It's like Beelzebub ate Stalin and Hitler and George Wallace; drank a coupla gallons of orange food coloring, then took a giant shit, and boom - Donald Trump.
Not unrelated, Aaron Blake, WaPo:
The theory that President Trump is or has been a Russian asset is a popular one among his detractors. But for the first time, we’re learning that it’s something the FBI suspected strongly enough to dig into.
The Washington Post has confirmed that the FBI launched a counterintelligence inquiry into whether Trump was working for Russia shortly after Trump fired FBI Director James B. Comey in May 2017. The news was first reported by the New York Times.
Practically speaking, this may not mean a whole lot. Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III was appointed mere days later, meaning any evidence the FBI collected was likely limited. It was Mueller’s decision to continue the line of inquiry, and we don’t know whether he has. But practical concerns aside, it’s a shocking story: The nation’s leading law enforcement agency was looking into whether a sitting U.S. president was working for a hostile foreign nation. The decision was something the FBI reportedly struggled with for months, and it still has its detractors.
But what might have led to such an extraordinary step by the FBI? And what’s the state of the evidence?
Comey’s firing was obviously the tipping point. Investigators reportedly shed their previous reservations about the inquiry after Trump’s televised admission to NBC News’s Lester Holt that the Russia investigation was on his mind when he did it. Another red flag was Trump’s attempts to include a reference to the Russia investigation in Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein’s letter justifying the firing.
We already know that these few days contained a central event in Mueller’s investigation into whether Trump obstructed justice, but the idea that it also warranted a counterintelligence inquiry is notable. It’s one thing to deliberately hamper the investigation; it’s another to suspect Trump might have done so on behalf of Russia. Were this to ever lead to any concrete conclusions, that Holt interview will apparently have been an extraordinary misstep by Trump, who has often seemed to blurt out unhelpful statements about his true motivations.
I need to push back on that last point - the one about the "extraordinary misstep". It's not a misstep when it's intended - when it's part of the plan to do all this shit more or less out in the open. I think they do that because we're more likely to think they wouldn't do it out in the open if it's not OK.
Our conditioning is that the bad guys do their bad things under cover - that they wouldn't do those bad things in full view if those bad things were really bad.
If they just keep at it, and keep doing things little-by-little, then little-by-little, they can do whatever they want, and because we've never really objected all that much, we have everything we need to resolve our cognitive dissonance. We shrug it off - accepting their rationalizations as our own.
No comments:
Post a Comment