Replies to post #275656 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

The campaign to delegitimize the Russia probe is well under way

"'Blow the Mueller House Down', says the big bad conservative right."

By Doyle McManus

Dec 10, 2017 | 4:00 AM

[PHOTO:]
Sean Hannity interviews Former White House strategist Steve Bannon on the set of Fox News Channel's Hannity in New York on Oct. 9. (Craig Ruttle / Associated Press)

Some of President Trump's biggest fans have declared war against special counsel Robert Mueller — and given Trump's television-watching habits, he's surely listening.

"Mueller is corrupt. The senior FBI is corrupt. The system is corrupt," former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said on Fox News last week.

"A disgrace to the American justice system," Fox News host Sean Hannity, a Trump favorite, declared. "The head of the snake." Mueller has put the country "on the brink of becoming a banana republic," he charged.

"Mueller poses an existential threat to the Trump presidency," warned Christopher Ruddy, a longtime Trump friend who runs the conservative Newsmax website.

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"The anti-Mueller campaign isn’t just noisy; it’s dangerous."
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Even the Wall Street Journal published an editorial calling on the special counsel to quit. "Mueller is too conflicted to investigate the FBI and should step down in favor of someone more credible," the newspaper argued.

Other conservatives, including members of Congress, have joined a chorus of complaints about the special counsel, the FBI and the Justice Department — even though all three are led by Trump appointees.

It all looks and sounds like a concerted campaign to delegitimize Mueller's investigation, launched in May to look into evidence that Russia tampered with the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Trump's most fervent supporters disliked the idea from the start, but anti-Mueller fury stepped up markedly after the prosecutor indicted former national security advisor Michael Flynn this month. Flynn's cooperation could enable Mueller to charge Trump with obstruction of justice, although there's no sign that the prosecutor plans to take that step.

The anti-Mueller campaign isn't just noisy; it's dangerous. Gingrich, Hannity and Ruddy are people Trump listens to. Fox News is the channel he watches. Whether or not they persuade the president that he ought to fire Mueller, they are clearly paving the way — by convincing Trump's political base, the Fox News-watching public, that dismissing the prosecutor would be justified.

A CBS News Poll this month found that Americans overall are evenly divided over whether Mueller's investigation is fair or politically motivated. But there was a stark partisan split: 81% of Republicans said the probe is politically motivated, while only 23% of Democrats agreed. That suggests that if Trump fired Mueller, he would get nearly automatic support from his party's voters.

Despite the high volume, the case against Mueller is thin.

One major talking point is that although the special counsel is a Republican, many of the lawyers he has hired are Democrats. Six of Mueller's top 15 aides donated money to Hillary Clinton's campaign, according to Politifact; at least one gave to Republicans.

Critics have also complained that some of the FBI agents working on the investigation also worked on the 2016 investigation of Clinton's emails, which they consider a whitewash. Among them, one agent has attracted particular attention: Peter Strzok, who was moved off the team by Mueller after he sent a derisive text message about Trump. GOP members of Congress are particularly angry that they didn't learn about the incident until months later.

And they have charged that Mueller aide Andrew Weissmann, a career Justice Department official, is biased. The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that Weissmann attended Hillary Clinton's election night party in November.

So, yes, the investigation — like every other part of the federal bureaucracy — includes Democrats. There's no cure for that. Federal regulations prohibit the Justice Department from considering career appointees' political affiliation.

That didn't stop House Republicans from criticizing FBI Director Christopher Wray, another Trump appointee, when he appeared before them last week.

"If you kicked everybody off of Mueller's team who was anti-Trump, I don't think there'd be anyone left," griped Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio).

"I am emphasizing in every audience I can inside the bureau that our decisions need to be made based on nothing other than the facts and the law," Wray replied. "I'm not aware of any senior FBI executives who are allowing improper political considerations to affect their work."

Trump's lawyers say he's never even considered firing the special counsel. But experts who worked on earlier investigations, both Republicans and Democrats, told me that Trump is essentially free to fire Mueller and, in effect, shut the inquest down — if he's willing to take some political heat.

That doesn't mean Mueller's evidence will disappear. It will remain in the hands of the Justice Department. At that point, Congress can summon Mueller to disclose what he learned. Congress can also press for a new special counsel — or begin impeachment proceedings.

