Tag: James Comey

TRUMP’S ONLY SUCCESS: LOWERING THE BAR FOR PRESIDENTIAL BEHAVIOR

If there is a twelve-step program for superlative dependency, someone should throw Donald Trump an intervention. Can you imagine his first support group meeting? “Hi, my name is Donald, and I’m a hyperbole abuser. In fact, I am the most marvelous, magnificent, outstanding hyperbole abuser who was ever born.” Needless to say, his road to linguistic recovery will be long and winding.

According to the Donald, every person he has hired or appointed is absolutely fantastic, even those he later fired or forced to resign. He claims (incorrectly) to have signed more legislation in his first six months than any other president. He once gave an unremarkable, but relatively gaffe-free, speech to a joint session of Congress. He claims it was the best oration ever uttered in the House chamber.

The same is true on the flip side. Trump never experiences run-of-the-mill adversity. It’s always horrendously horrible, beyond all compare. In what had to have been the absolute least uplifting commencement address on record, Trump told Coast Guard Academy graduates in May that he is the world’s most mistreated pol. Here’s how he characterized his allegedly unparalleled plight: “No politician in history, and I say this with great surety, has been treated worse or more unfairly.” Never mind that other politicians – at home and abroad – have been assassinated, kidnapped and imprisoned. Donald has to endure CNN and Saturday Night Live. Cue the violin section. Boo hoo. Boo hoo.

Actually, Trump, in many ways, is the most Teflon president in modern history, a rare superlative he’s likely to reject. Throughout the campaign, and during the first six months of his presidency, he got by with more atrocities, flubs and mistakes than any of his predecessors. Who else could have mocked John McCain’s war record, belittled a Gold Star mother and revealed a proclivity for sexual assault, only to go on and become president? Trump entered the office with an expectations bar set so low a Trinidad limbo dancer couldn’t shimmy under it.

Let’s take a close look at just one class of White House transgressions, and compare the repercussions for Trump with those of his predecessors. Numerous presidential tongues have taken bad slips when it comes to declaring a person’s guilt or innocence. This can be quite problematic since the government’s prosecutorial arm – the U.S. Justice Department – serves under the president’s command. Legal experts, including Harvard’s Noah Feldman, say it is an impeachable “abuse of authority” for a president to accuse someone of committing a crime without evidence. It has happened not infrequently over the years. And, in every instance prior to January 20, 2016, the gaffe provoked an immediate dustup of criticism, usually followed by some sort of presidential mea culpa.

In 1970, President Nixon said Charles Manson was “guilty, directly or indirectly, of eight murders.” Since Manson’s trial had just gotten underway, the president’s declaration of guilt caused considerable pandemonium. Nixon apologized and walked his premature verdict back. In 1980, President Carter accused former attorney general Ramsey Clark and nine other Americans of a crime for defying his order to stay out of Iran. Carter’s declaration of guilt triggered a huge political blow up. Harvard’s Laurence Tribe called his remarks “a terrible blunder.” In 1988, President Reagan stunned his staff when he declared that Oliver North was not guilty in the Iran-Contra scandal, days after a grand jury indicted North on 23 charges. In 1998, President Clinton drew heavy criticism for saying that he didn’t think there should be a plea bargain in the Unabomber case because the defendant, Theodore J. Kaczynski, “if he’s guilty, killed a lot of people deliberately.” In 2009, President Obama opened a week-long media frenzy when he said the Cambridge, Massachusetts police department acted “stupidly” in the arrest of a black Harvard professor who was trying to get into his own home. Obama also took flack for implying that the alleged architect of the September 11 terrorist attacks would be found guilty and executed, should he be tried in U.S. Courts.

Trump, of course, soars far above the separation of powers concept, moonlighting as a wannabe Judge Judy. He pronounces someone’s criminal guilt on a near daily basis. Using Twitter as his gavel, the Donald dispenses his verdicts with terms like: “guilty as hell”, “totally illegal” and “so illegal”. The president has dispersed imaginary convictions for Hillary Clinton, her former campaign manager, John Podesta and his brother Tony; Obama and his former national security advisor, Susan Rice, and his former attorney general, Loretta Lynch; and recently fired FBI director James Comey. Just this morning, he accused his own attorney general and the acting FBI director of ignoring Hillary Clinton’s unspecified and unproven “crimes”. Unlike his predecessors, Trump has managed to issue these totally bogus claims of criminality against his political opponents with total impunity. In fact, they have become a staple of his presidency, akin to an innocuous proclamation for, say, National Condiment Appreciation Week.

Aside from a couple of obscure blogs, like the one you’re reading, there has been no public clamor about Trump bludgeoning his opponents with presidential criminal convictions. Yet, a single similar transgression by previous presidents kept the chattering class in a constant scold for days. This is just one of many ways in which this president has been held to a far lower standard than those who preceded him. There is an abundance of deficiencies that would invite rapt attention to any other president, but where Trump gets a pass. Like his speeches with the prosaic quality of a telephone book, his five-word sentence fragments that are utterly without meaning, his inability to know just what it is he doesn’t know, and his innate lack of intellectual curiosity.

