While James Comey and other security chiefs were in the process of answering questions under oath, he was Tweeting constantly, lying about what those testifying were ostensibly saying, and also liberally using the ‘FAKE NEWS!’ epithet.
From Richard Nixon to Bill Clinton, history suggests that it is never a good thing for a president to have the FBI, with its nearly infinite resources and sweeping investigative powers, on his tail.
FBI Director James Comey’s promise to the House intelligence committee Monday to “follow the facts wherever they lead” in the bureau’s investigation into possible collusion between the Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia during last year’s election amounted to an ominous guarantee, barely two months into Trump’s term, that institutional forces beyond any president’s control will force the facts of the case to light, whatever they are.
“Comey’s admission of an ongoing counterintelligence investigation, with no endpoint in sight, is a big deal,” said historian Timothy Naftali, who was the first director of the federally-run Nixon presidential library. “This is not going away.”
Moreover, given Trump’s demonstrated willingness to attack any adversary – hours before Comey’s testimony, he tweeted that the suggestion of collaboration between his campaign and Russia was “fake news” – official acknowledgment of the investigation not only raises sharp new questions about the president’s own credibility, but about his willingness to continue undermining public trust and confidence in the government institutions he leads.
The Rethuglicans cannot decide what to do with Drumpf.
Months ago, they put clothes-pegs on their noses and decided to back the swine, even though they knew that he was not really GOP. He won through abrasiveness and insensitivity and they cheered him. He is now ‘ruling’ by abrasiveness, administrative ignorance and an absolute inability to sense when it is tactically more prudent to STFU.
Mr. Trump’s allies have begun to wonder if his need for self-expression, often on social media, will exceed his instinct for self-preservation, with disastrous results both for the president and for a party whose fate is now tightly tied to his.
“The tweets make it much more difficult for us as we try to build a case against these leakers,” said Representative Peter T. King, a New York Republican who sits on the Intelligence Committee. “We always have to be answering questions about the tweets — it puts us on defense all the time when we could be building a case for the president.”
And Mr. Trump’s fixation on fighting is undermining his credibility at a time when he needs to toggle from go-it-alone executive action to collaborative congressional action on ambitious health care, budget and infrastructure legislation.
“I don’t always like what the president is saying,” the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, told The Washington Examiner last month. “I do think he frequently, by wading into other matters, takes attention away” from “the very substantial things we’re already accomplishing.”
In the immedite aftermath of Drumpf’s victory, such an empty statement would have been OK. You could also have reminded us that he is rich and we are not.
However, we are talking here about the leader of the Western world, the person who’d make America great. So far, he has excelled in boyish pettiness and childish tantrums, earning new enemies by the day.
Rather than apologize to Obama and control his impulsive tweeting, he drew in the GHCQ and also embarrassed his security chiefs during a live inquest hearing.