Passing Strange

May 12, 2017. Washington, DC. Today President Trump publicly threatened and blackmailed former FBI Director James Comey in an effort to keep him silent. “James Comey better hope that there are no “tapes” of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!” the President tweeted.

The circumstances of Comey’s firing in the mist of an FBI investigation into Russian campaign tampering was already suspicious enough. It’s suspicious in the sense that it smells like obstruction of justice. Now the President threatens Comey to shut him up, which is even more obviously obstruction of justice. Oh yes, and another thing: we now know that the President is recording White House conversations for purposes of blackmail.

This is concerning enough that even The American Conservative is calling for impeachment, “to protect the integrity of our Constitutional order.”

Tuesday, May 9, 2017. Washington, DC. The President of the United States fired the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation today. This is only the second time this has ever occurred (Bill Clinton fired William Sessions in 1993). It’s the first time, however, that an FBI director has been fired by a president while that president was under investigation by the FBI. And of course this investigation–regarding Russian election tampering and possible collusion with the Trump Administration–is what makes the firing look more than a little suspicious.

The reason given for the firing was a memo written (likely at Trump’s behest) by assistant Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, recommending Comey’s firing due to his handling of Hillary Clinton’s email controversy during the Presidential election. This is odd inasmuch as President Trump and Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions had previously praised Comey for this same handling in the past (Comey’s revelation that he was engaging in further investigations of leaked Clinton emails days before the election helped tilt the election in Trump’s favor).

By the way, the reason the memo didn’t come from Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions himself, is because Jeff-Bo has already recused himself from the Russian investigation after it was revealed that he had failed to disclose contact he’d had with the Russian ambassador during his confirmation hearings.

And let’s remember also that back in February National Security Advisor Michael Flynn resigned after it was revealed that he had lied to Vice President Mike Pence about is own collusion with Russians.

But if you remember just one thing: Comey was fired for the Clinton email thing. It had nothing to do with the FBI investigating Trump or anything. The President made this very clear in the termination letter he 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.”

Isn’t that a funny thing to write in a termination letter?

May 3rd, 2017. Washington, DC. Speaking before an audience of rank-and-file State Department employees today in the State Department’s Dean Acheson Auditorium, US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson set about to explain, for the assembled members of our foreign service, what could be the meaning of our foreign policy under the rubric of “America First”–a slogan the big boss loves, but which, for students of history like career diplomats, is inalienably associated with the proto-fascist movement that opposed American entry into WWII.

Tillerson had billed the talk as a “listening exercise” (amazingly, meant for them, and not for him!) and he was received with all the enthusiasm of a group of anxious employees hearing a pep talk from executive management on the eve of a major layoff. This is of course the case, because Tillerson has asked for a 26% cut in his annual budget, and plans to lay off as many as 2,300 people. Before taking them on a tour of global hotspots that had all the fine-line work of a restaurant coloring book, Tillerson said “We really have to understand, in each country or each region of the world that we are dealing with, what are our national security interests, what are our economic prosperity interests, and then as we can, advocate and advance our values.” Elaborating further, he also said that the US won’t just abandon core values. “In some instances, the US WILL require other nations to adopt certain actions as to how they treat people…in other instances, we will continue to advocate for our values without using them as leverage. So, It doesn’t mean that we leave those values on the sidelines…it doesn’t mean that we don’t advocate for and aspire to freedom, human dignity, and the treatment of people the world over.”

Response to the speech was swift. Writing in the Atlantic, Eliot Cohen, State Department Counsellor under George W Bush, wrote: “Tillerson’s idea that in foreign policy American interests and American Values are two separate things, the first mandatory, the second optional, reflects a grave misunderstanding…”. Stephen Walt, Professor of International Affairs at Harvard, interviewed by the BBC, said that while underscoring the challenges of balancing real politik with core democratic values was certainly nothing new, especially for this audience, saying that, per policy, we were no longer even going try, was something quite new.

Since we are apparently no longer moral and political universalists who hold certain truths to be self-evident, and recognize that they are enshrined in the Bill of Rights, our policy, under the President without qualities, is to have an administration without policies.

April 24, 2017. Palm Beach, Florida. On April 5th the U.S State Department’s Share America blog posted a piece on the history of President Donald J. Trump’s “winter White House” (the $200,000 per membership Mar-a-Lago private club and resort in Palm Beach, Florida). This blog, like all things part of the U.S. State Department, is taxpayer funded. We’ve already heard over and over again about Mr. Trump’s refusal to divest his interests in his private business ventures to avoid potential conflicts of interest. An example of such an unethical practice might be to use taxpayer funded Federal government resources to market one’s private business interests.

This point was not lost in Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), who tweeted a reply directly to a U.S. Department of State tweet promoting the President’s resort: “Yes, I am curious @StateDept. Why are taxpayer $$ promoting the President’s private country club?” The “ad” has since been deleted, but there is a screen grab of the actual “twitter campaign” on the right.

