It seems the picture is growing more clear as the Manafort trial goes to the Jury, Trump and his authoritarian allies are becoming more and more worried and panicked, enough to take more and more drastic steps to protect themselves from the ultimate abrupt end of the Trump administration with Impeachment, Removal, Indictment and Prosecution.
And they aren’t shy about it, as Trump himself just admitted to the Wall Street Journal that his yanking of Brennan’s Security Clearance — without any legitimate reason, rationale or process involving the Dan Coates the Director of National Intelligence or Gina Haspel the CIA Director — wasn’t about any of his “wild comments” it was really all about the “Witch Hunt.”
During a 20-minute impromptu interview with the Wall Street Journal Wednesday, Trump blamed former CIA Director John Brennan — and the nine other, notably Democratic, former officials whose security clearances he’s reviewing — for starting the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Brennan was one of the officials who informed Trump about Russian meddling just before his inauguration.
“I call it the rigged witch hunt, (it) is a sham,” he told the WSJ.“And these people led it! … So I think it’s something that had to be done.”
So basically this is nothing less than another attempt at witness intimidation against several of those people who could potentially testify against him in an obstruction case — particularly Comey whose contemporaneous notes where the catalyst for the Special Counsel and Andrew McCabe who was in the room during at least one of Trump’s phone calls trying to get his named cleared in the Russia probe.
Earlier this week Trump Television-Attorney Rudy Giuliani appeared again on Chris Cuomo and dropped a ton of whoppers on the public, especially the claim the “Truth is in the eye of the beholder.”
The host referenced Giuliani’s recent comments claiming Trump never asked Comey to “go easy” on his disgraced former national security adviser Michael Flynn — a talking point he appeared to have introduced just this week.
“I cannot find you ever saying ‘the president did not have that conversation with Comey’ until this week,” Cuomo said.
“I did all the time,” Giuliani responded, “every time I gave a hypothetical.”
At the conclusion of the interview, the concept of truth in Trump world came up once more.
After the lawyer echoed Trump’s claim that no president had ever been as mistreated or maligned as he and backed it up with “evidence” of his success, Cuomo appeared to suggest that the president has excelled in lying.
“If fact-counting is anything,” the host said, “we’ve never had anybody with the level of mendacity that he has.”
“It’s in the eye of the beholder,” Giuliani said while laughing.
“No,” Cuomo concluded, “facts are not in the eye of the beholder.”
Rudy also made the false claim that both Comey and Andrew McCabe had claimed under oath that they were not “unduly influenced” by anything Trump had said to them — which is flatly wrong.
Coats reportedly told associates in March that Trump had attempted to enlist him in efforts to push back against the investigation of disgraced national security adviser Mike Flynn.
He told Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), the committee’s ranking Democrat, that he did not want to discuss the matter in an open hearing, but he insisted he had “never felt pressure to intervene or interfere in any way.”
[...]
Afterward, Coats told other officials that Trump had asked him to get Comey to back off the investigation of Flynn and other campaign associates — but the intelligence official declined.
When Comey testified in 2017 it was before he was ultimately fired and before he'd released his memos so he wasn’t even asked about Trump trying to influence him because no one even suspected that that might have been the case.
When McCabe testified a few days after Comey was fired he wouldn’t characterize any of Trump’s discussions with Comey most likely because he knew very well that those conversations were part of Mueller ongoing investigation.
Comey originally had been set to testify Thursday about worldwide threats, but McCabe appeared in his place, offering assurances to lawmakers that if there was any interference he would inform them. When asked by Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., if he would promise to tell them of any moves to interfere in the probe, McCabe said: “I absolutely do.”
McCabe also denied reports that Comey had requested more resources for the Russia probe in the days leading up to his termination, with McCabe saying he believes the probe to be “adequately resourced” and adding that normally the FBI will not request resources for a single investigation.
Earlier in the hearing, McCabe declined to confirm if Comey had told Trump that he was not the subject of an investigation by the FBI. McCabe told Chairman Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C. he couldn’t comment on conversations between the two.
So neither Comey or McCabe had said their weren’t “improperly influenced.”
Giuliani also accused Comey of violating "Misprision of Felony" for not reporting what Trump asked him to do about Flynn, but that law requires you to report it to the FBI, and he had immediately wrote a memo — actually an email — and shared it with his staff and counsel, so yeah, he “reported it” to the FBI.
He also claimed he “knows Omaraso is lying” about Trump knowing about the Clinton emails early, “I was closer to Trump than she was” which is highly ironic because both Papadopoulos and Sessions knew about the Russia having the DNC/Hillary emails after they were informed by Prof. Mifsud at least two months before Wikileaks released copies of them and since they didn’t inform the FBI they are the ones liable for Misprision of Felony.
18 U.S. Code § 4 - Misprision of felony
Whoever, having knowledge of the actual commission of a felony cognizable by a court of the United States, conceals and does not as soon as possible make known the same to some judge or other person in civil or military authority under the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.
If Trump knew too, as Omarosa alleges, then he’s liable for that charge also and obviously Giuliani knows that because that’s why he tried to paint that same charge against Comey. Without really realizing it Omarosa just happened hit touch on the real third rail of this case, and Giuliani is savvy enough to try and shutdown her allegation quick before it sticks, since that one fact alone is devastating to their defense.
