No 'Treason.' No Coup. Just Lies - and Dumb Lies at That.

By James Comey, The Washington Post

30 May 19

James Comey is a former director of the FBI and a former deputy attorney general.

t is tempting for normal people to ignore our president when he starts ranting about treason and corruption at the FBI. I understand the temptation. I’m the object of many of his rants, and even I try to ignore him.

But we shouldn’t, because millions of good people believe what a president of the United States says. In normal times, that’s healthy. But not now, when the president is a liar who doesn’t care what damage he does to vital institutions. We must call out his lies that the FBI was corrupt and committed treason, that we spied on the Trump campaign and tried to defeat Donald Trump. We must constantly return to the stubborn facts.

Russia engaged in a massive effort to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. Near as I can tell, there is only one U.S. leader who still denies that fact. The FBI saw the attack starting in mid-June 2016, with the first dumping of stolen emails. In late July, when we were hard at work trying to understand the scope of the effort, we learned that one of Trump’s foreign policy advisers knew about the Russian effort seven weeks before we did.

In April 2016, that adviser talked to a Russian agent in London, learned that the Russians had obtained “dirt” on Hillary Clinton in the form of thousands of emails and that the Russians could assist the Trump campaign through the anonymous release of information damaging to Clinton. Of course, nobody from the Trump campaign told us this (or about later Russian approaches); we had to learn it, months after the fact, from an allied ambassador.

But when we finally learned of it in late July, what should the FBI have done? Let it go? Go tell the Trump campaign? Tell the press? No. Investigate, to see what the facts were. We didn’t know what was true. Maybe there was nothing to it, or maybe Americans were actively conspiring with the Russians. To find out, the FBI would live up to its name and investigate.

As director, I was determined that the work would be done carefully, professionally and discreetly. We were just starting. If there was nothing to it, we didn’t want to smear Americans. If there was something to it, we didn’t want to let corrupt Americans know we were onto them. So, we kept it secret. That’s how the FBI approaches all counterintelligence cases.

And there’s the first problem with Trump’s whole “treason” narrative. If we were “deep state” Clinton loyalists bent on stopping him, why would we keep it secret? Why wouldn’t the much-maligned FBI supervisor Peter Strzok — the alleged kingpin of the “treasonous” plot to stop Trump — tell anyone? He was one of the very few people who knew what we were investigating.

We investigated. We didn’t gather information about the campaign’s strategy. We didn’t “spy” on anyone’s campaign. We investigated to see whether it was true that Americans associated with the campaign had taken the Russians up on any offer of help. By late October, the investigators thought they had probable cause to get a federal court order to conduct electronic surveillance of a former Trump campaign adviser named Carter Page. Page was no longer with the campaign, but there was reason to believe he was acting as an agent of the Russian government. We asked a federal judge for permission to surveil him and then we did it, all without revealing our work, despite the fact that it was late October and a leak would have been very harmful to candidate Trump. Worst deep-state conspiracy ever.

But wait, the conspiracy idea gets dumber. On Oct. 28, after agonizing deliberation over two terrible options, I concluded I had no choice but to inform Congress that we had reopened the Clinton email investigation. I?judged that hiding that fact — after having told Congress repeatedly and under oath that the case was finished — would be worse than telling Congress the truth. It was a decision William Barr praised and Hillary Clinton blamed for her loss 11 days later. Strzok, alleged architect of the treasonous plot to stop Trump, drafted the letter I sent Congress.

And there’s still more to the dumbness of the conspiracy allegation. At the center of the alleged FBI “corruption” we hear so much about was the conclusion that Deputy Director Andrew McCabe lied to internal investigators about a disclosure to the press in late October 2016. McCabe was fired over it. And what was that disclosure? Some stop-Trump election-eve screed? No. McCabe authorized a disclosure that revealed the FBI was actively investigating the Clinton Foundation, a disclosure that was harmful to Clinton.

There is a reason the non-fringe media doesn’t spend much time on this “treason” and “corruption” business. The conspiracy theory makes no sense. The FBI wasn’t out to get Donald Trump. It also wasn’t out to get Hillary Clinton. It was out to do its best to investigate serious matters while walking through a vicious political minefield.

