I was interested to see how White House press secretary Sean Spicer would respond to the swirling mess around House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes’s bizarre secret late night visit to the White House last week, as well as the breaking news that the White House initially attempted to thwart the testimony of former acting Attorney General Sally Yates.
If I thought he was going to take these issues seriously, I was disappointed. At one point, Spicer told the assembled reporters that if the president had Russian dressing on his salad they would report it as a Russian connection.
He also went back on a promise to inform the press who it was who signed Devin Nunes into the White House complex.
His line on Sally Yates was somewhat defensible but also largely beside the point. Spicer noted that they ultimately did not exert an executive privilege to prevent her testimony and that they have no problem with her testifying in the future. Yet, that doesn’t explain why Devin Nunes cancelled her scheduled appearance before the House Intelligence Committee immediately after Yates’s attorney informed the White House that she intended to testify to precisely the things the White House was threatening her not to discuss.
Yates and another witness at the planned hearing, former CIA director John Brennan, had made clear to government officials by Thursday that their testimony to the committee probably would contradict some statements that White House officials had made, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Ken Wainstein, a lawyer for Brennan, declined to comment.
On Friday, when Yates’s lawyer sent a letter to the White House indicating that she still wanted to testify, the hearing was canceled.
Spicer sidestepped this issue entirely. It’s nice that the White House backed down and claims that they won’t impede the investigators’ efforts to learn from Yates and Brennan, but it’s an inescapable conclusion that they convinced Nunes to cancel the hearing once they realized that it would be damaging to them.
When you combine that with the confusing saga surrounding Nunes two visits to the White House, it all adds up to a blatant effort to direct the congressional investigation rather than cooperate with it.
Meanwhile, former Acting CIA Director John McLaughlin has been making media appearances today saying that he’s never seen anything like the behavior of Rep. Devin Nunes and that Congress needs an independent investigation of Russia’s “most successful covert operation in decades.”
Spicer can talk about salad dressing all he wants, but the administration he serves has made enemies who are taking things quite a bit more seriously than that.
Spicer and his boss will take the Russia issue seriously when others who have the authority to change their complaisant attitude exercise that authority. These are not people burdened by concerns about patriotism and honor. They will respond only to power, and Spicer’s attitude is a clear indication that at the moment they don’t feel endangered. His attitude will change when that calculus changes — not before.
It’s not whether Spicer takes the issue seriously, but whether a grand jury will.
This whole Russia thing is about the hundreds of millions of dollars Putin and his boys washed through real estate deals. Once they start digging into the money then you will see fear.
“follow the money”.
Gosh, where have I hear that before? [thinking . . . thinking . . . thinking . . . ]
Walter Sobchak. Or Lenin. Wait…Lenin was the one who said “I am the walrus.”
The walrus was Paul Manafort.
He’s definitely that.
“At one point, Spicer told the assembled reporters that if the president had Russian dressing on his salad they would report it as a Russian connection.”
Time for the Trump Sandwich meme.
That image doesn’t load for me.
The Trump Sandwich:
White bread
Full of baloney
Russian dressing
…and a small pickle.
Crap. Does this site have restrictions on image sources? If so, which sites are whitelisted/blacklisted?
Yes, the image lists all of those ingredients plus White American Cheese.
i see the image no problem.
Strange, I can’t see it in chrome, firefox, edge or IE. I’m not behind any work firewall either.
But I can see it on chrome (safari) on my phone. How odd.
I don’t think it’s the site, I get a dns error following that link.
I can hit cdn.viewing.nyc directly, maybe a problem with the rest of the link?
Know what? Spicer is a mealy-mouthed little shit. Talk about a punchable face…I think he’s just a snotty little punk.
The charges against the Trump administration are not only legitimate, but actionable. The Dems need to stay all over the Russian story like their lives depend upon it. It stinks to high heaven and if Spicer thinks he’s cute to mock the allegations, he needs to STFU.
