What Robert Mueller Already Knows

Image credit: Jasjyot Singh Hans

Despite the constant lies and shrieks of "fake news" coming out of the White House, the indictments handed down to date and the growing desperation on Donald Trump's part to stop the Russiagate investigation suggest that there is fire beneath the smoke seen to date. Add the list of questions Mueller may want to ask Trump - a list seemingly leaked by the White House itself or White House staff - and while the word "collusion" isn't used, some of the questions certainly dance  closely around the topic.  Add to this the rumor that Mueller may subpoena Trump - a situation which might force Trump to testify and, given his proclivity for lying - and set the stage for future perjury charges.  Remember Bill Clinton's lie under oath that set his impeachment in motion?  Lying about having sex with a woman pales in comparison to interacting with a hostile foreign government to throw a U.S. presidential election.  As an editorial in the New York Times notes, Mueller likely knows and can document the true answer to questions to be asked of Trump.  He also no doubt knows that Trump will lie under oath about those very issues just like he lies about virtually everything else. Here are editorial highlights:

The 49 questions that the special counsel, Robert Mueller, hopes to ask President Trump as part of the yearlong Russia investigation suggest that Mr. Mueller knows a great deal more than he’s letting on — and he hasn’t even gotten to the follow-ups yet.

After the questions, which were published by The Times on Monday, were provided to Mr. Trump’s legal team in March, John Dowd, the president’s lead personal lawyer at the time, urged him to avoid sitting for an interview with Mr. Mueller. When Mr. Trump said he intended to anyway, Mr. Dowd resigned.

Reading through the list, it’s clear why Mr. Dowd was so concerned. Federal investigators don’t like being lied to, and Mr. Trump has a marked tendency to say things that aren’t true. If he agrees to speak with Mr. Mueller’s team, he will have to answer some very basic questions about what he knew, when he knew it and what motivated some of his most shocking and inexplicable actions over the past year.

To name just a few: When and why did you decide to fire James Comey, the F.B.I. director, who was leading the Russia investigation at the time? What did you mean when you told NBC’s Lester Holt that you fired Mr. Comey because “this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story”? Did you try to persuade the attorney general, Jeff Sessions, to protect you from the investigation? Did you secretly promise to pardon Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser who has pleaded guilty to lying to federal investigators about his communications with the Russian ambassador?

The questions are a reminder of just how aberrant this White House has been. No prior president so openly assaulted the rule of law or undermined the integrity of the law enforcement community.

It may unnerve Mr. Trump, who has spent his life skirting the law and avoiding full accountability, but this is how the law works. Without saying a word publicly, Mr. Mueller and his team of experienced investigators are showing America how a government premised on the rule of law is supposed to function. The process may seem slow, but that is out of diligence and caution. Its fundamental purpose is truth-seeking — unlike, say, the embarrassing obfuscations of the Republican leaders of the House Intelligence Committee, who last week absolved Mr. Trump and his campaign of any wrongdoing in a 250-page report that reads more like a work of fantasy than a government investigation.

Obstruction of justice is itself a federal crime — see, for example, Section 1505 of Title 18 of the United States Code — regardless of whether prosecutors can establish an underlying offense. Mr. Trump and his defenders mock it as a “process crime,” but the rule of law breaks down if people can interfere, with impunity, in law enforcement’s efforts to do justice. Don’t forget that both presidents who have faced impeachment proceedings in the past few decades, Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton, were accused of obstructing justice.

Mr. Mueller appears to have at least some evidence of an underlying offense. That is the implication of about a dozen of his questions, including the most surprising of all: Was Mr. Trump aware of any efforts by his campaign, and specifically by his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, to seek Russia’s help in winning the 2016 election?

[I]t’s worth noting that as far back as August 2017, CNN reported that American intelligence services had intercepted communications among suspected Russian operatives discussing conversations they claimed to have had with Mr. Manafort, in which he requested their help in damaging Hillary Clinton’s election prospects.

