Senators Warn They’ll Act If Trump Goes After Mueller
By Jason Easley on Sun, Mar 18th, 2018 at 4:13 pm
Trump’s attacks on Robert Mueller have been met with warnings across Congress that he better back away from the Special Counsel or face dire consequences.
Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) warned on Fox News Sunday that the Senate has leverage over Trump, [ http://www.foxnews.com/transcript/2018/03/18/rep-trey-gowdy-mueller-probe-should-not-be-shut-down.html ] ” Well, I’m not sure the House can do a lot. We don’t have advice and consent. I think the president is going to have a really difficult time nominating and having approved another attorney general. It’s going to be — I would just counsel the president, it’s going to be very, very long bad 2018. And it’s going to be distracting from other things that he wants to do and was elected to do. Let it play out its course. If you’ve done nothing wrong, you should want the investigation to be as wholesome and thorough as possible.”
In the Senate, Democratic leader Sen. Chuck Schumer warned of severe consequences for Trump if he acts against Mueller, “The president, the administration, and his legal team must not take any steps to curtail, interfere with, or end the special counsel’s investigation or there will be severe consequences from both Democrats and Republicans.”
Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) warned that the Senate would act against Trump if he goes after Mueller, “I mean, talking to my colleagues all along, it was, you know, once he goes after Mueller, then we will take action,“I think that people see that as a massive red line that can’t be crossed. So, I hope that that’s the case. And I would just hope that enough people would prevail on the president now: ‘Don’t go there.‘” Video of Flake on CNN’s State Of The Union:
If Trump tries to fire Mueller, it will be up to the Senate to protect the Special Counsel. It is expected over the next few days that Republicans are going to pressure Trump to leave the special counsel alone.
I don’t buy that Republicans will act if Trump tries to move on Mueller. There is enough support in the Senate to pass a bill protecting Mueller, but Senators have struggled to agree on a final bill, and it would be up to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to bring a bill to the floor for a vote. I think that the Senate will wait until they can’t avoid the threat any longer before they try to act.
If Republicans act to protect Mueller, they won’t do out of concern for democracy, but because they are facing massive losses in the midterm. Republicans may save Mueller because the Special Counsel keeps the Russia scandal out of their reelection campaigns.
However, when it comes to promises that the Senate will defy Trump, we all should wait to see it before we believe it.
For more discussion about this story join our Rachel Maddow and MSNBC group.
Colbert sums much of the White House slapsloppy show up
Jared Kushner Lost His 'Top Secret' Privileges
Published on Feb 28, 2018 by The Late Show with Stephen Colbert Jared Kushner is now an out-of- the-loop in-law after his security clearance was downgraded from 'top secret' to just 'secret.' [originally aired February 27, 2018] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dedZtI355i8 [with comments]
To "stashed February 27, 2018:"
Panamanian police handcuff a guard at the Trump hotel as standoff escalates PANAMA CITY — Panamanian police on Tuesday handcuffed a security guard working for President Trump’s hotel here, in the midst of a dispute in which the hotel’s majority owner has tried to fire the Trump Organization — and Trump employees have refused to leave. The guard was brought down an elevator by police who arrived at the luxury hotel Tuesday morning, and driven away in a patrol car. The guard was detained for denying officers access to hotel offices, according to two witnesses who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the ongoing legal dispute. It was unclear whether he had been formally arrested. That detention came on a day when a long-running standoff over the fate of the Trump hotel — pitting the majority owner against the Trump Organization, which manages the property — escalated sharply. There were physical altercations between rival groups of security guards, the visit by the police officers, and a triumphant piano performance by the majority owner, Orestes Fintiklis. As the day went on, it appeared that Fintiklis’s strategy — to short-circuit a drawn-out legal battle over the hotel by showing up and asserting his power as owner — might be working. [...] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/panamanian-police-arrest-a-guard-at-the-trump-hotel-as-standoff-escalates/2018/02/27/800151ce-1bd1-11e8-98f5-ceecfa8741b6_story.html
