A night view of the White House from Lafeyette Square Park in Washington, D.C.: Glynn Wilson

The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson –

MOBILE, Ala. — It’s the last day of winter on Wednesday, March 20, and the blue sky is finally visible here after months of foggy, rainy weather and overcast skies.

Mobile has taken over from Seattle, Washington and Portland, Oregon as the rainiest city in America. I’m not making this up. Google it.

But Spring has sprung, which means it’s time to start planning the migration north for summer. In keeping with my philosophy that honesty is the best policy, I must come clean and reveal to readers that I honestly considered retiring from political journalism again this year on some of the darkest days of winter.

One cloudy day in February, I snuck over to the National Park Service website and applied for a couple of volunteer campground hosting gigs in Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado, just to see if I could get the offer to head that way — and maybe never come back to the American South.

Regular readers will recall that my retirement plan calls for heading west into the sunset and living for the rest of my life in a camper van, traveling to explore, see and photograph the American West. I have no plans to stop writing or taking pictures and publishing on the web. I may just spend more time documenting America’s beauty and writing about travel, science and the environment more, maybe less about politics.

My luck and timing in life has often been quite good, as you can see from my long career, and this case was no exception. Apparently my application hit just at the right time and I said all the right things, because I was offered first shot at the gig with my choice of two campgrounds, Glacier Basin or Timber Creek. One of the reasons they probably chose me was that the camp host sites there are not big enough to handle the large RVs over 30 feet long. With my 19-foot-long camper van, I would fit right in.

I was seriously thinking about it, but while conducting research into the places, I figured out that neither campground has shower houses and are so remote that they have no cell phone service available, which would mean no internet access. I would have no way to work from the campground and would have to make special arrangements to stay clean.

So this prompted me to hit the pause button and think long and hard about what I really want to do in life, now and in the future. As for going west, I may be better off making arrangements with the National Forest Service or other federal agencies or state parks rather than the National Park Service, since the national forests and state parks are not as remote as the national parks and one can camp closer to towns where cell phone towers are in range.

Yellowstone bison in the first autumn snow, October 2016: Glynn Wilson

More Work To Do

But the real, main driving factor helping me to decide to head back to Washington, D.C. for another year or two is that there is more work to do. Donald Trump will apparently still be around in the White House for a couple more years, so there will be important news to cover in the nation’s capital.

One of the important stories left to cover will be the outcome of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian tampering with the 2016 election, which also includes an investigation into obstruction of justice by the president himself.

There are four related stories worth mentioning in this vein already out this week.

The magazine Vanity Fair carried a column from Joe Pompeo detailing the anticipation among journalists about the Mueller report, wondering what will happen if the report is a dud.

“The main press room at the Department of Justice is usually a full house these days,” Pompeo says, with “satellite trucks posted up outside the building every day.”

“Everyone is basically staking out the scene, keeping their eyes peeled for a sudden flurry of activity or dash of commotion, or any sign of anything at all that might suggest something is afoot,” he writes.

“IT’S SUCH A HYPED-UP MOMENT”: HOW THE MUELLER PRESS CORPS IS BRACING FOR THE BIG ONE: At the Post, Times, Journal, and other outlets, journalists are reading tea leaves, stalking the Justice Department, and writing stories anticipating many possible outcomes. But what if Mueller’s bomb is a dud?

Now that Alabama’s Jeff Sessions is gone from the building, fired by Trump as Attorney General back in November, it might be worth the trip one day to wander over there and see what’s going on.

The New York Times has nothing new to report, so it ran another summary this week about what we already know.

The Mueller Report Is Highly Anticipated. Here’s What We Already Know

There is so much at stake, it seems, that The Washington Post does not seem willing to wait on the report, so they have petitioned the U.S. District Court in Washington to open redacted records in the case of former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort to public view. This request was denied by the Special Counsel’s legal team this week, citing the “press of other work” that would “require additional time to consult with the government.”

Mueller team cites ‘press of other work’ in seeking delay until April 1 over request to open Manafort records

The National Affairs Desk of Rolling Stone magazine also carried a story this week, linking to just released government documents in the case against Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen in the Southern District of New York.

While there’s no contents of any of Cohen’s emails in the document release, it does show the search warrants that were issued and foreshadowed the charges Cohen ultimately pleaded guilty to.

What Did Mueller Find in Michael Cohen’s Emails? The special counsel’s scrutiny of Trump’s former fixer began months earlier than previously known — and appears to contain troves of data

“Federal agents seized documents and other potential evidence of crimes that helped build the case against Cohen alleging tax and bank fraud and violating campaign finance law,” according to the story.

The new legal documents show that, after the July 2017 search warrant, the Special Counsel’s office got two more warrants in November of that year to search through more of Cohen’s Gmail messages, as well as the contents of a separate email account he used. Those warrants extended the period of time Mueller could access Cohen’s emails to November 13th, 2017.

There’s another eyebrow-raising detail in the decision by Mueller’s office to refer the case to SDNY. Specifically, the documents say that the special counsel’s office had suspected that Cohen had not only lied to banks about his financial dealings, but that he had also represented foreign individuals or entities without registering under the law that requires disclosure of foreign lobbying and influence work, known as the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

The search warrant documents describe several of Cohen’s clients that he routed through a side company he’d created, Essential Consultants. One was Columbus Nova, an investment firm linked to Renova Group and Russian businessman Viktor Vekselberg. Another was a Kazakhstani bank that paid a $150,000 deposit to Cohen’s Essential Consultants, according to the search warrant documents. (Essential Consultants was the same company Cohen used to make hush-money payments to Daniels.)

By the time he appeared before Congress last month, Cohen was ready to repudiate the president. “He is a racist. He is a con man. And he is a cheat,” Cohen testified. “I am not protecting Mr. Trump anymore.”

Our Previous Coverage

Trump’s Fixer Michael Cohen’s Damning Testimony Before Congress Puts the Legal Fix In for Trump’s Downfall

Yes, but what I want to know is, what is going on with AT&T being represented by Cohen, revealed in the same documents but not reported on in any depth by any news organization? Did the telecom giant hire Cohen thinking he could help get Trump and his appointments to the FCC not to oppose the merger of AT&T with Time Warner, which would include CNN?

There are stories still worth covering in Washington, and I will be there from May through October of this year to cover them. Stay tuned.

A barred own in Greenbelt National Park: Glynn Wilson

A unique view of the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C., July 7, 2018: Glynn Wilson