Heavier, thicker and fouler
by Tom Sullivan
Let’s just say Tuesday was a personal tipping point. The sewage pond contained behind the fences at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue overtopped the sandbags. Jonathan Chait’s thumbnail bill of particulars is an indecent place to start:
Trump of course faces massive political and legal vulnerabilities not only for collusion with Russia during the presidential campaign, but also secretive financial ties to Russia and other authoritarian states, tax fraud, campaign finance violations, abuse of a pseudo-charitable foundation, and embezzlement of inaugural funds. This is a non-exhaustive list of potential crimes that precede Trump taking the oath of office.
The list is among the sort of pre-2017 crimes for which David Rivkin and Elizabeth Price Foley argued in the Wall Street Journal that Donald Trump cannot be investigated. Unlike investigating Bill Clinton’s prepresidential peccadilloes — investigating those was a minor distraction from Oval Office duties — Trump’s massive body of evidence is so corpulent, they argue, that investigating what he did before entering the White House just might interfere with the president’s Executive Time in his golf simulator. Can’t have that.
Word got out in the New York Times just before Chait’s list posted about a plan by Trump family grifters to pad their pockets by cutting a side deal in sensitive nuclear technology with Saudi Arabia, bypassing the Atomic Energy Act and Congressional approval required by law. House Democrats released a report based on multiple whistleblower accounts:
The report is the most detailed portrait to date of how senior White House figures — including Michael T. Flynn, President Trump’s first national security adviser — worked with retired military officers to circumvent the normal policymaking process to promote an export plan that experts worried could spread nuclear weapons technology in the volatile Middle East. Administration lawyers warned that the nuclear exports plan — called the Middle East Marshall Plan — could violate laws meant to stop nuclear proliferation and raised concerns about Mr. Flynn’s conflicts of interest.
Mr. Flynn had worked on the issue for the company promoting the nuclear export plan and kept pushing it once inside the White House.
But Flynn’s leaving the White House one year ago did not slow Team Avarice. The House report assures:
On February 12, 2019, the President met with nuclear power developers at the White House about sharing nuclear technology with countries in the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia. In addition, next week Mr. Kushner will be embarking on a tour of Middle Eastern capitals—including Riyadh — to discuss the economic portion of the Administration’s Middle East peace plan.
The staff report adds,
Further investigation is needed to determine whether the actions being pursued by the Trump Administration are in the national security interest of the United States or, rather, serve those who stand to gain financially as a result of this potential change in U.S. foreign policy.
How many guesses do we get?
House Oversight and Intelligence Committees are investigating whether Trump officials have been pursuing an illegal plan from which some of them would personally financially benefit, to give nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia. pic.twitter.com/eoDbvUdtZZ— Maddow Blog (@MaddowBlog) February 20, 2019
Then, after Chait’s list posted, the New York Times dropped another bunker-buster:
As federal prosecutors in Manhattan gathered evidence late last year about President Trump’s role in silencing women with hush payments during the 2016 campaign, Mr. Trump called Matthew G. Whitaker, his newly installed attorney general, with a question. He asked whether Geoffrey S. Berman, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York and a Trump ally, could be put in charge of the widening investigation, according to several American officials with direct knowledge of the call.
Installing “a perceived loyalist atop a widening inquiry” is by now a standard Trump tactic, part of “an even more sustained, more secretive assault” over the last two years by the sitting president to undermine efforts by law enforcement and obstruct inquiries into affairs sexual, financial, and international. Say, like trading in nuclear technology. The Times explains the problem for the public in keeping up is:
… Mr. Trump’s attempts to defang the investigations has been voluminously covered in the news media, to such a degree that many Americans have lost track of how unusual his behavior is. But fusing the strands reveals an extraordinary story of a president who has attacked the law enforcement apparatus of his own government like no other president in history, and who has turned the effort into an obsession. Mr. Trump has done it with the same tactics he once used in his business empire: demanding fierce loyalty from employees, applying pressure tactics to keep people in line and protecting the brand — himself — at all costs.
Dangling presidential pardons before the indicted is one method the president has kept some of his secrets to date. But which of the president’s “friends” to whom he’s offered to trade pardons for silence can be sure he’ll give them another fleeting thought once Himself is firmly up against the wall?
I watched these stories unfold Tuesday over Twitter on the left side of my monitor while streaming Day 2 of the NC-9 election fraud hearing on the right. It was a binocular horror show of criminal incompetence by the willfully ignorant and morally bankrupt.
At least, there is a chance or two North Carolina will unwind its election mess in the next few days. Out in the provinces, people will go to jail, that’s certain. Yet in the nation’s capitol, the Trump crime family still sits scheming in the White House and making a mockery of the republic rather than serving Executive Time in the hoosegow.
In May 2017, then-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe briefed “The Gang of Eight” that Trump was possibly compromised by the Russians and that the FBI had opened a counterintelligence investigation. Among them, the chairmen and ranking members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees. None objected, McCabe told the Today Show, “not on legal grounds, constitutional grounds or based on the facts.”
Charlie Pierce yesterday lamented the meaning of this revelation, writing:
In 2017, at the time McCabe requested the investigation, these would have included Senator Mitch McConnell, Speaker Paul Ryan, Richard Burr, and White House lawn ornament Devin Nunes from the House. According to McCabe, even Nunes didn’t object to the investigation. This is just a bit astounding, considering the supine performance of congressional Republicans once the president* got sworn in.
They all know. That’s the main thing. They all know and they’ve done nothing. Historians one day will fall out of their anti-gravity chairs.
Teapot what? will have been forgotten.