White House rushes to protect Trump after Trump tweet seemingly admitting to obstruction of justice
By Hunter -- Dec 03, 2017 · 10:34 AM PST

Donald Trump, aka the Garbage Fire masquerading as a president, has been made fully aware that ex-national security adviser Michael Flynn has cut a plea deal and will be cooperating into the special counsel investigation of whether the Donald Trump campaign illegally conspired with Russian espionage or propaganda efforts during the 2016 elections. We know this because Garbage Fire is melting down on his weekend Twitter feed even more than is typical. Most of it is an extended condemnation of our nation’s FBI, which is not expected behavior of any president, in any era.

But the most curious part of his reaction is being widely interpreted by reporters, lawyers and pundits alike as being an admission on Trump's part that he indeed knew Michael Flynn had committed prosecutable crimes before he asked then-FBI director James Comey to stop pursuing Flynn—firing Comey soon after that conversation

So Trump had been made personally aware that Flynn had lied to the FBI, as he met with the director of that FBI to encourage leniency.

As this blockbuster Trump admission ricocheted around press rooms, the White House quickly attempted to walk it back by claiming it was Trump's lawyer, John Dowd, who authored the tweet. This was intended to immunize Trump. It did not work, because having the President's personal lawyer assert, in the voice of his client, that his client knew of a committed crime before asking that the FBI curtail their investigation does not seem to be as innocent-sounding as they had presumed.

So the White House rapidly moved to revise their statements again; this time, Dowd gave a confusing mea culpa in which he attempted to explain that the White House did indeed know that Flynn had lied to the FBI, but Trump was somehow under the impression that the Justice Department wasn't going to be bothering to press charges against Flynn so … something. As Axios says in their own reporting, this explanation is "just plain suspicious and weird."

So then. The question of the day is: Just what the hell is going on here?

First things first: Even Dowd's latest excuse does not exonerate the White House. Dowd's claim is that Trump knew Flynn had committed a potential federal offense when asking the FBI director to back off on pursuing him, but Trump was already under the impression that the FBI wasn't going to charge Flynn to begin with. So he's arguing that Trump had no reason to ask Comey to "back off" Flynn, but did so anyway.

Second: The White House is probably lying. Trump almost certainly did indeed send the tweet himself. It is in his voice; it is consistent with his usual belligerence and exclamation-point-based random Twitter outbursts. The rapid White House effort at damage control suggests they did not, in fact, plan the wording in advance but were caught off-guard by it. The best evidence the tweet was not written by Trump is that all the words are spelled correctly, but Trump has indeed managed that before.

The best evidence that the White House is lying about who authored the tweet, however, is that the White House lies about everything, all the time, on a daily basis. They lie in every press briefing; they lie repeatedly when summoned to television-land, and in readily provable ways; they entered office lying about the size of the president's this and the success of his that and are widely recognized at this point to be willing to lie about anything, for any reason, if they believe the dodge will get them through another day of gubberminting.

It is not likely Dowd authored the tweet, crafting it to sound exactly like a blustering Garbage Fire. It is more likely Trump authored the tweet, and Trump's staff and his personal lawyer immediately launched a defensive effort to pretend Trump did not ...................................