The Evidence Mounts

Evidence of Donald Trump's incompetence, dishonesty, and commission of acts that are detrimental to the vital interests of this country increases daily.

Trump's appointment of John Bolton as National Security Director is just one more piece of evidence indicating that Trump's Romneyesque approach to draining the swamp assumes that the swamp will drain itself in disgust if Trump keeps crapping in it! Trump is now taking a similar approach in dealing with Special Counsel Mueller's investigation. The firing of Deputy Director of the FBI, Andrew McCabe is a prime example of this approach.

As the New York Times reported, Andrew McCabe is a 21 year veteran of the bureau who “...oversaw two of the most politically charged cases in F.B.I. history: the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, and the investigation of Donald J. Trump’s campaign ties to the Russian government.” It should be noted here that Mr. McCabe was also one of the people who read the notes Mr. Comey made contemporaneous with the meetings where Mr. Comey thought President Trump had made troubling statements or inappropriate requests. So Mr. McCabe was participant in the investigation of Trump's campaign and is a potential witness who can corroborate Mr. Comey's version of events! In what passes for Trump's mind you cannot pose a much greater threat than that. To Trump this obviously means Mr. McCabe must be discredited, even destroyed if possible; Andrew McCabe must become an example of what happens to all such would be witnesses. To that end Trump spent months hurling insults and accusations at deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe and letting it be known that he, the President of the United States, wanted McCabe fired.

“Mr. Trump … seized on the fact that Mr. McCabe’s wife, Jill, ran for a Virginia State Senate seat as a Democrat and received hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign donations from a political ally of Mrs. Clinton. He says Mr. McCabe never should have been allowed to oversee the Clinton investigation. He says the campaign donations are proof that a pro-Clinton bias within the F.B.I. explains why Mrs. Clinton was never charged.” But “Mr. McCabe did not begin supervising the Clinton investigation until after his wife had lost the race, and records show that he sought ethics and legal advice inside the F.B.I. before deciding not to recuse himself.”

The fact that Mr. McCabe finally did recuse himself late in the investigation does not matter to Trump, nor does it matter to Attorney General Jeff Session's who fired Andrew McCabe just two days short of the date on which Mr. McCabe's retirement was to become effective; thus depriving Mr. McCabe of the pension he would have received if he had been allowed to retire.

The stated reason for firing Mr. McCabe and depriving him of the pension he earned with 21 years of devoted service to this country was that he, McCabe, was not forthcoming with investigators about what Mr. Sessions said was an “unauthorized disclosure to the news media.” To put the accusation in the department parlance, Mr. McCabe “lacked candor” when he was questioned about supposedly leaked information appearing in the Wall Street Journal.  The documents supporting and/or making this allegation against Mr. McCabe have not been made available for public scrutiny, but the rush to fire Mr. McCabe before his retirement makes the allegations suspicious at best, particularly when you take into consideration the fact that other members of the FBI to whom Comey showed his notes were also accused of political bias are no longer with the bureau. 

Those of you who have been paying attention also know that there has been a marked change in the tone of Trump's criticism of Mueller's investigation. In addition to Trump's mindless chants of “No Collusion” and “Witch Hunt” he has now taken to criticizing Mueller by name. Trump has also added to his legal team “a new lawyer, former U.S. Attorney Joseph diGenova, who has accused FBI officials of being involved in a "brazen plot" to exonerate Hillary Clinton in the email investigation and to "frame" Mr. Trump for nonexistent crimes.

This latest addition of Fox News commentator diGenova to Trump's defense team just emphasizes the fact that none of the heavy hitters in the relevant areas of law will work for Trump. There is now an unmistakable odor of desperation about that as the probable legal consequences begin to seep into the denser regions of Trump's awareness. Everyone is entitled to competent legal representation unless they refuse to take legal advice and/or try to stiff their attorneys. Defense by Fox? I would laugh at that if the appointment of John Bolton and Trump's other actions did not threaten us with a government of and by Fox News and Vladimir Putin. Such a government is almost as scary as conjecture about what Trump will do as his legal perils hurl him into his political death throes.  

Bear Slapped!

What are we to make of this? Vladimir Putin has just bear slapped his man ho, Donald Trump, and Putin did this in public where he knew everyone would see it. In a not so vailed threat to the United States, “Vladimir Putin ... announced that Russia has developed and is testing a new line of strategic, nuclear-capable weapons that would be able to outmanoeuvre US defences, suggesting a new arms race between Moscow and the west.” Mr. Putin said the development of these weapons was a result of the “...US pulling out of the 1972 anti-ballistic missile treaty signed with the Soviet Union.” The speech in which Mr. Putin made this threat “...came in the same month that the Pentagon released a new nuclear arms policy, which followed on from a promise by the US president, Donald Trump, to develop an arsenal 'so strong and powerful that it will deter any acts of aggression'.”

Is this Mr. Putin's way of reminding Mr. Trump of who is the boss? Or is it merely a reaction to the hawkish behavior that threatens to keep Russian military aggression in check? Whatever Mr. Putin's intent may be, he could not have made this threat of nuclear proliferation at a worst time for Donald Trump!

As Vox reported “... Special counsel Robert Mueller’s team has either indicted or gotten guilty pleas from 19 people and three companies so far — with most of those being announced just in the past two weeks.

That group is composed of four former Trump advisers, 13 Russian nationals, three Russian companies, one California man, and one London-based lawyer. Five of these people have already pleaded guilty — the latest being former Trump campaign staffer Rick Gates, who signed a plea deal and committed to cooperate with Mueller’s investigation Friday.”

In other words Mr. Mueller is gathering up the people close to Trump and is placing them like fallen leaves in a basket labeled “Cooperating/indicted” and/or a basket simply labeled “indicted!” Furthermore, NBC is reporting that:

”Special counsel Robert Mueller's team is asking witnesses pointed questions about whether Donald Trump was aware that Democratic emails had been stolen before that was publicly known, and whether he was involved in their strategic release, according to multiple people familiar with the probe.

Mueller's investigators have asked witnesses whether Trump was aware of plans for WikiLeaks to publish the emails. They have also asked about the relationship between GOP operative Roger Stone and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, and why Trump took policy positions favorable to Russia.

The line of questioning suggests the special counsel, who is tasked with examining whether there was collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 election, is looking into possible coordination between WikiLeaks and Trump associates in disseminating the emails, which U.S. intelligence officials say were stolen by Russia.”

The new threats of an arms race by Putin make any conspiracy or collusion with Russia to interfere in our elections all the more egregious, and they make Trump's refusal to enforce the congressionally mandated sanctions against Russia all the more damning. During the cold war any conspiracy involving US citizens and the Soviet Union against this country and its allies was considered treasonous by a majority of the people even though such a conspiracy did not meet the legal definition of treason.  Even the legal distinction between espionage and treason was often meaningless to defendants convicted of either crime, e.g. although the Rosenbergs could not be charged with treason because we were not technically “at war” with the Soviet Union, their conviction for espionage carried with it the same penalty as a conviction for treason and they were executed! The threat from Russia then and now is real, and Putin has just reminded us of how grave that threat is. We desperately need an honest President who will defend this country from all threats foreign and domestic!