Based on news reports, it doesn’t seem Donald Trump is handling himself like a martial arts master, cooly in control. He’s more like an old punch-drunk fighter swinging at every shadow. This morning he attacked Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein:

I am being investigated for firing the FBI Director by the man who told me to fire the FBI Director! Witch Hunt

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 16, 2017

The Daily Beast also reports that Trump is furious with Rosenstein and would have no qualms throwing him under the bus.

The word for today, boy’s and girls, is “lawyered.” As in “lawyered up.” Mike Pence has lawyered up. Trump personal attorney Michael Cohen has lawyered up.  Bob Mueller also is lawyering up and hiring 13 more lawyers to pursue the investigations.

The investigation has expanded to take in obstruction of justice on Trump’s part as well as little Jared’s business dealings. The list of people being investigated has expanded to included associates of associates.

The circle of people under scrutiny in the various investigations into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election apparently has widened to include Rick Gates (pictured at left), former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s closest ally on the trail.

According to a memo sent out to former campaign officials and obtained by various news outlets, a lawyer for President Donald Trump’s transition team requested the preservation of all documents related to Russia and Ukraine, as well as travel records and all documents connected to a small handful of former campaign officials. Gates’ name was on that list, sandwiched between other Trump allies known to be under federal investigation like Manafort and Michael Flynn, the ousted national security adviser.

Earlier today there was speculation that Rosenstein would have to recuse himself from the investigation. The Justice Department is now saying otherwise. Or, at least, it’s not recusal time yet.

“As the deputy attorney general has said numerous times, if there comes a point when he needs to recuse, he will. However, nothing has changed,” DOJ spokesman Ian Prior said in a statement, according to the Washington Post.

ABC News reported Friday that sources within the Department of Justice said Rosenstein had acknowleged that he could have to recuse himself in a meeting with colleagues. Rosenstein is overseeing the investigation into Russian meddling, though it is being spearheaded by a special prosecutor, Robert Mueller.

But before the Justice Department statement, Paul Waldman speculated what a Trump version of the Saturday Night Massacre might look like.

If Rosenstein is considering recusal, it’s because of his role in the Comey firing — which, let’s not forget, Trump admitted both on national television and in a conversation with Russian officials in the Oval Office that he did out of unhappiness with the Russia investigation. Rosenstein could become a witness in the obstruction investigation, which would make it problematic for him to be overseeing Mueller. The authority would then fall to Brand. Is Trump going to go after her next? What happens if he orders her to fire Mueller? Would she resign in protest like Richardson and Ruckelshaus, or follow orders like Bork?

“Brand” is Associate Attorney General Rachel Brand, now #3 at the Justice Department. Waldman continues,

While Trump is erratic and impulsive much of the time, he seems particularly so with regard to this investigation. In some limited way it’s understandable — no president likes being investigated — but it seems to be pushing Trump to particular heights of irrationality. If you were trying to limit the investigation and its political fallout and not antagonize the prosecutors, it would be utterly insane to send out these kinds of tweets. Trump’s staff and lawyers are surely begging him to stop. But they can’t control him. There may be people who are willing to stand up to him and tell him that he’s making a mistake, but he’s obviously not willing to listen.

So, even though it would be the height of folly on Trump’s part to try to fire Mueller, he still might try to fire Mueller. But, legally, he cannot do so and would have to find a toady, a Robert Bork, in the Justice Department to do the job for him. But if it gets to that, we’ll know that Trump has totally, utterly lost it.

There have been 154 mass shootings, 6,880 gun-related deaths, and 13,504 firearm injuries in the U.S. in 2017, so far, according to Fortune. But some are shocked, shocked I tell you, that a powerful white male pro-gun Congressperson would be a victim of gun violence. And it must be liberals’ fault.

I don’t want to talk about fault just yet. This one guy decided to shoot at congressmen. As far as I know, he didn’t consult with anybody first. Nobody took a vote to ask him to shoot people. He did this by himself.

