Trump is hiding something. Something
extraordinary.
by Bill Moyers & Michael Winship
This post first appeared at BillMoyers.com
Daily Kos
So Donald Trump fired James Comey because
the FBI director mistreated Hillary Clinton last summer over her use of
private emails.
Stop laughing.
Trump takes us for chumps. The Republic is nothing to him but a crap game. And he loads the dice.
In this case, he signs the letter dismissing Comey and
hands it to his personal bodyguard to take over to the FBI office. But
Comey isn’t there. He’s in Los Angeles, where he will hear on television
that he has been dumped — and at first think it’s a practical joke. We
are not making this up.
Hardly 24 hours had passed since Sally Q.
Yates, the former acting attorney general who in late January also was
fired by Trump, testified before a Senate hearing that she had informed
the White House that Trump’s duplicitous national security adviser,
retired Gen. Michael Flynn, had lied about his contacts with Russia’s
ambassador to the United States and was vulnerable to Russian blackmail.
But it took Trump another 18 days to fire him and then only after The Washington Post leaked what Yates had uncovered.
In her testimony Monday, Yates was such a
straight arrow, the iconic public servant, and so devastatingly credible
that the White House had to figure out how to blunt her testimony.
How to change the story? How to send the bloodhounds of the press howling down another trail?
Fire Comey, and say you don’t like the way
he handled the Hillary Clinton email affair, although last year — gasp! —
you lavished praise on him for doing exactly what you now say he
screwed up.
“It took a lot of guts,” Trump said when
Comey reopened his investigation of Clinton. But that was then and this
is now. The irony of the man who screamed “Lock her up!”
throughout his
presidential campaign now trying to shed crocodile tears for “Crooked
Hillary,” as Trump called his Democratic rival, would be hilarious if it
wasn’t so very obviously cynical and contrived.
But clearly, something else is going on
here. Could it be that Comey’s investigation of Russia’s interference
with our election was getting closer and closer to Trump? Is that why
the Trump gang pushed him out the nearest window?
And what about this statement in Trump’s
brief letter officially dismissing Comey: “While I greatly appreciate
you informing me on three separate occasions that I am not under
investigation, I nevertheless, concur with the judgment of the
Department of Justice that you are not able to effectively lead the
bureau.” WHAT three occasions, and what did Comey say, when did he say
it, and why? Or is Trump lying about that, too?
Bottom line: Is the White House simply trying to cover up the truth? That question answers itself.
And oh, let’s not forget Jefferson
Beauregard Sessions, the attorney general of the United States, who had
to recuse himself from the investigation of Russia because he, too, had
been dishonest about contacts with the Russian ambassador. Recused or
not, he was directly involved in sacking Comey. Does anyone around Trump
keep his word?
Trump’s dismissal of Comey smacks of what
the autocrats in Turkey, Egypt, and the Philippines would do – each of
them praised recently by Trump, who clearly sees them as role models. It
is also more than a little reminiscent of Richard Nixon’s 1973 Saturday
Night Massacre. Nixon wanted to fire Watergate special prosecutor
Archibald Cox but his attorney general and deputy attorney general
refused to do his dirty work. They were fired, too. In Sessions, Trump
has a more compliant stooge.
The constant drip of evidence continues. There are reports that a federal grand jury has issued subpoenas to associates of Michael Flynn. James Hohmann at The Washington Postnoted
that at Monday’s Senate hearing, former director of national
intelligence James Clapper “was asked about a news report that Britain’s
intelligence service first became aware in late 2015 of suspicious
interactions between Trump advisers and Russian intelligence agents. The
same story also said multiple European allies passed along information
in the spring of 2016. Asked if that is accurate, [Clapper] replied:
‘Yes, it is and it’s also quite sensitive… The specifics are quite
sensitive.’”
How does Trump react? He fires off more of
his querulous, defensive tweets, claiming the whole Russia story is
“fake news.” That’s his response to just about everything. What was it
Joseph Addison, playwright beloved by the Founders, said? Oh, yes:
“Husband a lie, and trump it up in some extraordinary emergency.” No pun
intended.
Trump is hiding something. Something
extraordinary. To keep it hidden there is no end to the chaos he will
stir at the highest level of government. Every day he lies lustily, as
reflexively as the rest of us breathe, knowing some filth will stick.
With each day he edges us closer to autocracy.
With the news of Comey’s sacking, the need
is clear and more absolute than ever: We must have a special prosecutor
to turn the stones over — or an independent and bipartisan commission
with subpoena power and public hearings, like the 9/11 commission. Or
both.
Trump’s presidency is deeply corrupted, our democracy is compromised, and the system of checks and balances is failing us.
He’s attempting a coup. No joke. We need the truth. Now.
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