April 20th 2018
The Democrats filed a broad-spectrum suit against the Republicans, the Trump Campaign, members of Trump’s family, the Russian Federation, Julian Assange, and a long list of Russian operatives and hackers who allegedly orchestrated the stealing and dissemination of Democratic Party emails as part of a concerted campaign to destabilize America through vilification of Hillary Clinton and the electing of the least fit man in the country to be President: Donald Trump.
Rachel Maddow has an excellent episode tonight about a similar suit Lawrence O’Brien and the Democratic Party brought several weeks after the Watergate break-in, alleging that members of the White House financed, coordinated and ran the Watergate burglary, as it was known back in 1972. “A third-rate burglary” was the preferred term.
The ‘liberal media’ of the time was openly scornful of the suit. David Brinkley called it “a novel form of political fundraising” and asked why the Democrats only sued for one million, when they were nine million in debt at the time, and should have sued for that and made the Republicans pays their expenses for the McGovern campaign.
Of course, Nixon and the White House were involved in the breakin, and Nixon wound up resigning in disgrace two years later. On that same day, the GOP quietly settled the suit, paying the Dems $775,000.
Nobody is laughing at today’s suit, least of all the GOP. We already have strong evidence of conspiracy to commit felony theft (including Trump’s announcement that Assange would be releasing the emails in a few days), conspiracy against the United States, and a host of other crimes up to and including sedition. It seems a suit the Dems are likely to win in due course, even if they won’t be able to collect damages from the criminal empire of Russia.
But there is a far more immediate impact. It is a civil suit, which means it will utilize the discovery process, which allows lawyers on both sides to ask the court to demand any and all material evidence that may pertain to the specifics of the case.
Even if Trump fires Mueller tomorrow, this civil case may make it impossible for Sessions or Trump or some other GOP miscreant to destroy the evidence Mueller has compiled. I suspect that a lot of Mueller’s findings have been passed along to the Court of South New York, which is also out of Trump’s ability to file or negate through the power of the pardon.
But by making this a civil suit, this removes the ability of Trump’s lawyers, whoever they are this week, to argue that such proceedings cannot take place against a sitting President.
Ironically, it was the Republicans who fought like wolverines to make that possible, in the form of Jones vs. Clinton, which upheld the right of Paula Jones to take Bill Clinton to court for allegations of sexual harassment. The case was dismissed when a court ruled that Jones’ complaint on the face of it didn’t rise to the level of sexual harassment, but the ruling that the president could be sued for civil matters remained.
I don’t know if this is immediately related but Jeff Sessions announced today that if Trump fired Rod Rosenstein so he could get a Mueller, he, Sessions, would also resign. Since Jeff Sessions has pretty much no ethical principles to stand upon, it’s safe to assume that he knows that an action such as firing Rosenstein or Mueller would cause an utter implosion of this administration, and destroy everyone in it. He may sense that such a move would not only be the biggest political firestorm since the Saturday Night Massacree, but could paralyze the country and possibly lead to open revolt against Republicans—all Republicans.
With each passing day, Trump’s options appear more and more limited. Putin won’t be of much help at this point, and about the only foreign leader willing to toss him a lifebuoy is Kim Jung Un, who announced that North Korea would suspend nuclear testing. Quite aside from the fact that Kim probably doesn’t have America’s best interests at heart and doesn’t mind helping to keep a weak moron in the Oval Office, there’s the fact, missed by narcissistic Americans, that Kim didn’t announce it as a prelude to a meeting with Trump: it was as a olive branch for his upcoming meetings with the South Koreans. Neither side wants Trump involved with those.
Hans Solo to Princess Leia in the Trash Compactor Scene: “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”
That might be the new motto of the Trump White House.