But go ahead, investigate the investigators, if you must. When those investigations are over, you will find the work was done appropriately and focused only on discerning the truth of very serious allegations. There was no corruption. There was no treason. There was no attempted coup. Those are lies, and dumb lies at that. There were just good people trying to figure out what was true, under unprecedented circumstances.

I'm Undocumented and I Work for Bernie Sanders. Here's How We're Fighting to Prevent More Migrant Kids From Dying.

By Belén Sisa, Refinery29

30 May 19

n December 2017, I sat alone in a dark cell on a metal bunk bed without a mattress or heat, over 2,000 miles away from my hometown of Gilbert, AZ.

Seven other DACA recipients and I spent six days in a D.C. jail for taking part in sit-ins inside Congressional offices as part of a fight for a Clean Dream Act. Standing up and demanding that undocumented youth like us be given the chance to live in this country without fear of deportation, we put everything on the line in hopes of pushing politicians to have the courage we had and pass a Dream Act.

My parents brought me to the U.S. from Argentina when I was 6 years old so I could live a better life than they experienced. They made the right choice, and Arizona is truly the only place I’ve known as home. But as I see photos of children sitting in cages, and I read the reports of minors dying in Customs and Border Protection (CBP) custody, I can’t help but wonder: What if Trump were the president when my parents came to the U.S.?

I was fortunate enough not to be detained when my family immigrated here. Although life was far from easy growing up during the era of SB 1070, infamously known as the “show me your papers law,” which formalized the damaging and hostile practice of racial profiling, I was still able to attend public school and eventually go to Arizona State University, where I found my voice through activism and local campaigns.

Carlos Gregorio Hernández Vásquez, 16, the latest victim of this administration’s policies, died in a detention center from the flu after being held longer than the 72-hour limit — not in a hospital where he should have been. Imagine being a child who does not speak English and have no one protecting you from having to experience these inhumane conditions. These places are made to break you. This violation of human rights should not be happening in the United States.

What were these children going through during their last few moments of life? What were their dreams? Why did they die from completely preventable causes? These are all the questions we should be asking.

These asylum-seeking children died because of the cruel immigration policies being put in place by the Trump administration and due to CBP’s lack of following protocol. Hernández Vásquez; Jakelin Caal Maquin, 7; Felipe Alonzo-Gomez, 8; Juan de León Gutiérrez, 16; Wilmer Josué Ramírez Vásquez, 2; and another unidentified girl whose death was covered up, 10, all deserved better than to have died caged in a detention center. It was our duty to keep them safe.

This is happening in the “land of the free.” We cannot normalize the detainment and death of children and their family members. The outrage must be clear in the same way it was a year ago when we were confronted with audio recordings of immigrant children crying for their mothers. The Trump administration must be held accountable — by us, the American people. We constantly hear Republicans say they are pro-life, yet they ignore the lives of migrant children. If this isn’t hypocritical, I don’t know what is.

While taxpayer dollars are being wastefully thrown at walls and increased funding for ICE and CBP, children are dying and the root causes of this human rights crisis are not being addressed. As Americans, we should be helping countries in Central America rebuild to address the reason people are fleeing to the U.S. As a nation of immigrants, we should fix our broken immigration system to welcome immigrants in a humane and civil process.

The time is now to stand up for justice and humanity — we must end the barbaric practice of family separation and detention of children in cages. We must dismantle the cruel and inhumane deportation programs and detention centers and establish standards for independent oversight of relevant agencies within the Department of Homeland Security.

This is why we need leaders like Bernie Sanders, who will fight for all people, not just those who cast ballots. Bernie supports these policy proposals and believes they should be the standard of basic human rights that we, as a country, guarantee to all people. We cannot continue to allow politicians and corporations — who have the power to end migrant child deaths, but instead are profiting from immigrant detention — off the hook, and we must demand justice.

Belén Sisa is the Latino Press Secretary for Bernie Sanders' 2020 presidential campaign. The views expressed here are her own. She is an undocumented immigrant and DACA recipient who cofounded Undocumented Students for Education Equity (USEE) at Arizona State University.