My blogging has been light of late because I’ve been working on a magazine article. It’s been a nice reprieve from the grind of the 24 hour news cycle. But you all deserve a few more threads than I’ve been providing, so here’s something to chew over.
If I were a lawyer for Donald Trump, I would most definitely do everything I could to postpone or avoid entirely any scenario where he was sworn to tell the truth under the penalty of perjury. I wouldn’t even want him to testify to what clothing he was wearing or what he ate for lunch, fearing that his impulse to lie is so reflexive that he’d get crosswise with the law. So, I can’t criticize Trump’s attorneys for this:
Lawyers for President Trump have advised him against sitting down for a wide-ranging interview with the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, according to four people briefed on the matter, raising the specter of a monthslong court battle over whether the president must answer questions under oath.
His lawyers are concerned that the president, who has a history of making false statements and contradicting himself, could be charged with lying to investigators.
The problem is that Trump can almost definitely be compelled to testify under oath. It may take a while for the matter to wind its way through the courts, but eventually Trump will probably find out that even his right-wing Supreme Court won’t save him.
Now, maybe Trump will try to solve this problem on his own through some kind of Saturday Night Massacre, but if this is a battle to testify or not testify, his best bet is to negotiate the terms rather than try to avoid it altogether. Of course, there could be an argument that it’s best to delay things so that perhaps Mueller can’t deliver a report before the midterms. But there’s also an argument that it’s better to get this over one way or the other rather than letting it continue to dog his presidency.
The bottom line is that the president of the United States has a legal team, and seemingly all but one of his lawyers (Ty Cobb) thinks the president should avoid testifying at all costs because he’s such a gigantic liar.
I think Ty Cobb is a cockeyed optimist, but the other lawyers seem to be giving solid advice. I’m just not sure they have any idea what to do once their client loses in court.
And if Trump fights a subpoena and loses, the likelihood of Mueller putting him in in front of a grand jury increases. With his lawyers in the hallway.
No way he survives that.
My guess is his lawyers are using this obstinacy as a negotiating tactic.
.
He can take the Fifth. It won’t look good, but in fact he doesn’t have to answer any questions. Nobody does.
Nah, there is at least one circumstance where you cannot take the fifth.
It won’t apply here because its give to little fish to catch big fish.
Not sure what you’re saying. If you’re granted immunity you have to testify, that is true.
“Taking the Fifth” in front of a Grand Jury means that you don’t open your mouth AT ALL. Say ANYTHING, and you’ve waived the Fifth.
What are the odds of Trump being silent while undergoing hostile probing questioning? For HOURS?
With a prosecutor trying to outsmart him the whole time. With his lawyers in the hall.
.
Firing Mueller doesn’t dismiss the Grand Jury, either. Maybe just gives them a stronger motivation.
Well he’s a self-proclaimed deal-maker. I would suggest he make the best deal he can now, while he has the upper-hand. Get out. No prison. No testimony. Claim victory (patriot, martyr, victim, Deep State, whatever). Make a killing off the story…
Since he is guilty* he can’t do himself any good in any interview with the investigation. Not now, not ever.
I think this story is about a guilty man playing for time, a way to delay the finish of the investigation. Every guilty defendant out on bail wants a distant trial date. A court fight over a subpoena will win a few months. Once the Supreme Court upholds the subpoena, taking the fifth is probably better than facing Mueller in front of a grand jury.
A political disaster is safer than answering Mueller’s questions for a guilty man. Maybe he can survive a political firestorm.
*Guilty Of everything – coordinating with the Russians, money laundering, and obstruction of justice.
I agree his best moves are stalling combined with taking the fifth. I think his lawyers would be smart to recommend that, but Trump’s ego might get in the way.
I think that Trump has way more than average ability to create false memories for himself, so if he testified it would be truly unpredictable. Also, he tends to brag about how superior his memory is so as to deny how obviously it is deteriorating. I can see him just winging it, making stuff up, if he is asked something he does not know the answer to.
So yeah, for him, the fifth is the only sensible option, provided his ego lets him be talked into it.
His recent interviews with the media have tended to be incoherent babbling sessions. Hence, even if he decided not to “take the Fifth” in any interview with Mueller, his testimony could end up being incomprehensible garbage and so not very useful for the investigation.
Daily we’re seeing Trump’s arguments weaken and fail. Time gained by dragging this through the courts will only put him in front of a grand jury farther down the timeline when the public perception of him has diminished even more.
Mueller surely anticipated this and so now we’ll see more indictments, more guilty pleas inbound that will further erode any credibility Trump thinks he has. By waiting, he’s his own worst enemy. Again.
I don’t think there would be many good options as Trump’s lawyer. Either deny requests for interviews and hope to ride out the consequences or try to negotiate for the narrowest/shortest interview possible.
