Trump is Terrified and Still on the Run

I remember the sudden conviction I experienced back when I first edited this piece, in early June, that advisors, like Bannon and Miller, assured Trump that as president he could effectively evade any legal reprisals for all that had gone before… This is why he yells at McConnell and other senators for not “protecting him” from the Russia investigation. This is why he repeatedly walks right in to more and more classic Obstruction of Justice charges, in addition to the cause for the investigation in the first place, that being Trump’s attempts to pressure Comey to drop his investigation into the dossier. There are other sexual allegations to be verified as well, besides the ‘pee tape.’ The reason the pee tapes episode stands out it because it just sounds SO like him — and because he hasn’t let up around trying to overcome Obama to this minute. It consumes him.
His arrogant behaviour absolutely reeks of ignorance just starting to be horribly disabused. I think such fairytales of presidential immunity and pardoning ability are how the Alt-Right (billionaire funders, Koch bros, Mercers, DeVoses, Bannon, Conway, et al) got him to run as their wedge, their ‘front-man,’ plying him with false assurances. It’s why Miller keeps going on about the ‘very extensive powers of the president,’ ad nauseum. The irony in all of this? It was a ‘Never Trump’ Republican who contracted the Steele Dossier that will effectively seal his, family’s and his political affiliates’ fates. (The ways of Nemesis are perfect, inscrutable and fair.)
Essentially, Mueller already has him. He just has to build an airtight case and nail everything down. Much of the evidence is already in and has actually been being compiled over a period of years through affiliated investigations into Manafort, Ukraine corruption, Deutsche Bank, VEB and stateside faux banking institutions/money launderers. It can take several months for banks to disclose — all the documents need to be catalogued and backed up the yin yang etc. Deutsche is complying right now. Basically, Trump was fucked the moment he started campaigning in a U.S. election. Very little in his past can withstand that glare. As in Shakespearean drama or Greek Tragedy, his stupidity and hubris has doomed not only himself but his family. Tonight, instead of any of the other stuff they’re supposed to be doing as per their job descriptions, his team is actively, frenetically researching Trump’s pardoning powers, for himself, his aides and family. Mueller has him on the run and he knows it.
Mueller is a former combat veteran. He’s strategical, brilliant, and widely recognized as incorruptible. When Mueller accepted the brief, he projected 16 months to 2 years to complete the investigation before laying charges. The best case scenario for Trump was only ever going to be less than a full first term in office. Now, his continual fuck ups suggest it will be sooner. He threatens Mueller, Sessions, Rosenstein, troublesome senators and Democrats, etc.. He really seems to think everyone in government is working for HIM, and that he can fire them if he feels like it. He has no concept of how the government is structured, or how the checks and balances system is meant to function, or why. Like the Constitution and the actual history of the U.S., the topic just doesn’t interest him.
He tells interviewers he and Putin discussed adoption in that second, long private meeting with Putin at the dinner, thinking that will provide camouflage or some kind of protective colouring for Jr. having said the same thing about his illicit meeting with Russian state operatives. He probably doesn’t know how bad that sounds and that all knowledgeable people hear Magnitsky Act sanctions when he says that, which is the worst thing he could possibly confess to discussing in those isolated, dodgy circumstances, or doesn’t care. He’s so offensively dumb; I take it as an insult to intelligence itself, and as one of his greatest crimes.
As so much in the current situation is unprecedented, and there is new law in place since 9–11 that covers domestic security, it could be the case that a sitting president might be charges with treason or treasonous activities. Financial crime as it affects domestic security might sneak around the edges of the Office of the President as actionable. Mueller’s team is heavily weighted on the side of financial crime and treason investigation. Cyber-crime, cyber-terrorism are other areas of jurisdiction, already under intense surveillance and investigation by the CIA and the FBI, with help from friendly international intelligence, like MI6 and MI5. Trump could be found to have been complicit with an act of cyber-warfare, pending new definitions of hostile espionage activities and technologies, and newly emerging legislation to accommodate these sectors.
There is still so much to play out. He’s pissed off the intelligence agencies to such a degree that there could be Homeland Security angles that come into play against the president, immunities be damned. The election results could still be determined invalid, not due to anything as clumsy as voting booth hacking or physical manipulations of physical results, by due to military psi-ops (or ‘psyops’) cyber warfare techniques having been deployed against domestic civilians. There are three fronts the cyber-warfare issue is being investigated upon, and a Special Prosecutor could have agency, depending upon what is established to have gone down. They already know much of the Trump campaign’s use of putatively illegal methodologies, and Mueller’s, domestic intelligence’s, voter protection agencies’ and consumer protection agencies’ investigations progress side by side with their equivalents in Britain pertaining to the possibly criminal Brexit campaign.
