Tag Archives: Russian meddling

national news

Was there spying going on? Maybe, but not for politics

Donald J. Trump has accused someone in the FBI of “spying” on his 2016 presidential campaign for “political purposes.”

Now we hear from the former director of national intelligence, James Clapper, who all but confirms a portion of what Trump has alleged.

Except that Clapper says that if the FBI got wind of Russian meddling in our presidential election, then it was duty bound to find out if the reports had any veracity.

The FBI was doing its job, if that’s what occurred.

Trump has offered no evidence of politicking. No surprise there. The president has become the master of innuendo, diversion and destruction. He wants to subvert and dismantle special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Russian meddling issue.

He calls it a “witch hunt” and says he didn’t do anything wrong. So, his strategy is to discredit the work of a highly respected career prosecutor who once led the FBI under two administrations, one Republican and one Democratic.

This is getting weird, man.

national news

It’s the intent that matters

James Clapper is the expert on national security and matters relating to deep-cover operations.

I am not.

Still, I want to take issue with an assertion that the former director of national intelligence has said about the Russian meddling in our 2016 presidential election. Clapper has said the Russians actually tilted the election in Donald John Trump’s favor; he said their attack on our electoral process was decisive that Trump essentially is an illegitimate president.

I have trouble buying into that assumption.

Clapper says the Russians targeted three states that Trump won over Hillary Clinton: Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Trump won those states by a grand total of 77,000 votes; their electoral vote count put him over the top and, thus, he was elected president.

My own view — albeit from afar — is that Clinton’s last-minute strategy backfired. She didn’t visit Wisconsin after being nominated by the Democrats. She paid only cursory attention to Michigan and Pennsylvania.

Having said that, I want to make an assertion of my own, which is that the Russians’ intention to swing the election toward Trump is grievous enough on its own.

Clapper is far from alone in his belief that the Russians actually meddled, that they attacked our electoral system. Every national security chieftain on board now or who was aboard during the 2016 election have said the same thing. Even the president’s own team has acknowledged as much; and I include the current secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, who was CIA director when he told a congressional committee that he had no doubt the Russians meddled.

Trump’s response has been shameful in its negligence. He continues to spread the blame around to others who “might” have interfered. He fails to acknowledge publicly that Russian strongman/president Vladimir Putin was involved, which is another assertion that the intelligence committee has made.

James Clapper, a retired Air Force general, is an intelligence professional. He brings strong credibility to any argument about the integrity of the 2016 election. I am just unwilling to buy totally into the idea that Russian meddling actually turned the tide in Trump’s favor.

What matters as much — if not more — is that they intended to sow discord and mistrust in our electoral process.

The Russians have succeeded.

If only the president would acknowledge it, too.

national news

Spygate? Clever, Mr. POTUS

Good grief, Mr. President.

You now have done what every cheap-seat pundit does when a controversy begins to rise to the level of a serious constitutional crisis, one that actually happened and toppled a sitting president of the United States.

You’ve attached the “gate” suffix to something that has yet to be determined to have any legs at all.

“Spygate” might go nowhere, Mr. President. In fact, it looks to me as though you have concocted something out of nothing.

Mr. President, you accuse the FBI of planting a “spy” in your 2016 presidential campaign. You imply that the FBI acted on the direction of someone within the Barack Obama administration. You offer the usual “I hope it’s not the case,” but then you say that if it’s true, we have the biggest scandal in this country since Watergate.

Holy crap, Mr. President! Why don’t you leave the “gate” reference out of it? Watergate stands on its own as the worst of the worst scandals. You might not recall these events, sir, but President Nixon’s coverup of the original crime — a so-called “third rate burglary” — was what did him in. I’ll accept that you weren’t all that interested in politics and public policy at that time; you were just coming out of college and preparing to parlay your father’s stake into a billion-dollar enterprise.

Do I need to remind you, Mr. President, that you haven’t yet produced a shred of evidence that someone “spied” on your campaign for “political purposes.”

And for crying out loud, if you’re so damn concerned about the integrity of the 2016 presidential election, why don’t you give at least a nod to the nation’s network of actual spies and intelligence experts that the Russians attacked our electoral process?

Now you’re calling it “spygate.” Give me a break.

media news, national news

Trump wages war on wrong foe

While the Russians are attacking our nation’s electoral process and the media report on it, who does the president of the United States declare to be the “enemy of the American people”?

The media. The folks who are doing their job. The individuals and their organizations that take their mission seriously.

A cable news network today ran a compilation of the various times Donald J. Trump disparaged the media. He calls reporters “dishonest,” he assails them for fomenting “fake news,” he said journalists don’t love their country.

