Tag: FBI

NIXON’S GHOST TO TRUMP: I WAS BETTER THAN YOU!

The nation’s toxic presidency just hit a new low. And I’m not talking about the firing of FBI Director James Comey. The administration’s rock bottom moment of the past 24 hours came when the Nixon Library told the news media to stop comparing Donald Trump to Richard Nixon.

Less than an hour after Comey’s discharge was announced, major news outlets posted sidebars recalling the “Saturday Night Massacre” of 1973. For those not yet on Social Security – and those recipients with memory loss – here’s a quick scorecard from that October Saturday of 44 years ago: Slowly sinking from the Watergate break-in scandal, Nixon ordered his attorney general, Elliot Richardson, to fire Archibald Cox, who was then leading the independent Watergate investigation. Richardson refused the president’s order and resigned. Nixon then passed the order to the deputy attorney general, William Ruckelshaus, who also refused to fire Cox and resigned. That put Robert Bork, then solicitor general, in charge of the justice department. Bork carried out Nixon’s discharge order. Two days later the bumper stickers were out: “Impeach the Cox Sacker.” Ten months later, with impeachment proceedings underway, Richard Nixon resigned the presidency.

So, as the inevitable comparisons between Trump’s and Nixon’s motives to fire their investigators surfaced last night, this tweet, with the hashtag “notNixonian”, was sent out by the Richard Nixon Library: “President Nixon never fired the Director of the FBI.” You know you are in trouble when the ghost of Richard Nixon distances himself from you. In fairness to both sides of this intense Worst President Ever competition, it should be noted that Nixon didn’t have to fire his FBI director. J. Edgar Hoover died in sleep in May of 1972.

Although an obvious and inviting comparison, the 1973 “massacre” was not the first Nixonian image that jumped into my head as the Comey story broke. Instead, it was Nixon’s dogged insistence, expressed in a five word sentence at a November 17, 1973 news conference.

Here’s what Nixon said: “I am not a crook.”

Here’s what Trump wrote to Comey: “While I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation, I nevertheless concur with the judgment of the Department of Justice that you are not able to effectively lead the Bureau.”

In Nixon’s case, when a president is compelled to say he is not a crook, you can be pretty sure he is a crook. In Trump’s case, when a president is compelled to say he is not under FBI investigation, you know darn well he is under FBI investigation.

The most amazing aspect of this latest piece of Trump theater, is the president’s innate inability to follow his own script. Here’s how it was supposed to go: They get a nonpartisan, career deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, two weeks into the job, to write a memo recommending Comey’s discharge based on the handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation. Trump sycophant, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, concurs with his deputy’s recommendation, setting the stage for the Donald to fire Comey on the basis of a Clinton investigation that Clinton believes put Trump in the White House.

Get it? The key storyline of this script is that the discharge is wholly apolitical; it’s all about integrity and good government. That’s why he’s firing the guy who messed up his opponent’s investigation. Okay, so it’s not the most believable scenario in the world; it was still their script, crafted in an inexperienced writers room, where everyone figured that Democrats would welcome Comey’s Clinton-linked firing because they blame him for her election loss. Of course, days earlier, according to the New York Times, Comey asked the Justice Department for additional funds for the FBI’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and a possible link to the Trump campaign. But that would be omitted from the script. This was about how badly the FBI guy bungled the Clinton matter. Just stick to that storyline and the public will be none the wiser. Then the star had to go and improvise. Badly. He had to throw in that seemingly non sequitur of a phrase, “While I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation. . .” before telling the guy he is fired.

Early in my journalism career, I covered small town and village governments. There wasn’t a staff member in any of them who would have allowed a script like this to be performed. And there certainly wasn’t a mayoral aide who would have allowed their boss to allude to the very subject you are trying to avoid in discharging a department head. In a city of 20,000 people, political pros knew about optics, audience reaction and how to manage both. Those basics are either totally missing in this White House or are being ignored by a president who seems perpetually wired to deliver messages that go against his own interest.

Trump was madly tweeting this morning about Democrats who couldn’t stand Comey expressing outrage over his discharge. It was as if he really anticipated a Palm Sunday reception from the opposition for firing the point guy on the Russian interference investigation. The unanticipated blowback was so bad for the administration that Kellyanne Conway was released from the Witness Protection Program to run interference. She insisted to reporters last night that Comey was fired because Trump had “lost confidence in him,” not because of the Russian investigation. Think about that for a while. Based on what we know about this president, God help us all if we end up with a director of the FBI who has Trump’s confidence.

