“You have an oath to uphold the rule of law and protect the Constitution,” the senators wrote. “This includes refusing to take part in any effort to deny the American public access to the truth and refusing to participate in any attempt by the president to interfere with a legitimate and critical investigation of national importance.”
“This comes on the heels of a bipartisan statement from GOP Senator Tom Tillis and Dem Chris Coons that Trump cease his attacks against Mueller.”
“We believe that the American people should have confidence in the Department of Justice’s ability to conduct independent investigations and its commitment to the rule of law,” the pair said. “We urge President Trump to allow the Special Counsel to complete his work without impediment.”
Again, the question that begs is why is there this amp up in warnings to Trump and the DOJ not to interfere with the Mueller investigation?
And, lo and behold, this morning we get this Politico piece about a ‘source familiar with Trump’s strategy’ saying this looks like the beginning of an oppo campaign against Mueller:
“When President Donald Trump lashed out against Robert Mueller by name earlier this month, the president’s supporters sprang into action—treating the chief Russia investigator to political campaign-style opposition research.”
This was a clear dog whistle to begin a direct oppo attack against Mueller himself.
“Within hours, the Drudge Report featured a story blaming Mueller, the special counsel leading the Justice Department’s Russia probe, for the FBI’s clumsy investigation into the 2001 anthrax attacks when Mueller ran the bureau. The independent pro-Trump journalist Sara Carter posted a story charging that Mueller, as a federal prosecutor in Boston in the mid-1980s, had covered up the FBI’s dealings with the Mafia informant Whitey Bulger. Carter was soon discussing her findings in prime time with Fox News host Sean Hannity.
They even whacked Mueller for supporting the Iraq War:
“Meanwhile, Trump supporters on Twitter circulated video of testimony Mueller gave to Congress ahead of the 2003 Iraq War in which he endorsed the view, later proven false, that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.”
This-besides being totally irrelevant to the Russia probe, is sort of ironic as Trump just appointed the biggest supporter of the Iraq War to run the NSC.
UPDATE 2.0: Who now seems hellbent on pushing Trump into a war with Iran that could be a bigger quagmire than even Iraq was.
As Nancy Pelosi tries to slowdown impeachment talk it needs to be kept in mind that maladministration is an impeachable offense-one reason to impeach the faux ‘President’ is to protect the country from his increasingly abusive behavior but more on this below.
End of UPDATE 2.0.
Clearly what we have here is a coordinated political strategy to tarnish Mueller’s reputation through a drip drip drip of attacks that while not relevant to the probe, begin to construct the basis for undermining the probe. Basically, Trump and friends are now going to attempt to to what they did to Andy McCabe, Comey and others charged with investigating Herr Trump.
“It looks like the beginnings of a campaign,” a source familiar with Trump’s legal strategy said. “It looks like they are trying to seed the ground. Ultimately if the president determines he wants to fire Mueller he’s going to want to make sure there’s ample public record that he can fall back on.”
“While Trump has long publicly denounced the Russia probe, and Mueller has been the target of criticism since he first began his work, both Democratic and Republicans observers say the latest wave of personal attacks on Mueller seem more barbed—and personal—than ever.”
What was new was when Trump attacked him by name the Saturday morning after McCabe was fired.
“People close to the Russia probe call it a crucial moment when Trump swiped at Mueller by name for the first time earlier this month. Until then, the president had followed the advice of his lawyers and refrained from mentioning the special counsel in his online tirades about the “Fake News” and “WITCH HUNT!” of the Russia scandal.”
But two Saturdays ago, Trump angrily tweeted that “[t]he Mueller probe should never have been started in that there was no collusion and there was no crime.”
UPDATE 3.0
In other news, we now know that Manafort’s deputy, Richard Gates, had substantive conversations with someone he knew was former GRU intelligence during the campaign. So you can’t say ‘no collusion now’ but-of course for the Deplorables there are always alternative facts…
End of UPDATE 3.0
“Why does the Mueller team have 13 hardened Democrats, some big Crooked Hillary supporters, and Zero Republicans?” he added the next morning.
