Sen. Joe Manchin left a steaming lump of West Virginia coal in Democrats’ Christmas stockings this year. Perhaps the universe will be as generous with the mob-boss-in-residence down in Mar-a-Lago.
The Guardian suggests that lately he’s not having many silent nights:
Donald Trump is increasingly agitated by the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack, according to sources familiar with the matter, and appears anxious he might be implicated in the sprawling inquiry into the insurrection even as he protests his innocence.
The House Jan. 6 investigation has the poor lad unnerved. Mark Meadows betrayed him by releasing documents. Other Trump associates invoked the Fifth Amendment against testifying, and that makes them and him look guilty. Trump previously declared to an Iowa rally, “You see the mob takes the Fifth. If you’re innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?”
They should have followed Steve Bannon’s lead and ignored congressional subpoenas, Trump tells associates. If Bannon took his lead from Trump, that could in itself be a crime for Trump, couldn’t it?
When Trump sees new developments in the Capitol attack investigation on television, he has started swearing about the negative coverage and bemoaned that the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, was too incompetent to put Republicans on the committee to defend him.
One would say he’s getting sloppy if he were ever not sloppy.
The portrait that emerges from interviews with multiple sources close to Trump, including current and former aides, suggest a former president unmoored and backed into a corner by the rapid escalation in intensity of the committee’s investigation.
A spokesperson for Trump did not respond to requests for comment.
But as Trump struggles to shield himself from the select committee, with public hearings next year and the justice department said to be tracking the investigation, the path ahead is only likely to be more treacherous.
Plus, he is under investigation in New York City, and that one is much further along. When current District Attorney Cy Vance Jr. retires in ten days, his replacement, Alvin Bragg Jr., “plans to personally focus on the high-profile probe into former President Donald Trump’s business practices and may expand the investigative team while keeping at least one senior prosecutor on the case.” So that one is not going away.
For the moment, Trump’s allies are not leaping from the taffrails. The committee has yet to secure documents covered by executive privilege that could directly implicate Trump.
But an unnamed member of the House committee concludes that Team MAGA mounted a multi-pronged effort to overturn the 2020 election: “There was a DoJ strategy, a state legislative strategy, a state election official strategy, the vice-president strategy. And there was the insurrection strategy.”
Trump is not having a merry, little Christmas.
The trouble for Trump – and part of the source of his frustration, the sources said – is his inability, out of office, to wield the far-reaching power of the executive branch to affect the course of the inquiry.
The limited success of strategies he hoped would stymie the committee – ordering aides to defy subpoenas or launching legal challenges to slow-walk the release White House records – has been jarring for Trump.
“I think what he’s finding is that as the ex-president, he has a lot less authority than he did as president. But his playbook doesn’t work if he’s not president,” said Daniel Goldman, former lead counsel in the first House impeachment inquiry into Trump.
If this was a race to file indictments, the safe bet is something coming first from the Manhattan District Attorney’s office.
It’s not too late to update your list to Santa.
It’s Happy Hollandaise time here at Hullabaloo. If you’d like to drop a little something in the old Christmas stocking you can do so here: