Week 23: Mueller Bombs Trump's Big Week

[riversedge]

Lots of embedded links in this article--kind of a summary of what all happened this week.


Week 23: Mueller Bombs Trump's Big Week


https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/10/28/swamp-diary-jack-shafer-mueller-probe-215757

The president was thrilled to turn the tables on the Democrats, but news the grand jury had filed charges made the celebration look premature.

By JACK SHAFER

October 28, 2017



The Friday Cover
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Fortified by news in the Washington Post that the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee paid the oppo-research outfit Fusion GPS to produce the Steele Dossier, President Donald Trump overran his opponents’ positions this week. Splattering them with half-truths and hyperbole, Trump charged that “the whole Russian thing” was a “hoax” and an excuse for Democrats unwilling to accept that they lost the election. Then he rolled in a grenade, calling the dossier “fake.” Finally, he sparked his flamethrower to life and hosed his political foes with rhetorical fire by invoking the uranium deal in none-dare-call-it-conspiracy style, describing Uranium One’s sale to a Russian company during the Obama era as the equal of Watergate.

At least that’s how it looked in Trump’s version of the war movie until late Friday, when it turned out that the president was rushing to take the wrong hill. First, the conservative Washington Free Beacon website—funded by a billionaire from the never-Trump movement—’fessed to having paid for Fusion GPS’s original anti-Trump work before the Clinton Democrats took over the payments. Then CNN reported that special prosecutor Robert S. Mueller III had fired a bunker buster, bringing his first indictment in the probe. The identity of the person charged is under seal still, CNN reported, and will remain so until the person is arrested, possibly as soon as Monday. Will it be Paul Manfort, whom prosecutors reportedly all but promised to indict? It will be a long weekend of rampant speculation until the scoop is confirmed.

During the week, when the news still appeared to be on Trump’s side, he tried to make the Democrats’ funding of the dossier sound like a bombshell, but even casual news consumers knew from numerous accounts—including the first mention of the dossier in the press by Mother Jones’ David Corn—that they had paid for it. What gave the story dimension was the fact that attorney Marc E. Elias, who paid for the report at the behest of the Clinton campaign and the DNC, had lied about it for months, which made it look like they were trying to hide something. Elias has paid for his sin. Reporters don’t like being lied to, and when they are, they pour the scorn on, as lied-to-reporter Ken Vogel did on Twitter and in the pages of the New York Times. Trump welcomed the Post’s raw news with such enthusiasm he seemed to have forgotten that he and his spokespeople had gone on record saying the paper isn’t a legitimate news source.

His imaginary battlefield smoking and in disarray, Trump retreated to the White House to celebrate what looked like his public relations victories. As the New York Times reported, the three Hill committees investigating the Russia stuff can’t seem to get their acts together. The Republican-led House Intelligence Committee, as the Daily Beast noted, was “blocking and tackling for Trump” by turning its Trump-Russia probe into a counter-investigation, grilling former Obama administration officials Samantha Power and Susan Rice on the “unmasking“ issue, seeking to discredit the dossier, and digging into the uranium allegations. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) went rogue on the Senate Judiciary Committee chair Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) by requesting information from Facebook, Twitter, and the White House without asking him first. Meanwhile, GOP lawmakers were urging an early end to the probes. “Wrap it up,” Trump loyalist Gov. Chris Christie said Friday of the Mueller Russia investigation before news of the indictment hit.

If the Trump Tower scandal could be boiled down to a war of words, we would have crowned Trump the winner months ago because he’s so dang good at jaw-jamming. Whenever accused, he assumes the role of the accuser, deflecting charges by hurling them back at his challengers. ............................................

[Sneederbunk]

1. If Mueller had not bombed it Trump would have.

[Sunlei]

2. How does it feel Mr Trump to know the Republican party knew all the stuff about you for YEARS?

How about you voters? Republican party hid their Private Investigation -"Vetting of Trump" from their own voters.

[Hortensis]

3. Useful summary, thanks! Regarding that Vanity Fair

article linked/relinked to, I'm reminded of the peculiar gap between at very least someone closely related to the Clinton campaign OWNING the Steele dossier and Steele giving parts of it to his own contacts in the FBI, then after the FBI (shockingly) failed to act, "not knowing who to trust," giving it to David Korn of Mother Jones.

It's very hard to believe Steele's client did not authorize both transactions since at that point they were paying for the "dossier." Steele is reportedly a very well regarded, high level investigator who has a reputation to guard (i.e., he doesn't unethically give away information commissioned by his clients without their permission). But that is a gap in information.

Of course, at that point it was believed that Hillary would be our next president, and it would have been appropriate to keep her name well out of what was expected to be a huge scandal on the right. (Her job would be to steer America in a return to normalcy where these events would once again be unthinkable.) So it was John McCain, too high level for the FBI to ignore and coordinating with British intelligence, (re-)presented the entire dossier to the FBI (one possibly longer and far more detailed than the 35 pages that have been published?).

And now, regarding the FBI's lack of action on the two five-alarm memos Steele passed to it, the dragging out of the phony email investigation all through the campaign, even though Comey admitted early on that nothing would be found, and then Comey's subsequent public and highly unethical (at the VERY least) actions against Clinton running up to the election...

We really, really need another investigation. I believe this internal problem is potentially every bit as serious as Russia's meddling. And for that, we need to win control of Congress in 2018.

[yurbud]

4. problem with "you did it too" strategy: even if true, Trump is still himself

an incompetent, ignorant, emotionally incontinent narcissist.