Tuesday Morning Male Beauty

Senate Republicans May Block Another Trump Shutdown

While Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Trumpenführer, remains bellicose about his "border wall" despite the fact that polls indicate that 71% of voters do not want it and/or do not believe it is worth a government shutdown,.  Senate Republicans - in contrast to the misnamed "Freedom Caucus" in the House of Representatives which might just as easily be called the KKK Caucus - seem to have gotten the message that Trump's monument to himself might prove costly in the 2020 Senate elections where the GOP will face a far more challenging map than in 2018. Thus, as Politico reports, some Senate Republicans are even talking about a bi-partisan agreement that might be veto proof and which could end Trump's delusions about a border wall for good despite the lingering anti-immigrant hatred that binds his base to him.  Here are highlights that reflect how Trump may yet see his delusions of grandeur dashed (Joni Ernst is, in my view, a certifiable nut case and hopefully not representative of even semi-delusional Republicans): 

Senate Republicans can’t stomach another shutdown.  After weathering 35 days of a partial government closure, the Senate GOP is dreading the possibility another one will hit in less than three weeks — a sentiment that could prevent President Donald Trump from closing the government again.

Though House Republicans aren’t ruling out supporting the president should he choose another confrontation over his border wall, the Republican Senate majority — which actually has governing power — has another view.

Most GOP lawmakers dutifully stuck with Trump in public as the partial government shutdown dragged on. But privately, Republican support began to crack as their polling and the economy both suffered. After a half-dozen GOP senators defected last week, Trump dropped his demands for border wall money before a full-scale revolt unfolded.

[W]hile White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Monday that Trump “doesn’t want to go through another shutdown,” she declined to rule it out if Congress doesn’t come up with a border security plan to Trump’s liking. Neither did House Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), a close Trump confidant.

Senators are already making calls to gauge what their fellow conference committee members might support ahead of their first meeting Wednesday. And Republicans writ large are touting the panel as a possible solution for the problem.

But if that committee fails, as many on the Hill privately believe is likely, Trump has touted two paths to again try to build his wall: a shutdown or a national emergency on the border. . . . Senate Republicans loathe both options, but for now, they’d choose almost anything over another funding lapse.

The Republican retreat from the border wall confrontation was evident on Monday not just among the rank and file.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) barely mentioned the standoff over the border, other than to ding Democrats for voting against a Middle East policy bill during the shutdown.

It seemed few Republicans had any desire to rehash the episode. “There is little or no appetite for it,” said Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine). “Those who thought that shutdowns were a good idea have been disabused by that.” Some Republican centrists are even suggesting that a bipartisan border agreement could withstand a veto threat.

“I think the committee will come up with a deal ... If they come up with something that isn’t crazy, I think it’ll have enough votes to override a veto in the House and Senate,” Rep. Mike Simpson of Idaho said Monday. . . . “Because we’ve all learned, hopefully, that shutdowns don’t work, and they’re stupid.”

But even as some Republicans look to use their influence with Trump to nudge him away from another self-destructive shutdown, others are just as queasy about being at odds with the president.

Take Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), who is up for reelection in 2020 and could face a tough Democratic challenge. She disliked the shutdown and said it made everyone in Congress look bad, but she was not among those thinking about bolting from Trump’s position last week before the president himself caved.

Rep. Rodney Davis (R-Ill.), who was among the few Republicans to support Democratic funding bills to reopen the government this month, acknowledged that nobody wants another shutdown. But he said Democrats — specifically, Pelosi — would take the heat this time if the border security talks collapsed, despite polls consistently showing the public sided with Democrats.

McHenry warned not to read too much into polls showing Trump was hurt by the shutdown: “So to say that is going to have some lasting impact is not commensurate with the last two years of experience.”

Senate Republicans would disagree. They face a more difficult Senate map in 2020 than they did last year and could be dragged into the minority if Trump's popularity collapses. And if in two weeks the conference committee isn't going anywhere, they're the ones that will have to put a bill on the floor to fund the government — and potentially shirk Trump’s demands for the wall.

With luck, Senate Republicans will have learned a lesson and will put self-preservation ahead of boot licking and politico fellatio of Trump.  With luck, some apparently brain dead government employees who voted for Trump and/or the GOP  in 2016 and 2018 will also have learned a lesson and will vote Democrat in 2020.

