A scramble on Saturday
Oopsie. Trump’s lawyers don’t know exactly what McGahn told the Mueller team.
The president’s lawyers said on Sunday that they were confident that Mr. McGahn had said nothing injurious to the president during the 30 hours of interviews. But Mr. McGahn’s lawyer has offered only a limited accounting of what Mr. McGahn told the investigators, according to two people close to the president.
That has prompted concern among Mr. Trump’s advisers that Mr. McGahn’s statements could help serve as a key component for a damning report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, which the Justice Department could send to Congress, according to two people familiar with the discussions.
But that’s ok, because Trump is telling us on Twitter that Mueller is “disgraced” so naturally nobody will care about his stinky old report.
Or, even more likely, the Republicans will just bury it…unless they’re outnumbered.
Trump’s lawyers realized they had this little problem once they read the Times story about McGahn. I’m sure that made for a jolly weekend.
The article set off a scramble on Saturday among Mr. Trump’s lawyers and advisers. The president, sequestered at his private golf club in Bedminster, N.J., solicited opinions from a small group of advisers on the possible repercussions from the article. The president ordered Mr. Giuliani to tell reporters that the article was wrong, but Mr. Giuliani did not go that far in his television appearances.
Donnie ordered Rudy to lie for him but Rudy told slightly fewer lies than Donnie ordered him to tell. This is the state of things.
Mr. Trump was rattled by the Times report, according to people familiar with his thinking. The president, who is said to be obsessed with the role that John W. Dean, the White House counsel to President Richard M. Nixon, played as an informant during Watergate, was jolted by the notion that he did not know what Mr. McGahn had shared.
I hope he’s miserable. I hope he’s stressed all to fuck and climbing the walls.
Don’t worry, I’m sure the President appoints much better folks to run the country than the ones he hires to defend his own ass…. no, of course he doesn’t, what am I saying?
In a strange, upside-down world kind of way, Rudy did accidentally tell the truth. Whether we like it or not, truth and facts have become partisan and your views on what is true or what the facts are is heavily influenced by your ideological bent. Or rather, people choose what they believe based on whether it fits with what they already believe (or want to believe).
No pile of evidence, no matter how high, how compelling or even how utterly irrefutable will convince the Trumpsters that their God-Emperor is anything short of perfect and any attempts to convince them of the contrary will only cause them to push back more. The legitimacy assigned to what was once tinfoil hat territory such as QAnon shows how much they will pretzel themselves into believing Hilary Clinton is the real villain in this melodrama.
It scares me because the GOP are more frightened of their ever-maddening base than they are of their political opposition. Some blame Democrats for this, for not fighting back hard enough, but I’m not sure there’s anything one party can do when they see their opposite number merrily throw themselves into the abyss, screaming insults as they fall.
But in the short term, even if the Dems manage an epic blue wave in the midterms, there’s no way even mathematically they can capture enough Senate seats to convict Trump on articles of impeachment handed down by the House. So the only other option is to hope that moderate GOP senators will listen to reason. But it’s not clear there’s even enough of them, and anyway, why should they listen? That way lies certain unemployment at their next primary battle.
I don’t know how this ends. If this were a TV show, I would complain that the writers have painted themselves into a corner and only Deus ex machina can get them out. But I do know one thing – it’s going to get much, much worse.
Ironically, I think what Giuliani said is nothing all that bonkers – I think it was misunderstood. He was talking about testimony, and attribution – about different people making different truth claims. Of course people do that. I think his meaning was that not all truth claims are true, which is about the most obvious truth a lawyer can utter.
Why should moderate Republican senators listen? Because their personal careers are a good deal less important than the harm Trump is doing. They won’t be unemployed when they lose the next election, they will get new jobs selling their political connections. Yes they want to keep their jobs as long as they can but one would hope some of them can see the greater good when it’s this stark, and act accordingly. (No, I don’t think they will. But I do think they could and should.)
Ed Brayton post about a recent RAND Corporation report on “truth decay”, as well as the report itself, are quite good and seem relevant here.
@Ophelia I agree completely, but my question was more cynical – only a few of the so-called moderates have shown any spine whatsoever but even they have been in lockstep with Trump more often than not (Murkowski, Collins etc).
So forgive me if I am skeptical that the Democrats can convince enough GOPers to convict. Remember impeachment needs 67 votes, not 60. That seems like an impossible mountain to climb even if the Dems captured every red state up for grabs this cycle and didn’t lose any – that’s only 9 more seats. That’s 55 votes plus the two Independents, assuming Schumer can keep the Heidtkamps and Manchins of the world in line. So who are the 10 Republicans willing to risk the wrath of their party’s base? Collins, Murkowski, Portman, Burr, Alexander? Maybe Ernst since she’s so mad about the farmers (but probably not). Maybe Capito or Johnson if they think their asses are on the line in 2020. I’m already scraping the barrel here. And let’s be honest, MS, WY, UT and NE are not up for grabs so there are at least four more votes you need to find.
You know, I didn’t used to be this cynical or pessimistic. Then Brexit and Trump happened.
I know, Claire…I was arguing more with the generalized idea than with you, though I didn’t make that clear. It seems to be the received wisdom that the Republicans can’t do anything else because they have to cling to their Senate desks.
@Ophelia Fair enough. Forgive me if I sound frustrated, I’m just a bit fed up. My home country’s politics are a shambles because of stupidity and racism and my adopted country’s politics are a shambles because of stupidity and racism. And as a non-citizen, there’s not much I can do about the latter.
All in all, I’d quite like to exchange this reality for another one, thanks. This one’s broken.
Oh no, I’m the one who was sloppy about how I worded it.
And yes about the reality. This reality is so defective.