#fakeBarrLetter - Special Counsel investigation: "Russia if you are listening"

In my opinion, Attorney General William Barr will live the rest of his life knowing how he facilitated a cover up by writing his #fakeBarrLetter, a four page summary about a 400 page special counsel report, whereby Donald Trump seized the opportunity to self declare being exonerated. Here are the facts as reported in Vox.com by Andrew Prokop. This is article is an excellent summary and more credible than the #fakeBarrLetter.

The New York Times editorial:  You might expect that an American president, presented with the indictment of a dozen Russian military officers for engaging in a concerted, years long cyberattack on American democracy, would be outraged and demand justice. Donald Trump is outraged, all right. But his anger is directed at his fellow Americans.

As far as MaineWriter is concerned, George Papadopoulos (Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to making false statements to FBI agents) was the man who started the illegal Russia communications*. It was his tip to the Trump campaign that led to the admission by Donald Trump, "Russia if you are listening".  Obviously, they were...

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s team indicted or got guilty pleas from 34 people and three companies during their lengthy investigation, which is now complete.

That group is composed of six former Trump advisers, 26 Russian nationals, three Russian companies, one California man, and one London-based lawyer. Seven of these people (including five of the six former Trump advisers) have pleaded guilty.

If you also count investigations that Mueller originated but then referred elsewhere in the Justice Department, you can add a plea deal from one more person to the list.

It’s a sprawling set of allegations, encompassing both election interference charges against overseas Russians, and various other crimes by American Trump advisers.

However, Mueller did not allege any crimes directly connecting the two — that is, that Trump advisers criminally conspired with Russian officials to impact the election.

Other reported focuses of Mueller’s investigation — such as potential obstruction of justice by the Trump administration — also did not result in any charges.

Justice Department officials told reporters Friday that this is the final list, and that no more indictments are coming from the special counsel’s probe.

The full list of Mueller indictments and plea deals

1) George Papadopoulos*, former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser, was arrested in July 2017 and pleaded guilty in October 2017 to making false statements to the FBI. He got a 14-day sentence.

2) Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chair, was indicted on a total of 25 different counts by Mueller’s team, related mainly to his past work for Ukrainian politicians and his finances. He had two trials scheduled, and the first ended in a conviction on eight counts of financial crimes. To avert the second trial, Manafort struck a plea deal with Mueller in September 2018 (though Mueller’s team said in November that he breached that agreementby lying to them). He was sentenced to a combined seven and a half years in prison.

3) Rick Gates, a former Trump campaign aide and Manafort’s longtime junior business partner, was indicted on similar charges to Manafort. But in February 2018 he agreed to a plea deal with Mueller’s team, pleading guilty to just one false statements charge and one conspiracy charge.

4) Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, pleaded guilty in December 2017 to making false statements to the FBI.

5-20) 13 Russian nationals and three Russian companies were indicted on conspiracy charges, with some also being accused of identity theft. The charges related to a Russian propaganda effort designed to interfere with the 2016 campaign. The companies involved are the Internet Research Agency, often described as a “Russian troll farm,” and two other companies that helped finance it. The Russian nationals indicted include 12 of the agency’s employees and its alleged financier, Yevgeny Prigozhin.

21) Richard Pinedo: This California man pleaded guilty to an identity theft charge in connection with the Russian indictments, and has agreed to cooperate with Mueller. He was sentenced to 6 months in prison and 6 months of home detention in October 2018.

22) Alex van der Zwaan: This London lawyer pleaded guilty to making false statements to the FBI about his contacts with Rick Gates and another unnamed person based in Ukraine. He was sentenced to 30 days in jail and has completed his sentence.

23) Konstantin Kilimnik: This longtime business associate of Manafort and Gates, who’s currently based in Russia, was charged alongside Manafort with attempting to obstruct justice by tampering with witnesses in Manafort’s pending case last year.

24-35) 12 Russian GRU officers: These officers of Russia’s military intelligence service were charged with crimes related to the hacking and leaking of leading Democrats’ emails in 2016.

36) Michael Cohen: In August 2018, Trump’s former lawyer pleaded guilty to 8 counts — tax and bank charges, related to his finances and taxi business, and campaign finance violations — related to hush money payments to women who alleged affairs with Donald Trump, as part of a separate investigation in New York (that Mueller had handed off). But in November, he made a plea deal with Mueller too, for lying to Congress about efforts to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.

