Mueller investigation

On Christmas Eve, President Trump spoke to a seven-year-old girl called Collman Lloyd. ‘Are you still a believer in Santa?’ he asked her, ‘coz at seven, it’s marginal, right?’ Perfect. Pure Trump. It was OK, though. Later, little Collman told reporters that she still believed, despite what the leader of the free world had said to her. Trump didn’t manage to shake a seven-year-old’s faith in Santa. But, in another surprise declaration over Christmas, he announced that American troops would be leaving Syria. It happened ‘very fast,’ as Trump likes to say. He took a call from the Turkish leader, President Erdogan.

Individual 1 is at it again. This morning, he went to the old reliable: ‘AFTER TWO YEARS AND MILLIONS OF PAGES OF DOCUMENTS (and a cost of over $30,000,000), NO COLLUSION!’ But the filings yesterday from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and federal prosecutors in New York indicate that this is an unintentionally self-deprecatory statement. For once, Trump is being far too modest about his abilities. He and his fellow colluders were colluding so much that they have already helped rack up no less than 192 criminal charges. So perhaps Individual 1 should take a step back for a moment from frenetic tweeting to admire his greatest handiwork before it collapses entirely.It’s the very sweep of his schemes that is likely to prove his undoing.

Will wonders never cease? Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III is recommending that General Mike Flynn serve no jail time. Isn’t that nice of him? Of course, Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III first destroyed Mike Flynn’s career and essentially pauperized him through legal fees (‘the process,’ as they say, ‘is the punishment’). In making his recommendation, Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III cited Gen. Flynn’s ‘substantial assistance’ in the long-running soap opera that is his campaign against the president of the United States. The centerpiece of that ‘special assistance’ are the 19 interviews with the Office of Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III for which Gen. Flynn sat.

There is a point where one can go from being a conspiracy theorist to becoming an actual conspirator. It seems that Jerome Corsi, who is reportedly negotiating a plea deal with Special Counsel Robert Mueller, may have reached that point during the 2016 presidential campaign. Mueller is zeroing in on the ties between Corsi, Roger Stone, WikiLeaks, and, of course, Mother Russia. Corsi has been at the center of right-wing conspiracy thinking for some years. He has been part of numerous campaigns to vilify leading Democrats, a veteran, so to speak, of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth’s mission to take down John Kerry in 2004 and the birther contretemps about Barack Obama, which Donald Trump, among others, helped to push.

When Donald Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, went to Moscow in 2006, she did all the usual tourist things: walked around Red Square, visited the Kremlin... sat in Vladimir Putin’s private chair. At least she did according to Trump’s broker and business partner Felix Sater. ‘I arranged for Ivanka to sit in Putins private chair at his desk and office in the Kremlin,’ Sater said in an email, which was later leaked. Ivanka put out a statement more or less confirming this, saying that she ‘might have’ sat in Putin’s chair, but couldn’t exactly recall. The rest of Sater’s emails were more important as they gave details of his efforts to fix a deal for a Trump Tower in Moscow. ‘I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected...