So on Friday night, we learned that a federal grand jury in Washington has approved the first charges in the Mueller investigation. Apparently, at least one person is going to be taken into custody as soon as Monday.
That was originally reported by CNN has since been confirmed by multiple outlets.
Of course there were the usual attempts to play this down and, amusingly, we noticed a couple of outlets suggesting that somehow this isn’t real. That seems like a decidedly risky claim to implicitly make considering that if history is any guide, a day called Monday is a real thing that usually follows Sunday. And Sunday is tomorrow. So you know, if you’re out there saying this is somehow a dubious story, you’ve got about 48 hours until your contention will be tested.
Relatedly, some folks are still clinging to the notion that this doesn’t represent what it in fact represents: actual real charges being filed against actual real people. I’m not sure what the excuse will be once someone is either arrested on live television or else is seen turning themselves in. I guess then the alt-Right blogosphere will claim what you’re seeing is a hologram constructed by the same cabal of Soros-backed homosexual aliens that killed JFK.
Well for their part, Axios thinks you should “be smart.” And here’s what you can find in the “be smart” section of their brief post on this:
Be smart: Matt Miller – former Obama Justice Department official, and close Mueller watcher, emails me: “I think it means this will be a rolling investigation. Rather than conduct his entire investigation and then wrap things up with indictments and possibly a report at the end, he is doing it in stages, the way the Justice Department might attack a drug cartel or a mafia family.”
- Miller adds that this “is a watershed moment for the politics surrounding the investigation. In less than six months on the job, Mueller has already returned indictments.
- “This isn’t a fishing expedition or a witch hunt – it’s an investigation that’s already born fruit with a grand jury of regular Americans finding probable cause that a crime was committed.”
And here’s MSNBC’s Ari Melber:
[W]e’re moving away from a political fight, where everyone can see it the way they want, and into … a legal process – where there are rules of evidence, facts are established. … Bob Mueller is known to be a pretty careful prosecutor.
Invariably, someone reading that quote will claim that MSNBC is hopelessly biased without realizing that the whole point of that quote is to say that it no longer matters what you think because now someone is going to be charged with a crime and subsequently prosecuted.
Should you want to persist in a fantasy world where you pretend that what’s happening in front of people with working eyes and ears isn’t actually happening, then you’re free to do so, but that’s not going to change reality.
Meanwhile, you should note that stories about Hillary Clinton and uranium probably aren’t going to derail this either. It’s the same thing we’ve been saying since the very beginning: at a certain point you have to be honest with yourself.
That is, even if someone produced definitive evidence tomorrow that Hillary Clinton is actually the Zodiac killer, that isn’t going to stop this Mueller probe. Another thing that won’t stop this Mueller probe is the firing of Mueller. Because what would happen then is you’d have a constitutional crisis. Firing Mueller is simply not a realistic option for Donald Trump. If he does that, the entire world will stop spinning. Tax reform, border wall, infrastructure, – all of it – would be dead. Democrats and probably the Republicans that Trump has pissed off would move heaven and Earth to try and have him removed from office.
So, again: it’s best to just be honest with yourself about what’s probably coming lest you should end up having some kind of mental breakdown every time you turn on the news and have to listen to how someone else has been indicted.
On the other hand, the other spin interpretation which is no doubt coming down the pipes already is that now that it’s over and someone other than Trump is charged, obviously Mueller found all the dirt he could, the president is implicitly not guilty of anything, and now we can move on.
yeah, and that’s a halfway plausible narrative, so i’m not going to rule it out. but in all likelihood, this will never end. they’re treating this like a RICO case. RICOs don’t ever really go away. and unlike the Clintons or [fill in the blank member of the political aristocracy], Trump isn’t connected enough politically to make this disappear. his family will never – ever – get out from under this. his great grandchildren won’t be able to do business deals with foreign countries without someone looking at it.
You are so right about his family name and future generations but even if someone explained to him using pictures and bullet points, he would not care because he sees nothing beyond his own shadow.
One other interesting possibility of this ensuing arrest/charge, Mueller could be using it to squeeze them to spill their guts and stay out of prison.
Of course, Roger Stone said that no one would dump on trump, and it was kinda like a threat and we are now right back to that mafia comparison.
Meh. One thing you are failing to take into account is NOBODY in this country whose indictment could conceivably have an adverse material effect on any BANK is EVER indicted for anything. Hasn’t happened since the S & L crisis in the late 1980’s. That’s why successful trillion-dollar heist perpetrators like Hank Paulson, Tim Geithner, Lloyd Blankfein, Jamie Dimon, John Meriweather, Dick Fuld, etc etc etc are still walking around in their $4000 Italian bespoke suits instead of orange jumpsuits.
Trump owes so much money to so many banks, the messy disclosures brought on by indictments / plea bargains / trials would be a catastrophe for Goldman Sachs and, no doubt, several other major banks.
So Mueller may round up myriad small fish like Manafort, Flynn, Cohen, etc, and possibly even Kushner, but this whole affair is not going anywhere near The Cheeto-In-Chief.
lol. Donald Trump’s demise would in no materially impact Goldman Sachs’ financial situation. that’s laughable.
You misunderstand. I didn’t write FINANCIAL effect, I wrote MATERIAL effect.
I’m not saying the collapse of Trump’s debts could cause FINANCIAL harm to GS (nor others). His debts are less than the wrist-slap fines they pay out of petty cash every time they are caught manipulating markets, violating insider trading laws, inaccurate reporting, etc. But GS et al were never made to endure even cursory investigations after collectively causing the 2008 GFC and then heisting $4 trillion via Paulson and Geithner to make the effects go away. Do they really want a Mueller type poking around in their books and email servers as part of further investigations?
Did you just connect the Mueller investigation to the financial bailouts from the GFC? That’s a stretch. Let’s suppose that even if somehow all of Trump’s dealings with GS came into view, do you really think that would somehow translate into investigating any and all financial crimes by Wall St??? That’s an even bigger stretch. TBTF (too big to fail, or in this case be investigated)
10 minutes of trading gains/losses.
Right now we are still every early in the spin cycle. If a close associate of Trump is charged with shady business dealings, it’s easy for Trump detractors (myself included) to reason that Trump will also be found to have dealt with Russian oligarchs, to whom he would owe favors.
But that reasoning is far from the proof necessary to remove him from office. The Clintons survived the (petty) whitewater scandal, although some of their associates spent jail time. Nixon did not survive, as his role in the cover-up became clear even to his supporters.
It could go either way for the POTUS (President Orange That Usually Survives).
An earlier commenter suggested: “his great grandchildren won’t be able to do business deals with foreign countries without someone looking at it.”
That’s quite a stretch. Although the Bill and Hillary Clinton carry more baggage than American Airlines, Chelsea is pretty much unaffected.
“That’s quite a stretch. Although the Bill and Hillary Clinton carry more baggage than American Airlines,
Chelsea is pretty much unaffected”
The Clinton and Trump situation and power dynamics aren’t even comparable.