Mike Pence is rapidly losing top aides while talk swirls about a possible interview with Robert Mueller.

Courtesy of CNN:

Vice President Mike Pence's chief lawyer and domestic policy director are leaving his office at the beginning of the new year, according to four sources familiar with the staff turnover. 

The moves come amid high tensions and staff turnover in the Trump administration thanks to the ongoing Russia probe and a new tell-all book about West Wing happenings. 

"These moves have been in the works for weeks," the vice president's communications director confirmed to CNN. 

CNN has learned that longtime senior staffers Mark Paoletta and Daris Meeks are leaving Pence's office. The announcement was made by chief of staff Nick Ayers in a staff meeting at the beginning of the week. 

Paoletta and Meeks' departures follow two other top Pence aides who have left the Office of the Vice President: chief of staff Josh Pitcock and press secretary Marc Lotter. The vice president's staff is considerably smaller than the West Wing, making the departures a more notable shift at the beginning of the new year.

There has been talk for over a month that Pence will soon have his time testifying before the Muller team, which of course makes sense since Pence was in charge of the transition, and has been present at a lot of meetings with Flynn, Jared, and Donald Jr..

Apparently this possibility really troubled Steve Bannon who tried to keep Pence insulated from some of the more troubling goings on in the Trump White House.

Courtesy of Raw Story: 

It’s been widely reported that former White House political strategist Steve Bannon thought that Donald Trump Jr.’s infamous Trump Tower meeting with Russian officials was “treasonous.” 

However, author Michael Wolff also claims that Bannon worried that Vice President Mike Pence was similarly attending problematic meetings — and he worked to protect him from them because he saw Pence as a solid backup plan in the event of President Donald Trump’s impeachment. 

Specifically, Bannon worried about Pence taking meetings with Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner and First Daughter Ivanka Trump, whom he’d decided were, in Wolff’s words, “Russia toxic.”

“Bannon observed a hapless Pence in a lot of ‘wrong meetings,’ and helped to bring in the Republican operative Nick Ayers as Pence’s chief of staff, and to get ‘our fallback guy’ out of the White House and ‘running around the world and looking like a vice president,'” writes Wolff.

Bannon apparently believed that at some point Trump would definitely be forced from office, and he wanted to keep Pence squeaky clean so that he could carry the agenda forward once Trump was no longer gumming up the works. 

Here's hoping that his attempts to protect Pence failed to work, and that Mueller has significant dirt on him as well.

The Washington Post dives deep to explore Donald Trump's overwhelming desire to be Vladimir Putin's buddy and his skepticism concerning American intelligence.

The following is courtesy of WaPo.

Trump angrily resisted having to admit that the Russians hacked the DNC:

But as aides persisted, Trump became agitated. He railed that the intelligence couldn’t be trusted and scoffed at the suggestion that his candidacy had been propelled by forces other than his own strategy, message and charisma.

Told that members of his incoming Cabinet had already publicly backed the intelligence report on Russia, Trump shot back, “So what?” Admitting that the Kremlin had hacked Democratic Party emails, he said, was a “trap.” 

As Trump addressed journalists on Jan. 11 in the lobby of Trump Tower, he came as close as he ever would to grudging acceptance. “As far as hacking, I think it was Russia,” he said, adding that “we also get hacked by other countries and other people.” 

As hedged as those words were, Trump regretted them almost immediately. “It’s not me,” he said to aides afterward. “It wasn’t right.”

This has left America essentially defenseless against further Russian cyber attacks:  

Nearly a year into his presidency, Trump continues to reject the evidence that Russia waged an assault on a pillar of American democracy and supported his run for the White House. 

The result is without obvious parallel in U.S. history, a situation in which the personal insecurities of the president — and his refusal to accept what even many in his administration regard as objective reality — have impaired the government’s response to a national security threat. The repercussions radiate across the government. 

Rather than search for ways to deter Kremlin attacks or safeguard U.S. elections, Trump has waged his own campaign to discredit the case that Russia poses any threat and he has resisted or attempted to roll back efforts to hold Moscow to account.

In fact rather than look for ways to protect America and punish Russia for their interference, the Trump Administration has worked to  roll back some of the sanctions put in place by the Obama Administration and to resist the implementation of newer ones.

Trump also seems almost desperate to form an alliance with Putin and the Kremlin:  

Trump’s stance on the election is part of a broader entanglement with Moscow that has defined the first year of his presidency. He continues to pursue an elusive bond with Putin, which he sees as critical to dealing with North Korea, Iran and other issues. “Having Russia in a friendly posture,” he said last month, “is an asset to the world and an asset to our country.” 

His position has alienated close American allies and often undercut members of his Cabinet — all against the backdrop of a criminal probe into possible ties between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.

Overall the Kremlin is pleased with the results of their interference:   

Moscow has not achieved some its most narrow and immediate goals. The annexation of Crimea from Ukraine has not been recognized. Sanctions imposed for Russian intervention in Ukraine remain in place. Additional penalties have been mandated by Congress. And a wave of diplomatic retaliation has cost Russia access to additional diplomatic facilities, including its San Francisco consulate. 

But overall, U.S. officials said, the Kremlin believes it got a staggering return on an operation that by some estimates cost less than $500,000 to execute and was organized around two main objectives — destabilizing U.S. democracy and preventing Hillary Clinton, who is despised by Putin, from reaching the White House. 