I do want to talk about rhetoric. Violent rhetoric does, I think, encourage people to become violent. Whether Kathy Griffin’s stupid stunt of a few days ago played any part in the shooter’s motivation to shoot we cannot know, but it certainly didn’t help.

But there’s another expression of political violence being blamed for the shooting, and this one is entirely unjust, and I want to say something about it.

Even before this week’s shooting in Virginia, righties were throwing fits over the new production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar going on in the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, Manhattan. The director, Oskar Eustis, dresses his characters to look like current-day politicians, and Caesar himself unmistakably resembles Donald Trump. And, as you might remember, Caesar is assassinated in this play. So the wingnuts interpreted this as expressing a desire to kill Donald Trump. In an act of massive cultural cowardice, Bank of America and Delta Air Lines had both withdrawn sponsorship money from the theater even before the shooting because of the play.

The terrible irony here is that Shakespeare’s sympathies in this play are with Caesar, not the assassins. As director Eustis said,

“Julius Caesar can be read as a warning parable to those who try to fight for democracy by undemocratic means. To fight the tyrant does not mean imitating him.” 

This play does not glorify assassination; just the opposite. All the bedwetting about the assassination scene just reveals how culturally illiterate Americans are. This play is one of the jewels of English literature. Anyone who has graduated high school, never mind college, ought to be familiar with it even if you’re not a Shakespeare fan.

The play is really about Brutus, a man absorbed with notions of honor and morality, who allows himself to be talked into joining the assassins to kill his friend Caesar. The first part of the play is about Brutus coming to that decision, the assassination scene is roughly in the middle, and the second part is about Brutus being haunted by Caesar’s ghost while being driven into disgrace and exile, and eventual suicide. And rather than restore the Republic, the fallout of Caesar’s assassination helped reinforce the Empire. J.C. was followed by Augustus, then Tiberius, then Caligula, etc. pretty much going from bad to worse.

So, basically, the moral of the play is, don’t assassinate people. Even if it looks like a good idea at the time. It may not turn out well.

The genetically defective Donald Trump, Jr., naturally shared an opinion that the play was about “NY elites glorifying the assassination of our President.” We can’t expect anything more from the Trump offspring. But people with normal chromosomes should have no such excuse.

I do think conflating Caesar with Trump is a terrible slander of Julius Caesar.  Sophie Gilbert wrote for The Atlantic,

So why is a Trumpian Caesar so controversial?

The easy answer is that right-wing media outlets have generated outrage, amplified both by Donald Trump Jr. and by Griffin’s earlier stunt. But it’s also possible that the issue with the Public’s current production is that the point it’s making doesn’t fully compute, no matter your affiliation. “Shakespeare’s Caesar is a war hero and, as smartly played by Gregg Henry, a deeply charismatic one,” wrote The New York Times’s Jesse Green. “When offered the chance, three times, to become emperor, he chooses three times to remain a senator. This is more like George Washington than Mr. Trump.”

Many commentators have argued that, rather than advocate for the assassination of a controversial political figure, Julius Caesar does the opposite, warning of the chaos that comes from such action. But the subtlety of such a point is considerably easier to miss than the symbolism of a blond-coiffed businessman in a red tie being graphically executed onstage. “We are asked to consider how far citizens may go in removing a destructive leader, and we are warned about unforeseen consequences,” Green writes. “Dressing Caesar as Trump gives that agenda its juice but leaves the production a bit desiccated and incoherent thereafter.”

So maybe the production doesn’t quite work; I haven’t seen it and cannot comment. (I did see a Julius Caesar at the Delacorte many years ago, with David McCallum as Caesar. The production had traditional staging but suffered from Brutus being played by a guy from the Kevin Costner School of Under-Acting. Instead of a man tormented by a gut-wrenching decision he came to regret, this Brutus was more like a nice mook who fell in with the wrong crowd. Oh, well)

The great turning point of the play is, of course, the funeral scene, when Mark Antony turned the crowd against the assassins. I regret this isn’t the whole scene, but IMO nobody did it better than Brando.

