Removing a criminal president from office through the impeachment procedure is a very difficult and impactful thing. It is unprecedented, as it has never been done in American history (Nixon resigned on the threat), and so is completely unfamiliar to the American people. The reality, that their president is as venally criminal as he is, is a very hard thing to swallow.
Accordingly, those who are working to bring the truth to light are being careful. Republican senators remain intransigent; the case made has to be so damning as to force their hands. Civil war has been mentioned and even threatened by some, though I think it’s unlikely. But violence in the form of street riots, shootings and lynchings by outraged T***pists with heads full of lies and conspiracy theories from the right-wing noise machine is entirely plausible.
The idea here is to get him and his co-conspirators out of power with the lowest possible death toll and least possible and suffering.
Thus, I think, what we are seeing now is a purposeful gradual escalation of the severity of T***p criminal activity being revealed by the media, so as to allow Americans to gradually adjust to the reality, and thus push the national Overton Window—the realm of what is acceptable to say rather than marginal in public discourse—towards removing T***p.
Last week, we first had the NYT’s release of the fact that the FBI was investigating T***p for acting as a Russian agent from late spring 2017, followed by WaPo with T***p concealing the content of private conversations with Putin.
[Re next section, see update on Mueller disavowing the Buzzfeed story below. I’ve made other edits to this diary, including deleting one update, due to this development.]
Now it’s Buzzfeed claiming that T***p ordered Cohen to lie to Congress about the Moscow T***p Tower, with what sounds like very solid and copious evidence held by Mueller:
The special counsel’s office learned about Trump’s directive for Cohen to lie to Congress through interviews with multiple witnesses from the Trump Organization and internal company emails, text messages, and a cache of other documents. Cohen then acknowledged those instructions during his interviews with that office.
It also implicates two of the T***p kids, Ivanka and Don Jr., which is another new level of severity.
This has taken the calls for impeachment to a much higher level. The Overton Window has been successfully shoved strongly in that direction.
Mark Sumner on the front page right here (headline): “impeachment proceedings are likely.”
The Dems are being given increasingly safe cover to launch them. The idea is to get to where Nancy Pelosi says honestly, “We really had no choice.”
But let’s go back even before all this, to a clip from Rachel Maddow that I diaried about 10 days ago. In it, she notices a pattern of key Congressional Democrats saying that, yes, it is possible to indict a president in the week or two before that.
She paraphrases House Judiciary Committee Chair Jerry Nadler—who would be the one to initiate impeachment proceedings—and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, both saying that indictment is possible, in TV interviews. She then shows a clip of House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff in a TV interview in which he says “There is a very powerful case to be made that you can indict a sitting President.” Finally she quotes Eric Swalwell, who sits with Schiff on the House Intelligence Committee, as saying in the few days prior that prosecutors in the Southern District of New York may already have indicted T***p in a sealed indictment.
Oh, hey, here’s a more recent tweet from Ted Lieu:
The argument I made in that diary was that the ground was being prepared for indictment. Now it looks to me like the ground was and still is being prepared for both indictment and impeachment.
I’m not saying the investigators, media and Dems are all colluding (haha) with each other, though possibly some are (especially anonymous sources with reporters and, of course—I would hope!—Dems with each other). But at the very least they are all moving in the same direction intentionally because they all agree on the ultimate goal—save the USA from this stupid, incompetent, crazy, evil criminal who usurped the Presidency and is damaging the nation and everything good about it.
I bet whoever makes the decision when to drop an incriminating story is watching the public reaction to the previous one, to see if the time is right.
Toward getting rid of T***p, his crime family and his vile criminal co-conspirators with as low a death toll and as little pain and suffering as possible.
So what’s going to happen going forward?
Well, the one firm date we have is Feb. 7, the day Michael Cohen testifies before the House Oversight Committee, with the cameras rolling. He says he’s going to lay it all out, though I think it’s safe to predict he’ll do that in a way that makes him look as good as possible, which may involve some shading of the truth. But I think we can expect a thorough throwing of T***p under the bus, if not a herd of buses, such that he’ll look like hamberder afterward. Perhaps Mueller and the Dems in concert will make a big move after his testimony. Possibly that’s the key to the timing here: to let out a glimpse of the horrors he will reveal so as to get Americans used to the full view.
But it would also be, I think, to get Americans ready for coming indictments of T***p and his spawn and other conspirators for even worse crimes, before or after Cohen’s testimony. After all, telling a witness to lie to Congress is not nearly as bad as conspiring with a hostile foreign power to steal an election.
However that goes, I think we can expect a continuing stream of increasingly incriminating stories, whether they come from law enforcement leaks, court filings, testimony or what-have-you. I don’t know that they will become more frequent, but they may, as the American people acclimatize to the reality.
Their doing so will force Republican senators to turn against T***p; I expect at some point that’ll hit a critical mass. When the time is judged to be right, there will be both indictments and impeachment proceedings, with T***p’s trials waiting on his being removed from office by Congress.
February? March?
Let’s hope.
Saturday, Jan 19, 2019 · 1:18:30 AM +00:00 · KM Wehrstein
Well. Robert Mueller is disavowing the Buzzfeed story.
Text:
“Buzzfeed’s description of specific statements to the Special Counsel’s Office, and characterization of documents and testimony obtained by this office, regarding Michael Cohen’s Congressional testimony are not accurate.” — Spokesperson for special counsel Robert Mueller’s office.
In its lack of specificity, this statement is faintly damning of the whole story, but without substantiation through specifics. Frustrating, though it does answer a niggling question I had about it; it sounded like a Mueller leak, but his operation has been leak-proof. So who were the “two law-enforcement officers”?
Someone’s playing us all for some reason, either to push for impeachment (which has been successful so far) or to confuse matters. Or else the Office of the Special Counsel is making very sure it’s known that they weren’t the leakers.
I feel I should explain why I credited the Buzzfeed story: not only does it seem plausible to me that Mueller has evidence of Trump directing Cohen to lie to Congress, but, since we know 1) Cohen did lie to Congress; 2) Cohen took orders from Trump generally; and 3) Cohen’s office, home and hotel were all raided and large amounts of material including recorded conversations were taken, it seems implausible to me that Mueller doesn’t have evidence of it.
Still, he’s saying that the purported facts of the story are inaccurate. In some way.
Anyway, I don’t think this negates the thrust of the diary, else I’d unpublish it.
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You know, it actually feels better to key “T***p” than the actual name… it does! It feels cleaner. Try it!
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