Palace intrigue

[Kane]

His tweets over the weekend singled him out for basically the first time. And then there's the subpeona to the Trump Org. I'm guessing Trump feels the heat more now than ever. So yeah, I can see him firing Mueller - question is how? Replace Sessions with Pruitt and fire Rosenstein? It's prefect really - he was AG of Oklahoma for a while. And under Pruitt there was advocacy for friendly business legislation that went through his office that was sent through Oklahoma gov which was written by lobbyists. The lobbyists literally wrote it up and Pruitt put his name on the bottom and sent it on. He's a classic cronyist.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/war-on-the-epa/

But yeah - this can't carry on. He's getting too close to Trump's skeletons (that he apparently still has hidden....somehow...with some of the dumbest lawyers).

[Kane]

How it plays out though? Trump replaces Sessions with Pruitt - Pruitt fires Rosenstein. Pruitt ends special counsel.

GOP will offer mere words. No action. Lindsay Graham is all talk and no action. They all have been.

The only question is when? Is Mueller pressing harder and faster in anticipation of the midterms? If Trump does this before the midterms the GOP could lose larger than it even thought possible. Comey's book is set to come out soon and McCabe now being free from those restraints can now openly disclose new material as well.

Time is not on Trump's side either way.

[ToddStarnes]

It's amazing that he's able to get lawyers to flat out lie for him. Lawyers will lie to other lawyers and bend the truth frequently but publicly making flat out lies is atypical.

This whole thing is bizarre. All of this. The cast of characters is absurd and almost universally clownish. Even normal things become weird. It's like the shimmer.

[Philly]

In the event that Trump does fire Mueller, can someone give me a run-down of what other branches hypothetically could do in response?

Is there anything that could be challenged in court?

If not, can Congress do anything? I don't expect them to do anything while the GOP is still in charge, but I'm wondering what they hypothetically could do, or what Democrats could do if they were to win in November. If the courts can't intervene to say the firing is not legal, then it, ostensibly, is legal...in which case, I'd have to assume it's not something that's impeachable.

It seems that there's an assumption on the part of some that if Trump fires Mueller, there will be a much bigger swell of public outrage than any previous Trump controversy, with a slew of new high-profile resignations in the White House and many loyal pro-Trump Republican elected officials finally breaking with him. I don't really see that. At this point, anyone in the public who still isn't already anti-Trump probably either doesn't care about the Mueller investigation or believes the Trump talking points about how Mueller is just some anti-Trump partisan trying to set the Donald up. It's not inconceivable that a few administration officials would decide that enough is enough and tender their resignations, but a) most of the ones most likely to do this have already quit or been fired, bringing us to b) constant high-level staff turnover has become the norm in this administration anyway. As for other GOP politicians, I think that much like the public, you already have lines drawn in the sand. There's the #NeverTrump crowd who will slam him for it, but they already slam him all the time. The ones who offer tepid support for Trump as a Republican while also frequently expressing their concern about his statements and actions will wring their hands and say they disapprove, but that's all they'll do. And the real pro-Trumpers who have decidedly hitched their wagon to him already will keep pandering to the Trump base because that's the only card they can play anyway. They've already stuck by him through so much shit in the past year and change. Getting off the Trump Train now will cause his base to hate them, but it won't earn them many points with anyone else at this point.

So, like, what actually happens next if Trump fires Mueller?

[Kane]

I can't attest to the court side of things but in order to fire Mueller he'd have to get Rosenstein to do it. If he refuses then he cans him and keeps going until he gets a yes man/woman. From there the problem would be figuring out who would take their place after. But more to the point - Dems only need 1/3 of the GOP to dump Trump. Even Nixon still had ardent support up to the end - he just lost a sizable minority that made it untenable for him to stay. On the GOP side this makes sense - sacrifice a few but maintain most. If the House swings to the dems this fall (don't f**k it up guys) that could actually increase the chance of impeachment by mere fact that the Senate GOP has been more critical of Trump anyways. Trump could also possible do some other stuff in this article but it's all mostly theory - it'd all end in untested calamity.

https://www.factcheck.org/2017/06/can-t ... e-mueller/

[Philly]

As things already stand, if the Democrats get the majority in the House there will certainly be a lot of the Democratic base hollering for an impeachment vote the day the new Congress is sworn in. If Trump axes Comey, the cries will be all the more urgent. I, however, would proceed with a lot of caution.

If Mueller is not fired, then I'd only proceed with impeachment if he has uncovered something that truly takes the level of Trump's lack of fitness up another two or three notches from what it's already been. If Mueller has yet to bring forward cold hard evidence of something that is truly appalling even by Trump standards -- and something that is straightforward enough that the average American can understand how f**k up it is -- don't jump the gun. Republicans will love the opportunity to obscure whatever allegations the impeachment is based on and paint the Dems as solely motivated by obsessive hatred of Trump. If the evidence isn't straight forward enough to easily convey and strong enough to generate a consensus in favor of impeachment, they will have a good chance at spinning that narrative. It may be the members of the Senate who get to deliberate on the verdict in an impeachment trial, but it's the court of public opinion that would really dictate how an impeachment plays out.

If Trump puts in a new Deputy AG who proceeds to fire Mueller, as improper as we can agree that is, my understanding is that it isn't illegal. In this scenario, anything that Mueller may have been closing in on re: Trump and criminal misconduct doesn't come to fruition. We now have a mess on our hands thanks to a decades long bipartisan trend toward an increasingly powerful and unaccountable executive. If this story has any kind of good ending, it's not just somehow finding dirt on Trump and getting rid of him, but also realizing that another Trump - or something even worse - could be elected in the future and making the presidency more accountable in case that happens.

Quite honestly, as someone on the left, I'm generally weary of impeaching Trump even if it was certain to succeed in the Senate and result in his removal. On all of the domestic stuff that we hate about Trump, Pence is going to be just as much of a piece of shit but he can actually focus on pursuing an agenda without getting constantly distracted and starting pissing matches with his own party in Congress. People worry about Trump commanding the military and war with North Korea but the truth is that he's not only dumb; he's dumb and he finds most complicated matters too boring to want to be hands on about it. He will talk a lot of blustery shit and then the same military ghouls who would run Pence's foreign policy will shake their car keys in front of his face to distract him while they make the actual decisions. I will say that the tariffs shit is one terrible Trump thing that I think we wouldn't have with Pence, but all in all, if we're going to have an evil reactionary bigot leading our country, I'll take a stupid one over a relatively competent one.

[John Galt]

[Spider]

This is a partisan problem. There are constraints on the executive...but when he's got Congress cleaning up after him and enabling and excusing his misbehavior, and a voter base that genuinely seems to love him.....? He could fire Mueller, and the Republicans would roll right over. Nixon couldn't do this shit...but trump can. And the rules haven't changed much since then. It's just that there aren't any consequences for anything anymore as the final arbiters, the voters, have been effectively taken out of the loop via the whole "fake news"/"liberal media conspiracy" thing.

That said...I'm more than a bit perplexed at the POTUS having personal, instantaneous, and unchecked authority over the nuclear arsenal. trump could literally nuke Korea from his toilet because he got called a dotard one too many times.

[exploited]

He needs SecDef in the bathroom with him, and under the same state of mind. If SecDef refuses, Trump could fire him and appoint somebody else, but presumably that would require leaving the bathroom. There are SOME safeguards in place.

[Kane]

It blows my mind that this isn't a front page story right now:

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing- ... g-on-trump

Brennan, the ex head of the CIA, just suggested the Russian's may have something on Trump.