 

Americans Need to Focus on Far Right Violence, Not Immigrants

Since launching his campaign in 2015, Donald Trump has demonized racial and religious minorities and, of course, Hispanic immigrants and refugees.  This demagoguery has played well with aging whites and poorly educated whites terrified at the prospect of a loss of white privilege in a changing nation and global economy.  The reality, however, is that the largest threat to American lives comes from far right extremists who kill more Americans every year than any other group.  Looking past that, gun violence - thanks to America's insane gun laws - kill more Americans every year than auto accidents, yet Republicans and Trump oppose any meaningful gun reform.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the reality of the true source of terrorism in American and argues that Americans need to shift their focus and cease allowing themselves to be played by Trump and those like him.  The sad reality is that far right extremists are almost without exception white males. Here are highlights:

[T]here’s one spike in violence that [Trump] rarely acknowledges or even mentions, and it’s the rise in far-right terror that has accompanied his ascension to the White House.

On Wednesday, the Anti-Defamation League released a report finding that attackers with ties to right-wing extremist movements killed at least 50 people in 2018. That was close to the total number of Americans killed by domestic extremists, meaning that the far right had an almost absolute monopoly on lethal terrorism in the United States last year. That monopoly would be total if, in one case, the perpetrator had not “switched from white supremacist to radical Islamist beliefs prior to committing the murder.”

The number of fatalities is 35 percent higher than the previous year, and it marks the fourth-deadliest year for such attacks since 1970. In fact, according to the ADL, white supremacists are responsible for the majority of such attacks “almost every year.”

The 2018 attacks include the one at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue by a man who blamed Jews for the migrant caravan, the mass shooting at a yoga studio by an “incel” obsessed with interracial dating, and the school massacre in Parkland, Florida, carried out by a student who wished that “all the Jews were dead.”

From 2009 through 2018, right-wing extremists accounted for 73 percent of such killings, according to the ADL, compared with 23 percent for Islamists and 3 percent for left-wing extremists. In other words, most terrorist attacks in the United States, and most deaths from terrorist attacks, are caused by white extremists. But they do not cause the sort of nationwide panic that helped Trump win the 2016 election and helped the GOP expand its Senate majority in the midterms.

It would be immoral to collectively punish white people for the actions of a few extremists—and it would only raise the stature of those extremists, partially legitimize their grievances in the eyes of potential followers, and strengthen their ability to recruit future operatives for further attacks. But that’s not the reason none of those things happen. They don’t happen because, as America’s largest demographic group, white people have the political power and influence to prevent such proposals from even being contemplated. This is a form of political correctness so powerful that it shapes behavior without being mentioned or publicly acknowledged; it is simply the way things work.

By contrast, when religious or ethnic minorities commit such acts, they are seen not as individual extremists, but as representative of the groups to which they belong. As such, collective punishment is believed to be justified. This is, in a basic sense, how American bigotry works: White Christians are simply individuals, while everyone else is vulnerable to demonization by demagogues prepared to exploit the fear of those who are different in exchange for political power.

The correct response to the rise in right-wing terrorism is not a nationwide panic that mirrors those that accompany terrorist attacks by religious or ethnic minorities. It is to extend the same benefit of the doubt, the same proportionate, measured response with which Americans meet attacks from right-wing extremists, to attacks of all sorts. It is to recognize that the constitutional rights of minorities are no less inviolable than the constitutional rights of white Americans, and that anyone who would run on a platform of disregarding those rights is not fit to hold public office.

Pelosi and Shumer Have Only Just Begun Reining in Trump’

For most of his life, Donald Trump has lead a life where he has escaped consequences. Born to wealth, he escaped service in the Vietnam War by his father's buying of a medical excuse to win him a deferment.  Throughout his business career, he has used bankruptcy to ditch failed ventures and let the pain fall on others - others he typical failed to pay. When banks ceased loaning him money, he seems to have found Deutsche Bank's apparent Russian money laundering operation to keep his business going when he wasn't selling properties to Russian oligarchs in his own money laundering gambit.  Then in his first two years in the White House he had emasculated Republicans only too happy to engage in political fellatio so as to avoid primary challenges from Trump's unwashed, hate-filled base of support.  Now, the game has changed with the shift of control of the House of Representatives to Democrat control.  This, combined with a majority of Americans opposing Trump and his agenda, means Trump's in for a continuing shock.  A piece in The Daily Beast suggests that Trump had best brace himself for numerous political spankings.  Here are article excerpts:

So, having won round one so resoundingly, what should the Democrats do next about the wall?