The intelligence agencies know all about this as they’ve been deploying the psychology and technology to alter public voting behaviour and election results in desired ways in Third World countries for years. The thing is, there’s new algorithmic coding technology available now, used against the domestic populations in Britain (for the Brexit campaign) and in America (for the Trump campaign) for the first time ever. The IP is owned by Robert Mercer, who put the technology at the service of both Brexit and Trump in 2016. Both Bannon and Kushner are implicated in that deployment. The hostile domestic deployment of military psi-op tactics and strategies already comes well within existing felony treason laws, and if the election itself is determined invalid and in fact criminal, he’s subject to federal charges — not as president, but as a civilian — under federal law. This would invalidate the entire Republican win, and the election would have to be recalled and re-run. The running of the government would limp along, no more crippled than it already is under the Republicans, certainly, and probably more efficacious in many respects, under National Emergency procedures.
As this is a wholly unprecedented situation, not least of all due to the new media and technology involved, it’s not clear exactly how it can play out. We’ve simply never had a PRESIDENT working hand-in-hand with a hostile moreover criminal government against American, Western, and democratic interests before. Ever. Plus, there are some more surprises in store besides. (I can feel them. I think everybody can.) But I’m pretty confident in Mueller and his particular team to enable bringing the Fall of Donald Trump and his inimitable cabal to term. The Treason and Sedition and Subversion charges could trump Trump.
As reported in the LA Times in March, 2017, ‘The Senate Intelligence Committee hearing Thursday into Russian efforts to influence the November elections has been a long history lesson, tracing Moscow’s decades-long efforts to use misinformation to undermine democracies. Clinton Watts, of the Center for Cyber and Homeland Security at George Washington University, provided a roadmap to better understanding the Kremlin’s efforts. He urged senators and the U.S. government to follow the money to figure out how misinformation websites and social media outlets are being funded. While the Russians conducted their hacking in the Internet’s shadows, their efforts to influence the election was hardly a secret, he said. “You can hack stuff and be covert, but you can’t influence and be covert,” he said. “You have to ultimately show your hand. And that’s why we have been able to discover it online.”
The fact that Mueller and the Intelligence Agencies are closing in on the evidence is proven by the number of deaths of potential witnesses or those who could testify to these investigations. ‘The second way to trace Russian influence was more ominous: “Follow the trail of dead Russians,” [Clinton Watts] said. “There have been more dead Russians in the past three months that are tied to this investigation,” he added. “They are dropping dead, even in Western countries.” Watts didn’t finish the thought but was likely referring to a spate of deaths of high-profile Russians, some of which appeared to be assassinations although others appear to have been from natural causes. With the daytime execution of a Russian politician in Ukraine last week, at least eight Russian politicians, activists, ambassadors and a former intelligence official have died since the U.S. election.’ (Del Quentin Wilber, ‘Follow the money and the trail of ‘dead Russians,’ expert urges senators,’ LA Times, March 30, 2017.)
The Legal Code, 18 U.S. Code Chapter 115, which covers Treason, Subversion and Sedition as federal crimes, does not say a POTUS cannot be charged, particularly in the instance of straight-up Treason. Although there are already several movements toward indicting Trump for ‘Misprision of Treason,’ it seems that under the Legal Code straight-up Treason is the key, as the other urges disclosure to the president. “Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States. (June 25, 1948, ch. 645, 62 Stat. 807; Pub. L. 103–322, title XXXIII, § 330016(2)(J), Sept. 13, 1994, 108 Stat. 2148.)
The wholesale vandalization of a sovereign nation state, the former ‘Leader of the Free World,’ is well underway, and it is, certainly, a case of what will come first — his and his cabal’s removal to jail, Constitutional crisis, or the grinding to a halt of the government’s ability to function. Trump and his cabal are working to dismantle the U.S.’s sole federal voter protection agency. He will probably not appoint a successor to the recently resigned cyber-security head, and could close down the department altogether. That equates to throwing open the only truly operative national borders that exist in a state of cyber-warfare.
Many offices and agencies sit empty and unstaffed as the result of Bannon’s war against U.S. administrative infrastructure and the Constitution. Social and educational programs have been axed, as we sadly know. He’s obliterated and made redundant the Ethics Oversight agency, and that newly freed public servant is outspoken about the vandalism of the American moral and ethical system of representative government, democratic principles and Constitutional Law that is being systematically savaged and dismantled by Trump’s administration under Bannon’s hand. He’s thrown open the gates of federal lands to the Koch Brothers, Big Oil, Big Pharma privatization and petro-chemicals/fossil fuels development.
“The GOP and Trump are dismantling and deconstructing the Government, they won’t care and their supporters won’t care until they personally need these services.” (Charles Cooper, Aug. 25, 2017) We see the wisdom of this assessment when we watch the administration’s scramble to staff FEMA in advance of Hurricane Harvey making landfall in East Texas this August, 2017, the most serious storm to harry the U.S. since 2005. At times like this, we remember all those vital positions in the U.S. Administration that the president failed to staff at Bannon’s urging because he hates Establishment, U.S. Institutions, Protective Regulatory Measures and Bureaucratic Infrastructure.
