This doesn’t pass the smell test

| 10:00 pm EDT March 27, 2019
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Seventy-two hours after Donald Trump’s newly handpicked Attorney General William Barr announced that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had found no evidence of Trump-Russia collusion, and that he was not recommending any charges regarding obstruction, so many holes have been poked in that announcement, we’re not even sure where to start. Suffice it to say that something smells here, and the worsening stench has the makings of a coverup.

For instance, why would Robert Mueller wait until almost all the way to winning his high stakes subpoena battle with an unnamed foreign government-owned company, and then hurry up and turn in his “final report” without waiting just a bit longer to get his hands on that subpoenaed information? If Mueller simply decided that the subpoena wasn’t important, why did other federal prosecutors reveal in court this morning that they’re still pursuing the subpoena, and that Mueller’s grand jury is still “continuing robustly” without him?

Then there’s the fact that, even as Barr published a nuanced interpretation of the findings of the Trump obstruction investigation, Barr basically just yelled “no collusion” when it came to the Trump-Russia collusion investigation. How convenient, considering that Trump’s own mouth gave away that all he cared about was being “cleared” on collusion. Nevermind that people with high security clearances like House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff are now saying that they know about collusion for a fact.

Now that new polling reveals the majority of Americans aren’t buying William Barr’s claims about the Mueller report, the Trump gang can’t even get their story straight about how they’re going to play this next. Lindsey Graham announced yesterday that Barr was going to let Trump edit the report before it was released, even as Barr’s own DOJ was insisting that no such thing would happen.

Do Donald Trump and his people even know what their next step is? Did they even plan things out this far, or were they naively counting on the public falling for Barr’s love letter to Trump? Team Trump is now sitting on a proverbial ticking time bomb, trying to keep it from going off by any desperate means possible, even as they try to prevent anyone from figuring out what the bomb’s ingredients are. All we know for the moment is that this doesn’t pass the smell test – and it’s getting stanker by the hour.