Who’s actually running this game?

Posted by Pointman on May 3, 2018 · 23 Comments 

I’ve said on previous occasions that although Trump habitually likes to seize the initiative in surprising ways when confronted by problems, he’s actually more of a long-term planner. He understands that some problems have a quick fire tactical solution, but other problems have what can only be called inertia. They need patience and can’t be solved quickly, but must be picked apart over a few months or even a year or two. Any legal problems certainly have inertia and the concept of a quick settlement is a very relative term in legal circles.

His handling of the Mueller investigation has been classic Trump. The whole idea of Russia being able to significantly influence a presidential election was laughable from the very start, especially as I’ve no doubt Putin would rather be dealing with Clinton than Trump for reasons that have become obvious over the last year and a half. Trump has curtailed Putin’s territorial ambitions on Russia’s western approaches and is presently pushing him out of his toehold in Syria. Trump is brutally taking back all the ground lost in the foreign policy disasters of the Obama, Clinton and Kerry years.

Given that Vlad didn’t help him win the presidency, Trump has nothing to fear from the investigation. If it were to start manufacturing a case against him, he’s got more than enough money to hire enough legal firepower to rip it apart, which is why Mueller will steer well clear of going after Trump directly. But there’s another consideration. If you think the whole thing was just set up to somehow delegitimise and most optimistically pull down the Trump presidency, which I do, then it would be a large part of the devious plan to staff it only with Clinton sycophants and Trump haters, which is exactly what they did.

At face value, that might seem a tough situation for Trump to make the great escape out of, but on sober consideration, it has one central and very exploitable flaw running through the whole thing. You don’t just pluck hitherto honourable people out of the air and then instruct them to do dishonourable things just to bring down a legitimate presidency by any means possible. So, you have to go in the other direction, and staff it with compliant scum who’ll do whatever they’re told to do. People who have no professional integrity were always like that. They didn’t suddenly make that change in mid-career. Scum are scum from the word go.

A good example of that is Hillary Clinton, who as a junior lawyer attached to the Watergate investigation, was fired from it for lying and a lack of integrity. As I said, scum are scum from the word go, and they don’t change either. It was as if Trump was sitting down to play a game of poker, but had the advantage of knowing for sure every other player around the table was a cheat. Once you’ve spotted that weakness in your opponent, the problem then becomes one of how to exploit it to maximum effect.

As far as I know, Trump didn’t raise any significant objection to Mueller’s appointment, the terms of reference of the investigation – long since abandoned in desperation by Mueller – nor the selection of personnel on it who were supposedly going to decide his fate as president. When your opponent is putting together a very bad move, you let them get on with it. Mueller duly brought back in all the old Obama/Clinton henchmen who were veterans of several previous dodgy exploits. The whole kangaroo court he ended up with was a left-winger’s wet dream and Trump’s impeachment, for that was what would surely happen, was now only a few month’s away. Oh to have a political hymen like that again.

Seemingly, he’s practically ignored Mueller for over a year. By refusing to engage with the whole thing, he’s made them look like little lap dogs furiously nipping at his heels in a vain attempt to get his attention. He’s been very presidential, and the optics are he’s held himself well above the partisan grubbiness of it all while he got on with the more important matters of state. His hands have always been clean in that he directly had nothing to do with the various scandals that have rocked it about its legal basis and personnel, all of which have devalued any possible judgment they might come to, but I’ve no doubt it was occasionally his hand behind the scenes moving a few pawns around on the board.

In the year the investigation’s been running, there’s been a steady drip of revelations that have totally undermined the whole legal basis of it, never mind any supposed objectivity on the part of the various lawyers and investigators attached to it. Who actually paid for the black ops dossier which was the legal rationale for appointing Mueller in the first place. The machinations of people like Comey, McCabe and McCain in routing that dossier through the swamp to create the investigation. All the leaking of classified information by people like Clapper, Comey and others in a gross betrayal of office. The hate Trumps texts being exchanged by Strzok and Page as they conducted their adulterous affair, as well as supposedly objective investigations into Trump. The list goes on and on.

If it were a trial, rather than an investigation that in blatant disregard of its terms of reference, seems to want to keep investigating Trump for years back until it finds something anything to indict him on, the whole thing would have been thrown out of court months ago because of the fruit of the poisonous tree rule. It’s not so much a poisonous tree but a whole forest of them.

It all smacks of a typical Trump plan; drive them insane over months with a latter-day version of the chinese water torture. A long slow push of minimal moves to achieve the maximum outcome. The net result is that instead of the investigation deligitimising Trump, it’s the investigation itself which has been deligitimised. Mueller has spent a year on a political goose chase and has come up with precisely nothing. It’s a sign of how successful Trump’s strategy of dealing with the whole situation has been that he’s now begun to openly taunt Mueller and the investigation on social media, calling it a witch hunt.

