On Sunday, Donald Trump’s new attorney/spokesman/official promoter of chaos, Rudy Giuliani said that Trump had agreed to concentrate on doing his job—dealing with North Korea, threatening to break a treaty with Iran, sneaking in phone calls to Putin when John Kelly isn’t looking—and leave dealing with Mueller to Giuliani. Which Giuliani is dealing with in his own very special way.
"I am focused on the law more than the facts right now.”
And Trump is certainly demonstrating his commitment to that new arrangement with the focus of his morning tweets.
The “13 Angry Democrats” comes either because Trump fell asleep watching Turner Movie Classics and got things a little confused, or because he’s returned to his contention that everyone on the Russia investigation is a “hardened Democrat.”
The president is ignoring one important fact: Robert S. Mueller III, who heads the team, is a longtime registered Republican. He was appointed by another Republican, Rod J. Rosenstein, whom Trump nominated as deputy attorney general. But publicly available voter registration information shows that 13 of the 17 members of Mueller's team have previously registered as Democrats, while four had no affiliation or their affiliation could not be found.
What makes someone a “hardened Democrat” as opposed to … a Democrat, isn’t explained. And probably isn’t explainable. Those 17 are the other members of the team, not counting Mueller or Rosenstein. But as Trump continues to let Giuliani handle the investigation, it’s clear that the only way it’s possible for Trump to get what he considers a fair hearing, is if everyone involved is a Trump supporter. Which means … the Republican House Intelligence Committee report to the rescue!
“There is no O.” It could be the promotional tagline for a horror film. Wait … maybe it is.
The House Intelligence Committee report, which was written expressly to give Trump something to waive around in his claim that there was “no collusion,” might be a little more convincing if one of the lead Republicans on the report hadn’t admitted that collusion and obstruction weren’t in the list of things they “investigated.”
Rep. Mike Conaway (R-Texas) said Sunday the House Intelligence Committee was not tasked with investigating collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign, despite the committee issuing a report last week stating it found no evidence of collusion in the 2016 election.
“Our committee was not charged with answering the collusion idea,” Conaway said on NBC's “Meet The Press.”
"So we really weren’t focused on that direction."
They did not find what they did not seek. It’s handier that way, even if it required turning down every Democratic request to subpoena documents and leaving almost three dozen witnesses off the table.
But Trump’s morning tweets demonstrate one thing clearly enough: He’s not counting on Rudy Giuliani to get him out of this thing. He’s counting on Devin Nunes, and Mark Meadows, and Paul Ryan. Trump is still considering pulling the plug on the investigation, and letting the same people who didn’t look at collusion in their report, demonstrate that they’re just as good in not looking at obstruction.