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FOCUS: Firing Comey Won't Save Trump From the Flames of the Russia Scandal |
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Friday, 12 May 2017 10:32 |
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Abramson writes: "It's certainly possible that President Trump doesn't know the lessons of Watergate. The most famous lesson is that the cover-up is always worse than the crime."
'Public trust in institutions in Washington is at a low. Comey's firing will only fuel the cynicism.' (photo: Carolyn Kaster/AP)
Firing Comey Won't Save Trump From the Flames of the Russia Scandal
By Jill Abramson, Guardian UK
12 May 17
Unless an independent prosecutor takes over the FBI investigation, the whiff of a cover-up will not go away
  his is Nixonian” was the reaction of Senator Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, to the news that President Trump had fired FBI director James Comey.
Casey, echoed by fellow Democrats, was referring to the infamous Saturday Night Massacre, when President Richard Nixon fired the special prosecutor and attorney general who were leading the Watergate investigation. The massacre did not derail the probe. It only fueled calls for Nixon’s impeachment.
We know that President Trump has a stunning ignorance of history. He recently flubbed the basics of the causes of the civil war and seemed to think the famous abolitionist Frederick Douglass was still alive and had “done an amazing job”. It’s certainly possible that President Trump doesn’t know the lessons of Watergate.
The most famous lesson is that the cover-up is always worse than the crime.
We don’t yet know the full story of Russia’s meddling in the election, but the abrupt firing of the FBI director, who was leading an investigation into possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign, certainly reeks of a cover-up.
The firings did not save Richard Nixon from impeachment in the Watergate scandal and getting rid of Comey won’t save Donald Trump from the flames of the Russia scandal.
Comey’s abrupt removal as FBI director only brought calls for an independent prosecutor to a fever pitch. Senate minority leader Charles Schumer said unless such a prosecutor is appointed, “everyone will suspect cover-up.”
Republican claims on cable television on Tuesday night that the president fired Comey for his improper handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation is absurd at face value, a cynical ploy. California representative Eric Swalwell, the ranking member of the CIA subcommittee of the House permanent select committee on Intelligence, one of the congressional panels digging into the Russia mess, called the firing “Trump’s ‘Tuesday Afternoon Massacre.”
In a recent interview, Hillary Clinton has said Comey cost her the White House with his election-eve letter re-opening the email probe. At the time, presidential candidate Trump said the devastating letter redeemed Comey’s reputation.
He had blasted Comey as a Hillary apologist for his earlier decision not to recommend criminal charges against Clinton. Many Democratic and Republican lawyers said Comey’s unusual public comments, calling Clinton “extremely careless” without charging her, amounted to prosecutorial misconduct. The White House suggested on Tuesday night that this is what fueled the decision to dump Comey.
But this makes no sense. If Comey’s showboating nine months ago provoked his abrupt dismissal, why now? Surely, if this was the reason, the president would have acted much earlier, perhaps immediately on taking office.
More likely to have provoked the president was Comey’s recent congressional testimony, in which he said that it made him nauseous to think his actions affected the election results. This remark likely hit President Trump’s most sensitive nerve. Anything that strikes at the legitimacy of his election is destabilizing to the president. He is insecure and seems to feel that his hold on his office is tenuous. That’s why reminders that he lost the popular vote make him apoplectic.
It’s also relevant that he fired the FBI director just as the Russia scandal was heating up again following Sally Yates’ testimony on Monday. Yates’s head had already rolled, but Comey continued to stand at the white-hot center of this investigation. With the house and senate Russia investigations barely off the ground, derailing Comey now could help send the FBI’s probe off the tracks, too.
If the immediate reactions were any indication, it had the opposite effect. The calls for an independent prosecutor became a thunderous chorus in a matter of hours.
So did the Nixon parallels. But during Watergate, Democrats and Republicans actually joined arms to save the country from a corrupt White House. That kind of bipartisan sanity is not possible today.
