Will the federal conclusion to #TrumpRussia be inconclusive and will the New York State prosecution get stymied. There’s still hope, but the forces of Evil are really quite formidable.
Congress is running three separate Russia-related investigations, all of which are supposed to answer Mr Graham’s question. None looks likely to do get to the bottom of it. Small wonder, then, that those Americans anxious to know more about who attacked their political system last year, and what could be done to prevent a repeat, pin such hopes on a probe led by Robert Mueller, who was appointed special counsel in May 2017 with a broad remit to investigate whether Russians tried to swing the election, and whether anyone in America tried to help them.
[...]
People with long experience of how special counsels operate—including former federal prosecutors and government officials who have known Mr Mueller for years, who spoke to The Economist on condition of anonymity—warn that Americans may need to steel themselves for a more ambiguous, and unhappily political, ending to his work. To start with their simplest advice, it is a mistake to assume that leaks or purported leaks are a good way to map the investigation. Because official Washington is agog at the idea of members of Mr Trump’s inner circle or family facing prosecution, most leaks involve what one expert calls “Trump people stuff”. Mr Mueller’s most significant work could involve a counter-intelligence probe built around closely-held secret evidence of National Security Agency intercepts of Russians talking to Russians, they say.
[...]
,,,
But even the most dramatic revelations might not involve criminality, warns one person. One plausible scenario is that Mr Mueller finds that Russia’s government did indeed attack America, and that Mr Trump is more beholden to Russian interests than he admits, but does not find evidence of collusion that justifies prosecutions.
If Democrats take control of one or more chambers of Congress in the mid-term elections of 2018, then they could attempt to impeach Mr Trump, triggering yet another partisan fight. Alternatively, Mr Trump could review Mr Mueller’s report, declare it “fake news” and recommend to the Department of Justice that it should not be made public. These scenarios are just guesses, our sources concede. But one thing above all seems probable: for all that many Americans long for clarity, this saga will have a political ending.
Until then the diversion will become more idiotic, HRC emails and some malarkey about a meaningless 2010 uranium transaction.
Consider three key factor surrounding this body of evidence (tapes of Trump):
- First, there would be eavesdropping against hostile foreign actors representing a wide range of players, including Russia, China and other nations with ties to espionage against America or other crimes.
- Second, considering the strangely long list of Trump associates who have had business interests or contact with people having Russian ties, there is probably a substantial number of recordings when we add them all up!
- Third, as I mentioned in my most recent op-ed in The Hill, the Russians know everything about every contact of a Trump associate with every actor working for Russia. For practical purposes, there are probably two sets of Trump tapes in existence, one possessed by American authorities, the other possessed by Russian authorities. Either Russian or American actors could choose to leak, disclose or otherwise weaponize this information.
It is 100-percent certain, based on public sources, that some form of Trump tapes exist. We do not know exactly how many tapes the Feds have, or exactly what they would prove if disclosed.
thehill.com/...
This depiction of Donald Trump as a weak president would no doubt shock his ardent followers, especially since Trump usually covers his retreats with bluster. It might also be a surprise to those who have worried that he’s a would-be autocrat. It turns out that Trump has neither the wit nor the grit to seize power, and he may be too lazy and too uninterested in governing to make much of it if he did. (He can, however, empower by default cabinet officials who do know what to do with the power at their disposal—for example, Sessions.) But, except for his use of executive orders (often to countermand ones by Obama) and his cyber-bullying, Trump is essentially a passive participant in his own government. His campaign against the press is of concern, but thus far he’s not taken action to curb its independence, nor have his threats to do so had any discernible impact on the rigorous job the press is doing of holding his presidency to account. In fact, all things taken together, it begins to seem as if the strongman of the rallies was a convenient deception, a figure that Trump invented but couldn’t maintain when it came to making actual decisions in the Oval Office.
If this approach to governing keeps up, Trump may find himself once again on a newsweekly cover—the kind of prominence he craves—but this time with a sobriquet that once ordained one of his predecessors: “WIMP.”