Here come the big Robert Mueller indictments you’ve been waiting for
The saga of Donald Trump’s criminally illegitimate and disastrous presidency has dragged on long enough that it’s left some of us antsy. Special Counsel Robert Mueller has been so quietly methodical with his investigation, it’s easy to forget that he’s already gotten a plea deal out of Michael Flynn and he has Paul Manafort under house arrest. The big question, of course, is when Mueller is going to move on Trump’s current and recent inner circle, in order to take him down. Now we have a good look at that answer.
When former Trump adviser Sam Nunberg had a series of cartoonish meltdowns on cable news this week, his strange behavior understandably became the focus, and it drowned out the real underlying story. Nunberg was upset because he’d been subpoenaed to testify before a Mueller grand jury about his communications with ten different people in the Trump-Russia scandal. The names on that list are eye popping.
Here are the people that we now know are the focus of that grand jury, thanks to Nunberg’s big mouth: Carter Page. Corey Lewandowski. Hope Hicks. Keith Schiller. Michael Cohen. Paul Manafort. Rick Gates. Roger Stone. Steve Bannon. Also, some guy named Donald Trump. Aside from Gates’ recent plea deal and Manafort’s existing bundle of indictments, we don’t yet have any confirmation of which of these people are being targeted for criminal indictments, and which of them are merely being included as conduits for getting to the targets. But grand juries only have one purpose: to hand down indictments. And they nearly always do it.
So now we know that at least some, and maybe most, of the above ten names are on the verge of being indicted. Prosecutors always turn indictments into arrests or plea deals. How long will this grand jury take? That’s up to them. We don’t even know how long this grand jury has been in action before Nunberg outed it. But the indictments and arrests you’ve been waiting for are coming. The clock is ticking.