Unfortunately, there is a lesson here for future presidents: If you want to deflect attention from your inherent inadequacies, be sure to collude with a foreign adversary, obstruct justice and tell lots of lies. Nobody will notice the other foibles.

THE WHITE HOUSE HELL WEEK THAT DOESN’T END

Even in a four month presidency that made Alice’s rabbit hole adventures look normal, last week was extraordinarily bizarre. The entire White House staff now understands what it was like in 1969 for those Woodstock revelers who ignored the warnings about the brown blotter acid.

Any other week, Vladimir Putin’s offer to share with Congress state secrets gleaned in an Oval Office meeting would have been hot, above-the-fold, front page news. But not last week. There was way too much competition. It started with the revelation that Trump disclosed highly confidential intelligence while showing off to Russian envoys. Then came the report that the Donald attempted to pull the FBI off its investigation of his former national security advisor, followed by a scoop about 18 undisclosed contacts between the Trump campaign and the Russians.

By week’s end, we were reading about the appointment of a special prosecutor, a possible subpoena for a “person of interest” in the top echelon of the White House, and my personal favorite: Trump telling his Russian visitors that he fired the FBI director because he was “a real nut job”. Depending on the interpreter’s adeptness with pronouns, the Russian officials may have left the Oval Office a tad confused over who the nut job was, the president or the fired FBI guy. Alas, it didn’t really matter. In the context of last week’s totality, they, like the rest of us, were quite capable of figuring it out for themselves.

To quote a favorite cliché of Washington speech writers, “Make no mistake about it.” Last week was some kind of turning point for this country’s 45th president. The New York Times Roger Cohen: “All this is right out of Despotism 101.” The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent: “Trump’s conduct further devolves into truly unhinged autocratic madness.” Conservative blogger Erick Erickson: “The sad reality is that the greatest defense of the president available at this point is one his team could never give on the record: He is an idiot who does not know any better.”

After such a dystopian week, it’s easy to fixate on the darkness, finding sweet solace only in thoughts of an impending impeachment. To that I offer two notes, one of caution and the other, oddly, of guarded optimism.

Here’s the caution part: Yes, the White House staff is pulling out the procedural files on impeachment. Most media outlets are running thumb-suckers on the subject. Still, it would be unwise to plan any Trump farewell parties just yet. Donald Trump does not possess the propensity to go gentle into Dylan Thomas’ good night. Most of us counted him out at least a dozen times before the election. His base is still chugging the Kool Aid. More importantly, Republicans control both houses of Congress. They may be disgusted and disheartened by Trump. They may even privately accept that he is brain dead. But they won’t take him off life support until they are certain such a move serves their political interests. Besides, impeachment hardly takes us out of dystopia. It merely gives us Mike Pence, a functioning-but-rabid right winger who has never met a human right he likes (here, here and here).

As for optimism, as guarded as it may be, the architecture of our 241-year-old democracy has so far succeeded admirably in restraining a severe assault from the first authoritarian strongman to hold the presidency. Trump’s election pumped new life into a long forgotten novel by Sinclair Lewis, “It Can’t Happen Here.” Written in 1935, as fascism was slowly taking its hold in Europe, Lewis wanted to wake up sanguine Americans to the realization that they were not immune to such a totalitarian takeover. Against the backdrop of a populist uprising called the “Forgotten Men,” Lewis’s antagonist, Berzelius Windrip, was elected president, largely on the Trump-like premise that he, alone, could solve the problems of the forgotten. Once in office, Windrip made three immediate moves that would have left Trump drooling. He strong-armed Congress into turning all decision-making power over to the president. Then he abolished the courts. Finally, he imprisoned reporters who wrote bad things about him.

Trump would trade Mar a Largo for that kind of power. As it stands, the Art of the Deal president hasn’t gotten one substantive bill through Congress. He has repeatedly railed at all the judges who have dared to block his travel ban and other executive orders. Among the morass of last week’s news stories was the revelation that Trump told the former FBI director that he wants to put journalists in jail. He has had one bromance after another with foreign authoritarian despots who have jailed or killed anyone who dared get in their way, including Russia’s Putin, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, and the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte.

Thanks to our constitutional underpinnings, Donald Trump is only a wannabe dictator. Last week’s crazy chain of events showed that the system is working. As much as he’d like the Russian influence investigation to go away, it’s here to stay, complete with grand jury and subpoena powers. As much as he’d like to take over Congress, there are 535 ego-driven members there worrying much more about their reelections than his. And despite his fantasy of locking up reporters, Trump’s antics have fueled a revival in journalism that defies the business models of the struggling news outlets that employ them.

