President Trump is demanding -- no, ordering -- a federal investigation into the investigation that is dogging his administration and that he wants desperately to end.
WIthin hours, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein responded to Trump’s tweet.
“If anyone did infiltrate or surveil participants in a presidential campaign for inappropriate purposes, we need to know about it and take appropriate action,” Rosenstein said in a statement, announcing that the president’s allegations would be referred to the inspector general for investigation.
Let’s be clear: There is zero evidence that the FBI “infiltrated or surveilled” the Trump campaign for political or inappropriate purposes. There is zero indication that anybody in the Obama administration acted improperly in pushing the investigation. In fact, I have seen no Trump defender even attempt to explain what that “political purpose” might possibly have been, given that the FBI kept its entire investigation secret until after the election was completed.
Rosenstein knows all that, as does FBI Director Chris Wray. Had any such evidence existed, they would have initiated an investigation on their own, with no need for a presidential directive. But given the gravity of the charge and the high office of the person making the charge, referring it to the inspector general for investigation is exactly the right move.
The question, however, is whether Trump will be satisfied with that referral. He is not merely dictating an investigation; for all practical purposes he is attempting to dictate the outcome of that investigation. And in the past, he has expressed complete disdain for such referrals to the inspector general, a post created to handle exactly this kind of problem.
If Trump accepts the referral to the office of inspector general, a crisis will have been averted, if only temporarily. Over the next few months, the IG will study the documents, interview those involved and then issue a report concluding that politics played no role in the investigation.
However, Trump defenders in the media and Congress have long demanded something more: They want a special counsel, to investigate the special counsel.
If Trump demands that step, then all hell breaks lose. Under federal law, initiating a criminal investigation requires some degree of evidence that a crime has been committed, and again, no such evidence exists. The bar for appointment of a special counsel is even higher. If ordered by the president to commence a criminal prosecution based on no such evidence, any attorney of any integrity within the Department of Justice would be compelled to resign rather than carry out those illegal, unconstitutional orders.
It’s also critically important to put this into context and to view this controversy as one part of a highly disturbing pattern in which Trump attempts to enlist the powers of the federal government against those whom he considers his enemies.
In repeated tweets, Trump has demanded that Attorney General Jeff Sessions initiate the prosecution of Hillary Clinton, Tony Podesta, Andrew McCabe, James Comey and others, based on no evidence whatsoever. Those demands have so far been ignored by Trump’s own appointees, and so far Trump has not taken concrete steps to force those actions.
In another case, The Washington Post reported last week that Trump has repeatedly pressured Postmaster General Megan Brennan to double the rate that the Postal Service charges Amazon.com and other firms to ship packages. Trump’s claim -- refuted by experts, including analysts at the Postal Service itself -- is that the shipping rates constitute a taxpayer subsidy for Amazon. Brennan has tried to explain that USPS makes money on its Amazon contract, but Trump has no interest in such explanations.
If it strikes you as odd that Trump is involving himself in package delivery rates, it should. If you think it’s even more weird that he’s taking the side of a government agency against a private company, unprovoked, you’re right. If it also strikes you as bizarre that Trump has repeatedly complained that Amazon pays too little in state and local taxes, your confusion is justified.
However if you consider that Amazon is owned by Jeff Bezos, which also owns the Post -- “the Amazon Washington Post,” as Trump calls it -- then his interest in those affairs becomes much more understandable and also much more troubling.
Under any other president, at any other time, such open attempts to leverage the regulatory, law-enforcement and commercial powers of the federal government against perceived political opponents would itself be considered just grounds for impeachment. It poses a direct threat to the freedoms that we Americans claim to hold dear, and is fascistic to its core, but so far we’re pretending that what’s happening is not really happening.
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