The country deserves to know what transpired between the Trump campaign and Russia. The Congress can’t be trusted to get to the bottom of the possible collusion. Russian meddling struck at the heart of democracy. There are few things more serious than a powerful foreign nation trying to influence the American vote.
Now the FBI is under a dark cloud. If the new director finds nothing on Russia, he will surely be suspected of a whitewash. The agency’s credibility and reputation for keeping out of politics was already badly damaged by Comey during the campaign.
Public trust in institutions in Washington is at a low. Comey’s firing will only fuel the cynicism. An independent prosecutor is both necessary and inevitable now.
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Comey Was 'Inching Closer to Trump' |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=28850"><span class="small">Michael Daly, The Daily Beast</span></a>
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Friday, 12 May 2017 08:42 |
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Daly writes: "Everybody had been asking why Trump waited 18 days to fire National Security Advisor Michael Flynn after learning he had been compromised by the Russians. That was eclipsed by the sudden firing of Comey, whose investigation into Russian meddling could lead to other questions about other Trump associates."
Donald Trump and James Comey. (photo: Getty)
Comey Was 'Inching Closer to Trump'
By Michael Daly, The Daily Beast
12 May 17
A senior law-enforcement official dismisses the White House excuse for firing the FBI director, says Comey was ‘inching closer to Trump.’
he whole country may end up more than “mildly nauseous” if a senior law-enforcement official is right when he translates into cop terms President Trump’s firing of James Comey
“Basically [Trump] is saying, ‘I’m firing Comey for doing the things that got me elected because I’m afraid people are going to find out who did the rest of the things to get me elected,’” the official said.
The things that got Trump elected being Comey’s handling of the Hillary Clinton email case. The other things being the Russian interference in the election.
The official is certainly not convinced that Trump was disturbed by Comey’s departure from the usual Department of Justice protocol in his pursuit of the president’s political opponent.
“If that’s the case, then why the f— did you wait five and a half months to fire him?” the official asked. “The real reason is he’s inching closer to Trump. He’s getting uncomfortably close to people who are uncomfortably close.”
And after nearly six months, there was a sudden rush.
“Five-thirty on a Tuesday?” the official asked. “Whatever happened to 5:30 on a Friday?”
Earlier Tuesday, everybody had been asking why Trump waited 18 days to fire National Security Advisor Michael Flynn after learning he had been compromised by the Russians. That was eclipsed by the sudden firing of Comey, whose investigation into Russian meddling could lead to other questions about other Trump associates.
In a decidedly Trumpian twist, the Justice Department memorandum that detailed justifications for firing Comey was written by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. That is the same guy who took over the investigation of Russian meddling after Attorney General Jeff Sessions grudgingly recused himself, having failed to disclose two meetings with Russian Ambassador Sergey I. Kislyak during the campaign.
On a day when subpoenas reportedly went out in connection with Flynn and the Russian investigation, Rosenstein took the time to write a six-page memorandum detailing Comey’s transgressions against Department of Justice protocol last year.
“RESTORING PUBLIC CONFIDENCE IN THE FBI,” the subject line read.
Rosenstein did not likely take it upon himself to prepare the document. And Sessions would not likely have asked him to do so unless prompted by the White House.
In his letter to Comey, Trump made sure to say—in what was news to everybody—“I greatly appreciate you having told me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation,” but “I nevertheless concur with the judgment of the Department of Justice that you are not able to effectively lead the Bureau.”
In other words, Trump concurred with what his minions had to know he wanted to hear.
The director of the FBI is appointed to a 10-year term and a sitting one can only be removed by the president and only for cause. The lone instance was in 1993, when President Clinton removed William Sessions—no relation—for “overwhelming improprieties” that included everything from a hinky home mortgage to phony tax exemptions to misuse of the FBI planes.
Comey has been known to overthink things, but he has repeatedly proven that he will do what he thinks is right with no thought of the consequences for himself. The few people who suggest an exception are some New York FBI agents who grumble that he pressed them to rush too fast through the emails found on Huma Abedin’s laptop and that they might otherwise have been able to make a case against Clinton.
