But Her Emails

Mueller Watch: It’s not clear if it’s really Mueller time yet but it most certainly is Mueller watch time.  The special counsel and his team are now being followed by hordes of reporters who are tracking their every move in hopes that they will be the first to catch one or more of them delivering Mueller’s much anticipated final report to Attorney General Barr.  Earlier in the week we were shown pictures of departing prosecutor Andrew Weissman dressed in a sporty tan suit rather than the usual somber grey typically worn by all the members of the Mueller squad and yesterday many of the cable news shows shared shots of Mueller himself, arriving at his office wearing a baseball cap.  The assorted pundits got particularly excited when Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and AG Barr showed up at the White House but it turned out to be nothing more than a regularly scheduled meeting, or so we’ve been told.  In any case, it is March and it is Friday something could happen……or not!  Regardless of what happens on the Mueller front, things are most definitely heating up on the Congressional side of the investigation.  Yesterday Oversight Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings sent a letter to White House Counsel Pat Cipollone demanding, as if demanding anything from the White House ever bears fruit, more information about Jared Kushner’s email and messaging application usage.  It turns out that Cummings and then Chairman of the Oversight Committee Trey Gowdy learned that Kushner was still using WhatsApp, the encrypted service owned by Facebook, rather than any required official White House communication device during a December meeting from Kushner’s attorney Abbe Lowell but since he wasn’t chairman at that time there was little that Cummings could do about it.  Cummings indicated that Lowell said that he doesn’t know if any of Kushner’s communications involved highly classified matters because that’s “beyond his pay grade” but not to worry Kushner promises that he’s keeping screen shots of all of his conversations  in order to avoid violating the Federal Records Act.  Lowell also told Cummings and Gowdy that Ivanka uses her personal email but tries really hard to send any work related emails on to her work email, but only the ones that she actually reads, the others she destroys because that gnarly records act thing doesn’t really concern her.  It’s highly likely that some of those WhatsApp conversations that Kushner may or may not have saved for posterity were with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the charming royal who everyone but Trump and Kushner acknowledge was responsible for the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Apparently, using unapproved devices is quite the thing in the Trump White House, Steve Bannon and one time deputy security advisor KT McFarland used their own too, in fact McFarland used her AOL email address for White House business because what could be more secure or un-hackable than AOL? That primal screen you just heard, it’s coming from Casa Clinton in Chappaqua. Lock. Them. Up.  As to all of the other documents that Jerry Nadler, Chair of the House Judiciary Committee, has requested from the White House and an assortment of former Trumpies, so far the White House is not proving to be all that cooperative, in fact they aren’t all that into sharing but a number of others including Steve Bannon, George Papadopoulos and Sam Numberg  have forwarded their documents.  However Roger Stone sent a letter saying that on the advice of his counsel, he won’t be sharing any of his trove, he’s pleading the fifth because of his upcoming trial. Former Communications guru and Gal Friday Hope Hicks has also indicated that she plans to cooperate with the document requests and with the House Intelligence Committee too, the last time she met with them she told them that she had lied one or two or a hundred times for Trump but didn’t go into too many details.  The committee expects her to be more forthcoming this time around.  For his part, Trump continues to knock the very dead John McCain. In response to his assertion that he gave permission for McCain’s funeral to be held at the National Cathedral, a Cathedral representative said you don’t need presidential permission to have your funeral held at the Cathedral and countering Trump’s assertion that no one thanked him for facilitating the McCain funeral, a number of media outlets released an old tape of a McCain family representative thanking Trump for helping the family out, though to be fair to Trump, there are no tapes of the departed McCain saying thank you.  And of course George Conway weighed in too, once again calling Trump a narcissist and a liar.          

International Yet Domestic:  Yesterday European Union leaders agreed to extend the deadline for Britain’s “looming” exit from the bloc otherwise known as Brexit from March 29 to May 22  in order to give the Brits more time to get their act together, as if that’s going to happen.  Though he claimed that he wasn’t all that focused on the upcoming Israeli elections, Trump decided it was time to throw another bone Prime Minister Netanyahu’s way so yesterday he tweeted “"After 52 years it is time for the United States to fully recognize Israel's Sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which is of critical strategic and security importance to the State of Israel and Regional Stability."  Though Trump’s tweet represents a significant change in official US policy it doesn’t really change much on the ground. The reality is that maintaining control of the Golan Heights high ground as a buffer zone and protection from missile attacks has always been viewed by Israeli leadership as essential to the nation’s security, something more important than ever given the instability and turmoil in Syria so it’s always been a stretch to believe that the Israelis would ever agree to return the Golan to Syria. Besides that’s where all the good Israeli wineries are located. Anyway, Trump’s tweet was clearly timed to help Netanyahu.  Separately under pressure from the “progressive/liberal” organization MoveOn to boycott of the upcoming AIPAC annual conference, all the Democratic presidential candidates have indicated that they will not be attending.  It’s not clear that any or all of them were actually planning to attend anyway, Sanders has never been much of an AIPAC or Israel supporter.  However, instead of boycotting the others might have found it more effective to show up and express their views, they’d find that a number of the attendees share their concerns about Netanyahu and his attempt to insure his reelection by aligning with the far right ultranationalist Jewish Power party, something that AIPAC leadership criticized recently by issuing a statement saying that “AIPAC has a longstanding policy not to meet with members of this racist and reprehensible party.” Following the MoveOn boycott call just feeds into Trump’s call for “Jexodus” from the Democratic party.  Anyway, Speaker Pelosi, New York Mayor Bill De Blasio and Senate Minority Leader Schumer are still planning to speak. For their part, taking a page from the Trump “raise money on controversy” playbook, MoveOn sent out a text this morning seeking to raise money off their boycott success, a text that includes the hashtag #SkipAIPAC. Separately, yesterday it was reported that former VP Biden who isn’t a candidate, yet, was considering asking one time Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams to be his running mate. Just the leak of that nugget of news, raised enough eyebrows and attacks of gimmickry to provoke critics.  Gimmick or not, that could be a winning combo in the general election but the primaries come first and any effort to circumvent them would probably not be received all that well. Fasten your seatbelts, election season is upon us and it is going to be a bumpy, very bumpy ride.