One thing: Remember that this is Donald Trump’s problem. And Mitch McConnell’s, and Kevin McCarthy’s (who? The House minority leader). They’re the ones who are trying to push a minority position down the country’s throat. [Trump] The president in particular, of course. But majorities of Americans are against the wall and always have been. So let Trump turn that around, if he can.

It’s worth chortling again for a few paragraphs over how ridiculous and weak they made Trump look. Remember, this is a man who spent years, going way back before he started campaigning in 2015, saying over and over and over how easy being president would be. Bring the Chinese to heel? Very easy. Make Middle East peace? Please. Get Mexico to pay for the wall? Piece of cake. He’s been saying these things in books and television appearances for years.

I can’t imagine who believed him—and if anyone out there was a big enough idiot to do so, that’s their problem. But the point is that he believed it. . . . . But in January, he met reality.

Nancy Pelosi took him to the cleaners, and she deserves enormous credit. Her State of the Union gambit was just inspired. The awesome tell at the way she discombobulated Trump was that he couldn’t even come up with a nickname for her. Did you see that? “Nancy Pelosi, or Nancy, as I call her…” Wow, Don, good one! Her first name!

Taking nothing away from her, though, it wasn’t all Pelosi. Chuck Schumer was the one who goaded Trump into accepting responsibility for the shutdown at that Dec. 11 meeting.

And it was right after those [Senate votes last week] votes that McConnell called Chuck Schumer into his office. McConnell wanted Schumer to agree to a down payment on the wall. Schumer said no and counter-offered a continuing resolution and put together a conference committee to negotiate this. And this is exactly what’s happening.

I’ve followed this stuff closely for many years, and I can’t count the number of times I’ve complained about the Democrats wilting during some congressional confrontation, not staying unified, and getting their hats handed to them by Republicans. Well—no more. The Democrats can play hardball now. They did it already on health care and tax reform, when they didn’t lose a single vote. And there’s no reason they shouldn’t do more of it going forward, on the upcoming debt ceiling fight, on budget stuff, and in the House on investigations and subpoenas of every kind. They have the leverage now to deny Trump a win on anything.

So this week, this conference committee that Schumer suggested will start their talks. The Democratic conferees are Richard Durbin, Pat Leahy, and Jon Tester from the Senate; and from the House, a sextet led by Nita Lowey of upstate New York. They’re mostly pretty senior, and the only lefty in the bunch is Barbara Lee of Oakland. The Senate Republicans are led by Richard Shelby of Alabama, who’s plenty conservative but not really a MAGA fire-breather.

[T]hey might find a way to cut a deal. And maybe the Democrats should cut one—if  and only if they get just massive concessions on Dreamers and temporary protected status people and whatever else.

But what they absolutely should not do in this case is make a deal for the sake of seeming like reasonable people. Healthy majorities of Americans are against the wall and think it’s basically pointless or won’t do the job Trump swears it will do. So the position they’re representing right now—no wall—is the reasonable position. They don’t need to budge an inch from that.

Trump already told The Wall Street Journal that he'll shut the government down again and considers a deal to be less than a 50-50 shot. He has probably persuaded everyone he’s going to persuade by now. He can buy all the duct tape from here to Laredo and it still won’t change things. And if it comes to him declaring his emergency powers, then so be it. That will be really popular.

Easy? His life has been easy. Life tends to be that way when you start it with $300 million. But he lived his whole life in a bubble of no consequences. Those days are gone. He owes consequences a very large bill indeed, and on a number of fronts, it’s about to come due.

Monday Morning Male Beauty

Trump’s - and Evangelical Christians' - Foul Version of "Justice"

Water bottles left by aid workers prosecuted by the
Trump/Pence regime.

