Douglas Blackmon interviewed Sally Yates for 6 hours over 10 days.
Karen Germaine? @KarenGermaine
TRUMP-RUSSIA THREAD:
1/ Douglas Blackmon (writer/producer/former journalist) interviewed Sally Yates recently for 6 hours over 10 days.
2/ Present for the first 4-hour interview was Ryan Lizza, whose article on Yates will appear in The New Yorker on Monday 5/22.
3/ Based on his interviews and other research, Blackmon has concluded that the Trump presidency will not recover from its current crisis.
4/“...this is an investigation about one thing: the now undeniable fact that a Russian espionage conspiracy accomplished an objective...”
5/”...that has never previously occurred in American history—compromising the highest levels of U.S. government,…”
6/”...penetrating the White House, establishing influence and leverage over the president’s National Security Advisor,…”
7/”…and planting false information with the Vice-President of the United States—who then unwittingly repeated those fictions…”
8/”…to the American people.” Blackmon generally describes the interview, questions it prompted, and opinions he’s formed in a FB post.
9/ His conclusion: “Within a few months—and possibly in just weeks—most GOP elected officials will have acknowledged, at least privately...”
10/”…that Donald Trump is a suicide vest strapped around the body of the Republican Party.” If those words don't shake you, what will?
11/ His final words: ”The collapse of this administration may or may not be swift. But it is inevitable.”
12/ Read it here: https://www.facebook.com/douglas.a.blackmon/posts/10155079495445269?pnref=story … And watch for Ryan Lizza's article on Monday. /END/
Link to tweet
"RussiaGate" has become a catastrophic failure of leadership—and a debacle from which the Trump presidency will not recover
#TrumpRussia
By Douglas A. Blackmon
A little more than a week ago, I said on CNN and wrote here that—based on reporting I’d just completed in Washington D.C.—it was clear that the controversy surrounding Russian contacts with advisors to President Donald J. Trump and his campaign team was about to become much more serious, much more directly focused on the president himself, and have deeply troubling consequences for our democracy.
The revelations of the past seven days have confirmed all that, and will be remembered as the point when an extraordinary but perhaps still manageable political embarrassment for the Trump administration mushroomed into the most serious controversy to engulf a presidency since Watergate.
Based on what we know already, and new revelations that will soon illuminate more key events in this sequence, our country faces a dramatic constitutional exigency. This crisis now is directly about the President himself, and one for which he now bears complete responsibility. Bluntly stated, it has become a catastrophic failure of conduct and leadership—and a debacle from which the Trump presidency will not recover.
What I couldn’t say last week was that, earlier the same day, I spent more than four hours conducting Sally Yates’ first media interview since being fired by President Trump as acting U.S. Attorney General. With me in the interview was The New Yorker magazine’s White House correspondent, Ryan Lizza, whose profile of Yates will appear on Monday, May 22. (I have known Yates for more than 25 years. To read a profile I wrote of her in February, look here: http://slate.me/2l1ROhR)
During our interview, and subsequent conversations in the following days, Yates never disclosed any classified details of the ongoing investigation or specific new bombshells. But by the end of that long series of questions, answers and clarifications, important contours of the scandal—the boundaries of what is known or not known and the enormous scale of the stakes involved—became much more clear to me. .....................
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