Highly amusing update:
hahahah.. so when Bloomberg asked Dowd he "clarifies that he’s speaking for himself"
— Heisenberg Report (@heisenbergrpt) March 17, 2018
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Hopefully, you didn’t need to be told that Trump orchestrated the firing of Andrew McCabe and that Jeff Sessions’ decision was effectively made under duress as the President would have almost certainly moved against his Attorney General had Sessions decided not to go through with the move against the former deputy director of the FBI.
But just in case you were having trouble putting the pieces together, McCabe spelled it out for you in his statement:
This attack on my credibility is one part of a larger effort not just to slander me personally, but to taint the FBI, law enforcement, and intelligence professionals more generally. It is part of this Administration’s ongoing war on the FBI and the efforts of the Special Counsel investigation, which continue to this day. Their persistence in this campaign only highlights the importance of the Special Counsel’s work.
Right. And you’re reminded that this comes less than two months after Devin Nunes attempted to give Trump the ammunition he needed to try and dismantle the Mueller probe. Although Nunes’ “memo” was by all accounts rather underwhelming given the hype and despite the fact that the Democratic rebuttal offered a pretty convincing (as these things go) refutation, Trump still had what he needed. Here’s what we said in late January after the Nunes memo was made public:
Implicated in this allegedly nefarious FBI/DOJ plot are all the people you’d expect to implicated given what it is Trump’s trying to do. In fact, it almost seems like he could have sent Nunes a list of people who he wanted named because there’s Comey, McCabe, Yates, and Rosenstein.
Only one of those people hasn’t yet been fired or otherwise forced out and that person is Rosenstein who just happens to be overseeing the Mueller probe. Imagine that.
And here’s what Trump said about Rosenstein at the time:
Well guess what? This, from The Daily Beast:
President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, John Dowd, told The Daily Beast on Saturday morning that he hopes Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein will shut down the Mueller probe.
Reached for comment by email about the firing of former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, sent The Daily Beast the text of Trump’s most recent tweet on the subject, which applauded the firing. Then he wrote that Rosenstein should follow Sessions’ lead
“I pray that Acting Attorney General Rosenstein will follow the brilliant and courageous example of the FBI Office of Professional Responsibility and Attorney General Jeff Sessions and bring an end to alleged Russia Collusion investigation manufactured by McCabe’s boss James Comey based upon a fraudulent and corrupt Dossier,” Dowd then wrote.
He told The Daily Beast he was speaking on behalf of the president, in his capacity as the president’s attorney.
Of course as clearly stated in the Democratic counter memo linked above, the Russia probe was not “based” on the Dossier. That’s a lie.
But the point here is that Trump is angling to get rid of Mueller and the path to that goes through Rosenstein who, you’re reminded, was effectively used by Trump and Sessions last year in the firing of Comey. And this would be the same Rosenstein about which Trump tweeted this last June:
I’m sure you can see where this is going.
Incidentally, this would be the same John Dowd who was forced to figuratively fall on his sword after Trump effectively tweeted out an admission to obstructing justice in December. And the same John Dowd who subsequently said this:
The President cannot obstruct justice.
Finally, for those of you who care about markets, if Trump convinces Rosenstein to fire Mueller or else if Rosenstein is forced to resign, stocks will collapse.
As for the whole “pray” thing, that’s probably the best way to describe how Trump thinks about the Mueller probe – so we’ll give John Dowd that.
Technical question: Can Mueller set up some kind of “poison pill” that would still trigger whatever charges he might already have prepared, should he get fired? I know that working with NY AG might be the answer to that, but wondering if there’s some concrete legal theory here?
In a universe of irony, Sessions his own self firing McCabe for “a lack of candor by Mr. McCabe in interviews with internal investigators” raises the bar to a new level.