This Was the Week the Mueller Probe Switched From "What If" to "What Else"

[babylonsister]

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/12/this-was-the-week-the-mueller-probe-switched-from-what-if-to-what-else.html

This Was the Week the Mueller Probe Switched From “What If” to “What Else”
Real-world conspiracies don’t unravel neatly. But this is a week we’ll look back on.

By Dahlia Lithwick
Dec 01, 20185:45 PM


At some point in the future, we will perhaps look back at this week as the week that brought a time switch in the Mueller probe. This was the week in which we learned that a lot of what had been reported as speculative, or reported but not taken seriously, or reported but forgotten, now maps onto real facts. This was the week that Trump confederates were shown to be liars or admitted to being liars. The president’s former lawyer has now established that he was lying to Congress to protect the president. The president, or “Individual 1” as he’s now described in legal filings, himself is now certainly a subject of great interest to federal investigators.

There are many things we do not know. But it is worth recognizing that we have gone from a state of being in which Trump and his campaign were lying about Russia if certain things were shown to be true, to a state of being in which the president and his campaign were simply lying about Russia. Is that in and of itself illegal? No. But whatever it is, this is not a witch hunt.

Instead, it’s clearer than ever that, in addition to an ongoing obstruction investigation, Mueller is now setting down markers around which of Trump’s advisers and associates and family were involved in Russian entanglements that may have compromised them and with efforts to cover those entanglements up. As former federal prosecutor Ken White put it in the Atlantic:

The president of the United States’ personal lawyer admitted to lying to Congress about the president’s business activities with a hostile foreign power, in order to support the president’s story. In any rational era, that would be earthshaking. Now it’s barely a blip.

snip//

It is worth recognizing that at the same rate that Bob Mueller is amassing a mountain of provable factual evidence, the president is continuing to construct his national political movement based on the principle that reality should mostly be a choose-your-own-ending kind of enterprise—see this week’s dismissal of his own government’s game-changing climate report. His response to the Cohen news was equally predictable—hoax, witch hunt, he just “lightly looked at doing a building somewhere in Russia,” all very cool and very legal. But as Democrats take control of key committees in Congress in a few weeks, it will prove harder and harder to claim that the witness testimony, and facts, and evidence that the public will see with their own eyes is actually a grand-scale “Deep State” conspiracy. That is all about to happen, and as this week’s deluge demonstrated, it is likely to happen at a pace that will be challenging for many of us to keep up with.

There is no doubting that for millions of Americans, nothing Robert Mueller ever reveals will ever dislodge anything. But even without the delicious caper-movie master-plan reveal scene, it is becoming clear that Mueller’s investigators have been and are building to something that cannot be easily discounted. You can decide for yourself if all this is the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning or merely the middle of forever. But what it is not is the end—thank you Sen. John Thune—or even the middle of the end. For anyone who still allows the facts to determine outcomes, even through the confusion and the hectic pace, this was the week it got real.

[NotASurfer]

1. So if it's at "a pace that will be challenging for many of us to keep up with"

(Next to last paragraph quoted there) Then I accept the challenge : )

[empedocles]

2. Hopefully, if possible, the evidentiary story will unfold over time,

for better digesting and optimum exposure of the evidence.

Mueller still has to analyze and utilize the House hearing transcripts that were apparently withheld by the 'cons.

[lilactime]

3. K&R

[Mc Mike]

4. Lightly looked at very cool business deals with a sanctioned Russian state bank.

Very not legal, conspiring with the US's enemies to violate sanctions.
Traitor.

[peekaloo]

5. haha from Witch Hunt to Which Hunt

as to which hunt is he following?

[wiggs]

6. Moscow Tower tip of the iceberg. Decades of money laundering will do him in. nt

[wiggs]

7. Along with election fraud. nt