Everything hits the fan at once, and Donald Trump is getting hit from all sides
Palmer Report » Analysis
For a few days there, Donald Trump thought he was winning. Much of the media was reporting William Barr’s laugh out loud “summary” of the Mueller report as if it were the Mueller report, Trump was getting away with falsely claiming he had been exonerated, and he was giddily seeking revenge against, well, everyone. But as the past week has gone on, things have gotten gradually darker for Trump – and today everything hit the fan at once.
Things began ominously enough today for Donald Trump, when the House Judiciary Committee voted to subpoena the Mueller report. That alone was bad news for Trump. But even as that battle was gearing up throughout the day, Mueller’s team began leaking that the report is actually rather bad for Trump, and that Attorney General William Barr is misrepresenting what the report says. This gives House Democrats precisely what they need when it comes to winning the inevitable subpoena battle in the court of law and the court of public opinion. But that was only the half of it.
In what appears to be a well-timed coordinated effort by House Democrats, the House Ways and Means Committee formally requested this afternoon that the Treasury Department turn over Donald Trump’s tax returns within the next seven days. This came even as the Miami Herald revealed today that the FBI has secretly been running a counterintelligence probe for some time now into what Chinese operatives have been doing at Mar-a-Lago. And of course yesterday, the House Oversight Committee served subpoenas in Trump’s White House security clearance scandal.
Donald Trump is now getting hit from all sides. His attempt at misrepresenting and burying the Mueller report has now failed. We’re about to find out what he’s been so desperately hiding in his tax returns all this time. We’re also about to learn precisely what Trump’s top advisers and family members did to get themselves rejected for security clearances before he overruled them. This is getting uglier for Trump by the hour.
