Justice appoints a Russiagate special counsel, and more

The Justice Department has announced the appointment of former FBI Director Robert Mueller as Special Counsel in the Russiagate investigation.

Apparently getting rid of Director Comey isn't going to take the heat off President Trump after all. When an administration's own Justice Department feels obligated to take such a step, that's evidence that things have become serious indeed.

Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, even while warning against "jumping to conclusions" about the matter, is also obviously taking the ominous turn the matter has taken very seriously and is not even trying to laugh it off. has joined in the demand that the House receive a copy of the Comey memo.

 And even Vladimir Putin has gotten into the act. The Russian president is offering to supply Congress with a copy of the transcript of the meeting between Mr. Trump, Russian Foreign Secretary Sergey Lavrov, and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak on May 10 in which the president seems to have impulsively "burned" an Israeli intelligence source who provided the United States with information about an ISIS plot to subvert aircraft security. If anyone-Republican or Democrat- would ascribe any credibility at all to such a transcript, it would surely be a sign that he or she is not taking this matter seriously.



Meanwhile, the odds on the president's impeachment have risen dramatically since it was revealed that the president asked Director Comey to drop the investigation into former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. Remember when the president threatened Comey on Twitter about "leaking" information to the media? Now we appear to have found out what that particular piece of attempted bullying was all about. This would seem to indicate what the lawyers call "consciousness of guilt." Only Mr. Trump seems to have picked on the wrong guy,

And it seems that Republicans are claiming- with straight faces, more or less- that the president was just joking when he tried to obstruct justice in the Russiagate probe.

Lost amid the chaos of an administration apparently going down in flames is  Mr. Trump's....er, interesting... appointment of a literal fascist, Milwaukee County Sherriff David Clarke, as Undersecretary of Homeland Security.

Clarke, sadly, is a graduate of Concordia University Wisconsin and a long-time Trump supporter.