Think about this for a minute:
Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence, told House investigators Thursday that President Trump seemed obsessed with the Russia probe and repeatedly asked him to say publicly there was no evidence of collusion, a U.S. official familiar with the conversation told NBC News…
…Admiral Mike Rogers, director of the NSA, has also told associates that Trump asked him to say publicly there was no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian election interference effort…
…A former senior intelligence official familiar with their accounts said both Coats and Rogers [in their refusal to comply with Trump’s requests] were trying to balance their service to the country and to the president with their desire not to be seen as in an way interfering in an ongoing FBI investigation.
Coats and Rogers were covering their own asses when they declined to fulfill the president’s wishes and clear him of any possible collusion with the Russians, but in doing so they also prevented Trump from committing one more count of “interfering in an ongoing FBI investigation.”
The mere fact that Trump asked them to do it is a possible obstruction of justice, but if they had actually done it there would be little doubt.
Director Coats said that Trump “seems obsessed” with the Russian probe. The Washington Post says this morning that Trump is “struggling to remain calm” about it.
President Trump has a new morning ritual. Around 6:30 a.m. on many days — before all the network news shows have come on the air — he gets on the phone with a member of his outside legal team to chew over all things Russia.
The calls — detailed by three senior White House officials — are part strategy consultation and part presidential venting session, during which Trump’s lawyers and public-relations gurus take turns reviewing the latest headlines with him. They also devise their plan for battling his avowed enemies: the special counsel leading the Russia investigation; the “fake news” media chronicling it; and, in some instances, the president’s own Justice Department overseeing the probe.
His advisers have encouraged the calls — which the early-to-rise Trump takes from his private quarters in the White House residence — in hopes that he can compartmentalize the widening Russia investigation. By the time the president arrives for work in the Oval Office, the thinking goes, he will no longer be consumed by the Russia probe that he complains hangs over his presidency like a darkening cloud.
It rarely works, however. Asked whether the tactic was effective, one top White House adviser paused for several seconds and then just laughed.
Whatever else the Russian issue has done, it’s certainly gotten into Trump’s head and under his thin skin. And I think Roger Stone is right. The FBI is going to move against the president and he’s going to have to try to weather it both legally and politically.
“This is a train that’s coming,” said Roger Stone, a former Trump adviser and longtime confidant, referring to the investigation led by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. “These guys are going to move on him despite the fact that they don’t have a case. The question on the table is what is he going to do about it, and that is a legal and political question.”
Roger Stone says that there won’t be a case, but the FBI doesn’t come for the president if they don’t have a case. And the FBI is so spitting mad at Trump that he has no prayer of getting any mercy. His entire fraudulent history is an open book now. If the collusion case is made, it will be game over. But there will be other crimes spelled out in the kind of painful detail that would make Spiro Agnew blush.
You want to know how angry the FBI is with Trump? Take a look at what Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe testified to yesterday before a House Appropriations subcommittee:
Rep. Jose Serrano (D-N.Y.) asked [acting head of the FBI, Andrew] McCabe whether he’d been asked for a loyalty oath by Trump, as Comey has said he was, and how he would reply.
“I have taken an oath already to the United States of America to protect and defend the Constitution. That is the only oath I will take, so that’s really not an issue for me,” McCabe said. He added that it wouldn’t be appropriate “in this forum” to discuss his conversations with the president.
As in past testimony, McCabe did dispute claims by Trump and other officials that morale at the FBI suffered under Comey.
“Director Comey enjoyed a great relationship with the men and women of the FBI. So, his removal took many many people by surprise. It was a shock. It’s something that we’ve all had to come to terms with,” McCabe said.
“We understand it is the president’s privilege to remove the FBI director or any appointee, whenever he chooses to do so. … It’s been my challenge to keep people focused on the mission during this time of transition.”
Here’s my translation of that. The FBI is furious that Comey was fired and absolutely incensed that his reputation was dragged through the mud. They’re so pissed off about the suggestion that the Bureau was being run poorly and had been suffering from poor morale that they can’t see straight. In fact, the agents at the FBI are so intensely out for blood that McCabe’s main challenge as Acting Director has simply been to get them to focus on their actual jobs.
Trump should understand that his countless frauds, mob connections, perjury before casino commissions, abuses of charities, and money laundering are all fair game now. Mueller will have to stick to drawing lines that lead back in some way to the charter he has to investigate the Russia matter, but that probably rules out very little in Trump’s past since his business practices are under investigation. And Trump’s business practice has been to defraud people, renege on contracts and abuse the court system to bully his way through the legal hazards. He has never dotted i’s or crossed t’s. He’s a sitting duck.
He’s only lucky that his sexual assaults are probably walled off from anything that Mueller can consider. And, yet, as Trump stews on all of this, he still doesn’t get how vulnerable he is.
Trump’s grievances and moods often bleed into one another. Frustration with the investigation stews inside him until it bubbles up in the form of rants to aides about unfair cable television commentary or as slights aimed at Attorney General Jeff Sessions and his deputy, Rod J. Rosenstein.
And, of course, it emerges in fiery tweets about the “WITCH HUNT” — or, as he wrote Thursday morning, shortly before an event promoting leadership in technology, “a big Dem HOAX!”
