Source: Mueller Putting the 'Squeeze' on Trump Jr.
In the minds of anti-Trump liberals, the special counsel investigation led by Robert Mueller just scored a couple of “wins” with regard to the guilty verdicts for former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and a guilty plea by former Trump attorney Michael Cohen.
This, even as neither of those have much of anything to do with President Donald Trump or his 2016 campaign. Manafort’s crimes are related to bank and tax fraud from several years ago, and the supposed “campaign finance violations” Cohen pleaded guilty to are in dispute as actually even occurring, much less being a “crime” rising to the impeachable offense level.
Regardless, some liberals insist that Mueller is continuing to close in on the ultimate goal of digging up impeachable trouble for Trump, and anonymous sources have claimed that recent developments have the president “rattled,” particularly a suspicion that Mueller is “squeezing” the president’s eldest son, Donald Trump, Jr.
That assertion came in an anonymously-sourced article by Gabriel Sherman of Vanity Fair, which painted the picture of an enraged and “extremely frustrated” President Trump in recent days and weeks.
Trump has supposedly grown to doubt the loyalty of White House counsel Don McGahn, a feeling made worse by recent articles in The New York Times and The Washington Post detailing McGahn’s cooperation with Mueller’s investigation, allegedly even sitting for more than 30 hours of interviews with “extensive notes” of his countless interactions with the president.
He is also said to have grown increasingly suspicious of McGahn as being a “(Reince) Priebus guy” … in other words, a member of the Republican establishment that has not been fully supportive of Trump or his MAGA agenda, and who might subversively work against his interests.
The liberal media has played up the McGahn story as if the attorney had “flipped” on Trump and was secretly helping Mueller to bring him down, while the administration has downplayed the interviews as not being incriminating against Trump at all and merely a part of the president’s call for full transparency and cooperation on the part of his team with the Mueller probe.
Of Trump’s recent “lashing out” via Twitter against the Mueller investigation, one unnamed source suggested, “He’s got to frame the narrative. He thinks the media is like a shark: you’re either feeding it or it eats you.”
Other anonymous sources said that Trump has grown incredibly frustrated that Attorney General Jeff Sessions hasn’t resigned yet, in spite of the abuse he has received from the president, and one person relayed second-hand how they’d heard that Trump even blamed the entire Russia investigation on his attorney Rudy Giuliani.
Trump supposedly yelled, “It’s your fault! I offered you attorney general, but you insisted on being secretary of state. Had I picked you none of this would be happening.” The White House neither confirmed or denied that assertion when asked for comment.
The president is also said to regret the “strategic error” made by his previous legal team, Ty Cobb and John Dowd, who waived executive privilege and agreed to cooperate closely with the Mueller investigation, a “mistake” that Trump refuses to admit and instead blames on others.
But perhaps the biggest driver in Trump’s allegedly growing “rage” and “frustration,” according to the anonymous sources, is the rumor that Mueller is “closing in” on Trump Jr., likely over his role in the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer — a meeting that increasingly looks to some as if it were a set up designed to ensnare the Trump campaign.
“A lot of what Trump is doing is based on the fact (that) Mueller is going after Don Jr. They’re squeezing Don Jr. right now,” stated an unnamed person close to the Trump family, allegedly.
Trump Jr.’s lawyer declined to comment for the Vanity Fair piece, and another unnamed source suggested that “squeeze” wasn’t the proper word to describe what Mueller was doing to Trump Jr., though that person did say that Mueller’s team continues to ask for certain documents to be turned over to them.
Bear in mind, there were virtually no on-the-record statements included in the Vanity Fair piece, only anonymous allegations that can’t easily be confirmed or denied.
The piece should therefore be taken with a healthy dose of skepticism, given how previous anonymously-sourced anti-Trump claims have played out over the past two years.
That said, it would be entirely understandable for Trump to be “frustrated” if Mueller were indeed attempting to “squeeze” his eldest son, placing him in a position where he must turn on his father or face severe legal consequences.
If true, Trump’s frustration would be shared by a significant portion of his supporters, who have grown exceedingly tired of this increasingly obvious “witch hunt” that seems intent on smearing the president and bringing him down through guilt by association to unrelated crimes and unconfirmed allegations of wrongdoing.
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