“Fueling the fire was a statement from his then-personal attorney John Dowd to a Daily Beast reporter saying that the Mueller investigation should be shuttered. Dowd later told POLITICO he had only been speaking for himself, but that claim met a skeptical reception.”
“Some suggest that, in taking off the gloves, the president was setting a new tone for discourse toward the special counsel at the same time his lawyers are trying to negotiate the terms for an interview with Mueller.”
“This anti-Mueller wave feels different because it is being driven directly by the President,” said Kurt Bardella, a former spokesman for Breitbart News and for California GOP Rep. Darrell Issa.
So what’s going on?
“An open question is whether the ensuing wave of anti-Mueller attacks by Trump’s allies really is orchestrated—or just a reflexive response.”
“They just activate,” Bardella said. “They don’t need to have a conversation or a meeting or a memo. They know once that signal comes they’re free to, as Steve Bannon would say, ‘Go buck wild.’”
But that they recognize the signal hardly proves its not coordinated but the opposite. It’s pretty obvious what’s going on:
“One longtime Trump ally says what’s happening is clear.”
“I think President Trump is going to war. I think it’s very obvious he’s going to war on this,” former Trump White House strategist Steven Bannon said last week during a Financial Times panel in New York.
Right it IS obvious and going to war is coordinated.
As for the GOP Congress, as usual their response is total milquetoast:
“The onslaught against Mueller has also tested the mood among Congressional Republicans. It took a couple of days for House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to weigh in on the president’s attacks. And while both came to Mueller’s defense—Ryan said he’d gotten “assurances” the special counsel wouldn’t be fired, and McConnell called Mueller “an excellent appointment” — they stopped well short of rebuking Trump’s openly hostile tone.”
“If Trump is trying to determine how far Congress will let him go, the silence becomes very important,” said Charlie Sykes, the frequent Trump critic and former conservative radio host from Wisconsin. “They could have shut this down almost immediately by saying this would be absolutely intolerable, this would cross a bright red line.”
“The fact neither McConnell or Ryan is not drawing a red line,” he added, “is potentially signaling a green light to Trump.”
It makes you feel about as reassured as when Paul Ryan promised to tutor Trump on the Constitution just after the election when Trump threatened to prosecute flag burners.
Amy Siskind Pg. 8
UPDATE 4.0: The refrain from McConnell and Friends during the Mueller probe was that passing a bill to protect Mueller wasn’t necessary as they didn’t believe Trump would fire Mueller. This ‘belief’ was never very reassuring. Of course, in retrospect no doubt the GOP talking point is that, Mueller wasn’t fired so their reassurances were correct.
However, it remains an open question wether Mueller was pushed to ‘land the plane’ once Coverup Barr took over at DOJ. Note that in Barr’s testimony to the Senate in early May he used this exact same phrase I’m landing the plane right now.
It’s striking that Barr used this same phrase attributed to Rosenstein in the Washington Post piece-Bill Palmer has noted the same thing.
It sounds like ‘land the plane’ was an inside thing in TrumpWorld.
In retrospect while as we know from Don McGahn’s testimony documented in the redacted Mueller Report that Trump tried to fire Mueller more than once he ultimately listened to his legal team that this would be a bridge too far. However he did find another very effective way to destroy the investigation. First Coverup AG Barr put out that misleading memo that the MSM ran with and which set the Beltway press’ false narrative for the next month-a narrative that they refused to correct even once they realized what had happened.
Proving a MSM narrative is false doesn’t necessarily mean the MSM stops selling the false narrative.
Even now you hear many pundits talk about the fact that ‘there was no collusion found’ which is totally false.
Trump’s new talking point is that the Democrats ‘didn’t like the Mueller Report and want a redo.’
While this is like so much that he says false on multiple levels he is basically using the frame that the MSM itself set in the immediate aftermath of the Barr Letter.
Meanwhile the campaign against the Mueller probe post Mueller only intensifies.
