Rachel Maddow confirms Mike Pence is completely screwed in the Trump-Russia scandal

All year long, it’s been clear to close observers that Vice President Mike Pence has been bending over backwards to try to cover up Donald Trump’s Russia scandal – yet the mainstream media has barely even touched the topic. Congress notified Pence in late 2016 that Michael Flynn was on the take from foreign governments, meaning that Pence was lying when he publicly defended Flynn. Now that Flynn has flipped, Pence is screwed. Most of the media still won’t touch it, but Rachel Maddow just did.

The MSNBC host has long been the first person on cable news to acknowledge burgeoning storylines that haven’t quite yet developed into television-friendly narratives. Now Maddow is pointing out just how much trouble Mike Pence is facing. Michael Flynn is now admitting that while he was conspiring with the Russian Ambassador to illegally sabotage President Obama’s sanctions in late December of 2016, he was keeping the entire Trump transition team in the loop.

The White House has long argued that Mike Pence only made a false public defense of Michael Flynn because Flynn had lied to him in the first place. But now it’s clear that the entire transition team knew Flynn was dirty. Pence was the head of the transition team. So, as Maddow pointed out during her Monday night show, Pence’s position is now that his entire transition team was conspiring to keep him in the dark.

That doesn’t fly in the court of public opinion. More importantly, in a legal sense that Rachel Maddow hasn’t yet touched on, one or more of the people on that transition team is going to end up flipping and cutting a deal. Once one of them inevitably testifies that Mike Pence knew about the Trump-Russia conspiracy all the way back in late 2016, Pence will be facing severe legal trouble – and he’ll struggle mightily to avoid being ousted from office.