The waves of breaking news cascading around the White House
were so frequent and so intense this past week that even fresh news about O.J. Simpson was relegated to the second
block. Geez, once upon a time, the entire country had to go through Johnny Cochran detox in order to make
it through a news cycle without cutting a vein for an O.J. fix. But in the
fairy land of Trumpelstiltskin, even old
Mr. “the glove don’t fit!” was gasping for media oxygen.
O.J. was mercifully buried under a steady flow of breaking
news items that appeared at face value to be just another week of routine
mayhem in the Trump White House. Stepping back a bit, however, these news items
suddenly seem to be jigsaw pieces falling into place toward a seismic day of
reckoning. By week’s end it had become apparent that Donald Trump is laying the
groundwork for firing Robert Mueller, and, in all likelihood, doing anything and everything he
perceives to be within his power to cripple the Russia investigation
permanently.
If this comes to pass, the United States could very well
face the gravest constitutional crisis in its history. But there is constitutional crisis – as in, the
unwillingness of one branch of government to accede to the limits of its
constitutional authority – and then there is a crisis of our national constitution … a challenge to our character and will as a people. Once the facts are established that Trump is overstepping his constitutional authority, are we as a people willing to act in order to force our representatives to
rein in or remove a President who is brazenly and nakedly intent on subverting a vital
investigation into the most serious threat to our democracy in the history of
our republic?
Let’s begin to assemble the pieces with the news that at
the G-20 Summit in Europe last week, Donald Trump actually had a second meeting
with Vladimir Putin. There were only three people in that meeting: Putin, the
Russian translator, and Trump. Trump had foolishly taken a meeting
with Putin without a single representative from the U.S. government to stand as
witness, ally, and safeguard for himself. He was winging it.
No one except those three people knows what was discussed.
The only thing we know for sure is that when Donald Trump
arrived back in the United States, he suddenly began pressing a variety of
buttons that clearly signaled a circling of the wagons around the White House.
He eagerly submitted himself to an hour of questions from
the organization he routinely excoriates as “fake news.” On this particular
day, however, Trump used The New York Times as a megaphone to get a new message
into the public square: the President felt Jeff Sessions had essentially
betrayed him by recusing himself from the Russian investigation. It was, of
course, Sessions' decision to recuse himself that put the Russia investigation in
the sole authority of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who promptly
hired Robert Mueller as Special Prosecutor.
Trump let The New York Times know that Sessions’ decision to recuse was “very
unfair” to the President, and that he would not have hired Sessions for the job
if he had known that Sessions would take that step.
Well, there’s hanging someone out to dry, and then there is
holding them in a hammerlock directly underneath the nozzle of an industrial
strength Dyson Airblade. No one could
quite recall the last time a U.S. President filleted one of his
cabinet officers quite so publicly and so comprehensively. It did not take a
Freudian analysis of the President’s subconscious motives to get the point:
“Hey, Jeff… time to resign, so that I can hire a new Attorney General who fire Mueller.”
More startling still was the fact that Sessions did not
take the hint. The Attorney General seemed oddly unperturbed by the fire hose
of disrespect dished out in an audio recording released by The Times, and in a stream of invective as Trump resorted to social media to angrily mistweat his Attorney General. Sessions, to his credit, simply issued
a bland statement about continuing to serve as long as it was appropriate and
went back to work.
However, a second and perhaps even more consequential Trump
quote emerged from the Times interview. Trump told The New York Times that he
felt that it would not be appropriate for Special Prosecutor Mueller to go
“beyond the scope” of the Russian election-tampering investigation by looking
into Donald Trump’s personal finances. As Bill Clinton learned while watching
Ken Starr take the Scandal Local from Whitewater to Monica Lewinsky with all
stops in between, presidents don’t get to tell special prosecutors what is and
is not “in the scope of the investigation.” The message was unmistakable: if
Mueller went after Trump's finances, the President would find a way to fire Mueller.
Therein lies the germinating seed of constitutional crisis.
Shortly after came the reports that Trump lawyers are doing diligence on the nature and scope of the President’s authority to grant
pardons. (Please excuse us if we take a
quick victory lap on this one, as BTRTN was out ahead of the Huffington Post
and The New York Times with our post last
week, entitled “Pardon Me. And Me. Me, too! Don’t Forget Me.” You can find it at http://www.borntorunthenumbers.com/2017/07/pardon-me-and-me-me-too-dont-forget-me.html.) The clear message in each of these reports
is that Trump is gauging how to employ the pardon to undercut Mueller’s
ability to secure honest testimony from Trump’s inner circle.
Then came the Times reporting that Trump’s legal team was
busy researching how to slime the individuals selected to serve on Robert
Mueller’s staff. The clear intent of this initiative was to prepare a “kitchen
sink” rationale for firing Mueller. When Trump is ready to take the big leap in
the unknown by firing Mueller, he wants to cloak his true reason under layers
of camo netting in the form of spurious unrelated accusations of conflict of
interest, liberal bias, and alleged past misdeeds on the part of Mueller’s
elite investigate team.
On Friday, we learned that Sean Spicer had resigned from
his position as the White House Communications Director in protest of the
President’s decision to name Anthony Scaramucci to the Comms Director spot,
layering Spicer in the pecking order.