WHERE IS THE OUTRAGE OVER RUSSIA’S THEFT OF OUR ELECTION?

The biggest guessing game in Washington right now is what it will take for the Democrats to throw a major league temper tantrum over the antics of the incoming administration. How about a conclusion by the CIA and FBI that Russian espionage helped elect Donald Trump? Wait, that actually happened, didn’t it? It was easy to miss because the reaction from the loyal opposition was more of a whimper than a wail.

House Democratic leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., normally no shrinking violet when it comes to pitched rhetoric, responded to the bombshell with these uncharacteristically modulated sentences: “This is not (about) overturning this election. This is about making sure it doesn’t happen again.”

In the Senate, incoming Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-NY, said the unanimous consensus by the country’s top intelligence agencies that Russia interfered in the election to help Trump win was “simultaneously stunning and not surprising.” He and Pelosi then pushed for a bipartisan congressional investigation. Watergate and 9/11 eventually had their investigations, but they were preceded by well-deserved rhetorical flourishes aimed at setting a moral tone for the country.

Obviously, such an inquiry is necessary. But from the standpoint of leveraging power and public opinion in dealing with Team Trump, particularly as a minority party, it is far from sufficient. I’ve never been an advocate of frivolously jumping into battles. Anger is not a strategy, but used sparingly and selectively, it can be an effective tactic, particularly when laced with a dose or two of righteous indignation. Given the enormity of evil associated with Russian spies pressing their fingers on the scales of our democracy, it’s hard to think of a better time to let loose with that tactic. As Rabbi Hillel so wisely and rhetorically asked, “If not now, when?”

Now is the time for Democratic leaders to fan out to the networks and cable shows, talking points in hand. Now is the time for them to scream from the rooftops about an election that was stolen from the American people. Now is the time to avoid mincing words. It’s time to call Donald Trump out as Vladimir Putin’s puppet, the candidate backed by the Kremlin’s finest chicanery. Now is the time to take to the streets, not because we don’t like Donald Trump, but because his election was rigged by the Russians and, therefore lacks legitimacy.

One of the first things I learned as a union negotiator is that if your side is suffering a power deficit, as ours always did, you have to find a way to create power. Right now, through a confluence of circumstances, Democrats, who are sorely lacking in political power, have an opportunity to gain leverage. But they have to rise above their post-election shell shock and timidity. Russian spies helped elect Donald Trump, for God’s sake. Why tiptoe around it? If nothing else, a strong offense could pull Trump off his transition game, sending him into late night Twitter defense, a play that brings a cringe to even his most ardent supporters. Better yet, it could build enough steam for the Senate to torpedo the confirmation of Putin’s buddy, Rex Tillerson for Secretary of State.

There is power in the moral high ground. It captures peoples’ hearts and minds, rallying them to a noble cause. No, it is not likely to stop a Trump presidency. But it can alter the narrative. And as we learned from this election, the right narrative delivers power. Instead of the outsider riding into Washington on his white horse to shake everything up, we can make it about Russian skullduggery producing a U.S. president who had 2.8 million fewer votes than Putin’s nemesis, Hillary Clinton. To those who say, “Get over it. Trump won; he is our president,” a reminder is in order. Barack Obama won in 2008 and 2012, by much wider electoral vote margins and without interference from a foreign adversary. Yet, the legitimacy of his presidency was challenged by Republicans from Day 1, all on the basis of utter balderdash. Every blatantly false claim imaginable – from being a Muslim to his birth in Kenya – was used to challenge the authenticity of the country’s first black president.

Although despicable, the Republican strategy was effective. It weakened his administration, particularly in the early years. Democrats may be hesitant to follow that path because it left such a stench in the political atmosphere. But there is one huge difference between then and now, namely a genuine, real life, honest-to-God basis to challenge the legitimacy of the 45th president.

FBI Director James Comey, a Republican and obviously no friend of Hillary Clinton, today joined the CIA and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper in declaring that Russia’s interference in the election was done to help Trump win. Couple those findings with Putin’s autocratic history as a dictator who has had his political opponents imprisoned and murdered, and you have a compellingly strong basis upon which to challenge the legitimacy of this president.

