5331

Daily briefing is on. Opening statement = tax reform.

5332

The weight of justice falls mightily without regard to position.

5333

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5334

The Fox News hot take:

5335

Good. Tony and John both kinda need to sunset themselves.

5336

Manafort and Gates both enter not guilty pleas.

5337

“Your honor, are you going to believe me or your lying eyes?”

5338

Dear heavens! Fox has concerns about Mueller’s credibility.

Fox from several months ago.

5339

This is the key bit of information I’m seeing. IMHO, Mueller isn’t done by a longshot, and is still digging deep.

5340

This is just the first Indictment Day.
Mueller is not even done with the interviews yet.

If Mueller is not fired (and, really, how can that possibly happen now? I have to think (hope) at least some number of Republicans would make a stand were that to happen) this might turn out to be the largest scandal in US political history.

5341

I wish I had your optimism.

5342

I think a few more would announce their retirements, but the vast majority would say nothing. Unless they are convinced the GOP primary voters are turning anti-Trump, I wouldn’t count on a sudden outbreak of moral courage from GOP politicians.

Perhaps if the Kochs/ Mercers become anti-Trump, this might change.

5343
5344

My understanding is that the Kochs more or less are. They want the tax cuts and deregulation, but they also want market stability. They can get the first two under Pence if they need to.

Mercer is full on white nationalism though, he wants Trump and Bannon running things.

5345

They are all quite happily willing to let the world choke on carbon dioxide, of course.

5346
5347

Sure, it wont really affect them. If 90% of the water on Earth became poison, they’d still be getting that 10% that wasn’t.

5348
5349

More analysis:

Before we dive any deeper into the Manafort-Gates indictment—charges to which both pled not guilty to today—or the Papadopoulos plea and stipulation, let’s pause a moment over these two remarkable claims, one of which we must still consider as allegation and the other of which we can now consider as admitted fact. President Trump, in short, had on his campaign at least one person, and allegedly two people, who actively worked with adversarial foreign governments in a fashion they sought to criminally conceal from investigators. One of them ran the campaign. The other, meanwhile, was interfacing with people he “understood to have substantial connections to Russian government officials” and with a person introduced to him as “a relative of Russian President Vladimir Putin with connections to senior Russian government officials.” All of this while President Trump was assuring the American people that he and his campaign had “nothing to do with Russia.”

The release of these documents should, though it probably won’t, put to rest the suggestion that there are no serious questions of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government in the latter’s interference on the former’s behalf during the 2016 election. It also raises a profound set of questions of its own about the truthfulness of a larger set of representations Trump campaign officials and operatives have made both in public, and presumably, under oath and to investigators.

And here’s the rub: This is only Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s opening salvo.

As opening salvos go, it’s a doozy.

5350

I concur with the notion that it’s too late for Trump to kill this thing now.

There’s no reasonable way to suggest that there’s nothing there now. He’s indicted two major players. One guy’s already pleaded guilty to colluding with Russia and then lying to the FBI about it.

At this point, there’s little reasonable action Trump can take to slow things down. However, I can imagine him taking overtly unreasonable actions, because he’s not a smart man, and he doesn’t have smart people advising him.

I feel like, ultimately, this will come down to a test of the GOP in congress. I do not have faith that they will be able to pass that test.