Living in a Fox-Limbaugh-Breitbart fantasy

Opinion

By William H. Freivogel

 

Many Americans are living in a fantasy world constructed by Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Breitbart News and right-wing bloggers.

In this fantasy world:

  1. President Donald Trump has more credibility than James B. Comey, the man he fired as FBI director.
  2. Comey has perjured himself by first testifying he wasn’t ordered to drop any investigation into Trump associates and then testifying last week that Trump asked him to drop the criminal investigation of former national security adviser Michael Flynn.
  3. It is Comey, not Trump, who committed a crime, leaking his contemporaneous notes of Trump’s request to drop the investigation.
  4. Comey has cleared the president of obstruction of justice.
  5. And then there was the surreal cabinet meeting at which, Trump said he was just about the most successful president in history and his cabinet and staff kowtowed with statements of how blessed they were to work for him.

Now take off those Fox-colored glasses and re-enter the reality.

  1. Comey is a truthteller. Trump has lied more over a short time than any president in history.

Comey – a registered Republican longer than Trump – has lived the life of a straight-arrow lawyer and law enforcement official. As George W. Bush’s deputy attorney general he rushed to John Ashcroft’s hospital bedside to make sure the White House didn’t pressure the ill attorney general to reauthorize a warrantless surveillance program the Justice Department thought was illegal.

In the rare instance where Comey makes a factual mistake in testimony, he quickly corrects the record.

Meanwhile when Trump lies, he refuses to admit it – think Obama wiretap charges.

Most Americans get this. A YouGov poll shows 46 percent of Americans believed Comey was more trustworthy and 26 percent Trump. But in the alternative media universe inhabited by Trump voters, 70 percent thought Trump more trustworthy as compared to 7 percent who believed Comey.

  1. Comey did not lie or perjure himself. That false news story began with right-wing conspiracy theorist, Jack Posobiec, who styles himself a White House correspondent. In the weeks before last fall’s election, it was Posobiec who spread the dangerous nonsense about Hillary Clinton running a child sex ring out of the back rooms of Comet Pizza in Washington, D.C.

This time, Posobiec tweeted that in testimony in early May Comey had “said under oath that Trump did not ask him to halt any investigation.”

Actually, Comey had been asked if “the attorney general or senior officials at the Department of Justice” had ever tried to halt an investigation. He said no. He was not asked if Trump had asked him to halt an investigation. So when he testified last week that the president had asked him to drop the investigation of Flynn, he was not contradicting earlier testimony.

Facts be damned; the Posobiec tweet ricocheted through conservative media. The New York Times traced its path. Breitbart published a story headlined: “Comey Under Oath: ‘Have Not Experienced Any Requests to Stop FBI Investigations.’” GotNews.com, a Trump favorite that has distorted reports on the Russia investigation, upped the ante by suggesting Comey may have perjured himself.

InfoWars, run by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, picked up the perjury angle. Jones is the “journalist” who says 9/11 was a U.S. black bag job and that no children died at the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre. Then Limbaugh read the GotNews.com article on air and called the Russia investigation a “witch hunt.” And Fox’s Sean Hannity picked up the story, claiming it showed Comey himself had admitted the Trump request to drop the Flynn investigation “never happened.”

  1. Comey did not commit a crime by leaking his notes of the Trump meeting.

Comey acknowledged the leak without hesitation during testimony. This is not an illegal leak, such as revealing classified information. The memo was not classified and did not contain national security secrets. Comey’s leak of the memo is better understood as whistleblowing than leaking.

https://lawfareblog.com/sharing-memos-comey-did-nothing-wrong-former-official-and-everything-right-whistleblower

  1. Comey never said Trump was not under investigation for obstruction of justice.

On last Sunday’s “This Week” program, Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow, who moonlights as a Fox legal analyst, challenged the credibility of Comey and Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III and baldly asserted “it was made very clear from the FBI director on multiple occasions that the president had not been and was not under investigation for obstruction of justice.”

In fact it wasn’t clear or even implied. Comey declined to make a conclusion about obstruction of justice, properly leaving that legal judgment to Mueller. “I don’t think it’s for me to say whether the conversation I had with the President was an effort to obstruct,” he testified. “I took it as a very disturbing thing, very concerning, but that’s a conclusion I’m sure the special counsel will work towards to what the intention was there and whether that’s an offense.”

Comey said he had leaked his memo to trigger the appointment of a special counsel. So the gist of Comey’s testimony was the opposite of Sekulow’s claim. Rather than saying the president is not under investigation for obstruction, Comey made it clear he thought the act was so disturbing that there needed to be a special counsel to investigate the president on possible obstruction. In other words, even though the White House ballyhooed the claim that Comey had cleared Trump, Comey’s testimony strongly suggest Mueller is investigating the president for possible obstruction.

As former Watergate prosecutor Philip Allen Lacovara wrote in the Washington Post, “Any experienced prosecutor would see….a prima facie case of obstruction of justice.”

Trump puts Comey’s job in play, demands loyalty, repeatedly asks him to remove the cloud of the Russia investigation, asks him to drop the Flynn criminal investigation, reportedly asks intelligence chiefs to intervene with Comey, fires Comey because of the Russia investigation and tells the Russians the firing relieves the pressure of the investigation.

Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard law professor who is Fox’s favorite commentator of late, claims the president can shut down any investigation he wants and can fire anybody he wants because he is totally in charge of the executive branch. This may have been the case before Watergate, but the Supreme Court rejected that view in 1988 in saying it was not “so central to the functioning of the executive Branch” for the president to be able to torpedo investigations of himself and aides. https://lawfareblog.com/view-supreme-court-alan-dershowitz-wrong-about-powers-president

  1. A cabinet meeting like no other.

The most surreal moment of the week, however, was not the made up charges of the right-wing media, but rather the actual video of Trump’s first full cabinet meeting.

The president who has yet to get a major bill through the GOP Congress, bragged “Never has there been a president, with few exceptions…who has passed more legislation….” As cabinet and staff heaped praise on Trump, Chief of Staff Reince Priebus’s comment stood out as he thanked Trump for “the blessing that you’ve given us to serve your agenda.”

In the real world, one of those blessings was Trump’s reported ultimatum that Priebus had until July 4 to clean up the White House’s dysfunctional staff. http://www.politico.com/story/2017/06/11/donald-trump-reince-priebus-deadline-239411

 

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