The Whistles Blow & Trump Doubles Down On The Deep-State Election Fiction

ANDREW HARNIK / THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Donald Trump has long nursed a well-developed sense of grievance, and no more so than anger over the (accurate) view of his enemies that he was not legitimately elected. This goes far in explaining why, as the threat of impeachment looms larger because of the whistleblower allegations central to the Ukraine scandal, he is doubling down on the long discredited fiction that the FBI worked to prevent his election and then Special Counsel Robert Mueller tried to discredit it because of a nefarious "deep state" plot. 

Attorney General William Barr's effective whitewash of Mueller's final Russia scandal report -- which found that Trump repeatedly obstructed justice but could not be criminally indicted as a sitting president -- and the former special counsel's tepid performance in an appearance before Congress in July has emboldened Barr and John Durham, a top federal prosecutor whom Barr assigned to review the origins of the Russia scandal investigation.  They are mining the conspiracy theory long nurtured by Trump that some of America's closest allies plotted with his deep-state enemies at home in 2016 to try to prevent him from winning the presidency. 

To that end, Barr and Durham visited Rome and the United Kingdom last month in an effort to prove the entire Russia scandal investigation was a setup.   Key to the setup claim is Joseph Mifsud (photo, below), whom FBI Director James Comey bluntly called a "Russian agent" and Mueller's prosecutors said "had connections to Russia."

According to the deep-state theory, Mifsud, a Maltese professor with Russian ties who taught in Rome and dangled the prospect of Russia having "dirt" on Hillary Clinton in the form of "thousands of emails" before Trump campaign staffer George Papadopoulos during a London meeting in one of the earliest connections between Kremlin and campaign, actually was a CIA agent in some tellings and merely a Western intelligence asset in others. 

Trump personal attorney and fixer Rudy Giuliani, who is Trump's wingman in his efforts to extort the Ukrainian president into investigating Joe Biden and his son, said that the White House is interested in Mifsud because it "seems to me it was a counterintelligence setup . . . a rather typical CIA plot to create a basis for the investigation." 

Papadopoulos, who served 12 days in prison after pleading guilty to lying to the FBI about his interactions with Mifsud, has tweeted that Mifsud was "an Italian intelligence asset who the CIA weaponized." 

Establishing those fictions is made easier by the fact that Mifsud went missing -- and is presumed dead by some observers -- three days after Papadopoulos guilty plea was announced. 

Barr's efforts to enlist the Italian intelligence service in his effort drew a blank.  "They confirmed no connections, no activities, no interference," an Italian intelligence official said.  

THE NEW YORK TIMES

Meanwhile, Australia also is in the White House's crosshairs. 

Prime Minister Scott Morrison was asked by the president himself in a phone call to help discredit the Mueller report because the FBI's Russia investigation began after a drunken Papadopoulos told Alexander Downer, Australia's High Commissioner to Great Britain, that Russia had political dirt on Clinton in the form of emails.  Downer later passed on the information to Australian intelligence officials, who informed the FBI. 

Like Trump's call to Ukrainian President Zelensky, the transcript of the Trump-Morrison call -- in which he essentially asked Australia to investigate itself -- was restricted to a small handful of aides in yet another instance of the president using high-level diplomacy for political gain.      

Giuliani, in communications with convicted Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort's legal team, originally intended to push a variation on the deep-state narrative -- that the Democratic National Committee, Democratic donors, and Ukrainian government officials had "colluded" to defeat Trump in 2016.  

The narrative has been repeatedly debunked, although that has not prevented Trump, Giuliani and conservative media surrogates from repeatedly pushing it, while Giuliani himself has acknowledged that while pursuing that failed narrative he stumbled upon the business dealings of Biden's son Hunter in Ukraine and consequent creation of the also debunked allegation that Biden, while Barack Obama's vice president, sought to bail out Hunter by pushing for the dismissal of a Ukrainian prosecutor who was investigating the energy firm with whom his son did business. 

This was part of an overall effort to pursue Manafort's enemies in Ukraine in the service of a possible presidential pardon. 

Trump, for whom Ukraine scandal events are moving faster than he has been able to push back against them, has defaulted to claims that there is a broad foreign plot against him.  "And just so you know --  just so you know, I was investigated," he told reporters on the South Lawn of the White House.  "I was investigated.  O.K.?  Me.  Me.  I was investigated. I was investigated.  And they think it could have been by U.K.  They think it could have been by Australia.  They think it could have been by Italy." 

Durham, the United States attorney for Connecticut and a veteran prosecutor who has broken up mafia rings and investigated CIA torture, has no power to subpoena witnesses or documents and has the authority only to read materials the government already gathered and to request voluntary interviews from witnesses.  He could write a report at the end of his review summarizing his findings and presumably make a criminal referral if he finds evidence of a crime. 

You don't have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows on the deep-state pushback narrative: Trump's base and the Fox News crowd will eagerly lap it up while few other voters, if any, will be moved as Trump's reelection poll numbers continue to march southward.  The efforts of the new lawyer for Michael Flynn, Trump's short-lived and abjectly corrupt national security adviser, to portray himself as a deep-state victim to get a lighter prison sentence also have flopped in court.  That lawyer is Sidney Powell, an appeals court attorney and Fox News pundit.

The shameless Barr, who has been hardwired to the Ukraine scandal at Trump's behest, makes predecessor Jeff Sessions seem like a pillar of probity by comparison.  He is stonewalling Congress, including Republicans, on requests for details on his deep-state mission and will do anything to placate Trump.   Even if that means undercutting his own Justice Department, U.S. law enforcement in general, and its  intelligence agencies.

DELHI SOULEIMAN / AFP-GETTY IMAGES 

There basically are two ways to get rid of Donald Trump: Convict him in the Senate after a trial on House-submitted articles of impeachment or defeat his ass in the November 2020 election. 

At least 20 Republican defections would be needed to convict Trump in the Senate, which is decidedly long shot even if many upper chamber Republicans privately loath the president and what he has done to their party, let alone the country. 

They know that even the most muted criticism will provoke outrage from Trump, but if they are going to break with Trump, they have to start somewhere and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell may have provided that opening on Monday when he joined several other Republicans in rebuking Trump over his latest effort to plunge U.S. Middle East policy into deeper turmoil by removing troops from northern Syria as Turkey plans a military offensive there.  This, in one fell swoop, is an effective abandonment of America's Kurdish allies (photo, above) and a victory for Russia, Syria and Turkey, countries ruled by three of Trump's favorite strongmen, as well as ISIS. 

"The Kurds were instrumental in our successful fight against ISIS in Syria," tweeted Nikki Haley, Trump's first ambassador to the United Nations.  "Leaving them to die is a big mistake." 

McConnell called on the president to "exercise American leadership" in a rare show of bipartisanship, and criticizing him over the Syria capitulation may be a way to provide some cover without criticizing him directly for the Ukraine outrage.  Trump, confronted by influential members of his own party, partially walked back his decision in a series of conflicting messages, but that did not appease McConnell. 

Are Senate Republicans learning to count to 20?  Perhaps.  In any event, you have to start somewhere.