Inflamed tensions
A lawyer for Paul Manafort, the president’s onetime campaign chairman, repeatedly briefed President Trump’s lawyers on his client’s discussions with federal investigators after Mr. Manafort agreed to cooperate with the special counsel, according to one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers and two other people familiar with the conversations.
Boom.
The arrangement was highly unusual and inflamed tensions with the special counsel’s office when prosecutors discovered it after Mr. Manafort began cooperating two months ago, the people said. Some legal experts speculated that it was a bid by Mr. Manafort for a presidential pardon even as he worked with the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, in hopes of a lighter sentence.
Whatever it was a bid for, it’s dirty dirty dirty.
Rudolph W. Giuliani, one of the president’s personal lawyers, acknowledged the arrangement on Tuesday and defended it as a source of valuable insights into the special counsel’s inquiry and where it was headed.
WELL NO SHIT, SHERLOCK, THAT’S THE POINT. That’s what makes it dirty dirty dirty.
Such information could help shape a legal defense strategy, and it also appeared to give Mr. Trump and his legal advisers ammunition in their public relations campaign against Mr. Mueller’s office.
But a public relations campaign should be wholly beside the point. It’s not a vote whether or not Trump is a crook, it’s a factual question.
While Mr. Downing’s discussions with the president’s team violated no laws, they helped contribute to a deteriorating relationship between lawyers for Mr. Manafort and Mr. Mueller’s prosecutors, who accused Mr. Manafort of holding out on them despite his pledge to assist them in any matter they deemed relevant, according to the people. That conflict spilled into public view on Monday when the prosecutors took the rare step of declaring that Mr. Manafort had breached his plea agreement by lying to them about a variety of subjects.
Awwww; I hope they can be friends again some time down the road.
In his own recent Twitter attacks on the special counsel, the president seemed to imply that he had inside information about the prosecutors’ lines of inquiry and frustrations. “Wait until it comes out how horribly & viciously they are treating people, ruining lives for them refusing to lie,” Mr. Trump wrote on Tuesday.
Earlier this month, he tweeted: “The inner workings of the Mueller investigation are a total mess. They have found no collusion and have gone absolutely nuts. They are screaming and shouting at people, horribly threatening them to come up with the answers they want.”
I wish a prosecutor twenty feet tall would just tear the roof off the White House right now and pluck Trump out and smash his head on Pennsylvania Avenue.
Twenty feet tall seems a tad short for that job. Two hundred seems a bit more appropriate.
I’d be happy with a cream pie in the face, on stage, at one of his rallies. Played over and over, it would be a sign of weakness, maybe a fatal one.
And since every day with Trump seems to be opposites day, the things he is saying on Twitter about the investigation should be taken with a very large dose, like about an ocean’s worth, of salt. He continues to insist that MBS’s innocence is at least as likely as his guilt, even as evidence points toward guilt. He continues to insist on lot of things, most of which are either demonstrably false or have a high probability of being false, so his reports of chaos and no collusion could simply be projection and wishful thinking. Or an indication that he doesn’t understand what those words mean.
On that, I’ll go with Occam’s Razor: simplest explanation is the best.
“smash his head on Pennsylvania Avenue”
That’s mild and compassionate compared to some of my fantasies for commander orange orangutan and his ilk.
He’s losing it big-time. Look at what he’s re-tweeting; https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-twitter-rod-rosenstein-jail-treason-photo-meme-deputy-attorney-a8656036.html
That’s just childish fantasy; I’ll put you all in prison for not liking me, just you wait and see”.
What a remarkable sentence.
“Tony Soprano’s lawyer acknowledged the arrangement of having moles on the FBI task force, and defended it as a source of valuable insights into the impending charges.”
No, really????