Huh, so that happened.

In a sense, it’s probably good news for all of us. With any luck, Washington will be all but paralysed as the witch-hunters import kilotonnes of bullshit and block the roads with them.

One might be afraid that Trump would start a war to distract the public’s attention, as Clinton did, but he’s already done that so what else is new?

On the other hand, be afraid, be very afraid, once Pence becomes President.

@3
Why are you ignoring the idea that Trump is stupid and genuinely didn’t understand the impact sacking Comey would have on his reputation, such as it is?

From OP

‘A total Trump legal implosion would be bad for Republicans generally.’

Well short term, but can Trump’s demise really be worse than Nixon’s? (Perhaps it can, but seems unlikely at the moment). And Nixon’s political demise seemed to be a bad thing for the Republicans, and for a short time, it was. But Nixon was ‘the last liberal’, a Keynesian who founded the EPA. Removing him enabled the Republicans to purge their party of the last ‘moderate Republicans’ and move hard to the right, and with the Reagan counter-revolution they shifted American politics to the extreme right, where it has remained ever since.

‘It’s hard to imagine Mueller isn’t going to find something that Trump really really doesn’t want him to find’.

Mueller will find out that, like all wealthy American capitalists, without exception, Trump is a sleazebag and a scumbag who played fast and loose with the law (crony capitalism is the only kind of capitalism there is, or has ever been). Trump probably has links with unpleasant Russian oligarchs, not because they are Russian, but because they are oligarchs. Will that be enough to hang Trump? Depends on how much the Republicans want President Pence. A lot, would be my guess. So yes Trump is probably doomed, but maybe in his second term (if he has one) not his first. Will he go peacefully or accept defeat like Nixon? Not a chance. Remember Trump has the army and the armed police force on his side. When states fracture that counts for a lot more than the Democrats’ de facto control of the media.

‘One might be afraid that Trump would start a war to distract the public’s attention, as Clinton did, but he’s already done that so what else is new?’

The one way Trump can stop all this Russian nonsense, right now, is to start a war (preferably nuclear) with Russia. It’s really the only way to ‘clear his name’ if you think about it. Interesting to note that the Americans have just bombed the Syrian army, who, as everyone knows, is supported/backed by the Russians. You can forget any ideas you might have about Trump being ‘reigned in’ in this respect by his ‘allies’. Prime Minister May will defend him whatever happens, she has made that perfectly clear. And the Europeans hate Putin much more than they hate Trump (which is a lot). So the more the investigation starts to menace Trump (and that would seem to be a more or less unstoppable process now) the more appealing the idea of an attack of Russia will become. And of course the ironically named ‘Democrats’, by the logical of their own position, will feel duty bound to back him.

So those are your options: creeping fascism, a coup/civil war, or nuclear Armageddon.

@Hidari

Yes, Trump is stupid. But Trump’s situation is now directly tied to Comey’s goals, which is why it makes sense to inquire further into Comey’s politics.

Overall, I disagree with most everything being said here; so I don’t expect this to be well received –

Trump is being tripped up by circles of people who despise anyone who supports him; which is part of the ‘drain the swamp’ – the alligators are bad, but the mosquitoes are killer.

He was doing the natural and right thing in dismissing Comey, even though Comey had tripped up Clinton, because [ironically] the Justice Department National Capital Region crew had not forgiven Comey for the election – which was rendering him relatively ineffective – and Comey was lashing out this way and that trying to get ahead of the organization itself and avoid all the impediments thrown his way.

Anything Trump does is used as a point of attack, both by the Democrats and by most Republican politicians – with the occasional exception that half the Republicans will side with him when he is on their side against the other Republicans (which half depends on the issue). Meanwhile, the media will latch onto any opposition _by Republicans_ as somehow especially damning.

Meanwhile, a victory by Trump was always low probability, and yet, he continues to have them. So I’d wait and see…

Hidari: “The one way Trump can stop all this Russian nonsense, right now, is to start a war (preferably nuclear) with Russia [etc…]”

I’m amazed that people can write this sort of nonsense as if they really believe it; in particular the notion that European leaders will seize on it as the way to save Trump.

