The rumor mill is going crazyby digby
I don’t know if any of this is well sourced or not. In fact, there’s some evidence that the Russian bots are involved in perpetuating lots of rumors at the moment. But this is a member of the House Intelligence Committee:
Congresswoman Jackie Speier (D-San Mateo) told KQED Newsroom on Friday that she believes Republicans are trying to shut down the House Intelligence Committee’s probe into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 elections.
Speier also said, “The rumor on the Hill when I left yesterday was that the president was going to make a significant speech at the end of next week. And on Dec. 22nd, when we are out of D.C., he was going to fire Robert Mueller.”
If this were to happen, Speier said, it would cause a constitutional crisis. “That is Saturday massacre 2.0,” she said. “Without a doubt there would be an impeachment effort.”
Who’s going to lead an impeachment effort? Republicans?
I want what she’s smoking.
The shutdown of the House Intelligence probe does seem to be a real thing. Adam Schiff was all ove the place warning about it. And yesterday Trey Gowdy was quoted saying he doesn’t think Andrew McCabe will have a job next week. It does suggest a coordinated move between the White House and the House Republicans to clean house and end the Russia investigation. I don’t know what happens then but impeachment is highly unlikely.
Update:
Special Counsel Robert Mueller has obtained “many tens of thousands” of Trump transition emails, including sensitive emails of Jared Kushner, transition team sources tell Axios.
Trump officials discovered Mueller had the emails when his prosecutors used them as the basis for questions to witnesses, the sources said.
The emails include 12 accounts, one of which contains about 7,000 emails, the sources said.
The accounts include the team’s political leadership and the foreign-policy team, the sources said.Why it matters: The transition emails are said to include sensitive exchanges on matters that include potential appointments, gossip about the views of particular senators involved in the confirmation process, speculation about vulnerabilities of Trump nominees, strategizing about press statements, and policy planning on everything from war to taxes.
“Mueller is using the emails to confirm things, and get new leads,” a transition source told me.
How it happened: The sources say Mueller obtained the emails from the General Services Administration, the government agency that hosted the transition email system, which had addresses ending in “ptt.gov,” for Presidential Transition Team.Axios has asked the Special Counsel’s Office for comment and will update this story with the response.
The transition sources said they were surprised about the emails because they have been in touch with Mueller’s team and have cooperated.
“They ask us to waive NDAs [nondisclosure agreements] and things like that,” a second source said. “We have never said ‘no’ to anything.”
The twist: The sources say that transition officials assumed that Mueller would come calling, and had sifted through the emails and separated the ones they considered privileged. But the sources said that was for naught, since Mueller has the complete cache from the dozen accounts.
I will look forward to all the handwringing about privacy and abuse of power from the people who insisted that all the personal Clinton, DNC and Podesta emails be published on the internet.
I mean the guy who said this has no room to kvetch about government investigators looking at the transition emails he and his staff sent on a government server:
.