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Month: November 2018

“I could actually run my business and run government at the same time”

Published by digby on November 29, 2018

“I could actually run my business and run government at the same time”

by digby

That was almost exactly five years ago.

Trump said this today:

Just a reminder: Trump says there was nothing wrong with running his business while he was a candidate and he admitted that he did that.

But he also believes that he could run the country and his business at the same time. Which, of course, he has been doing even though he says he turned it over to the spwan.

11/22/2016:

Donald Trump said on Tuesday that he faces no legal obligation to cut ties with his businesses, even as he described how winning the presidency has made his brand “hotter” and acknowledged advancing his business interests during a conversation with a British politician.

“The law’s totally on my side, the president can’t have a conflict of interest,” Trump said in an interview with New York Times editors and writers.

Trump said he was surprised by how little was legally required of him. “In theory I could run my business perfectly and then run the country perfectly. There’s never been a case like this,” he said. “I’d assumed that you’d have to set up some type of trust or whatever and you don’t.”

January 11,2017:

I could actually run my business and run government at the same time. I don’t like the way that looks, but I would be able to do that if I wanted to,” Trump said.

He was making deals throughout the campaign. There’s a good chance he’s been doing it since he became president.

It makes you think they call it “executive time” for a reason.

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They knew he was a snake before they let him in

Published by digby on November 29, 2018

They knew he was a snake before they let him in

by digby

This is from a National Review article of May 2016:

A friend of Donald Trump’s recently approached him to suggest that he will eventually have to release his tax returns, as every presidential nominee has for decades… “What will you do if the returns come out as part of an October surprise?” Trump was asked. Trump pondered the question and replied, “I’ll say they aren’t mine.”

That stunning answer is the essence of Donald Trump. “It’s exactly what I’d expect him to say,” Fox Business’s Charlie Gasparino, who has known Trump for decades, told me.

At the time National Review was 100% Never Trump. Today, not so much. Rich Lowry is team Trump most of the time.

You should have been nicer to Michael

Published by digby on November 29, 2018

You should have been nicer to Michael

by digby


He feels no loyalty any more:

Michael D. Cohen, President Trump’s former lawyer and fixer, admitted in court on Thursday that he had engaged in negotiations to build a tower in Moscow for Mr. Trump well into the 2016 presidential campaign, far later than previously known.

Mr. Cohen said he discussed the status of the project with Mr. Trump on more than three occasions and briefed Mr. Trump’s family members about it. He also admitted he agreed to travel to Russia for meetings on the project.

Trump admitted to lying today. I’m not sure he knows he did. But he has said many times that he had nothing to do with Russia.

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Only mostly dead by @BloggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on November 29, 2018

Only mostly dead
by Tom Sullivan

Given that Uncle Sam is supporting bombing a starving population in Yemen and teargassing desperate migrants on the Mexico/U.S border, these may be small lights in the darkness, but take what you can get. Two items this morning on how the United States sees itself, or still wants to. The U-S-of-A may be only mostly dead.

The noxious civil asset forfeiture practice police agencies made a regular feature of drug enforcement thirty years ago is under challenge in the U.S. Supreme Court. “Policing for profit” at long last is on trial.

The state of Indiana confiscated Tyson Timbs’ $42,000 Land Rover after arresting him for selling $400 worth of heroin to undercover cops. The vehicle is more than four times the amount of fine assessed for the crime, and Timbs sued to get back his vehicle. A trial court agreed the “fine” in this case was excessive. An appeals court agreed.

Indiana’s state Supreme Court ruled, however, that the Constitution’s ban on excessive fines (Eighth Amendment) does not enjoin the states from imposing them. U.S. Supreme Court justices from across the ideological spectrum challenged that assertion on Wednesday when the case came before the high court.

“Weirdly enough, the court has never explicitly held that [the Eight Amendment] restricts state governments,” writes Mark Joseph Stern at Slate:

There is little doubt that the justices will use Timbs to incorporate the clause at long last. Under long-standing precedent, a right that is “fundamental” to “ordered liberty” and “deeply rooted” in history receives protection under the 14th Amendment. And in its extraordinary brief, the Institute for Justice—the libertarian firm representing Timbs—demonstrates that the right against excessive fines checks both boxes. It was enshrined in the Magna Carta and safeguarded by most state constitutions when the U.S. Constitution was ratified. When Congress wrote the 14th Amendment, lawmakers argued that it would nullify “Black Codes” in Southern states that levied crippling, arbitrary fines on newly freed slaves. There is really no plausible argument that the right against excessive fines is not “fundamental” or “deeply rooted” and thus incorporated against the states.

Questioning on Wednesday did not go well for Indiana, as NPR’s audio coverage confirms. Justices hammered Indiana Solicitor General Thomas Fisher who struggled to justify the practice finally before the Supreme Court.

“In 2014, federal prosecutors used asset forfeiture to take more stuff than burglars,” Stern adds.

Decades of states blurring the lines between who is a criminal and who is the law, I’d argue, has contributed to the widespread lack of trust in government that has led us to the Trump era. A ruling to quash civil asset forfeiture would begin restoring that trust.

Next up: “Nearly all of the world’s 180-plus countries include the term education in their constitution,” Alia Wong explains in The Atlantic. A class-action lawsuit filed in Rhode Island seeks to include education as a right in the one major holdout nation: yours:

The 14 plaintiffs in Cook v. Raimondo, all public-school students or parents on behalf of their children, accuse the state of Rhode Island of providing an education so inferior that the state has failed to fulfill its duties under the U.S. Constitution. But given that there is no explicit guarantee of education in the Constitution, the lawyers are making a sort of bank-shot argument: that in denying citizens of Rhode Island a quality education, the state is in essence preventing people from exercising their Constitutional rights, such as forming a legal assembly (as is guaranteed by the First Amendment) or voting (as is guaranteed by the Fifteenth). That this denial falls unevenly across the population is a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment, which promises people equal protection under the law. As of Wednesday afternoon, none of the defendants offered comment on the suit.

The absence of an explicit right to education in the Constitution is not some mere oversight but is instead the result of the country’s federalist system of government: Schooling in America is not the domain of the federal government, but rather the domain of states, all 50 of which mandate in their individual constitutions the provision of public education. This decentralized approach has its benefits: Local governments control their local schools, and parents in any one place can more easily involve themselves in educational policy than they could if those policies were national. But one consequence, many observers contend, is that school funding varies hugely from region to region, often with those who have the greatest need getting the least. With close to half of education spending coming from local property-tax revenue, a child’s zip code has a huge bearing on the quality of her schooling.

Court fights over this inequality have been fought for years in state courts. A favorable federal court ruling in Cook v. Raimondo, litigants hope, “can appeal not just to liberals who are more inclined toward the establishment of a national right to education, but also to conservatives who’ve long advocated for improved civics education.” Not to mention it could result in more equitable education across states and districts. It is a shrewd strategy.

Should the Supreme Court rule against policing for profit, perhaps it will be of a mood later to prohibit public education for profit (looking at you, charter school movement) and to restore civics in schools. Don’t hold your breath. Still, these two cases suggest our institutions may only be mostly dead. Don’t throw out that old bellows just yet.

The coffee boy enjoys Samovar service

Published by digby on November 29, 2018

The coffee boy enjoys Samovar service

by digby

Add this to the crazy from Natasha Bertrand and Scott Stedman at The Atlantic late today:

George Papadopoulos, a Trump campaign adviser who pleaded guilty to lying to federal agents about his interactions with a Russia-linked professor in 2016, went to jail on Monday after fighting, and failing, to delay the start of his two-week prison sentence. But a letter now being investigated by the House Intelligence Committee and the FBI indicates that Papadopoulos is still in the crosshairs of investigators probing a potential conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia.

The letter, obtained last week by The Atlantic, was sent to Democratic Representative Adam Schiff’s office on November 19 by an individual who claims to have been close to Papadopoulos in late 2016 and early 2017. The letter was brought to the attention of Schiff and House Intelligence Committee staff, according to an aide who requested anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation. The letter was also obtained by federal authorities, who are taking its claims “very seriously,” said two U.S. officials who also requested anonymity due to the sensitivities of the probe.

The statement makes a series of explosive but uncorroborated claims about Papadopoulos’s alleged coordination with Russians in the weeks following Trump’s election in November 2016, including that Papadopoulos said he was “doing a business deal with Russians which would result in large financial gains for himself and Mr. Trump.” The confidant said they were willing to take a polygraph test “to prove that I am being truthful” and had come forward now after seeing Papadopoulos “become increasingly hostile towards those who are investigating him and his associates.” A lawyer for Papadopoulos declined to comment.

