March 28, 2017

COMEY V. COMB-OVER:

The Russia Scandal Has Reached the Trump Family : And only a special counsel can find out how deep the rot goes. (MAX BOOT, MARCH 27, 2017, Foreign Policy)

When, in the past, has an FBI director ever announced that his agents were investigating allegations that the president and his closest associates -- including his senior advisor-cum-son-in-law -- were guilty of collusion with a hostile foreign power? Never. Yet that's just what James Comey did on March 20 when he told the House Intelligence Committee that the G-men were looking into "the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia's efforts."

To make the event even more surreal, Comey and his fellow witness, Adm. Michael Rogers of the National Security Agency, all but called their boss, the commander in chief, a liar by publicly dismissing his allegations that former President Barack Obama had wiretapped him. "I have no information that supports those tweets, and we have looked carefully inside the FBI," Comey said. As for Donald Trump's desperate claim that Obama had asked Britain's GCHQ spy agency to wiretap him, Rogers said, "I've seen nothing on the NSA side that we engaged in any such activity nor that anyone ever asked us to engage in such activity."

It is impossible to conceive of J. Edgar Hoover publicly calling out any of the presidents that he served in such a fashion -- and yet Comey had good cause to do so, because Trump has shown that he is prepared to smear the reputation of the intelligence community in order to save his own. And while Hoover was always paranoid about "subversives" worming their way into the government, not even he went so far as to hint at a possible conspiracy between the American president and the ruler in Moscow.

Yet the jaw-dropping revelations were just beginning. 

Posted by at March 28, 2017 9:29 AM

  

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