The Deutsche Bank thing is potentially way more important than Flynn or Manafort, as financial misdoings could implicate Trump personally - and more importantly, could involve NY state crimes Trump can’t pardon his way out of.
Though while the specific Deutsche Bank subpoena is news, the fact that Mueller is looking at possible financial crimes is not. It’s been known since at least this summer. The red line was crossed a long time ago, and so far Trump hasn’t done anything about it (except, of course, whine.)
The bank thing is gonna freak Trump out, and stress him, which will make him make more mistakes.
The thing I’ve seen from dealing with a guy who is suffering from dementia, is that it gets way WAY worse as stress levels go up. In the morning, when relaxed, he’s fairly normal. But when things get stressful, he goes downhill fast, and become hugely irrational and hard to deal with.
So Trump’s morning tweetstorms are the point at which he is most rational? Uh oh.
Bookmark this if you haven’t already:
https://act.moveon.org/event/mueller-firing-rapid-response-events/search/
Today I learned Doonesbury still exists!
I certainly hope the Deutsche Bank story doesn’t induce DJT’s lawyer to go rogue with DJT’s twitter account again!
All I want to see are debt obligations and creditor names. One little small wafer-thin table.
Normally Trump’s pattern is to not react within the first 24 hours or so after a major breaking story like that one, and then he unleashes all the poison at once. He’ll probably start this evening or tomorrow.
I certainly hope DJT’s lawyer issues some ‘Why isn’t the DOJ investigating Crooked Hillary Clinton’s financial connections to Russia?’ tweets from DJT’s personal twitter account. Those are always fresh.
Uranium One: The Truth is Out There
That’s because the news breaks after fox and friends is off the air for the day. Pretty sure he has to find out that he should be outraged…
Any chance you may rethink this position?
lost in this whirlwind of legal speculation is an important detail in Flynn’s plea: The Trump transition team’s response to the Obama administration’s expulsion of 35 Russian diplomats last December. The secretive actions Flynn and others took following these sanctions reveal a fundamental breach of public trust that cannot be overlooked in the frenzy to find criminal wrongdoing.
I know firsthand from my experience working counterintelligence investigations for the FBI that kicking a diplomat out of the country is no small thing. The process of expelling a diplomat is called “PNG”-ing, which stands for declaring the individual a “persona non grata.”
Diplomats, who are visiting dignitaries, typically receive the highest level of courtesy from the host government and enjoy diplomatic immunity — so a PNG is the harshest punishment the U.S. can give a diplomat…
…As a result, a PNG request involves a tug-of-war between the FBI, the CIA and the State Department (with the final decision taken by the White House), and is most often denied. Of the cases I was involved with, the only time a PNG was approved was when allowing the spy to remain would have resulted in actual physical harm to a U.S. person.
This is the complex process and very high threshold to keep in mind when looking at President Obama’s actions against Russia last December. In response to Russia’s election hacking, the U.S. expelled not just one, but 35 spies posing as diplomats — the strongest response ever to a cyberattack against the U.S.
In addition, President Obama made a public statement on the expulsions, calling them a “necessary and appropriate response to efforts to harm U.S. interests in violation of established international norms of behavior.” Both the magnitude of the sanctions and the public condemnation by the president was intended to send as sharp a rebuke as possible to Russia’s attack on our democracy.
As Flynn’s plea deal reveals, the Trump transition team immediately made a concerted effort to undermine the signal that the United States was sending…
…By relaying this message covertly (and in spite of a “pointed request” by the Obama administration to avoid sending mixed signals to foreign officials), the Trump team negated the message being sent by the United States to Russia — and effectively put its stamp of approval on Russia’s efforts.
The repercussions of the Trump team’s covert efforts are not merely symbolic; they have also had serious long-term consequences on our intelligence capabilities against Russia.
I think Obama’s sanctions were a purely political move to try to discredit the election and Trump over something that has been done routinely by both ourselves and the Russian over many decades. By doing so Obama is the one who hurt the US, both by undermining our own democracy and hurting relations with the Russians at the same time. It was nothing but a temper tantrum over the result of the election, Obama didn’t do a thing about it beforehand.
Please, not the ‘we do it too’ line of argument. It’s absolutely true that the U.S. has (IMO reprehensibly) subverted democracy in many countries since World War II, and it has nothing to do with whether we need to protect our own democratic processes.
Sssh. Whataboutism is about all the right has as an “argument” these days.
I’ll do even better. Fake, seditious, politically motivated outrage. That all this has ever been.
Speaking of Mueller:
https://twitter.com/johnrobertsFox/status/938126764274044930
At least your honest about you and your fellow Republicans. That is a start
At no point in history did the Russians ever engage so directly in manipulating the consciousness of the American electorate.
The technological basis for such a manipulation simply did not exist previously.
It is appalling that you, who once stood on the side of men like Reagan, now stand on the side of the Soviets he fought so hard against.
There is literally nothing left of what once constituted your principles. You are just a husk full of partisan tribalism now. And the tribe you have dedicated yourself to is very, very bad.