More on the "Witch Hunt"

Mueller Time: Nothing about the Russia investigation follows a straight line so yesterday’s revelations, while surprising, shouldn’t be all that shocking.  The day began with another one of Trump’s Mueller focused attack tweets: “Terrible Gang of Angry Democrats. Look at their past, and look where they come from. The now $30,000,000 Witch Hunt continues and they’ve got nothing but ruined lives. Where is the Server? Let these terrible people go back to the Clinton Foundation and “Justice” Department!” The tweet was hostile but Trump’s Mueller tweets are always hostile so while it raised a few eyebrows, most wrote it off to general Trump lunacy.  Then the unexpected happened.  First, The Guardian reported that Paul Manafort had secretly visited WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy in London in 2014, 2015 and in the spring of 2016 around the time that he joined Trump’s campaign. To the extent the Guardian report is true, the implication is that Manafort was in on Assange’s plan to release the Russian sourced DNC emails earlier than anyone knew, he may have even sought his Trump campaign position to facilitate the process.  So far Manafort and Assange have denied the accuracy of the Guardian story and no other news outlets have been able to confirm its veracity but given how many security camera’s are focused on the area around the Ecuadorean embassy, Manafort’s visits, though not entered into the embassy visitors log, should be easy to prove to the extent that someone in British Intelligence wants to share videos and given the Guardian story, maybe they already have? Second,  conspiracy wingnut, Roger Stone associate Jerome Corsi, who had reported that he was on the verge of reaching a plea agreement with Mueller only to announce that he had changed his mind, shared some draft court documents that had been provided to him as part of his “failed” negotiations with Mueller.  Those documents reveal details of his communication with Stone including an August 2016 email where he reports to Stone that  “Word is friend in embassy plans 2 more dumps, one shortly after I'm back. 2nd in Oct. Impact planned to be very damaging."  The friend is Assange and the dumps refer to the DNC emails.  In another email Stone tells Corsi to "Get to (Assange) [a]t Ecuadorian Embassy in London and get the pending (WikiLeaks) emails.”   Corsi had lied about the content of this communication during his interviews with Mueller’s team; the plea deal that he rejected related to those lies.  As if the Manafort-Assange connection and the Corsi-Stone email exchange weren’t enough new plot points for one day of the Russia saga, late yesterday the New York Times revealed that pursuant to a joint defense pact that under normal conditions would have gone away once Manafort agreed to his plea deal Mueller, one of Manafort’s lawyers has continued to provide Trump’s legal team with regular updates about what Manafort has been telling Mueller’s team, particularly what he’s been “discussing” with Andrew Weissman, the toughest and most persistent prosecutor on what Trump calls Mueller’s “group of Angry Democrats.” In all likelihood, that shared information is the source of Rudy Giuliani’s assertions that nothing that Manafort has told Mueller implicates Trump. The assumption is that Manafort was trying to provide Mueller with enough information to minimize his jail time while at the same time spinning lies and withholding enough about what he knows about Trump’s knowledge of, among other things, the infamous Trump Tower, in order to smooth his path to a Trump pardon.  Manafort is now on the outs with Mueller and though he might eventually get that Trump pardon, it’s not a sure thing and in any case won’t get him back the millions of dollars that have already been confiscated nor will it do much to absolve him of the related New York and Virginia crimes that he has already pleaded guilty to. As to Trump, he provided Mueller with written answers to some questions last week, those answers may well have been based on responses coordinated to appear consistent with what Manafort had been telling Andrew Weissman during their “chats.” It’s also quite possible that Mueller knows that some of those things were based on jointly crafted lies.  That would be a bigly problem for Trump who at least for now still asserts that he has no plans to stop Mueller’s investigation.  For now.   

More Trumpisms:  Trump spent some of his down time yesterday talking with the Washington Post.  Apparently he is very unhappy with Jerome Powell, his hand-picked Federal Reserve Chairman, blaming his decision to raise interest rates for General Motor’s decision to close plants and cut 15000 US jobs.  To be clear GM’s actions have absolutely nothing to do with Trump’s tariffs or Republican failures to anticipate that US corporations might decide to move jobs to lower cost environments like Mexico, something that Ohio’s Democratic Senator and likely presidential nominee Sherrod Brown was quick to remind everyone who would listen that that he warned would be a likely outcome of last year’s tax legislation because the new tax law allows companies to pay a lower tax rate on their overseas earnings than they are charged on their domestic profits.  As to Powell, Trump says that one of the reasons that he picked him to be Fed Chairman was because he felt that Janet Yellin, the former Fed Chair, was too short to continue in the position. Enough said about that.  Trump doubled down on his climate change denial pointing out that he was among those who “have very  high levels of intelligence” but are not “believers” in climate change. And in case you doubt his brainpower, not to worry because his “gut” tells him more than anyone else’s brains.  While repeating that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman  is likely innocent of ordering journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s murder because he says he’s innocent, Trump actually criticized his BFF Putin, saying that he doesn’t like Russia’s aggression against Ukraine and as a result he might decide not to meet with him at the upcoming G20 meeting.  No one really believes that, but it sounds good.  In other news, Trump is threatening another government shutdown if he doesn’t get at least $5 billion for his wall, the one he wants very badly and that once constructed will allow him to stop with all that tear gas stuff tossing. And though the Democrats are closing in on a 40 net seat gain in the House, the Republicans now have 53 seats in the Senate as a result of yesterday’s Mississippi Senate run-off election where Cindy Hyde Smith easily beat Mike Espy.  It turns out that joking about lynching is still okay in Mississippi.