You’re against the rule of law and in favor of institutional damage, ceretis paribus. Or just in this situation?

I was thinking of general principles, not particularly this situation.

I am struck by the way conservatives forget their conservative values when it comes to Trump. The man is probably a traitor, as well as many around him, yet conservatives rally around him.

@Layman 15

Frankly, I’m not sure even a nuclear war with Russia would sway people on the alt-centre from their conclusion that Trump was somehow Putin’s puppet. The conclusion would be drawn that nuking Moscow was the whole purpose of Trump’s Manchurian Candidacy.

My best guess with Trump is that Trump has no personal and direct and legally improper connections with Putin. I suspect he’s just an easily manipulated guy and Putin felt like putting a dumb clown in the White House was a good idea. Then Putin and Putins many friends went ahead and convinced the dumb idiot to hire a bunch of people he knew would be friendly to Russian interests for a wide variety of reasons.

So I suspect that the independent counsel will find more of the same thing we already know about. People with tons of Russian ties, all exactly as slimy as Russian politics always are, hired by Trump because they’re really smarmy and Trump loves smarm. There won’t ever be a good smoking gun, but there will be tons of smoke that allows the investigation will run for as long as the investigator wants it to run, and a bunch of mid level Trump advisors will be disgraced and removed from office for failure to disclose foreign contacts and entanglements.

If Trump goes down for Russia stuff it will probably be because one of his advisors gets thrown out for improprieties, and Trump blows that off and keeps taking advice from the disgraced guy because he doesn’t believe anything he doesn’t want to believe. Maybe in the process he might commit a crime, excelt that there are a ton of hideously irresponsible things that aren’t technically crimes if the President does them.

“It’s hard to imagine Mueller isn’t going to find something that Trump really really doesn’t want him to find.”

Actually, I think the opposite is pretty much the case.

Nixon was in trouble after the Saturday Night Massacre because taking such a public action against the investigation of the Watergate burglary was a desperate move. It tied him indisputably, for the first time in the public mind, to the burglary, which might otherwise have very reasonably been attributed to some overzealous underling or ally.

We leap to the analogy of Trump’s Tuesday Night Massacre to Nixon’s action. Here we have Trump making a seemingly desperate move, publically quashing an investigation into his campaign’s ties to Russia. A rational person would not have done that unless there was something he really, really didn’t want Comey to find and publicize.

But Trump isn’t a rational person. He has dementia.

Nixon had to cover up Watergate, he had no choice. The conventional wisdom is that it wasn’t the third rate burglary that did him in, it was the cover up. It’s true enough that in getting his own fingerprints on the Saturday Night Massacre, he violated criminal mastermind rule #1. It was that overt involvement in the criminal enterprise that made people take seriously the idea that a president could be behind a third rate burglary. But this was not a mistake. Nixon had no choice but incriminate himself by launching a cover up, because what he had to cover up was much, much worse than the third rate burglary. He had only had to turn to the plan of hiring an ad hoc group of fourth rate amateurs as his goon squad as second best after his earlier efforts had been rebuffed to get the FBI and the CIA to spy on and sabotage the Democratic Party and his other long list of enemies.

What’s the equivalent of the White House Horrors that we can imagine Trump is covering up? That Trump and Manafort were even deeper in the pockets of the Russians, the Turks, the Chinese, the Albanians (Not the Dutch! That’s too horrible to contemplate.)? That’s embarrassing stuff, but Trump has already taken the hit for the poor judgement of hiring those two by having to fire them.

It’s not as if whatever we find out about Flynn’s and Manafort’s and others’ ties to Russia would make Trump’s judgment seem more questionable than what he already does in public on a daily basis. He’s a bathroom idiot. They’re child-proofing the upcoming NATO summit against him.