37) Roger Stone: In January 2019, Mueller indicted longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone on 7 counts. He accused Stone of lying to the House Intelligence Committee about his efforts to get in touch with WikiLeaks during the campaign, and tampering with a witness who could have debunked his story.

Finally, there is one other person Mueller initially investigated, but handed over to others in the Justice Department to charge: Sam Patten. This Republican operative and lobbyist pleaded guilty to not registering as a foreign agent with his work for Ukrainian political bigwigs, and agreed to cooperate with the government.

That’s the full list, but we’ll delve into the charges in a bit more detail below.

The five ex-Trump aides who struck plea deals with Mueller

So far, no Trump associates have been specifically charged with any crimes relating to helping Russia interfere with the 2016 election.

Nevertheless, five pleaded guilty to other crimes. Manafort and Gates were charged with a series of offenses related to their past work for Ukrainian politicians and their finances. Papadopoulos and Flynn both admitted making false statements to investigators to hide their contacts with Russians, and Cohen admitted making false statements to Congress.

Papadopoulos: Back in April 2016, Papadopoulos got a tip from a foreign professor he understood to have Russian government connections that the Russians had “dirt” on Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails.” He then proceeded to have extensive contacts with the professor and two Russian nationals, during which he tried to plan a Trump campaign trip to Russia.

But when the FBI interviewed Papadopoulos* about all this in January 2017, he repeatedly lied about what happened, he now admits. So he was arrested in July 2017, and later agreed to plead guilty to a false statements charge, which was dramatically unsealed in October 2017.

Initially, it seemed as if Papadopoulos* was cooperating with Mueller’s probe. But we later learned that the special counsel cut off contact with him in late 2017, after he talked to the press. In the end, he didn’t provide much information of note, Mueller’s team said in court filing. His involvement with the investigation now appears to be over, and in September 2018, he was sentenced to 14 days incarceration.

Flynn: In December 2016, during the transition, Flynn spoke to Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak about sanctions that President Barack Obama had just placed on Russia, and about a planned United Nations Security Council vote condemning Israeli settlements.

But when FBI agents interviewed him about all this in January 2017, Flynn lied to them about what his talks with Kislyak entailed, he now admits. In December 2017, Flynn pleaded guilty to a false statements charge and began cooperating with Mueller’s investigation. We haven’t seen the fruits of his cooperation yet, and he has not yet been sentenced.

Manafort and Gates: This pair worked for Ukrainian politicians (and, eventually, the Ukrainian government) for several years prior to the Trump campaign, and made an enormous amount of money for it. Mueller charged them with hiding their lobbying work and the money they made from it from the government, as well as other financial crimes and attempts to interfere with the investigation.

Gates was the first to strike a plea deal. In February, Mueller dropped most of the charges he had brought against him. In exchange, Gates pleaded guilty to two counts — one conspiracy to defraud the United States charge encompassing the overall Ukrainian lobbying and money allegations, and a false statements charge. (With the latter, Gates admitted lying to Mueller’s team during a meeting this February. A Dutch lawyer, Alex van der Zwaan, also pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI related to his Ukrainian work with Gates.)

Manafort, meanwhile, fought the charges in two venues, Washington, DC, and Virginia. His first trial was in Virginia, and in August, it ended with his conviction on eight counts — five counts of subscribing to false income tax returns, one count of failing to report his foreign bank accounts, and two counts of bank fraud. The jury deadlocked on another 10 counts, so for those, the judge declared a mistrial.

The conviction finally brought Manafort to the table, and on September 14, he and Mueller’s team struck a plea deal requiring his cooperation. Manafort pleaded guilty to just two more counts — conspiracy to defraud the United States, and an attempted obstruction of justice charge. But he admitted that the other allegations Mueller previously made against him were true as well. The cooperation element of his plea deal fell apart in November, though, as Mueller’s team accused Manafort of lying to them. Manafort ended up being sentenced to a combined seven and a half years in prison.

