This is the part where they all start taking each other down
Donald Trump and his family are in the process of being taken down by the criminal justice system in New York. Matt Gaetz’s best friend and ex-girlfriend are now helping prosecutors criminally indict him. The wheels of justice turn far too slowly, but they’re getting there. Now that things are in motion across the board, it appears some of Trump’s people have decided to start taking each other down.
Out of nowhere today, Gordon Sondland – the guy who gave false testimony in Trump’s first impeachment trial and then came back later and fessed up to Trump’s crimes – has filed a $1.8 million suit against Mike Pompeo of all people. Why? Sondland says that Pompeo promised that Sondland’s legal fees would be covered if he stuck to the party line during his testimony.
This raises two questions. 1) Why is Sondland really doing this? 2) Why now? $1.8 million is a lot of money to most people, but Sondland isn’t exactly hurting for money; his art collection alone is reportedly worth fifteen times that amount. So why is Sondland suddenly taking this civil action, a year and a half after his testimony, and four months after Trump and Pompeo left office?
The timing feels like it’s not coincidental. Trump is finally about to get hit with criminal charges, and now suddenly Sondland is reemerging from the shadows with a suit that seems aimed at using discovery to unearth Mike Pompeo’s criminal role in the Trump-Ukraine scandal. Civil cases can’t directly result in criminal charges. But if Sondland gets his hands on evidence of Pompeo’s criminal actions, he can give it to prosecutors, and he can make it public in the name of pushing prosecutors to file criminal charges.
We don’t have any way of knowing if the Department of Justice is already building a criminal case against Mike Pompeo and others for the Trump-Ukraine scandal. But it sure feels like Gordon Sondland may be trying to nudge things in that direction. If Sondland ends up taking down Pompeo, then Pompeo could decide to try to save himself by taking down others from the Trump regime.
This kind of thing was never going to play out as quickly as observers would like, or as quickly as justice would seemingly demand. But it keeps becoming more clear that Trump and many of his people are going down in the end. And now it’s looking like some of them are going to do us all the favor of taking each other down as part of the chaos.