Whatever information he has, Mr. Mueller, like any seasoned prosecutor, does not ask questions unless he already knows the answers. Whether or not Mr. Trump decides to talk to him, the rest of us will know, too, soon enough.

How a Porn Star Became More Credible Than Trump

A piece in Vanity Fair takes a look at why Stormy Daniels is viewed by many as more credible than Donald Trump (I never give him the title "president" since it diminishes the office).  True, Trump is a pathological liar and lies about countless things where only someone brain dead and utterly incurious would know in a heartbeat - or after a quick Google search - that the words flowing from Trump's lips are complete lies or, at best, half truths.  Instead, the piece suggests that porn and porn performers have become more respectable and that as a consequence stigma that once might have destroyed Daniels' credibility has greatly abated.   Indeed, the Bible Belt has the highest use of Internet porn.  Here are article highlights and I'd like to know what readers think:

It wasn’t so long ago that the sort of person who made their livelihood by starring in a film called Sexbots: Programmed for Pleasure, or who staged a nationwide strip-club tour under the banner “Make America Horny Again,” would have had some serious credibility issues. Yet ever since she emerged as a fetching national figure, Stephanie Clifford, the adult-film actress and exotic dancer known as Stormy Daniels, has resoundingly appeared more credible than [Trump]the president. It’s the result, certainly, of Trump’s own complications with honesty, . . . . And it also has something to do with Clifford’s sangfroid as a canny, press-savvy entrepreneur and entertainer.

She seemed preternaturally collected during her much-hyped appearance on 60 Minutes. Indeed, after federal agents raided the office and hotel room of Michael Cohen, who offered Clifford $130,000 in hush money, it is [Trump] the president who has seemed ruffled and the porn star who seems demure. One presumes they will both be watching her appearance on The View on Tuesday.

But Clifford’s credibility also owes to a less obvious transformation that took place during the 1990s, when the culture, if inadvertently, was beginning to normalize porn. Long considered a medium that degraded women, exploited actors, and de-valued sexual intimacy, pornography began gaining mainstream traction in the 1980s. It became inexpensive and ubiquitous thanks to videotapes, cable, satellite, pay-per-view, and CD-ROMs, developing into a multi-billion-dollar industry.

After the introduction of the World Wide Web, in 1991, a new boom followed: online porn, which opened the kimono to every age, demo, geographic region, and kink. And with a culturally progressive president occupying the White House, porn prosecutions—which had been on the rise under Ronald Reagan—virtually dried up.

At the same time, baby boomers were coming of age, and many of them, children of the counterculture, considered porn a form of pop-culture camp. The guy and gal next door suddenly realized that they, too, could make a career for a while by getting down and dirty in front of a video camera.

The 90s was also a period of peak erotic indulgence and adult entertainment. Massage parlors and “spas”—fronts for sexual favors—set up shop in suburban strip malls. Several thousand gentleman’s clubs, many of them decidedly upscale, operated across the heartland. The stories and struggles of exotic dancers, adult-film performers, escorts, and sex workers—who were often socially and economically disadvantaged to begin with—surfaced in the press and on the screen.

Which is another way of saying that Clifford’s stock-in-trade had become rather ho-hum—a career so common that it would not disqualify someone like her from comporting (or posing for pictures) with a future president—a man whose name until recently graced Atlantic City’s Taj Mahal, once home to a strip club.

All of this occurred against the backdrop of the tabloidization of the news. In the 80s and 90s, news items that involved infidelity, crime, violence, or graphic footage were referred to, among America’s editors and news directors, as sexy. . . . . Meanwhile, TV newsmagazines and supermarket tabloids were turning the nocturnal exploits of public personalities into addictive serials.

And now, of course, Clifford seems almost a conventional player in a Trump-era news cycle that has brought us Anthony Scaramucci, Don King, and the Mnuchins taking selfies at the U.S. Mint. During these crazy days, a scandal with a porn star is at least a crisis [Trump] with precedent.

Add to all of this Trump's own sleazy escapades and serial adulteries, and perhaps the author is on to something.