Philip Bump comments on what might be the most suspicious thing Sessions said yesterday:

In his testimony, Sessions told Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) that he “did not recall” any meeting during which Trump expressed concern or curiosity about what Russia had been doing during the 2016 election. Sessions also testified that he himself, as the country’s and Trump’s lead law enforcement official, was never briefed on Russian interference.

Even if nothing else Sessions said on Tuesday had comported with what former FBI director James B. Comey said before the same committee last week, this did. Manchin asked Comey whether Trump had ever expressed curiosity about Russia’s attempts to swing the election; Comey said that he “[didn’t] remember any conversations with the president about the Russia election interference.”

Both before and after his election and inauguration, Trump’s attitude toward the Russia investigation has almost exclusively been that it’s a hassle, not an important step toward assuring the sanctity of American elections. (A sanctity, mind you, that has been his purported focus in establishing a commission to look at alleged voter fraud.) Instead, he has consistently disputed whether Russia was even behind the hacking — a line that Sessions mirrored in his testimony on Tuesday by stating that Russia’s role was the conclusion of U.S. intelligence agencies without embracing it as his own.

Here’s Trump’s most recent comment:

Russian officials must be laughing at the U.S. & how a lame excuse for why the Dems lost the election has taken over the Fake News.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 30, 2017

Of course, Trump is downplaying anything that might question the legitimacy of his election. This suggests that somewhere in his addled brain he knows Russians were trying to help him win the election.

And, of course, this tells us he is less concerned about the security of the United States than he is in protecting his own sorry ass.

So I’m back, the malware cleanup is done, and the site is safe to visit. I’ll be back tomorrow with some actual posts.

I didn’t get to watch it, but I take it Jeff Sessions’s testimony today was a lot of chest thumping and bluster without substance.

Josh Marshall:

The big and overriding takeaway from this hearing is that Sessions declined to answer almost all the pertinent questions – in most cases because they involved his discussions with President Trump and in at least one case (or this was what I understood him to be saying) discussions with other leaders at the Department of Justice. There’s an important back and forth about what basis he had for this refusal. That is important in itself. But the gist, as Sessions eventually seemed to concede, was that he was refusing to answer because he did not want to preclude or render moot the President’s ability to assert executive privilege.

But as the President hasn’t asserted executive privilege yet, I’m not sure how that’s supposed to fly.

What did jump out at me across the whole testimony is that Sessions claims he recused himself from the Russia probe simply and only because it involved a presidential campaign of which he could reasonably be viewed as a top advisor. This is almost certainly not true. Sessions recused himself the day after The Washington Post reported two meetings with Ambassador Kislyak which Sessions had failed to disclose at his confirmation hearing. Sessions now claims that that he had made what amounts to an in pectore recusal the day after he was sworn in (little shout out to you canon lawyers out there). So in Sessions’ mind, what we thought was a recusal was just the formal version of what he had done in his head weeks earlier. Again, this seems almost certainly false. Inevitably this elaborate ruse undermines his credibility about all the rest. Comey seemed to have in mind something more than simply a technical reason requiring Sessions to recuse himself.

Big picture: Sessions refused to answer the biggest questions; he was almost certainly not telling the truth about what triggered his refusal. Most of the rest was atmospherics.

Jennifer Rubin:

The contrast with Comey was striking. Sessions, grayer and older, looked nervous and shrunken in his seat, growing defensive at times. He weakly complained to Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) about her questioning. He sharply objected: “I’m not able to be rushed this fast, it makes me nervous.” Indeed, while Comey was relaxed, confident and expansive, Sessions was evasive and skittish. He repeatedly refused to answer questions, not invoking executive privilege but saying it was Justice Department “policy” not to talk about conversations with the president. Democrats repeatedly challenged him, accusing him of “stonewalling.” Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) slammed him: “You are impeding this investigation.” Heinrich told Sessions there’s no “appropriateness” standard that alleviates him from the need to testify under oath fully and completely. Heinrich flat out accused Sessions of “obstructing” the investigation.

