The Phony War Against Donald Trump
by Daniel McCarthy via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
ZeroHedge.com
Jun 11, 2017
There is no known crime at the heart of the Trump-Russia affair, and no crime has yet been even credibly alleged in President Trump’s involvement in the investigation
James Comey’s public testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee revealed both more and less than expected. It revealed less than expected by President Trump’s critics: Comey related no other incidents as eyebrow-raising as his account of when Trump asked him, in discussing the investigation of Mike Flynn, to “let this go.” Comey wrote memoranda to document each of his direct discussions with the president, but based on his testimony to Congress, none of those other memos contains anything comparable to the exchange about Flynn.
In his prepared remarks for the hearing, Comey described President Trump asking for his loyalty. This is one place where Comey’s testimony was more revealing than expected—not in showing that the president might apply vague pressure to his employees but in showing how ill-defined the relationship between a president and America’s intelligence agencies can be. There is a difficulty here that does not begin or end with Trump, a basic, but unexamined, problem of how the executive branch operates. How can it be both political and, at the same time, above politics? How can the president have full legal authority not only to dismiss the FBI director, as Comey testified, even to direct what the FBI does and does not investigate, while the FBI also holds itself to be “independent”? And what does it mean for any intelligence service to be independent of elected leaders—and thus, independent of the public?
Trump is a political outsider, and he came into office with the same doubts about the independence of executive agencies, including the “intelligence community,” that millions of ordinary Americans harbor. They wonder whether spies and bureaucrats are selfless servants of the public good or every bit as self-interested and ideological as elected officials are. The suspicions that Trump and grassroots Republicans entertain—not to mention many grassroots progressives—may be excessive, but they are sincerely held, and they explain a great deal. They explain why Trump, for example, views the federal bureaucracy as the enemy, and they explain why Trump might be very concerned about “loyalty” on the part of those who serve under him, including the FBI director.
High officials such as Comey are no strangers to political pressure, but they are unaccustomed to a president being as blunt as Trump is. In his testimony Thursday, Comey alluded to the Obama administration’s attempt to enfold the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server into a narrative that would serve the Democratic nominee’s interests in 2016: Comey testified that Obama’s attorney general, Loretta Lynch, “had directed me not to call it an investigation, but instead to call it a matter, which confused me and concerned me.” Lynch’s brief meeting with Bill Clinton on a runway tarmac in Phoenix, Arizona was, according to Comey, what prompted him to speak publicly about the reopening of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s activities. “In an ultimately conclusive way, that was the thing that capped it for me, that I had to do something separately to protect the credibility of the investigation, which meant both the FBI and the Justice Department,” he told Sen. Richard Burr.
Yet Comey’s actions may have had an effect on the election, however, and supporters of Mrs. Clinton have long viewed Comey’s move as political—or at least, they did so before Comey became a focal point for Trump criticism. In his testimony Thursday, Comey acknowledged the political and personal stakes: he told Sen. Joe Manchin, “if Hillary Clinton was elected, I might have been terminated.” The FBI director’s job was fraught with political peril, whether Trump or Clinton won the election.
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