Although it is always reassuring to get even part way through a hurricane without the roof caving in, this storm is by no means over. Let us remain ever vigilant until the all-clear signal is given. Sinclair Lewis was right: it can happen here. We need to do everything possible to see that it doesn’t.

TRUMP’S FORGOTTEN PEOPLE ARE STILL FORGOTTEN

After a five-day binge of all things Trump and Comey, along comes this story about bad teeth to poignantly capture the essence of our current quagmire. Don’t get me wrong. The coverage of the White House’s latest cataclysmic adventure in governance has been compellingly entertaining. It’s not every day you get to watch the president’s aides frantically scramble to assemble a cover story for firing the FBI director, only to be upstaged by their boss’s declaration that he canned the guy because of the Russia investigation.

But a cracked molar brought it all home, a dental narrative that sadly and succinctly depicted a leaderless America that has lost its way. The Sunday Washington Post ran a front page story on the chronic tooth decay facing millions of the working poor who have neither the necessary insurance nor disposable income to maintain their dental health. The piece described a scene on a cold March morning on Maryland’s eastern shore. More than 1,000 people had huddled in blankets for up to 12 hours, waiting for a chance to get free dental care.

Dee Matello was in that line. She’s a small business owner, but has neither insurance nor budget for dentist bills. She told Post reporters that she’s had a cracked tooth for years. It causes constant pain, forcing her to chew on only one side of her mouth. She also said she was a strong Trump supporter because politicians stopped caring about people who work hard but can’t afford to take care of themselves.

“The country is way too divided between well-off people and people struggling for everything – even to see the dentist,” Matello told the Post. “And the worst part is, I don’t see a bridge to cross over to be one of those rich people.”

Trump, she said, was the only person talking about “the forgotten men and women of our country, people who work hard but don’t have a voice.” It was Trump, Matello recalled, who repeatedly said that he was running to be a voice for those people. She was particularly taken with his assurance that he would create a “wonderful” health care plan that would cost less and provide far more services than Obamacare.

As she shivered in line, waiting to get her tooth fixed, Matello shared her deep political disappointment with the Post. “I am hearing about a number of people who will lose their coverage under the new plan,” she said. “Is Trump the wolf in grandma’s clothes? My husband and I are now saying to each other, ‘Did we really vote for him?’”

More than any story since Trump’s inauguration, this rotting teeth article captures the depth and breadth of last fall’s electoral catastrophe. The daily headlines inundate us with the president’s buffoonery, his never-disappointing adeptness at accessing his ignorance. When I started writing this post, the Comey fiasco was on center stage. It was replaced two paragraphs ago with breaking news about Trump revealing top secret intelligence to Russian officials. But the dental care piece takes us beyond the purview of chaotic stage management, and gives us a direct view into the marrow of a critically wounded American life.

Working adults can’t afford to fix their teeth, and nobody in Washington is doing anything to help them. Those in the investor class, buoyed by a Trump-induced bull market, think nothing of spending thousands a year on cosmetic tooth whitening, while millions of hard-working Americans don’t make enough to pay for basic dentistry. These are the forgotten people, the downtrodden and heartbroken masses left behind by politicians beholden to the moneyed interests that put them in office.

Donald J. Trump was their last hope, an unlikely billionaire hero who took up their cause, spoke their language and promised to drain the swamp of the bought-and-paid-for Washington functionaries catering to the rich and powerful. They voted for him because their anger was his anger. They voted for him because he was wholly different than every slick, smooth-talking, glad-handing politician who came before him. They voted for him because he was going to blow Washington up and get them fantastic jobs and absolutely wonderful health insurance. The forgotten people would never be forgotten again.

Sadly, Trump has only delivered on half the promise. He has, indeed, blown up Washington. He shocked and stunned the FBI, pushed the intelligence community into a state of suspended animation and invoked paralysis on a Republican Congress totally transfixed on the most chaotic White House since Richard Nixon spent long alcoholic nights talking to the portraits of dead presidents.

As for the forgotten people, well, they were promptly forgotten by a president who had something far more important to consider: himself. Donald Trump was absolutely right when he promised never to be tied to special interests and outside influences. This is a man with absolutely no interests outside of himself. He can’t stop talking about his election, how many counties he carried, how remarkable his campaign was, how he got cheated out of the popular vote, how the whole Russian scandal seeks to delegitimize his humungous accomplishment.

The forgotten people? They are still waiting in line to have their teeth fixed. Some 24 million of them will lose health insurance under the House Republican bill that Trump supports but doesn’t understand. Millions more stand to lose job retraining opportunities under his proposed budget. Did he sell them out to special interests? No, not really. It’s just that his whole campaign was about him, not them. It was about his need to be loved and admired, to be seen as a truly remarkable person. He didn’t drain a swamp; he created a new one, a swamp filled with his own insatiable and grandiose ego needs. There is no room there for the forgotten people. Even if there was, this guy doesn’t have the skill or the chops to help them. He is far too busy pretending to be remarkable.

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.