Mick Mulvaney #BeBest At Trying To Make Trump's Ukraine Crimes Great Again

GET OVER IT!

Public hearings in the House may be over (for now, we don't really know what's coming), but that doesn't mean evidence of crimes committed by Trump Inc. aren't still rushing toward us at one million American kilometers per hour. It's like a tsunami, except instead of delivering confused fish unto the seashore, it's delivering evidence unto us!

The Washington Post has new things to report about (acting) White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney's involvement in Donald Trump's Ukraine extortion crime scheme, as well as his efforts to cover up the White House's withholding of desperately needed military aid for Ukraine that had already been appropriated by Congress. The news is coming out because the White House Counsel's Office has been doing an internal look-see at what happened, the same review we wrote about weeks back, where it seemed like the White House was going to try to scapegoat NSC lawyer John Eisenberg (and ONLY HIM) for putting the transcript of Trump's treason call with Ukraine on the secret Bin Laden server, where they keep America's deepest secrets and also Trump's most embarrassing treason calls with foreign leaders.

We should mention that White House Counsel Pat Cipollone haaaaaaaaaate Mick Mulvaney, because that is a relevant fact.

Cipollone's review has found Mulvaney schemin' and gettin' buck wild trying to invent after-the-fact legal justifications for the hold, which was factcheck illegal, according to many concerned administration officials:  

The research by the White House Counsel's Office, which was triggered by a congressional impeachment inquiry announced in September, includes early August email exchanges between acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and White House budget officials seeking to provide an explanation for withholding the funds after the president had already ordered a hold in mid-July on the nearly $400 million in security assistance, according to the three people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal White House deliberations.

Also:

One person briefed on the records examination said White House lawyers are expressing concern that the review has turned up some unflattering exchanges and facts that could at a minimum embarrass the president. It's unclear whether the Mulvaney discussions or other records pose any legal problems for Trump in the impeachment inquiry, but some fear they could pose political problems if revealed publicly.

Ooh, tell us the parts that would "at a minimum embarrass the president." We like that kind of stuff! Is it all about how Trump is a dumb stupid idiot who's extremely bad at crime? Because that would be surprising.

As the Post reports, Trump ordered the hold (which was carried out by Mulvaney ) back in July without bothering to even ask anybody if it was legal. Therefore, in August Mulvaney was emailing Russell Vought, the (acting) OMB director, to see if there was any kind of legal justification for what they were doing. Reportedly he was also very concerned with how long they could get away with hiding Ukraine's congressionally appropriated aid inside the folds of Trump's voluminous butt.

But what happened between Trump ordering the hold and Mulvaney trying to legally justify it after the fact? You know, besides Trump's treason call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on July 25?

Well, you see, a little birdie told them ...

Mulvaney's request for information came days after the White House Counsel's Office was put on notice that an anonymous CIA official had made a complaint to the agency's general counsel about Trump's July 25 call to Zelensky during which he requested Ukraine investigate former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden, as well as an unfounded theory that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

In other words, they got clued in to the fact that they were in the process of getting caught. And when they for official got caught, when Congress found out about the whistleblower complaint filed by that same anonymous CIA official, that is when they released the aid, on September 11.

As Steve Benen notes at the MaddowBlog, in one way this is totally on-brand for TrumpWorld, as his lackeys are always having to go back and jerry-rig plans after the fact, for "policies" he's prematurely announced on Twitter and whatnot. (Benen in particular mentions SPAAAAAACE FORCE!) Also when Trump was hosting "The Celebrity Apprentice," he'd r eportedly get confused and accidentally fire the wrong person all the time, which meant they had to go back and create an imaginary show out of spliced footage that made it look like Trump meant to do that.

In this case, it just so happens that Trump, who is for real the president of the United States, was illegally extorting/bribing the Ukrainian president for political investigations into his rivals in order to help him steal an election he couldn't win clean if his life depended on it.

And Mick Mulvaney helped him commit the crime, and also had to do clean-up on aisle #Trump, in order to try to make Trump's crimes great again, or at least legal again. GET OVER IT, as Mulvaney said when he stood in the White House briefing room and confessed.

We don't know what-all else Pat Cipollone found in his review, but we highly doubt he'll be turning it over to Congress, since Cipollone wrote that funny, universally mocked letter that said according to his very important legal reasoning, Congress is not Donald Trump's real dad and also does not exist.

But as we noted, Cipollone hates Mulvaney so much , so we might get more leaks.

Drip drip drip!

[ Washington Post ]

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