Cohen: Mueller’s team was investigating Trump’s former attorney in 2017, but at some point, they referred the Cohen probe to the US Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York (SDNY). It was SDNY that authorized the FBI raid of Cohen’s residence and office in April.

In August, Cohen cut a deal with SDNY. He agreed to plead guilty to 8 counts. Six of them involved his own finances — 5 tax counts involving hiding various income related to his taxi medallion business and other financial transactions from the US government, and a bank fraud count. Cohen also admitted participating in a scheme to violate campaign finance laws in connection with hush money payments to women alleging affairs with then-presidential candidate Donald Trump.

Then, in November, Cohen made his deal with Mueller. Here, he agreed to plead guilty to making false statements to Congress, to try and cover up his work on behalf of a Trump Tower Moscow project during the campaign.

Cohen had told Congress that the Trump Tower Moscow project ended early in the campaign, that he hadn’t discussed it much with others at Trump’s company, and that he hadn’t successfully gotten in touch with the Russian government about it.

In fact, he now admits, the project was still active months later, he’d talked about it with Trump more than he’d admitted (and with unnamed Trump family members), and he’d talked about it with an assistant for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s press secretary.
Roger Stone was the final Trump associate indicted in the investigation

Then, on January 25, another political operative with a decades-long history with Trump — Roger Stone — was indicted.

Various statements by Stone, including many public ones, raised questions about whether he had some sort of inside knowledge about WikiLeaks’s posting of Democrats’ hacked emails during the 2016 campaign.

Stone has long denied having any such knowledge — and claimed that anything he knew about WikiLeaks came through an intermediary, radio host Randy Credico. Mueller’s indictment alleges that this story was false — and that Stone’s telling it to the House Intelligence Committee was criminal.

Mueller’s indictment of Stone alleges that the GOP operative gave a false story to explain his knowledge about WikiLeaks.

Stone has been accused of lying about this to the House Intelligence Committee in 2017, and trying to tamper with a witness — Credico — so that he would stick to that false story. Read this explainer for more.

About two dozen overseas Russians have been charged with election interference

Mueller has also filed two major indictments of Russian nationals and a few Russian companies for crimes related to alleged interference with the 2016 election: the troll farm indictment, and the email hacking indictment.

The troll farm indictment: In February, Mueller brought charges related to the propaganda efforts of one Russian group in particular: the Internet Research Agency. That group’s operations — which included social media posts, online ads, and organization of rallies in the US — were, the indictment alleges, often (but not exclusively) aimed at denigrating Hillary Clinton’s presidential candidacy and supporting Donald Trump’s.

Mueller indicted the Internet Research Agency, two other shell companies involved in financing the agency, its alleged financier (Yevgeny Prigozhin), and 12 other Russian nationals who allegedly worked for it.

The specific charges in the case include one broad “conspiracy to defraud the United States” count, but the rest are far narrower — one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and bank fraud, and six counts of identity theft. It is highly unlikely that the indicted Russian individuals will ever come to the US to face trial, but one company involved, Concord Catering, is fighting back in court.

No Americans have been charged with being witting participants in this Russian election interference effort. However, one American, Richard Pinedo of California, pleaded guilty to an identity fraud charge, seemingly because he sold bank account numbers created with stolen identities to the Russians. Pinedo agreed to cooperate with the probe as part of his plea deal. He was sentenced to 6 months in prison and 6 months home detention in October.

The email hacking indictment: Brought in July, here Mueller charged 12 officers of the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency, with crimes committed to the high-profile hacking and leaking of leading Democrats’ emails during the 2016 campaign.

Specifically indicted were nine officers of the GRU’s “Unit 26165,” which Mueller alleges “had primary responsibility for hacking the DCCC and DNC, as well as the email accounts of individuals affiliated with the Clinton Campaign” like John Podesta. Three other GRU officers, Mueller alleges, “assisted in the release of stolen documents,” “the promotion of those releases,” “and the publication of anti-Clinton content on social media accounts operated by the GRU.”

A trial here is unlikely, since all of the people indicted live in Russia.

Konstantin Kilimnik, a longtime Manafort associate, has been charged with obstruction of justice

Then, Konstantin Kilimnik — who worked with Manafort in Ukraine and is now based in Russia — was charged alongside Manafort with obstruction of justice and conspiracy to obstruct justice, in June.