With every passing day, Donald Trump has provided further displays of his moral bankruptcy: A total lack of empathy for 800,000 federal workers whose lives he threw into chaos over what amounts basically to a temper tantrum.  Fanning racial animosity and anti-immigrant animus. The callous separation of children from their parents. Growing evidence that suggests a desire to conspire with a hostile foreign power.  And supporting him all the way are his most loyal base of supporters: evangelical Christians.  However, perhaps the most stunning display of a betrayal of everything the Gospel message supposedly stands for has been the criminal prosecution of four women who left water in the desert so that refugees and immigrants seeking safety in America would not die of lack of water in the desert.  Meanwhile, a border control guard who shot and killed a Mexican teenager - the guard fired 16 times - had his prosecution dropped.  An editorial in the Washington Post looks at the perverted sense of justice of the Trump/Pence regime.  Here are excerpts:

16-year-old José Antonio Elena
Rodríguez killed by a border guard.

A FEW weeks ago, federal prosecutors in Arizona secured a conviction against four humanitarian aid workers who left water in the desert for migrants who might otherwise die of heat exposure and thirst.

Separately, they dropped manslaughter charges against a U.S. Border Patrol agent who fired 16 times across the border, killing a teenage Mexican boy. The aid workers face a fine and up to six months in jail. The Border Patrol officer faces no further legal consequences.
That is a snapshot of twisted frontier justice in the age of Trump. Save a migrant’s life, and you risk becoming a political prisoner. Kill a Mexican teenager, and you walk free.

The four aid workers, all women, were volunteers in service to an organization, No More Deaths, whose religious views inform its mission to prevent undocumented migrants from dying during their perilous northward trek.

The women — Natalie Hoffman, Oona Holcomb, Madeline Huse and Zaachila Orozco-McCormick — made no effort to conceal their work. Confronted by a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officer, they said they believed everyone deserved access to basic survival needs. One of them, Ms. Orozco-McCormick, compared the wildlife refuge to a graveyard, such is the ubiquity of human remains there.

Since the turn of the century, more than 2,100 undocumented migrants have died in that sun-scorched region of southern Arizona, according to Humane Borders, a nonprofit group that keeps track of the numbers. Last year, according to the Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office, the remains of 127 dead migrants were recovered there.

In the past, prosecutors declined to press charges against the volunteers who try to help by leaving water and canned food in the desert. But the four women, arrested in August 2017, were tried for the misdemeanor offenses of entering a refuge without a permit, abandoning personal property and, in the case of Ms. Hoffman, driving in a restricted area. U.S. Magistrate Judge Bernardo Velasco, who presided over the bench trial, said their actions ran afoul of the “national decision to maintain the Reserve in its pristine nature.”

In fact, prosecutors have broad discretion in deciding whether to press such minor charges — just as they do in more consequential cases such as the manslaughter charge against Lonnie Swartz, the Border Patrol agent who killed 16-year-old José Antonio Elena Rodríguez in October 2012. According to Mr. Swartz, he opened fire on the boy, shooting 16 times in what the agent said was self-defense, through the fence that divides the city of Nogales along the Arizona-Mexico border. He said the boy had been throwing stones at him across the frontier.

Mr. Swartz was acquitted on second-degree murder charges last spring, but the jury deadlocked on manslaughter charges. In a second trial, last fall, the jury also failed to reach a verdict on manslaughter. Last month, prosecutors declined to seek a third trial.

While the aid workers seek to avoid prison time, Americans may well wonder about a system in which justice is rendered so perversely.

Seemingly, there is nothing Trump can do that causes evangelicals to cease their loyalty to a man who embodies literally everything a true Christian should find abhorrent.  These false Christians have so damaged the Christian brand that I for one no longer want to refer to myself as a "Christian." Meanwhile, 40% of the under 30 generations have left religion.  I wonder how long until that percentage hits 50%. 

Hate Group Goes Ballistic Over Parents Magazine Gay Dads

The Southern Poverty Law Center monitors hate groups across American.  While the organization's mission began focused and white supremacist groups, it now follows neo-Nazi and other far right groups.  It also monitors anti-gay hate groups that disseminate deliberate lies and untruths about LGBT individuals with the goal of demonizing us and stripping us of civil rights.  One such group is falsely named "One Million Moms" ("OMM") which in actuality is a very small extremist group operating under the umbrella of American Family Association, itself a hate group, that disseminates wildly untrue propaganda against LGBT, including claims that gays were behind Hitler's Third Reich.  Not surprisingly, Parents Magazine's recent decision to place a family with two dads on its cover has sent the toxic women at OMM into absolute conniption fits.  Like most Christofascists, the leaders of OMM seek to impose their Bronze Age beliefs on all of society.  If given an opportunity, they would erase the very existence of LGBT people and our families.  A piece in The Advocate looks at this latest disingenuous round of OMM hysterics.  Here are excerpts:

Right-wing extremists are losing it over the February cover of Parents magazine, which features a same-sex couple — the first such cover in the publication’s 93-year history.