But Republican voters, primed by the delegitimization campaign, will press GOP senators and representatives to support Trump, not Mueller. Judging from the lawmakers' performance so far, there's little reason to expect that many would defy both their president and their most loyal voters.

[e-mail]

Twitter: @DoyleMcManus

http://beta.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-mcmanus-mueller-delegitimization-20171210-story.html

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This one looks familiar so it may be on the board with a different heading.

Will President Donald Trump Attempt To Fire Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller? | AM Joy | MSNBC

See also:

An extremely dangerous authoritarian streak resides
in President Trump, and in others of his White House.


https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=136835372

[fuagf]

Unanswered question hangs over the GOP’s anti-Mueller offensive

"'Blow the Mueller House Down', says the big bad conservative right"

The Rachel Maddow Show / The MaddowBlog


Then FBI Director Robert Mueller arrives on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., May 16, 2012, to testify during a hearing.
J. Scott Applewhite/AP

12/11/17 10:41 AM—Updated 12/11/17 03:43 PM
By Steve Benen

Promoting a piece from a far-right pundit yesterday, Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) said ..

Opinion | Robert Mueller has got some explaining to do https://t.co/aFU2okfRuU

— Senator John Cornyn (@JohnCornyn) December 10, 2017

.. yesterday that Special Counsel Robert Mueller “has got some explaining to do.” It was a timely reminder that when it comes to the Trump-Russia scandal, many Republicans have begun turning their fire, not on the White House or its benefactors in Putin’s government, but on the official overseeing the investigation.

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[Loading this one sucks for me. It's not gonna.]
The Rachel Maddow Show, 12/4/17, 9:24 PM ET
Trump team turns to specious legal arguments as pressure builds
Bob Bauer, former White House counsel, talks with Rachel Maddow about Donald Trump’s legal jeopardy in the Russia scandal, and whether Trump has it within his power to make the Robert Mueller and the Trump Russia investigation go away.
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[INSERT:] Ok, thi one at least looks on the same topic.

Trump disdain for law could backfire in obstruction case
The Rachel Maddow Show
8/25/17
Bob Bauer, former White House Counsel under President Obama, talks with Ari Melber about the legality and propriety of Donald Trump's
pardon of Joe Arpaio and the potential fallout for Trump in his obstruction of justice investigation. Duration: 13:34
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/trump-disdain-for-law-could-backfire-in-obstruction-case-1032892995746
.. inside the first quarter here, 8/25/17: Weekly Address
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=134603426
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GOP members of the House Judiciary Committee, for example, appeared desperate .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/republicans-hammer-mueller-fbi-as-russia-investigation-intensifies/2017/12/06/4a6097ca-dabb-11e7-b1a8-62589434a581_story.html .. last week to tear Mueller down. Several congressional Republicans have also called for .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2017/08/01/another-conservative-house-republican-calls-on-mueller-to-resign/ .. Mueller’s resignation. Conservative media, meanwhile, has become almost hysterical .. http://money.cnn.com/2017/12/07/media/fox-news-mueller-investigation-coverage/index.html .. in targeting the special counsel, eager to discredit the entire probe.

Clearly, Mueller’s investigation is causing some of Donald Trump’s allies to panic, and their fears are well grounded. It’s hardly unreasonable to think the Russia scandal poses an existential threat to this presidency – a threat made more potent following the arrests of Trump’s former national security advisor, campaign chairman, and others.

The Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne today touched on .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-attacks-on-mueller-push-us-closer-to-the-precipice/2017/12/10/97762606-dddb-11e7-89e8-edec16379010_story.html a question that too often goes unasked.

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Because we are inured to extreme partisanship and to the political right’s habit of rejecting inconvenient facts, we risk overlooking the profound political crisis that a Trumpified Republican Party could create. And the conflagration may come sooner rather than later, as Mueller zeroes in on Trump and his inner circle.

Only recently, it was widely assumed that if Trump fired Mueller, many Republicans would rise up to defend our institutions. Now, many in the party are laying the groundwork for justifying a coverup. This is a recipe for lawlessness.
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There was a point earlier this year in which Mueller, a Republican and a former FBI director, received bipartisan praise. With him at the helm, the political establishment declared in unison, there was reason to feel confidence in the integrity of the investigation.