The Times writes (emphasis mine):
The spirit of Judith Miller hovers over this sentence.
The questions that should immediately be asked by any sensible reader would be:
A definition of “sensible reader?” Sure. Anyone who remembers the buildup to the Iraq War and the Times’s role in that buildup, especially that of Judith Miller. (And while we’re at it, this little Miller trick, too.)
Now that we established the fallibility of the NY Times (If fallibility is precisely the right word, of course. Maybe “collusion with the bipartisan Deep State” might be a more accurate term.) we have yet more unnamed sources speaking from conversations from an unnamed “inside” source. This sort of thing has been going on throughout the entire anti-Trump mass media since the day that it even looked possible that he might win the Republican nomination.
Now, I fully expect all of the kneejerk naysayers on this site are probably going to jump right in with shouts of “RIGHT WING TROLL!!!” and the like, so let me establish before they do that I object to these tactics on one level and one level only.
They have not worked!!!! I expect no more from establishment media like the NY Times and the Washingtoon Post…National Enquirer-level presentations of unsourced whatever, all gussied up in Ivy League prose and syntax…but if one good definition of insanity is repeating the same actions over and over again even though they don’t work, then these media are Looney Tunes!!!
I would like nothing more than to see Trump and his cohorts…and I don’t care if they are Russian spooks and plutocrats,, Mafia Dons and/or trillionaire corporate hustlers…tarred, feathered and run out of DC on a rail. But this lame media shit needs to end before that can possibly happen. The only thing that it is successfully accomplishing is making money on every succeeding news cycle foofaraw by fanning the flames of hope in the hearts all of the leftiness, Dem-centric dopes.
This bullshit, this “according-to -the-four-people-that-we-simply-cannot-name…and we will willingly go to jail until the heat goes down if you promise that we can get back into the bipartisan DC/Media revolving door game at a good salary” foolishness has simply got to end.
Enough already!!!
It ain’t working.
Over and out…
Proof?
Sure.
He’s still in office.
Duh.
AG
P.S. Twenty-five paragraphs later in this NYT story, nothing has been established as identifiably true…like “So-and-so said such-and-such”…except months-old quotes from such upstanding sources as Chris Christie, Newt Gingrich and Marc E. Kasowitz, …”the president’s longtime personal lawyer” who is undoubtedly cut from exactly the same vicious cloth as Trump’s original “long-time lawyer” Roy “The Hitman” Cohn.
Good work, NY Times.
The paper of record, indeed.
The Looney Tunes record.
P.P.S. It was no coincidence that Judith Miller so smoothly pivoted from being a NY Times reporter to Fox News. No coincidence whatsoever. They are just two sides of the same counterfeit media coin. WTFU.
You know what’s not working? Your claim that you’re not on the Trump Train.
Arthur, you attempted to organize voters against Clinton in the general election. Your quarrelsome expressions of Ron Paul-style libertarianism are being enthusiastically pursued by this Administration and Congress. Your personal, invective-filled hatred for non-Republicans is well-established.
This President is your kind of guy. You even openly support voter ID laws, a primary method Trump and other Republicans are using to take away the right to vote from poor people. You support him because he hates the same people and institutions you hate. Trump’s an old, privileged white man, just like you, and his politics come from that privileged place, the same place your politics come from.
You write:
No . Do you know what’s not working? Your claim that am on the Trump Train. It’s just more partisan, two-dimensional bullshit “If you’re not toitally with me you must be tiotally against me.” It’s weak, centerfielddj. It’s unimaginative too, and it is precisely what the DNC and HRC did to Bernie Sanders.
I gotta give you this:
You are certainly a good little DemRat.
You can put that on the headstone above the Dem hopes over the next several years if they don’t wake the fuck up.
Thanks loads.
You and people like you…people who supported Hubert “Humbert Humbert” Humphrey in 1968 over George McGovern and thus gave us Richard “I am not a crook!!!” Nixon…turn my stomach.
AG
AG
Keep it up.
You might end up burying us all.
AG
Thank you for confirming that you support voter ID laws. It fits in an ideological piece with this week’s reminder that you oppose unemployment insurance.
Given these and other radical policy preferences of yours which aim to bring back the Confederacy, your claimed support for Bernie Sanders is shown to be a pathetic lie. You were supportive of anything which could divide the progressive community in 2016, and you are supportive of anything which could divide the progressive community today.
You’re proposing to members of a left-wing community that we should be willing to smash the paradigm by supporting your far right wing policy preferences. That’s never going to sell here, and it’s going to continue to run you into bitter problems with community members. Go somewhere else to sell your brand of crazy.
Your knowledge of 1968 political history is shit. Go back and check your facts.
You write:
1968? I was there centristfield., among other things living in the East Village and working for the far-left Rat newspaper.
