Mueller stretches
With the caveat “if this report is true” (something we have to state more and more frequently these days about MSM news), Special Counsel Mueller appears to be doing exactly what was predicted would happen when he was appointed: going on a fishing expedition against Trump:
John Dowd, one of Trump’s lawyers, said on Thursday that he was unaware of the inquiry into Trump’s businesses by the two-months-old investigation and considered it beyond the scope of what Special Counsel Robert Mueller should be examining.
“Those transactions are in my view well beyond the mandate of the Special counsel; are unrelated to the election of 2016 or any alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia and most importantly, are well beyond any Statute of Limitation imposed by the United States Code,” he wrote in an email.
William Jacobsen at Legal Insurrection has a lengthy post today about this. And in late June, Andrew C. McCarthy wrote extensively on the subject of the way-too-broad scope of the Mueller investigation, which I discussed here.
That’s why, when I first looked at the headline of today’s Bloomberg article (“Mueller Expands Probe to Trump Business Transactions”), I immediately thought “There it is.”
The “line” on this fishing expedition will be “Trump’s business deals with Russians are what enabled him to collude with Russia” (Putin, presumably, although he doesn’t appear to have had anything to do with the deals mentioned in the article) — but that is a very thin line for the fish Mueller wants to reel in.
Jacobson’s closer is good:
“Even Kevin Drum at Mother Jones notes this problem:
“I’ll confess to some mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, this stuff is all semi-related to Russia, and might therefore be relevant to the campaign issue. On the other hand, we’ve all seen what happens when special prosecutors get out of control and start investigating everything under the sun. So far this looks like it’s still legitimately tied to Mueller’s original brief, but it’s a close call.”
There is a place where the doctrine was to find the person, then find the crime. It was in Russia’s predecessor, the Soviet Union. How ironic and inappropriate it would be if that is the direction Mueller is heading.”
* * *
When you’ve lost Mother Jones….
The other caveat should be if the business transactions turn out to be related to Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia.
This might be a tipping point because while I have supported Trump, voted for him and enjoy so much of what he has done, old guys like me are not going to keep him in office being a functional president. To remain an effective leader he needs his majority leaders, cabinet and staff pulling together and all the other cliches about team work and that is not happening.
This is the classic, Peter Principle, new Turn-around CEO thing where a leader with a successful background is brought in the make a difference, set a new course, lead onward and upward, etc. Except oft times it ends up with a crash and burn because the organization culture does not come on board and when that happens those who should be helping start setting booby traps and closing doors, especially if their positions might be in jeopardy.
Trump talked a fair amount of trash working his way up the ladder and I don’t know if that was a factor in his winning but the price of that trash talk is coming due now that there appears to be a fair amount of weakness in his position. To use a football metaphor Trump reminds me of Jerry Jones, owner of the Dallas Cowboys who resented having to share the spotlight with an effective coach. Instead of having strong, seasoned, savvy politicians he has surrounded himself with family and friends for trust and support. Probably was not a good idea.
I am still hoping he can make it through a full four years and I am thankful for all of the great work Trump has done so far but, there is a but, I think there is blood in the water and he is up against sharks, in the media, opposition and some in his own party who are chumming the water with every offal they can throw.
My best guess is that we are close to a tipping point and if the Republicans in office, house and senate can see their way to re-election enhanced by Trump’s exit then he will be gone. Every bit of trash and confusion dug up about him and his family will surface and there might be a day when old Trump says, “It’s not worth it and I am out of here.” And then he takes his kids with him.
This probably inspired the complaint about Sessions yesterday.
FWIW, Rush Limbaugh described this today is the biggest, government funded political oppo research in history.
Tell me you don’t think, given that Mueller has hired Democrat lawyers (such as the Clinton Foundation’s lawyer), that details of what they find won’t be leaked to whoever runs against Trump in 2020.
What a stupid idiot? why run for president when you have done so many dirty dealings in the past? Howard Stern warned him already. I hope Trump goes to jail, wasted our time and energy supporting this snake oil salesman. just impeach this piece of garbage so Pence can have time to fix the mess he made.
The Democratic and Republican establishments, and their JournoListic footsoldiers, should be required to compensate Americans and other people around the world for the collateral damage and redistributive change caused by their baby hunts.
OldTexan Says: IF you cant beat em, join em, lets become dems cause they wont let republicans do anything and its bertter to be an effective dem than an inneffective republican… unless the republican is practicing entryism and is really a dem, then you have your effective again.
thats nuts.. and in essence that is what your saying
if the dems can block and play games long enough your going to abandon supporting him, and go to what? the communist they DO support?