But as the threats to Trump’s presidency have grown more serious, so too has the GOP’s willingness to attack Mueller. Trump’s conservative media allies have begun practically begging the president to fire the special counsel before Mueller brings down the White House.

So what happens if he does?

Trump, by his own admission, already fired a sitting FBI director in order to help derail the investigation into the Russia scandal. At the urging of his far-right allies, the president may very well consider doing the same thing with Mueller in order to, as Trump put it to Russian officials, relieve the “pressure” of the scandal.

Greg Sargent had a good piece .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2017/12/04/its-time-to-ask-every-republican-this-question-about-trump-and-mueller/ .. on this last week, explaining that every congressional Republican should go on the record responding to a straightforward question: “If President Trump tries to remove special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, would you view that as an impeachable offense?”

There’s nothing rhetorical about this. The White House hasn’t hinted that Mueller’s ouster is on the table, but Trump has warned about various “red lines” that he expects the special counsel to honor. That was before congressional Republicans and the GOP’s media allies began characterizing Mueller as Public Enemy #1.

When Nixon pulled his Saturday Night Massacre .. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturday_Night_Massacre .. and fired the official overseeing the Watergate scandal, it was the beginning of the end of his presidency. It’s in the public’s interest to know whether Trump would face a similar fate under similar circumstances, or whether Congress’ Republican majority would applaud the radical escalation.

http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/unanswered-question-hangs-over-the-gops-anti-mueller-offensive

See also:

Mueller Has a Roadmap and the End Game Is Nigh
President Trump is unhinged because Michael Flynn knows everything about his ties with Russia and he’s talking.
[...]
So what is Mueller’s end game? Assuming he survives in office and doesn’t suffer his own “Saturday Night Massacre,” I think he’s aiming to indict the president of the United States for multiple felonies. Trump’s lawyers know this. They’ve told him what Mueller’s intentions are. Maybe this explains Trump’s wild-eyed endorsement of child-molester Roy Moore in Alabama, his deranged retweeting of anti-Muslim videos from some British neo-Nazi website, and his surreal resurrection of Obama’s alleged Kenyan birth. He can see the end coming, and it’s driving him crazy. President Donald J. Trump knows that he and his White House are surrounded by investigators, and they are asking questions of literally every single person who worked on the Trump campaign and in the Trump White House. He knows, because John Dowd, an old time D.C. lawyer who has been through the wars of Washington scandals, has told him, that once an investigation like Mueller’s starts, you can’t stop it. Like a house of cards collapsing, you can’t move your hands fast enough to grab enough cards to put it back together. It just keeps coming down until the whole thing is on the floor.
https://www.alternet.org/right-wing/president-trump-unhinged-because-michael-flynn-knows-everything-about-his-ties-russia-and
.. h/t BOREALIS .. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=136609890

[BOREALIS]

Inside Trump’s legal team: Trying to protect the president from Mueller’s ‘killers’

By Philip Rucker, Josh Dawsey and Rosalind S. Helderman December 12 at 6:00 AM

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and his team of a dozen-plus lawyers and investigators have proven stealthy in their wide-ranging Russia probe. They have surprised the White House with one indictment after another, and summoned President Trump’s confidants for lengthy interviews. In the case of former campaign chairman Paul Manafort alone, court filings show, they have collected more than 400,000 documents and 36 electronic devices.

Mueller and his deputies are, in the fearful word of some Trump loyalists, “killers.”

Trump’s response, by contrast, is being directed by John M. Dowd, the president’s personal lawyer retired from a large firm who works essentially as a one-man band, and Ty Cobb, a White House lawyer who works out of a small office in the West Wing basement, near the cafeteria where staffers get lunch.

Dowd and Cobb, along with attorney Jay Sekulow, serve not only as Trump’s lawyers but also as his strategists, publicists, therapists and — based on Dowd’s claim that he wrote a controversial presidential tweet — ghostwriters.

