Attempting to maintain any attention span reading through 30 pages of Trumplings coming utterly unhinged. I'm on page 12 and that'll probably be enough.
Fortified by
news in the
Washington Post that the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee paid the oppo-research outfit Fusion GPS to produce the
Steele Dossier, President Donald Trump overran his opponents’ positions this week. Splattering them with half-truths and hyperbole, Trump
charged that “the whole Russian thing” was a “hoax” and an excuse for Democrats unwilling to accept that they lost the election. Then he rolled in a grenade, calling the dossier “fake.” Finally, he sparked his flamethrower to life and hosed his political foes with rhetorical fire by invoking the uranium deal in none-dare-call-it-conspiracy style, describing Uranium One’s sale to a Russian company during the Obama era as the equal of Watergate.
At least that’s how it looked in Trump’s version of the war movie until late Friday, when it turned out that the president was rushing to take the wrong hill. First, the conservative Washington Free Beacon website—funded by a billionaire from the never-Trump movement—
’fessed to having paid for Fusion GPS’s original anti-Trump work before the Clinton Democrats took over the payments. Then CNN
reported that special prosecutor Robert S. Mueller III had fired a bunker buster, bringing his first indictment in the probe. The identity of the person charged is under seal still, CNN reported, and will remain so until the person is arrested, possibly as soon as Monday. Will it be Paul Manfort, whom prosecutors reportedly all but promised to indict? It will be a long weekend of rampant speculation until the scoop is confirmed.
If the Trump Tower scandal could be boiled down to a war of words, we would have crowned Trump the winner months ago because he’s so dang good at jaw-jamming. Whenever accused, he assumes the role of the accuser, deflecting charges by hurling them back at his challengers. The Clinton camp and the press try to pin campaign collusion with Russia on him, and he flips it around by weirdly
claiming it was Hillary Clinton who committed collusion with the Russians by commissioning the dossier. And remember when he argued that Facebook, the
New York Times and the
Washington Post committed collusion against
him?
As for the cost of Mueller’s investigation, everybody knows these things don’t come cheap. The Iran-Contra investigation swallowed
$47 million, which is about $104 million in today’s dollars. Even at $200 million, the Mueller investigation will be a bargain if it uncovers obstruction of justice, money laundering, and tax fraud by the president or his associates.