Politics, Society

Christie and Emanuel: Trump Should Not Have Allowed Staff To Freely Speak With Mueller

There was an interesting exchange on ABC This Week with former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Christie attacked the Trump legal team as “C-level” performers, specifically calling out John Dowd and Ty Cobb. However, the reason given by both politicians to George Stephanopolous is that they did not believe that President Donald Trump should have been so cooperative with Special Counsel Robert Mueller and should have refused to have White House staff cooperate freely with him.

Here is the exchange:

CHRIS CHRISTIE: Let’s go back to where this all really started and when the president looks back if he does get struck down, he’s talking about Don McGahn in a tweet yesterday. The people he should be talking to are John Dowd and Ty Cobb who gave the screwiest advice I’ve ever seen to a sitting executive by saying —

STEPHANOPOULOS: Cooperate in part. 

CHRISTIE: Let the White House counsel go in and give all the testimony he wants without restriction. 

RAHM EMANUEL: He needs his money back for that. 

CHRISTIE: I said to you, you remember, on this show, that they were a c-level legal team on their best way and let me tell you something, what’s going on right now shows I had great insight. 

STEPHANOPOULOS: Before we move on, let me play devil’s advocate on that point. Say they decided to hold the line and in the face of holding the line Mueller does in fact subpoena the president, does in fact subpoena these White House aides and that makes the president, we all know, the president blow up and fire Mueller?

CHRISTIE: Donald Trump’s self-preservation gene would never have permitted him to fire Bob Mueller. There’s not much that I’m confident about — 

STEPHANOPOULOS: He tried. 

CHRISTIE: No, no, he didn’t try. He did what Donald Trump does. 

EMANUEL: He blew up. 

CHRISTIE: Which is to blow off steam and if someone else wants to go and do it, then go ahead and do it. 

EMANUEL: Two things — 

MAGGIE HABERMAN: The argument from a lot of people around him. He did touch the hot stove with Comey and I think he saw there was a lesson from that. 

CHRISTIE: It’s a big lesson he learned from that. 

EMANUEL: Number one, get Mueller in front of Congress. Number two, the legal team should have known what McGahn was saying from day one. 

CHRISTIE: No one interviewed Don McGahn before he got interviewed by Bob Mueller. Imagine the malpractice there.

EMANUEL: I’m not even a lawyer and I know not to do that.

So both Emanuel and Christie believes Trump should have been less transparent? The problem is that it would have forced Mueller into court where he would eventually prevail to get the testimony. In the meantime, an obstruction case viewed as close by some Mueller aides would have been dramatically strengthened in their eyes. It would also have the President resisting his own Justice Department since Mueller is a Special, not Independent, Counsel.

For Christie, there is an obvious irony given the fact that his former aides were recently criminally sentenced in the Bridgegate scandal. They have insisted that Christie knew of their plan to slow traffic to punish one of his political opponents and that he was ultimate co-conspirator. However, he was spared any prosecution.

For Emanuel, he is a sole Democratic politician who believes that Trump should not have cooperated so much with Trump. It is a curious position when most Democrats are already alleged obstruction due to a lack of cooperation by Trump. How can Trump be both obstructive but too cooperative?

A curious world just gets curiouser and curiouser.

16 thoughts on “Christie and Emanuel: Trump Should Not Have Allowed Staff To Freely Speak With Mueller”

  1. Maybe these 2 should have run together on the same ticket.

  2. I don’t like Rahm Emmanuel, but i have a lot of respect for his psychological intensity and his cunning as a strategist. If he shows this kind of candor in the future, I will tune into him when i can. Chicago Democrats are always tougher and smarter than the rest of them, and there’s a place for them to the right, if they grow tired of the dog and pony show the coastals always want to stage.

    Christie would have been a good help to Trump but Jared sidelined him over a family beef. Sad!

    1. Let’s have a hard look at the idea that Rahm Emmanuel can ever be accused of candor.

      Texts between Chicago State’s attorney Kimberly Foxx and Obama “fixer” Tina Tchen turned over to the Chicago Tribune show that Foxx asked Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson to turn over the investigation of Jussie Smollett’s reported attack to the FBI.

      Later, Foxx texted an unnamed relative of Smollett who’d asked Tchen for help

      “Spoke to the superintendent earlier, he made the ask,” Foxx wrote. “Trying to figure out logistics. I’ll keep you posted.”

      “Omg this would be a huge victory,” the relative replied.

      “I make no guarantees, but I’m trying,” Foxx wrote back.

      Rahm Emmanuel would have been the first person Tchen or anyone else contacted before asking for favors in Chicago. The chat logs show Superintendent Johnson was calling the FBI to have Jussie Smollett’s case taken away from him beforehis press conference with Rahm Emmanuel.

      If, as Emmanuel and Johnson said, a “whitewash of justice” occurred, they were in on it. The best thing about their performance at that press conference is that it was “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”.

      You can’t listen to Rahm Emmanuel and expect candor. The law of averages says he’ll be candid now and then, but you can’t count on it.

