Last Call For The (Archie) Bunker Mentality

We're starting to freely get Trump regime "bunker mode" stories again, which is a fair indication that the people behind the scenes with Trump realize that when the hurricane hits, every one of them will be tossed in the path of the storm by Trump in order for him to survive.

In private, President Trump spent much of the past week brooding, as he often does. He has been anxious about the Russia ­investigation’s widening fallout, with his former campaign chairman standing trial. And he has fretted that he is failing to accrue enough political credit for what he claims as triumphs.

At rare moments of introspection for the famously self-centered president, Trump has also expressed to confidants lingering unease about how some in his orbit — including his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr. — are ensnared in the Russia probe, in his assessment simply because of their ­connection to him.

Yet in public, Trump is a man roaring. The president, more than ever, is channeling his internal frustration and fear into a ravenous maw of grievance and invective. He is churning out false statements with greater frequency and attacking his perceived enemies with intensifying fury. A fresh broadside came on Twitter at 11:37 p.m. Friday, mocking basketball superstar LeBron James and calling CNN’s Don Lemon “the dumbest man on television.”

This is the new, uneasy reality for Trump at an especially precarious moment of his presidency, with the Republican Party struggling to keep control of Congress, where a Democratic takeover brings with it the specter of ­impeachment, and special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s grip seeming to tighten on the president and his circle.

Trump, who has decamped to his New Jersey golf estate for an 11-day working vacation, is at a critical juncture in the Russia investigation as he decides in coming days whether to sit for an interview with Mueller or defy investigators and risk being issued a subpoena.

“He’s more definitive than ever: This investigation should end now, and Mueller should put out what he has,” said Rudolph W. Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney. “He doesn’t think they have anything, and he wants the country to move on.”

This portrait of Trump behind the scenes is based on interviews with 14 administration officials, presidential friends and outside advisers to the White House, many of whom spoke only on the condition of anonymity to share candid assessments.

Trump appeared to stand in conflict with his own government when he blasted the “Russian hoax” just hours after his national security team gathered at the White House on Thursday in a rare show of force to warn that Russia is yet again trying to interfere in U.S. elections. But a White House spokesman said Trump instructed them to hold the news conference and was adamant that they explain what the administration is doing to safeguard the ­midterm elections.

The frequency of the president’s mistruths has picked up, as well. The Washington Post Fact Checker found last week that Trump has now made 4,229 false or misleading claims so far in his presidency — an average of nearly 7.6 such claims per day, and an increase of 978 in just two months.

They still refuse to use the word "lie" and "liar" for Trump and what he does, but this is the closest they've come yet to fully describing the trainwreck stage that this is rapidly becoming.  The post-Helsinki distancing of Trump's national security team from Trump's own actions would have been unthinkable even thirty days ago, but the twin pressures of Mueller and the midterms are serving as hammer-and-anvil to the GOP and they know it.

Trump could care less about Manafort, really.  But Don Junior, well, that's a different story.

President Donald Trump is concerned about whether his son Donald Trump Jr. might have exposure in the special counsel's Russia investigation, leading to his increasingly frenzied public agitation over Robert Mueller, sources close to the White House tell CNN. 

Trump has been concerned for months now that the Mueller probe could reach his family, and potentially his son-in-law Jared Kushner, but his focus has turned to his namesake in recent weeks, one person who speaks with Trump frequently tells CNN. This is one of several reasons Trump has upped his public attacks on Mueller, because he doesn't want him touching his family, the person adds. 

Trump Jr. and his attorney have insisted he has always told the truth. But his claims publicly and to the Senate Judiciary Committee that he never told his father about the 2016 Trump Tower meeting with a Russian attorney promising dirt on Hillary Clinton have been contradicted by others in Trump's orbit. Michael Cohen, Trump's longtime attorney and former fixer, is said to be prepared to testify that the President knew about the Trump Tower meeting ahead of time sources with knowledge of the matter told CNN. Trump has denied knowing about the meeting before it happened. 

Others who have been close to the President -- including his former White House communications director, Anthony Scaramucci, and former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon — have suggested the President at the very least knew shortly after the fact. 

Asked about CNN's latest reporting on the President's mindset, a source close to Trump Jr. said he's not concerned and maintains he did nothing wrong. 