While Speaker Pelosi urges caution and desperately tries to quell the increased desire for impeachment in her own Democratic caucus Trump is going balls to the wall full speed ahead.
The Dem leaders are so much more restrained in legitimate investigations than Trump is in fake ones.
There are so many reasons to impeach this illegitimate President-the most important and fundamental, of course, is that of former GOP Congressman Tom Coleman:
Note that he correctly argues that Pence is also illegitimate-this is something I’ve heard no one currently in politics much less the MSM point out. After all if Trump gained his Office illegitimately no one associated with his Russia House is.
But another reason to impeach Trump is his dangerous maladministration as Yoni Applebaum explains.
Other institutions are already acting as brakes on the Trump presidency. To the president’s vocal frustration, federal judges have repeatedly enjoined his executive orders. Robert Mueller’s investigation has brought convictions of, or plea deals from, key figures in his campaign as well as his administration. Some Democrats are clearly hoping that if they stall for long enough, Mueller will deliver them from Trump, obviating the need to act themselves.
But Congress can’t outsource its responsibilities to federal prosecutors. No one knows when Mueller’s report will arrive, what form it will take, or what it will say. Even if Mueller alleges criminal misconduct on the part of the president, under Justice Department guidelines, a sitting president cannot be indicted. Nor will the host of congressional hearings fulfill that branch’s obligations. The view they will offer of his conduct will be both limited and scattershot, focused on discrete acts. Only by authorizing a dedicated impeachment inquiry can the House begin to assemble disparate allegations into a coherent picture, forcing lawmakers to consider both whether specific charges are true and whether the president’s abuses of his power justify his removal.
Trump’s bipartisan critics are not merely arguing that he has lied or dishonored the presidency. The most serious allegations against him ultimately rest on the charge that he is attacking the bedrock of American democracy. That is the situation impeachment was devised to address.
This is the key-everyday his attacks on the Rule of Law and American democracy itself get worse. He is a clear and present danger.
The qualms of the Dem leaders is political not principled-for some reason impeachment will help Trump they claim. This claim is largely based on some bad history of the Clinton impeachment. So they argue just beat him in 2020 impeach him at the ballot box.
This is a canard-elections happen every two year but they don’t have any bearing on the Rule of Law. The idea of just waiting for the next election is not new-the Framers themselves considered and rejected it. The fact that there’s an election around the corner is a canard-if you never impeach the President because in under two years there will be another election that’s always true. Ok there’s a POTUS election every four years so is the idea that you only do it in the first two years of his term?
That also makes no sense-as it’s early in the term it will be felt that you’re rushing into it.
Impeachment is about addressing a specific kind of crisis in abuse of the Office of the Presidency.
The electorate passes judgment on its presidents and their shortcomings every four years. But the Framers were concerned that a president could abuse his authority in ways that would undermine the democratic process and that could not wait to be addressed. So they created a mechanism for considering whether a president is subverting the rule of law or pursuing his own self-interest at the expense of the general welfare—in short, whether his continued tenure in office poses a threat to the republic. This mechanism is impeachment.
The other zombie argument from the impeachment phobes is that it’s a ‘waste of time’ and even harmful if Trump is impeached by the House but acquitted by Mitch McConnell-which would actually give McConnell who is a Republican first and an American second absolute veto power over wether to impeach a Republican ‘President’-what’s perverse about that?
But Applebaum is clear impeachment is a process and it’s virtues are far beyond wether or not it leads to ultimate removal.
“After the house impeaches a president, the Constitution requires a two-thirds majority in the Senate to remove him from office. Opponents of impeachment point out that, despite the greater severity of the prospective charges against Trump, there is little reason to believe the Senate is more likely to remove him than it was to remove Clinton. Indeed, the Senate’s Republican majority has shown little will to break with the president—though that may change. The process of impeachment itself is likely to shift public opinion, both by highlighting what’s already known and by bringing new evidence to light. If Trump’s support among Republican voters erodes, his support in the Senate may do the same. One lesson of Richard Nixon’s impeachment is that when legislators conclude a presidency is doomed, they can switch allegiances in the blink of an eye.