  3. When someone does something that has bad results the competitor always has the Monday Morning answer. This leads to a comparison of what actually happened to what would have happened had their idea worked. (That is how the left does comparisons. There is no reality and no understanding of unintended consequences which makes their calculations ludicrous.) What makes anyone believe their idea was any better? I don’t think good alternatives existed.

    They were dealing with things they could not change. The Dems are crazy today and their objective is to destroy Trump no matter what it does to them or the country. What the lawyers are trying to change is unchnageable. A bullet is fired on the street and they are arguing that changing the street lights by choosing different variations of red, green or yellow will make a difference.

    2. Rahm Emmanuel plays a deep game. As he admits, he’s not an attorney (nor am I, for that matter), so the immediate question is “why is his legal opinion important in this case?”

      The important things in that interview? The interviewer and one of the interviewees were Clinton henchmen and campaign staff back in the 1990s. The other interviewee had a run-in with Trump’s son-in-law and may have lost a White House position he felt he earned by being the first GOP primary candidate to endorse Trump.

      So we’re not talking about objective, unbiased analysis here (on George Stephanopoulos’ show you’re stuck with Hillary fanboy perspective, admittedly).. The one thing that makes sense is two people evaluating Trump’s choices from the outside looking in. No insight, just outsight, hindsight, and the view from the Left.

  4. Emmanuel isn’t a Democrat. He would cooperate with an investigation into his administration, I’m sure. Too much to find. He’s so much like Trump. Arrogant, mean and self centered. Rules don’t apply to him either.

    The president and his staff had a duty to cooperate and if he was really clean, he would have met with Mueller. I’m sick of these tainted men pontificating about how good government should run!

    2. How and when, exactly, did Rahm Emmanuel and the Democratic Party part ways? I’m sure that’s news all around Cook County.

      Of course, the answer is “insufficient doctrinal purity during two terms as Mayor of Chicago, when he was actually responsible for running the Second City, had to make practical decisions and pissed off the local party leadership”.

      Does that make Emmanuel a “DINO”?

  5. Let me see if I’ve got this right. The lawyers who waived executive privilege up front were Trump’s C-Team lawyers and the lawyers who are attempting to assert executive privilege after the fact of executive privilege having been already waived up front are NOT Trump’s C-Team lawyers. And, in both cases, the assertions of executive privilege don’t stand a chance of being upheld by any court. But by waiving executive privilege up front the Special Counsel’s investigation was brought to a conclusion (of sorts) sooner than it otherwise would’ve been. Perhaps the Special Counsel’s investigation would have still been under way without any end in sight had executive privilege been asserted up front.

    So when did the vaunted Emmett Flood–who supposedly specializes in executive privilege–join the Trump C-Team lawyers? Before McGahn gave 30 hours of interviews with Mueller? Or after McGahn gave 30 hours of interviews with Mueller?

    And what are the chances that McGahn is the source of the inadmissible evidence that would establish Donald Trump Jr.’s “willfulness” under the rubric of the campaign finance laws taken in conjunction with the defraud clause of the conspiracy statute? Are there any precedents for asserting attorney-client privilege over evidence presented at a congressional hearing against a “person” who cannot be indicted while in office? The evidence at issue would still be inadmissible against Donald Trump Jr. in a United States Court, anyway. It would only be admissible at a congressional hearing against the “person” who cannot be indicted while in office.

  6. I sure hope Barr and Horowitz are the real deal, if their not this great nation is in a world of s#^*.

    1. That’s really where we are at GZ. When the president is viewed as being obstructive and too transparent at the same time, it is evident that the only rules the political elites recognize are those that will protect their jobs. If heads don’t roll now, then they never will.

  7. Perhaps it is time for you to change professions. Clearly you keep highlighting the dregs that populate the legal profession: Avenatti (of whom you might have a passing knowledge), Cohen (you may have come across his name at least once), Chris “bridge too far” Christie, “Harvard” House Deans (ROFLOL) / law professors/deans (insert genuflection here), and the “apolitical” Judges, Justices and lawyers who lose their minds when a person speaks a language other than English in their presence.

    You have done everything to convince us lawyers are “C-level” performers.

    Success!

  8. Rahm is speaking from a political POV. Trump gave his enemies tons of dirt they wouldn’t have likely had if he had not been so transparent. The same goes with not exerting Executive privilege over Volume II of the Report but allowing Barr to release it.
    Trump belives in a world where inherent fairness exists. It doesn’t. He thought if he was transparent, he would get credit for it. He truly doesn’t understand how much the media and the Dems HATE him simply because he beat HRC.

  9. Trump is hit from all sides of the aisle with all aspects of all things considered. “All Things Considered” used to be the name of a radio show in St Louis. All this russian collusion stuff is stuff to drain from the swamp by the citizens of America. The lesson is: Do Not Talk To A Russian or any person from a former Soviet entity. Next it will be China. They were Communist too before they went Capitalist Oligarch.
    The letters CO are relevant. Capitalist Oligarchy.

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