Fresh off the heels of his personal lawyer being sentences to prison and implicating him in campaign finance crimes comes news that Trump’s inauguration committee is reportedly under criminal investigation. We begin today’s roundup with Michelle Goldberg’s take at The New York Times on the year justice began catching up with Trumpworld:
[2018] was a year of justice and accountability for at least some of those who foisted this administration on the country. An awful menagerie of lowlifes was swept into power by Trump’s victory two years ago. In 2018, at least some of them started to fall back out again. [...]
when you consider the events of the last 12 months together, it becomes clear how relentlessly justice has ground forward, and how much Trump and his flunkies have lost. As I was writing this, news broke that federal prosecutors have started a criminal investigation into Trump’s inaugural committee, adding to inquiries into his business, foundation, campaign and presidency. America is still in a perilous place, and even a weakened Trump can torment migrants, pack the courts, wreck the environment and suck up to tyrants. Nevertheless, this is the first year since 2015, when Trump rode down that cursed escalator to launch his bid for office, that is ending more hopefully than it began.
Eugene Robinson at The Washington Post explains how Trump’s lies may be catching up to him:
Now the law is beginning to squeeze him from all directions. [...]
The bottom line is that two witnesses, Cohen and AMI, independently now implicate the president of the United States in the commission of two felonies.
The campaign finance case is being brought by federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York. Back in Washington, meanwhile, special counsel Robert S. Mueller III has been busy, as well. [...] Trump’s longtime accountant, Allen Weisselberg, has turned state’s evidence. He may be the Virgil who guides federal, state and local prosecutors through a Trumpian inferno of shell companies and opaque transactions. The outlines of Trump’s fate begin to emerge.
Meanwhile, at The Atlantic, Natasha Bertrand dives into the Maria Butina Russian spying case:
Butina, who has agreed to cooperate with prosecutors, could shed light on yet another avenue through which Russia tried to influence American politics in 2016: namely, via an old-fashioned, on-the-ground operation, conducted not by experienced spies but by disarming political operatives. She could reveal whether there was any coordination between President Donald Trump’s campaign, Russia, and the NRA during the election. Butina is young—just 30 years old—but effective: In the short time she spent operating in Washington, D.C., she interacted with Trump, Donald Trump Jr., and a Trump-campaign adviser named J.D. Gordon. She also helped organize a Russian delegation to the 2017 National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C. (which Trump attended), tasked with establishing “a back channel of communication” to the administration, according to prosecutors.
At New York magazine, Eric Levitz chronicles Trump’s contradictory defenses:
So: Michael Cohen was simultaneously Trump’s trusted attorney, whose scrupulous commitment to abiding by the law the president had no reason to doubt — and, also, a pseudo-attorney whose primary responsibility was protecting Trump’s public image (i.e., the kind of person who might arrange a legally dubious payment to an adult-film actress to protect the GOP nominee’s public image in autumn 2016). The classic “Schrödinger’s lawyer” defense.
USA Today dedicates its editorial to the job nobody seems to want:
Why would one of the most powerful and desirable jobs in the world be so hard to fill? Let us count the ways.
Start with the fact there really isn’t an opening for chief of staff. There is an opening for pretend chief of staff. To the extent that a White House as chaotic as Trump’s could have a chief of staff, the position is already taken by presidential daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner, who are said to have backed Kelly’s ouster and are involved in the search for a replacement. (In fact, Kushner might be one of the five finalists that Trump said Thursday he is down to.) Add to this the lack of job security. The next chief would be the third in less than two years and would be part of an administration that goes through staffers like kids go through peanut M&M's.
At The Week, Ryan Cooper pens an insightful piece on how corruption is eroding American democracy:
As The Daily Beast reports, after announcing his support for pushing the 2020 military budget to an eye-popping $750 billion, [Republican Senator] Inhofe's financial adviser bought between $50,000 and $100,000 of the stock of military contractor Raytheon. When the news came out, he dumped the stock.
It's representative of the kind of corruption that is slowly eroding American democracy — when the people's elected representatives do not even pretend to hide they fact that they are making policy to benefit themselves.
On a final note, don’t miss another excellent overview piece from Susan B. Glasser at The New Yorker:
During Watergate, the last time a sitting President was named an unindicted co-conspirator in a criminal investigation, Hugh Scott, who was then the Minority Leader, and other Republican senators marched into the White House to tell Nixon to resign, but only once his fate was already clear. Nixon was not only a two-term President but a lifetime Republican who had devoted his career to the Party. The senators may not have loved him, but, by most accounts, he had earned their respect.
Trump faces a far different situation, with far fewer reserves of personal or partisan loyalty to call upon. A former Democrat, he was opposed by the vast majority of congressional Republicans in the party primaries for President. He has little personal connection to most of them now, did not spend decades raising money for their elections or campaigning for them, and has often publicly feuded with their leaders. He disagrees with many of their core ideological beliefs on issues such as free trade and deficit spending. He has fired two White House chiefs of staff who saw it as their responsibility to try to interpret the President to the wary troops on the Hill. For now Trump is banking on his continued high popularity with core Republican voters to keep their representatives in line. But if and when the politics change, he should watch out.