KEEPIN' ALL MY SECRETS SAFE TONIGHT
Thanksgiving Day brought news that Mike Flynn’s attorney has withdrawn Flynn from a joint defense agreement (in which the information their attorneys share is protected by a form of joint attorney-client privilege) with Donald Trump. This seems significant. But assuming for the moment that it’s true, what does it mean?
The simplest conclusion (on which the New York Times and others have based their analysis) is that it means Flynn has flipped, and is now telling everything he knows to Robert Mueller, in exchange for a lighter sentence for his son and himself (both of whom may have been facing some very serious, “die in prison,” charges, including espionage). If this is true, it’s bad news for Donald Trump and his crime family.
Remember that protecting Mike Flynn was an uncharacteristically high priority for Donald Trump, who has never been known for his loyalty to former employees. He asked James Comey point blank not to pursue charges against Flynn, and fired him when he refused to comply. It’s fair to wonder why Trump would go to such extremes if Flynn didn’t have some pretty damaging information to barter with federal prosecutors.
Heather Digby Parton wonders whether Trump was dumb enough to sign off on Flynn’s scheme to kidnap the US-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gülen and turn him over to Turkish authorities in return for $15 million. She admits that’s wild speculation, and I only include it here because I can’t resist quoting her summary: “This plot would easily be one that Trump and his crazy pal Flynn would think was very, very clever. Flynn had a vendetta against the Intelligence Community and Trump is a fucking moron.”
But wait! Another theory has been advanced about the sudden severing of ties between Flynn and Trump. Perhaps Flynn’s attorney has learned that one or more of Trump’s lawyers have been charged with obstruction of justice, and he wants to keep them far away from his client, who is already in enough trouble. If this is true, it too is bad news for Donald Trump and his crime family.
The case for the second scenario is this. Consider the late October indictments of Paul Manafort and his partner Rick Gates, which were followed later that day by a third indictment, of one George Papadopoulos, who appears to have had nothing to do with the crimes Manafort and Gates were charged with. Why, we might wonder, did Mueller unseal all three indictments on the same day, along with the information that Papadopoulos had been cooperating with Mueller for months?
Scenario number two posits that Mueller was using Papadopoulos to bait a trap for Trump’s attorneys. He gave them something serious to worry about, such as whether Papadopoulos had been wearing a wire in conversations with White House personnel, and if so, who in the White House might have said something incriminating. It’s not inconceivable that one of these lawyers might have taken the bait and either deliberately or inadvertently broke the law. If so, it would mean that at least one of Trump’s attorneys is himself in serious legal trouble.
The good news is that either scenario is bad news for Donald J. Trump and his co-conspirators. And there are a lot of co-conspirators.
In fact, there are so many criminals in Donald Trump’s orbit that it’s hard to keep track of them all, and what they’ve allegedly done. You can’t tell the players without a scorecard, as the saying goes. Luckily, Seth Abramson provided just such a scorecard on his twitter feed last week. Here are Abramson’s top 25 investigative angles (complete with likely suspects and/or witnesses) in the Trump-Russia scandal.
1. Hacking of DNC/Clinton (Guccifer, Stone, FancyBear et. al.);
2. Illicit Sanctions Negotiations (Page, Sessions, Papadopoulos, Kislyak et. al.);
3. Clandestine GOP Platform Changes (Gordon, Manafort et. al.);
4. Clandestine Foreign Agents in Government A (Flynn, Gulen, Turkish officials et. al.);
5. Clandestine Foreign Agents in Government B (Manafort, Gates, Deripaska et. al.);
6. Data Analytics Collusion and Social Media Propaganda (Kushner, Mercer, Cambridge Analytica et. al);
7. Obstruction of Justice A [Comey Firing] (Trump, Yates, Sessions, Miller, Comey, Lavrov, Kislyak, Hicks et. al.);
8. Obstruction of Justice B [Trump Jr. Statement] (Trump, Trump Jr., Miller, Hicks et. al.);
9. Making False Statements and/or Perjury A (Sessions);
10. Making False Statements and/or Perjury B (Flynn);
11. Making False Statements and/or Perjury C (Kushner);
12. Making False Statements and/or Perjury D (Page);
13. Making False Statements and/or Perjury E (Papadopoulos);
14. Money Laundering (Manafort, Gates, et. al.);
15. Espionage [Putin Backchannel] (Kushner, Flynn, Kislyak, et. al.);
16. Clandestine Trump Tower Moscow Agreement [2013 to 2017] (Trump, Aras Agalarov, Emin Agalarov, Michael Cohen, Felix Sater, Kremlin officials et. al.);
17. Clandestine Trump-Putin Meeting Plans (Clovis, Papadopoulos, Dearborn, Page, Mifsud, Millian et. al.);
18. Clandestine Outreach to Pro-Putin Ukrainian Officials (Manafort, Deripaska et. al.);
19. Possible Trump-Rosneft Collusion (Steele, Page, Lavrov, Peskov et. al.);
20. Kremlin Kompromat [Trump Indiscretions] (Trump, Schiller, Agalarov, Ritz Moscow staff, Trump org employees, Ritz visitors, Sarka et. al.);
21. Kremlin Kompromat [HRC/Ukraine] (Veselnitskaya, Kaveladze, Akhmetshin, Goldstone, Emin Agalarov, Kushner, Manafort, Trump Jr.);
22. Clandestine Trump-Putin Meeting Plans B (Torshin, Rogozin, Clarke, NRA et. al.);
23. Emoluments Violations [Russian Investors] (Eric Trump, Don Jr., Ivanka Trump, Kushner, Dodson, Gorka et. al.);
24. WikiLeaks (Trump, Assange, Trump Jr., Kushner, Rohrabacher et. al.);
25. Suspicious Contacts in Other Nations (Papadopoulos, Kammenos, and Putin in Greece; Gordon, Page, Orbán, Finkelstein, and Schmitz in Hungary; Papadopoulos in the UK and Israel)
Our 45th president appears on the list four times, but that’s only good enough, or bad enough, to tie for second place with Paul Manafort and Donald Trump Jr. Jared Kushner, jack of all trades and master of none, tops the list with no fewer than six mentions. Among the famous names, Mike Flynn brings up the rear with three mentions. All The President’s Men, 21st century edition – the President’s son and son-in-law, his campaign manager, and his Director of National Security, plus the Colluder in Chief himself.
Donald Trump has spent the past year proving the truth of Proverbs 16:18: “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.” These guys were minor league grifters who could probably have continued to fly under the radar, paying the occasional multi-million dollar fine, but staying out of jail – until Donald Trump decided to run for president. When he stepped out of the shadows and into the spotlight, it was soon clear that he wasn’t ready for prime time. He’s tried to bluff, bully, and buy his way out of trouble. Robert Mueller isn’t impressed.
Remember that, because Mueller runs a tight ship, everything here is just speculation. So far.
One value of a list like Abramson’s is that it reminds us of the complexity of Mueller’s task. No one is more impatient than I am for a tsunami of indictments, but I trust Mueller and I’d rather he did it right than did it fast.