If there was a competition for rhetorical gymnastics, it would be named after Donald Trump.
He’s the first politician in American history to not even pretend to have consistent positions. Each night the bombast screen is wiped clean, and with each new dawn comes a spew of statements that are typically the exact inverse of the statements from the day before. In a single, one-hour interview with the New York Times, Trump flip-flopped six times.
Trump has seemingly never held a consistent position on ANYTHING.
Actually, that’s not true. There is one issue on which his position is, and always has been, crystal clear: Russia.
Trump has been aggressively adamant to the point of hysteria that the Russians are our friends, that the future will be about an American/Russian partnership, that Putin is a real leader (like he will be), and that the Russians did not interfere in the recent elections. This is a remarkable anomaly given Trump’s endless elasticity about every other issue under the sun.
I was talking to a friend recently about how remarkable this was and about how it made no sense politically. The smart response for Trump to the Russian hacking would have been to meet with the intelligence community, tell them that he appreciated their conclusions and that he would act on them, and then ignore the whole thing and wait for the hoo-haw to die down. Instead, the President-elect completely torpedoed his relationship with his own intelligence agencies, hurt their morale, and appeared to the world to be at war with his most important advisors. Trump hasn’t even been sworn in yet and he’s speeding backwards at ninety miles an hour. I told my friend that if I were a reporter I would go totally deep on the Russian story because there had to be a big story behind Trump’s startling and unique consistency on this one topic.
Remember how Watergate unfolded? John Dean ratted out Nixon and his former mates in the President’s inner circle in extraordinary detail in several days of public testimony. His tale was completely implausible. The general consensus was that his claims were so outrageous that they couldn’t possibly be true. A President would never approve the payment of hush money to criminals, much less approve a slew of break-ins and robberies aimed at his political opponents. A President would never tell the director of the FBI to burn evidence in his fireplace or urge his employees to lie under oath and engage in a cover-up. Dean had no documents to back up his fantastic claims, and he was destined to go down in history as an unhinged sociopath who concocted a web of lies to bring down his former boss to save his own skin.
Then came Butterfield with his tapes, and nearly every bizarre claim and arcane detail that Dean made in his testimony turned out to be eerily accurate. And the tapes revealed other horrible truths that would have been branded as science fiction had we not had the President’s voice putting the noose around his own neck.
So a few days ago I told my friend that the only explanation for Trump’s obsessive defense of the Russians was that they had something on him. But that seemed so utterly fantastic and Manchurian-candidate-like that I added that I must have finally fallen prey to one of the hundreds of grotesque conspiracy theories that so many people embraced during this weird election cycle.
Now CNN has a new report out on the briefing that the heads of the CIA, FBI, National Intelligence, and the NSA gave to Donald Trump last Friday. That was a weirdly historical occasion in which the intelligence leaders presented evidence to a President-elect that a foreign country deliberately meddled in a Presidential election.
As it turns out, that’s not all they informed Trump about. They also presented him with allegations that are currently sweeping through the global intelligence community. Allegations from sources that some intel pros feel could be credible that the Russians have “personal and financial information” on Trump that they could use to compromise him. The intelligence heads deemed this information so explosive that they limited the disclosure of it to President Obama, President-elect Trump, the top four Congressional leaders, and the ranking members of the House and Senate intelligence committees.
That pretense of confidentiality turns out to have been a huge joke, because it turns out that these allegations have been an open secret in U.S. political circles for months. Mother Jones even reported on some of this a week before the election.
It was the anti-Trump Republicans who started this ball rolling. They hired a former British MI6 agent to try to dig up dirt on Trump’s ties with the Russians. Once Trump was nominated, it seems that the Clinton campaign moved this former agent over to their payroll, and the skullduggery continued. This explains the letter that Harry Reid sent to FBI Director Comey in October demanding that he disclose any information he had about Trump coordinating with the Russians.
It gets even weirder. Just last month Senator John McCain gave the FBI copies of written memos from the former British agent detailing exchanges of information between Russian officials and several members of the Trump campaign staff. McCain had been given them by a former British diplomat. (The FBI had already been given copies of these memos by the former British agent last August.)
So last week’s briefing was more historic, more bizarre, and much, much more troubling than we thought. For this was the first time (we hope, anyway) that a President-elect was informed by U.S. intelligence just prior to being sworn in that potentially credible evidence revealed that he might be the subject of a blackmail attempt by a foreign power.
It also reveals that the Russians were working the Republicans and not just the Democrats.
In addition, it indicates that the Clinton campaign had memoranda detailing collusion between Trump and the Russians and decided not to use it.
It also makes clear that FBI Director Comey had information that had the potential to harm both Presidential candidates, but chose to publicly reveal only the information about Hillary Clinton. There has to be a statute or two that was broken when the head of the FBI tried to determine the outcome of the election.
This would explain why Trump has been attacking the credibility of the intelligence community so vigorously and why the Trump camp rushed to announce a reorganization of the CIA before Trump was even inaugurated.
It may turn out that no Alexander Butterfield, Carl Bernstein or Bob Woodward will surface with tapes, documents, or emails giving incontrovertible evidence that Donald Trump is being set up by the Russians. These charges, despite them being serious enough that the heads of the four biggest intelligence agencies included them in Trump’s personal briefing last Friday, may never be substantiated and thus pass into folklore as a fevered dream by the defeated Democratic faithful that was briefly given legs by the lamestream, liberal media.
Then again, it may turn out to be the story of the century.