Last week was one hell of a doozy for Donald Trump and his administration. In the course of around seven days, Trump was outed by a whistleblower on his shady call with a foreign leader which turned out to be Ukraine, revealing that he called the country’s president up and attempted to extort him for dirt on his political opponent, former VP and Democratic 2020 candidate Joe Biden by withholding military aid and funding from the country until he got the information he was after on Biden’s son Hunter and his past dealings in Ukraine.
Things quickly spiraled downhill from there, with Trump himself releasing a “transcript” of the call in question in hopes that it would exonerate him from any wrongdoing, but ultimately just incriminating him further considering the doctored version of the call’s contents still essentially mirrored the whistleblower’s complaint. Last week also saw a release of the full whistleblower complaint, which certainly didn’t do Donnie any favors either, and the whole thing was wrapped up with a nice, pretty impeachment inquiry bow before all of these pieces of evidence had even reached the public.
Seriously, he’s had a long-ass week — by literally no one’s fault but his own.
But it seems that Donald’s woes are still far from over after the Washington Post dropped a bombshell report indicating that Trump’s Ukraine scandal could just be the tip of a much larger iceberg.
According to the WaPo report, there is a summarizing memo in existence that covers the May 10, 2017 meeting between Trump, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in which Donald exposed a foreign agent through highly classified intel and revealed to Lavrov and Kislyak that it took “great pressure” off of him when he fired FBI Director James B. Comey who was originally to head the Russia investigation.
The Post notes in their report that, “it is not clear whether a memo documenting the May 10, 2017, meeting with Lavrov and Kislyak was placed into that system, but the three former officials said it was restricted to a very small number of people.”
What’s the big issue here? The particular meeting in question was under high scrutiny by Mueller and his team as part of their investigation into why Comey was terminated to begin with. While Mueller’s report cites the meeting in a White House document titled “Working Visit with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov of Russia,” dated the day before the meeting took place and one additional email of the same document, that’s it. The memo discovered by the Post reporters,  Shane Harris, Josh Dawsey, and Ellen Nakashima, was never produced or handed over to Mueller at any point during the two-year course of his investigation.
It’s virtually impossible to believe that the former Special Counsel somehow missed this memo or just forgot to ask for it. In fact, Mueller’s report revealed that he wanted to speak with Trump specifically regarding “Information regarding communications with Ambassador Kislyak, Minister Lavrov, and Lester Holt.”
There’s simply not a chance that he didn’t ask for any documentation surrounding the May 2017 meeting considering he wanted to speak to Donald about it specifically.
Tobias Barrington Wolff, an American civil justice system and constitutional law professor at University of Pennsylvania Law School says that the memo could have been withheld from the Special Counsel due to national security issues. However, he goes on to note that even if the memo was classified for proper reasons, “This emphasizes the point that Mueller’s conclusions were based on imperfect information precisely because of White House and Trump misconduct.”
So now we’re left to determine what happened to that memo that essentially proves the collusion that Mueller fought so hard to find. Was it classified through the proper channels? Did Mueller somehow slip up? Or did it end up on the same backdoor server that the Ukraine call did?
Something is telling me it’s most definitely the latter.
Featured image via DC Tribune GalleryÂ
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