Mueller is desperate, and looking for some way out. The recent FBI raid he ordered on Trump’s attorney was a unique and brutal violation of any notion of client attorney privilege whether you were a special counsel or not. To quote Newt Gingrich’s reaction to it – “Setting up a precedent that a prosecutor is allowed to dig into your life until finding a crime is a threat to the rule of law and a threat to every American.”

It was Mueller’s one last gasp attempt to get out of his dilemma by provoking Trump to fire him, which Trump won’t oblige him by doing, since he’s now got him exactly where he always planned to have him. That’s to say, wiggling on the end of a hook blown high in the wind, and he’s going to leave him dangling there in full public view for as long as possible.

The longer the farce runs on, the more damage will be done to its credibility by the accretion of more nuggets of scandal magically appearing out of nowhere and sticking to it. Trump will see to that. Superficially, its game over, but that’s not the true end game being played here. If you’ve wondered why it’s all gone so silent on the Mueller investigation front, it’s not just because it’s ran out of steam, which it actually has, but because I think they’ve finally spotted what the true end game really is.

All the time, and quietly in the background, AG Sessions has been reopening his own inquiries into various things like the Clinton emails scandal and its investigation lite exoneration by assorted people. All the Obama era scandals formerly thought to be safely buried are being exhumed by him, and all the wrongdoing coming to light about various people involved in investigating Trump are providing him with the legal cause to do so.

A lot of the cheats around the table were involved at a foot soldier level in those dubious investigations as well as other questionable activities, but are still around, their bums polishing FBI and DoJ seats while by all normal procedures, the DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility would have long ago had them frog marched out of the building in disgrace.

The obvious and only conclusion to be drawn is Sessions has flipped them and they’re just sitting there on ice, because some sort of deal has been done. The first one to flush the others down the toilet and turn state’s evidence escapes a prison cell. If you don’t cooperate, you get hurt, as McCabe found out when he was not forced to resign, but fired unceremoniously from the FBI with only one day to go to reach a fully pensioned up retirement.

The harshness of his treatment set off a lot of red alarm lights in swampland, because as we approach end game, the kid gloves will come off and the knuckle dusters will be put on in their place, and that was a brutal foretaste of things to come. The message is people are going to end up answering for their misdeeds of previous years. Forgiveness just doesn’t play a big part in Trump’s psychological makeup.

What the implosion of the Mueller investigation has revealed is the manufacture of evidential documents, the outright lies to courts like FISA and too many people having lied under oath, and perjury is still an offense, whether you’re a liberal or not. There are strong grounds to suspect AG sessions has impaneled at least two other grand juries he’s keeping under wraps, but more importantly I wouldn’t be at all surprised if covered warrants for various individuals are being drawn up.

Once you open up warfare on the legalities front, you in effect begin the construction of an intricate machine that on an almost daily basis becomes ever more complex. In the end, it has way too many moving parts for you to keep an eye on all of them. People can no longer just mouth off unsubstantiated rumours as facts; they have to restrict themselves to provable facts that can withstand a cross-examination. If you make up stuff, otherwise known as lying under oath, you open yourself up to legal punishment, as Bill Clinton found out when he was impeached for lying to Congress.

The latest effort of the DNC on the lawfare front is to sue Russia, Wikileaks and various people involved in the Trump campaign, but notably not Trump himself. Call me cynical, but interestingly, none of the supporting paperwork mentions any “facts” thrown up by a year’s worth of the Mueller shenanigans in support of the suits. It is of course madness, not only because there’s no hope of winning any case against any of those parties, but even if a case could be brought to a successful conclusion, it would neither fill their severely depleted coffers with money nor would it roll back the election result of 2016.

Patently, there’s no win there for them beyond trying to irritate various people, but there are several downsides to such a dumb move. I’ll mention only one, since it’s already been mention by the Don himself on Twitter, and that is it introduces the legal complication of the discovery process. Essentially, that means I get the legal right to see the documents and evidence you’re basing your accusation against me on, never mind getting sucked into the obvious move of a counter suit. You either have to hide the embarrassing internal documents, and risk legal punishment, or you have to hand them over to eventually appear in open court.

But that’s not the big danger that goes with such a dumb move. They’ve learnt nothing from the Mueller débâcle, and if they persist along the legal Yellow Brick road, Trump will run exactly the same number on them as he did with Mueller, and make equally sure that road ends abruptly at a similar precipice. Of late, the DNC have that sweaty smell of hurried desperation about them, so I wouldn’t put it past them to plough on with such a bad move. Time will tell.

What’s beyond doubt though, is that there’s only ever been one person manipulating the strings attached to various witting and unwitting puppets all the way through the hearings, and that’s been Trump. What was originally intended to hurt him, has by design been reversed to end up hurting them badly. All in all, he played the Mueller investigation beautifully.

©Pointman

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When you attack, you hit them with everything you’ve got and all at once.

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Filed under Article · Tagged with Mueller, Politics, Strategy, Trump