Testify

Rachel Maddow is the only one who gets it.

On last Friday's show, she warned the audience that the Trumpers are going to blame everything on Hillary -- and that they are going to accomplish this trick by way of the Fusion GPS connection. In a previous post, I outlined what I think will happen. Maddow seems to be the only major figure whose thinking resembles mine:

This thing that is about to happen on Wednesday that just got scheduled tonight. This is the thing that I have been saying was coming. This is the thing I’ve been saying was coming from Congressional Republicans and Republicans who want to defend Donald Trump. Sen. Grassley has sent the subpoena tonight to head of Fusion GPS. He has canceled the testimony from Don Jr. and Paul Manafort and instead of hearing from them next week on the collusion issue, the Senate instead, will play host at a big open televised hearing to the big Republican pushback theory that they have been gearing up with, gearing up for on conservative media for a couple of weeks now.

This is the big push back in which they will claim that there is a Russian scandal, but it’s not a Trump/Russia scandal. It’s the Democrats, and the dossier on Trump, that’s the real Russia scandal. That’s from Russia, and the scandal is about Hillary Clinton and the Democrats. We have known this was coming. Now, as of tonight, we know it is arriving on Wednesday morning in the Senate, and the first subpoena has just gone out.

Politicus adds:

The Senate Judiciary Committee is the home base for the Republican defense of Trump on the Russia scandal in the Senate. People should have known that Grassley was going to pull a bait and switch.

Sen. Grassley is dipping into the right wing conspiracy theory pool in a desperate effort to distract from the real Russia scandal. Rachel Maddow smelled a rat here early on. She knew that Grassley was going to abuse his committee’s investigative powers to try and save Trump, and thanks to here people aren’t going to be fooled by the latest look over here gimmick that Republicans are trying to pull.

The pro-Trump trolls have been preparing the way for the testimony of Glenn Simpson, the head of Fusion GPS. Hell, they haven't been this active since the election. Pay attention to the trolls: They offer a glimpse of what's about to hit us.

Not long ago, a number of Dems stupidly came under the impression that Simpson's testimony can help them. Good Lord, why don't these people look around and see what's going on? The troll army has filled the internet with a bizarre conspiracy theory in which Evil Hillary took complete control of Simpson and forced him to come up with the Steele dossier, which the Trumpers consider a total fake. (As you know, the right pretends that all of Russiagate hinges on that dossier. It doesn't.) The rightists even say that Simpson was the one who wrangled poor DJT Jr. into that famous meeting in Trump Tower. A preposterous notion, this. Even though the scenario doesn't make one whit of sense, that's their story and they're sticking with it.

(What the right-wingers won't tell you is that Fusion switched sides, and has worked on behalf of Russians hoping to undo the Magnitsky Act.)

Being an irresponsible bastard, I'll take things further than Maddow does. I suspect that the Simpson has been given a script. I think that he is supposed to offer "damning" testimony against Clinton, and that what he has to say will be backstopped by fake documentary evidence, with perhaps a faked recording tossed in. This would be a risky maneuver, but Trump is desperate.

(Remember, during the election, "Guccifer 2.0" offered a massive "hack" of the Clinton Foundation -- a put-up job so hilariously obvious that not even the Infowars crowd would buy it. That episode tells us that we're dealing with people willing to gin up all sorts of "evidence.")

That, in my opinion, is the plan. Of course, my opinion be wrong; there is more than one way to read the tea leaves. But if I am right, this scheme would appear to have hit a big snag: Simpson wants no part of it. Can you blame him? For this operation to work, Simpson would have to give false testimony, and that's a huge risk.

Through his lawyer, Simpson tried to get out of testifying on the grounds that he was going on an overseas vacation. Apparently, it was to be one of those long, long vacations -- the kind of vacay that lasts until the heat is off. So the Committee decided to subpoena him.

From the Washington Times (caution: Right-wing spin ahead):

The co-founder of the Washington-based firm that commissioned the explosive and largely unsubstantiated anti-Trump campaign research dossier will reject a Senate subpoena to testify before Congress next week and invoke his Fifth Amendment rights, according to the heads of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Poor guy. He really, really does not want to testify.

“Glenn Simpson, through his attorney, has declined to voluntarily attend Wednesday’s Judiciary Committee hearing regarding compliance with the Foreign Agents Registration Act,” the senators wrote in a statement. “Therefore, a subpoena has been issued to compel his attendance. Simpson’s attorney has asserted that his client will invoke his Fifth Amendment rights in response to the subpoena.”

A charge of not complying with FARA is hanging over Simpson. Violating FARA can get you up to five years.

That's the "stick" they will use. In a sense, he'll be given the "Susan McDougal" treatment: He'll face all sorts of legal hell until he agrees to offer false testimony against a Clinton. I predict that he will eventually play ball.

Savor the irony: Nobody is going to charge Paul Manafort or Michael Flynn with FARA non-compliance. They are allowed to register after the fact.