He’s lashing out at irrelevant factors, like the kind of cable news coverage he’s getting or the performance of his hand-picked leaders at the Department of Justice. His problem is that his whole career has been a fraud and he just made a mortal enemy of the one organization in the country that can expose him for what he really is.
And I don’t want to suggest that any of it will be unfair, because it will actually be long overdue. Trump should never have been able to get away with the way he goes about his business. The Feds have been looking the other way for far too long.
Our god-emperor is discovering that “Be careful what you wish for; you might get it” applies even to his august personage, and he doesn’t like it one little bit.
If he weren’t such a loathsome character, with such a long and sordid history of loathsomeness, so richly deserving of the comeuppance in store for him, one could almost — almost — feel sorry for him in his clueless baffled fury.
Oh, who am I kidding, besides myself? I’m reveling in every minute of Trump’s misery.
Unfortunately, it’s not just Trump. “The Feds” have made far too much a practice for far too long of letting felonious rich people off the hook, to the detriment both of ordinary people and the rule of law. It is impossible to read David Dayen’s “Chain of Title,” as I have, without experiencing real rage at the utter refusal of Barack Obama and Eric Holder to hold anyone to account for the tens of thousands of act of mortgage fraud involved in the foreclosure crisis. As Dayen details, extraordinary efforts by a few citizen-activists produced a huge file of crimes and perpetrators, on which the FBI was beginning to move before the 2010 election. After that election, the entire effort was abandoned.
The soft treatment given to Trump was indeed appalling and harmful, but it is typical of a more general problem: one law for the rich, another for everyone else. That is a major reason having Eric “I Never Met a Billionaire I Wanted to Prosecute” Holder involve in efforts to revive the Democratic Party is so problematic. Bringing the felonious rich to book would have been a political as well as a legal achievement, and Obama and Holder together completely failed to do so.
On a political level, the reason for this was Obama and Holder were on board with the Democratic Party’s reliance on wealthy donors. As such, going after the wealthy was a non starter.
But at the institutional level, there is another more practical, although equally sinister and morally repulsive reason: the poor and working classes are easy targets. Here’s a story to illustrate the point.
Many years ago I received a letter to the effect that I had underpaid on my income taxes, even though I had been a W2 wage earner all previous years to that point. I went to the local Internal Revenue office to meet with the agent who had sent the letter. In the waiting room, I was thinking I’d see other people like me, middle class working professionals whose problem was small enough it could be personally handled, the upper middle class and a smattering of rich folk with their lawyers. Instead, the waiting room was filled mostly with the working poor, many of them in their maid and janitorial uniforms, others who were clearly down on their luck because of a lost job or some other calamity that routinely befalls those who work for a living. There were even some homeless there I had the pleasure of speaking with. These were hardly “tax scammers,” but people who had been off the grid for so long or otherwise messed up somehow.
I was able to work out my issues, but not before I got the third degree by the agent who seemed to have been trained to be unnecessarily harsh and almost comically rude to the people she dealt with. I knew the game before I came in, so I humored her and played along. But I can imagine they scared the bejeezus out of most of those people.
I was later told by someone in the know that the people in that room were there because they had no resources and were easy targets. They get beat up on and get the full criminal, moral degenerate treatment for what amounts to crumbs to the high-dollar crowd so the feds can point to the numbers as proof they’re doing their jobs. Every now and then a high-profile case gets done, but for the most part the wealthy fly under the radar and are left alone because it is simply easier to go after those with little access to resources to rack up numbers of successful cases.
The democratic party though, has simply abandoned its mantel as a party of the middle class and “working families” and has embraced policies that for the most part cater to the wealthy and upper middle class professionals. Their policies and actions too often put the needs of this group first. I am hard pressed to come up with legislation the party put forward, other than the ACA (which itself included a huge windfall for the insurance and pharma industries) that was targeted towards the working classes that did not come with some type of sop to or hedge for the wealthy. Even when many labor and even industry groups and municipalities came out in support of the $15 minimum wage, the party hedged and was reluctant to support it, as it did not want to get on the wrong side of wealthy donors.
Some have said, democrats need to have the support of wealthy donors, otherwise they can’t raise the funds to compete with the GOP. But we know that using technology democrats can raise substantial sums and be competitive through small donations. More than the donations, its the good graces of these donors that ensure democratic leadership have a very cushy and rewarding place to land if the end up out of office, either by being voted out or when they are simply ready to cash it in.
Obama was a great president, and though not perfect, I am proud of the legacy he was able to build, especially in light of what we have in the White House today. But I wonder how much more he could have been were it not for that albatross of the wealthy democratic leadership insists on carrying.
Hear. Hear. It is WELL past time for these chickens to come home to roost. Law enforcement has no one to blame but themselves for not doing their job all these years.
I’m not actually sure they have enough agents. A lot resources were switched to fighting world-wide terrorism after 9/11. Also agents are made to move every 4 years – since 9/11…maybe lack of time to get familiar with local mob?
I hope the FBI is spitting mad, but remember there were so many FBI spitting madders for trump that comey had to make a statement before the election to appease the trumpistan FBI. I hope you have more info than I do and that you are right, but I have seen no evidence in the last 20 years that republicans will put country over party. Ever. I hope you are right
I can confirm that Booman is reading “spitting mad” correctly.