Congressman Ted Lieu talks Robert Mueller’s Trump-Russia contingency plan
Donald Trump has spent the past few days publicly whining about Special Counsel Robert Mueller instead of trying to take any substantive action against him, which perhaps means that Trump knows he doesn’t have the political muscle to try to fire him. But what if Trump does try? Mueller has been on the job for the better part of a year, and he’s repeatedly demonstrated that he’s been several steps ahead of Trump the entire time, so Mueller is widely assumed to have a contingency plan if Trump tries to fire him. Now Congressman Ted Lieu is talking about that plan.
Trump hasn’t exactly been demonizing Mueller, so much as insisting that the Mueller investigation into the Trump-Russia scandal shouldn’t exist, while falsely claiming that Mueller – who in actuality is a lifelong registered Republican himself – has put together a team of Democrats to run the investigation. Here’s how Ted Lieu sees it: “For several days Donald Trump has attacked Mueller. In addition to showing CONSCIOUSNESS OF GUILT, these attacks give Mueller time to prepare for the possibility that he, Sessions, or Rosenstein get fired. I’m certain Mueller has a contingency plan. The truth is coming out.”
Lieu’s use of “CONSCIOUSNESS OF GUILT” in all caps is seemingly a way of mocking the fact that Trump’s own staffers wrote “DO NOT CONGRATULATE” in their notes for Trump during his call with Vladimir Putin, yet Trump congratulated Putin anyway. Lieu then pointed to the four reported topics that Mueller wants to speak to Trump about, and added “Now we know why Donald Trump has been having a meltdown and attacking Special Counsel Mueller by name. @POTUS realizes he is going to be interviewed by Mueller not as a witness, but as a TARGET of the federal criminal investigation.”
The bottom line is that it’s so obvious Robert Mueller has a contingency plan, even members of Congress are publicly discussing it under the assumption that it exists. The catch, of course, is that no one – not Ted Lieu, not us, and most importantly not Donald Trump – knows what that plan is. If Trump were to try to fire Mueller, he knows he’ll face consequences that are as mysterious as they are severe.
Bill Palmer is the publisher of the political news outlet Palmer Report