Well, this has been a helluva day, hasn't it?

Just to sum up, briefly: the World's Greatest Negotiator has banned bump stocks and folded on The Wall, folded his eponymous Foundation into court-monitored receivership, and watched his former National Security Advisor and chief foreign-policy expert get belabored by a federal judge who livened things up by tossing the word "treason" up into the general word-cloud. We spelunk into The Base's mind at our peril, but it's probable that the president*'s surrender on guns and the shutdown will be obliterated from the hive-mind by the obvious deep-state conspiracy fronted by U.S, Judge Emmett Sullivan, who slid Michael Flynn down a cheese grater before agreeing to delay his sentencing until March.

Before we get to those hijinx, however, we should take a look at the documents regarding the Trump Foundation, which could be called a slush fund, if you want to be insulting to foul, dirty snow. From the Washington Post:

Underwood said that the Donald J. Trump Foundation is dissolving as her office pursues its lawsuit against the charity, Trump and his three eldest children. The suit, filed in June, alleged “persistently illegal conduct” at the foundation and sought to have it shut down. Underwood is continuing to seek more than $2.8 million in restitution and has asked a judge to ban the Trumps temporarily from serving on the boards of other New York nonprofit organizations.

Underwood said Tuesday that her investigation found “a shocking pattern of illegality involving the Trump Foundation — including unlawful coordination with the Trump presidential campaign, repeated and willful self-dealing, and much more.”

"A shocking pattern of illegality..."

Lovely.

Tasos Katopodis Getty Images

What Tuesday's development indicates is that everything that people believed—and that the Post's David Fahrenthold won a Pulitzer documenting—was true. The Trump Foundation was a massive exercise in essential Trumpism—One For All and All For Me. (Remember when he bought a portrait of himself at a TF charity auction for 10-grand? That was cool.) And, at the end, he went down like the mutt he's always been.

The settlement with Underwood’s office represents a concession by Trump to a state investigation he decried as a partisan attack. The case is one of numerous legal investigations of Trump organizations that have proliferated during his presidency.

Now, getting back to Michael Flynn's day in court, nothing was more amusing than all the shocked faces on all the pundits who apparently were amazed and astounded that someone with Flynn's record of "service" could be such an amazing international grifter. (One might suggest a quick visit to Dr. Google's office under the names "Kim Philby" or "Fat Leonard.")

SAUL LOEB

Judge Sullivan seemed particularly piqued by the sentencing memo submitted by Flynn's legal team this week, in which they seemed to argue that Flynn somehow had been trapped, bamboozled, and hornswoggled into perjuring himself in his conversations with the FBI. This was a master class in bad lawyering; you save that stuff for after the smoke clears and you're out on your book tour, especially when you've got a sweet no-jail plea deal lined up with Robert Mueller's office.

Nonetheless, the right-wing echo bubble resounded with it for a few days, and Judge Sullivan finally had had enough. He forced Flynn to say that the whole entrapment business was a play for the cheap seats without an ounce of truth in it, and then he said quite plainly that the no-jail promise had slipped very close to the edge of the table.

"I want to be frank with you, this crime is very serious," Sullivan said. "Not only did you lie to the FBI, you lied to senior officials in the incoming administration...All along, you were an unregistered agent of a foreign country while serving as the national security adviser to the President of the United States. That undermines everything this flag over here stands for. Arguably you sold your country out."

Chip Somodevilla Getty Images

Judge Sullivan also had a question for the prosecutors.

"Could he have been charged with treason?"

That one stopped the entire news cycle for a minute or two, even though the prosecutors maintained they'd never considered such a thing. Everybody then went into chambers and, when they finally emerged, Flynn's lawyers accepted Sullivan's offer to delay sentencing until some time in March, giving him three more months to chat with Mueller's prosecutors about god knows what else.

Flynn is well and truly screwed. They have him on dealing with both Russia and Turkey while he was ostensibly working in the White House. The I-Wuz-Framed gambit was his last shot, and it succeeded only in supplying Fox News with a talking point for a few days—and in frosting the judge down to his liver. Sullivan plainly was ready to send Flynn up the river no matter what deal Flynn had been promised by the special counsel's office.

Thus ended one more day in the life of the world's oldest democracy, where so much is suddenly for sale. Cheap.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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