I don’t expect any better from the New York Post’s Page Six, but this is still remarkable:
The federal grand jury handing down indictments for special counsel Robert Mueller doesn’t appear to include any supporters of President Donald Trump, according to one witness who recently testified before the panel.
“The grand jury room looks like a Bernie Sanders rally,” my source said. “Maybe they found these jurors in central casting, or at a Black Lives Matter rally in Berkeley [Calif.]”
Of the 20 jurors, 11 are African-Americans and two were wearing “peace T-shirts,” the witness said. “There was only one white male in the room, and he was a prosecutor.”
It reminds me of this, from October 22nd, 2008:
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin apologized yesterday for implying that some parts of the country are more American than others, even as similar comments by two Republican congressmen were causing a backlash that threatened their chances for reelection.
In an interview on CNN, Palin said comments she made last week in North Carolina praising small towns as “the real America” and the “pro-America areas of this great nation” were not intended to suggest that other parts of the country are less patriotic or less American.
“If that’s the way it has come across, I apologize,” she told CNN’s Drew Griffin.
That might be the last time that Sarah Palin or the conservative movement apologized for anything, and it obviously wasn’t sincere. In their view, the country is divided into whites, particularly white men, and everyone else. White men can serve on a grand jury but if anyone else serves on a grand jury then the proceedings lack legitimacy.
The obvious point here is to undermine the credibility of the investigation into the Trump campaign’s dealings with the Russians. Not only is the FBI biased, but the grand jury pool is biased, too. They might as well be peace-shirt wearing hippies and black militants from Berkeley and Oakland. They’re not going to give the president a fair shake.
Of course, Steve Bannon just dropped a nuclear bomb on this strategy by accusing the president, his son, his son-in-law, and his former campaign chief of committing treason. If Bannon and his type are prejudging the case against Trump, then it’s hard to see where a fair-minded jury might be found.
One thing that’s significant in this Page Six piece is that the source recently testified in front of the grand jury. They clearly felt that the members of that grand jury are going to bringing the hammer down soon or they wouldn’t be talking trash about them. Things do seem to be headed in that direction. Trump’s bizarre, irrational and irresponsible tweeting seems to have been turned up to eleven since the new year, and people are wondering what might be behind it:
“There’s the possibility that something else is going on here,” Jeff Zeleny said on CNN, noting that Trump “knows more about the Russia investigation” than the public — he knows more, “through his attorneys and other things, about what may be coming.”
There were hints of something coming down in the days before the indictments of Manafort and Papadapoulos, and again before the announcement about Michael Flynn. I think we’re about to begin Phase Three.