Wednesday, November 1, 2017

Calling out Mueller probably isn't smart

By far the biggest personal danger to Trump is that Mueller moves against him for obstruction. That decision could go either way, but there is already substantial evidence that he obstructed justice. The reason Trump's lawyers keep talking about the White House’s efforts to cooperate with Mueller’s investigation is to convince the special counsel of Trump’s good faith, and so to limit further exposure of the president.

Whatever other bad things happened for Trump on Monday, at least the revelations hadn’t wiggled the obstruction needle — until Tuesday morning, when Trump attacked Mueller's cooperating witness. Take it from me as someone who for a quarter of a century worked against and with prosecutors and FBI agents (including Mueller himself): they are fiercely protective of their cooperators. By attacking Papadopoulos as a liar, Trump hardly signals his good faith to Mueller. After all, Mueller is offering Papadopoulos's testimony as true. So Trump is not just assaulting the special counsel’s cooperator; Trump is contradicting Mueller, and maybe even hinting that Mueller is intentionally offering the testimony of a liar.

That is a negative for the careful strategy of the president’s legal team, John Dowd and Ty Cobb, to cooperate with Mueller and so win his goodwill in persuading him not to take action against the president. As of today, their strategy has become harder to implement, and Mueller taking action against the president a little more likely. We have miles to go before Mueller makes his final decision of course, but for Dowd and Cobb, Tuesday's tweets might have been worse than Monday's indictments. It was too for Trump, whether or not he realizes it.

  USA Today
And Mueller hasn't even brought up the money laundering thing as far as Trump is concerned - yet.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

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