As the multiple Russia investigations deepen, President Trump has gathered a group of controversial lawyers to defend him, within the White House and outside it (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)

Who are the lawyers defending Trump?
Video 3:05
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/inside-trumps-legal-team-trying-to-protect-the-president-from-muellers-killers/2017/12/11/57e180c0-dc74-11e7-b859-fb0995360725_story.html?hpid=hp_rhp-top-table-main_trumplawyers-706am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.157519800fd6
President Trump, former FBI director James B. Comey and former national security adviser Michael Flynn's stories are entangled, to say the least.
(Meg Kelly/The Washington Post)

When Mueller requests documents, they provide them. When Trump reacts to new twists in the Russia saga, they seek to calm him down. When he has questions about the law, such as the Logan Act or Magnitsky Act, they explain it. And when the president frets that Mueller may be getting too close to him, they assure him he has done nothing wrong, urge him to resist attacking the special counsel and insist that the investigation is wrapping up — first, they said, by Thanksgiving, then by Christmas and now by early next year.

As lawyers for the world’s highest-profile client, Dowd and Cobb have come under scrutiny for their every move and utterance — and the criticism has been harsh.

Many in the Washington legal community chide them as being indiscreet, error-prone and outmatched. They say public blunders — such as Dowd and Cobb casually chatting about their legal strategy on the patio of a downtown Washington steakhouse in September within earshot of a reporter — suggest a lack of discipline.

Critics also question why, seven months into Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election, they have not assembled a battalion of lawyers as President Bill Clinton had when he was being investigated by independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr. And some Trump loyalists, spoiling for a fight, say the president’s lawyers should be combative rather than cooperative with Mueller.

“There certainly have been gaffes,” said Alan Dershowitz, a criminal defense attorney and Harvard Law School professor who has won praise from Trump for his television appearances defending a president’s constitutional prerogative to fire his FBI director.

“These are not the kinds of things that one would expect from the most powerful man in America, who has a choice of anybody to be his defense counsel,” Dershowitz said. “Well — almost anybody,” he added, saying that he is not interested in the job.

[Trump’s legal team faces tensions — and a client who often takes his own counsel]
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trumps-legal-team-faces-tensions--and-a-client-who-often-takes-his-own-counsel/2017/07/13/07361fc6-67eb-11e7-8eb5-cbccc2e7bfbf_story.html?utm_term=.b1e437200f4c


Lawyer Ty Cobb, left, in 2004 and Jay Sekulow, in 2015.
The two, along with John Dowd, are representing President Trump in the Russia probe, serving as his strategists, publicists and therapists. (AP)

This portrait of Trump’s legal team and defense strategy is based on interviews with more than two dozen White House officials, lawyers and other people connected to the Russia probe, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.

The chorus of criticism may be growing louder, but Trump is not singing along. By most accounts, the president is satisfied with his representation — and talks to Cobb several times a day — though advisers say he has occasionally discussed bringing on new lawyers.

Trump, 71, connects with Dowd, 76, and Cobb, in his mid-60s, as contemporaries. He appreciates their no-nonsense old-school style, and likes that neither appears on television, believing their absence from the airwaves deprives what he calls the Russia “witch hunt” of oxygen, according to Trump’s advisers.

A former Marine Corps captain, Dowd has a gruff demeanor and has proven able at times to cool Trump’s temper and convince him of the virtues of pragmatism over pugnacity, aides said.

Some Trump advisers dismiss Cobb’s predictions that the Mueller probe is nearing its conclusions as misleading happy talk, but the president has internalized it as reality. One reason for Trump’s faith is his belief that his lawyers are plugged in. Cobb tells him he is in frequent, and sometimes daily, contact with the special counsel’s office, according to people familiar with the dynamic.

Over Thanksgiving at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla., Trump boasted to friends that Cobb was “brilliant” and that he was certain Mueller would soon exonerate him.

Cobb declined to comment, and Dowd responded to an email inquiry with two words: “No, thanks.”

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said, “The president is happy with his legal team.”

Cobb works as a White House lawyer whose salary is paid by the government, and his duty is to the office of the presidency, whereas Dowd and Sekulow are employed by Trump and represent him personally. Dowd and Sekulow enjoy attorney-client privilege, but Cobb does not — meaning that Mueller could seek access to Cobb’s notes or ask to interview him about his interactions with the president.

[...]

Sari Horwitz and Tom Hamburger contributed to this report.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/inside-trumps-legal-team-trying-to-protect-the-president-from-muellers-killers/2017/12/11/57e180c0-dc74-11e7-b859-fb0995360725_story.html?hpid=hp_rhp-top-table-main_trumplawyers-706am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.6420c75f58ba

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