The president’s scorched-Earth policy against the media has continued at a breakneck pace ever since he took office. You’ll recall how former White House press secretary Sean Spicer conducted his first press briefing by excoriating the media for way they reported on the size of the inaugural crowd that heard Donald J. Trump paint a grim picture of the nation he was elected to lead.

It’s been going downhill ever since.

For the ever-lovin’ life of me I cannot understand the president’s fixation with demonizing the media. All forms of media gave this clown a pass time and time again during the initial stages of his presidential campaign. Much of the media was complicit in allowing Trump to continue to lie through his teeth. They didn’t call him out.

Now that the media have awakened to the kind of man he always has been — a self-aggrandizing narcissist — they have done their job.

Trump’s response? He has launched a full-scale frontal assault on the organizations that almost all of his predecessors have recognized as being vital to the good health of a representative democracy.

The media aren’t the “enemy of the American people.” The real enemy — apart from the Russians who meddled in our election — is the president who seeks to discredit them.

national news

POTUS ratchets up war with Mueller

Here we go.

Donald Trump has accused the FBI of improper surveillance of his 2016 presidential campaign and has “demanded” that the Justice Department launch a probe into it.

DOJ has responded by asking its inspector general to conduct a thorough investigation into whether anything improper occurred with regard to the Russian meddling in our 2016 election.

“If anyone did infiltrate or surveil participants in a presidential campaign for inappropriate purposes, we need to know about it and take appropriate action,” Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said in a statement.

OK, where do we stand?

It looks to me as though the president has pulled out all the stops in his strategy to discredit, disparage and disqualify the serious probe being conducted by special counsel Robert Mueller.

Mueller has been given the authority to determine to what extent if any the president’s campaign cooperated with Russians who meddled in our electoral process. What’s more, Mueller’s team is examining a whole range of related issues, such as potential obstruction of justice and possible Trump Organization business ties with Russians involved in the meddling.

Trump’s allegation, as he has done with other such accusations, comes with no evidence up front. The president just, um, said it.

Rosenstein’s decision is the right call. If what the president alleges proves true, then we have a serious problem on our hands. I am going to rely on the IG’s ability to conduct the kind of thorough investigation that doesn’t presume guilt, but instead examines what — if any — evidence exists to lend credence to what the president has alleged.

If the IG finds nothing, well, then we have a problem of an entirely different nature.

And it is just as serious as the first one.

national news

Obstruction of justice, anyone?

The news of the long list of questions special counsel Robert Mueller wants to ask Donald J. Trump hits me hard at two levels.

First things first.

Mueller appears loaded for a deep probe into obstruction of justice, according to the questions obtained by the New York Times. From what I’ve read of the NY Times account of the inquiry, Mueller isn’t looking too carefully into collusion, given that there appears to be no federal statute that covers whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russian government officials who meddled in our 2016 presidential election.

He is zeroing in on obstruction and whether the president sought to derail the investigation by pressuring the Justice Department, and former FBI Director James Comey to back off their probe into former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s role in those meetings with the Russians.

The Times also reports that Mueller is looking at the Trump family’s business dealings and whether there is any link between that aspect of the president’s other life and the one he inherited by getting elected president of the United States.

Mueller is known to be a meticulous lawyer. He dots all the “i’s” and crosses all the “t’s” before proceeding.

I hope he is allowed to continue this probe to its conclusion.

The second part of this story is the troubling aspect of the leak that apparently allowed the Times to obtain the questions in the first place.

I am forced to ask: Did someone within the Mueller legal team leak these questions to the media and possibly undermine its integrity?

I hope that’s not the case.

media news

Wolf controversy overshadows media’s good work

4 Comments

It’s a shame that a foul-mouthed comedian’s performance at the White House Correspondents Dinner has overshadowed much of what the crowd was there to do.

They came to honor those who work in the media, who cover the news and report to the public the happenings of the federal government, its elected officials and appointed staff.

The media are not, in the words of Donald J. Trump — who skipped the dinner for the second consecutive year — the “enemy of the American people.” Far from it. They are the protectors of transparency, accountability and government integrity.

Many media outlets were honored. CNN, for example, received a high honor for its work reporting on the dossier that emerged revealing potential connections between the Trump presidential campaign and Russian government operatives seeking to meddle in our 2016 presidential election.

The correspondents dinner focus should be on those individuals and organizations. Instead, we’re arguing from coast to coast over whether comedian Michelle Wolf crossed the line of decency in her scathing criticism of the president and his senior staff members.

For the record … she did.

The media, though, are doing the job the U.S. Constitution empowers them to do — without government interference, bullying, intimidation or threats.

