Trump admin. continues to run on skeleton staff, vast majority of key positions are unfilled. Many Obama holdovers remain in White House and especially Nat. Security Council-Spengler, David P. Goldman...(Elected to drain the swamp, Trump instead has added to it, thus putting all Americans in danger. He even agreed with them that Putin hacked the election, so he thinks he's in office by fraud)

June 16, 2017, "The lawyers’ civil war," David P. Goldman (Spengler), Asia Times

"Trump is under siege by shock troops from the left and right – an illegal and unconstitutional mutiny, says Spengler." 

"The attempted massacre this week of Republican Congressmen and their staff by a deranged partisan of Sen. Bernie Sanders turned up the heat a notch, but it would be mistaken to attribute much importance to this dreadful outburst of left-wing rage. The augury of American fracture will not be street violence, but a constitutional crisis implicating virtually the whole of America’s governing caste. The shock troops in the cold civil war are not gunmen but lawyers....

Podesta and his gang at the DNC used unethical and perhaps illegal means to sandbag the campaign of Sen. Sanders, leaks about which embarrassed Hillary Clinton. Sanders, knowing on which side his bread is buttered, declined to make an issue of the sandbagging, allowing Trump’s enemies to transform what should have been an investigation of corruption in the Democratic Party into a fairy-tale about Russian spies stealing an American election with implied collusion by the Trump campaign.

The Trump-Russia collusion story is nonsense, as its disseminators know better than anyone else. The object of the exercise is not to support the innuendo, but to launch an investigation which can provoke the White House into responses that might be construed as illegal.

The intelligence leaks involved in framing the story alone are probably sufficient grounds to put several dozen senior officials in federal prison for double-digit terms. That consideration gauges the scale of the problem: the mutineers have committed multiple felonies, and their downside should the mutiny go wrong is not ignominious retirement but hard time at Leavenworth.

For the moment, the mutineers have the momentum. The Trump administration continues to run on a skeleton staff, with the vast majority of key positions still unoccupied. If my surmise is correct, it was unable to persuade the director of the FBI, the nation’s chief watchdog, to undertake vigorous countermeasures against the mutiny, for example, a comprehensive screening of electronic communications by the reporters who received leaks of classified materials.

Most mainstream journalists consider Trump a threat to a desirable social order and are not squeamish about the means they might employ to undermine him. And there are any number of former Obama appointees, for example, former US Attorney for New York’s Southern District Preet Bharara, prepared to convict the president in the media.

Bharara claimed earlier this month that “there’s absolutely evidence to begin a case” for obstruction of justice against Trump, although he allowed that as a private citizen he had no access to the evidence.

The White House and in particular the National Security Council meanwhile remain riddled with Obama Administration holdovers, forcing Trump to rely on a close circle of trusted advisers. That limits the president’s ability to reach out for allies against the mutineers.

The installation of former FBI director Robert Mueller as Special Counsel to chase the Russian McGuffin also constrains the counterintelligence operations of the White House. If senior intelligence officials claim to be engaged in counterintelligence investigations against Russian interference in US elections, is it obstruction of justice to investigate their illegal contacts with the media?

The mutineers also can count on the support of Establishment worthies like Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina), for whom Trump’s election was an intolerable humiliation. Trump ran against the Bush wing of the Republican Party as much as he ran against the Democrats.

The NeverTrump Republicans are complicit in the destruction of Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen and the Sudan, and would have wrecked Egypt had Gen. al-Sisi not overthrown a Muslim Brotherhood government that the Establishment Republicans helped incubate.

The President’s free-wheeling style, more suited to the management of a family business than the Executive Branch, makes minor missteps more likely. Minor missteps are dangerous when a desperate and determined enemy is ready to exploit them. 

Trump’s one great advantage in all of this is that he has done nothing wrong. He did not obstruct justice because there is no crime. The mutineers’ only hope is to provoke him to take actions which might be construed as obstruction of justice in an investigation with no crime and no victim. Still, it is a moment of great danger for the American Republic.
 
The mutiny has burned its bridges on the beach, and its perpetrators will risk everything to make it succeed. Whatever the outcome, the legitimacy of a political system designed to be litigious and oppositional will be called into question, and the polarization of American opinion will become more rather than less extreme."






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