You're Fired, Almost

Fireworks:  At various times over the past year a number of Democratic lawmakers have expressed concerns that Trump was about to fire Special Counsel Mueller, it turns out that their fears were warranted.  Last night the NY Times reported that in June, enraged over Mueller’s appointment and the Russia investigation, Trump ordered White House Counsel Don McGahn to direct the Justice Department to dismiss Mueller.  Trump cited an old dispute that Mueller may or may not have had over fees at his Virginia golf club, his work at the law firm that at that time also represented Jared Kushner and that he had recently interviewed Mueller the FBI director position vacated by the fired Comey as justification for the dismissal.  McGahn refused, saying that he would quit rather than fire Mueller because he disagreed with Trump’s reasoning and thought that the firing would have a “catastrophic effect” on his presidency.  When asked about this in Davos, Trump responded “Fake news, folks, fake news.  A typical NY Times fake story.”  Ty Cobb, his White House “Russia” lawyer was less direct, he said “we decline to comment out of respect for the Office of the Special Counsel and its process.”  In other words, it’s all true but we’d rather not admit it.  The NY Times story cites four unnamed sources, in all likelihood those sources have already spilled their guts to Mueller.  Last night, one pundit suggested that with the investigation heating up and his interview on the horizon, Trump may be once again thinking about firing Mueller and that McGahn, together with one of Trump’s Russia lawyers, may have leaked the story to the NY Times in an effort to cut Trump’s worst instincts off at the pass. Trump’s toady, Devon Nunes is doing his best to provide Trump with a few new excuses for dumping Mueller.  He’s still running around with his “earth shattering” memo, the one that “proves” that Mueller’s whole investigation is based on illegal warrants. He’s refusing to share the memo with his Senate counterpart, Intelligence Committee Chair Richard Burr, or the Justice Department but is still threatening to release it to the public. For the moment the “missing” FBI lovebird texts about the “secret society” won’t provide much cover for firing Mueller.  The texts have been retrieved from the technology hole they fell into and are likely to reveal more snide comments but little that is genuinely incriminating. Forget about joining that secret society of Trump skewers, it doesn’t exist. As to that upcoming interview with Mueller, Trump’s lawyers continue to walk back his comment that he would be more than willing to sit down with the Special Counsel and his team.  Yesterday, Trump’s lawyer Mike Dowd said that discussions about the interview rest with Trump’s legal team and that he will be making the final decision, not Trump. Fearing what he will say when pressed by Mueller, Trump’s friends, including Roger Stone, and his most ardent supporters, including Rush Limbaugh, are telling just about anyone who will listen that Trump shouldn’t sit for the interview. A subpoena could be in the offing.    

The DACA Negotiations:  Trump’s immigration proposal includes a path for citizenship for 1.8 million young undocumented  immigrants, a number that includes the DACA participants as well as others who would have qualified for DACA but never applied because of fears that revealing their information to the government heightened their risk of deportation.  The proposal also includes a $25 billion trust fund for a border wall, an amount that is ridiculous given budget constraints and the stupidity of building an actual wall, but an amount that could get approved to move the DACA stalemate forward.  The Trump plan has a number of controversial provisions that will be sticking points.  It terminates the ability of US citizens to apply for green cards for parents and siblings, limiting family reunification visas, what anti-immigrant advocates derisively call  “chain migration,” to spouses and minor children.  The plan would end the diversity lottery that provided 50,000 green cards to foreigners from countries with low immigration rates (i.e. the sh-thole countries).  Those slots would be applied to the existing waiting list of 4 million family members of green card holders.  The Graham-Durbin plan that Trump shot down had applied a portion of those visas to people who were losing their temporary protected status, people from places like Haiti, Trump’s not so favorite country. The Senate is expected to view the Trump proposal as a starting point for negotiations.  Immigration hardliners are likely to protest giving a path to citizenship to anyone. Democrats and other DACA supporters just want to resolve the DACA problem, don’t see the need to solve all of the outstanding immigration problems right now given the tight timetable and aren’t supportive of the more restrictive immigration provisions.  Trump is mercurial and could change his mind on everything and anything particularly if he pays close attention to his buddies at Fox News.  The clock is ticking, the February 8 deadline is right around the corner.

Russia, Russia, Russia:  Under pressure from Democratic Senators Whitehouse and Blumenthal, Senator Grassley, the Republican Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has agreed to release the transcripts of all of his committee’s interviews related to the infamous Trump Tower meeting with the Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya.  This means that we will get to read what Don Jr had to say about the meeting which should be interesting because the Democratic Senators  believe that he wasn’t all that truthful or forthcoming about what he knew and want to make sure that Mueller is up on whatever lies he told.  Grassley had previously refused to release the transcripts because he feared that their release would make it more difficult for him to convince Jared Kushner to show up for an interview.  At this point he’s concluded that as a result of Senator Feinstein’s earlier, unilateral release of the Fusion GPS transcripts,  Kushner is too “spooked” to voluntarily testify before the committee anyway.  While he and the Democrats tussle over whether or not to force Kushner’s appearance with a subpoena, he’s agreed to release the requested transcripts.  Should make for some interesting reading.

Davos Talks:  In an interview with his former “Apprentice” Piers Morgan, Trump sort of apologized for retweeting the hateful anti-Muslim message that originated from the far right hateful British First party by telling Morgan that “if you are telling me they’re horrible, I would certainly apologize if you’d like me to do that.”  He also said “I am often the least racist person anybody is going to meet” which may have been an admission that the rest of the time he is a racist.  Steve Mnuchin has also been fairly busy at Davos.  He’s been busying roiling the currency markets by talking down the US Dollar.  Travel, appliances, and designer stuff just got way more expensive.