From Axios this morning:
- We’ve only been reading about Mueller’s interviews with Trump associates and White House officials — because these are the folks that Washington reporters talk to.
- But Mueller has been picking apart complicated, secretive and well-funded Russian networks that could only have originated from the Kremlin.
- Mueller’s indictments are not the work product of some frivolous fishing expedition to indict Trump, as some of Trump’s conservative allies have claimed.
- This shows that Trump was wrong when he said during a debate that the DNC hacker “could be somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds.” It’s not fake news.
- This shows Mueller has been doing consequential work, not just sniffing around the White House looking for an excuse to indict Trump.
- President Trump is either woefully ignorant, or deliberately lying, about the scope of Kremlin influence. This was a major Kremlin operation.
Those comments during the first debate that the DNC hacker “could have been somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds” were so deeply disingenuous at the time (he was receiving intelligence briefings then, so he knew better). Now that he’s president, he’s violating his oath of office if he does nothing to respond.
The essence of Trump though is that he only ever cares about himself. In the context of Russia (assuming he’s innocent of any collusion and assuming he’s not being blackmailed or otherwise unduly pressured by Russia), what that means is avoiding accepting any conclusion or taking any action that calls into question the legitimacy of his election.