Catching up on the Mueller investigation

1.  News was leaked on Friday that the Washington Grand Jury, convened by Special Counsel Mueller, has approved an indictment.   At this point, we don't know who the person or persons indicted are, and the indictment was sealed.

This will make it more difficult for Republicans to claim that Mueller is conducting a witch hunt with no basis in facts.   It means that both a grand jury and a judge have thought the evidence warrants an arrest.  NBC has confirmed from two sources with knowledge that Mueller will make the indictment public on Monday.    Conservative news sources are flipping out, calling for Mueller to resign, claiming that he has a conflict of interest because . . . friend of Comey, . . .  biased toward Clinton. . . . blah, blah, blah.

Already there's a casualty.   Long-time, dirty-trickster, Republican operative Roger Stone let loose with a series of profane, sexually explicit and insulting tweets against CNN anchors, who reported CNN's breaking story.  Stone is a minor player in the Russia connection, having seemed to have prior knowledge of when Wikileaks was going to release John Podesta's hacked emails and claiming to be in contact with Julian Assange.   His tweets clearly violated, multiple times, their language code, so Twitter has banned him, permanently.   Couldn't happen to a nastier guy.

2.  The July 2016 meeting in Trump Tower with a Russian lawyer, supposedly bringing dirt on Hillary Clinton, takes on new significance and credibility as it has now been shown that the Russian lawyer did have links to people close to Putin.  The best analysis is that this was a "dangle," to test the Trump team's openness to cooperating.   They would not have brought anything that would have incriminated themselves until they tested the receptivity.   The unknown question is what happened next?   Were there other exchanges?   Trump Jr. says no.  But the evidence does apparently show the Trump team's willingness to collude with Russia to get damaging information on Clinton.  Maybe it came in the form of hacked emails released on Wikileaks.

3.  Cambridge Analytica, the data enterprise that began working for the Trump campaign in August of 2016, had earlier (June 2016, according to one report) reached out to Wikileaks to offer to help them disseminate the hacked emails from the DNC.   One TV analyst pointed out that this was before they were associated with the campaign.

However, the Mercers (Trump's billionaire donors who also bankroll Breitbart News and who brought Bannon to the Trump campaign) are part owners in Cambridge Analytica.   So there's the connection.    The Mercers backed Ted Cruz until after the convention, then switched to Trump.   Also:   we've heard nothing about this since;  but early on I remember when the data firm was first mentioned in connection with the campaign it was said that Jared Kushner had some connection with the guy who runs the data operation.   And, by the way, where is Jared?   He's dropped from the news like a hot potato.

4.  The top lawyer for the office of Director of National Intelligence under Obama has said that the controversial Steele dossier was not part of the evidence that led the national security agencies to agree collectively that Russia was directly behind the hacking of the DNC emails.   In other words, that finding stands, regardless of whether the information in the dossier proves to be true or not.   For the record, some of it has been verified as true;  and none of it has yet been proved untrue.

5.  There has been a frenzy in Republican circles in the past week or so, suggesting that they're trying to distract from something, perhaps something they knew was coming.   Suddenly chief Trump bagboy, Rep. David Nunes, who keeps interfering with the House Intelligence Committe investigation, plus Trey Gowdy, who has replaced the chair of the House Oversight Committee, are practically frothing at the mouth over their newly planned investigations into -- wait for it -- Hillary Clinton.

Yes, it's been revealed that someone who has donated to her campaign also picked up the payment for the investigations that led to the Steele dossier, after the Republican candidate backer stopped paying when his candidate lost the primary.   See, it was opposition research looking for damaging info on Trump;   so first it was paid for by Republicans, then by Democrats.   What don't they understand that needs another investigation?   It's just noise.  Bur they're grasping at straws, trying to say that the "Russian collusion" is really about Clinton, not Trump.    But Steele, who did the investigation of Trump and compiled the dossier, is British, a former MI 5 spy.  He was simply doing some private investigative work in Russia, because that's where the facts led him.   He was not working for or with the Russians.  And Mueller has already gotten information from him.

6.  Back in August, Congress voted to impose new sanctions on Russia to punish them for hacking into our election -- exactly what is the core of the Mueller investigation.    President Trump very reluctantly signed the bill into law (since only 3 members of the House and 2 members of the Senate voted against it, it was veto-proof).   The law gave Trump until October 1st to impose the sanctions.   It is now the end of October, and no new sanctions have been imposed.

If I were Mueller, I would count this among the many many examples of Trump's positive, even protective attitude toward Russia, which only bolsters Mueller's case for collusion.

Ralph