Like Gotti

Donald Trump is crowing and taking a victory lap this morning. And we'll hear a lot more crowing in the days to come. While it's true that Robert Mueller found no evidence of a conspiracy with Russia, it's not true that Mueller cleared Trump of obstruction of justice charges. Trump claims that's what Mueller did. But, as usual, Trump is lying.

What Mueller did was leave the decision to prosecute Trump for obstruction in Barr's hands. Given Barr's previous statements about the Mueller enquiry and his view of the president's expansive powers, there is the distinct possibility that Trump may walk away unscathed.

It's an indication of how thoroughly the American system has been corrupted under Trump -- which happens to be the subject of Andrew Sullivan's latest column in New York Magazine. Sullivan writes:

Talk about “ripe for tyranny”! And that, it seems to me, is the real salience of the tweets. Trump is showing his foes and friends that he can say anything, abuse anyone, lie about anything, break every norm of decency, propriety and prudence — and suffer no consequences at all. It’s all a dominance ritual. And just think about what he has actually claimed: that the heads of the FBI and DOJ engaged in treasonous and illegal activity; that Russia, despite the unanimous judgment of U.S. and Western intelligence, did not attempt to intervene in the 2016 election; and that the opposition party cannot “legitimately” win an election. The latter — repeated over the years — is a direct assault on liberal democracy, and on the integrity and legitimacy of the entire system. It opens up the very real possibility that Trump will not concede an election he loses. In any functioning democracy, such statements would end any politician’s career. They merely burnish Trump’s hold.

In this post-truth world, where Trump has allied with social media to create an alternate reality, lies work. This week, he approached the press corps simply repeating, “No Collusion! No Collusion!” And he will continue to say this regardless of what the Mueller report may reveal, because it doesn’t matter what actually happened. Whatever Trump says will become the truth for 40 percent of the country, while the expectations of the opposition, troubled by pesky empiricism, may well be deflated. Fox, a de facto state propaganda channel, will do the rest.

This is a dark time for the United States, indeed, for the world. However, there is a ray of hope. If Washington can't deal with Trump, perhaps New York State can. There are a raft of indictments waiting for Trump in New York. Prosecutors will deal with Trump under the RICO statutes. Like New York mobsters before him, prosecutors will attempt to take his organization apart.

It took a while for them to catch up to John Gotti. But, like Gotti, Trump may die in jail.

Image: The New York Times

Getting Closer To The Fire

On Friday, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein announced the indictment of 12 members of the Russian GRU for attempting to sabotage the American election. Donald Trump knew the indictments were coming. But, when they were announced, he was unimpressed. Andrew Coyne writes:

“I think I would have a very good relationship with President Putin if we spent time together,” Trump mused the next morning at a joint press conference with British Prime Minister Theresa May. He would, that is, were it not for “the rigged witch hunt.” By which he meant the investigation, under special counsel Robert Mueller, of possible collusion between the Russian government and members of the Trump campaign to throw the 2016 election to the Republicans.

All along the way, Trump has been monumentally incurious about Russian involvement in the election:

A thought experiment. Let us suppose the Trump administration were entirely blameless. How would an entirely blameless government ordinarily be expected to react at even the first whiff of suspicion that a foreign power, let alone an acknowledged adversary, had tampered with U.S. elections? It would be leading the charge. It would have ordered its own inquiry. It would have demanded answers from the Russian government. And the more evidence it had that its suspicions were true — long before the laying of actual criminal charges — the more ready it would be to impose penalties of some kind.

Yet at every turn the Trump administration and its supporters have done the opposite. They have not just been stunningly incurious about the worst American intelligence debacle since the Rosenbergs — they have been actively hostile to any attempt to get to the bottom of it.

The closer Mueller gets, the more Mr. Trump appears to have something to hide. So far, there has been lots of smoke. But it's clear that Mueller is getting closer to the fire.

Image: The Nation

The Truth Will Out

David Leonhardt writes that, for most of his career, Donald Trump has been able to lie with impunity:

Throughout his business and political careers, Donald Trump has had an important advantage: He is willing to lie, frequently and shamelessly.

Most other people in public life view reality as a limitation. Trump does not. If telling falsehoods is more convenient or helpful to him than telling the truth, he tells falsehoods. It’s worked out very well for him — making his business look more successful than it was, helping him land a primetime television show and, of course, allowing him to win the most powerful political office on earth.