Honestly, this patronizing tone bugs me, coming from a bunch of idiots who don’t know what they’re even doing.
Spicer and the T admin are stuck: Nunes was at the meeting with the Turkish foreign minister where Flynn talked about kidnapping a green card holder for rendition to Turkey. otoh Sessions did not mention – even in his “corrected” statment a meeting at the Mayflower hotel with various ppl including Kushner evidently. there was a summary on someone’s twitter feed, when I find it again I’ll embed
the lies he presumed his lying liar boss demanded throughout his first “performance” as PressSec.
Consider what this says about him (“snotty little punk” barely begins to scratch the surface).
Consider what it says about them.
I’m starting to think there might be something to this Russia stuff, but we can’t know for sure, so stop talking about it:
Ryan Lizza in the New Yorker: White House and Nunes worked together to halt the investigation
and there’s this also too:
BREAKING NEWS:
Nunes is the 383rd wealthiest member of Congress with a minimum net worth of $51,002.
Nunes, chairman of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, has at least $50,000
invested in Napa Valley’s Alpha Omega Winery, LLC.
McCarthyism was just a breeze compared to these hysterics- shoot the traitors!
Nunes has been in Congress 14 years and just from his Congressional salary has earned about 2 million dollars. If his declared assets are so low, either he’s been hiding money or he’s got some serious (and blackmailable) spending problem. His totally bizarre behavior over the past few weeks merits some investigation into his finances and whether they’re being used to influence him.
Nah. Trust me on this.
It’s just the Scoop Jackson alumni association, getting its hate on, because some people want fraternal relations and peaceful cooperation between our two peoples, and that’s something they just can’t stand…..
Cooperation between two peoples: US bombs Mosul killing hundreds of civilians even they were just trying to kill the terrorist snipers on the rooftop. Just like Putin’s bombardment of Aleppo was killing terrorists using human shields.
You should know that wanting to investigate this means you want war with Russia. And really it’s all a distraction anyway.
Walter Jones called for Nunes to rescuse himself. First republican to do so.
Manafort-Linked Accounts on Cyprus Raised Red Flag
Why SHOULD Spicer take the Russia issue “seriously”? If by seriously you mean give answers that would somehow, someway, sometime take away the problem????
What? Were you guys never 12? If no one asks about the vase, you DON’T tell everyone that you didn’t break it.
When the ball went thru the window, you run. MAYBE the folks who live there won’t notice the broken window.
Sheesh, you people are OLD!!!
Of course the imbecile Sturmbannfuhrer Spicer isn’t taking it seriously (Russian dressing? Can it get any lamer than this?); the Littlest Confederate’s DOJ isn’t taking it seriously, and no US attorney is taking it seriously. No law enforcement, no real concern by the minions.
It does appear that the Repub Congress is taking it seriously in the sense of holding onto a nuclear bombshell for which the only serious response is appointing a special prosecutor, or independent investigation. Indeed, not just holding onto it, but allowing Repub operative Nunes to compromise whatever investigation the FBI (whose director also worked to intentionally threw the election to Der Trumper) might be purporting to conduct.
That our “system” permits a single unaccountable committee chairman (from a Deep Red district of the braindead) to completely frustrate a supposed Congressional investigation shows how deeply corrupt and irredeemable our failed nation has become.
A full proof of the facts will likely never be known, as all the various electronic devices which contain the evidence are all being destroyed and scrubbed as Nunes works to throw wrenches into everything. But the outline seems clear: Trumper and his serially failed family business(es), after conning an army of credulous US bankers, had to turn to the laundering of Russian gangster/oligarch money in order to keep the Vulgarian Versailles running.
Putin, who knows the financial facts and can blow the whistle on Trumper’s money laundering whenever he wants, thought a deeply compromised US prez that was under his thumb might be highly comical, so what the hell, let’s try to throw their election. And of course Trumper and his traitorous advisors knew they needed all the help they could get. The incompetent white electorate and our failed constitution did the rest.