Perhaps Comey has complicated, nausea-inducing feelings about that aspect of the investigation. And maybe that caused his uncharacteristic error when he testified before Congress last week that Huma Abedin had “forwarded hundreds and thousands” of emails to her husband Anthony Weiner’s laptop. She had, in fact, forwarded only a handful.
The FBI was preparing a letter correcting the error right about the time Rosenstein was writing his memo taking Comey to task for not acknowledging much bigger errors in handling the email case.
“Almost everyone agrees the director made serious mistakes,” Rosenstein wrote. “It is one of the few issues that unites people of diverse perspectives.”
In those very sentences is woven one reason for moving now, after six months; Democrats and Republicans both felt that Comey had egregiously erred. And the dopey error in his testimony about the emails made him vulnerable.
Comey was vanquished as if Trump were a king who had bellowed, “Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?”
But not even the ever-impulsive Trump would likely have made such a move without having some kind of plan for Comey’s successor. A suggestion of the next step is offered by another sentence in Rosenstein’s letter.
“We should reject the departure and return to the traditions,” Rosenstein wrote.
More than a few people at FBI headquarters are betting on the job going to John Pistole, onetime deputy director of the FBI who appeared in an iconic photo walking Mafia Boss Vincent “the Chin” Gigante in a bathrobe and handcuffs from his Greenwich Village home in 1990. Pistole went on become a no-nonsense administrator of the Transportation Safety Administration. He is now president of Anderson University in Indiana, home state of Vice President Mike Pence.
Indeed, the lean, straight-laced Pistole looks like Pence’s g-man cousin. And we know how important looks are to our president.
“He even has a neat name,” one official said of Pistole.
Whoever becomes the new director, he or she will be working with Rosenstein, who continues to run the investigation into the Russian meddling that is starting to look like it just might go down in history with the suffix “-gate.”
Meanwhile, an official who was at FBI headquarters on Tuesday tried to joke off the late afternoon shock, asking: “Does the president have the power to fire the FBI director?”
He answered: “President Putin can fire anybody. If Putin can put Trump in the White House, he can get rid of the FBI director.”
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The Census Director's Sudden Resignation May Create Serious Long-Term Problems |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=37790"><span class="small">Amanda Marcotte, Salon</span></a>
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Friday, 12 May 2017 08:37 |
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Marcotte writes: "Why are Republicans attacking the Census Bureau? Because they don't want an accurate count of Americans."
John H. Thompson had served at the Census Bureau since 1975. (photo: Mike McCleary/The Bismarck Tribune)
The Census Director's Sudden Resignation May Create Serious Long-Term Problems
By Amanda Marcotte, Salon
12 May 17
Why are Republicans attacking the Census Bureau? Because they don't want an accurate count of Americans
he news that President Donald Trump, in a fit of childish petulance, fired FBI Director James Comey on Tuesday is understandably dominating the news cycle. But on the same day, the director of another major federal agency, John Thompson of the Census Bureau, also left his job in a move that came as a surprise to those who follow the agency’s goings-on. In many ways, this sudden resignation of a major agency director is just as troubling as Comey’s outright firing.
The Trump administration is trying to spin Thompson’s departure as a simple decision to retire, which is a narrative that’s impossible to swallow, considering the abrupt nature of his exit. The reality is that Thompson was at the center of an ugly debate over funding, with Republicans trying to slash the bureau’s budget well below what he felt he needed in order to conduct an accurate nationwide census. It’s widely believed Thompson left rather than deal with an untenable situation of trying to do a good job without adequate resources.
Republicans love cutting government budgets in order to fund tax cuts for rich people, of course, but the choice to target the Census Bureau is alarming because it has clear political ramifications. Not to put too fine a point on it, but there is reason to worry that Republicans may not want the bureau to do too good a job collecting the 2020 data on Americans. Having a full and accurate picture of the American population cuts against many conservative goals, so it’s no surprise that the party of “alternative facts” is not particularly interested in letting the Census Bureau do its job.