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
meanwhile, i am sure this marlin fishing expedition is trying to find a white whale, and is wasting a whole lot of stuff not just money in persuing ahabs dream.
basically the way this investigation is going everyone in the USA under 6 degrees of contact will be investigages as being part of the trump cabal of soviet l;iving.. post soviet..
though on an othner point
Bill Clinton was paid $500,000 for a brief speech in Russia in 2010 for an entity called Renaissance Capital. What you may not know is why. Renaissance Capital is a Moscow based investment firm that was the focus of the attention of Sergei Magnitsky.:
really?
I have to wonder what these people are thinking. I mean look, I was never a big Trump fan, and pulled hard for Ted in the primaries, so it is not like I love this guy.
But if the deep state thinks they can pull some crap out of their hat, and remove Trump now, they better think again.
The right has been remarkably restrained in response to people shutting down their talkers and thinkers, shooting up their elected reps, and beating up their own people who are caught out in the wrong hat.
But you go down this road too far, and I fear that the right is gonna go off. Right now they have won an election, so are being patient with the hissy fit from the left. However, if the hissy fit gets an election overturned over some baloney fishing expedition and some taxes not payed correctly, the current level of animosity we are seeing is going to ve viewed as a church meeting.
Think about that shooter who shot up that baseball practice, now replace the reps with democrats and install as the shooter a hunter from anytown , USA. Game over man.
They need to stop and get a grip on themselves, they do not want the right to start behaving as they are now, it will be bad for them.
Art,
What I think they should do is stick together, president, house and senate and get busy and work together and move forward cleaning up the mess the previous administration has left. Not let’s become Dems but I am afraid some don’t have the will to stay the course. I hope I am wrong and you are right.
Dave and n.n. emerge from their lairs to spew some venom.
Trump is surrounded in the Exec Branch by anonymous leaking bureaucrats and people who refuse the honor the change in leadership. The huuge majority of Federal public (ahem!) servants are Democrats who cannot be removed from their jobs due to the good old Civil Service rules. Public teachers’ union members as public “servants”.
It reminds me of the fragging done in Vietnam, when platoons killed their one officer. Happened many times.
We are inching ever closer to civil strife.
Oh that Mueller would “expand” some investigation this way…
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/370753.php
Trump needs to claim the heck down，overreacting will only get him into more trouble like the the ill advised firing of comey，doesn’t matter how imcompetent he is firing him is pure bad optic and a sign that the president has something to hide. So disappointed in him attacking sessions，not that i am a fan of sessions or anything but it is an indictation that trump has lost his cool and he has shown weakness to his enmeies.
Dave and n.n. emerge from their lairs to spew some venom.
Frog: You spew plenty enough of your own venom to be calling anyone else out on that count.
Dave: I’m curious about your change of heart about Trump.
Trump’s optics have always been bad yet we’ve also learned optics didn’t matter much with Bill Clinton, Hillary, and Obama.
Trump, as I see it, is just working from the Dem playbook on the Republican side. I wish he were a better guy, but I can’t blame him for this stuff.
You have to admit it’s funny for a fishing expedition to be taking place to investigate if someone undertook a fishing expedition!
Huxley
I do not like him going after his own man，you do not do that unless you caught him being a mole from the other side. He keeps handing the other side ropes to hang him with，mistakes after mistakes after mistakes，keeps shooting himself in the foot，keeps bringing the collusion bs back to the front pages. He has shown the lacking of the most basic strategic thinking. If you want the democrats to back off from the Russia colludion claims, very simple, threaten to escalate nuclear war with Russia. “Fellow democrats, I feel your pain, when Putin hurt an American he has hurt all of us, today I am declaring war against Russia, that will teach them not to meddle with our democracy again”. You don’t play defense, that’s the number 1 rule, the best way to deal with commies is give them what they wanted, times 1000, bluff the living heck out of them.
Trump should’ve fired this guy a month ago when the revelations of his personal friendship with Comey came out. On top of that, there’s all the ex-Clintonistas he’s appointed to help him.
There is absolutely the appearance of impropriety here, and I reject any findings from his office before they’re even issued.
Conservatives in America are too honest, they refuse to play dirty with democrats, you refuse to use their dirty play book against them, you will never win like that. To deal with commies, play along with them give everything they wanted to them, times a million. They want refugees, just let in a million of unvetted refugees and relocate them all in California; They hate police, take all police out of inner cities; They want high tax, charge wall street 100% capital gain tax; they want affirmative action, ban Harvard from accepting whites; they want unisex bathroom, give them that, make all genders of people sharing the same bathroom. Within a month the democrats will crawl back begging you to repeal all these ultra progressive laws.
