Is Trump White House Trying to Create an Excuse to Fire Mueller? Hypocritical claims of private email being private
December 18, 2017

 
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It was 1992. The presidential race was already in full-swing and accusations Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton having had multiple extramarital affairs were already common in Republican circles. They even found a former lounge singer named Gennifer Flowers to claim she had had an affair with Clinton while he was governor. But despite those claims, Bill Clinton was still elected the 42nd President of the United States. Clinton had Democratic majorities in both the House & Senate to shield him from a congressional investigation, but years of accusing the president of criminal wrongdoing (“Whitewater”) and “extramarital affairs” while he was governor of Arkansas helped flip control of BOTH houses of Congress to the Republicans in 1994, leading to the appointment of a Special prosecutor named “Ken Starr” who… on the taxpayers dime, investigated Bill Clinton for everything from “Whitewater” (a failed land deal where the Clinton’s actually lost money) to the “White House Christmas Card List”. And there was (essentially) nothing President Clinton could do about it. The most he could have done is ordered his Attorney General Janet Reno to fire Starr, but it was understood that that would only make him look even more guilty. So he never did. And it was only when they managed to get President Clinton to agree to testify under oath, that they were finally able to prosecute/impeach him… not for any actual crime committed while governor, nor of committing any crime relating to an extramarital affair while in the White House, but for the crime of “lying under oath” about even having an affair. And for that, they impeached him (note, an “impeachment” is an indictment, NOT a conviction.)

Flash forward to 2016. Another Clinton is running for president and her Republican opponent was already accusing her of criminal wrongdoing. “She used a private email server while she was Secretary of State to hide evidence of currying political favors in exchange for contributions to her charitable foundation”… or something along those lines. It actually was never entirely clear what “crime” they were accusing Hillary of attempting to conceal (reports of the nonsensical “Uranium One” deal came much later) by setting up a private email server in her home, suggesting only that it looked mighty suspicious. And when news broke she deleted some “30,000 private messages” (using professional deletion software called “Bleach” that overwrites old data so it can’t be recovered) that she herself deemed unrelated to her tenure as Secretary of State and not pertinent to any investigation, chants of “Lock her up (for obstruction of justice)” started to be repeated at every campaign event through the rest of the election (and in many cases, continue to this day as Trump attends partisan events.) Trump himself… alluding to the Russian hacking of the DNC in an attempt to meddle in our election… half-jokingly encouraged the Russians to “find the 30,000 missing emails”… ostensibly by committing further acts of cyber-crime against the United States… encouraged by the GOP front-runner for President of the United States.

Outgoing President Obama learned that December that we had solid evidence Russia meddled in the 2016 Presidential Election and may have even received assistance from members of the Trump campaign. A Special Prosecutor admired by Republicans and Democrats alike… a hold-over from the Bush Administration… Robert Mueller, was tasked with finding out whether or not members of the Trump Campaign may have “colluded” with the Russian Government to help them win the election. Like Janet Reno in 1993, only the Attorney General… the highest ranking law enforcement officer in the nation… has the power to fire a special prosecutor. Trump bestowed that position to Jeff Sessions, an early supporter and member of his campaign, who ended up having to recuse himself from anything related to that investigation (including the ability to fire Mueller, which made Trump furious.)

And here we are now at the end of Trump’s first year in office, characterized by lurching from one self-inflicted controversy to the next and a criminal investigation of a sitting president that just won’t go away. Like Bill Clinton before him, Trump entered office with his own party in charge of both houses of Congress, essentially shielding him from impeachment hearings of a Congressional investigation. But if past is prologue, and the recent upset with Alabama electing its first Democratic senator in 25 years are signs of what’s yet to come, Trump very well could be looking at a Democratic takeover of congress 13 months from now and impeachment hearings by mid 2019.

The GOP’s best hope of avoiding this fate is to start laying the groundwork for painting the Mueller investigation as a “partisan witch hunt” to justify the dismissal of Robert Mueller and quashing the case against Donald Trump before it’s too late. And that effort appears to have already begun, first (updated 12/19/17), the scandal (“evidence of bias”) was Mueller NOT investigating the “unmasking of names by the Obama Administration of just “who leaked the fact Flynn was meeting with Russians?”, then it was the “controversy” that Mueller was NOT investigating Hillary Clinton over the “Uranium One” deal. Then it was his not investigating “the DNC paying British Agent Christopher Steele to continue his dossier on Trump by contacting Russian (among other) agents, and now the news Mueller himself fired two members of his investigative team last Summer (“Peter Strzok” & “Lisa Page”) when it was discovered they had exchanged text messages criticizing candidate Trump (as well as Hillary Clinton, Sanders, O’Malley, Richard Clarke, Eric Holder and even Chelsea) in July of 2016… right around the time Trump was criticizing FBI Director James Comey for refusing to prosecute Hillary Clinton for her handling of her emails from when she was Secretary of State. So it should hardly come as a surprise to no one (no one sane) that members of the Justice Department might have been a wee bit unhappy with Donald Trump. It’s not like Washington (aka: “The Swamp” according to him) was “Trump Country” to begin with (Hillary won DC with 92.8% of the vote.) I’d be astonished if MORE people working for the Justice Department hadn’t sent “unkind” emails ridiculing Trump and favoring Clinton.

Revelations of partisan bias expressed in emails during the campaign already had Republicans accusing the Mueller investigation of being “filled” with “thousands” of biased Justice Department officials (keep in mind, only TWO people were found to have exchanged biased emails more than a year & a half ago) and therefore the investigation is nothing more than a partisan witch hunt (which, I assumed wasn’t until AFTER they investigate Trump’s Christmas Card List.) But last Saturday, Trump’s lawyers accused Mueller of “illegally” obtaining the transition team’s “private emails” from a source other than them. Mueller asked the Trump Transition Team to turn over all of their private emails, to which Team Trump said, “Sure, just as soon as we… uh… move (read: delete) thousands of private messages we don’t believe have anything to do with your investigation.” Sound familiar? Mueller, rightfully concerned Team Trump could be… wittingly or unwittingly… destroying evidence, circumvented them and obtained the emails from a different source (presumably their ISP’s servers.) This has Trump’s lawyers feigning outrage, calling the confiscation of their private emails “illegal” (Mueller assures them he either had the author’s permission or legal authority granted by a judge to obtain the emails the way he did.)

If there is one thing Trump is good at, it’s the art of “scandal fatigue”. And I believe his objective here… and for the next 10 months… is to repeatedly accuse the Mueller investigation of criminal misconduct… throwing everything but the kitchen sink at him until they find something that sticks… much the way Ken Starr did in the 90’s investigating President Clinton for nearly a dozen different “scandals” (including, as I’ve mentioned before, “Socks the Cat’s Fan Club Mailing list” to find out if taxpayers were footing the bill for all those stamps.) They are hoping that eventually, after hearing (accusations of) “scandal after scandal” day-after-day for months, voters will just come to accept that the Mueller investigation itself is corrupt and should be disbanded, without cries of protest by the American Public.

The problem with THAT theory is that voters already are not on Trump’s side (with an approval rating already below 40% and falling fast) and may welcome an investigation that could lead to his impeachment if it means getting him out of office sooner-rather-than-later. “Help us Obi Mueller, you’re our only hope!” Now deliver that message, R2!
 


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December 18, 2017 · Admin Mugsy · No Comments - Add
Posted in: Crime, Partisanship, Politics, Right-Wing Hypocrisy, Scandals

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