Trump campaign chief lends name to penny stock tied to felon - AP WASHINGTON — The political strategist and online guru who was named President Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign manager Tuesday has a close financial relationship with a penny-stock firm with a questionable history that includes longstanding ties to a convicted fraudster, according to an Associated Press investigation. Brad Parscale, who played a key role in Trump’s 2016 election victory, signed a $10 million deal in August to sell his digital marketing company to CloudCommerce Inc. As part of the deal, Parscale currently serves as a member of California-based company’s management team. The company touts itself as “a global provider of cloud-driven e-commerce and mobile commerce solutions.” Records reviewed by the AP raise questions about its current finances and its rocky past. CloudCommerce’s operations have not turned a profit in nearly a decade. The company’s most recent quarterly earnings showed it has spent more than $19 million in investor money since its creation nearly two decades ago and has only $107,000 in cash on hand. In 2006, a top executive at the company, which was operating under a different name at the time, was caught in an FBI bribery sting and later pleaded guilty to securities fraud. Documents reviewed by the AP indicate he remained involved in CloudCommerce’s major corporate decisions in recent years. Parscale did not answer written questions from the AP about the sale of his company to CloudCommerce and his role in the company. The owner of an obscure web development firm before the 2016 presidential race, Parscale parlayed commercial website work for Trump family businesses into a role as the public face of Trump’s highly successful digital campaign. A press release announcing Parscale’s hiring as Trump’s new campaign manager included Eric Trump calling him “an amazing talent” who has the Trump family’s “complete trust.” When Parscale’s CloudCommerce deal was originally announced last August, the price of the company’s shares surged. [...] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-campaign-chief-lends-name-to-penny-stock-tied-to-felon/2018/02/27/9941a2d8-1c17-11e8-98f5-ceecfa8741b6_story.html original https://apnews.com/5bdc810e38c94b119e2e0c2d206c4486
Trump Organization says it has donated foreign profits to U.S. Treasury, but declines to share details The Trump Organization announced Monday that it donated the profits from “foreign government patronage” at its hotels last year to the U.S. Treasury, but declined to identify those foreign customers or the amount of the contribution. President Trump’s company made the donation on Thursday, according to George A. Sorial, the Trump Organization’s chief compliance counsel. “Although not a legal requirement, this voluntary donation fulfills our pledge to donate profits from foreign government patronage at our hotels and similar business during President Trump’s term in office,” Sorial said. The Washington Post asked for more details: How much was donated? Which Trump properties were included in this accounting? Which foreign entities had paid money to Trump’s businesses? “We have nothing further to share at this time,” Amanda Miller, a Trump Organization spokeswoman, wrote in an email. The Treasury Department also did not immediately respond to questions about the donation. [...] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-organization-says-it-has-donated-foreign-profits-to-us-treasury-but-declines-to-share-details/2018/02/26/747522e0-1b22-11e8-ae5a-16e60e4605f3_story.html
What I meant to write was that I wasn’t skeptical.
Last week’s events have nullified my previous skepticism. To recap: Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein revealed indictments against 12 Russians for the hacks of the Democratic National Committee, and we learned that Russian hackers went after Hillary Clinton’s private office for the first time on the very day Trump said, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.” At the NATO summit in Brussels, Trump attacked a close European ally—Germany—and generally questioned the value of the alliance. Next, he visited the United Kingdom and trashed Prime Minister Theresa May. Then, in Helsinki, he met with Vladimir Putin privately for two hours, with no U.S. officials present other than a translator. After this suspicious meeting, he sang the Russian strongman’s praises at a news conference at which he said he viewed Putin’s denials on a par with the unanimous and unchallenged conclusions of America’s intelligence agencies.
VIDEO - Top moments from Trump–Putin summit
With every other world leader, the physically imposing Trump attempts to dominate—witness his alpha-male handshakes with French President Emanuel Macron or his flamboyant man-spreading next to German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Yet with the diminutive Putin—who is maybe 5 feet, 6 inches tall—he’s oddly submissive. During the public portion of their encounter, Trump was slumping in his chair, as if defeated. Why? Why did he insist on a one-on-one meeting with Putin in the first place?
And why does Trump inevitably return to questioning the irrefutable evidence that Russia meddled in the 2016 election? We can dispense with the explanation, conveyed anonymously .. https://www.axios.com/trump-putin-russia-helsinki-congress-intelligence-06a4c21e-59e5-419e-9f70-e88018c87bd2.html .. by senior administration officials, that “his brain can’t process that collusion and cyberattacks are two different things.” We can also forget about the widely held theory that he views the various Russia investigations as a threat to the legitimacy of his election, and therefore a devastating blow to his sense of self-worth.