April 20th, 2017. Washington, DC. In response to the decision of US District Court of Hawaii to grant a hold on implementation of the latest version of the Muslim travel ban in late March until the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals hears the case on May 8th, US Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions today said in a radio interview that he was “…amazed that a judge sitting on an island in the Pacific can issue an order that stops the president of the United States from what appears to be clearly his statutory and Constitutional power.” As pointed out by Washington Post reporter Aaron Blake, the problems with this statement include, among others, the fact that Hawaii has been a state since 1959, the judge who issued the order is a Federal judge for the district court of Hawaii, and Hawaii has standing as a major port of entry to the United States of America (of which Hawaii is a member). That the Attorney General of the United States should suggest that some states are better than others in such a cavalier manner is mind boggling to say the least. For the moment, all that can be said is kulikuli, you disgusting pua‘a.

April 18, 2017. Thousands of Miles Southwest of the Korean Peninsula. Last week, fresh off of deeply satisfying fawning from bellicose sycophants in the American media and in both the Democratic and Republican parties for ineffectually bombing an airfield in Syria, POTUS Trump began engaging in some serious saber rattling with North Korea about their nuclear program. Supreme Leader Kim Jong-Un, being a narcissistic megalomaniac, is not exactly one to back down from a double-dog-dare pissing contest with anyone, which historically has forced other world leaders to behave like the adult in the room. Supreme Leader Donald J. Trump, also being a narcissistic megalomaniac, however, isn’t like other world leaders (excluding Kim Jong-Un that is).

Learning that Kim was threatening to conduct nuclear tests, the Trump Administration warned North Korea that a carrier strike force was on the way. They cited an announcement made on April 9th by U.S. Pacific Commander, Admiral Harry Harris that the Carl Vinson carrier strike group was “heading north”. Trump reinforced the escalation by remarking on Fox Business News on April 12, “We are sending an armada, very powerful.” Yeah! American Cowboy diplomacy is back!

We learned today, however, that the aircraft carrier Carl Vinson was never heading to the Korean Peninsula. Photos showed it headed in the opposite direction–towards Australia for scheduled war games. President Trump had simply lied to North Korea, China, you, me, and the rest of the world in order to escalate the war threat. Imagine how the 24 million residents of the Seoul metropolitan area felt about this clever bluffing game.

April 4, 2017: Washington, DC. For a brief moment it looked as though POTUS Donald Trump quietly changed the terms of his conflict of interest avoiding trust so that he could withdraw funds. We now know, thanks to ProPublica, is that actually he’s been able to withdraw principle or interest since the inauguration, meaning it never was much of a trust. His sons may be running the organization, but the trust “shall distribute net income or principal to Donald J. Trump at his request.” Why didn’t we hear about this earlier? Apparently it’s in the fine print that somehow was hitherto unnoticed. There is a big caveat on page 161,

March 17, 2017, Washington DC: Earlier this month, as we noted here in The Passing Strange, POTUS Donald Trump tweeted the wildly irresponsible (particularly for a standing President) and wholly unsubstantiated claim that former President Barack Obama had “wire tapped” Trump Tower during the US Presidential election cycle. In defense of this charge Trump offered no evidence, frustrating congressional Republicans and even causing House Intelligence Committee chair Devin Nunes (R-CA) to state the Mr. Trump’s assertion was simply “wrong”.

Coming to the defense of Mr. Trump, on the morning of March 14th former New Jersey Superior Court Judge, libertarian fan-boy, and 9/11 conspiracy theorist “Judge” Andrew Napolitano spun up a fresh conspiracy theory on the GOP-leaning political talk show Fox News and Friends. Understanding well that an unfalsifiable conspiracy theory can never be decisively refuted, Napolitano moved the location of any potential evidence of Mr. Trump’s wiretapping conspiracy outside of the preview of Congressional intelligence investigations.

“Three intelligence sources have informed Fox News that President Obama went outside the chain of command,” Napolitano said. “He didn’t use the NSA, he didn’t use the CIA, he didn’t use the FBI, and he didn’t use the Department of Justice.” Rather, Napolitano suggested, Obama conspired with Britain’s intelligence agency GCHQ. This set-up conveniently afforded Napolitano to conclude, “There’s no American fingerprints on this.”

The clincher here? On March 17th, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer then cited Napolitano’s conspiracy theory in a press briefing in defense of Mr. Trump’s “wire tapping” (which Secretary Spicer described using air quotes) charge against President Obama. This lead to an extremely rare public statement from Britain’s GCHQ (which typically neither confirms or denies any allegations) angrily denouncing the conspiracy. Blowback from this denunciation had the White House backpedaling, including a reported apology to the British government from Sean Spicer for, as Gizmodo aptly put it, “talking shit”.

Mr. Trump, following his typical modus operandi, simply distanced himself from any responsibility for his incendiary and unsubstantiated allegations by stating, “We said nothing. All we did was quote a certain very talented legal mind who was the one responsible for saying that on television.” Note how this comment simultaneously distances the POTUS from the charge while supporting the credibility of the source. Notice also that the “very talented legal mind” in question is a paid partisan political pundit with a well documented relish for conspiracy theories (i.e., “Judge” Napolitano) speaking on the GOP’s propaganda network (Fox News).  The propagandist makes the unsubstantiated claim. The conspiracy seed is planted in the minds of the American public. The POTUS gets to deny any responsibility. See how that works?