Tag Archives: FBI

national news, political news

Trump makes zero sense in explaining Comey firing

I am confused, confounded, baffled and outraged … all at once.

That is what Donald John Trump has done to me with the latest live grenade he has just tossed into the political pile.

He fired FBI Director James Comey because he lacked the trust of his agents. The agency needs new leadership, said the president. Then he tossed out a morsel relating to the manner in which Comey handled the 2016 Hillary Clinton e-mail mess.

But, but … wait!

As a candidate for president, Trump spoke effusively about what a wonderful job the FBI boss did in sending that letter to Congress 11 days before the election, informing lawmakers that he had found some more e-mails that needed a closer look.

So, Comey’s a hero in one breath and a zero in the next.

And now the vice president says the Comey firing had nothing at all to do with the FBI’s investigation into whether the Trump-Pence campaign colluded with Russian government officials who were seeking — allegedly — to influence the outcome of the 2016 election.

Are you confused? Or are you just angry?

Truth be told, my confusion and is abating a good bit and it’s being replaced with outrage over what the president has done.

I’m smelling something very foul in the air as it regards the president.

national news

No, ma’am, it’s not yet ‘time to move on’

Sarah Huckabee Sanders gets paid to do the bidding of the president of the United States.

However, the deputy White House press secretary should know better than to insult Americans’ intelligence with a goofy assertion about it being “time to move on” from questions swirling about Donald Trump’s campaign and its possible link to Russian government operatives.

We’ve got a lot more ground to cover, young lady, especially in light of the president’s abrupt firing today of FBI Director James Comey.

With that, I would urge you to tell your boss — the president — something he needs to hear, but likely won’t want to hear. It is that these questions won’t blow away with the wind until he comes clean about what he knew, when he knew and who was doing it.

The “it” happens to involve questions about whether the Trump presidential campaign colluded with Russian hackers seeking to swing the 2016 presidential election in Trump’s favor. He keeps dismissing the questions out of hand. He suggests that “anyone” could have done the hacking; yet he never fingers the Russians directly.

All of these dismissals, all this obfuscation, all the maneuvering only lend credence to the suspicion in many circles that the president is trying mightily to keep information from the public — from those he now governs as head of state.

Time to move on, Sarah Sanders? Hardly.

Sanders said: “Frankly, it’s kind of getting absurd. There’s nothing there. We’ve heard that time and time again. We’ve heard that in the testimonies earlier this week. We’ve heard it for the last 11 months. There is no ‘there’ there.

“It’s time to move on and frankly it’s time to focus on the things the American people care about.”

I happen to “care about ” knowing whether the president worked with a foreign government to influence our election. I suspect I am not the only American with such concerns.

national news, political news

For starters, Mr. POTUS, please explain the timing of Comey firing

This has been a big week in the presidency of Donald J. Trump, wouldn’t you agree?

The former acting attorney general of the United States, Sally Yates, testified Monday that she warned the Trump campaign about Michael Flynn’s association with Russian government officials.

Then on Tuesday, the president decided to fire FBI Director James Comey, whose agency is in the midst of investigating questions surrounding the former national security adviser.

The firing has shocked and stunned much of Washington, D.C., and — I venture to guess — much of the rest of the nation, too.

What in the world does one make of this?

Trump’s letter to Comey discusses something about his conduct regarding the Hillary Clinton e-mail matter that erupted 11 days before the presidential election. So … he waits until today — May 8 — to pull the trigger on Comey?

I don’t know about you, but something smells badly here. It stinks. It reeks.

There’s going to be some gnashing of teeth for a few days. Then what?

Here’s what I think ought to happen. I believe it is monumentally imperative that Congress — House and Senate, Democrats and Republicans — declare the need for an independent prosecutor to continue this Trump-Russia probe. There can be no hint, not a whiff, of bias in this investigation.

Comey told a congressional committee that his office was examining questions about whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russian government officials who — according to intelligence agencies’ assessment — sought to interfere with the 2016 election. Has any of it been proven? No, although the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, Democrat Adam Schiff, has said there appears to be something “more than circumstantial evidence” to pin the collusion charge on the Trump campaign.