But this sort of vote-counting, in any case, misunderstands the point of impeachment. The question of whether impeachment is justified should not be confused with the question of whether it is likely to succeed in removing a president from office. The country will benefit greatly regardless of how the Senate ultimately votes. Even if the impeachment of Donald Trump fails to produce a conviction in the Senate, it can safeguard the constitutional order from a president who seeks to undermine it. The protections of the process alone are formidable.”
With Trump’s new Holy War against American intelligence itself-including our foreign intelligence assets-protections of our process are more desperately needed than ever.
One vital protection Applebaum enumerates is the President-or in Trump’s case the ‘President’-loses control of the public conversation.
The first is that once an impeachment inquiry begins, the president loses control of the public conversation. Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton each discovered this, much to their chagrin. Johnson, the irascible Tennessee Democrat who succeeded to the presidency in 1865 upon the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, quickly found himself at odds with the Republican Congress. He shattered precedents by delivering a series of inflammatory addresses that dominated the headlines and forced his opponents into a reactive posture. The launching of impeachment inquiries changed that. Day after day, Congress held hearings. Day after day, newspapers splashed the proceedings across their front pages. Instead of focusing on Johnson’s fearmongering, the press turned its attention to the president’s missteps, to the infighting within his administration, and to all the things that congressional investigators believed he had done wrong.
It isn’t just the coverage that changes. When presidents face the prospect of impeachment, they tend to discover a previously unsuspected capacity for restraint and compromise, at least in public. They know that their words can be used against them, so they fume in private. Johnson’s calls for the hanging of his political opponents yielded quickly to promises to defer to their judgment on the key questions of the day. Nixon raged to his aides, but tried to show a different face to the country. “Dignity, command, faith, head high, no fear, build a new spirit,” he told himself. Clinton sent bare-knuckled proxies to the television-news shows, but he and his staff chose their own words carefully.
Trump is easily the most pugilistic president since Johnson; he’s never going to behave with decorous restraint. But if impeachment proceedings begin, his staff will surely redouble its efforts to curtail his tweeting, his lawyers will counsel silence, and his allies on Capitol Hill will beg for whatever civility he can muster. His ability to sidestep scandal by changing the subject—perhaps his greatest political skill—will diminish.
As Trump fights for his political survival, that struggle will overwhelm other concerns. This is the second benefit of impeachment: It paralyzes a wayward president’s ability to advance the undemocratic elements of his agenda. Some of Trump’s policies are popular, and others are widely reviled. Some of his challenges to settled orthodoxies were long overdue, and others have proved ill-advised. These are ordinary features of our politics and are best dealt with through ordinary electoral processes. It is, rather, the extraordinary elements of Trump’s presidency that merit the use of impeachment to forestall their success: his subversion of the rule of law, attacks on constitutional liberties, and advancement of his own interests at the public’s expense.
There are so many extraordinary elements-extarodinarily bad and awful-of Trump’s illegitimate ‘Presidency’ starting with its illegitimacy.
With his frontal attack on the intelligence community’s Trump-Russia investigation forestalling its success is priority number one.
In any case this week has seen considerable progress-39 House Democrats now support opening an impeachment inquiry including the majority on the House Judiciary-the Committee that would actually open the inquiry.
Yes HJ has already effectively opened a preimpeachment inquiry but as Applebaum notes in the quote above a virtue of an impeachment inquiry is controlling the conversation. In any case watch HJ-they may introduce a bill in the coming weeks.
Sheila Jackson also proposed a possible resolution of impeachment.
Congressman Al Green-whose been a lonely voice in the wilderness for impeachment-along with Maxine Waters-for over two years says he will be introducing a new bill in the near future. So the momentum is clearly moving towards impeachment. When the majority of House Dems get there we’ll probably see an inquiry.