Earlier this week, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Republican Chuck Grassley of Iowa, told CNN, "If he misled the committee, he's lying to Congress. That's a crime. And that'd be up to the prosecutors, not me." 

 We'll see what happens.  As I said earlier today, the hammer of justice is coming.

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It's About Suppression, Con't

It's been clear for well over a year now, but the "massive Democrat voter fraud" that the Trump regime vowed to find after the 2016 election never existed, and was completed manufactured in order to justify GOP voter suppression efforts.

Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap, one of the 11 members of the commission formed by President Trump to investigate supposed voter fraud, issued a scathing rebuke of the disbanded panel on Friday, accusing Vice Chair Kris Kobach and the White House of making false statements and saying that he had concluded that the panel had been set up to try to validate the president’s baseless claims about fraudulent votes in the 2016 election.

Dunlap, one of four Democrats on the panel, made the statements in a report he sent to the commission’s two leaders — Vice President Pence and Kobach, who is Kansas’s secretary of state — after reviewing more than 8,000 documents from the group’s work, which he acquired only after a legal fight despite his participation on the panel.

Before it was disbanded by Trump in January, the panel had never presented any findings or evidence of widespread voter fraud. But the White House claimed at the time that it had shut down the commission despite “substantial evidence of voter fraud” due to the mounting legal challenges it faced from states. Kobach, too, spoke around that time about how “some people on the left were getting uncomfortable about how much we were finding out.”

Dunlap said that the commission’s documents that were turned over to him underscore the hollowness of those claims: “they do not contain evidence of widespread voter fraud,” he said in his report, adding that some of the documentation seemed to indicate that the commission was predicting it would find evidence of fraud, evincing “a troubling bias.”

In particular, Dunlap pointed to an outline for a report the commission was working on that circulated in November 2017. The outline included sections for “Improper voter registration practices,” and “Instances of fraudulent or improper voting,” though the sections themselves were blank as they awaited evidence, speaking to what Dunlap said indicated a push for preordained conclusions.

“After reading this,” Dunlap said of the more than 8,000 pages of documents in an interview with The Washington Post, “I see that it wasn’t just a matter of investigating President Trump’s claims that 3 to 5 million people voted illegally, but the goal of the commission seems to have been to validate those claims.” 

It wasn't just about validating Trump's false claims of "widespread" voter fraud by "illegal immigrants", it was a moneymaking opportunity for Republican grifters like Kobach, who is now the leading GOP candidate for Kansas governor in Tuesday's primary.

Kris Kobach likes to tout his work for Valley Park, Missouri. He has boasted on cable TV about crafting and defending the town’s hardline anti-immigration ordinance. He discussed his “victory” there at length on his old radio show. He still lists it on his resume.

But “victory” isn’t the word most Valley Park residents would use to describe the results of Kobach’s work. With his help, the town of 7,000 passed an ordinance in 2006 that punished employers for hiring illegal immigrants and landlords for renting to them. But after two years of litigation and nearly $300,000 in expenses, the ordinance was largely gutted. Now, it is illegal only to “knowingly” hire illegal immigrants there—something that was already illegal under federal law. The town’s attorney can’t recall a single case brought under the ordinance.

“Ambulance chasing” is how Grant Young, a former mayor of Valley Park, describes Kobach’s role. Young characterized Kobach’s attitude as, “Let’s find a town that’s got some issues or pretends to have some issues, let’s drum up an immigration problem and maybe I can advance my political position, my political thinking and maybe make some money at the same time.”

Kobach used his work in Valley Park to attract other clients, with sometimes disastrous effects on the municipalities. The towns—some with budgets in the single-digit-millions—ran up hefty legal costs after hiring him to defend similar ordinances. Farmers Branch, Texas, wound up owing $7 million in legal bills. Hazleton, Pennsylvania, took on debt to pay $1.4 million and eventually had to file for a state bailout. In Fremont, Nebraska, the city raised property taxes to pay for Kobach’s services. None of the towns is currently enforcing the laws he helped craft.

“This sounds a little bit to me like Harold Hill in ‘The Music Man,'” said Larry Dessem, a law professor at the University of Missouri who focuses on legal ethics. “Got a problem here in River City and we can solve it if you buy the band instruments from me. He is selling something that goes well beyond legal services.”