Still, the investigation must continue. Can a Trump appointee as head of the FBI be trusted fully to do what he or she must do to root out the truth? Call me a skeptic — even a cynic, if you prefer — but I have grave doubts that the president is going to nominate a truly independent FBI director.

We’re hearing words like “Nixonian” to describe what Trump has just done. President Nixon fired the independent prosecutor who was zeroing in on the White House during the Watergate scandal. As we know, it didn’t work out well for the president, who quit his office just as the House of Representatives was preparing articles of impeachment against him.

This latest matter has taken a dramatic turn for sure.

It’s timing of this dismissal that has awakened a lot of Americans.

Mr. President, you need to explain yourself. Now!

national news, political news

Yates testimony deepens Flynn-Russia mystery

No one in Washington, D.C., likely thought Sally Yates was going to clear things up when she testified today about a former national security adviser and his relationship with the Russian government.

Oh, no. The former acting U.S. attorney general deepened the questions, heightened the intrigue and quite possibly opened some more doors of inquiry into this ongoing mess within the Trump administration.

At issue is former national security adviser Michael Flynn, the retired Army lieutenant general who last 24 whole days as Donald Trump’s right-hand man on national security issues. The president booted him after Flynn lied to Vice President Pence about conversations he had with Russian government officials.

Yates’ testimony, though, did reveal an interesting lapse of time: It took 18 days for the president to fire Flynn after learning about the general’s deception. Why did it take so long to let him go?

Flynn’s seat gets even hotter

Yates also told U.S. senators that Flynn’s conversations with the Russians — and his lying to the vice president — likely exposed him to blackmail. She said that’s a dangerous set of circumstances surrounding someone upon whom the president must rely for national security advice.

Oh, the web of intrigue continues to grow.

Yates stayed on after Donald Trump took office; she had been appointed by President Barack Obama to serve in the Justice Department, but then the new president asked her to stay on during his initial days in office. Then he fired her.

The Hill reports: “Reporting based on leaks of U.S. surveillance revealed in February that Flynn misled Vice President Pence about the contents of a December phone call to Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak — an account Pence was then repeating to the American people.”

There’s also this from The Hill: “‘We weren’t the only ones that knew all of this,’ Yates said Monday, referring to the revelation that Flynn misled Pence about the true content of the phone call with Kislyak. ‘The Russians also knew about what Gen. Flynn had done. The Russians also knew that Gen. Flynn had misled the vice president and others.

“’This was a problem because not only do we believe that the Russians knew this, but that they likely had proof of this information — and that created a compromise situation, where the national security adviser essentially could be blackmailed by the Russians,’ she said.”

Do you think this Russia-Trump story is going away any time soon? Neither do I.

The FBI is examining this relationship. And of course there’s the question about collusion and whether the Trump campaign actually cooperated with Russian hackers who sought to influence the 2016 presidential election.

I believe I’m going to stay tuned to this drama as it plays out.

International news

‘Greatest threat … on Earth’

FBI Director James Comey had a big day earlier this week fielding questions from the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee.

The bulk of the attention regarding his testimony dealt with the 2016 presidential election and how he justified blowing the whistle on Hillary Clinton’s e-mail matter while staying quiet about an FBI probe into Donald J. Trump’s alleged connection with the Russian government.

Buried in all that testimony came his answer to a question about whether Russia poses a threat to the United States.

Comey’s answer? He called Russia “the greatest threat of any nation on Earth.”

I heard the FBI director’s response and wondered immediately: Why cannot the president of the United States treat Russia as the “greatest threat of any nation on Earth”? Why doesn’t the president condemn the Russians for seeking to influence the outcome of the 2016 election? Why couldn’t he acknowledge flat out on national TV that Vladimir Putin is a “killer”?

Comey’s assessment of Russia’s threat to this nation harkens back to a Cold War-era fear of the Big Bear, the Evil Empire. Putin’s rule of Russia only heightens that reminder.

If only the president of the United States would speak as strongly against Russia and its subversion of our electoral process as the FBI director as just done.

His relative silence on Putin and the nation he governs seems to speak eloquently about something no one in this country should want to hear.

national news, political news

Here’s why Hillary lost

Hillary Clinton has blamed a lot of factors on her shocking defeat during the 2016 presidential election.