Unfortunately, the Democratic response has been limited to meekly calling for an investigation, as if we were dealing with some sort of bureaucratic screw up, as opposed to one of the most extraordinary events in our political history. The party’s leaders are understandably in a bit of post-election disarray right now. For the sake of the country, they need to quickly get past it. And then work up some passionate outrage over Russia’s theft of our election.

FBI, PIGS AND LIES, OH MY!

There is an old crusty political tale that I first heard more than 40 years ago while covering one of Walter Mondale’s senate campaigns in Minnesota. It may well have been apocryphal, except for the fact it was about Lyndon Johnson, whose biography is far more colorful than most fiction. Here’s Mondale’s story: “Lyndon was in a tight race for Congress and he called his staff together and told them to leak word that his opponent fucks pigs. ‘But, sir, we don’t know that to be true,’ complained a staffer. ‘Okay,’ said Johnson, ‘then, let’s get out a report that he doesn’t fuck pigs. Either way, voters will associate him with pig fucking.’”

That story immediately came to mind this morning as I grabbed the Washington Post off the front step and glanced at the banner headline: “FBI won’t pursue charges against Clinton”. In the Lyndon Johnson’s Texas School of Campaign Pragmatics, there is no difference between “FBI may pursue charges against Clinton” and “FBI won’t pursue charges against Clinton”. Forget about the choice of a modal verb – may or won’t – all that matters are the words “FBI”, “charges” and “Clinton”. Either way, it’s still pig fucking.

So can we now please place a moratorium on any more nauseating stories or op-ed pieces about how much integrity James Comey has, or how he was caught in an untenable position? None of it survives a basic smell test. Based on his own account, the head of the FBI, in a letter to Congressional leaders, publically announced 11 days before the election that the agency was going to investigate emails it had never seen that might, once they were seen, implicate Hillary Clinton in criminal activity. Then, 36 hours before the polls open, Congress’ favorite pen pal strikes again, plagiarizing by paraphrase Gertrude Stein’s declaration that “there is no there there.” Lo and behold, Director Comey announces that criminal charges will not be pursued against the Democratic presidential nominee. And so voters trot off to the polls associating Clinton with dishonesty, corruption and criminal charges.

Sadly and completely unjustifiably, that false narrative feeds Hillary Clinton’s single largest negative character trait with voters. In the major polls released this weekend, Clinton significantly topped Trump in all aspects of the presidency, save for one: trustworthiness. By sizable margins, voters prefer her over him when it comes to personality and temperament, general qualifications, moral character and someone who has an understanding of “problems of people like you.” But when asked which candidate is the most honest and trustworthy, Trump beats Clinton by 44 to 40.

Of course winning a contest where only 44 percent of the people rate you as honest is not exactly something for Trump to slap in his trophy case, perhaps where the Emmy Award he never won would have gone. It is, however, a significant measure of one of the many perception-to-reality gaps in this despicable campaign. Construing the facts in the most unfavorable light from Clinton’s perspective, she was guilty of carelessness and bad judgment in using her private email server while in the State Department and, true to form from a lifetime of right wing persecution, she was slow to own up to the mistake. But none of that even begins to rise to the level of the kind of throw-her-in-jail frenzy Trump and his disciples whip up at their rallies.

Therein lies one of the biggest paradoxes of this campaign. Hillary Clinton loses the honesty vote to Trump only on the basis that he has repeatedly, in a thoroughly dishonest manner, characterized his opponent as corrupt, even threatening to throw her in jail if he is elected. He has never once laid out a set of specific facts constituting evidence of corruption. That’s not the way this guy rolls. He simply constructs his own reality out of thin air. As Lyndon Johnson knew so well, if you say false stuff enough, people begin to believe it. One of the amazing facts of this election season has been that the candidate seen as the most honest is the one who fact checkers say tells the truth only 9 percent of the time, a record low never before seen or approached in the history of political fact checking. Unfortunately, Trump’s campaign of lies had way too many enablers and co-conspirators, including parts of the news media and, of course, James Comey.

The only mitigation in the FBI Director’s deplorable and grossly negligent conduct may come from the fact that this campaign has been conducted so deep inside Lewis Carroll’s rabbit hole that it may well make no discernable difference in the election’s outcome. So far, most polling activity has given credence to that proposition. If, on the other hand, the final results repudiate the pollsters and Clinton loses, Comey needs to be severely punished for his sins. Forcing him to serve four years in a Trump administration ought to be enough to make him deeply regret his inexcusable misdeeds and wish like hell he had become a Texas pig farmer.