“Parents is using its magazine as a platform to promote the pro-homosexual lifestyle,” screams an online post from One Million Moms, a Christian right group affiliated with the American Family Association. “Even if families do not personally subscribe to the publication, they should be warned that it could be displayed in waiting rooms of dentist and doctor offices, where children could easily be subjected to the glorification of same-sex parents.”

The cover shows fitness trainer Shaun T and his husband, Scott Blokker, and their 1-year-old sons. A story inside tells of their journey to fatherhood – the boys were conceived with the same egg donor, but one with each father’s sperm, and delivered by the same surrogate. They were born prematurely and spent the first three weeks of their life in intensive care.

One Million Moms doesn’t seem to care about the difficulties faced by the boys or their dads but instead worries about “children being indoctrinated to perceive same-sex couples as normal.” The group also claims that being gay is a “lifestyle … that the medical community identifies as unhealthy,” something that is blatantly untrue.

The organization implores its supporters to sign an online petition expressing their disapproval to Parents. As of Tuesday afternoon, the petition had a little over 10,000 signatures, far less than the million members the group claims. The Million Moms group has a history of objecting to LGBTQ-inclusive media and advertising.

Sunday Morning Male Beauty

Are Cracks Showing in Trump's Toxic Base?

As I suspect a majority of Americans bask in the glow of having seen Trump go down to defeat on his idiotic border wall stunt and government shutdown, some polls suggest there is even more reason to smile: cracks seem to have developed in some of Trump's base.  It's not that his base has relaxed its anti-immigrant hatred but rather that some have perhaps finally realized that Trump is a buffoon and that they have been played. The only cause Trump believes in is him self and satiating is unquenchable ego.  Nothing and no one else matters.  And now, those played for fools are perhaps belatedly realizing they were played from the beginning.  Yes, Trump is a racist and homophobe, but his calls for open racism and attacks on the LGBT community have been aimed at playing those best motivated by hatred of others, not due to any sincere belief or principles.  A column in The Atlantic looks at perhaps telltale cracks in Trump's base of support.  Here are excerpts:

On Friday, President Donald Trump announced a deal with Democrats to reopen the government, ending the longest shutdown in U.S. history. The deal was a concession to reality: Trump was not winning the battle over the shutdown in public opinion, he had not persuaded Democrats to fund the wall he wanted, and he had no plan to change that.

The unfavorable polling is not news. Since the early days of the shutdown, more Americans have blamed Trump than Democrats for the government’s closure, which is not altogether surprising since, in December, the president preemptively claimed responsibility. But over the past week, there have been signs that the shutdown has hurt Trump even with his base supporters . . .

In a CBS poll, seven in 10 voters said a border wall was not worth the shutdown, and respondents rated House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s handling of negotiations higher than Trump’s, 47–35. An Associated Press/NORC poll found that 60 percent held Trump responsible for the shutdown, versus 31 percent who blamed Democrats. For months, Trump’s overall approval rating has been an object of fascination for pundits. . . . Almost nothing—not the steady drumbeat of damning news on the Russia investigation, not the chaos of the White House, and neither a strong economy nor a volatile stock market—seemed able to dislodge it. The American people had apparently made up their minds about Trump, and the four in 10 who approved weren’t going to change their minds, come hell or high water.

Yet the shutdown seems to have broken that equilibrium. Trump hit his highest disapproval on record in the Morning Consult poll, at 57 percent. CBS found 59 percent disapproval. In the AP-NORC poll, Trump’s approval tanked from 42 percent a month ago to 34 percent.