Infamously stating for the record that, “Lenin wanted to destroy the state and that’s my goal too, I want to bring everything crashing down and destroy all of today’s establishment.” Even though Bannon is gone from the White House, he’s not gone from the Alt-Right mission, by any means, and that is the Alt-Right’s brief, nothing less than the decimation of the establishment Republican Party and U.S. government infrastructure. In aid of executing this brief of the anti-government Libertarians, Alt-Right operatives like Bannon, Miller, Conway, Coulter and others have infiltrated the Republican Party and administration. Linertarians in wolves clothing have in fact funded the whole charade — the Mercers, DeVoses, and Koches and their ilk put these criminals in power.
But all that falls can be resurrected, and probably in better form for the lessons learned and necessary updating of underlying values and principles. Environmental Rights and other innovations of law and jurisdiction can be updated and amended, as they have been in other countries, whereby the Earth itself is accorded Human Rights or protections even more sweeping, making it a capital crime to further knowingly practice ecocide and the gratuitous murder of wildlife or the witting destruction of environmental systems.
I don’t think anyone ever anticipated such a thing as the president actually being the enemy in a concretely traitorous way. No-one anticipated the possibility of a party adopting ideology that is hostile the established norms of the society, the citizenry, and the State of the Nation itself, certainly not the Framers of the Constitution. New fail-safes are required in unprecedented conditions. A Special Prosecutor needs to be appointed with the close of Mueller’s investigation. Much needs to be created from the rapidly expanding void at the heart of American society, government and jurisprudence.
Meanwhile, at the personal level, it’s pathetically simple: Why does Trump perform the way he does when he goes off-script? Because that’s what his KKK-affiliated father would have liked. In fact, from all accounts, it would have been the only thing about his second son the old man would’ve liked. The roaring racist Alt-Right crowd is a substitute for an approving father. This is genuinely pitiable, but not something the world should have to put up with given the calibre of the dad he’s seeking to posthumously impress. Really America, when Trump started attacking Rosie O’Donnell on a daily basis, in full-on unhinged sociopath mode, you should have known.
This is not to be discouraged; there is enormous opportunity in seeming chaos and destruction, which is simply an entropy phase prior to expansion and renewal, taking the long view. Brilliant, ethical minds have been engaged and their voices brought forward. The Resistance, as a spontaneously organized body, shows great unity makes conscientious, thoughtful, deeply moral commentary every day in quality print and streaming media and opinion pieces. The functional, operative, creative and responsive sector of the population has been unified and activated in a way I’ve never seen before, and I’ve been watching very closely for over fifty years.
Republicans need to read the following text, substituting ‘Trump’ for ‘Nixon,’ and the year, ‘2016’ for ‘1968.’ It is from an article in the Washington Post by conservative columnist George F. Will in 1973, on the Republicans’ dereliction of duty in protecting the functioning of democracy in the United States, and their shared complicity with the increasingly evident federal crimes committed by their chosen candidate in the Watergate scandal: ‘Now the misdeeds of the Nixon administration are similarly testing conservative judgment and integrity. In several senses, Mr. Nixon the conservatives’ “responsibility.” They rescued him from political oblivion; they gave him the benefit of what seem to have been quite warranted doubts; they superintended his nomination in 1968. Moreover, the misdeeds of the administration strike at what conservatives cherish most: the institutions and procedures that guarantee limited government and prevent ordered liberty from degenerating into the licentious abuse of unchecked power.’
With the exposure of McConnell, Ryan, Pence, Kushner and others in the administration as having been embroiled in huge money-making schemes with banks and oligarchs with close ties to Putin, the entire crew is caught in the net. And since the 10 hours of testimony from the intelligence contractor for the Steele Dossier before the Senate Intelligence Committee, Russian corruption expert Glenn Simpson, it’s not just Mueller and his crack team who’s holding the net, but the entire Senate Committee, and soon — if they release the transcripts of the testimony (very very much of which has been verified, with the exception of the pee tapes — yet), as it is within their rights to do, so will we be in possession of all of it, or at least what the British agent knows. That, too, though encompassing over 40,000 documents, could be merely the tip of an ice-burg that Mueller and his team are sitting on.
On the Russian front, their 2018 election is coming up fast and there’s an ethical candidate who’s enormously popular, Aleksei A. Navalny. People risk literal death, if not jail time in Siberia, to turn out in the streets for him. He enjoys the full support of Pussy Riot, which is no small thing. Putin’s government have sought to disqualify him on trumped up charges, but these would be thrown out if Putin’s reign was exposed, and his crimes against the Russian people were to be uncovered, in a very public, internationally shaming way, as they would be in the Fall of Donald Trump. With a big enough — an internationally resounding enough — crash, and his inevitable fall, Trump may well take Putin with him. Increasingly, the Western World and Russia and America’s domestic populations hate the likes of Trump and Putin. There will be cheering in the streets. They are each other’s Faustian bargain and serious ultimate doom.
