Tuesday, May 23, 2017

An Obstructed Trumpworld Grab-Bag

I'm not one of those folks who would begrudge people claiming their Constitutional rights, nor am a person who confuses allegations with confirmations of wrongdoing. (I agree with Frances Langum--it's totally within Mike Flynn's rights to refuse to comply with a request if he thinks it will potentially hold himself liable.  I will add that if he wants to cite "escalating public frenzy" as his reason for non-compliance, it seems pretty weird because he used other people's non-compliance and allegations of wrong-doing as just enough predicate to incite others to "frenzy", so--there's that working against his logic. )

But this is only tangentially about General Flynn. It's mainly about what President Trump did when people started looking into Gen. Flynn, which is interesting because as we all know, Trump fired Comey, who was looking into Flynn's connections with Russia, and he tried to tell him not to investigate that anymore.  But then, it turns out, he tried to get the heads of other intelligence agencies to do what they could to stop the inquiry. That adds to the idea that there was obstruction, because now we have the start of a pattern of obstruction.

On Flynn's part, he is doing his thing--not talking. It kind of makes me wonder if Trump's message to Flynn, "Stay strong", was code for "Sta' zitto".  If so, message received! But it looks like Flynn has always had an instinct for when to stay silent. And that's another part of the problem, if Manafort and Stone are giving up what they have...

(I dunno where Carter Page went--anyone else?) Well--what does it mean when people who talk a lot start to play mum? What has Trump and Flynn said? Nothing good.

Lessons of scandals past advise us that the devil isn't even always the scandal, but the cover-up. And I think it's starting to look too much like there's a cover-up. But these guys are insanely private.  Aren't they?  Everything starts to look like a red flag.

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