Trump's criminal cabal

They're not brilliant. They've just been getting a pass all their lives.

You’ll be shocked when I tell you that movies and television have given us a distorted view of how conspiracies work.

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In the real world, conspiracies are more likely to involve the lack of any coherent plan, a bunch of bumbling fools only partially understanding what the other fools are up to and then frantic attempts by all concerned to avoid responsibility when the whole thing unravels or gets revealed.

That appears to be what the conspiracy to get Donald Trump elected president was like.

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[T]he picture that’s coming into focus as special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation approaches its conclusion is one in which a collection of charlatans and cranks, connected both directly and indirectly to the future president, joined in an effort to use the Russian government’s help to bring Trump to victory.

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For the third morning in a row, President Trump rage-tweeted about the Mueller investigation, making it clear that he’s increasingly worried about what might happen next. He should be.

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For his part, [Roger Stone associate Jerome] Corsi insists that he didn’t communicate with Assange and only knew that Clinton campaign chair John Podesta would later be the subject of WikiLeaks releases (the Russians gained access to Podesta’s email through a phishing scam) because he brilliantly deduced it from other documents. Corsi says he did not intentionally lie to Mueller; he blames his false assertions on a faulty memory.

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Speaking of faulty memory, according to The Post’s latest reporting: “Rudolph W. Giuliani, an attorney for Trump, said the president does not recall ever speaking to either Stone or Corsi about WikiLeaks.”

For Trump, that’s unusually hedged. Which means the most damaging version of events is at least possible. It would be this: Russia gave the emails it stole from Podesta to WikiLeaks; Assange gave Corsi a preview of them before they were released; Corsi passed that information on to Stone; Stone passed that information on to Trump. That would be a direct if multipointed line from Russian intelligence to Trump, and the only part of it that Mueller has not yet shown evidence for is the last step, Stone telling Trump of what was to come.

But we should note that Stone said in an interview on Aug. 4, 2016, that the previous day he had spoken to Trump. The day before that, Aug. 2, was when Corsi sent him an email saying Podesta would be a target up the upcoming WikiLeaks dump. If the conversation between Stone and Trump took place, it’s hard to believe Stone wouldn’t have shared the juicy nugget he had just received.

  WaPo

Of course he did, but I suspect that a number of issues are going to come down to the case that they can't be proven if no one in the inner cabal will admit the truth.

The story coming from Trump and his defenders all along has been that there was no collusion, nobody did anything wrong, and any actions that might look questionable were in fact perfectly ordinary. But if that were true, why did so many people involved lie about what they did when it first came to light, whether it was to investigators or to the public? President Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos, Paul Manafort, Corsi — all have been caught lying about what they did with regard to some part of this scandal. That’s not how innocent people act.

Of course, if it was a conspiracy, it worked — after all, Trump is president.

To the detriment of the planet and the nations of the world.

The House GOP’s near-total abdication of any oversight role has done more than just shield President Trump on matters involving his finances and Russian collusion. It has also resulted in almost no serious scrutiny of the true depths of cruelty, inhumanity and bad-faith rationalization driving important aspects of Trump’s policy agenda — in particular, on his signature issue of immigration.

That’s about to change.

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“We will visit the border,” Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), who is expected to chair the [House Homeland Security Committee], which has jurisdiction over the Department of Homeland Security, told me. “We will hold hearings in committee on any and all aspects of DHS. … We will not back off of this issue.”

This oversight — which could result in calling for testimony from Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s immigration agenda — will include scrutiny of the administration’s justifications for its policies.

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“All this innuendo we hear about criminals coming in the caravan, we just want to know, how did you validate this?” Thompson told me, adding that DHS officials would be called on in hearings to account for Trump’s claims. “Policy has to be backed up with evidence. So we will do rigorous oversight.”

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Even if you take some of Trump’s complaints about asylum seeking seriously — there are serious issues with backlogs that have real consequences — you should want this oversight. If done well, it could shed light on actual problems, such as the role of the administration’s deliberate delays in processing asylum seekers in creating the current border mess, to the real need to reorganize the bureaucracy to relieve backlogs and to pursue regional solutions to the root causes of migration surges.

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Thompson told me the committee would also look at the process leading up to the travel ban, which proceeded despite the fact that two internal Homeland Security analyses undercut its national security rationale.

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Thompson also said the run-up to the implementation of the family separation policy and its rationale would receive similar scrutiny, as well as at the conditions under which children have been held, such as the reported Texas “tent city.”

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One big question: What will House Democrats do legislatively against such policies? Thompson told me the goal is to secure cooperation with DHS, but in cases where the agency continues policies that Democrats deem terribly misguided or serious abuses, they can try to legislate against them. That would run headlong into Trump and the GOP-controlled Senate, at which point one could see discussion of targeted defunding of certain policies, though whether that will happen or what that might look like remains to be seen.

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The big story here is that Trump has relied on the outright dismissal of his own administration’s factual determinations to justify many policies, not just on immigration, but also with his drive to weaken efforts to combat global warming despite the big report warning of the dire threats it poses.

The administration will strenuously resist Democratic oversight, and I don’t want to overstate what it can accomplish. But House Democrats must at least try to get into the fight against Trump’s war on facts and empiricism wherever possible.

  WaPo