Comey's written statement for tomorrow

[The_Doctor]

Trumpers: No. This is not good news and today wasn't good news for you either. Deal with it. Grasp reality by the horns and get with it. A President with this kind of testimony by the ex-FBI Director and the DNI/CIA chiefs issuing a non-denial on if he asked THEM to drop the investigation is NOT the successful presidency you imagined six months in.

Please grasp reality or at least, stop making it easy to mock you.

*Sanchez and Grumps (mostly) are exempted from this. I like them. So I have biases. Sue me.

[The_Doctor]

This confirms nothing. He stopped short of calling it obstruction of justice. The prosecution can move forward but how can they make a case when the literal investigators can't pin an actual crime. This was a good day for Trump judging by what I've read.

Seriously, I heard a long excerpt read on MSNBC and even they say this supports the Presidents claim that he did not try to end the wider Russia probe.

I don't think there has been much evidence of this to begin with, the dangerous parts for the President have involved his handling of the Flynn case.

This.

However, the wider Russian probe, however, remains troubling, in that the President won't reveal areas that would clear him. Such as his tax returns and his cabinet and aides did not report all the meetings with the Russian ambassador and other Russian operatives.

The President really just needs to lay it out there if he wants to kill this cloud. This is why I think there's more to the smoke here.

[The_Doctor]

There are three areas of investigation that can lead to impeachment. I think we have a solid ground on one of the three; weaker on the remaining two.

1. Flynn and Obstruction of Justice. Comey confirms this in his detailed written testimony about his meetings with Trump; notably the February 14 meeting where Trump asks everyone to leave, closes the door, and asks Flynn to be let go. That's an obstruction of justice. Since the intelligence chiefs today didn't explicitly deny communications from the White House on this (they refused to state, did not deny and implied the answer was potentially different in a closed session), we have a pattern of trying to obstruct justice in Flynn's case. That is the strongest case for impeachment - which involves trying to end a criminal investigation into an associate / former NSA of Trump's who has Russian ties.  

2. Emoluments and business ties & U.S. policy. Lawrence Tribe has made a good case that Trump is running afoul of the emoluments clause. This is trickier and would require a Democratic House to initiate impeachment hearings on these grounds. However, if ever there was revelations that Trump traded in on his presidency with his businesses, we'd see this happening really quickly. It still remains plausible to me. Trump, right after his election, used his conversations with world leaders to kvetch about his businesses. That to me implies that as President, Trump MAY have (or used associates) to do the same. We'll see.

3. Collusion with Russia. I think this is the most explosive and damaging assertion possible, but if proven, the destruction of the Republican Party would be one consequence (no you cannot walk away from a winning presidential candidate who won victory through direct collusion with a major enemy foreign power). I also feel that it may be the most obvious but the direct evidence may be the hardest to prove. Trump's associates' multiple meetings, Trump trying to relax sanctions, and Trujmp refusing to commit to Article V of NATO and Russia's leaking of information to Wikileaks all imply some sort of relationship between the Trump Administration and Russia that is out of line with traditional American geopolitical foreign policy - plus Kushner's meeting with Sergei Kisylak and asking for a secret channel, and the state bank business. But proving all this remains a long term expedition. For the record, I think indirect collusion might be easier to prove than direct collusion and I would rank this ahead of #2 on provable offenses. But the damage to the political system would be explosive.

[The_Doctor]

You have to look at all of Trump's actions within context and not as singular actions. Taken as a whole, there is a highly troubling set of interconnected actions and behavior that implies that is something more than just normal politics or the development of an ideological policy. The aberration is when you can suspect that there is criminal or unethical behavior.

Here's an example. W's war in Iraq began in 1998, with the PNAC (Project for the New American Century) calling for the war with leading neoconservative hawks on it. They saw a need to finish what Senior did. W took that foreign policy created in 1998 and then ran with it in 2003 to invade Iraq, using their convictions as his priors. (They actually wrote a letter to Clinton to invade Iraq in 1998). We had bombed Iraq in the 1990s, so honestly, the war was not entirely unexpected (especially after Gulf War I). You can see a bright line through legal ideological channels that gave rise to the war in Iraq.