What’s interesting is not just that the approval rate is finally budging, but why—and with whom. Trump has long been happy to withstand the opprobrium of the press, elites, and much of the country. . . . As my colleague Ron Brownstein has demonstrated, [Trump] the president has opted for political tactics meant to shore up his base. Shutting down the government over the wall was a part of that philosophy. The administration concluded that the wall was such an important issue for his base that it was worth whatever political blowback that might come from other quarters to get it done. In practice, however, weakened standing among that base accounts for Trump’s slumping approval. The NPR/NewsHour/Marist poll finds that Trump’s approval is down among suburban men, white evangelicals, and men without a college degree, all key segments of his constituency.

In the Politico/Morning Consult poll, Trump’s disapproval increased among evangelicals, non-college-educated voters, and those who voted for Trump in 2016, compared with a poll in early January. Meanwhile, the number who blamed Trump for the shutdown increased (slightly) among all three groups. . . . They haven’t changed their minds about the need for the wall; they’re just losing their faith in Trump and are fed up with the shutdown.

Nevertheless, the slippage in backing even among Trump’s base since the start of the shutdown calls into question the wisdom of the president’s calculation that the wall was an effective pander to his core supporters. It’s not just that Trump’s belief that Democrats would cave was out of touch with reality—even more dangerously for him, he was out of touch with the base.

Mueller’s Real Target in the Roger Stone Arrest

Having worked with the FBI on a couple of cases - I even gave some tutorials of real estate transactions to a couple of special agents and assistant U.S. Attorneys in one case - I know one thing.  The FBI's investigations are incredibly thorough and the goal is to assemble a series of four inch thick evidence note books that back up every aspect of indictments in sequence from start to finish.  To say that copies of email. wire transfer orders and documents that dispel lies and witness untruths are their stock in trade is an understatement. Given this reality, a column in the New York Times looks at what may have been the real target of Robert Mueller's indictment of Roger Stone beyond merely pushing Stone towards cooperating: Stone's cell phone(s), computers and encrypted email messages that may document Trump campaign coordination with Russian intelligence officials,  If Stone's message document such coordination and conspiring, Der Trumpenführer's life may be about to get very interesting and unsettling.  Ditto for perhaps Jared Kushner and others in the Trump inner circle.  Here are column highlights:

For many, Friday’s arrest of Roger Stone, the veteran political trickster and longtime adviser to Donald Trump, was a sign that the special counsel investigation into Russian electoral interference is entering its final phase. Yet there were also several indications that the probe may not be as near its conclusion as many observers assume — and that the true target of Friday’s F.B.I. actions was not Mr. Stone himself, but his electronic devices. 

[F]ederal agents were “seen carting hard drives and other evidence from Mr. Stone’s apartment in Harlem, and his recording studio in South Florida was also raided.” The F.B.I., in other words, was executing search warrants, not just arrest warrants. Even the timing and manner of Mr. Stone’s arrest — at the absolute earliest moment allowed under federal rules of criminal procedure without persuading a judge to authorize an exceptional nighttime raid — suggests a concern with preventing destruction of evidence: Otherwise it would make little sense to send a dozen agents to arrest a man in his 60s before sunrise. Of course, as the indictment also makes clear, the special counsel has already managed to get its hands on plenty of Mr. Stone’s communications by other means — but one seeming exception jumps out. . . . the special counsel is taking pains to establish that Mr. Stone made a habit of moving sensitive conversations to encrypted messaging platforms like WhatsApp — meaning that, unlike ordinary emails, the messages could not be obtained directly from the service provider. The clear implication is that any truly incriminating communications would have been conducted in encrypted form — and thus could be obtained only directly from Mr. Stone’s own phones and laptops. And while Mr. Stone likely has limited value as a cooperating witness — it’s hard to put someone on the stand after charging them with lying to obstruct justice — the charges against him provide leverage in the event his cooperation is needed to unlock those devices by supplying a cryptographic passphrase.

Of course, Mr. Mueller is likely interested in his communications with Trump campaign officials, but the detailed charges filed against the Russian hackers alleged to have broken into the Democratic National Committee’s servers also show the special counsel’s keen interest in Mr. Stone’s communications with the hacker “Guccifer 2.0,” an identity said to have been used as a front for the Russian intruders.

And if this really is the first time Mr. Mueller’s office is seeing the most sensitive communications from a key figure like Mr. Stone, it’s likely they’ll come away with new leads to follow and new questions to pose to other witnesses.

We may ultimately look back on Mr. Stone’s arrest not as the beginning of the special counsel’s endgame, but the point when the investigation began to really heat up.