Scaramucci is widely known as “The Mooch,” and no, that is not
a lame attempt at comedy. This guy actually
is widely known as “The Mooch.” Having a slick, smarmy guy known as “The
Mooch” pimping for a thug boss called “The Donald” is what you’d expect from
a cheesy screenwriter peddling a sequel to “Jersey Shore.”
Those who watched The
Mooch in action on Day One had to be impressed, if only because Scaramucci had
not yet been neutered by his boss and made a singular point of oozing alpha
from every pore. He did not merely project confidence, he visually exuded a
radioactive hubris, calling to mind the advertising executive who once proudly recounted how much effort he had put into learning how to pretend to look sincere.
But make no mistake: Scaramucci is a howitzer next to
Spicer’s water pistol. The Mooch is not the loopy, terrified marionette that
Spicer became over the course of six months under Donald Trump. Also, given
the litigious waters that lie ahead, it wasn’t dumb to put a Harvard lawyer out
in front of communications. In short
(ok, that was cheap), replacing
Spicer with Scaramucci was a serious upgrade in Trump’s communications arsenal,
replacing a weak milquetoast and pathetically inept liar with a weapons grade
propagandist. Trump had gamed this
out and knew that Spicer would not be up to the task of defending the
administration when time came to fire Mueller.
Just when we thought that Spicer’s exit was going to be the
last explosion before a much-needed weekend came the latest episode of Friday Night Blights. Well after happy hour commenced on the Beltway, the Washington Post reported on leaked intel
that Sergey Kislyak had reported back to the Kremlin during the election season that
he had spoken with Jeff Sessions about the Trump campaign.
What seems most curious about this one is realizing just how many parties could have wanted this
tidbit leaked. Sure, maybe it was yet another amazing bit of reporting by the
Washington Post. Maybe it was a senior whistle-blower at the FBI or CIA tired
of watching Trump and Sessions undermining intelligence operations. Or, could
it have been Trump himself? Perhaps the President heard this tidbit and decided
to air it out as further grounds for nailing Sessions. Or, try this: who, of
all the players is in the best position to leak Russian-to-Russian
communications? Why, one would have to believe that would be Vlad the Unveiler himself.
Maybe Putin decided to do his buddy Don a favor. Maybe
Putin doesn’t think that Mueller’s investigation is in Russia’s interest,
either. Maybe he thinks that having Donald Trump under his thumb is the best
possible scenario, so he is now happy to help torpedo the Mueller
investigation.
Which brings us full circle… back to that one-on-one
conversation back at the G-20 summit. Vladimir Putin is a trained KGB
operative. He knows when he has a once-in-a-lifetime moment… a one-on-one
meeting with the President with no other American witness to be found. He is
not a guy, Mr. Hamilton, who is going to miss
his shot. Hey, Putin worked hard to elect Donald Trump, and he was
not going to stand on the sideline and watch the bungling U.S. President slide
from mere incompetence to becoming pathetically ineffectual before crash-landing at an impeachment trial. So
maybe Putin used his private time to give Trump some advice.
Why, we can practically hear the Russian strongman lecturing
the neophyte…
“Donald,
I think you and I can accomplish great things together, but not if you let the
weaklings in your government push you around! Start acting like a real man, not
a sissy man! From what I can see, you have the full power to cripple this
investigation. You fire Sessions. You get a new Attorney General who will fire
Mueller and close down the Office of the Special Prosecutor. You tell your
Republicans in the House and Senate to vote down an independent Congressional
Committee. You understand? Donald, my
people are monitoring this investigation very closely. We have a good sense about what information
the Special Prosecutor already has. It does not look good for you. And, of
course, we know what our own intelligence officers have collected on your campaign, which – if it were ever to get out – would be a disaster. In sum,
the walls are closing in all around you. You better act fast, or you will lose
the ability to act entirely. If the wrong information
were to get out, you could lose the presidency. And, Donald... not even I would not have the
power to stop it.”
Who knows?
All we know now is that Trump came back from the G-20,
running scared and guns blazing. It’s easy to see one way this all plays out: Mueller will subpoena a raft of financial
records – including personal taxes -- from Trump. Trump will refuse to comply,
citing executive privilege. The case will go directly to the Supreme Court,
which will follow the lead of the 1974 Court that required Richard Nixon to
turn over the tapes. Trump will continue to refuse to provide the financial
information, triggering a Def Con One constitutional crisis. And the only thing protecting democracy as we
know it will be if enough Republicans perceive the outright rejection of a
Supreme Court ruling as grounds for impeachment.
Or, the alternative scenario: Trump’s lawyers will lay out this exact
scenario and urge the President to take the risk and fire Mueller now. Trump could easily conclude that he is
impervious to impeachment, as it would take a full 17 Republican Senators to
succeed. It’s possible that Congress would launch its own special
prosecutor, but in that circumstance, Trump’s act of firing Mueller succeeds as
a huge delaying tactic, pushing any investigation back to square one.
The first scenario is a textbook constitutional crisis –
one branch of government openly and flagrantly defying the constitutional authority
decreed to another branch of government.
The second is a crisis of our national constitution: our will to survive as a democracy of the people, for
the people, by the people. Do the people
of the United States have the strength and the will to get out on the streets
and defy a tyrant abusing his power to undermine our elections, subvert our
government, and crush the United States Constitution?
It’s coming this fall on your favorite television network.
But do remember one thing. It is not reality TV.
It will be reality.
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