Trump's behavior, however, has no precedent before 2014. In 2014, the Republican Party was highly anti-Russian and very vehemently anti-Putin. This was reflected in Romney's strident arguments against Russia in 2012. However, Trump comes out of the blue, and we now know that Russia aided his campaign openly through Wikileaks and sophisticated hacks. This is not a normal political - ideological development. There was no groundswell of support for Russia among conservative circles before 2014.

The behavior from Trump and his associates starting 2015 and going all the way to today taken in a whole suggests strongly criminal, unethical, or inappropriate behavior that imply contact with Russia and policy being made based on that contact. Essentially, logically, a foreign power influenced Trump and what we have yet to prove if there was direct contact or just indirect. What we don't know is WHY Trump (who bashed Russia in 2014) flipped so hard on the issue, which is an indicator that something aberrant happened.

His supporters take each piece of information by itself and refuse to acknowledge the whole, trying to deconstruct and dismiss each piece of evidence. For example, dismiss Comey's testimony on a specific event as a nothing burger. They ignore pieces of the picture, like Flynn's work for the Turkish and Russian government.

This is easier to do because if you take the whole thing as a whole construct, the picture becomes extremely damning.

Legally, however, when you assemble a criminal case, you look at the whole picture. This is what I want his supporters to address and convince me that the whole picture, legally, exonerates him.

[The_Doctor]

Trump is not a Republican.

Could have confused me because he's the leader of the Republican Party, sets the Republican agenda, and is the person the Republican majority in Congress follows.

Now is he a traditional Reaganite Republican, no. Is he even a true Republican, possibly not, but he is most definitely the face of the Republican Party, and its national leader.

NOW does everyone understand why the #Never Trump forces were so keen to deny him the nomination AND the White House?

[The_Doctor]

Trump is not a Republican.

Could have confused me because he's the leader of the Republican Party, sets the Republican agenda, and is the person the Republican majority in Congress follows.

Now is he a traditional Reaganite Republican, no. Is he even a true Republican, possibly not, but he is most definitely the face of the Republican Party, and its national leader.

The US administered Iraq after the war until a new government could be formed. That did not make George W Bush the President of Iraq.

I'm sorry, how is that answer anything that responds to my argument?

Trump is the duly nominated, elected, and leader of the GOP. That is nothing like an invasion of Iraq with a unelected government leading Iraq. Trump is most definitely the leader of the Party through a convened election.

There is no argument where Trump is not recognized as a Republican. A bad one yes, someone who is hijacking the party for his ambitions, yes, but there's no way you can say with a straight face he's not a Republican or the party's national leader through the same process every GOP President has led the party.

[The_Doctor]

One last post. From the "You have to look at all of Trump's actions within context and not as singular actions" post.

You can be sure that Bob Mueller's report will be damning in the extreme because he's going to look at the entire array of facts and the classified intelligence behind them. He's going to look at the chronological pattern and examine every possible contact. He's going to most likely conclude inappropriate contact DID happen between the Trump campaign and Russia. It hinges on what kind of contact it was.

Does anyone with a straight face believe that since late 2014, since Trump flipped on Russia, without divulging his tax returns, and with Putin's pattern of connecting with the political far right in various nations to further a pro-Russia agenda (Marine LePen's $4.5 million) and the multiple undisclosed meetings with Russian officials that there was none, that it all is innocent and unconnected?  And I'm not citing alt-right sources. I'm citing major mainstream papers.

The only question is whether it's damning enough to count as collusion or if Trump was a patsy or if we can find the missing link.

Literally, quite literally, there is no "Oh, by magic, Trump suddenly flips on Russia, and becomes a dove, when he callled Russia a major threat in 2014 and then exhibits a trend of behavior not unlike other leaders who have been bought off or supported by Putin directly." See LePen, Farage, and a whole bevy of other European leaders associated with United Russia. Trump did not arrive at his newfound position on Russia by magic. Nor did his Administration take these actions as sincere ideological conviction; we would have a paper trail from American ideological think tanks on the Right with no Russian connections who advocate this and then passed it onto the Trump campaign (this is why I cited Iraq and the way we went to war).

Every single action the Trump campaign and Administration mirrors other foreign leaders who had direct benefits from Putin. Literally. The question is what happened, how innocent or not so innocent it was. And you have to examine the entire picture.

This is exactly what Bob Mueller will do and this is why the iceberg has already been hit by the USS Republican Party. They've hit the iceberg. The question is when they realize it and if they avoid the ship being sunk entirely.