Trump fired Comey because something he saw on Fox News pushed him over the edge in the cartoon view he takes of the universe. Comey is an officious prick (also a tower of integrity, but those are two labels for the same thing), and Trump has been gifted with the power to put the officious pricks of this world in their place, so Comey is fired. There was no hidden agenda or ulterior motive at work. His dementia has taken away whatever interior or ulterior, depth or height, there ever might have been to the man.

All that’s left is the sad old dementia sufferer we can all see on the surface. He doesn’t even have family sensible or caring enough to have kept him from taking on a new job that they should have known would decompensate his dementia. He needs to be out of that job that is about as bad an idea for him and for the country as can be imagined. But he’s not going to be removed from office for being a criminal mastermind like Nixon.

Mueller’s investigation is going nowhere. It’s just a distraction, hopefully not a fatal distraction, from what really needs to be done. The patient needs to return to an environment in which his dementia is well-compensated, and the nation needs a mentally incompetent person out of the office.

Patrick: “There won’t ever be a good smoking gun…”

Who needs a smoking gun, when the accused actually admitted the crime on television?

@15: It was a CYA. The calculation was that if he didn’t let Congress know then the virulently anti-Clinton New York office would leak it and at least this way he was in control of how the information got out there.

Also, as you say, if you have a choice between having GOP congresspersons mad at you and Democratic ones mad at you, you choose the latter every time.

@20
you may be right. Reading through my Twitter feed, most of which is filled with ‘liberals’ one gets the sense that the entire American political class (apart from a few dissidents like Glenn Greenwald and Max Blumenthal) has simply lost its mind. It’s like following ancient scripts about politics in the 14th century, or amongst the Maya. Conspiracy mongering, veiled fantasies of violence…you name it. Trump and his crazy friends were always nuts, but those who oppose him aren’t much better.

In any case, whatever comes of this, it will be nothing good. At this stage, Trump going or Trump staying both seem equally bad outcomes.

An interesting point that perhaps has not gotten enough attention here (though I can’t say I’ve lavished minutely close attention on either Holbo’s self-designated stream-of-consciousness post or the thread) is that someone fairly high inside the WH saw fit to leak to the press what Trump said to the Russian f.m. and ambassador in that mtg: specifically, that (1) Trump apparently shared rather sensitive intel w them and (2) Trump apparently said to them that his getting rid of “the nut job” Comey relieved pressure on him (Trump).

Point (1) is not a crime, though it cd conceivably endanger the lives of sources and therefore is presumptively not good (irrespective of the nationality of those sources, since you don’t want as a matter of policy and morals for people who are giving you sensitive info to be killed). Point (2) might be evidence of obstruction of justice or it might not, depending on various things.

But even if Trump’s behavior in that mtg was not criminal, it does seem to underscore that while one can campaign by the seat of one’s pants, so to speak, it’s a lot more hazardous to be President by the seat of one’s pants, e.g. saying (even in private mtgs) whatever occurs to one on the spur of the moment. And right now there doesn’t appear, practically speaking, to be such a thing as a private mtg in this WH, which adds to the difficulties of anyone inclined to a somewhat improvisational approach to the Presidency. Meanwhile Trump has still managed to sign a lot of very bad executive orders, and even if only some of them are eventually implemented, and only partially, he will still have done considerable damage.

Trump probably fired Comey mostly because he sensed that Comey was not going to bend to his wishes, whatever they might be, in the way he wants an FBI director to do — that, rather than a desire to stymie this particular investigation, might have been the main motivation. Unfortunately for him, Trump does not seem to have realized that the firing would necessarily be read as tied to the investigation, just given the context of what was happening — and apparently he acted before some cooler head could explain to him that it was a bad idea from his own standpoint.

Investigations like this are high courtroom drama, guaranteed to draw large audiences as revelation after revelation emerges, with pundits pontificating endlessly over the significance of each detail. Bad news for Republicans. Also, the leaks are coming from inside the White House, as different factions compete. Add in the pressure that will come on as people inside start to worry about charges and start trying to throw others off the sleigh, and pissed-off bureaucrats feeding the press (officials routinely make records of high-level conversations as soon as they get back to the office, and circulate them to their immediate circle).