Sarah Posner:

Sessions’s recusal — his justification for it, and the scope of how he defines it — is central to the integrity of the FBI’s investigation into Russian interference in our election, and possible Trump campaign collusion with it. That’s because Sessions was at the center of advising the Trump campaign on national security issues during the campaign and has failed to be forthcoming about how that role might have blended with his communications with Russian officials throughout. This raises questions as to how impartially he can exercise his role as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer and whether he may still be in a position to influence the Russia probe.

Sessions’s testimony, though, failed to put to rest any doubts Senate investigators, or the public, have about many of the matters relating to his recusal, and whether he is adhering to it. In fact, Sessions only raised new and potentially damaging questions about his actions and cast doubt on his own truthfulness about what the recusal entails.

Charles Pierce:

The people who best treed JeffBo on his most preposterous bullshit—Heinrich, Kamala Harris of California, and The Mustache of Righteousness, Angus King of Maine—could only push him so far. Everybody on that committee knew that what JeffBo was selling was batter-fried nonsense. (Call me an elitist snob if you like, but whenever I hear a Southerner talking about “mah honah,” I reach for William Tecumseh Sherman’s phone number.)

Everybody on that committee knew that, when JeffBo declined to answer questions about whether James Comey was fired because of the Russia probe, he was hiding the plain truth behind a privilege that he’d made up on the spot. Everybody on that committee knew that JeffBo’s memory lapses were at best highly convenient. (He couldn’t remember meeting the Russian ambassador, but he could quote an op-ed by William Barr from almost a year ago? That dog don’t even want to hunt.) Everybody on that committee knew that you can’t refuse to answer a question because the president* might want to invoke executive privilege at some vague point in the future. But if the majority is content to look like an entire bag of tools and pretend otherwise, there’s not much the Senate can do about being obstructed in such a shameless fashion.

Actually, there is one historical precedent for what Sessions asserted that went unmentioned, and that precedent is not promising. Although even it wasn’t as barefaced as it was on Tuesday, the assertion of an illegitimate, unasserted “executive privilege” was, for a long time, central to the defense of John Mitchell, Richard Nixon’s corrupt AG who went to jail behind his crimes relating to Watergate and what Mitchell himself called, “the White House horrors.” It is an argument you make when you know that there is an unacceptable political price to be paid if the president* actually does assert executive privilege in advance—which is what the Obama administration did on several occasions, despite Tom Cotton’s having been deliberately and dishonestly obtuse on the comparison during Tuesday’s hearings.

There’s only a certain amount of sham that our institutions can tolerate. We’re getting very close to it.

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I’ve been arguing for months that the Russian hacking story needs to be taken seriously apart from whatever one felt about the election. I’ve also been saying all along that there’s no clear indication that anything the Russians did made any difference, and Clinton probably would have lost anyway.

I’m bringing this up now because I keep running into people who sincerely believe this whole Trump-Russia thing is just something like a false flag operation being run by Clinton supporters in media and government. One of these geniuses just told me James Comey obviously is part of this conspiracy. Um, James Comey? The guy who probably did cost Clinton the election? The whackjobbery is strong with this one.

Clinton supporters do like to bring up the Russian hacks as one of their many excuses for why Clinton’s loss was not her fault, but frankly, that’s bogus, also. As I’ve said, there’s no clear indication that anything the Russians did cost Clinton the election. There were so many factors that cost Clinton the election that it’s just about impossible to point to any one that made any measurable difference — with the possible exception of James Comey’s October 28 letter to Congress about Clinton’s damn emails. That does seem to have hit Clinton’s poll numbers hard.

And at this point, to believe the “false flag” theory one would have to believe that Glenn Greenwald and the crew at The Intercept are Clinton trolls. I don’t think so.

There are five major investigations going on right now into connections between the Trump campaign and Russia — two investigations in the Senate, two in the House, and one being led by special counsel Robert Mueller. Russian interference in the election is only one items on their agenda. They’re also looking into the circumstances that led to Michael Flynn’s dismissal as national security adviser, any inappropriate connections between Trump campaign and staff and foreign governments, leaks to media, and attempts to impede investigations of all that.

