GOP political consultant Mike Murphy dropped a tasty rumor in a conversation with Lawrence O'Donnell last night about Trump.

"The president does what the president wants and there's a bunch of guys running after him trying to clean up after him 24/7, which is completely it's exhausting. I don't think there's any strategy or anything, I think it's all Trump-driven.

"But I'll give you one salacious rumor, because it's Russia Speculation Night, I was walking around Beverly Hills -- and God, I don't want to be pulled in by Mueller on this, because I don't know anything. But I was walking around international businessmen who I know pretty well, swore me to secrecy, said you can say it on TV, 'A friend of mine got pulled in by Mueller asking about a memorandum of understanding for a deal that Trump had with Russian financial interests during the 2016 campaign, and Mueller has the document,' " he said.

"So that is my contribution to the cloud of speculation. I believe this guy's credible, but I have no way of knowing if this is true."

Well, I always knew there had to be something, somewhere, in writing. I mean, would anyone do a handshake deal with Trump? So this is really heartening to hear that Mueller may have the document.

By now, anyone who's paying attention has figured out that Trump is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Russia Inc., and has been for a while now. Charles Pierce wrote yesterday:

Certainly, this most recent action by Mueller isn’t going to make the president* any less of a furious paranoid. Mueller’s investigation is clearly now going into the deepest, darkest corners of Everywhere. He’s looking into shady money from the United Arab Emirates and he’s questioning whether or not the Saudi blockade of Qatar was in retaliation for the Qatari sheikhs’ understandable reluctance to loan gobs of cash to Jared Kushner.

He is looking at the Trump campaign and the Trump presidency* as one massive three-year money-suck, a fundraising mechanism to enrich its inside players and to monetize the political system, and then the presidency, for every last dollar, riyal, or ruble that can be squeezed out of both of those institutions. Mueller is finding corruption everywhere he looks. He is now a fireman in hell.

The part I think Pierce gets wrong is that he sees Pence as the Mueller-approved Dauphin. I don't believe that, because Pence is so clearly complicit and I can't think he'll be rewarded for that.

After all, it was his job to put Russia-friendly appointees into top positions, and in the Mueller equation, that can't count for nothing.

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