My “knowledge” came the hard way….on the streets, at the demonstrations. I was there at the Columbia University occupation in 1968. I couldn’t make it to Chicago and the infamous Democratic convention riots because I was already a working NYC musician and couldn’t afford to turn down gigs.
I personally think that RFK was shot because the controllers…among others, LBJ at the time…feared that RFK was unstoppable but they could beat McCarthy and install Humphrey as the Dem candidate. This is the usual tactic of the bipartisan UniParty. Eliminate the radicals…left or right…by any means necessar…a nd thus fix the election towards the supposedly safe center. You know…whereyou live?
I have been left of left for over 50 years. The assassinations…JFK, RFK, MLK Jr., Malcolm X…and later the attempted assassination of George Wallace (another dangerous outlier only from the right, all dangerous to the Deep State center…knocked me right off of my young, hereditary, centrist perch and into the maelstrom. I remain there today.
Buzz off.
AG
P.S. I just checked my post and realized that I wrote “McGovern” when I meant McCarthy. Shit happens. I spend too much time answering your worthless accusations. Sue me.
LOL. OK, Vanguard of the New Confederacy.
A lot of fetid water has flowed underneath your ideological bridge since 1968.
Feotid water!!!???
I got your “foetid water.”
Right here!!!
This image carries the very essence of the foetid water that makes up the DC swamp. DemRats and RatPubs all together, laughing merrily as they pound yet more nails into the coffin of the United States of America and all of its vast army of suckers.
Your every utterance supports these people and their little hammers.
Go pound a nail.
AG
He’s pleading the 5th in all but name.
Last year the Popular Vote Loser shrieked about Clinton staffers who requested immunity or invoked their Fifth Amendment rights in response to requests to testify about the former secretary of state’s private email server.
“If you are not guilty of a crime, what do you need immunity for?” Trump said at a campaign rally in Florida in September.
“The mob takes the Fifth Amendment,” Trump said at a campaign event in Iowa later that month. “If you’re innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?”
He tweeted in October more or less the same thing:
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-flynn-criticized-clinton-aides-seeking-immunity/story?id=464791
02
And it’s guaranteed that you’ll find past statements, tweets, rants, etc., by the Popular Vote Loser railing against the actions taken in the past by opponents that he is now taking in the present. I’ve seen it referenced elsewhere as an immutable law.
Therefore, we can predict that the Popular Vote Loser will eventually take the Fifth, an action he once denounced as the illegitimate refuge of mobsters.
Trump’s lawyers will tell him to take the Fifth, and he will, despite the optics. But he doesn’t have the discipline to stick to the advice. He will start extemporizing and lying within the first ten minutes.
Can’t take fifth selectively – either answer all questions or none.
Heh. Try telling our very smart stable genius he can’t do that.
Well, never underestimate the ability of the “conservative” volunteer law brigades to make up unprecedented, baseless legal arguments in favor of rightwing interests and “conservative” activists masquerading as justices to adopt them.
I was thinking of this recently after having been dragged to see “The Post” (imaginative title!) The guileless audience cheered the climax when the Supreme Court ruled (6-3) that Nixon could not stop publication of (age-old) classified reports about the futility of Vietnam (sorry, spoiler alert!) I remarked that this is the difference between having a Dem-controlled Supreme Court and a Repub one–as Roberts’ Repubs would almost certainly have ruled for a (Repub) prez in such an instance. Legal rulings do not have to aid American democracy, remember, as the last decade of the Roberts’ Repubs regime has amply demonstrated. The law is just as likely to fail in FailedNation, Inc. as everything else has, ha-ha.
So I wouldn’t be too sure about Roberts’ Repubs siding with Mueller over a Repub prez, as all 5 of them have made quite clear they are Repubs first and “justices” second. They work for Repub political control of the country just as assiduously as any elected Repub does.
As for our disgusting and nauseating Trumper (and treasonous, since he is so willing to throw the term about), I would hope that whatever he would “testify” to would be quite meaningless in Mueller’s figuring out the collusion and obstruction that was undertaken by Team Trumper. One surely can’t rely on getting the testimony of the lead perp, for Christ’s sake. One would guess that the goal of the “interview” (after all the evidence has been gathered) is simply to watch the egregious Trumper engage in his incomprehensible braindead word salad and report that conduct to the citizenry and the useless, complicit Repub Congress.
Republican politicians are circling the wagons around Trump because this protects their own careers and funding and ideology.
SCOTUS does not have those incentives, they would do well enough with a different President(R).
I hadn’t thought about that. You’re right. In fact, the conservative wing of SCOTUS almost has a vested interest in getting rid of Trump as soon as possible. If they screw around until the Senate changes hands (unlikely, but possible) they risk putting Pence in harms way (I don’t know what he’s guilty of, but its a lead pipe cinch he’s guilty of something).
Then they get a mainline Democrat as Pro Tem of the Senate.
Interesting scenario.