I’m going to save most of my good stuff for tomorrow, but I just want to offer one piece of perspective today.
What Trump did in demanding that Congress investigate whether, why and how he or his associates were surveilled during the campaign is to give away his best defense against this ending his presidency.
How?
His best defense was to rely on the fact that no one in the intelligence community has permission to talk about any of this, and that he could rely on the Republican Congress to keep it that way.
But, now Congress is supposed to find out what surveillance was done, which inevitably will require people still in authority or recently out of authority to testify under oath. And that is the absolute last thing he can afford to have happen, because they’ll explain why what they did was legal and what the legal underpinnings were.
Many of these people are so desperate to get this story out that they’ve been leaking like a sieve, but even the ones who might be friendly to Trump won’t take a bullet for him if it requires them to pretend that they did something illegal.
Trump cannot afford to have anyone in charge of the investigation of his campaign testifying, and certainly not in a position of having to defend what they did.
Trump just made it much harder to save his ass by simply not asking the right people the right questions.
His best hope now is that he is simply proven wrong, and there was no surveillance on his team authorized late in the campaign. But when the best you can hope for is being proven to be aggressively wrong, that’s a ridiculous strategy to pursue.
He might as well be strangling himself and his presidency.
