Jen Hayden Daily Kos Staff
Move over Tea
Pot Dome scandal and move over Watergate, there’s a newer, bigger, more
dangerous political scandal coming to light—the FBI initiated an investigation
into whether Donald Trump, President of the United States, is working on behalf
of the Russian government, against American interests.
Repeat: the FBI
opened a counterintelligence operation because they had reason to believe the
president was not acting in the interests of the United States.
If true, it
amounts to nothing short of treason. To gauge just how big this scandal truly
is, let’s look at reactions from legal experts, former U.S. Intelligence
officers and journalists.
First
up, Frank Figliuzzi, former Assistant Director for Counterintelligence at
the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
He’s somebody
who understands precisely what it would take for the FBI to take the drastic
step of opening a criminal investigation into the sitting President of the
United States.
Figliuzzi says
the FBI would never open such an investigation based purely on
Trump’s behavior, that they would have other hard evidence, such as damning
audio intercepts.
"The FBI is privy to all kinds of intel ... if you’re going to open a case on the POTUS, you're going to have more than just unstable behavior … you're going to have something that gives you at least a reasonable suspicion if not specific and articulable facts."
Evan
McMullin, former Central Intelligence Agency operations officer, had this
to say.
That the FBI had cause to investigate a sitting American president for possible collaboration with a foreign power against the nation should shock and awaken us to the gravity of our situation. Still beyond the perception of many, Trump has betrayed us.
Former FBI
Director James Comey, who’s dismissal was part of the reason for the
investigation, had something a little more subtle to say.
“I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made.” — FDR
Former federal
prosecutor Renato Mariotti made an urgent plea to Republicans to act
accordingly. This is bigger than holding power. This is about the fabric of the
nation.
Can any elected official explain *why* the American people should not be alarmed that the FBI thought Donald Trump might be acting to advance Russia’s interests over our own? Republicans, you are Americans first. Your country needs you.
Legal expert
Benjamin Wittes at Lawfare has pulled together several
critical pieces, revealing new information about Congressional
testimony related to these cases and revisiting older testimony from Comey and
others.
In short, Wittes
now believes that the Department of Justice’s investigation into whether Donald
Trump obstructed justice isn’t so much a stand alone case, but rather an
offshoot of the existing investigation into collusion.
That Trump’s
actions in 2017 were not simply obstruction, but rather part of the collusion
itself.
This is a brief
summary of Wittes’ conclusion, but do yourself a favor and read the
extensive post itself.
Would not a sequence of overt interferences in the investigation by Trump himself, culminating in the decapitation of the investigation’s leadership and boasted about both on national television and—later—in an Oval Office meeting to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak and flagged in a draft letter to Comey as specifically connected to the Russia probe, raise all kinds of red flags within the parameters of the existing investigation the FBI was already conducting?
This was, after all, one heck of “link” between an “individual[] associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government”!
The reporting
Schmidt shared with me about Baker’s testimony suggests rather strongly that
the FBI did not think of the Comey firing simply as a possible obstruction of
justice.
Officials
thought of it, rather, in the context of the underlying
counterintelligence purpose of the Russia investigation. At one point,
Baker was asked whether firing Director Comey added to the threat to national
security the FBI was confronting.
“Yes,” Baker
responds.
In short, the
FBI was doing their job, investigating Russian operations against the United
States of America, something they have been tasked with for decades, and
during the course of that investigation, people connected to Donald Trump began
appearing on the radar.
And then Donald
Trump’s own actions and words bolstered the case and the urgency of the agency
to get to the bottom of it, for the sake of our national security.
This isn’t a big
political scandal, it may turn out to be the biggest political scandal in the
history of this country—a fact made clear by Natasha Bertrand, national
security expert and politics writer for The Atlantic.
Stepping back for a minute: If no other reporting existed on Trump/Russia, the fact that the FBI started a CI investigation to determine whether or not the sitting president of the US was either comprised by or an agent of Russia, it would be the biggest political story...ever.
There were will rough seas ahead as more
information comes to light. Buckle up, one of the darkest chapters in American
history could be just getting started.