Bad Moon Rising

anexplanationofunfortunateevents:

The
big Trump-Russia development this weekend is email protocol, because of course it is.
News came out on Saturday that back in August, special prosecutor
Mueller’s got all the Trump transition team’s emails. Because he
did it through the government agency that hosts those email accounts,
nobody knew about it, including the White House. Trump’s lawyers
have written a characteristically incoherent complaint to Congress,
and the special prosecutor’s office has answered it saying they’ve
followed the letter of the law in their criminal investigation.

Relevant
details:

• There
  is a reason we are hearing about this now, though as of Sunday
  afternoon we don’t know what it is. There are other reasons we have
  not heard about it before now. We can make a pretty good guess that’s
  because Mueller’s team wanted to interview Trump’s staff before
  they realized that Mueller had all their emails. If any of
  them lied, they’re already caught.

• So
  far, the objection Trump’s lawyers are trying to make is being
  treated with exactly as much seriousness as it deserves, which is
  none. What really matters is that if they actually had a legal
  argument against how Mueller got the emails, they wouldn’t be
  sending a letter to Congress, they would be filing a motion in court. 

• Mueller’s
  office explicitly confirmed that this is, in fact, a criminal
  investigation, which completely rules out the (already pretty weak) line that they
  were doing a counterintelligence investigation and just happening to
  stumble into crimes along the way.

Something
that seems like a tell is the fact that we learned about this on a
Saturday, which is usually the slowest news day. That is, you’d
usually drop a bomb like this on a weekday right before close of
business, so it would make the evening news. That could be a signal
that there are bigger stories to come this week, or it could be a
response to last week’s escalating attacks on the special
prosecutor’s investigation. (Of course, it’s entirely possible
that the right-wing cranked up the attacks on Mueller last week
because they believe something major is going to come out of
his office next week.)

• Democrats
  on the House Intelligence Committee have sounded the alarm that they
  think the Republican leadership is trying to shut down their
  investigation. The committee chair has refused to schedule any
  interviews after the holiday recess, and they’ve tried to undermine
  the interviews that are scheduled for the coming week. 
• During recent House Judiciary Committee oversight hearings of Deputy Attorney
  General Rod Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher Wray, the
  Republican majority filled up their time with poisonous attacks on
  Mueller’s impartiality and professionalism, some of them going so
  far as to demand that Rosenstein use his oversight authority to fire
  the special counsel. It’s worth nothing that the House Judiciary
  Committee is the committee which would initiate impeachment
  proceedings. By shouting that Mueller should be fired, they’re
  telling Trump that they’ll protect him if he shuts down the
  investigation.
• The
  conservative media, all the way up to the occasionally respectable
  Wall Street Journal, has been calling for the special prosecutor’s
  investigation to be stopped. The hosts of Trump’s favorite Fox
  News programs have been aggressively trying to goad him into firing
  and prosecuting Mueller.
• The
  straw Trump’s defenders are grasping at to delegitimize Mueller’s
  office is genuinely absurd: two FBI investigators, who were removed
  from the investigation five months ago, made bitchy comments about
  politicians in text messages they exchanged while they were having an
  affair. Last week, someone at the Department of Justice released the
  comments they made about Trump to Congress, and then invited
  reporters down to the office to view those messages. The texts
  themselves are not serious, but the DOJ’s actions are. Basically, the American government did to Mueller what
  Wikileaks/Russian intelligence did to Clinton: cherry-pick and expose
  the private opinions of associates and subordinates to create a
  narrative of “bias.”

This
is not a fucking drill. A critical mass of American
right-of-center political institutions have made it clear that they
want Trump to plunge us into a major constitutional crisis. Get ready
to hit the streets.