Clearly Trump wants the FBI to become his version of Putin’s lapdog FSB (the Russian intelligence services successor to the KGB, that hacked both the American and French elections) — and just do what they are told. So Trump is lying– again. He is lying about the reason he fired James Comey. Trump had a motive to fire Comey and install a loyalist — another job for Ivanka perhaps? Comey was overseeing the investigation into the Trump campaign’s numerous potentially criminal ties with the Russian government.
Let’s remember just how often Trump lies as we scan this very incomplete list of provable lies about…
- President Obama’s birthplace
- President Obama’s phone “tapp“
- President John F. Kennedy’s assassination
- Sept. 11
- The Iraq war
- Mexican immigrants
- Anti-Semitic attacks
- The unemployment rate
- The murder rate
- So called voter fraud
- The size of his inaugural crowd
- His health care bill
- His own groping sexual assaults of women.
…And clearly Trump is lying this time because he previously praised Comey for reopening the Clinton email investigation, which was the core of Trump’s “rationale” for the firing.
Comey’s sacking came on a night when CNN reported that a grand jury had issued subpoenas in the investigation of the Trump camp’s contacts with Russian officials, and after it was confirmed to Congress that more than one person connected to the Trump campaign was the subject of an FBI counter-intelligence investigation. Comey had indicated that he was investigating leaks from inside the FBI to the Trump campaign in the course of the election.
Malcolm Nance, a former navy cryptographer and author of a book on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, said: “This is a Nixonian move clearly designed to take out the man who was investigating collusion with a foreign power. “We are in a completely new space. It will blow past Watergate. Nixon was being investigated for crimes. This is when the FBI is in the middle of a counter-espionage investigation. This is a spy hunt. We have never had that in the White House. This is third world dictator stuff.”
White House sources said 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 New York Times and others have reported.
Trump’s priority is, first and always, Trump.
Which raises the question: Knowing, as he must have, that firing Comey would set off a crisis, why did he calculate that this move was in his self-interest? It seems the only answer is that Trump knows that there is a “smoking gun” on his Putin/Russia election connection and knows — better than anyone — that he’d be on the way to impeachment and maybe to prison too- if the FBI investigation continues without a dramatic reversal.
Proof will come that Trump tried to avoid impeachment and maybe prison- if and when Trump appoints a Trump loyalist to head the FBI.
More and more Trump looks and acts like a Third World “leader” cast in the non-democracy mold.
We’ve seen this sort of thing recently in places es like Turkey and Russia, and the sacking also brought deserved comparisons to President Richard Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre, when the scandal-engulfed president ordered the Watergate prosecutor fired in a doomed attempt to keep that probe from ensnaring him.
Trump is the man who already sounded like a Nixon-type or the leader of a tin pot dictatorship when he questioned the legitimacy of “so-called” judges because of a ruling and said they should be blamed for terrorist attacks… all this as his chosen White House spokesman said Trump’s authority “will not be questioned.”
Trump is the man who seconded Putin’s praise for far-right candidate Marine Le Pen. Then Putin unleashed a Russian security service hack of the French election as he’d done in America on behalf of another white nationalist candidate: Trump. (French voters — notably absent a huge white evangelical throng of voters that tipped the US election in Trump’s favor — rejected Putin, Trump and Le Pen by 2-to-1.)
Trump’s assaults on democratic norms mirror his criminal assaults on women.
As he fires James Comey, once again Trump thinks himself unassailable. It’s a grab’s at our collective American crotch as Trump assaults our American dignity. But thinking Americans (other than white evangelical brain-dead Trump groupies that is) are seeing Trump for what he is: a tin-pot tyrant molester of both women and democracy who thinks he can get away with anything “because I’m Trump!”
As Brian Schatz, a Democratic senator from 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’s deputy, Rod Rosenstein, are just Trump enforcers, stooges and lick-spittle followers.
…And now the F.B.I. is compromised too.
Trump looks and acts more like a criminal trying to avoid prosecution by intimidating witnesses — rather than an American president upholding the Constitution. Trump is acting like a non-American dictator. He (and his con artist family merrily profiting off his corrupt hijack of the presidency) must be overthrown (a word appropriate to removing con men and dictators)– now.
The only way to begin this “overthrowing” American-style and start to end Trump’s assault on our constitutional process is by an independent inquiry. It must be completely free of Trump’s tender self-interested mobster-like “oversight.”
Please WATCH my new video about Trump v the FBI…
https://www.facebook.com/frank.schaeffer.16/videos/1028114240652015/
2 Comments. Leave new
I appreciate your comments and opinions. Thanks. I also think your paintings are beautiful and interesting. Is there a symbolism in the cyclamens?
I always paint the seasons as they pass no matter what the subject… these are my winter of discontent paintings as the Trump era unfolds… and these are winter flowers we keep indoors… so for me yes, they are part of a season rooted in discontent and hope for change… Thank for your interest, Best, Frank