I have written extensively on why this country should be grateful to even have a person with Robert Mueller’s experience and judgment to deal with the greatest national existential crises since …I really don’t know. The above link is to an article that many called the finest to appear in DailyKos, ever. To the extent there’s any truth to the statement, it is because knowing Robert Mueller’s background, his priorities, his sense of justice, can reassure us that despite the circus act ongoing in DC, there will be accountability.
I can’t predict what kind of information could be brought forth, except for the fact that it will be of the type that is near undeniable. I also fully believe that Mueller senses the moment, the need reaffirm the rule of law, and that this crises, the separation of children from parents, coupled with floating the idea that judges and due process are an impediment to Trump’s drive to authoritarianism, along with the ever-present possibility that Trump and/or his sycophants on the Hill will move against Rosenstein, all of it will spurn the Special Counsel’s office to act, perhaps faster than they otherwise might.
Get ready for a very hot summer, because clues abound that Mueller is about to bring some heat on the administration, and its apologists.
Mark Warner says he was kidding when he said that if someone handed him another glass of wine he’d spill secrets, and promised a wild ride this summer.
He wasn’t kidding.
The “tell” is noting the time period, “summer.” Had he just said; “I could tell you some crazy shit, it’s going to get wild,” that’s maybe a guy that already had too much wine. “This summer,” has nothing funny about it, nothing to add anything, really, except truth. Don’t doubt for a second that, though he might’ve been five glasses of wine deep at that point, Warner knew damn well that what he said would get out. He didn’t care.
Need more convincing that Mark Warner knows of which he speaks? Last winter, as noted by Rawstory, Warner went to the Senate floor right before Christmas and gave a grand speech, out of the friggin gray-snowy sky, about a red line regarding firing Robert Mueller, leaving everyone scratching their heads. Nothing “new” had happened to earn such a speech, and right before Christmas? Only later did everyone learn that just a day earlier Trump stormed through the White House, believing that Mueller subpoened bank records from Germany and demanding that Mueller be fired. It took adults, this time in the form of his lawyers, to calm him down.
Hmmm.
Mueller just called in some new prosecutors to handle the already-indicted Russian conspiracy cases. Why would he do that? We can’t know for sure, but the situation screams that he’s freeing up his “A-Team” to leave a case that he knows is going nowhere because Russia will never allow those people to be prosecuted here, yet the case must go forward as it is the basis of the conspiracy. Mueller needs his “players,” the varsity, and he needs them now.Â
Roger Stone figures to be the next indicted. Anyone wanting a thorough run-down on where the Mueller investigation stands and why it may well be coming to a head need read Empty Wheel by Mary Wheeler, her blog has about as good an analysis as I’ve found on the net. Her reasoning on why Stone could well be the next big domino:
Let’s see how evidence Mueller has recently shown might apply in the case of Roger Stone, Trump’s lifelong political advisor. We already knew that Stone had communications that he did not immediately disclose with Guccifer 2.0 and Wikileaks. With both, Stone has contributed to and reinforced claims the entities were not Russian operations, though his conversion about the source of the Hillary emails was pretty sudden and curiously timed.
Now we know that in May, Stone had lunch with someone calling himself Henry Greenberg offering dirt on Hillary. His explanation — based only on the texts that Michael Caputo was asked about in a Mueller interview — is not that he didn’t entertain the offer, but that he didn’t take Greenberg up on the offer as made in late May because Greenberg was asking for big money….
So we’ve got Stone meeting with other people, repeatedly agreeing to bypass US election law to obtain a benefit for Trump, evidence (notwithstanding Stone’s post-hoc attempts to deny a Russian connection with Guccifer 2.0 and Wikileaks) that Stone had the intent of obtaining that benefit, and tons of overt acts committed in furtherance of the scheme.
….And all that’s without leaning on the the other stuff Mueller found on Stone’s phone, which Stone is also trying to explain away by public conspiracies (in this case that the phone content was obtained with a FISA order rather than with a probable cause warrant obtained on March 9).
To go along with the well-argued case against Stone, a little-noticed tidbit emerged from BBC journalist Paul Wood, largely under the radar because of the appropriate focus on the border crises:
BBC journalist Paul Wood late last week: Via Rawstory:
An American lawyer I know told me that he was approached by a Cambridge Analytica employee after the election. They had had the Clinton campaign emails more than a month before they were published by WikiLeaks: ‘What should I do?’ Take this to Mueller, the lawyer replied.
I don’t know how many times I have said that the road to a Trump campaign conspiracy with Russia runs through Cambridge Analytica (admittedly, there are now far more roads available, a virtual interstate map of roads to get from here to there). I have said so because all the key players intersect at Cambridge, Kushner, Stone, Flynn, oft-forgotten Steve Bannon, Facebook, and Russia micro-targeting.
Last, Trump’s been acting plain old bizarre, even for him, as if he knows something and really doesn’t want to get into it. He’s traveling the country “campaigning” for his life, even though he’s not running against anyone (running from someone, maybe). Though the media has rightly focused on his comments regarding the border crises, he never misses an opportunity to decry the witch-hunt, the Democrats moving against him, how the media simply cannot be believed, unless it has good news for him, and that the Mueller probe is stuffed with Democrats engaging in a de-facto coup.
And, really last? Any of you ever been in DC in the dead of summer? It’s always hot, and wet, not in a good way as Robin Williams famously said in Good Morning Vietnam. The other thing it is? Empty. Congress figures out a reason to get away, even though McConnell has said it would remain in session throughout, don’t expect “in-session” to mean what it usually means. The president goes on vacation – more than this one usually does – the SCOTUS is long gone, as well as half the appeals courts, which means many of the law firms empty out for a bit …
What better time for a tiger on the prowl to spring? When no one’s looking?
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