Trump is in enormous trouble. This is not just due to the Mueller investigation although that by itself is a ticking time bomb wanting to explode trump's "presidency". Two other events could reduce the cover republicans are willing to give him. The tax plan exacerbated the upcoming debt ceiling limit problem.
www.washingtonpost.com/…
Unless Congress gets its act together, the federal government will default on its debt in a few short weeks. This event would set off a constitutional crisis and a global financial crisis. And it would be not some inevitable catastrophe but wholly man-made, created by an inept White House and a Congress too distracted, disorganized or greedy to act in the nation’s best interest.
The end of the extraordinary measures will be in the first half of March. The crazies in the US House of Representatives will never agree to raise the debt limit even though it is simply an agreement to pay debt that has already been accrued and it is not an accrual of new debt. It simply means that you don't stiff the restaurant after you already ate the food.
The consequences of defaulting on our debt by not raising the debt limit are large.
It would also send the global financial system into a tailspin.
Already, there has been a severe retreat in the DJIA and the Nikkei which was down almost five percent.
www.cnbc.com/…
U.S. stocks traded in a wide range Tuesday as the major indexes tried to recover from a recent steep sell-off.
The Dow Jones industrial average traded 61 points lower after rising as much as 367 points. The index also fell as much as 567 points at its session low.
On Monday, the Dow dropped 1,175.21 points, having briefly declined more than 1,500 points during the session. Other major indexes closed sharply lower. The sell-off kicked into action on Friday, after the latest nonfarm payrolls report saw interest rates in the U.S.
It is likely we will not raise the debt ceiling and will threaten to default on our debt. This will produce a hurt upon the economy. Trump's ratings are already historically low, but the Obama economy protected him from only 25% approval. When the economy heads South and he is unpopular even among a substantial minority of republicans, Congressional Republicans will stop reflexively covering for him and ignoring his crimes. As they see the economy weaken and polling go far enough South to make them feel that they themselves are in political jeopardy, they will vote for impeachment and conviction (2/3 of US Senators must vote for conviction/removal). The publicly available evidence is already overwhelming.
www.wired.com/…
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Right now, we know it involves at least five separate investigative angles:
1. Preexisting Business Deals and Money Laundering. Business dealings and money laundering related to Trump campaign staff, including former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and former campaign aide Rick Gates, are a major target of the inquiry. While this phase of the investigation has already led to the indictment of Gates and Manafort, it almost certainly will continue to bear further fruit. Gates appears to be headingtoward a plea deal with Mueller, and there is expected to be a so-called “superseding” indictment that may add to or refine the existing charges. Such indictments are common in federal prosecutions, particularly in complicated financial cases where additional evidence may surface. Mueller’s team is believed to have amassed more than 400,000 documents in this part of the investigation alone.
2. Russian Information Operations
Presumably these so-called active measures were conducted by or with the coordination of what’s known colloquially as the Russian troll factory, the Internet Research Agency, in St. Petersburg. The extent to which these social media efforts impacted the outcome of the election remains an open question, but according to Bloomberg these social media sites are a “red hot” focus of Mueller’s team, and he obtained search warrants to examine the records of companies like Facebook
3. Active Cyber Intrusions
4. Russian Campaign Contacts.
5. Obstruction of Justice. This is the big kahuna—the question of whether President Trump obstructed justice by pressuring FBI director James Comey to “look past” the FBI’s investigation of Michael Flynn and whether his firing in May was in any way tied to Comey’s refusal to stop the investigation. This thread, as far as we know from public reporting, remains the only part of the investigation that stretches directly into the Oval Office. It likely focuses not only on the President and the FBI director but also on a handful of related questions about the FBI investigation of Flynn and the White House’s statements about the Trump Tower meeting. The president himself has said publicly that he fired Comey over “this Russia thing.”
There’s fresh reason to believe that this is an active criminal investigation; lost amid the news of the Nunes memo on Friday was a court ruling in a lawsuit where I and a handful of other reporters from outlets like CNN and Daily Caller are suing the Justice Department to release the “Comey memos”: The rulingheld that, based on the FBI’s private testimony to the court—including evidence from Michael Dreeben, one of the leaders of the special counsel’s office—releasing the memos would compromise the investigation. “Having heard this, the Court is now fully convinced that disclosure ‘could reasonably be expected to interfere’ with that ongoing investigation,” the judge wrote in our case.