Yesterday, the paper for which Leonhardt works -- The New York Times -- released a list of questions Mueller wants to ask Trump. They show that Mueller knows with whom he is dealing:

The list of questions that Robert Mueller wants to ask Trump, which was reported yesterday by The Times, shows that Mueller understands Trump’s ways. There are several dozen questions on the list that Mueller gave to Trump’s lawyers, and many of them are highly detailed. But they revolve around two themes: obstructing justice and lying.

The questions try to pin down Trump’s behavior and to tether him to reality in ways he rarely is. And the questions go into great detail about Trump’s efforts to impede justice.

They reveal that Trump can't talk his way out of the mess he has created for himself. The danger -- as several psychiatrists have noted -- is that, when Trump is cornered, he lashes out and acts irrationally. One way or another, we're approaching the moment of truth.

Image: CNN

That Meeting In The Seychelles

Robert Mueller has another cooperating witness. His name is George Nader. Mueller is interested in Nader because of a meeting he attended. Andrew Prokop reports in Vox that Nader met with Erik Prince and a Russian representative in the Seychelles:

Nader helped organize, and attended, that curious Seychelles meeting on January 11, 2017, shortly before Trump’s inauguration. The meeting brought together Erik Prince, Trump donor and founder of the private security company Blackwater, with Kirill Dmitriev, who manages a Russian sovereign wealth fund and is thought to be close to Vladimir Putin.

Prince is the brother of Trump's Secretary of Education, Betsy deVos:

Anonymous sources have long claimed to reporters that the purpose of the Seychelles meeting was for Trump’s team to covertly communicate with Putin’s team. After all, it happened just weeks after Jared Kushner reportedly told the Russians that he wanted to set up a backchannel through which they could communicate.

But Prince has hotly denied that that’s what happened, including in sworn testimony last year. He said he just made the Seychelles trip for business reasons, that he was in no way representing Trump, and that the meeting with Dmitriev was both entirely unplanned on his end and completely uneventful.

It appears, however, that Nader is contradicting Prince's story:

The Washington Post’s Sari Horwitz and Devlin Barrett reported Wednesday that Nader is saying the meeting was “an effort to establish a back channel between the incoming administration and the Kremlin” — and that Mueller has other evidence to that effect, as well.

If Prince was acting on the Trump’s team behalf, it would demolish months’ worth of denials from both him and the White House that he was doing any such thing. And it would raise serious questions about just why, exactly, all parties involved were so set on keeping the Seychelles meeting secret.

There is a clear pattern to all of this. When Trump and his associates issue a denial, there is usually something percolating up to the top. And Mueller captures everything -- even the last drop.

Image: Vox.com

The OJ Defence

Republicans have Robert Mueller in their sites. They plan to mount the OJ Defence. Michael Harris reminds his readers how it worked:

Instead of allowing the prosecution to try their client on the evidence, Johnnie Cochran and company managed to put LAPD investigators on trial. It was the judicial world’s equivalent of a Hail Mary pass. 

In the face of Cochran’s relentless attack on the police, buttressed by full courtroom theatrics, prosecutor Marsha Clark’s mountain of evidence against Simpson was obscured behind all the legal smoke.

An email from FBI investigator Peter Strzok has been uncovered which calls Donald Trump an "idiot." When it was brought to Mueller's attention, Mueller removed Strrzok from the investigation. Now the Trump propaganda machine is going after Mueller. Harris writes:

Given Strzok’s role in the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email scandal, they are now demanding that the Justice Department appoint a second special counsel to investigate Mueller. 

Their position is at once absurd and another example of obstruction of justice by the Republicans. For one thing, Strzok’s texts were discovered by an internal investigation conducted by the Inspector General’s Office of the DOJ. When Mueller learned of them, Strzok was removed from the investigation. Does that sound like Mueller has it in for the president? Isn’t it proof of the exact opposite — that the former FBI director wouldn’t tolerate even the appearance of bias on his team? 

Secondly, if the premise of Congressional Republicans’ argument is that Strzok’s political leanings mean that he is unfit to conduct a fair investigation, then what about others who have clearly expressed their political preferences? 

Robert Mueller himself is a lifelong Republican. Does that make him unfit to lead the investigation? At the time of his appointment, Senator Lindsey Graham and Republican kingpin Newt Gingrich raved about his stellar credentials. Now they say he’s “corrupt”?

Trump and the Republicans are all about distraction. They're desperate to change the channel away from the big picture -- which is getting darker:

It is all about obscuring the clearly visible mountain range of lies told by Trump and his people about their Russian connections. It’s all about the serial instances of Donald Trump trying to obstruct justice, from lying about the Russia connection to pressuring James Comey to let the case against Michael Flynn go.

A showdown is coming. And the OJ Defence is at the heart of it.

Image: You Tube