Question: If Trump is driven out of office on the basis of all these dubious charges. what do you think will happen next? Answer: There will be terrible repercussions, probably another civil war. You really don’t think that the tens of millions of Trump supporters will allow the media to reverse the results of last year’s election.
prophecies of nostradamus Have already predicted that World War III will start when the senate vanquishs the false trumpet’s triumph. If the liberals truly believe that trump is the third antichrist as Nostradamus predicted, after nepoleon and hitler, then they have to also believe that he will not go down without a fight that will drag the whole world along with him. The most logical thing trump would do now to get himself out of troubles is to start a war, either a war with nk or Russia, and that pretty much seals the fate of the human kind. Democrats wanted a war with Russia, be aware what you wished for
Let’s be honest, Hillary had all the advantages going in by Colluding with Wall Street, deep state, Silicon Valley, incumbent president, the media and Middle East nations, and the establishments. a lot of people believe that even if trump has received help from Russia what was the big deal, it was just an effort to try to slightly even up an enormously unfair fight in hillary’s favor to begin with.
To defeat the brits did the founding fathers not receive help from the French? Our founding fathers were clearly colluding with the french, how can anyone win any war with that big a disadvantage without getting as much help from the outside as possible. If trump commits treason by selling America interests to Putin as a repayment then arrest him by then, you can’t punish someone for things that he might do in the future like minority report.
DJT may well be a dead in street. We’ll see. When Sessions went Trump over Cruz I was WTF. Cruz was everything Trump was not. Sessions will resign by the end of August.
“Sessions will resign by the end of August.”
Parker…I like the cut of your jib.
Remember what happened in the Valerie Plame investigation. The special prosecutor Fitzgerald quickly determined that Armitage was the leaker and no law was broken and the he went on a two year fishing expedition.
Dave had a change of heart? HAHAHAHA
Some poster mentioned that they thought he was 2 people. Could be. I chatted back and forth with him a bit early on (months ago) when he was spewing vile about Trump. I stopped replying. (Not that I engage that much on this blog at all, but I do reply as Julia on occasion ).
I didn’t consider him to be a conservative or Republican based on the ‘he flipped, he tricked us’ BS dave was spouting.
I was shocked to see how ‘perfect R’ dave became. Now, here we go again to being very anti-Trump.
This is just like O’s switch from being against gay marriage to supporting it. He ALWAYS supported it. So dave started out very insulting and anti-Trump and is merely showing his true colors.
Having doubts is part of being an authentic human being. I do not know what tucker Carlson’s political identification is but I think his beliefs probably match mine the most. Funny how after I withdrew my support for trump after he threw sessions under the bus two nights ago tucker lashed out on trump last night for the exact same reason. Not supporting him doesn’t mean I am against him, I just saw his vulnerabilities and no longer buy the 4d chess bs anymore. You do not go after your guys, that is my red line. One of the reasons I liked trump was how he defended Corey lewandowski during the Michelle fields assault scandal, but he disappointed me this time.
one of the biggest mistake the president has made in his first 6 months is pandering too much to the establishment conservative side. Because he was not a conservative, to prove to the Republican Party that he is one on of them he has overcompensated.
@ Dave:
Trump was quite obviously bought off by the GOP establishment when he endorsed McCain for re-election. They must’ve made their support somehow contingent upon that, and in fairness it may have been a wise choice on Trump’s part.
The problem is, what’s good for Trump isn’t necessarily good for voters, even HIS voters.
McCain could’ve been replaced by a more Trump-friendly candidate, but instead he got re-elected and then proceeded to immediately make Trump regret it.
I don’t think Trump is ideologically cozy with the GOP establishment, and the feeling is mutual. But Trump doesn’t have to like them to do their bidding.
The hydra head stretches. Plenty more where that came from.
You think HRC is bad? The Leftist alliance has thousands of tyrants worse than her and Hussein, just waiting.
Because he was not a conservative, to prove to the Republican Party that he is one on of them he has overcompensated.
Too busy winning. Not tired of winning yet.
@OldTexan at at 3:21 pm – a lot of wisdom in that.
I agree that the GOP in Congress and POTUS, if they work together, can get a LOT done.
One of the huge problems with trump is not just the “trash talk” during the election, it is the continued “trash talk” and the distraction and lack of focus it creates.
And, his aim seems indiscriminate at times – e.g. AG Sessions.
A good leader keeps that crap in house, close to the chest, and makes far better strategic use of his public “air time”.
I just saw his vulnerabilities and no longer buy the 4d chess bs anymore.
Swallowed too many purple pills from the Red Pill PUG Alt Right VoxDay crowd of white Christian State Religion race DNA based supremacists.