Mueller argued that, earlier in 2018, Manafort and Kilimnik worked together to contact potential witnesses against Manafort and encourage them to give false testimony. He argues that this is attempted witness tampering, and qualifies as obstruction of justice.

The alleged tampering relates to the “Hapsburg group”— a group of former senior European politicians Manafort paid to advocate for Ukraine’s interests.

Both Manafort and Kilimnik tried to contact witnesses to get them to claim the Hapsburg group only operated in Europe (where US foreign lobbying laws don’t apply). But Mueller says there’s ample evidence that the group did work in the US too, and the witnesses thought Manafort and Kilimnik were trying to get them to commit perjury.

In Manafort’s September plea deal, he admitted to this. Kilimnik, however, is in Russia, and will likely remain there rather than face charges.

Sam Patten struck a plea deal after Mueller referred his investigation elsewhere

There’re another instance in which where Mueller surfaced incriminating information about someone, but handed off the investigation to elsewhere in the Justice Department.

Sam Patten: A GOP lobbyist who had worked in some of the same Ukrainian circles as Manafort and alongside Konstantin Kilimnik, Mueller’s team began investigating Patten, but at some point handed him off to the DC US attorney’s office. However, the plea deal Patten eventually struck obligated him to cooperate with Mueller.

According to a criminal information document filed by the DC US attorney’s office, Patten and Kilimnik (who is not named but referred to as “Foreigner A”) founded a lobbying and consulting company together. They did campaign work in Ukraine and lobbying work in the US, and were paid over $1 million between 2015 and 2017.

Specifically, the document claims that Patten contacted members of Congress and their staffers, State Department officials, and members of the press on behalf of his Ukrainian clients — all without registering under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, as required by law.

Patten also admits to helping his Ukrainian oligarch client get around the prohibition on foreign donations to Donald Trump’s inauguration committee. The oligarch sent $50,000 to Patten’s company, and then he gave that money to a US citizen, who bought the four tickets. The tickets were given to the oligarch, Kilimnik, another Ukrainian, and Patten himself.

Finally, Patten also admits to misleading the Senate Intelligence Committee and withholding documents from them during testimony this January. He pleaded guilty to one count of violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

For more on the Mueller probe, follow Andrew Prokop on Twitter and check out Vox’s guide to the Trump-Russia investigation.

The Vox guide to Robert Mueller’s Trump-Russia investigation

*Papadopoulos was interviewed by FBI agents on January 27, 2017, regarding any Trump campaign connections with Russia. After the interrogation, Papadopoulos deactivated his Facebook account, which contained correspondences with Russians, and created a new account.[51] On July 27, 2017, Papadopoulos was arrested upon landing at Washington-Dulles International Airport, placed in handcuffs and leg shackles, and put in a prison cell overnight for his arraignment the following day. He was released without bail and subsequently cooperated with Special Counsel Robert Mueller in his investigation.[36]

On October 5, 2017, Papadopoulos pleaded guilty in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to making false statements to FBI agents

Robert Mueller Russia Report overview - follow the evidence

An echo opinion by columnist David Leonhardt published in The New York Times

The Mueller report seems to be coming soon. Maybe.

David Leonhardt says he wants to review what Robert Mueller's investigation (and others) have already uncovered.

The brief version: So far, there is no clear evidence that the Trump campaign and Russian officials worked together to coordinate campaign strategy. Trump and his defenders have tried to conflate this with innocence. 

Repeatedly, like an orange parrot, Donald Trump's mantra is “No collusion.”

But that’s both wrong and a brazen lowering of the bar for presidential behavior. 

Even without any further findings, the Mueller investigation shows that Trump has repeatedly violated his oath of office by lying to the American people, breaking the law, putting his personal interests above the country’s and secretly working with a hostile foreign country. The details:

Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help Trump. Russian officials hacked the emails of Democratic officials and created a social media campaign designed to hurt Hillary Clinton and help Trump.

Trump campaign officials knew of these foreign efforts and encouraged them. The president’s son did so. As did George Papadopoulos, a campaign adviser. And Trump himself publicly urged Russia to hack Clinton’s emails — on the same day Russian hackers tried to breach her private server for the first time.