This circus will run and run. Also, Mueller’s brief is not confined to Trump’s presidency, but covers the campaign period. I understand he has a background in money-laundering investigation and whatever ties to dodgy Russian finance he turns up will fuel the fire.

Trump is unlikely to resign and cannot be forced out. The best the GOP can hope for is that the headlines out of the White House will obscure progress on their larger agenda.

My view is that we can expect about as much resolution in the case of Trump as we got in the case of O.J. Simpson. The body, along with its cultural signifiers, will get tossed off into the weeds at some out of the way junction, while the train and its screaming passengers continues to barrel along toward its inevitable, if unknown destination. If we want anything good to come of this, we need to set up further down the track.

Re the talk of ‘treason’ – I’m no expert in US law, but when I look at the legal definition of treason, it doesn’t seem obvious to me that treason even *could* have taken place in this case. AFAIU, treason is defined as waging war against the US and ‘providing aid and comfort to the enemies of the US’ and an enemy of the US is someone who engages in hostilities against the US. Russia is not engaged in hostilities against the US, and it is not, I believe, officially designated as an enemy of the US. Furthermore, advocating dovish policies w.r.t. a hostile/rival country cannot reasonably be regarded as ‘aiding’, or else no conflict with a foreign country could ever end and no FP course could ever be changed. If we grant that many in the Trump campaign can be shown to have business ties to Russia and that it can be reasonably inferred that they have had their FP positions influenced by that, this should obviously be morally unacceptable, but I don’t see how it’s very different from, say, a politician with ties to gun manufacturing that campaigns against gun control; and while, again, I’m not an expert, I don’t have the impression that this sort of thing normally results in a sentence in court in the US. I also sort of wonder whether having, say, a ‘friend of Netanyahu’ as opposed to a ‘friend of Putin’ in a candidate/president’s entourage would have been referred to as something self-evidently wrong (and strategic allies and enemies are a matter of choice, not something predestined). Further, even if we grant that the Russians did attempt, or even that they can plausibly be argued to have *succeeded* in tipping the election in favour of Trump, this would be embarrassing, but it still would not incriminate the Trump campaign. And as for the possibility that the Trump campaign actively and deliberately guided or conspired with the Russians engaged in this alleged effort, that seems very implausible, simply because it was never necessary for the campaign to do anything as extreme as that in order to rip the benefits of what the Russians allegedly did.

So, in the end of the day, this still looks very artificial to me. There seems to be a lot of intentional noise, and little to no legal substance.

The legal(istic) considerations aside, one thing seems clear. The US Establishment, Democrats and Republicans alike, really, really don’t want to put up with a bigoted, chauvinistic, plutocratic, massively privatising, anti-social, environment-destroying, militaristic President who happens not to be *entirely* committed to antagonising the world’s other nuclear superpower at the risk of WW3. What they want is a bigoted, chauvinistic, plutocratic, massively privatising, anti-social, environment-destroying, militaristic President who is *also* *entirely* committed to antagonising the world’s other nuclear superpower at the risk of WW3. Oh well. Interesting times, one can’t deny that.

Roger Stone, on InfoWars, said next they’ll accuse Trump of dementia. Cenk Uygur on The Young Turks said, I haven’t seen that, that’s Roger Stone preemptively floating a legal defense for Trump. But here on Crooked Timber, I now see opponents of Trump asserting dementia. Score one for Roger Stone.

Two words, F. Foundling: “foreign emoluments”.

Foundling, as you say, it’s hard to prove treason. Still, a power which, though covert means, interferes with US elections is hardly a friend. In the end, “high crimes and misdemeanors,” which the Constitution gives as reasons for impeachment, are whatever the House says they are; there is enormous latitude. By the way, it appears that some members of the House are in it up to their ears.