Mueller Is Laying Siege to the Trump Presidency

[babylonsister]

Last edited Tue Dec 4, 2018, 03:48 PM - Edit history (1)

Mueller Is Laying Siege to the Trump Presidency
It won’t be a single news event that takes down the president.
6:00 AM ET
Mikhaila Fogel
Associate editor of Lawfare
Benjamin Wittes
Editor in chief of Lawfare and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution


snip//

We need to stop thinking of it as a fragile structure waiting for the right poke to fall in on itself. Think instead of the myriad investigations and legal proceedings surrounding the president as a multi-front siege on a walled city that is, in fact, relatively well fortified.

Siege warfare is not a matter of striking precisely the correct blow at the correct moment at a particular stone in the wall. It is a campaign of degradation over a substantial period of time. While those inside the fortified city may rely only on the strength of their walls and their stored resources, the attackers can take their time. Volleys of projectiles—arrows or trebuchets—pepper the city walls and those atop them, while the strength of the defending army diminishes as soldiers slip away and food dwindles. Moreover, active conflict is an episodic, not a constant, feature of siege warfare; the enemy army can encamp outside the walled city and blockade it without firing a shot. Over time, the walls and defending forces become degraded to such a degree that the invaders are able to scale the walls and sack the city.

No, Mueller and his forces are not a Mongol horde, but the Trump White House is very much under siege.

Mueller’s army isn’t the only force encircling Trump’s fortress, but it is the largest and most active force, and it actually has several distinct encampments. One contingent of Mueller’s forces is charged with investigating efforts by the Russian government to interfere with the 2016 election. In this capacity, the special counsel’s office has indicted individuals associated with the Internet Research Agency, a Russian troll farm that has spread disinformation and propaganda on social media. His office also indicted 13 members of the Russian military intelligence organization, the GRU, in connection with deliberately hacking into the Democratic National Committee server and passing the fruits of that hack to WikiLeaks “to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election.”

snip//

Last week’s events revealed another force surrounding the castle, also under Mueller’s command: the investigation of Trump’s efforts to do financial business in Russia. The president, while insisting there was “NO Collusion with Russia,” admitted that he “lightly looked” into building a tower in Moscow months into the 2016 campaign. Trebuchets from the Cohen front sounded into Friday evening, when Cohen’s lawyers filed a sentencing memorandum as a follow-up to the guilty plea. In the memo, Cohen’s legal team said that Cohen “remained in close and regular contact with White House–based staff and legal counsel to Client-1,” another euphemism for Trump. It’s unclear to what extent this investigation is one and the same with the main Mueller collusion force, but it is evidently an active matter, too.

Mueller’s forces also include a major encampment focused on obstruction of justice. This force has so far not done anything the public can see, but it may be getting ready to launch some kind of report against the castle. And this report, whenever it materializes, may prove devastating. But note that the day such a report is completed will also not be the “big one”—the cataclysmic event that causes the house of cards to collapse. After all, any report would likely have to undergo a lengthy approval process, either from within the Justice Department or by the courts, or both. It might have to be approved by Matthew Whitaker, the acting attorney general, before being released. It may have significant classified components. Even if the findings in this report are of bombshell proportions, given that it is unlikely Mueller will reject Office of Legal Counsel guidelines against the indictment of a sitting president, the damage that bombshell will inflict will ultimately be determined by Congress, and its detonation would likely be substantially delayed.

more...

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/12/no-single-news-event-will-take-down-trump/577264/

[Sedona]

1. K&R Well worth a longish read

[Danascot]

2. A seige is a great metaphor for how trump will fall

Hopefully the walls are becoming unstable.

"So what will the big one look like, if not some Mueller-lobbed bombshell? When the walls are finally breached, how will we know it really is the beginning of the end? Here’s a hint: The big one will not be a legal development, an indictment, or a plea. It will be a political development: that moment when the American political system decides not to tolerate the facts available to it any longer. What does that look like? It looks like impeachment. It looks like enough Republicans breaking with the president to seriously jeopardize his chances of renomination or re-election. The legal developments will degrade the walls. But only this sort of political battering ram can breach them."