Don't Lose Sight of Monday Morning's Real News
First thing Monday morning, the president* dropped by his favorite electric teevee show, the Fox News Channel's mega-hit Three Dolts On A Divan, to deliver his formal response to the stories that popped over the weekend about whether or not he's opened a branch office of the Kremlin on Pennsylvania Avenue. This is what you do if you're President* of the United States and you suddenly discover that the gas lights are growing dim.
He then stopped for a moment on the South Lawn to expand on his remarks in his usual temperate manner. From CNBC:
"I never worked for Russia," Trump told reporters before boarding a helicopter on the south lawn of the White House. "And you know that answer better than anybody," Trump said. "Not only did I never work for Russia, I think it's a disgrace that you even asked that question because it's a whole big fat hoax. It's just a hoax."
Now, I don't think there's a 1099 form somewhere in a file that shows payments to him from Putin Enterprises, LLC, either. However, the whole weekend was bristling with evidence that, at the very least, El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago is quaking in his valenkis. It peaked on Sunday night when he retweeted Senator Professor Warren's kitchen tweet from a couple weeks back, while adding his own unique brand of humor.
If Elizabeth Warren, often referred to by me as Pocahontas, did this commercial from Bighorn or Wounded Knee instead of her kitchen, with her husband dressed in full Indian garb, it would have been a smash! pic.twitter.com/D5KWr8EPan
- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 14, 2019
Wounded Knee! Gubba-gubba! MAGA, libtards! He's dumber than the people at his rallies. It's an underrated part of his charm.
This is just nuts.
Monday's real news, however, came from CNN, which got ahold of transcripts of closed-door congressional hearings at which FBI officials talked about the chaos that reigned in the aftermath of the president*'s firing of James Comey.
They debated a range of possibilities, according to portions of transcripts of two FBI officials' closed-door congressional interviews obtained by CNN. On one end was the idea that Trump fired Comey at the behest of Russia. On the other was the possibility that Trump didn't have an improper relationship with the Kremlin and was acting within the bounds of his executive authority, the transcripts show.
James Baker, then-FBI general counsel, said the FBI officials were contemplating with regard to Russia whether Trump was "acting at the behest of and somehow following directions, somehow executing their will."
"That was one extreme. The other extreme is that the President is completely innocent, and we discussed that too," Baker told House investigators last year. "There's a range of things this could possibly be. We need to investigate, because we don't know whether, you know, the worst-case scenario is possibly true or the President is totally innocent and we need to get this thing over with - and so he can move forward with his agenda."
That the question needed to be asked at all is a measure of how far down this dark road we've gone.
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