IS THE COMEY MEMO THE BEGINNING OF THE END FOR TRUMP?

[DemocratSinceBirth]

Donald Trump, who may well have attempted to obstruct justice within just a few weeks of taking his oath of office, came to the Presidency with a wealth of experience in the art of deceit. He may know little of domestic or foreign policy, he may be accustomed to running an office of satraps and cronies, and he may be unable to harness an institution as complex as the executive branch, but experience told him early on that he could dodge any accusation and deny any aggression against the truth.

As Trump’s biographers Marc Fisher and Michael Kranish tell the story, Roy Cohn, who lived for decades under various indictments for bribery, extortion, and other sins, and yet always managed to escape conviction, first instructed Trump more than forty years ago in the dark arts of counterattack and an over-all “go to hell” philosophy. Cohn, as a devious young lawyer, had been the protégé of Joe McCarthy, during the anti-Communist witch hunts of the fifties. He met Trump at a club called—seriously—Le Club, and began to tutor this eager young scion of an outer-borough real-estate family in the art of what’s what. Nothing delighted Trump more than to learn that prosecution did not necessarily follow from wrongdoing.

“When Cohn boasted that he had spent much of his life under indictment, Trump asked whether Cohn had really done what was alleged,” Fisher and Kranish write. “ ‘What the hell do you think?’ Cohn responded with a smile. Trump said he ‘never really knew’ what that meant, but he liked Cohn’s toughness and loyalty.”

Trump knew very well what Cohn was telling him, and he lived by that lesson. As a businessman, he distinguished himself as a disreputable con; he was spurned by the New York business community less for his cartoonish flamboyance than for his essential dishonesty, his meanness of character. He routinely stiffed contractors and workers. He screwed creditors. He violated casino regulations. He bragged of charitable contributions that he never made. He promoted scams such as Trump University. In the nineties, as his bankruptcies mounted, he lost the ability to obtain credit from the largest and most reputable American banks. In foreign deals, brandishing an inexplicably attractive marketing name, he ignored his legal obligations to carry out due diligence and did deals with flagrantly corrupt business partners. In Azerbaijan, he was party to a deal whose only real enterprise might have been the laundering of money. And yet he always avoided serious legal peril, not least because he played by the lessons imbibed from Roy Cohn. And all the while he lived it up, acquiring the life-style decorations of a third-world dictator or a second-world oligarch. His excess was his brand.

...

http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/is-the-comey-memo-the-beginning-of-the-end-for-trump?intcid=mod-latest

[Big Blue Marble]

1. Let's energize it being the end of the Republican Party as we know it... N/T

[MichMary]

5. And then what?

One-party rule is bad. Regardless of which party it is. Our system requires two strong parties.

[Big Blue Marble]

6. That is exactly why I said "as we know it."

The conservative corporate structures will reorganize and rebrand. Yes, no worries,
the right will always be with us.

[Freethinker65]

2. MemoS

[still_one]

3. At least not by all appearances since it does not seem republicans are interested pursuing

[ucrdem]

4. He kicked the hornet's nest, that's for sure.

All I can figure is that he tipped off the Ruskies to a pending operation. And if it was an operation like the Brussels attack, planned by whomever, or any other attack, whereby any preventative efforts could be construed as compromising to HUMINT and therefore not taken, possibly there was some merit to getting the word out.

Pure speculation but given the incredible sophistication of our many intel agencies, and our many allies' many intel agencies, I really have to wonder exactly how the more elaborate attacks keep happening, like the first Paris attack, in the capitals of Europe no less.



p.s. your OP is about Comey's diary so my guess is no, apart from being an election issue I don't think it will change anything, though I hope I'm wrong.