We don’t know what all Bob Mueller is doing, but he’s still staffing up. This just in —

On the other side of Pennsylvania Avenue, special counsel Robert Mueller has been quietly and methodically building the equivalent of a small US attorney’s office — a team of formidable legal minds who’ve worked on everything from Watergate to Enron, unlikely to leave any stone unturned.

The hires include top criminal prosecutors.  These include Michael Dreeben, considered one of the top criminal prosecutors in the U.S. Mueller is serious, and he has no particular ties to the Clintons that I can find. It may be months yet before we know where he’s going with his work.

Aside from the election, it seems just about every part of Trump’s real estate business, plus any associates one ever hears about, has ties to Russia. This is particularly critical, since Trump still is making money from that business, and genetically compromised offspring Eric admitted that he shows his father profit reports.  (Today the Washington Post published a story saying that Trump lawyer Marc E. Kasowitz has ties to Russia, for pity’s sake. )

Eric Trump said in an interview aired early Tuesday that sharing profit reports with his father “doesn’t blur the lines” in separating the family business from President Trump’s administration.

“You’re allowed to show that and remember the president of the United States has zero conflicts of interest,” Eric Trump told ABC’s “Good Morning America.” Zero.”

Some of those profits may be from money laundering for the Russians. Trump is extremely vulnerable to abuse-of-office and corruption charges, whether he realizes it or not. And then there are the many associates, such as his out-of-his-depth son-in-law Jared Kushner, who might as well have an “R” for rotten stamped into his forehead.

So, yeah, this is a big deal, and it’s a big deal that has nearly nothing to do with Hillary Clinton.

There’s lots of hollering for impeachment NOW, in both news and social media. I want Trump to go away as much as anybody, but if it’s done at all we’ll get one shot at it. Not all the ducks are in a row yet. The Slate Impeach-o-Meter has the odds for an impeachment at 41 percent, which seems about right to me —

And yet, as I alluded to yesterday, until this stuff all tangibly happens—until the things the Mueller investigation might conclude become the things it did conclude—Republicans, who hold the majority in Congress, don’t really have any reason to bail on their president. So we’ll raise our meter, but only by a symbolic 1 percent.

What’s going on with Trump resembles the Nixon almost-impeachment more than it does what went on with Andrew Johnson or Bill Clinton. Although technically Nixon wasn’t impeached, when he resigned in 1974 he did so after articles of impeachment had been passed in the House Judiciary Committee, and party elders in Congress assured him that they not only would pass in the House, there were enough votes in the Senate to remove him from office.  So this is the one time the impeachment/removal process succeeded, even if it was cut short at the end. So let’s look at Watergate.

Forgive me for not explaining who everybody in this narrative is. I’ve got a limited amount of time to blog today.

The Watergate burglary happened on June 17, 1972. Later that same month, the first of Woodward and Bernstein’s investigations tying the burglars to the White House were published in the Washington Post.

In June 1972 (we learned later), Nixon and Haldeman agreed to try to shut down the FBI investigation of Watergate. Through surrogates, FBI Director L. Patrick Gray was ordered to stay out of it.

The Watergate burglars were indicted by a federal grand jury for burglary, conspiracy and wiretapping in September, 1972.

Nixon was re-elected in a landslide in November, 1972.

In January 1973 the Watergate trial began. Several burglars entered guilty pleas. McCord and Liddy were convicted. Shortly after that McCord told a judge that he’d perjured himself under pressure. About this time John Dean began to cooperate with federal prosecutors.

In April, L. Patrick Gray resigned as FBI Director after it was discovered he had destroyed evidence that had been in E. Howard Hunt’s safe. William Ruckelshaus is appointed to replace Gray. Shortly after that Nixon aides Ehrlichman, Haldeman, and Kleindienst resigned. John Dean is fired. Nixon looks guilty as hell.