FBI Director James Comey’s 11th-hour letter to Congress about those “damn e-mails”; WikiLeaks dumps of more e-mail material; Russian hacking … and yes, her own missteps.

I only can surmise that one of those self-inflicted wounds occurred when Clinton failed to visit Wisconsin, one of the key “battleground states” that went for Donald J. Trump in the 2016 election. She also paid precious little attention to Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania — all of which also swung in Trump’s favor. She wasted a lot of time by taking those states for granted in the closing days and weeks of a campaign she thought was in the bag.

Had she and her campaign devoted the energy she needed to fire up her base on those states, none of the other matters would have amounted to anything.

She didn’t. She blew it. Her campaign disserved her.

Democrats have concluded as much in assessing where this election went south.

Now it’s time to look ahead. Democrats have a mid-term election next year on which to concentrate. After that, in 2020, they have another shot at the White House.

I will stand by my an earlier assertion that Democrats need to find a freshly scrubbed, unknown political star to carry their standard forward. I believe there’s something to be said about “Clinton fatigue.” Her best chance at grasping the big prize stood before her this past year, but she let it slip away.

Who would that new political star be? I have no idea. I haven’t heard his or her name yet.

Get busy, Democrats,

national news, political news

Hillary takes the blame — and places it elsewhere, too

Let’s stipulate something right up front: Political historians and journalists have a monumental task on their hands trying to assess and analyze the mind-boggling results of the 2016 presidential election.

Hillary Rodham Clinton, the candidate who lost the election to Donald John Trump, did not make their jobs any easier when offering her own view of how she snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Clinton spoke during a Women for Women conference in New York City.

Clinton took responsibility for the errors she made. She has determined that she ran a flawed campaign. She also said FBI Director James Comey’s letter to Congress revealing that he was taking a fresh look at the e-mail controversy played a part; so did the release of data from WikiLeaks, which raised questions among undecided voters about Clinton’s candidacy.

“It wasn’t a perfect campaign — there is no such thing — but I was on the way to winning until a combination of Jim Comey’s letter on Oct. 28 and Russian WikiLeaks raised doubts in the minds of people who were inclined to vote for me and got scared off,” Clinton told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour.

She also blamed a latent misogyny among voters who just couldn’t vote for a woman to become president of the United States.

Was it Comey? The WikiLeaks release? Misogyny? Campaign incompetence?

All of the above.

Hillary did note something that continues to rumble in the president’s craw, which is that she did win nearly 3 million more popular votes than Trump. She just was unable to win in those Rust Belt states that had voted twice for Barack H. Obama.

I’ll just add as well that pollsters took a lot of heat in the immediate aftermath of the election. But get a load of this: The RealClearPolitics average of polls shows that Hillary won the popular vote by a bit more than 2 percentage points, which is just about where the RCP pre-election poll average had pegged it.

What we have here is a perfect storm of circumstances that produced the most shocking U.S. political upset of, oh, the past 100 years.

Good luck, political historians, as you sort all of this out.

national news, political news

FBI managed to muck up a murky election

I continue to have great respect for FBI Director James Comey — even after reading a lengthy New York Times article providing excruciating detail about how might have changed the course of political history with a single letter to Congress.

Comey was holding on to information that I reckon he felt he had to make public while keeping secret other information related in some fashion to what he was about to disclose.

Did the nation’s top cop swing the 2016 presidential election all by himself by giving up the goods on Hillary Rodham Clinton while keeping quiet what he was looking at regarding Donald John Trump? I don’t believe that’s the case. But, damn! He made a tough call at the just the wrong time!

The article is long, but worth your time. It details the agony that Comey endured during the final months of a bitter presidential campaign.

Eleven days from Election Day, Comey decided he had to send a letter to Congress telling lawmakers that he had more information that might be pertinent to an investigation he had concluded regarding Clinton’s e-mail use during her time as secretary of state.

Do you remember how he held that press conference in July 2016 in which he criticized Hillary’s “careless” use of the personal server? And how he then said he had no grounds to prosecute her? That presser was, in itself, highly unusual.

