Mick Mulvaney decides to go down with the ship
Last week Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney leaked to the media that if Donald Trump tried to scapegoat him in the Ukraine scandal, he would resign. Instead, something much uglier happened: Fiona Hill told the House impeachment inquiry yesterday that John Bolton considered Mulvaney and Rudy Giuliani to have been running a “drug deal” against Ukraine.
This has placed all eyes on Mick Mulvaney to see what he’s going to do. If the allegations hold up, Mulvaney is facing serious criminal culpability, and is headed to prison for several years. His only hope would be to either cooperate with the House impeachment inquiry in the hope of getting leniency when he’s prosecuted by the next iteration of the DOJ, or to side with Donald Trump all the way to the bottom and hope that Trump is going to magically pardon him.
Mick Mulvaney just signaled that he’s going with the latter. In addition to being Acting White House Chief of Staff, Mulvaney is also the Director of the Office of Management and Budget. The OMB had until today to comply with a subpoena for records in the Ukraine whistleblower scandal, but CNN is reporting that the OMB is going to defy the subpoena. Make no mistake, this move is Mulvaney’s call.
So now we have our answer, at least for the time being. Mick Mulvaney has decided to go down with the ship. On some level he doesn’t have a choice. Even if he fully cooperates with impeachment, he’ll still end up in prison for some amount of time. So he has to play for the magic pardon, even though Trump obviously isn’t going to stick his neck out by trying to save a pawn like Mulvaney on his way down.
