It Does Seem Like They're Closing In on Donald J. Trump

Some pretty top notch journalists and columnists see the writing on the wall for Donald Trump and his presidency.

The Sydney Morning Herald's chief foreign correspondent, Paul McGeough, has produced a good body of reports on Trump's looming downfall.

Foreign Policy's right-of-centre columnist and Council on Foreign Relations Fellow, Max Boot,  has produced his own body of analysis. Most recently he's written that Trump knows the feds are closing in and that WikiLeaks has become Trump's preferred source of intelligence.  Boot writes that Assange has joined the Trump administration. Of course, he jests.

On Saturday, recall, Trump was making wild-eyed accusations that Obama had ordered the U.S. intelligence community to wiretap him. “How low has President Obama gone to tapp (sic) my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!” The White House could not come up with one iota of evidence to support this irresponsible allegation, which was denied by FBI Director James Comey and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. But Trump would not be dissuaded from pursuing this charge, which serves as a convenient distraction from the far more serious accusations of possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin while Russia was interfering with the presidential campaign.

Is it just a coincidence that WikiLeaks dumped a massive database pertaining to CIA hacking and wiretapping just three days after Trump made wiretapping a major political issue? Perhaps so. But there is cause for suspicion.

In the first place, WikiLeaks has often timed its leaks for maximum political impact. It released 20,000 stolen DNC emails just three days before the Democratic National Convention on July 25, 2016. As expected, WikiLeaks generated headlines about DNC staffers disparaging Sen. Bernie Sanders, buttressing a Trump campaign effort to prevent Clinton from consolidating Sanders supporters. DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned as a result, and the Clinton campaign suffered significant public relations damage.

But what about Assange, the guy who said he'd turn himself in to American authorities if only then president Obama would free Chelsea Manning only to change his mind once Obama did just that? 

It's said you can tell a man by the company he keeps and none other than Trump's British water boy, Nigel Farage, just happened to swing by the Ecuadorean embassy in London today where Assange is holed up for a 40-minute visit only to emerge saying he couldn't remember what he'd been doing there. Right, Nige, of course you can't remember.

And then there's Trump's longstanding pal, confidante and career dirty trickster, Roger Stone.

Over the weekend when Trump went through his Twitter meltdown, accusing Obama of having illegally wire tapped his campaign, Stone had a Twitter meltdown of his own in which he admitted that, on behalf of the Trump campaign, he colluded with Assange on the release of the hacked Clinton emails.

But wait, there's more. Now The Smoking Gun reports that Roger Stone was also in contact with Guccifer 2.0, the group that hacked the DNC computers.

Though “Guccifer 2.0” maintained that he was a lone “hacktivist” committed to “fight all those illuminati,” a U.S. intelligence assessment concluded with "high confidence" that the G.R.U., Russia’s military intelligence service, was operating the “Guccifer 2.0” persona, which communicated through Twitter, a WordPress blog, and a series of burner e-mail accounts.

...

Like Trump, Stone is vain, vindictive, and prone to declarations untethered to the truth. Both men are protégés of Roy Cohn, the reptilian attorney whose career initially blossomed at the elbow of Senator Joseph McCarthy and ended in disbarment weeks before his death from AIDS in 1986.

Stone began working for Trump’s presidential campaign months before the Republican candidate famously descended Trump Tower’s escalator in June 2015. Two months after Trump’s announcement, Stone--who had clashed with campaign manager Corey Lewandowski--was gone. Stone told reporters he quit, while Trump said he fired the veteran consultant, who was paid a total of $50,000 for his campaign work, Federal Election Commission records show.

Meanwhile, remember that Trump "dossier" prepared by former MI6 spy, Chris Steele, and almost instantly dismissed? Well, Rachel Maddow, has been showing how facts coming out are corroborating Steele's allegations that Trump is beholden to Vlad Putin.

At Foreign Policy in Focus, editor John Feffer writes that Trump has already given Putin everything he wanted - and more.

Even Fox News' Shep Smith can't take the endless, constant lying any more.