Mister Sterling believes that the White House counsel will have to become Trump’s primary legal team once the Muller report is released. Well, that report might not arrive until August 2019. So until then, Trump is relying on his personal, private lawyers.

Rudy Giuliani had been lying low for most of the fall of 2018. But by mid-December, he was back on television and speaking to the press. And in these last 33 days or so, he has been even more unhinged. He has unleashed more limited hangouts, and he even has a outrageous request from the DOJ and the Mueller team.

When Rudy was trotted out to defend Trump in early 2018, most journalists, anchors and pundits treated him as a joke or comic relief. But Marcy Wheeler wonders if Giuliani is intentionally being ineffective to assist with a future Trump conviction appeal. She was corrdect about something else as well. Mueller has taken another look at both Cohen and Manafort based on Rudy’s “haywire” news media appearances.

In one of his nutty hangouts since Thanksgiving, Rudy asserted that Trump’s crimes aren’t so bad because no one was killed. Remember the broken windows theory of crime suppression? If you nip bad behaviour in the bud, this perverse theory said, you'll stop criminal activities before they start. This quickly morphed into the assertion that if we stop and frisk young men, especially young men of color, we'll get guns off the streets, reduce the crime rate, and send a powerful message to the "bad guys", that the crack down on anti-social behaviour is real. Oh, it violated the rights of hundreds of thousands of innocent, mostly black men? It amounted to the humiliation of people whose only crime was being black in New York City? Well, you have to break a few eggs to make an omelette.

And then this disgusting man came round again in a historically bad week for Trump, with a new limited hangout. And what do you know? There was collusion? So there was a conspiracy involving a quid pro quo? And so Don Jr. lied to Congress, then?

Hoo boy.