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.