The most obvious concern is that census data is used to determine political representation, which is critical to a functioning democracy.
“Any turnover, any lack of funding, puts at risk a full and accurate count of every person in the country, and that has huge implications for fair representation,” explained Dan Vicuña, the national redistricting manager for Common Cause.
“There’s already a problem, even under the best of circumstances, with certain communities, especially communities of color, being counted fully and thus getting full representation in Congress, state legislatures and city councils,” continued Vicuña, whose nonpartisan group fights for fair representation and against corruption in government. “Compounding that problem by underfunding the count is a legitimate threat to democracy.”
In our phone conversation, Vicuña argued that underfunding the Census Bureau could lead to a situation where “political power will be distributed disproportionately to white voters, to people who are wealthier.”
Of course, none of that sounds bad to Republicans, who have already spent years trying to undermine the political power and representation of people of color through voting-rights restrictions and racialized gerrymandering strategies. Under the circumstances, underfunding the Census Bureau so it simply can’t provide a full and accurate count of how many people are living in racially diverse — and Democratic-leaning — communities has many benefits for Republicans.
But the voting rights issue isn’t the only concern raised by the budget fight that led to Thompson’s sudden departure. Allegra Chapman, the director of voting and elections at Common Cause, worries that undermining the Census Bureau constitutes an attack on the administrative duties of the federal government generally.
“The work that this bureau does is really important to the efficiency of government in general and making sure that Americans are getting everyday service to which they’re entitled,” Chapman explained over the phone. “Using that survey, we know more about people’s day to day lives: their jobs, how much education they have, whether they’re a veteran, whether they rent.”
That data is critical to determining everything from housing policy to educational allotments and even managing the 911 emergency call system. If the data isn’t accurate, a lot of Americans could be left out of receiving services.
“Trump has talked from the get-go about the need for infrastructure,” Chapman pointed out. “I don’t know how he’s going to do anything about infrastructure if he doesn’t have information about what’s happening in the country at large. You don’t start building bridges in places unless you have this accurate snapshot.”
It hardly requires mentioning that any promise made by Trump to help Americans can immediately be viewed as something between a gross misstatement and an outright lie. This is the same man who promised that he would make sure all Americans had health insurance but then got to work immediately with congressional Republicans to make sure that 24 million Americans who would otherwise have coverage will likely go without it.
As Chapman pointed out, this attack on Census funding is consistent with another stated goal of some members of the Trump administration — to undermine the operations of government.
Chief White House strategist Steve Bannon has vowed publicly to fight daily for the “deconstruction of the administrative state,” by which he means the system of federal regulations and agencies, administered by the executive branch, that helps run the country and the economy in particular. Bannon sees the various agencies as roadblocks to economic growth; the unwillingness of the Trump administration to fill hundreds of vacancies at various federal agencies is taken by many as an extension of this desire to see the federal government’s administrative arm fall apart from mismanagement.
Bannon didn’t pull this idea out of his ass. The influential conservative policy analyst Grover Norquist quipped in 2001 that he wanted to reduce the federal government to the size “where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” This demonizing “administrative state” language can be traced to think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, which advocate for a serious reduction or end to federal agencies that interfere with a libertarian utopia where the rich gobble up all the money and the rest of us are left with few resources and no real political power.
The Census Bureau is central, as Chapman said, to running the federal government. Undermining the ability of that agency to do its job will have ramifications for all other agencies in the government — which is most of them — that rely on Census data in order to make decisions and do their jobs.
Perhaps that’s why Republicans have long tried to stoke antagonism toward the Census Bureau among their base. The Republican National Committee has repeatedly denounced the agency’s efforts to collect thorough demographic data on the U.S. population, and conservative media outlets periodically gin up hatred against the bureau. Census data captures our nation’s growing racial diversity, as well as trends like the growth in the number of unmarried adults — all facts that some people on the right simply don’t want the public to know about. The more we know about how Americans really live today, the harder it is for Republicans to enact a backward-looking conservative agenda. No wonder they are trying to kneecap the Census Bureau’s ability to do its job.
