Punxsatawney Phil

The Chronicles of Nunes: Somehow or other Trump was among the last to know of the existence of the so-called Nunes memo but once he heard about it, he jumped on the #release the memo bandwagon and that was before he had even read it.  Now that he’s read the memo, or at least looked at it’s cover page, he is convinced that it will help him discredit the Mueller investigation, and that it will justify the firing of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, the Republican former Federal Attorney from Baltimore who failed to pledge fealty to Trump and is now Trump’s fall guy of choice.  Chief of Staff Kelly is fully on board although he isn’t as convinced that the memo will lead to Rosenstein’s demise.  Let’s hope the increasingly complicit Kelly is right, at least about that last point.  In any case, despite strong opposition from FBI Director Wray, the rest of FBI leadership and Director of National Security Dan Coats, Trump is expected to sign off on the memo’s release today. Democrats remain apoplectic, Representative Adam Schiff is telling any anyone who’ll listen how bad this is and Minority Leader Pelosi has called for Nunes to be stripped of his Intelligence Committee chairmanship.  Speaker Ryan could care less.  How Wray will react remains up in the air.  He may do nothing, he may release a detailed rebuttal to the memo’s erroneous assertions or he may resign.  The resignation outcome is unlikely but to the extent that he really left in protest, fireworks and comparisons to Nixon’s Friday night massacre would ensue.  There isn’t any precedent for losing two FBI Directors in one year but Teflon Trump, the master of the news cycle, seems to be breaking new ground.  As to the memo, by inaccurately summarizing hundreds of pages of confidential information, pages that Devin Nunes hasn’t even read, it asserts that the FISA warrant that authorized the surveillance of Carter Page was inappropriately obtained, possibly as part of a Hillary Clinton plot because as we all know most FBI guys are closet Democrats and undying feminists who are so sad that she didn’t win the election.  In Nunes-Trump fantasy land Republican Rosenstein is brought into all of this because though he wasn’t involved with  the original warrant application, he did sign off on its renewal and most importantly the road to kneecapping Mueller goes through him.  In the Nunes-Trump universe, surveilling Page, a guy who had countless meetings with Russians, a number of whom were spies who were trying to recruit him to join the Kremlin team, was inappropriate.  Page, the curiously oddball, who managed to worm his way onto the Trump campaign foreign advisory team because all the real experts were all never-Trumpers, is loving all this.  At the end of the day, though the memo charade probably won’t bring down the Mueller investigation, it has increased Page’s fame and marketability in a Kato Kaelin kind of way.  As to Rosenstein, his government career is in serious jeopardy.

Russia, Russia, Russia:  Though Mueller, the quiet man of Washington, remains characteristically silent, he seems to be making progress.  Yesterday, three members of Rick Gate’s legal team withdrew from his case, The indicted Gates is Paul Manafort’s business associate and partner-in-crime.  His remaining lawyer is a hotshot white collar crime expert best known for negotiating plea deals for his clients so the expectation is that Gates has turned and is either in the process of or about to be in the process of spilling his guts about Manafort and Trump.  Whether Gates’ turn will put pressure on Manafort to follow suit is not known, but it doesn’t bode well for Trump and his not so merry band of Russophiles.  Notably, while Manafort was booted from Trump’s campaign in the summer of 2016, Gates stayed on for much longer so he would have been privy to more campaign shenanigans.  Though the Nunes memo got a disproportionate amount of press attention yesterday, Hope Hicks’s possible involvement in the cover-up hasn’t gone unnoticed.  She remains the focus of Mueller’s attention and to the extent that she really did suggest that Trump Jr’s emails could be hidden from prosecutors and then lied about it, she could be in bigly trouble.  No one gets to wear their $700 Stuart Weitzman over the suede knee boots in jail. 

Groundhog’s Day: Punxsutawney Phil is back and so is the need for another continuing budget resolution.  The last one is due to expire next week on February 8 and little progress has been made on resolving the DACA sticking point or any of the other outstanding issues.  Trump spent some quality time at Greenbrier with a fawning collection of Republican Senators and Congressmen.  Echoing last year’s Sean Spicer performance, he bragged about the “historically huge” number of people who watched his State of the Union address, called for the election of more Republicans so that he won’t have to waste any of his valuable non-golfing time on bipartisan negotiations with the Democrats and then tried to rally the troops to support his version of immigration legislation.  Though he may have convinced a few more immigration hardliners to jump on board, the rest of the crowd was less enthusiastic, some just want to focus on resolving DACA in exchange for wall funding, others don’t want to hear the word immigration during an election year.  The bottom line is that next week’s funding battle is likely to look depressingly familiar, nothing has changed since last month.  Shadow or not, this winter will never end.