End of the Beginning

The One Two Punch:  You’ve got to give it to Special Counsel Mueller, he takes his job very seriously.  As expected, early yesterday morning former campaign manager Paul Manafort and his long-time associate Rick Gates, who also served as a member of the Trump team, outlasting Manafort by several months, were arrested.  Mueller’s twelve count indictment includes charges accusing Manafort and Gates of money laundering, conspiracy and failure to report income.  Significantly, the laundered money traveled through the Cyprus bank route favored by Putin’s Russian oligarch crowd.  Almost immediately Trump tweeted “Sorry, but this is years ago, before Paul Manafort was part of the Trump campaign. But why aren't Crooked Hillary & the Dems the focus?????” following up with “also, there is NO COLLUSION.” His way of expressing relief that the charges had nothing to do with the campaign or playing footsie with the Kremlin, because Trump doesn’t count financial interactions with Manafort colleague and Putin crony Oleg Deripaska as anything unusual.  Before he had a chance to down a celebratory Diet Coke, Mueller delivered the second, more deadly, punch disclosing that over the summer he had very discretely arrested George Papadopoulos, the not so expert foreign affairs advisor who had worked on the Trump campaign and who Trump had once introduced to the press as a really smart person.  Papadopoulos subsequently pled guilty to having lied to the FBI during three FBI interviews, one of those definite no-no’s that can land you in bigly trouble. 

The Back Story:  In March, almost immediately after joining the Trump campaign team, Papadopoulos responded to moves from a number of Russian cut-outs, including one representing herself as Putin’s niece and another who was allegedly a professor. They approached him, asking for his help facilitating a meeting with Trump to advance Russian-US relations and suggested that they might have some damaging Hillary Clinton emails, which was odd because at the time they offered up the “dirt” no one on Hillary’s side even knew that their servers had been hacked.  That is no one except the Russians, who knew because they were the hackers, but they hadn’t yet released their bounty to the guys at WikiLeaks, who one month later disseminated the Democrats emails on the internet.  Papadopoulos emailed requests for meetings to various and sundry Trumpsters hoping to set something up with the Russians.  Some of this went public over the summer, but at that time the Trump party line was that no one took that guy Papadopoulos, who by then was called a useless volunteer, up on his offer.  However, yesterday we learned that at least three people in the Trump campaign were interested.  One of those people appears to have been Manafort, whose response to Papadopoulos’ offer, via email of course, was “We need someone to communicate that D.T. is not doing these trips.  It should be someone low level in the campaign so as not to send a signal.”  Another was Sam Clovis, a climate denier who is now a nominee for a high level Department of Agriculture position, but was then a senior campaign official, who told Papadopoulos to “make the trip if it’s feasible.”  Papadopoulos is awaiting sentencing but is expected to get a suspended sentence as payback for being “helpful” to Mueller, in other word he’s been flipped and the reason no one knew he had been arrested is because under Mueller’s direction he’s been quietly interacting with other Trump team members, possibly wearing a wire and getting them to implicate themselves.  During yesterday’s press conference Sarah Huckabee Sanders ignored all of this, stuck with the party line that Manafort’s crimes all predate the campaign, insisted that there was no collusion, said that Mueller’s investigation is nearing completion and basically continued to dig herself into liar’s hell. Trump lawyer, Ty Cobb, insisted that Trump is fine with Mueller and has no plans to fire him any time soon.  The Washington Post reports that Trump sits upstairs at the White House with the TV on, fuming over the indictments and trying to control his impulse to do away with Mueller, an act that Mueller has made almost impossible with these indictments.  Manafort and Gates are out on $10 million and $5 million bail, respectively, only allowed to leave their homes to go to the doctor, their lawyers or church.  Anyone who’s ever spoken with Papadopoulos is now in a state of panic.  It’s not just Trumpsters and Republicans who’ve been impacted by Mueller’s investigation.  Tony Podesta, brother of John Podesta of Clinton fame, who worked on one of Manafort’s Russia friendly Ukraine assignments and may have provided some source material to Mueller, has stepped down from his eponymous consulting firm. To paraphrase Senator McCain, the shoes are falling, and the millipede has many more feet.

Troops Transgender and Not:  While attention was focused on Mueller and the indictments, a Washington DC Federal judge temporarily blocked Trump’s policy prohibiting transgender troops from serving in the military, ruling that it was “based on disapproval of transgender people” and was not consistent with the military’s own conclusions that having transgender troops doesn’t impact military readiness.  The judge cited the way that Trump had announced his decision and the lack of any facts to support the ban as reasons for her decision.  The judge did let stand the prohibition against funding for sex reassignment surgery.  Bowe Bergdahl may be another beneficiary of Trump’s tweet diarrhea.  He is due to be sentenced for desertion during his service in Afghanistan and the judge is taking into consideration the impact that Trump’s verbal and tweet attacks during the 2016 campaign may have had on his trial.  So who would have guessed, rash decisions by tweet are not the way to go? 

Kelly, Oh Kelly:  Chief of Staff Kelly appeared on right wing pundit Laura Ingraham’s FOX TV program last night.  Among other things he defended Confederate statues telling her that “Robert E. Lee was an honorable man who gave up his country to fight for his state.” He then applied the “there are fine people on both sides” excuse to the Civil War, suggesting that a better job of compromise might have avoided the war between the states.  By compromise, does he mean that another one hundred years of slavery would have been fine with all those fine people?  It looks like his inaccurate recollection and nasty comments about Congresswoman Frederica Wilson were not such an aberration after all.  Sigh….