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The Sadism of Creeping Dictatorship |
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Thursday, 11 May 2017 13:11 |
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Cole writes: "One of the classic techniques of dictatorship is humiliation, a manifestation of the sadism of the regime. Most people want to avoid being made the butt of ridicule, and authoritarian personalities calculate that they will even surrender some rights and liberties to avoid it."
President Donald Trump. (photo: AP)
The Sadism of Creeping Dictatorship
By Juan Cole, Informed Comment
11 May 17
 ne of the classic techniques of dictatorship is humiliation, a manifestation of the sadism of the regime. Most people want to avoid being made the butt of ridicule, and authoritarian personalities calculate that they will even surrender some rights and liberties to avoid it.
Even if you didn’t agree with him on many issues, Comey did not have an easy job and he put a lot of years and effort into it. If you’re his boss and you want to fire him, you owe him a face to face meeting to explain to him that he will be cycling out. In this case the firing was unwarranted and disturbing, given that he had a 10-year appointment and a presumption of protection from being let go over politics. But nearly as bad as the termination of employment itself was the way it was done.
Comey was personally humiliated. He was giving a talk in Los Angeles when the news came across the television screen. Here you have the Director of the FBI appearing in public and having his dignity abruptly stripped away. He reportedly thought it must be a hoax to begin with.
What is the message here? If you work for the Federal government, you work for Trump. And if you work for Trump, and you cross him or he just decides he doesn’t like the look of you, he will degrade you and make you abject in front of the whole world. Therefore, be afraid, be very afraid.
This technique of abruptness and lack of transparency was also visible in Trump’s attempts at a Muslim ban. The first Executive Order was deliberately issued on a weekend when it is hard to get hold of a judge. People who had duly applied for and received visas and who had spent money on airplane tickets were informed suddenly and without warning that their visas were no good and they had wasted their money on air fare and would have to go back on the next flight. Mothers were split from children, grandchildren from grandparents. People with jobs were not allowed back in to return to them.
Comey to his credit pushed back against the Bannon-Trump Muslim ban, pointing out that “Citizenship alone” is not a “threat indicator.” So it is perhaps not surprising that he was treated by his boss exactly as the Syrians, Libyans and Somalis were.
The message here is to be afraid, to be obedient, not to cross the Boss. It is a shameful message in a democracy, the whole basis of which is that every citizen is equal before the law. The president himself is not above the law.
Rule through sadism and humiliation and fear violates democracy because the most powerful man in the country goes around treating people like shit in order to terrify them into submitting to his will.
These thuggish techniques were also used to fire Sally Yates as acting Attorney General. She was informed that she was history 2 minutes before it was announced on t.v. The letter to her from Trump talked about her betrayal, implying she was let go for treason. Questioning the constitutionality of an executive order is not treason.
Or there was the sudden arrest of a reporter for “disorderly conduct” at the insistence of Tom Price, secretary of Health and Human Services. Reporters are often disruptive because they keep asking hard questions. If that is an arresting offense, then all of us are in danger. And that is Tom Price’s point.
That is, the same techniques, of sudden pouncing and smearing of reputation have been used over and over again by now not just by Trump but by Bannon and by cabinet secretaries..
The person thus humiliated is not even the real target. You are. Trump is trying to make you afraid to stick your head up, lest it get cut off. Price is trying to intimidate journalists. Bannon is trying to terrify would-be immigrants.
Everyone kept wondering what the first sign of descent into dictatorship would be. This is it. Government by sadism, government by humiliation, government by fear and caprice.
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et me preface this by saying I am someone who was not worried about the Russian efforts to influence our election. I am not surprised that Russia tried to influence our election, and I believe we are actively trying to influence the politics of Russia. I also think James Comey should have been fired by President Obama last October for interfering in the election in a way that aided Donald Trump.
