It’s also been suggested that Mueller unsealed GP’s arrest/plea to make it even more difficult for Trump to fire him and kill the investigation. Presumably because to do so now would be an obvious case of obstruction of justice.
While I can hope that all this will topple trump, I’m more of a realist and I can see that that is not in the cards now. First things first. Besides neutering any benefit Russian mafiosi got from meddling with the electorate, it is also good to point out that the current republican congress is part of the problem when they are not making an effort to counter the incompetent president.
Best hope is to press on by making the point that we need to toss all those congressional rascals out that are looking the other way.
Carter “sooo-per genius” Page was back on Chris Hayes’ show last night. I don’t think he can help himself.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ Violent Torpedo of Truth Tour 2017.
This brings up an important question: Can people be demoted retroactively like that? Like, if Jeff Sessions gets indicted, can the Trump team* say “He was peripheral to the administration, operating on the edges, and Attorney General isn’t really a senior position anyway. More of a consultant’s role, really.”
*not implying that F-P is on “the Trump team”.
Not only can they say it, they will. They’ve *been *doing it for some time.
Yeah, the trained response definitely seems to be “George Papa-who-polous? Paul Mana-whatsis? Never heard of 'em, they were nobodies, no position in our staff.”
As an aside, this morning I was listening to the Michael Smerconish program, and he did a pass-through of all the major news networks- and almost every one was of course talking about the indictments and the Papadapoulos plea… with the exception of Fox News, where they were going on about Benghazi, of all things.
In the case of people like Sessions and Manafort, these guys were obviously big players. In the case of people like Paopadopoulos, it’s the opposite; he was obviously a small player and people who assign him a major role are the ones who are trying to promote him retroactively. This, based on both his resume and on the nature of his interaction with other members of the campaign.
But another way to look at it would “how closely would you have to have been following the campaign in order to have heard of the guy?” Or, “how well known was/is the guy for things other than this issue?” I think the difference between him and the other two on these scores is pretty big.
GP may have been able to show Mueller that he still had access to certain targets.
Earlier upthreads, F-P mentioned the August news reports about GP’s emails regarding Russia and how the campaign pushed back on those requests. Now that we know GP was arrested in late July, I’ve seen the following scenario posited in a compelling way:
GP is arrested. Agrees to cooperate/wear a wire. Calls up someone up the ladder (Clovis or Sessions or Manafort perhaps) and says “I just got arrested, what do I do?” If he gets anybody on tape telling him in anyway how to coordinate a false story - they’re nailed.
Now, if GP had called somebody after his arrest… it would seem to indicate that the August press stories were pushed out by those with a reason to diminish GP’s role in the campaign and to show that the campaign did not go along with the Russia offers.
Anybody that has had conversations with GP since late July must be shitting themselves right now.
Also, GP just returned from a trip to London last week. Last week! His passport was confiscated if he was arrested - so he had to have gone with Mueller’s blessing. Theory is that he could have gone over there and gotten Farage or Assange on tape.
And next, wondering if Trump is worth going to prison for.
I don’t follow the news as closely as some, but I knew Papadopoulos as the Trump foreign policy advisor who listed model UN on his resume. My wife remembered him too.
I think the idea that he was a “low-level volunteer” is pretty laughable. I’m surprised anyone doesn’t see through it. He was clearly at the upper echelon of the campaign, meeting with principals and carrying out sensitive assignments.
Especially since there’s a photo of him sitting at a table with Trump and Sessions.
Even if GP was relatively low-level, according to Manafort’s email, they prefered to use low-level guys to do the colluding legwork. That was apparently the MO for the campaign, so as to offer Trump plausible deniability. Knowing that, it removes the plausible deniability by another notch, making the WH’s claims that much more unbelievable.
Trying to show who? I can’t imagine any possible target thinks Mueller and his team are going to be convinced by articles in media sources. (And there’s no real reason to target the public, both because they weren’t aware of the story to begin with and because it would be very temporary.)
Certainly the timing of those stories right after the GP arrest seems unlikely to be coincidental, but I’m having a hard time fitting it in. Seems more likely that people were aware of the arrest, and this spurred interest in his role.
That kind of proves my point. If a guy is best known for being scoffed at over using “model UN” on his resume that’s not a guy with a major role. And the type of people who know that about him are the type of people who follow campaigns closely. Not “as closely as some” but there are always bigger junkies. I myself follow the news much closer than many people but (to my recollection) I never heard of the guy prior to the August coverage. And even then, when the guy’s plea was publicized yesterday it took me a while before it occurred to me to check if maybe he was the same guy those earlier articles were about.
Trump’s campaign was very thinly staffed, and in addition, Trump has a very open-access style of management.
That’s a valid point. GP being low level doesn’t prove that Trump people didn’t collude. But it’s less incriminating than it would be if he was a senior guy. (It should be noted that meeting with Russians is not necessarily collusion, and the two can’t be automatically equated.)
And the WH is trying to play that off as just a photo-op type gathering. :rolleyes:
If it was that thinly staffed and open, that only exacerbates Trump’s problem. in a huge campaign, he could plausibly claim that he had no knowledge of what the drones in sector 7G were doing. In a campaign that’s so thin that there’s essentially no distinction between junior and senior staff, Trump must be presumed to have been in the loop.
Possibly. Though the flip side is that Trump is so clueless that you can’t really assume he’s in the loop on anything.
But I think it’s not really a matter of being in the loop. It’s a matter of how much authority the guy had, such that you can assume that his opinion reflects that of the campaign as a whole. If Manafort was in favor of increased contacts with Russians and GP was urging caution, then it’s likely that Manafort prevailed and that the Trump campaign had increased contact with Russians in one form or another. If it’s GP urging more contact and Manafort putting on the brakes, then it’s likely that the opposite happened.
Of course, with a guy like Trump you never know who might ultimately prevail. But from what’s been seen so far it seems like GP needed buy-in from more senior people, who tended to be skeptical of his approach.
To be fair to Fox, one of the Benghazi attackers was just busted, so it’s legit late news [del]as well as[/del] instead of their usual Clinton Derangement Syndrome.
Papadopolous’s supervisor, apparently Page, encouraged Papadopolous’s efforts. And there was subsequently a meeting with Russians promising derogatory information about Clinton, at which Manafort, Kushner, and Trump Jr. were present. This looks to me like both Papadopolous and Manafort were in favor of increased contact with the Russians, for the purpose of benefiting from information the Russians had gathered illegally.
I’m actually surprised that the Trump administration along with the Trump News Network (aka Fox News) has not already deemed GP an “unperson” and airbrushed him out of any photographs. I’m sure that they could get tips from the Russians on how to do this.