Rick Gates Lawyers Withdraw from Russiagate Case - Is A Guilty Plea Coming?

Wednesday we learned that Donald Trump and White House Communications Director Hope Hicks discussed hiding emails between Donald Trump, Jr. and Russian operatives from investigators.  The discussion caused one of Trump, Sr.'s attorneys to resign seemingly out of fears of being caught up in obstruction of justice.  Yesterday we learned that three of the attorneys for Robert Gates - one of two individuals indicted to date in the Mueller investigation - resigned, fueling speculation that Gates is seeking a possible guilty plea deal  and cooperation with Mueller efforts to put Trump and his co-conspirators in a bull's eye.   Making the whole situation more bizarre is the fact that the resigning counsel put their reasons for withdrawal in a filing that they asked the court to seal and bar from public view.  In practice, attorneys usually resign for one of three reasons: (i) their client isn't paying their bills, or (ii) the client is refusing to take their advice and recommendations, or (iii) their client is asking them to commit a fraud on the court.  Politico looks at this surprising development. (I suspect Messrs Trump and Manafort will not find this comforting).  Here are story highlights:

Three attorneys representing Rick Gates told a federal court Thursday they are immediately withdrawing as counsel for the former Donald Trump campaign aide, who is fighting special counsel Robert Mueller’s indictment of him on money laundering and other charges.

Lawyers Shanlon Wu, Walter Mack and Annemarie McAvoy said in a two-page motion that they would explain the reasons for their abrupt move in documents filed under seal with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

“The document speaks for itself,” McAvoy told POLITICO, declining further comment.
Gates and former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort both pleaded not guilty to Mueller’s charges filed in October, the first to be publicly announced in relation to the investigation into whether the Republican presidential campaign colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election.

While Gates’ shift in legal strategy was a surprise, speculation had been mounting that the longtime GOP operative might be seeking to cooperate with the Mueller investigation. CNN reported last month that Gates had added Washington defense attorney Tom Green to his team, noting he’d been spotted at Mueller’s downtown office twice.  Green has not filed a formal appearance in the court case . . . .

Gates had also retained former assistant U.S. attorney Michael Dry as his attorney, but that relationship was severed before Mueller filed his October indictment.

“The number of lawyers he’s cycled through in such a short period of time is highly unusual,” said one Washington-based defense attorney familiar with the Russia probe.

A criminal trial won’t start until September at the earliest, according to the federal judge overseeing the case, who last month rejected a request from Mueller’s team to begin the trial in May. Gates has also been working to get permanent release from house arrest by securing a $5 million bail package.

He [Gates] was reprimanded in December by U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson for appearing in a brief, videotaped address trying to raise money for his own legal defense fund, a move that she said raised questions about his following a gag order issued for all parties and lawyers involved in the high-profile case.

Let's hope Gates strikes a plea deal and spills his guts. :)

Robert Gates: Trump is "Beyond Repair"

Yet another prominent Republican, while not endorsing Hillary Clinton, has declared Donald Trump utterly unfit for the office of the presidency and in response to those in the GOP who are trying to tell themselves that Trump can be controlled or moderated, described Trump as "beyond repair."  This time the Republican is former Defense Secretary Robert Gates.  His take down of Trump is scathing even as it has cautionary words for Hillary Clinton.  A piece in Talking Points Memo looks at this latest condemnation of Trump.  Here are excerpts:

Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates ripped both presidential candidates in a Wall Street Journal op-ed Friday, but particularly blasted Donald Trump, calling him “beyond repair.”

Gates, who served under former President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama, knocked Trump for everything from his attitude to his thoughts on foreign policy. He characterized him as someone who is “willfully ignorant about the rest of the world, about our military and its capabilities, and about government itself.”

“He has no clue about the difference between negotiating a business deal and negotiating with sovereign nations,” Gates wrote. “A thin-skinned, temperamental, shoot-from-the-hip and lip, uninformed commander-in-chief is too great a risk for America.”

Gates urges Clinton to give voters more reason to trust her and to focus on her national security policies in speeches.

'"Mrs. Clinton has time before the election to address forthrightly her trustworthiness, to reassure people about her judgment, to demonstrate her willingness to stake out one or more positions on national security at odds with her party’s conventional wisdom, and to speak beyond generalities about how she would deal with China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, the Middle East — and international trade. Whether and how she addresses these issues will, I believe, affect how many people vote — including me,” Gates wrote.

For Trump, Gates had this to say: “He is unqualified and unfit to be commander-in-chief.”

While Clinton has not publicly addressed Gates’ op-ed, Trump took to his favorite medium, Twitter to blast Gates, saying that he has never met him, but that he does not like his work.

Indeed, Trump doesn't "like the work" of anyone who doesn't fawningly kiss his extremely ample ass.

Boy Scouts' President Calls for End to Ban on Gay Leaders

Facing the reality that the forces of hate, bigotry, and reaction are losing their war against gay equality and acceptance, Robert Gates, the president of the Boy Scouts of America has called for the end of the organization's ban on gay leaders at the organization's annual national meeting in Atlanta.  It goes without saying that sheets of spittle will be flying from the Christofascists who desperately need to be able to discriminate against gays in order to feel better about their own miserable lives as they cling to Bronze Age myths and fairy tales.  The New York Times looks at the development.  Here are excerpts:

Robert M. Gates, the president of the Boy Scouts of America and former secretary of defense, called on Thursday to end the Scouts’ ban on gay adult leaders, warning the group’s executives that “we must deal with the world as it is, not as we might wish it to be.”

Speaking at the Boy Scouts’ annual national meeting in Atlanta, Mr. Gates said cascading events — including potential employment discrimination lawsuits and the impending Supreme Court decision on same-sex marriage, as well as mounting internal dissent over the exclusionary policy — had led him to conclude that the current rules “cannot be sustained.”

If the Boy Scouts do not change on their own, he said, the courts are likely to force them to, and “we must all understand that this will probably happen sooner rather than later.”

In a nod to the religious organizations that sponsor a majority of local Scout troops, he said they should remain free to set their own guidelines for leaders. “I support a policy that accepts and respects our different perspectives and beliefs,” he said, adding, “I truly fear that any other alternative will be the end of us as a national movement.”

He said that he had not yet made a formal proposal to the national board, but that it must act soon to head off possible disaster.

Though his position is voluntary, Mr. Gates, an Eagle Scout, wields enormous power in the Boy Scouts, which have been struggling to stem a shrinking membership for decades.

The treatment of gay men and boys has been a source of wrenching debate. Conservative religious groups that sponsor many Scout troops, including the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Roman Catholic Church and some evangelical churches, opposed the participation of openly gay members, while local leaders in more liberal regions have called for an end to discrimination.

The Mormon Church uses the Boy Scouts as its main organization for boys and is by far the largest sponsor of Scout troops, overseeing more than 437,000 youths as of 2013, of a national total of 2.6 million youths participating in the Cub Scouts, Boy Scouts, Explorer Scouts and other programs.

The church issued a guarded statement Thursday: “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints will, of course, examine any such changes very carefully to assess how they might impact our own century-long association with the B.S.A.” If the Scouts’ executive board adopts the policy Mr. Gates has recommended, letting local groups set their own leadership rules, the church is not likely to be affected.

Religious conservatives, who had already condemned the Boy Scouts for the decision to admit openly gay boys, were strongly critical of Mr. Gates’s plan.

John Stemberger, president of the Florida Family Policy Council, a conservative Christian group, said: “I think it’s a sad thing. I think that many families and boys will be negatively affected by the Boy Scouts’ departure from their longstanding principles.”

Expect the hysteria of the Christofascists to become even more extreme as they see the world move away from their toxic form of Christianity which needs ignorance and censorship of information to prosper.

Robert Gates Mocks GOP Attacks On Obama’s Handling Of Benghazi

The fever ridden, fetid swamp that is today Republican Party continues to grow in insanity and toxicity as the far right elements and those within the GOP who are only to willing to prostitute themselves to these elements continue to try to conflate the attack on the U.S Consulate in Benghazi, Libya into a scandal.  Their motivation is two fold: (i) a racist motivated hatred towards Barack Obama and (ii) a desperate desire to harm Obama and Hillary Clinton politically.  Reality has nothing to do with much of anything in today's GOP.  Its like an insane asylum where the attendants have all fled and left the crazies in charge.   Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates is one of the few Republicans left willing to call out GOP insanity.  As Think Progress reports he basically bitch slapped his GOP contemporaries on Face the Nation yesterday.  Here are story highlights:

Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, a Republican who was appointed to the position by George W. Bush, told CBS News on Saturday that he would have handled the situation in Benghazi the same way that the Obama administration did last September.

During an interview that aired on CBS’ Face the Nation on Sunday morning, Gates defended the administration’s reaction to the attacks in Libya and dismissed many of the criticisms leveled by his fellow Republicans as “cartoonish”:

“Frankly, had I been in the job at the time, I think my decisions would have been just as theirs were,” said Gates, now the chancellor of the College of William and Mary.
“We don’t have a ready force standing by in the Middle East, and so getting somebody there in a timely way would have been very difficult, if not impossible.” he explained.
Suggestions that we could have flown a fighter jet over the attackers to “scare them with the noise or something,” Gates said, ignored the “number of surface to air missiles that have disappeared from [former Libyan leader] Qaddafi’s arsenals.”
[...]
Another suggestion posed by some critics of the administration, to, as Gates said, “send some small number of special forces or other troops in without knowing what the environment is, without knowing what the threat is, without having any intelligence in terms of what is actually going on on the ground, would have been very dangerous.”
“It’s sort of a cartoonish impression of military capabilities and military forces,” he said. “The one thing that our forces are noted for is planning and preparation before we send people in harm’s way, and there just wasn’t time to do that.”

Gates also defended former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who has increasingly become the subject of Republican criticism. Gates responded with a simple and emphatic “no” when asked if he believed Clinton could possibly be involved in any sort of a cover up, as some Republicans have baselessly suggested.