Or, at least, neither offers a sufficient explanation for why Trump consistently parrots Russian talking points on NATO, the American media, U.S. troop deployments, Ukraine and the legitimacy of the postwar liberal order. What does any of that have to do with his tender ego? Do we really think Trump has an informed position on, say, Montenegro’s history of aggression? Could Trump find Montenegro on a map?
What about my argument that Trump was constitutionally incapable of keeping a secret? That, too, is no longer operative. Since I first wrote, we’ve learned that Trump—a skinflint who once had his own charity pay a $7 fee to register his son for the Boy Scouts—was willing to shell out $130,000 of his own money to hush up a fling with a porn actress, Stormy Daniels. And he still hasn’t copped to sleeping with her, despite the discovery of their nondisclosure agreement and contemporaneous evidence that the affair really happened. None of this leaked out until well after the election, proving that Trump is indeed capable of keeping his yap shut when he wants. Not convinced? How about the fact that Brett Kavanaugh’s name didn’t leak out as Trump’s latest Supreme Court pick until minutes before the announcement?
Politically speaking, Trump’s devotion to his pro-Putin line doesn’t make sense. Yes, the GOP base is impressionable, and perhaps Republican voters would accept it if Trump came out and said, “You bet, Russia helped get me elected, and wasn’t that a good thing? We couldn’t let Crooked Hillary win!” But nobody would say his odd solicitousness toward the Kremlin leader is a political winner, and it certainly causes an unnecessary amount of friction with Republicans in Congress. He’s kept it up at great political cost to himself, and that suggests either that he is possessed by an anomalous level of conviction on this one issue, despite his extraordinary malleability on everything else—or that he’s beholden to Putin in some way.
You don’t have to buy Jonathan Chait’s sleeper agent theory .. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/07/trump-putin-russia-collusion.html .. of Trump to believe that something is deeply weird about all this. Nor do you need to be convinced that Putin is hanging onto a recording of something untoward that may have taken place in a certain Moscow hotel room. You don’t even have to buy the theory that Trump’s business is overly dependent on illicit flows of Russia money, giving Putin leverage. As Julia Ioffe posits .. https://www.gq.com/story/what-putin-has-on-trump , the kompromat could well be the mere fact of the Russian election meddling itself.
As for my argument that Trump’s collection of misfit toys was too incompetent, and too riven by infighting, to collaborate with Russia, this one might still be true. There were certainly sporadic, repeated attempts by some on or around the campaign to collaborate, but we don’t know if, or how, those flirtations were consummated. But certainly, the intent was there, as Donald Trump, Jr. has said publicly. They were all too happy to accept Russian help, even if they weren’t sure they would be enough to win in the end.
We might never get clear evidence that Trump made a secret deal with the Kremlin. It would be great to see his tax returns, and perhaps Mueller has evidence of private collusion that we have yet to see. These details matter. But in a larger sense, everything we need to know about Trump’s strange relationship with Russia is already out in the open. As The Donald himself might say, there’s something going on.
If Trump is indeed a tool of Putin, what might we expect him to do next? Well, I wouldn’t be sleeping too soundly in Kiev, Podgorica or Riga right now. If the Kremlin tests America’s wobbling commitment to NATO, watch how Trump responds. And pay attention, too, to what the White House says about Russia’s absurd demand that the U.S. hand over former ambassador to Moscow Mike McFaul—Wednesday’s spectacle of Sarah Huckabee Sanders refusing to immediately rule out the idea flies in the face of decades of American diplomacy. Trump may have grudgingly admitted that Russia did the deed, but nobody should be surprised if he starts shedding doubt on it all over again. Maybe, just maybe, he can’t admit that Moscow tried to put him in the Oval Office because he’s under strict instructions not to. Share on Facebook Share on Twitter
Blake Hounshell is the editor in chief of POLITICO Magazine.
"SAY THAT AGAIN?": PROSPECT OF PUTIN WHITE HOUSE VISIT SURPRISES INTELLIGENCE CHIEF [...] Mr. Coats also avoided wading into some controversies. He declined, for example, to weigh in on Mr. Putin’s request to interrogate Michael McFaul, the former American ambassador to Russia. The White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said on Thursday that the administration had rejected the offer. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=142328025
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