On top of Giuliani’s flim-flam you also have members of the Faux and Fools network cooking up a fresh new deep state theory against Mueller.
When conservative radio host Mark Levin appeared on Fox News’ “Hannity” last week to discuss the latest in the Russia investigation, he ended up baffling even some of his most conservative allies.
“Robert Mueller is a greater threat to this republic and the Constitution than anything Vladimir Putin did during the campaign,” Levin said. “And I am no fan of Vladimir Putin.”
While bringing up a basket of old claims about the Mueller investigation, Levin did not say specifically what made Mueller a larger threat than Putin.
Still, the following night, “Hannity” guest host Jeanine Pirro made the same comparison.
“Is Mueller a greater threat than Putin to this country?” Pirro asked Fox commentator Dan Bongino.
“Well, he’s a serious threat,” Bongino replied.
So Mueller isn’t doing a legitimate investigation, he’s just out to “get Trump” and knock him out of the White House because — jealousy.
And it seems according to several interviews done by Politico that more and more Republicans are expecting Trump to be Impeached especially if Democrats take over the House and they expect for that to backfire on them in 2020.
The idea gaining currency on the right is that Trump can be Bill Clinton, not Richard Nixon. It depends on a delicate political calculation — that a Republican-held Senate would never follow a Democratic House and vote to remove Trump, and that voters tired of the long-running Russia scandal will, as they did in the late 1990s with Clinton’s Monica Lewinsky scandal, want to move on.
The notion has surfaced spontaneously among a diverse set of conservatives, including politicians with Trump’s ear and young ultraloyalists of the president whose institutional knowledge of the GOP begins with its new standard-bearer. They’re also the die-hards who aren’t afraid to align themselves with pro-Trump positions even before the president has warmed to them himself.
In interviews, more than a dozen Republican politicians, activists and consultants — including some current and former Trump campaign aides with direct lines to the president — said they are increasingly convinced a Democratic House victory in the midterms and subsequent impeachment push would backfire and ultimately help the president in 2020.
“If they take the House, he wins big,” Barry Bennett, a former senior adviser to the Trump campaign, told POLITICO. “The market always overcorrects.
In Republi-world angry out-of-control Democrats, led by Mueller, will try to impeach Trump on a pack of ginned up charges using a discredited dossier and untrustworthy fired, disgruntled former Federal employees in a dark deep state plot to destroy the Trump administration which is doomed to futile failure in the Senate and will only push independents away from them and give Trump a rocket-boost to re-election in 2020. It has nothing to with truth, facts, or a mile’s long trial of evidence, text and emails.
Yeah, ok, that’s a neat theory.
But if only Trump wasn’t directly and personal involved in sending members of his staff out to begin negotiating directly with Russians in violation of the Logan Act and U.S. sanctions.
Marianna Kakaounaki, an investigative reporter for the Greek newspaper Kathimerini, said Papadopoulos told her that Trump called him personally after he was hired to the campaign in March 2016. Trump later met with Papadopoulos one-on-one, when the aide told Trump about his ongoing efforts to set up a meeting between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, Kakaounaki said.
Because if that had happened he was part of a corrupt criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States right from the beginning and then if he chose to aid and abet Russia’s criminal enterprise against the U.S. election after the fact by repeatedly denying their involvement even though he was specifically shown text messages indicating that the entire operation was personally ordered by Putin back on January 6, 2017, that would be bad. Real bad.
Oh yeah, right — he was shown that.
According to the New York Times, two weeks prior to the Presidential Inauguration in Jan. 2017, Donald Trump was shown raw evidence including data and text messages about the Russian hack and that Vladimir Putin knew about it. He has since been trying to cloud the evidence for reasons still not yet know.
The Times says Trump “was shown highly classified intelligence” proving Putin had personally ordered the cyberattacks to sway the 2016 American election. “The evidence included texts and emails from Russian military officers and information gleaned from a top-secret source close to Mr. Putin, who had described to the C.I.A. how the Kremlin decided to execute its campaign of hacking and disinformation.”
Which means that all his incessant claims since that time that there was “no collusion" were all acts of aiding and abetting the Russian crime after the fact by drawing suspicion away from them when he already knew for fact that they were involved not just because of what the Intel community told him in January, but also because of what Mifsud told Papadopoulos months earlier. If Mueller takes this case to Congress with the level of evidence he brought to the Manafort trial, well, I would say “good luck” to any GOP Senators who would vote in support of Trump after he’s been shown to have been a veritable Traitor to America this entire time.
The GOP is betting that the smear campaign against Mueller and the intimidation of all of his possible witnesses from Comey to Christopher Steele will put enough doubt in the mind of the public that it doesn’t matter what they come up with against Trump and how much evidence they have. They’re betting on “jury nullification” in the Senate.
I’m well aware that getting 10-12 GOP Senators to do the right and moral thing to protect the nation is probably far too much to ask, but at the very least they should be thinking twice about it, rather than relishing the idea as some of them seem to be now.
They should be seriously sweating this out, because if Mueller does even a halfway decent job it’s not going to be anywhere near as easy as they imagine.