In the Rose Garden on June 21, 2013, Obama announced that James B. Comey would replace Mueller as FBI director. “Like the Marine that he’s always been, Bob never took his eyes off his mission,” Obama said. “It’s a tribute to Bob’s trademark humility that most Americans probably wouldn’t recognize him on the street, but all of us are better because of his service.”

Four years later, last May, the new president invited Mueller back to the White House. President Trump had abruptly fired Comey and now, at the suggestion of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Mueller was coming in to talk about his former job. On his way into the Oval Office, Mueller met then-chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon, a former Navy officer, and teased him for letting his daughter go to West Point.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3902701&forum_id=2#35477363)

Bannon ridiculed the president’s own naïve belief that he could prevent Mueller from going after the president’s finances and those of his family members. Over that Chinese takeout at his Alexandria home, Bannon expressed incredulity that Trump would tell The New York Times in an interview that if Mueller examined Trump’s money trail it would cross the president’s “red line.” Wrote Wolff: “‘Ehhh … ehhh … ehhh!’ screeched Bannon, making the sound of an emergency alarm. ‘Don’t look here! Let’s tell a prosecutor what not to look at!’” When Bannon brought this up with Trump, the president said, “That’s not their mandate.” Bannon’s response: “Seriously, dude?”

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3902701&forum_id=2#35477544)

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(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3902701&forum_id=2#35477554)

By all accounts, Bannon is willing to tell both Mueller and congressional committees what he knows. During his appearance before the HPSCI on Tuesday, which focused on the transition between Obama and Trump and on Bannon’s White House service, the White House apparently blocked Bannon from giving answers, claiming executive privilege. But it’s unlikely the HPSCI will allow the White House to get away with that for long; Bannon will be back soon for another round. Meanwhile, executive privilege won’t be allowed when Bannon testifies before the grand jury, which he’ll have to do while his lawyers wait outside the room. And Bannon himself is well aware that, as shown by the precedents of Watergate and Whitewater, executive privilege has a very limited application. According to Fire and Fury, Bannon laughingly mimicked White House officials who believed that dodge would work. “‘We’ve got executive privilege!’ There’s no executive privilege! We proved that in Watergate.”

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3902701&forum_id=2#35477555)

Cognitive psychology tells us that both the conscious and the unconscious psyche have a great impact on people’s perceptions and how they solve problems. It is the psyche, more specifically, how we cognitively perceive society, which is used to explain occurrences. When an explanation is provided, or a theory is proposed, one of the principal questions we seek to answer is who benefits from the event or situation that disengages our emotional response (e.g. an assassination, a cover-up, a scandal, etc.). Under the assumptions that full information is impossible and that cognitive shortcuts are often biased or normative, the creation of a conspiracy theory as a somewhat ‘rational’ explanation is often not far away.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3902701&forum_id=2#35573243)