Ditto Trump, I assume.

i'ma let you finish but last season ramjin djawadi made one of the greatest compositions of all time



it's so beautiful that i have to fight back tears when i listen to it. can't even explain it.

This is the only thing that takes Trump and his cronies down. **** wasting time on trying to prove obstruction and collusion. Follow the money. Subpoena tax returns. Once any money trail is found the whole house of cards charade of an administration comes tumbling down. But nothing short of that will do it.

It shouldn't even be that hard! The dirty money from Manafort and Flynn is known! Trail from there shouldn't be too tough for someone this competent.

As John Oliver referenced, this is stupid Watergate. They probably did the most basic money laundering and these guys should be able to get all of it.

Gingrich is really exploring the boundaries of BS. It's like performance art. It's Surkovian. (Russian performance artist/Putin political advisor)

It's not a witch hunt, guys, it's a WITCH HUNT!

I'm sure Muller could have strong indictments against Manafort and Flynn in a week or two if that was his focus and he was in a hurry. They had FBI agents in Cypress even before Mueller came on, where commerce secretary Wilber Ross helped to run a bank with some of Putin's buddies. That's one minor facet. I suspect Mueller will be digging a good deal deeper and will be going through, and following up on, every page of Trump tax returns, among other things. The lawyers on his staff are like Farenthold (WaPo charity guy who won the Pulitzer) but much smarter and more experienced. However, what they are dealing with is a lot more complex.

How have Trump tax returns not leaked?

Also a lot of the public reporting around the Trump Foundation and Donald Jr's "charitable" antics pretty clearly point to out and out criminal tax fraud, and that's all from public information. Someone with the ability to subpoena bank records is going to be shooting fish in a barrel.

How hard has it been to get Trump's tax returns? You know, the ones he PROMISED to turn over after the audit? Even to those blinded by his racist, sexist, xenophic, narcissistic, pathological lying rhetoric, the issue of his tax returns alone should've been the red flag accompanied by alarm bells that should've stopped any sane person from voting for him.

So I'm guessing it's pretty hard to get access to them. I'm actually shocked they haven't already been leaked by some IRS employee. I'd bet half my bankroll at even money that his tax returns show some insanely shady dealings. Including with many Russian oligarchs.

I get that you're saying it wouldn't be hard to follow the money trail. But getting access to anyone's finances has been impossible so far.

Yeah. We've been over this repeatedly, but there's no chance Trump is smart enough to coordinate with Putin and if he did, there's no chance then of him not bragging about how smart he was to coordinate with Putin.

But his entire inner circle has all sorts of dirty money **** with Russian banks. There's probably tax fraud, non-reporting, lying on forms, etc. hiding there.

And he's afraid.

Who's that gonna be? And when? We've known about this since before the election, but have not been able to gain access to concrete records.

they're waiting. icing, meet cake

Definitely agree, but you don't really need direct communication to show collusion, but you would to show treason.

I lost my mind when he was on TV calling facts and stats theoretical.

Trump will try throw his lawyers and accountants under the bus. He so bigly awesome and rich he doesn't even know what's going on. But he signed his tax returns; that's why I think it's important for Mueller to get them. It isn't that the returns will reveal criminal activity, it's that the stuff not in them will constitute criminal tax fraud.

My guess is if he fires Mueller they will.

This is the main reason I believe that Trump didn't release his tax return; what is not in there, whats in there that could easily prove to be fraud by a third party, and just who knows what else. There is just no way that they would hold up to an army of investigative reporters. It would be like an IRS audit X 100.

Apparently it's going to be Mueller until he gets fired.

I highly doubt the security team travels on diplomatic passports.

Trump tax returns are probably "fine" on their face. You need to dig into the debts/assets/ownership of all the LLCs listed on them (Trump has interests in a few hundred corps) to get the real picture. Trump's accountants aren't dumb, so the returns will look "fine," but when you dig into the underlying financials ugly stuff will be turning up left and right.

Some of the trails will lead to entities in the Bahamas, Panama, Caymen, etc. where there is joint ownership with other parties. Just following those trails and demanding the documents from those jurisdictions could take a year of effort. (The US Govt can get the docs, but the tax havens have intentionally erected barriers. However, when muscled they will hand over everything--that's what happened with Cypress--noises started being made about their continued participation in the international banking system and they started being very cooperative.)

I'd still say there's got to be some collusion between Trump's camp with Trump at least being very very complicit in it even if he didn't directly do the dealing. It's just too weird that he has an politically toxic love affair with Russia in spite of it being against all the political winds blowing right now. The guy is genuinely uninterested in anything political like knowing his health care bill is exactly opposite of what he ran on, or policy in general, or where things are in the world, but he's consistently been trying to stick with Russia stuff.

The only banal thing I can think of is he's really got a hard on for that loyalty thing and Russia helped him out in the private sector a while back and he's just really wed to helping them out out of loyalty, same goes with Flynn, and I'm rolling my eyes just thinking about it, but maybe it's true. Or maybe it's some illogical, completely dumb, but banal reason that no one can think of because it doesn't make sense.

Hope he has ownership shares in the Russian oil deal

It's my understanding that the president is allowed to fire the FBI director for any reason, including the one that he refused orders to drop an investigation.

Is that wrong?