Kobach rode the attention the cases generated to political prominence, first as Kansas secretary of state, and now as a candidate for governor in the Republican primary on August 7. He also earned more than $800,000 for his immigration work, paid by both towns and an advocacy group, over 13 years.

Kobach has made a career of fake voter fraud claims, using it to stoke racial fears, and eagerly using his reputation to recruit help from white nationalists too.

Kobach has been the architect of GOP voter suppression efforts for years now, and it's high time Kansas voters put a stop to his adventures.

It's Mueller Time, Con't

Long-time Democratic strategist Brent Budowski predicts Robert Mueller will soon drop the obstruction of justice hammer on the Trump regime, and that the true battle for the soul of America will begin...

Why is President Trump escalating his attacks against special counsel counsel Robert Mueller, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the Department of Justice, the FBI and the free press to a fever pitch in recent days?

The reason is that the odds are very high that Mueller will offer a declarative public statement before the midterm elections, and very likely before Labor Day, that the president is guilty of obstruction of justice.The Mueller declaration of obstruction of justice could be issued in the form of a letter to Congress and may or may not ultimately be issued in the form of an indictment if he believes that the Trump situation creates extraordinary circumstances that warrant his seeking approval for a formal indictment.

It is impossible to know exactly what Mueller will do. We do not know the evidence he has that has not yet been made public. We do not know his private thinking on great matters of state and law that will govern his actions.

In April, there were public reports that Mueller would ultimately release his findings in two stages, the first being obstruction of justice, which could be released in whatever form it takes this summer.

When public reports indicated that Mueller is looking at Trump tweets, among other factors, in the obstruction investigation, some of his handful of legal defenders suggested that Trump tweets are not relevant evidence of obstruction. They are wrong, though the tweets are far from the most important evidence.

Consider the obstruction of justice provisions in the articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon that were passed by the House Judiciary Committee before Nixon resigned. Article 1, Section 8 of the articles of impeachment included this:

“making or causing to be made false or misleading public statements for the purpose of deceiving the people of the United States into believing that a thorough and complete investigation had been conducted with respect to allegations of misconduct on the part of personnel of the executive branch of the United States and personnel of the Committee for the Re-election of the President, and that there was no involvement of such personnel in such misconduct.”

In other words, repeatedly making false statements intended to deceive the public about matters under investigation constitute acts in furtherance of obstruction of justice in violation of American law.

Now consider this. Literally in real time, Trump is virtually at war over facts with leading members of his Cabinet about whether Russia has attacked American elections in the 2016 campaign and continues to attack American elections in the 2018 midterms.

On Thursday, leading members of his administration joined together in an extraordinary public session warning the nation about the continuing Russian attack against our elections. His national security adviser, director of National Intelligence, FBI director and secretary of Homeland Security stood united before the nation, warning of the continuing Russian attack in clear and powerful terms.

Trump could have joined them in person to offer his support. He did not. Instead, only hours later, he publicly claimed, again, that the Russia investigation was a hoax and that his recent meeting with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin was a huge success.

If charges that Trump obstructed justice by making false statements are considered in court or congressional hearings, it would be powerful testimony for his Cabinet members to be called to testify about whether Trump’s statements that the Russia investigations are a hoax are true or false.

Similarly, Trump’s fevered and escalating attacks against the free press, which even his daughter Ivanka had the good sense to rebut, provide more powerful and compelling evidence of intent to mislead the public about matters under intense investigation.

While Trump is in dramatic conflict with Cabinet members who warn about the Russian attack, which he falsely claims is a hoax, he attacks the free press for reporting about the Russian attack, which he falsely claims is fake news.

Mueller could argue that Trump is seeking to execute the first televised obstruction of justice, in plain view before the nation every day.

With a high probability that the obstruction issue reaches a crescendo before the midterm elections, there is now a growing likelihood that an anti-Trump wave will doom Republicans to a disastrous defeat in November.

I'm not 100% sure this is the path that will unfold.  I still believe, given Trump's long history of petty vengeance and mendacity, that he will attempt to fire Mueller before such a report can be issued.  There is the very real possibility that he will be successful in doing so.  The notion that Trump's own cabinet members will do the right thing here is laughably low.

What happens from that point on determines whether or not we keep the Republic, including the outcome of the 2018 midterm elections.