Investigators Close in on the Big Orange Enchilada

President Trump has another really bad day—with lots of Russians in the news.

1/9/19: The president’s big, beautiful Oval Office speech, on the need for a border wall, lands with a Trump Thud.

No one is moved by what he says and most of us know he’s lying because his vocal cords are twanging. He doesn’t mention terrorists pouring across the border—because the “Fake News” folks have been catching his surrogates lying about the numbers for a week. Was it 3,000 terrorists pouring in from Mexico? Or 4,000? Or a billion? Trump and his toadies couldn’t make up their minds.

They all agreed, however, that it was a lot!

Meanwhile, if you were hiding in your Safe Room, loading your weapons to repel lepers and people carrying smallpox—you might have missed several critical developments in the Russia probe.

First, the Grand Jury empaneled by Special Counsel Mueller has been extended for six months. That means when Trump sticks his head out of the White House on February 2, he’s going to see his fat shadow and know there’s six more months of Mueller to come.

The Big Orange Enchilada.

Second, we learn that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein has decided to step down when a new Attorney General is in place. We know that William Barr, Trump’s choice to take over at Justice, is scheduled for Senate confirmation hearings next week. At first blush, the president has to be excited to think that another nemesis is bowing out of the Russia fight. Yet, before the Big Orange Enchilda (see: Watergate, for reference) breaks out the champagne he might want to puzzle out what this means. It’s a distinct possibility that Rosenstein knows the investigation is guaranteed to draw Trump blood—and copious amounts—and sees the chance to be a stronger voice in defense of the rule of law on the outside of the government than in, giving warning about what he, Mueller and many others already know.

In fact, the bullets so far keep flying past the president’s head—and just missing. But the law of averages says, metaphorically, that Trump can’t dodge them all. Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee have announced that the first witness they call back and place under oath will be his son, Don Jr.

We can expect the president’s propaganda pals to start whining about “perjury traps” in which poor Jr. might inadvertently plant a foot. The problem is that Jr. almost certainly has both feet in traps already, and maybe two or three other valuable appendages, plus at least one ear.

Look for televised hearings soon and watch live as the president’s son takes the Fifth. (I’ll take a couple of friendly bets from conservative friends that Don Jr. gets indicted before the year is out.)

Second participant in Trump Tower meeting indicted.

Why might Don Jr. be sweating lately? We need to go back to the infamous Trump Tower meeting (June 2016), which he and everyone else involved forgot about until the “Fake News” folks broke the story thirteen months later. One participant has already been convicted on ten felony counts. Now a second, Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer who attended—and that would be the Russian lawyer with ties to top Russian officials—has been indicted.

If you’re a Trump lover, keep in mind this wasn’t Mueller’s call. This investigation comes out of the Southern District of New York, a federal attorney’s office headed up by a Trump appointee.

The Russian lawyer’s case may not be tied to the Mueller probe but it hints at where Mueller is going. Veselnitskaya is accused of obstruction of justice. Her motive? She was covering up a trail of Russian money-laundering.

Ah, money-laundering! Of course! A highly-secret court challenge—believed to be related to a demand for documents filed by Mueller and his team—has now reached the U.S. Supreme Court. The case involves a “mysterious foreign-owned company” that has so far refused to comply with a subpoena for documents. The lower courts have said that a fine of $50,000 per day shall be imposed, as long as the company remains in contempt. So the company appealed.

And now the U.S. Supreme Court has rejected that appeal—without a single dissenting vote.

I try to be realistic in my assessments. I still don’t see evidence to impeach the Big Orange Enchilada. But I’m getting the sense Mueller may have seen enough.

I will, however, venture a guess. I am guessing the company is Deutsche Bank. It could be the Bank of Cyprus, where Paul Manafort and Russian oligarchs used to hide their loot. Or it could be any number of Russian money-laundering fronts.

My money is on Deutsche Bank.

Get your senses checked: You may be dead.

I am definitely going to say this development is NOT good news for President Trump and his pals.

That brings us back to Manafort again. In a filing blunder this week, his lawyers failed to redact portions of a court document that offers a window into what Mueller and his team already know. And if you don’t read the documents—but I do—you don’t know that Mueller always knows way more than the targets of investigation think he knows. Now, we know that Manafort shared polling data with the Russians, while leading the Trump 2016 campaign.

We knew long ago that he was deeply in debt at the time—to a Russian oligarch, too. Mueller allegedly has evidence that puts Manafort in a secret meeting with Konstantin Kilimnik, a former Russian intelligence officer, in August 2016 and in another secret meeting in Madrid in early 2017. This passage of data would likely have been meant to aid the Russians in refining their efforts to disrupt U.S. elections.

I know, I know. “NO COLLUSION,” as the Big Orange Enchilada likes to tweet. But if you don’t sense 

CONSPIRACY, you had better have your eyes, ears, nose, taste and sense of touch checked.

You may be dead.

FOR WAY, WAY MORE ON THE MUELLER INVESTIGATION, GO TO: 

“A Year of Robert Mueller”

“Another Year of Robert Mueller (Part II of the Russia Investigation)”

“Another Year of Robert Mueller (Part III of the Russia Investigation)”

WARNING: Combined length equal to a healthy book.