Ty Cobb is “retiring”. Trump is adding Emmet Flood to his legal team. Flood has relevant experience, having been one of Bill Clinton’s lawyers representing him during his impeachment. 
Seeing as how he died in 1961 it’s about time he got off the payroll.
FTR, Cobb is my favorite Tommy Lee Jones movie. He was a nasty piece of work and it’s not surprising that his ghost went to work for Trump.
He may be retiring , but the mustache will stay and continue to work with NSA Bolton.
If you’re having trouble keeping track of the ever-increasing number of players in this saga, Politico has a handy compilation that aims to list everyone involved, what parts of the clusterfuck they’re connected to, etc. It’s nicely laid out. Trump-Russia investigation: See the 270 people connected to the probes
After people flip through that article, I think it is easy to come away confused with how all those people relate to one another and the whole investigation. Some really smart dude has basically taken all that information, fed it through these link analysis tools, and come up with a really concise way of visualizing all that data.
Seriously, first flip through that Politico article to get the details, then check out how it all fits together: link.
Something like … a dossier, perhaps.
Campaign aide Michael Caputo is talking to Mueller today behind closed doors. He spoke to the Senate Intel Committee yesterday (which, unlike the House committee, is actually apparently doing its job)
Trump will eventually testify because I truly think that Trump doesn’t believe that he did anything wrong.
I don’t think that he has any conception of right and wrong. He realizes that other people do, though, so he’ll avoid putting himself into the position where he has to justify his actions, tweets, and claims.
Of course he didn’t do anything wrong, that’s how he can be so sure that the system is rigged against him!
Michael Caputo is on CNN whining that he’ll have to move and get a better job to pay his attorneys and he hasn’t heard from some fund that’s supposed to help those caught up in the investigation.
Said something about maybe not being pretty enough.
It must suck to have counted on Trump to have his back after all the sucking up he’s done.
- plays tiny harmonica*
That is, when it’s not out there selling Quaker oatmeal
The beautiful thing about Trump testifying is that Mueller almost certainly doesn’t need Donald’s - you should pardon the phrase - info. It will all be lies, of course, some of which will be actionable, sure. But I have no doubt that Mueller already has his case typed up. Pushing Donald is just to keep him off balance and making mistakes. The more Donald talks, the guiltier he looks.
I could see him actually testifying – it would be crazy, but I could see him actually agreeing to it.
I sense what’s more likely is that he’ll talk about doing it as a stall tactic, and allow his allies in congress and in the right wing press to hammer away at Mueller, Rosenstein, Comey, and the “Deep State.” I suspect Mueller will either be fired or will have at least been the target of an attempted firing by Summer’s end, and perhaps by the end of Spring. The Republicans want time enough to recover from the political fallout, which will be intense, but they don’t want to wait until there are even more explosive allegations that come to light.
I don’t see how Trump stops the evidence from surfacing - someone’s going to at least try to pick up the pieces of Mueller’s investigation and we know damn well that Democrats will be howling the moment it goes down. It wouldn’t be enough to fire Mueller; he’d have to fire Rosenstein and Jeff Sessions as well, which could be done, but he would really be risking a civil war with the Senate if that were to happen.
So we’re all getting a big kick out of Rudy’s remarks on the Stormy Daniels covfefe but he’s opening up new legal fronts in the Mueller investigations as well. (Joy Behar thinks that Rudy is underbussing Donald for Revenge on not getting a WH position, btw.)
Here’s a short excerpt from a short RawStory bit on Jeffery Toobin’s reaction to Rudy’s claiming that Comey was fired for not confirming publically that Donald was not a target of investigation.
Here’s the link to the story, with the video exchange from CNN. The part with Toobin starts at 2:42.
America’s Mayor, ladies & gentlemen!
That story seems mistaken. Comey himself testified to Congress that he did tell Trump that he was not a target, so it doesn’t seem possible that Trump could have fired him for refusing to do this.
What it seems to be confused with is that Comey refused to publically announce that Trump was not a target. Whether that’s obstruction or not might be another issue.
I breathlessly await more in-depth analysis from the astute and well-informed legal mind of Joy Behar.
Cohen’s lines were tapped and at least one call between the White House and Cohen was intercepted during the time leading up to the Cohen raid.
(On edit, it’s not clear when the call took place, merely that the tap was in place at that point. The call might have been after the raid.)
Trump’s legal situation is in a tailspin and rapidly plunging toward the earth below. Expect something rash soon.