Trump campaign officials attempted to conceal contacts they had with Russians and other foreign officials. Trump and his associates repeatedly lied to the public and to investigators about their more than 100 contacts — including meetings, phone calls and emails — with Russians during the campaign. Among the examples: Michael Flynn, a campaign aide who became Trump’s national security adviser, lied about phone calls he had with the Russian ambassador to the United States.

Campaign officials knew in advance about the WikiLeaks email dumps. Before WikiLeaks released stolen Democratic emails, Roger Stone, a longtime Trump associate, told campaign officials it would happen.

Trump was secretly pursuing a business venture in Russia and lied about it. During most of the 2016 campaign, Trump associates worked to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, while publicly denying any such business relationship. Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, lied to Congress about the talks and was sentenced to three years in prison.

Trump directed a subordinate to break the law. During the campaign, Trump directed Cohen to pay hush money to women who claimed to have had affairs with Trump. The secret payments violated campaign finance laws.

Trump’s campaign was run by criminals. The Mueller investigation has also uncovered separate financial crimes committed by top campaign officials. Both Paul Manafort, the campaign chairman, and Rick Gates, a Manafort protégé, have been indicted on conspiracy and fraud. Others tied to the campaign, including Papadopoulos, have also received prison sentences.

For more:
In a Times Op-Ed, James Comey, the former F.B.I. director, writes that he hopes the Mueller report shows that Trump did not hinder the investigation.

My newsroom colleagues Larry Buchanan and Karen Yourish have put together a helpful guide to the people implicated in the investigation. FiveThirtyEight’s Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux and Perry Bacon Jr. note that Mueller’s court filings so far amount to a kind of public report.

Neal Katyal, a legal expert, has also put together a helpful Twitter thread on the subject. “Don’t focus on the one-line spin. Focus on the facts, judgments, and limitations in the Mueller Report,” he writes.

The legal scholar Joyce White Vance notes that the end of the Mueller investigation doesn’t necessarily mean the end of Trump’s legal issues. “Mueller appears to have stayed carefully within his lane, sending cases that strayed from his core mission to US attorneys & DOJ divisions,” she tweeted. “These career prosecutors will work their investigations to a conclusion, even after Mueller closes shop.”

And Aaron Blake of The Washington Post outlines what could happen to Mueller’s report once the attorney general has it.

“I am working to set things right,” Michael Flynn reported in The New Yorker

The New Yorker opinion by Eric Lach

Donald Trump will be compelled to eventually tell the truth to Robert Mueller

Almost exactly a year ago, after he had pleaded guilty to lying to the government about his conversations with the Russian Ambassador to the U.S. and about his business relationship with the Turkish government, Michael Flynn, the retired lieutenant general who served for a few short weeks as Donald Trump’s first national-security adviser, issued a statement acknowledging that he was coöperating with the special counsel, Robert Mueller. “I am working to set things right,” he said. At the time, Nicholas Schmidle, who wrote a Profile of Flynn for The New Yorker, predicted that coöperating with Mueller had the potential to be Flynn’s “most significant act of public service yet.” On Tuesday, Mueller filed a memo in court suggesting that Flynn had made good on his word.

Michael Flynn "I am working to set things right"

“The defendant’s assistance to the government was substantial and merits consideration at sentencing,” the memo says. “His early cooperation was particularly valuable because he was one of the few people with long-term and firsthand insight regarding events and issues under investigation.” 

Flynn is due to be sentenced for his crimes later in December, and the memo states that a sentence with no jail time “is appropriate and warranted.”

Many people had been eagerly anticipating Tuesday’s memo, hoping to learn what exactly Flynn has told Mueller. But the document doesn’t really say—citing “ongoing investigations,” Mueller redacted much of the document in the public filing. The document states that Flynn sat for nineteen interviews with the special counsel’s office (S.C.O.) or other attorneys from the Justice Department, that he coöperated in at least one criminal investigation separate from the special counsel’s investigation, that he turned over documents and communications, and that he spoke to Mueller’s team about interactions between Trump’s transition team and the Russian government. 