If corroborated, the claims in the letter would add to an emerging portrait of Trump and his associates’ eagerness to strike backdoor deals with Russia even after the intelligence community concluded that Moscow had interfered in the 2016 election. (Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, tried to set up a “backchannel” to Russia in the weeks after the election and met with the CEO of a sanctioned Russian bank during the transition period. Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn, meanwhile, negotiated with the Russian ambassador about U.S. sanctions before Trump was inaugurated.)

Much of the attention in recent days has been focused on former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and what the campaign knew about WikiLeaks’ plans to release stolen Democratic emails. But Papadopoulos remains one of the most important figures in the Russia investigation. He was ostensibly the first member of the Trump campaign to learn that the Russians had stolen emails that they planned to use against Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election. Rather than tell the FBI about the Russian “dirt” on Clinton, Papadopoulos continued trying to facilitate a meeting between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin as the campaign wore on. His disclosure to an Australian diplomat in May 2016 that Russia had dirt on Clinton is purportedly what triggered the FBI’s Russia investigation—Australian officials reported the comment to American law enforcement authorities in July 2016, after WikiLeaks released the stolen DNC emails.

Federal and congressional investigators are now examining the letter to determine whether Papadopoulos’s ties to Russia were deeper than he has acknowledged, and whether he stayed in Trump’s orbit because of, rather than in spite of, those connections. The confidant who sent the letter to Schiff’s office last week claimed to have witnessed a phone call between Papadopoulos and Trump in December 2016, around the same time that Papadopoulos was allegedly boasting about the Russia deal and sending emails to Flynn and Trump’s campaign CEO, Steve Bannon. In one email, Flynn urged Papadopoulos to “stay in touch, and, at some point, we should get together.” Trump has called Papadopoulos “a coffee boy” who played no meaningful role on the campaign.

Papadopoulos, who has denied having any financial ties to Russia, has claimed in recent weeks that his contact with a shadowy overseas professor named Joseph Mifsud was a set-up by Western intelligence agencies. Mifsud, who claimed to have high-level Kremlin contacts, told Papadopoulos in April 2016 that the Kremlin had dirt on Hillary Clinton in the form of thousands of emails—well before the Russian hacks on the Democratic National Committee or Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta were made public. Papadopoulos told the FBI that he learned of the Kremlin “dirt” before joining the Trump campaign, but that was a lie, according to prosecutors. He had already been a campaign adviser for well over a month by the time Mifsud told him about the stolen emails.

Mifsud was also apparently eager to connect Papadopoulos with his current wife, Simona Mangiante. Mangiante told The Atlantic last month that she first heard about Papadopoulos and his work for the Trump campaign after starting a job at the London Centre of International Law Practice, where Mifsud was the “Director for International Strategic Development,” in September 2016. Mifsud and his associate Nagi Idris told Mangiante over lunch that Papadopoulos, who worked at the London Centre briefly in the spring of 2016, would be visiting London soon, and that if Mangiante met him, she should “make sure” she said she liked Trump—or not discuss politics at all. Mangiante insists, however, that Mifsud never directly introduced her to Papadopoulos, who she says she met on LinkedIn later that fall.

Mifsud may only be one part of the story of Papadopoulos’s connections to Russian nationals in 2016. According to the letter sent to Schiff last week, Papadopoulos revealed in late 2016 that “Greek Orthodox leaders” and their Russian counterparts were “playing an important role” in Papadopoulos’s collaboration with the Russians.

Papadopoulos’s contact with Greek officials in 2016 have been of some interest to those investigating a potential conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia. In a September interview with CNN, Papadopoulos acknowledged for the first time that he told Greece’s foreign minister about the Russian “dirt” on Clinton in May 2016 while visiting the country on a trip authorized by the Trump campaign. Russian President Vladimir Putin was set to visit Greece the very next day, and the foreign minister “explained to me that where you are sitting right now, tomorrow Putin will be sitting there,” Papadopoulos told CNN, claiming that his disclosure about the “dirt” was “a nervous reaction” that he just “blurted out.”

Throughout 2016, Papadopoulos made multiple trips to Greece and developed a working relationship with influential Greek officials while he was serving as a foreign policy advisor on the Trump campaign. In addition to the foreign minister Nikos Kotzias, Papadopoulos had meetings with the former President of Greece Prokopis Pavlopoulos and Ieronymos II, the Archbishop of Athens and All Greece. Papadopoulos’s closest association with the Greek government, however, appears to have been with Greek Defense Minister Panos Kammenos, an outspoken supporter of Moscow with whom Papadopoulos met several times in 2016 and early 2017, including at Trump’s inauguration. In his congratulatory tweet celebrating Trump’s election victory, Kammenos noted Papadopoulos’s importance in maintaining U.S.-Greek relations. A NATO military intelligence official told BuzzFeed News earlier this year that the Greek Ministry of Defense “is considered compromised by Russian intelligence.”

It remains to be seen whether Schiff, the incoming chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, will subpoena Papadopoulos to appear before the panel once the Democrats take control in January. Patrick Boland, a spokesman for Schiff, told The Atlantic that, “at the appropriate time,” the congressman hopes to get “full answers on the range” of Papadopoulos’s “contacts with the Russians and their intermediaries.” Boland said that Schiff and his staff “evaluate all information brought to our attention, and remain concerned about the conduct that formed the basis of Mr. Papadopoulos’ guilty plea, as well as his subsequent and apparently contradictory statements.” Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to making false statements to investigators about “the timing, extent, and nature of his relationships and interactions with certain foreign nationals whom he understood to have close connections with senior Russian government officials.”

There’s more at the link. This is just nuts.

I wrote in my Salon column this morning that we are looking at a number of different strands to the possible conspiracy which includes some people participating incertain strands but not others. It’s obvious at this point that the Russian government was probing the Trump campaign from many different directions.

Keep in mind that to prove a conspiracy, the participants do not have to know the full extent of the plan. Any of these people who participated are in the crosshairs whether they understood the scope of the Russian campaign or not.

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Chip off the old block

Published by digby on November 29, 2018

Chip off the old block

by digby

You can’t make this stuff up. These Trumps all suffer from serious narcissistic personality disorder:

That’s right up with Trump saying on Thanksgiving that he’s thankful he’s done such a great job.

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President Soprano

Published by digby on November 28, 2018

President Soprano

by digby

He can’t stop obstructing justice:

He’s never discussed a pardon for Paul Manafort, President Trump said Wednesday — but it’s “not off the table.”

“It was never discussed, but I wouldn’t take it off the table. Why would I take it off the table?” the president said during an Oval Office interview.

He ripped special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe and charged that Manafort, former political adviser Roger Stone and Stone’s associate Jerome Corsi were all asked to lie by the special counsel.

“If you told the truth, you go to jail,” Trump said.

“You know this flipping stuff is terrible. You flip and you lie and you get — the prosecutors will tell you 99 percent of the time they can get people to flip. It’s rare that they can’t,” Trump said.

“But I had three people: Manafort, Corsi — I don’t know Corsi, but he refuses to say what they demanded. Manafort, Corsi and Roger Stone.”

“It’s actually very brave,” he said of the trio. “And I’m telling you, this is McCarthyism. We are in the McCarthy era. This is no better than McCarthy. And that was a bad situation for the country. But this is where we are. And it’s a terrible thing,” Trump added.

The professional liar circles the wagons around his henchmen. He might as well just say, “stay strong Paulie, I’ll take care o’ you.”

I don’t think we need to look for any other metaphors to explain this president. He’s just a cheap mob boss. Nothing more.

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Trump knew. Of course he knew. And Mueller knows he knew.

Published by digby on November 28, 2018

Trump knew. Of course he knew. And Mueller knows he knew.

by digby

I have no idea what was going on with the Manafort plea deal, but one this is obvious — Mueller knew he was sharing information with Trump. The New York Times article last night implies that this was a reason the plea agreement fell apart but that can’t be true. If I knew the Manafort team was sharing information, then they did. After all, it was reported back in October.

 Not only that, it was also known that the Manafort plea agreement mirrored the one the Special Prosecutor had with Rick Gates with one exception:

Ken Dilanian of MSNBC is saying he thinks this was just an oversight on the Mueller team’s part. But if you look at the second tweet you can see that it was brought to the attention of the Special Prosecutor by that lawyer and one presumes he wasn’t the only one. They knew.

