Have Donald Trump and his team just picked a new Trump-Russia scapegoat in the White House?
With four people having been arrested and two of them having pleaded guilty, the participants in Donald Trump’s Russia scandal have figured out that a whole lot of them are going down. They’re each just trying to make sure it isn’t them. We’re seeing plea deals, cooperating witnesses, and strategic leaks aimed at steering investigators in certain directions. In short, they’re trying to scapegoat each other. Now it appears Trump and his team may be trying to scapegoat a specific individual in the White House.
If you were familiar with the name “Dan Scavino” when the week began, it was only because you know him as Trump’s social media director. He’s the guy who posts promotional tweets to Trump’s Twitter account and such. Apart from that behind the scenes role, he’s largely been invisible to the public – until this week. Suddenly, he’s been invoked in a potentially incriminating manner in the Trump-Russia scandal twice within the span of a few days, and at least one of those instances came from Trump’s own team.
After Trump accidentally tweeted a confession to felony obstruction of justice this week, he then claimed that his attorney somehow wrote the tweet. Kellyanne Conway asserted that she witnessed the whole thing and it went exactly as Trump had claimed. She also insisted that Dan Scavino was involved in the posting of the tweet (link). At the time it was unclear why she chose to drag him into it.
Then CNN reported today that after Donald Trump Jr’s meeting with the Russians, his friend Rob Goldstone continued to communicate with – you guessed it – Dan Scavino after the meeting (link). We don’t yet know how CNN got these emails. But if they did come from Trump’s team, it would be the second time this week in which they’ve pushed the otherwise obscure Scavino front and center in the Trump-Russia scandal. It may be time for Dan Scavino to start asking why.