I hope to be done with the Michelle Wolf travesty.

The media that are reporting on the presidency and the rest of the government will continue to earn my undying pride and praise when they do well.

International news

Pompeo to become diplomat with thin backing

Mike Pompeo is likely to be confirmed as the nation’s next secretary of state, but he’ll take strange route on his way to leading the nation’s diplomatic corps.

Pompeo is the CIA director whom Donald Trump selected to succeed Rex Tillerson at the State Department. He has run into trouble on his way to confirmation: Pompeo won’t have the blessing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which conducted confirmation hearings on Pompeo’s nomination.

A Republican committee member, Rand Paul of Kentucky, is going to vote against Pompeo’s nomination. That will result more than likely in a vote of no confidence from the panel.

That won’t derail his confirmation. The full Senate will get to vote on it, but Pompeo will gain the support of Senate Democrats who might be in trouble in states that Trump carried in the 2016 presidential election. Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota and Joe  Manchin of West Virginia come to mind; let’s toss in Bill Nelson of Florida while we’re at it. They’re all running for re-election, which seems to give Pompeo a leg up in this strange journey toward confirmation.

Actually, I hope Pompeo does get confirmed. The State Department needs a steady hand and I think Pompeo can provide it … if only the president will allow him to lead the agency.

Tillerson had to fight the occasional battle against being undercut by the president. Tillerson would make a pronouncement and then Trump would countermand him. I don’t want that to happen with the new secretary of state, who’s got a big job awaiting him immediately — which happens to be the preparation for the planned summit between Donald Trump and North Korean despot Kim Jong Un.

What’s more, as head of the CIA, Pompeo has joined other U.S. intelligence officials in confirming the obvious: that the Russians meddled in our 2016 election.

This man needs to be our secretary of state.

International news

Obama congratulated Putin, too? Hold on!

So, critics of the media on the right have become fond in recent days of defending Donald J. Trump’s congratulatory phone call to Vladimir Putin. They’re using an interesting — if nonsensical — argument.

Trump called Putin the other day against the advice of his national security team. He congratulated the Russian strongman on his re-election in what many have called a “sham election.” His soon-to-be-former national security adviser H.R. McMaster said that Trump shouldn’t congratulate Putin because of corollary issues that have clouded U.S.-Russia relations.

The president’s phone call has gotten plenty of criticism. I’ve joined the chorus of critics on this blog.

The push back was immediate. Trump defenders point out that Barack H. Obama congratulated Putin on his re-election in 2012.

Whoa! Hold on here! Let’s examine briefly the situation and how it compares with the here and now.

Vladimir Putin was a bad guy in 2012. I get that. He is worse now. Why? Oh, let’s see. He has meddled in our 2016 presidential election and is likely going to meddle in our midterm election this year, let alone in other countries’ elections; he used nerve gas on a former Soviet spy and his daughter.

President Obama did not have issues such as those on the table when he chatted with Putin in 2012. Donald Trump had a lot of them to toss at Putin when he called him just the other day.

There’s the difference.

International news

Leak complicates an already complicated problem

Donald J. Trump’s congratulatory phone call to Vladimir Putin was bad enough. He shouldn’t have slapped the Russian president on the back for winning a “sham election,” as Republican U.S. Sen. John McCain has described it.

He should have taken Putin down for meddling in our 2016 election and for reports that Russian officials poisoned a former spy and his daughter in the United Kingdom. The president didn’t say a word about either of those things … reportedly!

Now, though, it gets seriously complicated.

Someone inside the West Wing, inside the president’s inner circle, likely leaked to the Washington Post that Trump congratulated Putin against the advice of his national security team.

Let’s roll this one around for a moment.

The president is rightfully furious that someone would leak this information to the media. I understand his anger. Please note that no one is denying the guts of what is being reported. The National Security Council implored Trump to avoid making a call in the first place, but if he were to do so to avoid offering any congratulations.

I don’t know which is worse: that Trump would ignore the advice of his national security team or that someone with access to this kind of highly sensitive information would be so emboldened to leak it to the public.

This poses a couple of key questions. 1. What kind of “extreme vetting” did the president and White House chief of staff John Kelly use to ensure these secrets would be protected? 2. And what in the world is Donald Trump thinking — if he is thinking at all — if he can defy the advice of some smart national security aides who understand how it looks for the president to continue to soft-pedal Russia’s attack on our electoral system?

Trump once boasted he knows more about international terrorists “than the generals, believe me.” Does this guy also know more about how to handle highly complicated bilateral relationships than the “best people” with whom he has surrounded himself — and who implored him to use extreme caution in talking to Vladimir Putin?

This guy, the president of the United States, is out of control.