There was plenty of reasonable suspicion

There was plenty of reasonable suspicion

by digby

Four different judges have at least started the sentencing process against Trump’s aides in the Mueller investigation. In every case, their suspect loyalty to Trump came up. With both Flynn and Manafort, the judges’ language about betraying country was far stronger.

— emptywheel (@emptywheel) February 18, 2019

Significantly, the two judges who have read significant non-public materials on the underlying conduct that Trump’s aides were lying to hide both suggested the aides had betrayed the country.

— emptywheel (@emptywheel) February 18, 2019

 Emptywheel’s post lays out the four legal proceedings before judges that we’ve seen evidence that this is not some partisan witch hunt and that the evidence, much of which we have not yet seen, shows something very nefarious. She concludes:

Four times so far in this investigation, Trump’s aides have started the sentencing process for their crimes designed to obstruction Robert Mueller’s investigation. All four times, before four different judges, their misplaced loyalty to Trump above country has come up. And with both Flynn and Manafort — where the judges have seen significant amounts of non-public information about the crimes they lied to cover-up — two very reasonable judges have raised explicit questions about whether Trump’s aides had betrayed their country.

Trump wants this to be a case of contested claims of betrayal. But the judges who have reviewed the record have used striking language about who betrayed their country.

Considering all the hand-wringing over the McCabe interview this morning, I thought I’d re-up my Salon piece from Friday that makes some of the same points:

My Salon column this mprning:


Valentine’s Day 2019 was a day to remember. Americans woke up with news about Andrew McCabe, the former acting director of the FBI and his new book outlining the details of the wild days in May of 2017 when members of the Justice Department considered ways to evoke the 25th Amendment to remove the president from office.  By that night we had word that the president was going to go through with his threat to declare a national emergency so that he could circumvent the will of the US Congress.


And just to add to the general chaos, in between breaking news stories,  legal and national security experts were still poring over earlier news from the Manafort case that had everyone who is following the Russia scandal closely just a little bit breathless. A federal judge has affirmed that the president’s former campaign chairman lied to the special prosecutor about some damning evidence that we can infer may implicate Donald Trump.


As House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-CA, explained on MSNBC:

It appears the judge has largely agreed with what the special counsel argued and that not only did he lie, but the motivation here is that if he told the truth about his relationship with someone with Russian Intelligence while he was the campaign chairman that would be so damaging  to Trump that it would negate his chance of a pardon. 

I have never subscribed to the theory that the president is a wily operator who’s always strategizing how to distract the media and the public from bad news about him. He’s got a strong feral survival instinct so he’s always bobbing and weaving but I doubt that he’s making any conscious choices. However, occurred to me that he seemed a bit too eager to draw attention to the McCabe story considering how damning it actually is.

Perhaps he really was upset. But it’s also the case that he knew upon waking up yesterday that he had just lost the biggest legislative fight of his presidency. He closed down the government for the longest shutdown in history and wound up getting less than he would have gotten had he taken the border funding deal they agreed to last December.  He also undoubtedly realized that in order to save face, even a little, was to call for the national emergency and create a rift among allies in congress, possibly changing the dynamic.


As Salon’s Amanda Marcotte pointed out on Thursday, Trump had already been in the unusual position of having to court his usually slavering media supporters to get them to accept the inevitable. McCabe’s book probably seemed like the better of all the bad news cascading down on him in this very bad week.


Needless to say, Trump’s defenders on Fox News and elsewhere in the right-wing media find this to be convincing evidence of an attempted “deep state” coup. But coming on the heels of this news about the Manafort case and the accumulated evidence of the last three years, it was a reminder to he rest of us of the craziness around the Comey firing when Trump had the Russian Ambassador up to the Oval Office the very next day and telling them:

“I just fired the head of the F.B.I. He was crazy, a real nut job,” Mr. Trump said, according to the document, which was read to The New York Times by an American official. “I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.” 

Mr. Trump added, “I’m not under investigation.” 

Imagine how that looked to law enforcement and intelligence officials at the time. And consider that they also knew that Trump  shared “code-word information”  one of the highest classification levels used by American spy agencies,  which one official characterized as “more information to the Russian ambassador than we have shared with our own allies.”


McCabe made some news in an excerpt of a CBS interview to air this weekend, by saying that he not only opened a counter-intelligence investigation, as reported earlier, but he also opened an obstruction of justice investigation around the same time based upon the president’s behavior and his insistence that the Justice Department was to do his bidding. He appears to have been right to do so.


One of the president’s most fervent defenders inadvertently made the point very clear with a tweet yesterday:

All of those firings have to do with the Russia investigation.


Former US Attorney and Deputy Assistant Attorney General Harry Litman said on MSNBC, “Is it a slow-motion Saturday night massacre? That’s what they were worried about at the time. In some ways, it’s worse. It is as McCabe says, a fall-off in standards of presidential accountability such as they’ve never had before.”


It must be noted that there is always a concern about powerful federal law enforcement investigating a president whether for the purpose of blackmail as Hoover was suspected of doing, or because of political bias against his policies. But, if anything, the law enforcement and intelligence communities in Washington tend to be conservative GOP so it would be very odd if they decided to go after a Republican administration right out of the gate for political purposes, even if they thought the president was a nut or a fool. They would most likely trust that the party and the bureaucracy would assert itself. In this case, with the evidence they had of Russian interference along with the president and his campaign’s bizarre behavior, they took some protective action some of which was reckless and got them into trouble. But it’s not hard to see why they would go there.


We’ve now had a United States federal judge in the Manafort case affirm what appears to be a central piece of the Special Counsel’s theory which may implicate the president in a conspiracy. We earlier saw another United States federal judge look at the evidence in the Flynn case and get so agitated he accidentally threw out the word treason. And as of Thursday evening, the United States has a new Attorney General, William Barr.


We don’t know as yet if Barr’s years in private life were spent being brainwashed by right-wing media (and there is some evidence that they were) but he was, at one time, thought of as a man who cared about the Department of Justice and saw himself as a patriot. He too will probably be seeing all the evidence as early as today. Much depends upon whether this lifelong Republican lawyer sees what all these other otherwise conservative cops, G-Men, spies, US Attorneys and federal judges have been seeing over the past couple of years.

.