Eyes of storms tend to be calm, so amid the natural disasters and human malevolence, plus those attempts to distract us, the Mueller folks continue to home in on Orange Menace.
Trump’s plays are now more insular, pandering to the RWNJ base and still following the Bannon playbook. The smell of desperation thickens as does the plot.
Trump’s unhinged behavior seems to now be untempered or perhaps unaltered from its pre-election irrationality, as actually being president seems too uncomfortable for Trump to sustain.
The trans ban and the Arpaio pardon are really about distracting from the new Russia subpoenas, as the Manafort PR firms’ evidence would be more about providing the foundation for how Russian influence during the 2012-2014 sanctions period became integral and indispensable for the relationship between Manafort and Trump.
This is fundamental for seeing structurally how Russian influence operated in manipulating various Republicans, as well as seeing the structure of other Russian interests in the EU beyond trying to thwart Ukraine, like Brexit. It has always been less about Manafort himself and more about the connections he facilitated, what the IC has uncovered, and the activities hinted at in the Steele Dossier.
The June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower was less about the meeting itself as it was the tip of a much more complex network of interactions whose structure will emerge … soon.
Somewhat interesting is the side possibility, however obtusely suggested already by several less credible sources, that other major GOP members took Russian money.
Special counsel Robert Mueller has begun demanding testimony in his grand jury investigation of alleged Russian meddling with a focus on President Trump’s former campaign manager, according to a report.
Mueller is looking at a lobbying campaign Paul Manafort helped coordinate while he was working for the party of Kremlin-backed Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, a public relations executive who was subpoenaed told NBC on Friday.
[...]
The PR campaign was run through the Brussels-based European Center for a Modern Ukraine, which says it supports moving Ukraine closer to the European Union.
Yanukovych later plunged his country into chaos after he turned from a proposed association agreement with the EU in favor of closer ties to Russia, leading to his ouster and the Kremlin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014.
Manafort left the Trump campaign last August after scrutiny of the Modern Ukraine operation, which aimed at getting positive press for Ukrainian leaders in the U.S. and undercut support for a Yanukovych rival.
The measure of infamy will be eventually be assessed by historians, but Twitter will allow Trump’s place in history to be addressed rationally, since Trump is now truly being what most expected, despite the constant hope by naive journalists that he had turned finally presidential rather than autocratic… The Pepe and his scorpion.
As Mark Sumner has observed, the end of Trump is going to be in the Russian details, and Mueller is doing the heavy lifting that could be interesting if in a last futile gesture, Trump removes him, because we already know that Russia:
- Created thousands of social media accounts with the specific goal of targeting voters in swing states with false reports attacking Hillary Clinton.
- Offered to provide the Trump campaign with documents that could be used to attack Clinton.
- Attempted to infiltrate the voter databases of over two dozens states and successfully recovered information from some of those states.
- Broke into the email server of the DNC and Clinton campaign officials, stole email and documents, and passed those documents to Wikileaks for distribution.
- Worked with Republicans to identify the most valuable documents captured from Democrats and how they could be used to suppress the vote in specific areas.
- Made multiple attempts to schedule meetings between the Trump team and Russian officials, up to and including Putin.
The speculative dynamic could be that moment when a 2020 POTUS-aspiring, GOP-Caucus member(s), decides to lead the impeachment charge because GOP leadership got caught with kompromat. At that moment, a coalition of Democrats and Republicans would bring the long, national nightmare to a close as Congress hires Mueller after he gets canned by the White House.