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How Scared Should Trump Be Of Mueller? Ask John Gotti Or Sammy “The Bull” (Vanity Fair link): Ten South, the high-security wing of the Metropolitan Correctional Center, in Lower Manhattan, is, by design, as grim as any corner of hell. A half dozen narrow cells are lined one after the other, the overhead lights glow day and night, and the tiny window in each cell is frosted, allowing only an opaque hint of the world beyond the prison. There’s a slot in the solid cell door, but it’s kept shut most of the time, and so the prisoner’s unvarying horizon stretches as far as the four cinderblock walls. Only small noises intrude: the chatter of guards, the slamming of cell doors, the high-pitched moan of an inmate.
For over a year, stretching from 1990 to 1991, 10 South was the forbidding home of the triumvirate that still ruled the Gambino crime family as they awaited trial—John Gotti, Frank Locascio, and Sammy Gravano. But in the first days of October 1991, a cunning plan began to take shape to covertly transfer Sammy the Bull, in the pre-dawn hours, from his inhospitable cell.
Today, nearly three eventful decades later, what makes this Great Escape more than just a faded episode from yesteryear’s gangland chronicles, but rather relevant and even instructive, is the identity of the man who ultimately had to sign off on the operation: then U.S. Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division Robert Mueller. This is, of course, the same hard-driving crime fighter who, as special counsel, is presently leading the federal investigation into alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
For months, Mueller has been working his way up the Trump food chain, beginning with a guilty plea by campaign adviser George Papadopoulos, and, more recently, a 12-count indictment against former campaign manager Paul Manafort. (Manafort has pleaded not guilty.) On Friday, after meetings to discuss a deal, the president’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, walked into a federal courtroom in Washington, D.C., and pleaded guilty in an arrangement that reportedly includes his testimony against more campaign officials, possibly including Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and the president himself.
It is, one person close the administration recently observed, a “classic Gambino-style roll-up.” To understand how Mueller might now proceed, to get a sense of the compromises he’d be willing to make to bag the larger prosecutorial targets in his sights, it’s eye-opening to go back to the deal he cut with Sammy the Bull.
Mod: The rest of this fascinating article is available at the link above. Here is some more interesting stuff on the Trump Family crime investigation.
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It all began around around 5pm on Saturday when Axios reported that Mueller has been sitting on fifty thousand emails from the Trump transition team all along. Mueller had kept this a secret, and had tricked Trump’s people into a false sense of security by requesting copies of the emails that he already had. Trump’s people only turned over the non-incriminating emails, and thought they were covered. This means he has a whole lot of people nailed for various crimes. If Trump tries to make a move, Mueller can begin arresting them all before Trump can complete the complicated process of trying to fire him.
Mueller was sending a message that if Trump tried to get him fired, he would immediately make a move on everyone involved in those emails. In the process, Mueller was also hinting that he’s been sitting on incriminating evidence against pretty much everyone involved, likely including Trump’s current White House advisers. It was a tacit demand that Trump’s people find a way to make sure he doesn’t fire Mueller. As The Palmer Report explained at the time, this move left Trump’s team with only one option: back down, and quickly.
Sure enough, less than an hour later, Donald Trump’s team made an announcement that Trump has no intention of firing Robert Mueller, according to a CNN report. This reads like a clear attempt on the part of Trump’s team to signal to Mueller that they can indeed keep Trump under control, and that there’s no need for Mueller to release the proverbial kraken on them. If Trump and his people do end up making any further threatening gestures in Mueller’s direction, look for even more leaks about the other aces Mueller has up his sleeve. He’ll keep taking increasingly damaging warning shots until they back down and let him do his job.
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To drive his point home, Nichols imagined an alternate universe in which a President Hillary Clinton had been revealed to have done even half of the things we already know about Trump’s actions over the past two years.
“It’s 2017, and President Hillary Clinton is facing charges that Chelsea met with Russians who offered oppo on Trump,” Nichols writes at the start of his hypothetical. “Chelsea didn’t call the FBI; and Clinton national security adviser Jake Sullivan lied to the FBI about talking to the Russians.”
Nichols goes on to imagine how conservatives would have reacted if she had told FBI Director James Comey to “let go” of his agency’s investigation into Sullivan, and if three other Clinton campaign officials were subsequently charged with Russia-related crimes.
“At least three other Clinton campaign officials end up indicted,” he muses. “All of them are tied in some way to a hostile foreign power. Robby Mook is confined to his home with an ankle monitor… Let’s cut the nonsense. The GOP would be in full impeachment mode, even without the completion of the special counsel investigation. This is not a partisan point; it’s a common-sense point.”
Mod: Things really are getting interesting.
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