Trump stooge Chad Wolf is playing a dangerous game
This is a dangerous game for former Acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf, going on Acosta today and answering questions about his deleted January 6th text messages, at a time when the DOJ is almost certainly investigating it as a criminal matter. Wolf is answering the questions evasively, but he’s answering them – and you can bet investigators are watching for clues.
One theory is that Wolf isn’t worried because he’s innocent. He’s a terrible person who’s done terrible things, but it’s possible that he simply wasn’t involved in the deletion of the text messages or in the underlying Trump 1/6 plot. It’s also possible that Wolf is simply delusional about how much legal trouble he’s in.
When Trump was in office, he tried to fight every criminal scandal by telling a lot of lies to the media and by tweeting a bunch of mean spirited things. But there’s no evidence that this strategy helped him any. What saved him was that everyone investigating him, from the DOJ to the FBI to the Special Counsel, answered to him. Now that Trump is out of office, he has no such protections, and his stupid statements to the media aren’t preventing the DOJ from carrying out search warrants at his home and such.
Yet a number of Trump allies are still under the impression that criminal investigations can somehow magically be fended off by running to the media and saying absurd things. Ask Steve Bannon how that worked out for him. Or Peter Navarro, or John Eastman, or Jeffrey Clark. The Feds are going to indict who they’re going to indict. Nothing that anyone in Trump world says on TV is going to change that – unless they screw up and say something that makes it easier for the Feds to indict.
Bill Palmer is the publisher of the political news outlet Palmer Report