Mueller knows that once the excrement hits the fan, Don the Con Trump is going to go ballistic and act do predictably unpredictable things. He may issue pardons, he may try to send his SS agents, or the Army, to bust people, he’ll certainly try to fire Mueller and his staff. Most of that is either impossible or can be stopped, and none of it makes sense. But anyone who thinks that those facts will stop Don the Con from getting cute is as dumb as a moldy brick.
I suspect that Mueller sees that the best strategy is to get the penultimate arrests done more or less all at the same time, and to have Federal indictments happen at the same time that state charges are filed. Oh, and yes, there will be parallel state level charges filed where possible, though I suspect some of that will be arranged last minute to keep the number in the know down. The state charges are not on their own that important, but that they are a thing is an important message to send.
The Penultimate arrests will be the likes of Don the Con Junior, They-Went-To-Jared Kushner, maybe a Russian here or there, a couple of other staffers. The ultimate arrest comes later. You know who that is going to be. 
Anyway, there will be a point when the penultimate arrests are set to go, and the moves will have to be organized and planned out just right. That will be a moment for the very careful, very professional, Robert Mueller to spend a little extra time dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s (and yes, you can use apostrophes in that case according to the Devagueing Principle).
So, here’s the thing. If I was a senior editor or producer at a major media outlet like the Washington Post or NBC News, I’d have somebody watching key FBI agents and Federal Marshals, and maybe BCI agents in key states. Watch for them to do certain things, like go ice fishing or take a couple of days off to work in the shop or spend a little extra time on the firing range or at the gym. That sort of thing. Things you do to keep yourself busy, relax at a time it is hard to relax, and let some extra slow time go by faster.
Why is that? Because Mueller’s people are going to send the word out like this.
“Next week, soonest, probably eight or ten days.”
“OK, gotcha.”
“Not before 7 days, anyway.”
“Not in six days or five?”
“No way, not before seven. Probably not even that. Not six, five, or sooner. Guarnteed.”
“OK, got it. I’ve had no time off since before the election. I’m taking four days, do some fishing, maybe work on the ‘Stang, if it’s warm enough.”
“OK, you do that. Expect a call in seven days. Soonest. Probably eight or nine.”
So, when a handful of the most likely agents or cops to participate in a big operation with multiple locations around DC, NY, and Florida seem to be taking a breather, call all the reporters and producers back from vacation and have them all check their batteries and keep the tanks full. The excrement will be hitting the fan, in eight or nine days, tops. Maybe seven.
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From CNN….”then-transition adviser KT McFarland, who later became deputy national security adviser under Michael Flynn”
“If there is a tit-for-tat escalation Trump will have difficulty improving relations with Russia, which has just thrown USA election to him,” McFarland wrote, according to the Times.”
Of course, KT was just joking. Heh heh. Didn’t really mean what she wrote. It was just an exaggeration…. you know, you can’t take anything a Republican says at face value….just a figure of speech… an idiom…Republicans never say what they really mean. It is all just a play on words. A charade. A bluff. Besides, Bengazi!! Bengazi!!
Not a joke. Read the full context, and it obviously means something different.
Ah, “Bengazi!! Bengazi!!”
Weren’t there 4 Americans killed recently in Niger as a result of one or more security blunders? No Congressional outrage or hearings on that yet and no cries for putting anyone in jail for it. Too busy passing tax bills without reading them. They were written by lobbyists so they must be ok, right?
Oh. I see now. Obama was not allowed to punish Russia for its already well known ( in intelligence circles) ( and in the public press) interference in the US election. Flynn was sent to smooth out any rough edges that the sanctions might create between the US and Russia. So Flynn was, essentially, trying to undermine Obama’s foreign policy while Obama was still president? And K.T. McFarland knew this? A real peach that one. I think she looks much better in the first interpretation….that she was merely confirming that Russia threw or attempted to throw the election to Trump…. and not that the Trump administration was purposefully sending Flynn to blunt, to interfere with, the sitting president’s foreign policy. But I will go with your interpretation if you like.
Nothing like that good ol’ Republican back door interference with US foreign policy. You like conspiracy theories. Remember the Iran hostages?
Oh, and about that subsequent conspiracy theory that Obama did this, not for the American people and to help protect future US elections, but just to make poor lil Donald look bad, and make things hard for him? Hello in there. I suppose that Obama brilliantly played Trump by advising him to fire Flynn, knowing that Trump would never take Obama’s advise and would, in fact, do the exact opposite, thereby ensuring that Trump would ensnare himself in the whole Russian disaster that he is currently in! Republicans don’t hate Obama! They secretly feared and admired him, is that how it is going to go down?
Time and again, Trump has made it clear that everything in the world is about making life good and easy for him, our first rate president Trump. And Republicans apparently support that position, even as it destroys the few remaining virtues of the once noble Republican party, and threatens all of our democratic institutions.
Greg, you have lost it! Probably never had it.
Re “Greg, you have lost it! Probably never had it.”
Concise but a bit lacking in, you know, precision, focus, evidence, reason …
Something that might change the lie of the land in the White House is Trump’s recent slurring of words:
https://www.statnews.com/2017/12/07/donald-trump-brain-specialist-disease/
And even if he doesn’t suddenly tip over from a stroke or incipient dementia he now has a great defense for any prosecution, so one way or another I suspect that he will never see the inside of prison.
I hope though that this doesn’t stop the FBI from fully investigating the full extent of Republican impropriety in the conduct of the election, and of Trump’s team in illegally dealing with Russia both with respect to the election and in other dealings.
Not only must justice be done, it must be seen to be done. There are rising powers around the world who are hoping that America fails in this, because such failure lends strong impetus to fowever tipping the balance of power to authoritarianism over democracy and and human rights.
Bernard J
That is my reading of the tightening spiral of deregulation and privatisation, where even HMRC has been sold to a Bermuda entity, being played out in the UK with Brexit being an attempt to further tighten that spiral. Sadly, elements of the media have done a good job with making sure most of the public do not notice, or understand the real reasons why there has been a hollowing out of key public sector services with attendant job losses.
Notice of book from Guardian bookshop: Collusion by Luke Harding
or
Collusion by Luke Harding
On one week before the election, warning do not recently have consumed a large meal before looking.