Does Mueller Have Evidence to Confirm an Obstruction Charge Against Trump?

A new piece in the New York Times would seem to indicate that the noose is tightening around Donald Trump's neck in terms of being guilty of obstruction of justice as a result of his efforts to kill the FBI Russiagate investigation.  The evidence appears to include James Comey's contemporaneous notes, hand written notes of White House chief of staff Reince Priebus, and evidence that Trump pressured his White Counsel to lobby Jeff Sessions - who himself had lied about his Russia contacts - not to recuse himself from the Russiagate investigation.  This news combined with the revelations of Michael Wolff's new book makes one wonder how much longer Congressional Republicans keep their heads up their asses and refuse to act to protect the nation and remove Trump from office.  Yes, I am fearful of what a Mike Pence presidency could mean - the man is a religious fanatic and a liar - but I suspect he would not trigger a nuclear war because of his obsession with his penis size and the need to satiate his narcissism.   Here are article highlights (read the entire piece):

President Trump gave firm instructions in March to the White House’s top lawyer: stop the attorney general, Jeff Sessions, from recusing himself in the Justice Department’s investigation into whether Mr. Trump’s associates had helped a Russian campaign to disrupt the 2016 election. . . . . White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, carried out the president’s orders and lobbied Mr. Sessions to remain in charge of the inquiry, according to two people with knowledge of the episode.

Mr. McGahn was unsuccessful, and the president erupted in anger in front of numerous White House officials, saying he needed his attorney general to protect him. Mr. Trump said he had expected his top law enforcement official to safeguard him.

The lobbying of Mr. Sessions is one of several previously unreported episodes that the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, has learned about as he investigates whether Mr. Trump obstructed the F.B.I.’s Russia inquiry. Among the other episodes, Mr. Trump described the Russia investigation as “fabricated and politically motivated” in a letter that he intended to send to the F.B.I. director at the time, James B. Comey, but that White House aides stopped him from sending. Mr. Mueller has also substantiated claims that Mr. Comey made in a series of memos describing troubling interactions with the president before he was fired in May. The special counsel has received handwritten notes from Mr. Trump’s former chief of staff, Reince Priebus, showing that Mr. Trump talked to Mr. Priebus about how he had called Mr. Comey to urge him to say publicly that he was not under investigation. The president’s determination to fire Mr. Comey even led one White House lawyer to take the extraordinary step of misleading Mr. Trump about whether he had the authority to remove him.

The New York Times has also learned that four days before Mr. Comey was fired, one of Mr. Sessions’s aides asked a congressional staff member whether he had damaging information about Mr. Comey, part of an apparent effort to undermine the F.B.I. director. It was not clear whether Mr. Mueller’s investigators knew about this episode.

Mr. Mueller has also been examining a false statement that the president dictated on Air Force One in July in response to an article in The Times about a meeting that Trump campaign officials had with Russians in 2016. A new book, “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” by Michael Wolff, says that the president’s lawyers believed that the statement was “an explicit attempt to throw sand into the investigation’s gears,” and that it led one of Mr. Trump’s spokesmen to quit because he believed it was obstruction of justice. Regardless of whether Mr. Mueller believes there is enough evidence to make a case against the president, Mr. Trump’s belief that his attorney general should protect him provides an important window into how he governs. Presidents have had close relationships with their attorneys general, but Mr. Trump’s obsession with loyalty is particularly unusual, especially given the Justice Department’s investigation into him and his associates.

