Trump fuels outsize expectations that Russia investigators will face prison time

Source: Politico | August 20, 2019 | Darren Samuelsohn

We’ve heard the hype before, and the reality has yet to match it.

To hear President Donald Trump and his allies tell it, the federal investigators who spent the past two years investigating the president are about to go down.

On Twitter, on conservative cable TV and in countless interviews, they’ve claimed the FBI and U.S. intelligence agencies are on the verge of being exposed for planting spies, falsifying evidence and forging testimony. They’ve relished in the possibility that a federal prosecutor on the case could file criminal charges. And they’ve predicted jail time for top Obama-era leaders who they say were behind a “deep state” plot to take down Trump.

They’re expecting all of this to come from a spate of Justice Department probes reviewing the full scope of the Trump-Russia investigation, which culminated earlier this year with special counsel Robert Mueller’s report.

“This was treason. This was high crimes,” Trump said during a recent Fox News interview with Sean Hannity. “This was everything as bad a definition as you want to come up with. This should never be allowed to happen to our country again.”

These hyperbolic expectations have legal experts, even some who are often sympathetic to the president, skeptical that the final product can equal the Trump-fueled rhetoric.

“What I think is going to happen is nobody is going to be charged with any criminal activity,” said Jon Sale, a former assistant U.S. attorney from Miami and longtime friend of Rudy Giuliani, a personal attorney to the president.

Sale expects the probes will instead offer much less dramatic procedural reforms, likely focused on potential future investigations of presidential candidates.

“I think that’s where this is all leading,” he said.

Such outsize expectation setting has become de rigueur in the Trump era, with the long-running Trump-Russia probe particularly prone to embellished predictions. And each overheated messaging campaign has served a political purpose. For Democrats, it has helped highlight Trump’s norm-busting behavior. For Republicans, it has helped counteract negative narratives about the president as he faces the possibility of impeachment.

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  • Consistent #31311

    EVERYDAY #31312

    “This was treason. This was high crimes”

    Uh, no Donnie. These were legitimate investigations into allegations of wrongdoing.

    Let’s see the proof of treason and high crimes.

    (Crickets)

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