The bottom line for Putin, said one U.S. official briefed on the stream of post-election intelligence, is that the operation was “more than worth the effort.”

“Putin has to believe this was the most successful intelligence operation in the history of Russian or Soviet intelligence,” said Andrew Weiss, a former adviser on Russia in the George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton administrations who is now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “It has driven the American political system into a crisis that will last years.”

Well gee, isn't that great?

When it came time to sign the new Russian sanctions bill that the Congress overwhelmingly approved, Trump almost could not bring himself to do it:

In the final days before passage, Trump watched MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program and stewed as hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski declared that the bill would be a slap in the face to the president. “He was raging,” one adviser said. 

“He was raging mad.” 

After final passage, Trump was “apoplectic,” the adviser recalled. It took four days for aides to persuade him to sign the bill, arguing that if he vetoed it and Congress overturned that veto, his standing would be permanently weakened. 

“Hey, here are the votes,” aides told the president, according to a second Trump adviser. “If you veto it, they’ll override you and then you’re f---ed and you look like you’re weak.” 

Trump signed but made his displeasure known. His signing statement asserted that the measure included “clearly unconstitutional provisions.” Trump had routinely made a show of bill signings, but in this case no media was allowed to attend.

After the sanctions bill passed into law the Russian Prime Minister taunted Trump on Facebook, and called him "impotent," which of course only further angered Trump.

There is a lot more to the article, and I urge you to read it.

Once you finish I am sure you will agree with me that we desperately need to find a way to remove this asshole from office as soon as possible.

Trouble in Trump paradise as bickering among top aides leads to another "You're fired" moment.

Karen Giorno with Donald Trump.

Courtesy of Politico: 

Donald Trump’s presidential campaign on Wednesday night announced it had parted ways with its national political director, Rick Wiley — a move that appears to stem in part from an ongoing turf war atop the campaign. 

Wiley was the first high-profile hire by Paul Manafort, the veteran GOP operative who Trump brought on board in late March to help professionalize a campaign that had cruised through the GOP primary season with a skeleton staff.

But Manafort and Wiley quickly found themselves at odds with Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and key members of the team he had built. 

Sources in and around the campaign told POLITICO that Wiley was not responsive to Lewandowski or other officials from the old regime, and that he had clashed in recent weeks with Karen Giorno, a Lewandowski ally who ran Trump’s campaign during the Florida GOP primary. 

Gee another organization put together by Donald Trump is starting to crumble? Who could have predicted such a thing?

You know, besides everybody.

By the way if you think that the name Karen Giorno sounds vaguely familiar well you are probably right.

Also courtesy of Politico:

The consultant Donald Trump hired in November to lead his Florida campaign abruptly resigned from a previous post with Gov. Rick Scott’s administration after a blow up at a Disney G.O.P. fundraiser, according to former party and administration staff.

Karen Giorno, who served as Scott’s external affairs director in 2011, now has the title of southeast political director for Trump’s campaign. Scott has also endorsed Trump's campaign. 

That year, the keynote speaker at the Republican Party of Florida’s Victory Dinner was Sarah Palin. 

Giorno wanted better seating for the Palin family at the Victory Dinner, according to the sources, which led her to try and rearrange seating in the ballroom at the Disney’s Grand Floridian Resort & Spa where the event was being held.

She received complaints from RPOF staff who had made the seating charts, and was reminded the event was a political function and that she worked for Scott’s administration, an official state job. 

“She was upset about how things were working with the Palin Victory Dinner event,” said a former party employee. “She yelled at RPOF staff and got into an altercation with some fundraising folks, then was summarily told to leave the room and not come back.”

Interesting.

Kind of makes one wonder if this most recent conflict was in some way Palin related as well.

Or perhaps it is yet another weird Palin coincidence.

(H/T to Martha.)

P.S. Since this post mentions Palin I should let you guys know that the trial call for Track's case has once again been continued.

I wonder how many times they can actually do that?

Ex-Romney aides claim that "Newsroom's" purely fictional account of a reporter's experiences on the Romney campaign bus did not happen.

"Hey, that didn't happen!"

On Sunday night's episode of the incredibly riveting HBO program "Newsroom" had character Jim Harper embedding himself on the Mitt Romney campaign bus and becoming so frustrated by his lack of access to the candidate and that all of his reporting was simply reading off a list of talking points provided by the campaign that he raises a stink and gets himself, and a few of his fellow reporters, kicked off of the bus.

This, ex-Romney aides contend, NEVER happened.

Courtesy of The Salt Lake Tribune:

A former 2012 Romney spokesman says that obviously pure fiction. 

"You all would have heard about that if it had happened" in the real campaign, says Ryan Williams, a Romney campaign spokesman who traveled with the former Massachusetts governor. The show "doesn't seem to be very close to the truth," he adds.

Well thank goodness they cleared up the fact that a fictional character's experiences as depicted on a fictional show were in fact fictional.

Gee I simply cannot understand how the Romney campaign managed to lose that election. 

However on a more serious note, the Harper character's frustration about the talking points and limited access to the candidate were well documented by reporters during the actual campaign. So THAT part, you know the part that was the point of the fictional interpretation, WAS based in fact.