Mothers and Cows

Warrant Reveal:  As ordered by the Judge overseeing his case, the Justice Department released several search warrants related to the investigation of one time Trump lawyer/fixer Michael Cohen yesterday.  As a result of the warrant release, we now know that that Mueller’s team began their investigation into Cohen’s misdeeds earlier than was previously known, a little more than nine months before the dramatic FBI raid of Cohen’s premises took place. In fact, within two months of Mueller’s May 2017 appointment the agency had already collected enough information to obtain warrants for Cohen’s Gmail accounts and cell phones, an indication that at that point, Mueller’s team already had more than enough probable cause to believe Cohen had violated several laws: making false statements to a financial institution, money laundering, and two statutes acting as an unregistered foreign agent.  The warrants also reveal that the investigation into Trump’s “campaign season” hush money payments to his playmate and adult film star paramours were originated by the Southern District of New York after Mueller passed the Cohen investigation into their hands.   A large amount of the released information was redacted including eighteen pages related to those hush payments, an indication that the investigation into those campaign finance violations remains active, leading many of those pundits with expertise about such things to surmise that details regarding the involvement of Trump, Trump Jr and one or more other members of Trump Inc are being held back from public view, another possible indication that that some if not all of them could still suffer the consequences of their actions.  The warrants also reveal that for the most part Mueller and the Southern District investigators have been way ahead of the press, for example they were onto Cohen’s interaction with and accepting of payments from Russian financier Victor Vekselberg way before the rest of us added that name to our Russian playlist. As to the Mueller investigation, yesterday NBC reported that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein who had previously indicated that he would be leaving in mid-March now plans to stick it out a little longer.  Apparently, his services are still needed, an indication that the wind up of the investigation is taking longer than he previously thought it would and/or an indication that as he's gotten up to speed on the whole investigation, new Attorney General Barr has come to the realization that it’s not a big nothing burger or a witch hunt but something more substantive and that he still needs Rosenstein’s involvement.  For their part Mueller’s team does appear to be very busy on something.  Yesterday his office asked a court for an 11-day extension on a filing deadline, claiming that, for the time being, key attorneys on his team were too busy with “the press of other work.”   

Wackadoodle Sideshow:  In the parallell universe of Trump world a number of other ridiculous things that shouldn’t be happening but sadly are also got a lot of attention yesterday.   Trump continued to go after John McCain because he just doesn’t get or more likely just doesn’t care that attacking dead war heroes is not all that classy or even remotely presidential.  When asked about his cruel anti-McCain weekend tweets during a press conference with Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro, another one of those autocratic world leaders with Trump like tendencies, Trump justified his McCain fixation by saying that he never liked or respected him and would never, ever forgive him for voting against the repeal and replacement of Obamacare, as if that’s a justifiable reason to slam a dead guy.  The very public marital spat between George and Kellyanne Conway rages on.  After George tweeted out pages from the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as “proof” that Trump suffers from a narcistic personality disorder or worse, Trump’s campaign manager Brad Parscale followed up by tweeting “We all know that @realDonaldTrump turned down Mr. Kellyanne Conway for a job he desperately wanted. He barely worked @TheJusticeDept and was either fired/quit, didn’t want the scrutiny? Now he hurts his wife because he is jealous of her success. POTUS doesn’t even know him!”  As if the absurdity of Trump’s campaign manager feeling it was necessary to weigh in on Kellyanne’s husband’s tweet, wasn’t enough, everything in the tweet was a lie.  George Conway is a very respected lawyer who shortly after the election showed sincere emotion as he very publicly congratulated his wife for “getting Trump elected.”  Not only did  Trump know and respect George but he sought out his advice on a number of subjects including about whether or not to retain Preet Bharara as US Attorney for the Southern District of New York.  Later, once he got to see Trump in action, George turned down an offer to serve as the head of the Justice Department’s Civil Division because he was so offended by Trump’s actions.  To be clear  Conway wasn’t fired because he refused to work for Trump in the first place.  Yesterday when asked about George Conway, Trump called him a “total loser.”  For her part Kellyanne says that she doesn’t think that Trump is crazy which may mean that she does think that he’s crazy but doesn’t really care.  By the way George justifies his tweets by saying that its better for him to tweet than for him to tell his wife what he thinks of her boss and her job over coffee and pancakes in front of their four kids.  Proving that he fits in well in the Trump loony bin, Congressman Devon Nunes, the one time chair of the House Intelligence Committee, who made a fool of himself early on by pretending to have obtained exculpatory documents in a faux midnight run to the White House is now suing Twitter and two tweeters, one who goes by the parody name of “DevinCow” and the other who purports to be his mother, for $250 million. Mostly Nunes is very upset that both tweeters, who until yesterday didn’t have many followers but now thanks to Nunes have tens of thousands, have been making fun of him.  The lawsuit more or less contends that Twitter has a negative bias against conservatives like Nunes.  It’s worth noting that Nunes once introduced legislation intended to ban spurious lawsuits.  Though Trump loves it, the lawsuit should go nowhere but like many of Nunes other actions it will feed many more jokes about his ridiculous stupidity and will be applauded in some corners of the Fox/Trump Media empire.  On a more concerning note, following his meeting with Brazil’s Bolsonaro Trump announced that he plans to advocate for Brazil to become a full member of NATO.  Apparently he either doesn’t know that the “N” and “A” in NATO stand for “North Atlantic” or hasn’t looked at a map lately.  Anyway, he really likes Bolsanaro, another “nationalist whose populist appeal comes partly from his use of Twitter and his history of making crude statements about women, gay people and indigenous groups,” or as Trump said yesterday, he’s the Donald Trump of South America.