Charles P. Pierce: I Think Mueller's Days Are Numbered

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a15917140/will-trump-fire-mueller/

I Think Mueller's Days Are Numbered

Trump will do anything. That's his power.
By Charles P. Pierce
Jan 29, 2018

It would be a capital mistake to underestimate the powers that can be marshaled to protect the plague ship that is the administration of this president*. If you were prone to do that, the sudden resignation, more than a month early, of Andrew McCabe from his post as Deputy Director of the FBI ought to shake you back into reality in one quick hurry. McCabe’s decision to abandon his post, when he could’ve simply stayed in it until March, is a signifying moment in what is rapidly becoming a constitutional crisis taking place almost entirely within the executive branch, with the members of the Republican majorities in the Congress either sitting this out, or throwing themselves behind the White House in its attempt to keep the hounds at bay.

Couple that with the powerful influence of the right-wing media enterprises, and their audiences, which will gladly buy any fantastical codswallop that is spooned out to them, and you get the sense that McCabe simply had had enough. From The Los Angeles Times:



That McCabe jumped under pressure seems undeniable, unless you are Sarah Huckabee Sanders, from whom truth fled months ago. The president*, she said, was not part of the process through which McCabe resigned. This, of course, ignores the rather salient fact that there would not have been a “process” at all had not the president* and his people not felt the hot breath of the hounds on their hindquarters almost a year ago. The “process” began when the president* canned James Comey over, in the president*’s own words, the Russian thing.

Nevertheless, the forces are organized and arrayed behind the president* if he wants to crank up the Enola Gay and fire Bob Mueller. (The terrified meeping of Republican senators like Lindsey Graham is of no consequence. Impeachment begins in the House, and that’s where the wild things roam.) They have established within their ranks an excuse that is plausible to the raving lunatics of The Base: that the FBI actively conspired against the president* and in favor of Hillary Rodham Clinton because a couple of FBI lovebirds texted each other about the fundamental absurdity of a Trump presidency*. Oh, and because #ReleaseTheMemo—the phantom document prepared by White House congressional doorstop Devin Nunes that purports to demonstrate to the feeble-minded the depths of FBI perfidy. Now for you, me, the lamp post, and anything with the intellectual depth of a handball, this is a ridiculous notion. We, however, are not the conscripted hoplites of this army of dumbasses.

On the right, in fact, they’re already crowing that McCabe left because of the possibility that someone will #ReleaseTheMemo. This, too, is idiotic because there’s one person in the country who could #ReleaseTheMemo with no unfortunate consequences, and that’s the President* of the United States. He can declassify anything. I suspect he has not yet decided to #ReleaseTheMemo because to #ReleaseTheMemo would be to demonstrate that The Memo represents Devin Nunes’s desperate attempt to get a raise for cleaning the White House pool.

snip//

So, it’s fairly clear that there’s no steadying influence on the White House staff, except maybe White House counsel Don McGahn, and he’s pretty clearly in it for himself. Kelly, who was supposed to fulfill that role, is all in, too. As long as brown people are being rounded up, he’s apparently OK with letting the president* bring the government down on his own head.

I think Mueller’s days are numbered. It’s set up that way now. Rosenstein has The Memo hanging over his head, and he’s the only thing between Mueller and a return to well-earned retirement. This is a president* who believes that he owes the country nothing except loyalty to his slavering base. He will do anything and, from that, he derives his power. It is not to be ignored.