As I noted in my piece for Salon this morning, this suggests to me that they didn’t have a reason to care that Manafort was sharing with Trump and that the real reason talks broke down is exactly what they said it was — Manafort could not stop lying about something. We don’t know what that was but whatever it was, it made Manafort useless to them and they pulled the plug.

There is some informed speculation that Mueller’s team wanted to see if Trump would take some bait and lie in his written answers, suggesting that that’s why they waited until they had been presented. It’s possible but unlikely, in my opinion. I think Mueller is very well aware of the political ramifications of this investigation and would not risk that. More likely, they were looking for Manafort to confess to crimes they already know he committed and he refused to do it for reasons of his own, most likely to keep open the possibility of a pardon.

The Trump team is now saying that the president has no involvement in collusion which is a switch from their earlier insistence that the “witch hunt” is a hoax and there was no collusion. This seems to be related to Stone and Corsi’s clear involvement with Wikileaks.

Over and over again, we’ve seen evidence referenced in the various Russia indictments that there was involvement with a senior member of the Trump campaign.  If the conduit is Roger Stone, that member is almost certainly his close associate for 40 years, Donald Trump.

The Corsi plea agreement draft names him:

The draft statement of offense describes Stone as “Person 1” and someone that Corsi “understood to be in regular contact with senior members of the Trump Campaign, including with then-candidate Donald J. Trump.” 

The inclusion of Trump by name infuriated Trump’s legal team, which obtained a copy of the draft the week before Thanksgiving. In response, the president’s attorneys delayed submitting his written answers to Mueller and formally complained to both the special counsel’s office and the Justice Department, according Giuliani. 

“It’s gratuitous. It’s not necessary,” he said. “If you read out of context, it creates a misimpression that they were in contact with the president during this critical time. And I believe that was done deliberately.” 

They say the draft of the Corsi agreement was delivered to them anonymously and they turned it over to the DOJ. But we’ve also been told that the grifter Corsi has a joint defense agreement with the Trump team. So I don’t know what the real story is there.

But one thing is clear. The Mueller team has reason to believe that Roger Stone kept Trump abrest of all the Wikileaks sabotage during the campaign.

This morning, CNN reported that they had received the answers to two of the questions Mueller had asked the president to answer under oath. He told them that to the best of his knowledge  Roger Stone did not tell him about WikiLeaks, nor was he told about the 2016 Trump Tower meeting.

If he had any credibility at all, that might be believable.  But nobody involved in this is more relentlessly dishonest than the President of the United States. He is lying.

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The president self-soothes with wingnut memes

Published by digby on November 28, 2018

The president self-soothes with wingnut memes

by digby

What’s that about, you ask? Josh Marshall has the answer:

While the tweet seems bizarre on its face, it seems to be related to a picture circulating everywhere from Mike Huckabee’s Twitter account to Roger Stone Jr.’s Instagram to the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer.

The president’s mental state is clearly disintegrating and he’s calming himself with far-right memes.

Here are some other examples from this morning. The first is from a parody account.

That last is a real doozy coming from the President of the United States, isn’t it?

People may dismiss this as Tump just acting like the puerile embarrassment he is. But this is bad even for him. He sent out a tweet to 55 million people that these people committed treason.

Remember people. 40% of the country is fine with this. At least 30% actively love it. They are all adults who have a severe lack of character.  They could elect this guy to another term if they manage to manipulate the system successfully. It’s tilted in their favor.

Two more years of this lunacy … at a minimum.

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Trump, Manafort, Stone and Corsi: the four colluding Musketeers

Published by digby on November 28, 2018

Trump, Manafort, Stone and Corsi: the four colluding Musketeers

by digby

My Salon column this morning:

Except for a brief hiatus before the midterm election, President Trump has been obsessively tweeting about Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller for months. He’s called him corrupt and conflicted, relentlessly complaining that Mueller isn’t investigating Hillary Clinton. There are times when he just bursts forth with a primal tweet containing two words: “Witch Hunt!” But something changed recently. For the first time, Trump commented on the “inner workings” of the investigation:

Trump had never mentioned this before and since he has no discipline, this description likely came from someone who had just recently described his or her experience to him.

Considering the news this week, the person whispering in the president’s ear was probably Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who had supposedly been cooperating with the investigation as part of his plea agreement, or right-wing conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi, revealed to have been in talks with Mueller about pleading guilty to lying to federal authorities. In what may or may not be a coincidence, talks with both men broke down this week.