But whole paragraphs are blocked out. Names, dates, and other details remain unknown. There is one other interesting part of the document, though. In a section titled “History and Characteristics of the Defendant,” the memo states, “The defendant’s record of military and public service distinguish him from every other person who has been charged as part of the SCO’s investigation”—a nod toward Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, George Papadopoulos, et al. “However,” the document goes on, “senior government leaders should be held to the highest standards.” 

Whom might this second sentence be nodding toward?

Eugene Robinson ~ echo on Trump delusional conspiracies

Donald Trump conspiracy theorist and fake news developer in chief

Eugene Robinson echo opinion from Washington — Stop waiting for the constitutional crisis that President Trump is sure to provoke. It’s here.  (Opinion column, an "editor's pick" published in the Albany Herald, in Georgia)

On Sunday, via Twitter (ugh!), Trump demanded that the Justice Department concoct a transparently political investigation, with the aim of smearing veteran professionals at Justice and the FBI and also throwing mud at the previous administration. 

Trump’s only rational goal is casting doubt on the probe by special counsel Robert Mueller, which appears to be closing in.

Trump’s power play is a gross misuse of his presidential authority and a dangerous departure from long-standing norms. Strongmen such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin use their justice systems to punish enemies and deflect attention from their own crimes. Presidents of the United States do not — or did not, until Sunday’s tweet:

“I hereby demand, and will do so officially tomorrow, that the Department of Justice look into whether or not the FBI/DOJ infiltrated or surveilled the Trump Campaign for Political Purposes — and if any such demands or requests were made by people within the Obama Administration!”

Rather than push back and defend the rule of law, Justice tried to mollify the president by at least appearing to give him what he wants. The Republican leadership in Congress has been silent as a mouse. This is how uncrossable lines are crossed.

The pretext Trump seized on is the revelation that a longtime FBI and CIA informant, described as a retired college professor, made contact with three Trump campaign associates before the election as part of the FBI’s initial investigation into Russian meddling.

With the full-throated (wrong minded) backing of right-wing media, Trump has described this person as a “spy” who was “implanted, for political purposes, into my campaign for president.” This claim is completely unsupported by the facts as we know them. Trump wants you to believe a lie.
The informant was not embedded or implanted or otherwise inserted into the campaign. He was asked to contact several campaign figures whose names had already surfaced in the FBI’s counterintelligence probe. It would have been an appalling dereliction of duty not to take a look at Trump advisers with Russia ties, such as Carter Page and George Papadopoulos, at a time when the outlines of a Russian campaign to influence the election were emerging.

Trump claims this is the nation’s “all time biggest political scandal” because, he alleges, Justice Department officials and the FBI used a “spy” to try to “frame” him and his campaign, in an effort to boost his opponent Hillary Clinton’s chance of winning the election. This conspiracy theory has so many holes that it’s hard to know where to begin, but let’s start with the glaringly obvious: If the aim was to make Trump lose, why wasn’t all the known information about the Trump campaign’s Russia connections leaked before the election, when it might have had some impact?

The truth appears to be precisely the opposite of what Trump says, which is not uncommon. The record suggests that Justice and the FBI were so uncomfortable investigating a presidential campaign in the weeks and months before an election that they tiptoed around promising lines of inquiry rather than appear to be taking a side. The FBI director at the time was James Comey, and while we heard plenty about Clinton’s emails before the vote, we had no idea that such a mature investigation of the Trump campaign was underway.

Now that the Mueller probe has bored into Trump’s inner circle — and federal authorities have raided the homes and office of his personal attorney, Michael Cohen — the president appears to be in a panic. The question is whether he sees this “spy” nonsense as a way to discredit Mueller’s eventual findings, or as a pretext for trying to end the investigation with a bloody purge akin to Richard Nixon’s “Saturday Night Massacre.”

The Justice Department answered Trump’s tweeted demand by announcing that an existing investigation by the Justice Department’s inspector general will now “include determining whether there was any impropriety or political motivation” by the FBI. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein may hope that is enough to avoid a showdown. I fear he is wrong.

None of this is normal or acceptable. One of the bedrock principles of our system of government is that no one is above the law, not even the president. But a gutless Congress has refused, so far, to protect this sacred inheritance.

Trump is determined to use the Justice Department and the FBI to punish those he sees as political enemies. This is a crisis, and it will get worse.

Eugene Robinson’s email address is eugenerobinson@washpost.com.

