FALLS CHURCH NEWS-PRESS | FCNP.COM
NATI O NA L
Comey Still Key to The Russia Probe
U.S. Senator Mark Warner of Virginia joined others on the Senate Intelligence Committee Wednesday suggesting that the committee might be interested in hiring James Comey, fired as head of the FBI by Trump Tuesday night and now as such a private citizen without a job. The most plausible explanation for the firing of Comey is that it stemmed from a paranoid hissy fit by the president, lashing out impotently like a cornered rat as a relentless progression of damning evidence mounts that will eventually land him behind bars. His decision was not rational and his explanation, assigned to his pathetic surrogates to deliver and defend, not plausible. Although the media has been doing its job pointing out the discrepancies in the president’s latest actions, it spent far too much time focused on judging the veracFALLS CHURCH NEWS-PRESS ity of his patently bogus explanation. On television yesterday, only commentators like the great Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame and legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin demonstrated sufficient umbrage at the ludicrous “cover story” for justifying the firing. The patently lying explanation should be compared with (likely to be dumped) Trump press secretary Sean Spicer’s performance in his very first day in office, when he was under strict orders to defy all the photographic and eyewitness evidence about the size of the crowds at the Inaugural. But now it is not just an arm-twisted new hire that “drank the KoolAid” and gone to the wall for Trump’s ridiculous lies, it is most of the Republicans in Congress, including those moral midgets who passed legislation to strip health insurance from 24 million Americans only last week. Still, it is Trump sycophant Kellyanne Conway who took the prize for the most repulsive defense of the indefensible. Tuesday night she said to CNN’s Anderson Cooper that critics bringing up the subject of Russia in the context of the Comey firing reminded her of gamers who win $50 for every time they mention Russia. Not linked to the investigation of Russian interference in the U.S. election, and Trump’s collusion with it? Comey is canned just after asking the Justice Department for more money for his Russia investigation, as the New York Times revealed. Thanks solely to a Washington Post expose, Trump’s appointee Michael Flynn was fired from the highly-sensitive role as National Security Adviser, as former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, fired earlier by Trump, was finally able to confirm in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week. Yates testified that she’d briefed Trump officials repeatedly about Flynn’s vulnerability to Russian blackmail, something that they ignored until the Post article appeared. Now, prosecutors have issued grand jury subpoenas to Flynn and associates seeking business records, constituting the first major escalation of the FBI’s Russia-Trump investigation in almost a year. Undoubtedly, it was this Yates testimony, and the subpoenas, that set Trump off into a paranoid rage that led to Comey’s firing in a futile attempt to insulate himself from more damning evidence that is sure to come. To be sure, this matter represents a far greater danger to the U.S. than the Watergate affair. Watergate was about a second rate break-in and theft. This time, it is about the intervention of a hostile foreign power into the inner corridors of power of the U.S. government. For this reason, for Republicans to defend Trump’s brazen and hopeless effort to cover up this Russian intrusion, and his own treasonous collaboration with it, is far, far beyond the pale. There were Republicans during Watergate like Sen. Howard Baker “who put country ahead of party,” as Bernstein put it. But now, he said shaking his head, “there is no GOP interest in obtaining the best obtainable version of the truth.” Republicans now are so cowed by their partisan attachments that they are heading for a special place in American history, one reserved for a handful of figures like Benedict Arnold or Aaron Burr, but now requiring a major expansion to accommodate a whole generation of treasonous Russian agents. This is the biggest challenge to American democracy since the Civil War, since the War of 1812, since the American revolution. Republicans today are flatly on the wrong side of history.
MAY 11 – 17, 2017 | PAGE 15
Nicholas F. Benton
Nicholas Benton may be emailed at nfbenton@fcnp.com.
Trump Is Lying Again The president of the United States is lying again. He is lying about the reason he fired James Comey, the FBI director. Trump claimed that he was doing so because Comey bungled the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email, which meant that Comey was “not able to effectively lead the bureau.” There is no reason to believe Trump’s version of the facts and many reasons to believe he is lying. How can I be so confident? First, it’s important NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE to remember just how often Trump lies. Virtually whenever he finds it more convenient to tell a falsehood than to tell a truth, he chooses the falsehood. An incomplete list of the things he has lied about include: Barack Obama’s birthplace, Obama’s phone “tapp,” John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Sept. 11, the Iraq War, ISIS, NATO, military veterans, Mexican immigrants, Muslim immigrants, anti-Semitic attacks, the unemployment rate, the murder rate, the Electoral College, voter fraud, the size of his inaugural crowd, his health care bill and his own groping of women. Second, Trump previously praised Comey for reopening the Clinton email investigation, which was the core of Trump’s rationale for the firing, as Igor Volsky of CAP Action noted. Third, Trump claimed that he was merely following up on a Justice Department recommendation and released a letter from the department to bolster his case. Yet the timing doesn’t make sense — and Trump aides have already undercut their boss, by acknowledging that he wanted to fire Comey. As Bill Kristol of the Weekly Standard pointed out, the Justice Department letter was dated the same day as the firing, and the official who wrote it has been on the job for just two weeks — not enough time for a serious review that could have reversed Trump’s previous position. “So there was no real recommendation from DOJ,” Kristol wrote. “Trump wanted to do it, and
David Leonhardt
they created a paper trail.” Kristol, a conservative, added, “One can be at once a critic of Comey and alarmed by what Trump has done and how he has done it.” Even more damning, White House sources also admitted on Tuesday night that Trump himself initiated the firing. The White House charged Jeff Sessions, the attorney general, with coming up with a reason to fire Comey, as The Times and others have reported. Finally, and most obviously, Trump had a very big motive to fire Comey and install a loyalist. Comey was overseeing the investigation into the Trump campaign’s numerous strange ties with the Russian government. “The firing of James Comey as FBI director is a stunning event,” Benjamin Wittes and Susan Hennessey, two of the sharpest observers of the Russia case, wrote for Lawfare. “It is a profoundly dangerous thing — a move that puts the TrumpRussia investigation in immediate jeopardy and removes from the investigative hierarchy the one senior official whom President Trump did not appoint and one who is known to stand up to power.” The president is lying about firing a top law enforcement official, and he is almost certainly lying to protect himself and his aides from a full investigation into their own activities. Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, wrote on Tuesday night, “We are in a full-fledged constitutional crisis.” It’s now clear that Trump’s Justice Department has no independence. Both Sessions, and Sessions’ deputy, Rod Rosenstein, are acting like Trump enforcers. And now the FBI is compromised as well. The only way to unwind the constitutional crisis is an independent inquiry, completely free of Trump’s oversight. Several Republican members of Congress expressed concern about Comey’s firing, but words aren’t enough. Members of Congress need to give Americans reason to believe the Russia investigation isn’t a charade with a predetermined outcome. They need to make clear that while the president may think he is above the truth, he is not above the law.