Rewarmed Russiagate

Notorious Never-Trumper Patterico weighs in on the piece that theorizes that Trump has been subpoenaed by Mueller. Has Mueller Subpoenaed Trump to the Grand Jury?

The United States v. Nixon case certainly does provide a useful parallel, but not in the way Cunningham thinks. Cunningham’s notion that Rehnquist recused himself from the Nixon tapes case in part because he was a Nixon appointee is wrong. How do we know this? Because of a fact that Cunningham does not tell his readers: three other Nixon appointees were in the unanimous majority against Nixon: Warren Burger, Lewis Powell, and Harry Blackmun. The real reason Rehnquist recused himself was because he had been an Assistant Attorney General, close to Richard Kleindienst and John Mitchell.

Similarly, if the litigation in the D.C. Circuit is over Trump, any recusal by Katsas would be because of his past work for Trump, not because Trump appointed him.

But the reason I don’t believe this is simple:

If Robert Mueller subpoenaed Donald Trump to the grand jury, there is no way Donald Trump could keep his mouth shut about it for several weeks.

No way.

So: nice theory, but no sale.

Speaking of Mueller, as we expected, Alleged victim is a no-show for news conference claiming Mueller 'sex assaults' (NBC news). But how does if feel to know that one can crawl out of the woodwork at any time, and the burden of proof is on you?

From da Caller. Soros Has Given $1 Million To Group Linked To Fusion GPS For Trump-Russia Investigation Only a million? I guess he doesn't have any confidence it will lead to anything.

Also at Da Caller, Roger Stone pens a fiery denunciation of political operative Steve Bannon, who is currently thought to be cooperating with Mueller's team in an attempt to bring down political operative Roger Stone. The Treachery Of Steve Bannon

Bannon’s animus toward me stems from a column I wrote for the Daily Caller arguing that he had outlived his usefulness in the Trump White House and should be fired. The next day, he was.

Bannon also told the Washington Post that the idea to bring the woman victims to the debate was his while the paper trail tells a very different story.

If the Grand Jury was told that either of my comments to Bannon were based on anything other than information I had already attributed to my source under oath or information reported publicly that day, they were misled.

What I am guilty of is using publicly available information and a solid tip to bluff, posture, hype and punk Democrats on Twitter. This is called “politics.” It’s not illegal.

The WaPo, of course, is hyping a very different story: In email to Trump’s campaign strategist, Roger Stone implied he knew of WikiLeaks’s plans

Roger Stone, a longtime adviser to President Trump, sent an email to Trump’s chief campaign strategist in October 2016 that implied that he had information about WikiLeaks’s plans to release material that would be damaging to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

In an email to Stephen K. Bannon on Oct. 4 — days before WikiLeaks began releasing emails hacked from the account of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta — Stone said that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange feared for his personal safety but would nevertheless be releasing “a load every week going forward.”

Stone posted the exchange with Bannon on Thursday in a column on the Daily Caller website, shortly before the New York Times published a story describing the message.

The 2016 email suggests that Stone — long known for a tendency to exaggerate and hype — was nevertheless viewed by Bannon and the Trump campaign as a source to consult for information about WikiLeaks. . . 

So the criminalization of politics proceeds apace. At the time of the leaks, public knowledge and perception were that the leaker, Guccifer 2.0, was a follow up to Romanian hacker Guccifer, although there were certainly suspicions that he might be a Russian, and maybe even associated with the Russian government. As far as I can see, Stone should be in no more trouble for communicating and publishing his communications with him than any journalist would be; which is to say exactly none. It seems entirely a matter of freedom of speech. Moreover, Stone, while an ardent Trump supporter, was not part of Trump's campaign, so it seems to me that prosecuting him is stretching  of Mueller's mandate which is to investigate "any links or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of Donald Trump ." And in any event, except for the most trivial of emails, there is no evidence that Stone actually did much communicating with Guccifer 2.0 or Wikileaks.