I appeared this morning on the Sandy Rios in the Morning on American Family Radio. I’ve appeared on Sandy’s show before, and I appreciate that she gives me plenty of time. The segment is 30 minutes long.
We talked about several topics, all surrounding Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and Trump’s related frustration with Attorney General Jeff Sessions for recusing himself from anything related to Russia. Trump’s continuing Twitter dressing down of Sessions and rumors Sessions and/or Mueller would be fired, were discussed.
In the course of the discussion we touched on the following posts of mine:
Because of the length of the interview, I can’t transcribe the whole thing, but here are some highlights focused on the dilemma Trump faces. I wish I had used the analogy of quicksand, because that’s the gist of what I was getting at.
“The whole way this thing has gone down has been really suspect. But the media, because they want the Special Counsel not only to harass the Trump administration, but to actually indict people, or try to indict people, the media is acting like the Special Counsel is sacrosanct. That there is nothing you can do. That if anything were to be done to the Special Counsel it’s a constitutional crisis, etc., etc.The media’s very happy, the Democrats are very happy, Republicans who hate Trump are very happy, because what you have is a situation that’s not supposed to take place in this country where they haven’t identified a crime to be investigated, they haven’t even said there’s a crime to be investigated, yet they appoint this team, which is growing in size, to do nothing but investigate people to try to find a crime. That’s not how we’re supposed to work here. The police, prosecutors, investigate and prosecute crimes. They don’t say, they don’t find the person and then try to find the crime. There’s a very famous saying by the head of the secret police during Stalin in the Soviet Union: “Find me the man, and I’ll find you the crime.”The fact is if any of our lives were to be subject to a team of 20 prosecutors plus FBI plus investigators, scouring over every aspect of our life, you probably could find some laws broken. There’s a very famous book written by civil liberties lawyer in the Boston area called Three Crimes a Day. With thousands and thousands of federal crimes on the books, we all probably violate some of those every day just by leading our lives.So it’s a really bad situation, it’s politically motivated, it has morphed into, and I do believe he’s [Trump’s] right about this, a witch hunt, where you have this enormous team of people trying to find a crime. That’s not what it was supposed to be when it started. When it started it was supposed to be, let’s investigate whether there was collusion between the campaign and the Russians, and now it’s morphed into something much, much more.”
***
“It’s a no win situation for the administration. Because if they let the [Mueller] thing go on, on the trajectory it is now, it is going to be water torture of them for years. It’s going to essentially freeze the administration’s ability to get anything done.If they terminate it, there will be enormous pressure, and who knows, they may even get the votes in Congress to impeach. They don’t need 100 percent of Republicans. Every single Democrat, of course, would vote [for impeachment], so they only need to pick off 40, or 30, whatever the number is, in the House Republicans out of 200 plus, they only need to pick off 10 or 15 percent of the Republicans, and they have enough for impeachment.I don’t know the way out of this for Trump. But it’s just a really bad situation, and it all emanates from the appointment of the special counsel, despite there not being a finding under the regulations that there was in fact a crime to be investigated.”
***
“What didn’t happen [in evaluating the nomination of Sessions], is nobody expected the Russia-mania to go on as long and as far as it did. I think Trump mistakenly believed, and the people around him believed, that once the election was over, yeah, there’s be a month or so of people screaming, but then it would calm down and we’d do like we do with every other presidency. Which is even if you don’t like the person and you oppose their policies, you don’t try to literally disrupt the transition of power. So I don’t think they expected it to go the direction that it went…, but I think it was something that nobody really thought through, where is this thing going to go, and is Sessions going to be in the position, and what might that mean.When people look back upon the history of the Trump administration, I think Jeff Sessions recusing himself is going to be, at least as of this point in time, the single biggest influencer of how the administration went. Now obviously we still got time, other things could happen. But as of now, that has probably been the single most significant event of the administration because it put into motion this seemingly endless, wide-ranging attempt to find a crime by the Mueller team. And that, I think, is the defining moment in the administration.So I understand Trump’s frustration, and I understand that it all goes back to the fact that if he hadn’t appointed Sessions, he had appointed somebody else, that he wouldn’t be in this situation now with this special counsel seemingly out of control ….”
***
“The Democrats, and some Never-Trump Republicans, decided immediately upon Trump’s election that they were going to do everything within their power to get him out of office, or prevent him from taking office. [Discussion of interference in Electoral College] … When Democrats, some Never-Trump Republicans, and parts of the legal community, tried to disrupt the Electoral College, I’ve never heard of that happening, at least not in our lifetimes, where you literally try to prevent the transition of power because you don’t like an election result.And when they tried to intimidate the Electors, when they tried to lobby them, when they were emailing them and harassing them, to me that said this is so far beyond what is the norm, that they pose a significant threat to our Republic…. Now it didn’t pan out, I don’t think any Electors changed their vote, but they tried…. Being nice to people who would try to prevent a peaceful transition of power, which is the Democrats and some Never-Trump Republicans, is not going to work….As much as people opposed Obama and Obamacare, and other things, I don’t recall anybody trying to prevent the transition of power …. You have had a full scale attempt to prevent the peaceful transition of power which is continuing to this day. And that’s what makes this whole situation very different than anything I’ve ever seen, very different than the opposition to Obama. And it’s really unprecedented and I think a very worrisome development.”
***
“This is one of those situations where there is no way out for the Trump administration, there’s no good way out, I should say. I think that allowing the Mueller investigation to continue the way it’s going is the easy choice, there’s no question about it, because whatever the repercussions are, they’re months, maybe years down the road, as opposed to the repercussion now of firing him, or firing Sessions and getting a new AG in place who says we no longer need a special counsel. I don’t know the way out, I wish I knew the way out.This all emanates, as I was indicating, from a desire of Democrats and some Never-Trump Republicans to prevent the administration of Donald Trump from being able to operate, to staff itself, and to conduct the business of the country. And I think this is an unprecedented and very dangerous situation we’re in where we’ve gone beyond political objections and we are now trying, six months after Inauguration still, to prevent the President from fully taking power.”
***
“His administration is in danger of being paralyzed. And that is the goal of the Democrats. The goal of the Democrats and Republicans who hate Trump is to completely paralyze the administration, to put it in a position as if it never existed. And they’re getting very close to that. They’re getting very, very close to that…. If I had advice to Trump, it would be, start getting things done…, start getting some successes.”
CLICK HERE FOR FULL VERSION OF THIS STORY