If you signed off early on Wednesday, you missed several major Trump-related stories that broke in the evening. The biggest of all, by far, was the news that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein—the chump who allowed Donald Trump to use his memo about James Comey as a pretext for firing the former FBI director—issued a sharp about-face and announced that he had appointed another former FBI director, Robert Mueller, as special counsel to lead an investigation into the Trump team’s ties with Russia.
Mueller was appointed by George W. Bush but also served under Barack Obama, and Democrats hailed his selection. However, Mueller’s position does not come with immunity from Trump’s meddling: Trump could conceivably order Attorney General Jeff Session to fire Mueller, and if Sessions doesn’t comply, Trump could sack him and replace him with someone who would. Sound familiar?
Soon after the Mueller news broke, the Washington Post reported that last year, in a closed-door meeting of top GOP officials, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy made some startling remarks about Trump, who was already the presumptive Republican nominee:
“There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump.”
That’s California Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, by the way, a notorious Putin stooge. A spokesman for House Speaker Paul Ryan, who had tried to swear the attendees to secrecy, initially denied that McCarthy had said any such thing. Then, when the Post told him that they had a recording of the conversation, he immediately switched to claiming that it was all just a joke gone wrong. Nobody’s laughing.
Finally, the night wrapped up with two explosive stories about retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who was fired in disgrace from his job as Trump’s national security advisor after serving just 24 days. According to the New York Times, Flynn had indeed informed Trump’s transition team that he was “under federal investigation for secretly working as a paid lobbyist for Turkey during the campaign”—a gig that had paid him over $500,000. Despite this, Trump went ahead and hired Flynn anyway, for a role that, as the Times notes, gave Flynn access to “nearly every secret held by American intelligence agencies.”
McClatchy closed things out with another Flynn hit. It turns out that Flynn ordered a planned military campaign to retake the Syrian city of Raqqa from ISIS be delayed, a move that was “consistent with the wishes of Turkey, which had long opposed the United States partnering with the Kurdish forces”—Turkey, which was Flynn’s paymaster. The operation had been planned for months by Obama’s national security team, which sought to hand it off to Trump’s. Only after Flynn got the boot was it finally put into action. And this is a man Trump has repeatedly called a “good guy.”
Much, much more to come—stay tuned to Daily Kos.