Manafort had been set to be sentenced about two weeks ago for his convictions earlier this year on numerous counts of fraud, subject to his agreement to cooperate with the special counsel’s office. At the last minute the prosecution asked for an extension of 10 days and on Monday we found out that it was because Manafort had allegedly continued to tell lies. Mueller’s office was clearly exasperated and pulled the plea agreement, promising to provide the judge with the full particulars of everything Manafort did to renege on his promises in the sentencing memorandum — and raising hopes that more details about the case would soon be made public.

The New York Times reported Tuesday night that Mueller was also upset to learn that Manafort’s attorneys had continued a joint defense understanding with Trump’s personal lawyers (a common arrangement before — but not after — a defendant has reached a plea bargain and is cooperating with the prosecution). This was not actually news. Reuters reported that it was happening and the president’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, confirmed it back on Oct. 22, so Mueller’s team had obviously known about it for weeks. In fact, legal experts noted at the time Manafort signed his cooperation agreement that it specifically omitted the usual requirement that he not speak to any third party about the case.

At this point, the obvious assumption is that the Mueller team knew Manafort was sharing what he knew with the Trump team and that what broke down the agreement was the lies, just as stated in the special counsel’s filing on Monday. What we don’t know is what he was lying about.

On Tuesday, the Guardian published an intriguing story reporting that Manafort had met with WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange at the Ecuadoran embassy in London several times, starting in 2013. The most important of these alleged meetings would have been in March of 2016 when Manafort was signing on with Trump and the Russian hacking was taking place. If that turns out to be true it would be yet another link to the Trump campaign, this time at the highest level. This story hasn’t been independently confirmed by other news organizations, and both Manafort and Assange vehemently deny that it happened. But then Manafort may be going to jail for a long time because he just can’t stop lying and Assange’s credibility when it comes to his involvement in the Trump mess isn’t exactly stellar either. So who knows?

Meanwhile, Corsi, the malevolent right-wing operator who brought the world the Swift Boat smear and the “birther” conspiracy is now the center of attention for allegedly breaking off plea discussions with Mueller’s office and releasing a draft of the agreement outlining his crimes to the press, for unclear reasons. Since he too is said to have a jointdefense agreement with the Trump legal team (who doesn’t?) it stands to reason that he’s the source for Trump’s handwringing tweet about the cruelty of the “witch hunt.”

Corsi appears to have been caught lying to federal prosecutors by saying that he forgot about sending emails back and forth to fellow hatchet man Roger Stone in which they discussed the then-impending WikiLeaks data dumps of Clinton campaign emails, including some emails that indicate communications with Assange and coordination of messaging. Corsi insists he was simply clairvoyant about all that and had no actual contact with WikiLeaks. But then Corsi, like Manafort, is an inveterate liar. In fact, lying is his calling.

Hovering in the background of all this is Stone, a man who has never talked to Mueller’s office, indicating that he is very likely a target. He is the fulcrum on which this part of the conspiracy rests, and arguably the most important player. His relationship to both Manafort and Trump goes back decades. In fact, Stone had been pressing Trump to run for president since 1988, and even worked as his campaign manager during Trump’s short-lived Reform Party candidacy in 1999. He left the 2016 campaign early on but kept in close touch with Trump. He denies any involvement with WikiLeaks or the hacking, which isn’t the least bit believable considering his public statements and behavior. But then, Stone too has made a living as a professional liar.

I’ve heard a number of pundits and reporters make the case recently that if Mueller ends up indicting Stone and Corsi for conspiracy, this whole thing will have been a a silly waste of time. After all, they are nothing but dishonest fringe players, gadflies, clowns. Maybe even Manafort, with his recent antics, fits that bill as well. But those people need to keep in mind that the most dishonest of all fringe players, the gadfly of gadflies, the person whom these kooks all served, is now the most powerful man on earth. If this was a conspiracy of clowns, the president of the United States has been one of them for years.

We have no way of knowing the full scope of the conspiracy investigation. This may just be one strand that connects to criminal hacking and sabotage while there are other strands relating to Manafort and Flynn and other attempts at infiltration. We’ll know soon enough. But this wild week has already made one thing clear. Contrary to months of media insistence that Mueller was only focused on obstruction of justice, we now know that “collusion” is definitely on the menu. Which explains why Trump’s tweets are getting more and more hysterical by the day:

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