When some more e-mails became available, he then seemed to believe he owed the public some sort of explanation of what he found.

But, man, the timing was terrible!

While all this is engulfing the campaign, we didn’t know that Comey’s agency was probing allegations that Trump’s campaign might be colluding with Russian computer hackers seeking to influence the election, trying to help the Republican nominee defeat Hillary.

He didn’t reveal any of that. Indeed, he only went public with that tidbit just a few weeks ago during a congressional hearing.

FBI policy had been to stay out of partisan political activity. It cannot be seen as a factor in deciding elections. I get it. So does everyone else.

As for whether Comey’s disclosure of the e-mail issue late in the campaign and whether it proved decisive … I’ll simply make this point: Hillary Clinton’s campaign never should have had to worry about an election outcome in the first place.

She and her team made enough mistakes without that disclosure to keep Trump’s campaign close enough to catch them.

Hillary Clinton is far more qualified to be president than the man who defeated  her. Her abject failure to communicate with voters as a living, breathing human being — to talk directly to them and to spell out a clear vision for how she intended to lead the country — doomed her effort to make history.

International news, national news, political news

To collude with Russians or not collude?

Let’s play out a hypothetical scenario that appears to be a bit less hypothetical than it was a month or two ago.

FBI Director James Comey says his agency is investigating whether Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign worked in cahoots with Russian goons to influence the outcome of the 2016 election.

Let’s presume for the sake of discussion that the FBI finds collusion. It determines that someone in the campaign worked with Russian government officials to swing the election in Trump’s favor.

How far up the campaign chain of command might it go? Maybe such collusion occurred only at the mid-level of the Trump campaign. Perhaps it was done only by some junior hired gun who, perhaps, was feeding the Russians information they could use against Hillary Rodham Clinton.

If that’s the case — that this was done without direct knowledge by the campaign’s senior management team — then it becomes fair to wonder: Does such a discovery presume an impeachable offense? Would that be grounds to impeach the president of the United States, even if he had zero direct knowledge of such collusion as it was taking place?

My sense is that it should. Why? Well, the president boasted of his business acumen. He bragged about how he had control over everything in his life.

If such collusion occurred out of his sight or his earshot, then would he be guilty of gross campaign incompetence? Does such incompetence translate to an inability to govern? And does any and/or all of it destroy whatever credibility the president needs to conduct his duties as head of state?

We don’t know the status of the FBI investigation. Nor do we know the extent of the evidence that congressional committees have gathered in their search for the truth behind this most disturbing story.

We are likely entering a frightening time as the FBI continues this complicated probe.

national news, political news

Stop the tease, Rep. Schiff, about ‘circumstantial evidence’

Now it’s a leading congressional Democrat who’s teasing the public with something — still unknown — relating to whether the Donald J. Trump presidential campaign was in cahoots with the Russians to influence the 2016 election.

Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told NBC’s Chuck Todd that the committee has “more than circumstantial evidence” that the campaign and the Russians conspired to swing the election in Trump’s favor.

Really, Rep. Schiff? But you can’t tell us anything because it’s, um, classified. Is that right?

Imagine the buzz such a statement is making. No, you don’t have to imagine it. It’s all over the media.

It’s getting a bit testy in Washington, D.C., these days.

Neil Gorsuch is going through a grueling confirmation hearing to become the next Supreme Court justice; the president is twisting arms among House Republicans to get them to approve a GOP alternative to the Affordable Care Act; a terrorist struck in London, killing and injuring several bystanders; Republicans are calling for a special prosecutor to examine the Russia story; and the Intelligence Committee’s Republican chairman, Devin Nunes, blabbed to the president that his office in New York might have been the object of “incidental” surveillance by someone.

In the meantime, the FBI director has shot down in flames the president’s assertion that Barack Obama bugged Trump Tower.

Now we hear from the House Intelligence panel’s top Democrat that the committee might have the goods on whether the Trump campaign committed a potentially treasonous act by colluding with Russians goons who attacked our democratic electoral process.

Rep. Schiff has now acted in a sort of Trumpian fashion by teasing us with a morsel that might evolve into a full-course political meal.

Or … it might be a lot of nothing.

Which is it?