view, impeachment would be counterproductive. Better to win in November, tie him and his cronies up in investigations, and only impeach of there is a very clear Russian or mobster connection. And once heās out of office, of course, he goes down. He gets no special treatment or legal defensesāalthough we cannot rule out an epilogue in which a self-pardon is litigated.
What actions have a 5 year statute of limitation?
Emmett Flood has been around. He helped Clinton during his impeachment and did the response to Ken Starrās report. He was involved in the Bush White House. He refused to get involved while Trump had certain lawyers working for him.
I think he knows what heās getting himself into and since heās working for the White House and not Trump it appears that heāll be working to give Trump as much legal cover as possible and then the chips fall where they fall after that.
My guess is that heās in it for the durationā¦I could be wrong. Itās hard to predict anything for certain with Trump. But Flood is a fighter and Trump likes that.
They donāt make enough popcornā¦