Don't Shed Any Tears for Reince Priebus

Long before his ignominious firing by Der  Trumpenführer, Reince Priebus had come to embody for me the extremist cancer and moral bankruptcy that has metastasized in the Republican Party.  While RNC chairman, Priebus demonstrated that no lie and no amount of dissembling was too foul to pass from his lips.  The man would do and say anything to further his own interests and the malignant agenda of today's GOP.  When he accepted the chief of staff position in Der  Trumpenführer, he signaled that his moral bankruptcy was complete.  He was only too willing to lie for and prostitute himself to a vulgar, malignant narcissist utterly unfit for the office of the presidency.  Thus, Priebus deserves not one shred of sympathy. When you get in bed with someone utterly toxic and and amoral, you deserve what you get.  A piece in Politico looks at Priebus's fall while one in the New Yorker looks at what may lie ahead with the arrival of Trump's "mini me," Anthony Scaramucci, at the West Wing.  First these highlights from Politico:

Reince Priebus spent his last day as White House chief of staff like nothing was out of the ordinary. . . . By 4:49 p.m., it was over. “I am pleased to inform you that I have just named General/Secretary John F Kelly as White House Chief of Staff,” Trump tweeted from the tarmac at Andrews Air Force Base, where Priebus still sat waiting in a black SUV. Other aides riding with him hopped into a different car once the tweet posted. His SUV separated from the motorcade and went on a rainy ride through Washington alone.

Priebus, in an interview on CNN Friday evening, tried to downplay his tensions with Trump, while saying it was his decision to resign.

It was an ignominious close to an operatic six months during which Priebus was sidelined from the outset, first by chief strategist Steve Bannon, then by Trump’s children and finally by Anthony Scaramucci, whose arrival last week as communications director heralded the imminent end of Priebus’ tenure.

But finally it was the absence of progress on Trump’s legislative agenda—health care, taxes, infrastructure—that prompted the president, in consultation with his family, to finally tell people around him it was time “to try a different approach,” said one senior administration official.

“It’s hard to overstate how much the family had to do with this,” this person added. After Scaramucci shredded Priebus in a vulgar rant to the New Yorker, published Thursday just as the health care debate was coming to its fruitless end, Priebus expressed his frustrations inside the White House. But the president took Scaramucci’s side—and Spicer’s successor, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, went on television to excuse the comments.

As for what Scaramucci's arrival may foretell (none of it good), here are excerpts from the New Yorker:

The Mooch is a man in a hurry. But while he looks to most like someone racing into a wall, he is, to his patron, doing precisely what is required.

Within moments of arrival, Scaramucci was declaring his everlasting fealty to the President (“I love the President”), erasing the digital evidence of his previous contempt for the President (“an inherited money dude from Queens County”), and comparing his relationship with Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff, to that of Cain and Abel, the killer and the killed. And then, the other night, he called Ryan Lizza, of The New Yorker. First, Scaramucci tried in vain to unearth the source who revealed that he had dined at the White House, and wrongly presumed it was Priebus. He then went on an obscene tirade about Priebus’s mental stability, Steve Bannon’s dorsal flexibility, and, most alarming of all, his intention to “fucking kill all the leakers” by employing the capacities, human and technological, of the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The reaction to all this was predictable. It roiled, yet again, the sense of vertigo that has accompanied the Trump era. And there were laughs all around, can-you-top-this jokes on Twitter, gleeful one-liners on late-night television, grave pronouncements on the morning shows. And yet the reaction that matters most was that of Scaramucci’s patron, the President of the United States. Mike Allen, the co-founder of the Web site Axios, wrote, “We’re told the President loved the Mooch quotes.”

Of course he did. After all, Scaramucci was, in language and in manner, channelling Trump himself. What about Scaramucci’s rant could possibly have offended Trump’s sense of propriety, dignity, or politics? As so many audiotapes, tweets, interviews, and speeches have made clear, Trump has no compunction about treating people, even his most self-abnegating loyalists, as vassals; he speaks in the language of obscenity and contempt.

Scaramucci, who was endorsed by Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, seems to have been installed to carry out Trump’s form of personnel management—to help demean and get rid of retainers who have proved disappointing or threatening to his interests. Sean Spicer. Reince Priebus. Steve Bannon. Jeff Sessions. And, ultimately, Robert Mueller.

In other words, the Mooch matters because the Mooch helps to clarify what matters most to the President and his family. What matters most is Trump’s grip on his base voters and his survival in office. Everything else—a sane health-care policy, the dignity of the transgender people who have volunteered to serve their country, a rational environmental policy, a foreign policy that serves basic democratic values, rule of law—is of tertiary interest.

