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Charles P. Pierce: 3 Important Takeaways From the Latest Mueller Investigation Bombshell
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a14759482/trump-obstruct-justice/3 Important Takeaways From the Latest Mueller Investigation Bombshell
President* Trump has attempted to obstruct justice, among other things.
By Charles P. Pierce
Jan 5, 2018
snip//
Some bullet points:
Point the First: Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III is a tool, and is probably up to his elvish ass in alligators, but he wasn’t going to go all the way off the diving board.
Schmidt presents the best account yet of how the White House got wrong-footed when Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation.
Mr. McGahn’s argument to Mr. Sessions that day was twofold: that he did not need to step aside from the inquiry until it was further along, and that recusing himself would not stop Democrats from saying he had lied. After Mr. Sessions told Mr. McGahn that career Justice Department officials had said he should step aside, Mr. McGahn said he understood and backed down. Mr. Trump’s frustrations with the inquiry erupted again about three weeks later, when Mr. Comey said publicly for the first time that the Justice Department and the F.B.I. were conducting an investigation into links between Mr. Trump’s campaign and Russia. Mr. Comey had told Mr. Trump in private that he was not personally under investigation, yet Mr. Comey infuriated Mr. Trump by refusing to answer a question about that at the hearing where he spoke publicly.
snip//
Point the Second: Rod Rosenstein has stepped into the barrel.
It is completely clear by now that the president* fired FBI director James Comey because he wanted Comey to shut down the Russia investigation and Comey refused. (The president* even said as much to Lester Holt of NBC.) Schmidt’s piece details the extraordinary lengths that the administration went to force out Comey without having to fire him.
It appears that half the White House lawyers were trying to find a way to keep the president* from making a catastrophic blunder. Yeah, good luck with that.
snip//
Point the Last: Holy shit. What a complete clusterfck this presidency is.
These people. Boy, I dunno.
After that hearing, Mr. Trump began to discuss openly with White House officials his desire to fire Mr. Comey. This unnerved some inside the White House counsel’s office, and even led one of Mr. McGahn’s deputies to mislead the president about his authority to fire the F.B.I. director. The lawyer, Uttam Dhillon, was convinced that if Mr. Comey was fired, the Trump presidency could be imperiled, because it would force the Justice Department to open an investigation into whether Mr. Trump was trying to derail the Russia investigation. Longstanding analysis of presidential power says that the president, as the head of the executive branch, does not need grounds to fire the F.B.I. director. Mr. Dhillon, a veteran Justice Department lawyer before joining the Trump White House, assigned a junior lawyer to examine this issue. That lawyer determined that the F.B.I. director was no different than any other employee in the executive branch, and that there was nothing prohibiting the president from firing him. But Mr. Dhillon, who had earlier told Mr. Trump that he needed cause to fire Mr. Comey, never corrected the record, withholding the conclusions of his research.
A White House lawyer determined that it was his duty to mislead the president* so that the president* would not commit a blatant act of obstruction of justice that would imperil his presidency. I have no doubt that, by and large, and given the prevailing operations down at Camp Runamuck, that Mr. Dhillon probably did the right thing. But, Jesus, how many other lies do people have to tell this guy just to keep the lights on in the government? This is not how any of this is supposed to work.
Reading Schmidt’s story, and its account of how evanescent the internal ethics of this administration are, I can only offer the president* this bit of advice: If you’re really looking for your own Roy Cohn, consult a damn mirror.
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so much is happening that it's difficult to know where to watch first.
Mr. Pierce does a great job of keeping our eyes on the prize! 
