Admitting guilt

President Trump has essentially ordered Attorney General Sessions to end the Special Counsel’s probe of Russia’s role in the 2016 presidential election:

..This is a terrible situation and Attorney General Jeff Sessions should stop this Rigged Witch Hunt right now, before it continues to stain our country any further.

As the investigation has already produced a slew of indictments and half a dozen guilty pleas, the President’s effort to end it is the moral equivalent of admitting guilt. It is now evident that Trump knew about meetings with the Russians in advance and that his public appeal for the Russians to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails was in fact a serious signal to Moscow to do what it could to help his campaign.

We are not talking legally moot collusion here. I am not a lawyer, but it seems to me we are talking conspiracy against the United States election, seeking and accepting foreign assistance to an electoral campaign, and obstruction of the Special Counsel investigation. All of those are serious crimes, even if collusion is not.

It is telling that Trump is trying to intervene just as the trial of Paul Manafort, his campaign chair, begins. Manafort is not yet charged with conspiracy with the Russians but rather with financial crimes unrelated to the campaign. If he is convicted, however, he will of course want to plea bargain, offering evidence to the Special Counsel on campaign-related issues. Trump wants desperately to avoid that. Manafort’s relationship to the Russians still needs elucidation, but it won’t be surprising to me if he is eventually shown to have been a witting agent of Moscow, to which he owed a good deal of the personal fortune the Special Counsel claims was not reported properly to the Internal Revenue Service.

Trump also wants to stop his former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, from assisting the Special Counsel. While most of Cohen’s involvement was not with the campaign, his payoffs to women on Trump’s behalf raise a host of financial and campaign-related issues.

What happens if Trump succeeds in firing Mueller? I would like to think there would be a massive rebellion in Congress, including among Republicans. But that now seems unlikely, since the Republicans with few exceptions have aligned with Trump. Nor is the reaction in the country easy to predict. More than half the electorate didn’t vote for Trump in the first place, but they have no way of weighing in politically until the November election. Street protests? Maybe: even massive ones if the August 11/12 white nationalist demonstration scheduled outside the White House goes ahead. Trump may even benefit if the demonstrators clash and he can pose as a law and order guy.

But this I am pretty sure will happen: the evidence of wrongdoing will spill out into the public domain, both through state-level prosecutions and by leaking. One way or another, we are headed for a major constitutional crisis as it becomes evident that Trump sought and accepted Russian help in the campaign and has tried desperately to cover up what he and his minions did.

The last time a president was caught violating the law he was forced to resign. Trump won’t do that. God bless America. We are going to need it.