The Senate Watergate Committee began televised hearings in May 1973. Shortly after that Archibald Cox is appointed special prosecutor.

In July 1973, Nixon refused to release White House tapes to anybody.

In October 1973, Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned for being a corrupt s.o.b. I don’t think anyone ever connected him to Watergate.

October 20, 1973, was the “Saturday night massacre” that resulted in Archibald Cox being fired. Nixon was pretty much toast after that, but impeachment was still several months away.

Let’s now move on to 1974. People close to Nixon continue to be indicted or to confess to illegal activities of various sorts.

On March 1, 1974, Nixon himself is named an “unindicted co-conspirator” in indictments of seven former presidential aides.

Finally we get to May 9, 1974 — impeachment hearings begin in the House Judiciary Committee. They were televised beginning on July 24. The Committee approved articles of impeachment by the end of July.

And then on August 8, Nixon delivered his resignation speech. He had been assured that not only would the articles be approved in the House, there were enough votes in the Senate to remove him from office. So, while Nixon technically was not impeached, in effect he actually was.

As I see it, relatively speaking, Trump’s case is somewhere around late spring or early summer of 1973. There is a lot of investigating still to do, and people close to Trump (first and foremost, Kushner and Sessions, IMO) have yet to be grilled and (presumably) indicted. As we’re seeing today after the Comey testimony, plenty of Republicans are still trying to protect Trump. And they have a majority in both Houses. And today’s Republicans are even worse partisan whackjobs than Republicans were in the 1970s. If attempted now, impeachment would fail.

I’m saying impeachment right this minute is premature. Let the process play out a little bit more first. I don’t mind Democrats standing up and saying they’d support it, but I also don’t mind Democrats saying it’s too soon, because it is.

British elections today, and Theresa May is in trouble.  She may hang on to being PM, but only by the skin of her teeth. And the results today could mean that Brexit could be canceled.

Naturally I’m having computer issues today, which means posting will be limited. From what I’ve heard of the Senate hearings so far, it strikes me that Republicans seem to be trying to blame Comey for not stopping Trump from trying to obstruct justice. Good luck with that, guys.

A few days ago, we were told that Donald Trump had signed a $110 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia. Details were not made available to the press immediately, but we were assured that this was a Big Deal.

“That was a tremendous day. Tremendous investments in the United States,” The so-called president said. “Hundreds of billions of dollars of investments into the United States and jobs, jobs, jobs.”

I’ve been keeping an eye out for analysis of what jobs might be created, or whether Congress actually would approve it. but it turns out there’s nothing to approve.

That’s right; the Brookings Institution is reporting that there is no arms deal.

I’ve spoken to contacts in the defense business and on the Hill, and all of them say the same thing: There is no $110 billion deal. Instead, there are a bunch of letters of interest or intent, but not contracts. Many are offers that the defense industry thinks the Saudis will be interested in someday. So far nothing has been notified to the Senate for review. The Defense Security Cooperation Agency, the arms sales wing of the Pentagon, calls them “intended sales.” None of the deals identified so far are new, all began in the Obama administration.

The author, Bruce Riedel, says that it’s doubtful the Saudis could pay for a $110 billion arms deal, anyway, given the price of oil these days.

So what was that dog and pony show in Riyadh about, anyway? I’ll bet you can guess, but here’s a hint:

The Trump International Hotel received about $270,000 from a lobbying campaign tied to the government of Saudi Arabia last year, according to a filing submitted to the Justice Department last week.

The filing from the MSLGroup, a public relations firm, shows that the group spent about $270,000 at the Trump International Hotel while conducting lobbying efforts on behalf of the Saudi Arabian government. MSLGroup was helping Saudi Arabia with several lobbying efforts, including opposing the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA), which allows the families of 9/11 victims to sue Saudi Arabia.

Yes. The so-called president insults the mayor of London for allegedly being soft on terrorism; meanwhile, he’s been in bed with a group trying to prevent the Saudis from owning up to their role in 9/11. An attack on Trump’s city. What a guy.