However, paradoxically the Dems success in major courts cases this week is being used as a pretext for impeachment probes-see we can get everything we need without opening an impeachment inquiry.
Despite some important victories that’s still not entirely clear-while in time the Dems will likely prevail time is what they don’t have-I think we need to put Dem leaders on notice now that saying ‘it’s too close to the election’ is also not an excuse that will pass mustard with the base.
My vision was always for them to wait to actually vote to impeach him until 11 days before November 6, 2020-a al the Comey letter.
On the other hand maybe a month or two earlier is optimum just to give Mitch McConnell a little more time to twist in the wind publicly as the GOP Senate holds the trial-even if they acquit Trump they lose politically-the opposite of what Speaker Pelosi is currently claiming to believe.
Elsewhere in this book I’ve cited Chris Rock who I think unlike the MSMers has correctly diagnosed the rise of Trump-Trump is President because no one remembers how to fight bullies anymore.
Ryan Cooper now has a piece that makes this same point-the Dem leaders fail to appreciate how schoolyard bullying works:
The Democratic Party is struggling mightily to figure out how to confront President Trump’s staggering corruption. More and more of its members of Congress are getting behind the idea of an impeachment inquiry, but the party leadership is (somewhat mysteriously) trying desperately to avoid the issue. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has deployed one excuse after the next, most recently the absolutely preposterous theory that Trump is plotting to get himself impeached as part of a Snidely Whiplash-esque scheme. Meanwhile, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who has less power but greater freedom, is all but absent from the entire discussion.
Here’s a suggestion: Democrats need to remember how playground bullying works. Trump is an enormous crook, yes, but he is also an overgrown petulant child. To fight him, Democrats should imagine him as a spoiled, lazy, entitled, none-too-bright 9-year-old who likes to kick puppies and kittens.
The first rule of bullies is that they are drawn to perceived weakness. No bully wants to try to pick on someone bigger and stronger than they are — they want to terrorize weak and helpless people who won’t fight back. The point is the psychological satisfaction of easy domination, not brawling for its own sake. Indeed, most bullies are not actually very good at fighting, and will fold immediately if faced with a real physical confrontation.”
This fits Trump’s record to a T. He talks big, but runs from a fight. He boasts about his physical prowess, but he’s an overweight, dainty slob whocheats at golf and can barely walk down stairs. He’s routinely ripped off small and helpless suppliers in his real estate projects, but quickly folded when presented with a powerful adversary, like a big bank or the mafia. The Mueller report details that when the investigation was announced, Trump whined, “Oh my god. This is terrible. This is the end of my presidency. I’m f–ked.”
Exactly. Then he met Steny Hoyer and realized maybe he’s not f-ked.
But when it turned out Democrats were too scared of their own shadow to actually pursue the impeachment inquiry that Mueller teed up for them (in addition to Trump’s unprecedented and wildly unconstitutional profiteering off the presidency), Trump’s bully instincts surged right back. He sensed, correctly, that he could continue to push around Democrats — and so instructed his subordinates to disobey congressional subpoenas, told his treasury secretary to keep his tax returns secret, and submitted lawsuits arguing Congress has no right to investigate anything he does.”
The lesson here is that timidity and handwringing only encourages Trump. If they don’t confront him with tactics just as aggressive as the ones he uses, he will conclude they are cowards who can be cowed easily. Now, attacking on all fronts might not stop Trump from trying to break the law — even a fearful bully can fight when cornered — but it’s a bare minimum requirement at least
If Democrats actually want to protect American democracy from Trump, they’re going to have to remember how to throw a punch.”
This is what the Dem leadership needs to get. Yes Trump is a bully-he’s Biff in Back to the Future. That’s who he is. But the Dem leadership is McFly. Americans may not like bullies but they don’t respect McFly.
In the movie things only turn around for McFly-played of course by Michael J. Fox-when he finally stands up to Biff rather than doing his homework and washing his car.
The Dem members including Nadler seem to be getting it now. We’ll see how long it takes the Dem leaders to get it-hopefully before it’s too late.