Today, The Huffington Post republished a "report" from the Associated Press stating that the President's White House inner circle is "one by one" turning against him:
"It was a bruising week for Trump, with a trio of men who are intimately familiar with his secrets and business dealings now cooperating with prosecutors. First, Trump’s former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, implicated him in testimony about hush money payments to two women who allege affairs with him. On the same day, his former campaign chairman was found guilty on a slew of financial charges. At least Paul Manafort had nothing to say about Trump or his campaign.
But then came revelations that his longtime friend, David Pecker, the CEO of National Enquirer publisher American Media Inc., had been granted immunity from prosecution to provide information, followed by news that Trump Organization finance chief Allen Weisselberg, who had once worked for Trump’s father, was cooperating as well."
However, there are a few problems with this statement. First, the National Enquirer payoffs are old news. We have known since March that the National Enquirer was paying people to sign nondisclosure agreements with them. This is nothing new. We were also already told, from Stormy Daniels's legal documents, that Michael Cohen was likely paying these women with hush money. So, honestly, the only "betrayal" going on here is people admitting to what we've already known about them. Regardless of whether they testified, the media has been telling us for months that they did these things.
At least the Huffington Post and Associated Press had a moment of honesty and reminded us that Paul Manafort's testimony revealed nothing about Trump. However, there was also another recent testimony in the FBI investigation that seemed to have slipped the Associated Press' and Huffington Post's mind: the testimony of Don McGahn. This man was grilled by Mueller for 30 hours in one of the most extensive sets of interviews in the entire investigation and it was absolutely useless for the FBI. At the end of the interview, which, might I add, was totally supported and encouraged by Trump and his entire legal council, Mueller found absolutely zero evidence to implicate Trump for collusion with the Russians.
What that interview alone tells me, since McGahn not only cooperated fully with Trump's requests but was also candid about his opinions of the President, stating a few personal qualms with him, is that whoever claims to have dirt on Trump was never a true friend to begin with. If a series of interviews with three current and former senior staffers brings up absolutely nothing useful, then clearly the "anonymous sources" are either liars or imaginary.
Just to review: Michael Flynn gave nothing to the FBI that implicated Trump in Russian collusion, neither did Paul Manafort, and neither did Don McGahn. The fact that the media still brings up these stories of Trump colluding with the Russians should show you just how accurate "anonymous sources" are. However, that isn't the point. The point is that, for a man who is supposedly losing his inner circle "one by one" to betrayal, President Trump sure has a lot of people who have not implicated him in crimes and had nothing of value to state to the FBI that furthered the Russia investigation toward any sort of indictments. For a man who has been betrayed by his inner circle, this is hardly anything of a betrayal.
However, what the Huffington Post and Associated Press have forgotten is that plenty of Trump's inner circle have not betrayed him: Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Mike Pence, Steve Mnuchin, Jim Mattis, John Bolton, Ben Carson, Melania Trump, Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, Donald Trump Jr, and Eric Trump, all of whom are either family members or high-ranking cabinet officials, have not betrayed Trump. So how can the Huffinton Post and Associated Press claim that Trump is facing a loyalty crisis when he is surrounded by loyal cabinet members and friends and former colleagues who had absolutely no secrets to divulge on the President?
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