Trump’s focus is not impossible to divine. He is increasingly anxious that Mueller and congressional investigators are exploring the details of his business transactions and financial holdings, and how they might have exposed him to being targeted by the Russian government.

In the meantime, Trump’s capacity to demean and diminish everyone in his proximity continues apace.

Scaramucci matters because he has divined what Donald Trump wants, and he is speaking in his language. Last night, John McCain and many others refused to be cowed or intimidated. They acted in favor of the most elemental notion of rationality and principle. Who else will follow?

The RNC: A Bunch of Suckers and Sellouts

Conservative columnist Kathleen Parker is off the GOP reservation again, this time writing a column that places the blame for Donald Trump's rise and the metastasizing cancer within the Republican Party at the feet of the Republican National Committee ("RNC") which sold out to Trump or allowed themselves to be suckered and played for fools.  The indictment, while certainly true, also applies far down the GOP's party structure and began years ago when those who should never have been elected to local party committees or allowed to win nominations were welcomed instead of being firmly rejected if not openly condemned.  Trump is merely the logical extension of a failure of leadership that applies up and down the party hierarchy.  Short turn opportunism and a refusal to reject extremists of all stripes - and a refusal to face objective reality - are what set the GOP on its march to insanity.  Here are column highlights:

Perhaps the strongest indicator that Trump will lose is his own premature distribution of blame. As far as he is concerned, defeat couldn’t be his fault.

The obvious truth is that Trump never should have been the Republican nominee, as even Trump probably would admit. When he descended the escalator to announce his candidacy, he was at just 1 percent — a barely perceptible speck on the continuum of Republican candidates.

He was ignored — or at least not taken seriously — by nearly everyone for good reason. And when he started spouting hot rhetoric, few in the GOP leadership worried much since he’d surely be moving along any day. This was not to be, in part because, as Trump commented laughing to a friend, who told me: “I had no idea it would be so easy.”

Translation: Once he realized he was dealing with a bunch of suckers, he continued to play them. What fun — and, voila.

The suckers of whom he was speaking are the party leadership, specifically: Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus and RNC communications director Sean Spicer. If these names don’t ring a bell, congratulations, you don’t watch TV. Because Priebus, when not jetting around with Trump on his gold-plated private plane, and Spicer are on one talk show or another nearly every time you look at a cable news screen. They’ve worn more makeup the past year than most women do in a lifetime.

They’re the elephants in the green room, in other words. Everyone sees them clearly but manages to avoid speaking openly of the obvious — that Priebus has presided over the ruin of the Republican Party. Why isn’t he being held accountable? Why isn’t he being called to the mat for allowing Trump’s rise, which might not have been possible had the party chair done his job?

Why was everyone willing to stand by and watch this reality-TV character take charge?

“Because [Priebus] is their boy,” a disgruntled top Republican told me. “He’s given them what they wanted. He’s kept the money flowing.”

The RNC gang sold out. When Trump launched his campaign by ranting about undocumented Mexicans as murderers and rapists, the party leadership should have shouted him down. Priebus should have summoned Trump to Washington and explained how things were going to go. He might have handed Trump the GOP’s autopsy report from the 2012 election and referred him to the “Hispanics” section of the chapter on cultivating “Demographic Partners,” saying: This is what you’re going to do from now on.

Would Trump have agreed? Probably not. But then Priebus should have said: Well, then, I’ll have to break you down during the primaries. At every opportunity, Priebus should have made the case that Trump, who eventually alienated not just Hispanics but also African Americans and women, doesn’t represent the Republican Party. Instead, Priebus and others feared a base that hadn’t formed around Trump yet and, by their inaction, contributed to Trump’s success.

By letting Trump rise to the top, as oil slicks tend to, Priebus has left the party in such a gelatinous mess Republicans will need a hazmat team to clean it up. And for this, he’d like to serve a third term?