Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse

Thread: This week has been a game-changer in the Russia investigation.

Before it was fairly reasonable to doubt where Mueller was headed and say maybe he won’t implicate Trump.

There’s almost no doubt anymore. This investigation will implicate Trump in conspiring w/ Russia 1/

First, w/ the Corsi draft plea we learned that Mueller has found collusion.

Stone was in “regular contact” w/ Trump and directed Corsi to get to WikiLeaks, which they knew was a Russian front. And Mueller clearly has evidence to prove they knew that. 2/

Second, the depths of the cover up effort became clear - the lies, the pardon dangles, the joint defense agreements w/ 32, the appt. of Whittaker. You don’t engage in a massive cover up if you’re innocent. Trump’s acting guilty, perhaps b/c he is. 3/

Lastly, we now know a lot more is coming. Indictments of Stone and Corsi are coming for collusion. We will learn what Manafort lied about. And we know Cohen has provided trove of info.

This isn’t just speculation relying on press reporting anymore. It’s based on Mueller. 4/

So it’s pretty clear where we are headed: a lot of very serious crimes are going to be revealed and they are almost certainly going to implicate the President.

It’s time for everyone to start preparing for that reality.

Thread by @maxbergmann: "Thread: This week has been a game-changer in the Russia investigation. Before it was fairly reasonable to doubt where Mueller was headed and […]"
 
MUELLER CHRISTMAS
https://claytoonz.com/2018/11/30/mueller-christmas/

Last night, CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin told Anderson Cooper, “Today’s the first day I actually thought Donald Trump might not finish his term in office.”

There has been a lot of speculation from people who dislike Trump that he wouldn’t finish his first term. You heard that before the inauguration. But, knowing just how difficult it is to remove an elected president, most legal analysts were skeptical. We’ve impeached two presidents and neither were removed from office.

Toobin laid out “preposterous” positions that Trump and his supporters now have to weave. They have to believe Trump lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen negotiated a deal with Russia for six months without telling Trump, that Trump and Roger Stone never discussed WikiLeaks, and that Don Jr. never talked to his father about the Trump Tower meeting with Kremlin-linked Russians offering dirt on Hillary Clinton.

The same people who will believe each of those positions also believed Trump when he said he wasn’t aware of any payoffs to porn stars before a tape recorded by Cohen revealed Trump was in the discussions on paying off porn stars.

Cohen has reached a plea deal with Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and what he’s revealing is enough to make the leader of a nation want to run and hide in South America. Argentina has history with hiding Nazis with Russian troubles.

Cohen is revealing that he lied to Congress to protect Trump and be consistent with his message. He now says Trump directed his initial financial crimes.

We learned that Trump’s liaison Felix Sater invited Cohen to attend an economic forum with Vladimir Putin’s Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov to negotiate building a Trump Tower in Moscow during the 2016 presidential campaign. Cohen now refutes Trump’s often-repeated claim that he had nothing to do with Russia as he sought the White House. Shortly after Cohen’s court appearance, federal agents raided the office of Trump’s tax lawyer.

Perhaps juicest of all is a report from Buzzfeed that Trump tried to bribe Putin by offering to gift him the $50 million penthouse in the proposed Trump Tower. It is not normal for a presidential candidate to conduct business deals with a hostile government. It’s even more bizarre for a candidate to attempt to bribe a foreign leader. Where is the president’s loyalty if he’s in a urine-soaked bed with Vladimir Putin?

We have learned that denial to Trump means innocence and facts don’t matter. In regards to meddling in our election, he defended Putin by citing his denial. He defended Roy Moore over accusations of pedophilia by pointing at his denial. He’s defended Mohammad Bin Salman over murdering a journalist by using his denial. When Trump attacked Democrats who sexually harassed women, Sarah Huckabee Sanders defended the hypocrisy by championing Trump’s denial.

Trump spent the last two years denying he had any business relationship with Russia. On Thursday, he said the man who was his personal attorney, fixer, and vice president of his company was a liar, which is what he also called him before he produced the Stormy recordings. Trump went on to say he didn’t have any business dealings with Russia, but it wouldn’t have been illegal if he did. This morning, he’s admitting he did but it’s “cool.”

It’s not cool. We know Trump’s denails are always empty and they turn into lies. Trump lied for over two years about having business with Russia. He lied every time he shouted and tweeted “no collusion.”

I’m not totally convinced that Trump won’t finish her term, but I do wish him a very Mueller Christmas.

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This has been the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week for President Don’t-tell Truth. It has been bad enough that it might be time to pause and shudder at the thought of Michael R. Pence becoming the 46th president of the United States. But more on that in a minute.

The predicament that the current president finds himself in is hardly surprising. A man like him weaves a web of falsity and dirty dealing by his very nature, and eventually this pattern becomes not only apparent to everybody, but also intolerable. The important question is how soon it gets revealed and how many people become collateral damage along the way. It is beginning to look as though special counsel Robert S. Mueller III has assembled the detritus of low roads that President Trump has traveled into a picture that is either legally damning or at least politically terminal. Which brings us to Pence.

What to think about a President Pence? Actually not that much. The conventional thing to say about a Pence presidency is that he might be even worse than Trump. That would require a prodigious talent. Pence might embody a lot of undesirable opinions and traits, but one thing he isn’t is worse than Trump. Trump is quite correct when he boasts that nobody is as skilled as he is, at least in the planetary-size charlatan category. Trump, like all truly great grifters, is amply endowed with a con artist’s charisma. It takes a special, ineffable talent to lie with a tone of sincerity beguiling enough to sweep (almost) half the crowd into your tent, make them chant for you AND buy your seriously defective and dangerous product at a preposterously inflated price.

Pence does not have that gift. He has all the charisma of an undertaker, as he stands somberly to one side in case the Trump presidency should suffer a premature misfortune. And Trump won’t go quietly, if he goes at all. The amount of wreckage that he would or will leave in his wake is not a presidency that anyone should wish to inherit. See Gerald Ford, only times 100.

So, yeah, think about President Pence, for about 30 seconds, and then start thinking past this dismal chapter of American history. Democrats need to be thinking about 2020 and laying a broad, solid foundation over the next two years for the kind of country Americans actually want. Please don’t waste time on some miserable compromise infrastructure bill to demonstrate how serious you can be about small beer. Chart a vision and a compelling agenda. Affordable health care, economic fairness and yes, above all, an urgent rescue of an environment that is unraveling even faster than Trump’s vast web of deception.

There is massive work to be done, and we had better act like we mean to do it.
 
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