OK sorry, more on topic this time. The topic being the unfitness of Whitaker. I don't feel too bad bumping this thread again at 12 AM CST. Exclusive: Trump loyalist Matthew Whitaker was counseling the White House on investigating Clinton: Despite this being the case, on Friday as he was leaving on a trip to Paris, Trump told reporters, “I don’t know Matt Whitaker.” He also claimed that he never spoke to the then-DOJ chief of staff about the Mueller investigation: “I didn’t speak to Matt Whitaker about it,” he said. Yeah, so Trump knows exactly who Whitaker is (a loyalist) and has spoken to him about diffusing the Mueller probe. If you believe the sources, that whole Vox article is pretty explosive. Trump would have weighed the inevitable backlash in the press against the advantage of installing a stooge, and decided that the advantages of the latter outweighed the drawbacks of the former. So that's fucking scary. I was wrong about predicting something from Mueller by COB this week, but I'm still buckled in tight.During this period, Whitaker frequently spoke by phone with both Trump and Chief of Staff John Kelly, this same official told me. On many of those phone calls, nobody else was on the phone except for the president and Whitaker, or only Kelly and Whitaker. As one senior law enforcement official told me, “Nobody else knew what was said on those calls except what Whitaker decided to tell others, and if he did, whether he was telling the truth. Who ever heard of a president barely speaking to his attorney general but on the phone constantly with a staff-level person?”
I think Trump's a little late with his soft coup attempt. Team Mueller is Holding ‘Dozens of Sealed Indictments,’ According to Intel Source (only the last paragraph has new information): I thought that sounded too good to true, but it's from the New York Observer, not only a reputable(-ish?) news source that typically leans toward the right, but is owned by Jared Kushner. The author's a former NSA analyst, ex-counterintel officer, etc., but eh, the piece is labeled "opinion". Meanwhile, nothing we didn't know though, really.When Mueller informs the public of more indictments is an open question. That they are coming, however, is not. And there are lots of them. The Special Counsel has been at work for almost 18 months now. An Intelligence Community official who assisted the Special Counsel’s investigation told me this week that Team Mueller is holding “dozens of sealed indictments” of people associated with the president, his 2015-16 campaign, and his administration. “Nobody who’s close to the Russians is getting out of this,” said the IC official. When will those indictments start being unsealed? Watch this space.