Nevada opinion editorial - Donald Trump is not normal

"We are not dealing with a normal person here, let alone a normal president." ~ Charles Blow (echo letter published in the Las Vegas Sun newspaper)

Nation’s constitutional crisis to hold Donald Trump accountable for "Russia gate",  is moving in slow motion

 George Papadopoulos~ has pleaded guillty

Donald Trump will destroy this entire country — its institutions and its safeguards, the rule of law and the customs of civility, the concept of truth and the inviolable nature of valor — to protect his own skin.

We are not dealing with a normal person here, let alone a normal president.

This is a damaged man, a man who has always lived in his own reality and played by his own rules. 

When the truth didn’t suit him, he simply, with a devilish ease, invented an alternate reality. There were no hard and fast absolutes in his realm of rubber. Everything was malleable, and he had an abundance of gall and a deficit of integrity to push everything until it bent.

Also, he didn’t start his run for president believing that he could actually win, or even wanting to win. 

Rather, Trump saw his campaign as just another show, another act in the carnival. He came slowly, I believe, to the realization that he could win, and more important, that he wanted to.

But again, Trump didn’t want to win to serve the country; he wanted to win to serve his ego. He wanted to win simply because he hates losing, and to come close and lose was far more injurious than to be able to say early on that a party of traditionalists simply wasn’t avant-garde enough for the radical change he represented.

In the process of turning a vanity campaign into a valid campaign, he had to hurry up and ramp up, and he had to take on some of the only people willing to ally themselves with such a ridiculous, tarnished, vile, scandalous, unscrupulous person. The people he got for his team share many of those same characteristics.

The president won the election, with Russian assistance and against all odds. The win shocked the world, including Trump himself. He hadn’t had to alter his most negative traits; he won with them on full display.

He was working-class white America’s rebuff to an erudite black man and a supremely experienced woman. Trump’s defects had been validated. He was loved among those who hate.

But Trump had no clue that his greatest victory could open him to his greatest jeopardy. For him, it is a stinging irony that his lifetime high could lay him low.

He is incensed by the threat and is shifting every lever of power to thwart it. His own survival, and that of his family and empire, is all that matters. For him, this is the ultimate game of Machismo Monopoly: The properties are at stake and there’s a “Go To Jail” square in Robert Mueller’s corner.

Another part of all of this that must sting is that much of this legal mess springs from Trump’s own recklessness and impetuousness.

The people he surrounded himself with were shady characters, just like him. For instance, Carter Page is the most weaselly of creatures. And yet the president was touting him as one of his foreign policy advisers.

The dud of a memo by the near-treasonous water boy Devin Nunes was mostly about the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court repeatedly granting the FBI permission to monitor Page’s contacts with Russians. Far from tarnishing the investigation into Russian contacts with the Trump campaign, the memo seemed to bolster the credibility of that investigation.

The investigation was not exclusively born of the Christopher Steele dossier, as Trump and his lackeys insisted. The memo says this about Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos: 

“The Papadopoulos information triggered the opening of an FBI counterintelligence investigation in late July 2016 by FBI agent Pete Strzok.”

Papadopoulos has since pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI and is cooperating with the special counsel.

Worse than firing a blank, Trump’s broadside on the FBI and the Department of Justice with this memo may well have backfired.

The tantalizing possibility that this memo would contain actual, accurate damning evidence that the investigation was corrupt just vanished. The contents of that memo are as thin as Trump’s coif.

His attempts to smear the truth seekers with lies are failing. Sure, some die-hards — millions of them actually — will continue to believe, but the truth is a funny thing: It will not forever be hidden. Everything eventually finds its way to the light.

But take no solace in that, folks. The closer Mueller gets to the full truth, the more Trump’s panic will grow. He will feel more and more like a cornered animal, and it is likely that he will resort to his final, unthinkable options.

Firing Mueller is a definite possibility.

People say that would create a constitutional crisis, but we are already trapped in a slow-motion constitutional crisis, or constitutional train wreck.
Trump will never put the country above himself. And his Republican assistants in the legislature have so bought into Trumpism that they now know they will share his fate.

Buckle up, folks: This ride will get much rougher before it finally comes to an end.

Charles Blow is a columnist for The New York Times.