President Donald Trump's speech to Congress was cheered by supporters and mildly applauded by the media as having turned the corner into
being "presidential." That he did not exhibit his typical puerile behavior breached a bar so low that people couldn't help themselves in
viewing the accomplishment of reading from a teleprompter for an hour as impressive. One might have wondered when the other shoe would drop,
since Tuesday night was a stepping outside of Trump's reality for a moment. The other shoe dropped over the weekend, sooner than one would
hope, but longer than might have been expected.
While anyone could be forgiven for expecting a Wednesday tweet from Trump, sporting a knowing grin that says, "Nailed it...," that never had the chance to happen, because on that very day, the news comes out that Jeff Sessions did indeed meet with Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak - twice - leading up to the November election. Of course, the problem isn't so much that Sessions met with him, as much as having said, under oath and unprompted, that he never met with any Russians during the campaign. Sessions, being a lawyer, thought he could get away with some linguistic technicalities that would make Bill Clinton smile with knowing approval. Unfortunately, the rest of the country, as well as the Senate committee, see it as a violation of the spirit of the confirmation hearing questions. Sessions could have said he met with the ambassador in a Senate-related capacity, and left the committee with little else to run with. Instead, he omitted the meetings completely in his answer, in hopes that no one noticed and, if they did, he could fall back on technicality. All very lawyerly.
Trump publicly supports Sessions and says that he should not recuse himself from any investigations, after which Jeff Sessions holds a press conference and does exactly that. And he does it on the same day that Trump campaign advisers J.D. Gordon, Carter Page, and Jared Kushner are outed as to having met Kislyak also. So by the early hours of Saturday morning, Trump is ready to start kicking puppies down the street. And so we get this:
Notice that the first tweet is not about Obama's alleged wiretapping, but about Jeff Sessions meeting the Russian ambassador under circumstances set up by the Obama administration. So right off the bat, there is an attempt to bring Obama into something that had nothing to do with him. If ever there was an indicator of where Trump's head was at ten minutes before he started in on Obama, that's it. But clearly, that tweet wasn't going to accomplish what Trump actually wanted, which is to drag Obama into scandal along with him. So 9 minutes later, we get the "Terrible!" tweet. 7 minutes later, he makes a poor attempt to draw an equivalency of Sessions meeting in the campaign season leading up to the election to all the times the White House met the ambassador over the entirety of Obama's second term. Then he muses legal questions in the next two tweets 7, and again 3, minutes later. The last tweet was 10 minutes later, in which he calls Obama a sick person and equates him to Nixon and Watergate.
The legal tweets are the most amusing, because there's a real argument that could be made against Trump for libel. The Nixon v. Fitgerald opinion states that the president is only protected from civil liability if his actions are done in an official capacity, and he doesn't have protections if his actions, even if official, are criminal. Trump might try to claim that his tweets were in an official capacity, but the argument that tweeting is an official presidential action would have to be made to a judge. He might also try to frame "official actions" around the request that Congress investigate the claims. But even that is questionable, since it wasn't Trump that voiced that request - it was Sean Spicer from his Twitter account the next day:
So Trump has himself a bit of a dilemma. He has accused President Obama of having committed a major felony. He provided no evidence that his building was wiretapped; provided no evidence as to which agency was responsible for physically wiretapping his building; provided no source of the information to which the claim is (not) attributed; provided no evidence that the order, if one was given, came from Obama himself. And that last part is highly unlikely. A judge would have had to issue a warrant, and that judge would most likely have to be in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), under the authority of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). We can all be assured Trump would not have known that little fact, or he would have probably picked something else to manufacture out of thin air to drag Obama into his misery. Instead, the Senate Intelligence Committee now has to request evidence, because they can't ignore that the claim was made. And all of this is made worse, in that Trump never fact-checked his claim with his own people. As NBC reported:
Meanwhile, former Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, went on Meet the Press to tell Chuck Todd that there was no wiretapping
of Trump in any way, FBI Director James Comey has requested the Department of Justice make a statement rejecting Trump's claim, and Kevin
Lewis, Spokesperson to President Barack Obama issued a statement, that "A cardinal rule of the Obama Administration was that no White House
official ever interfered with any independent investigation led by the Department of Justice. As part of that practice, neither President
Obama nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any U.S. citizen. Any suggestion otherwise is simply false."
All of this speaks to a complete lack of discipline on Trump's part, something that goes back years, and was prevalent throughout the entirety of his presidential campaign. Ironically, Trump has been regularly frustrated with the lack of discipline among several agencies since he took office. Clearly, the example is set at the top.
While anyone could be forgiven for expecting a Wednesday tweet from Trump, sporting a knowing grin that says, "Nailed it...," that never had the chance to happen, because on that very day, the news comes out that Jeff Sessions did indeed meet with Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak - twice - leading up to the November election. Of course, the problem isn't so much that Sessions met with him, as much as having said, under oath and unprompted, that he never met with any Russians during the campaign. Sessions, being a lawyer, thought he could get away with some linguistic technicalities that would make Bill Clinton smile with knowing approval. Unfortunately, the rest of the country, as well as the Senate committee, see it as a violation of the spirit of the confirmation hearing questions. Sessions could have said he met with the ambassador in a Senate-related capacity, and left the committee with little else to run with. Instead, he omitted the meetings completely in his answer, in hopes that no one noticed and, if they did, he could fall back on technicality. All very lawyerly.
Trump publicly supports Sessions and says that he should not recuse himself from any investigations, after which Jeff Sessions holds a press conference and does exactly that. And he does it on the same day that Trump campaign advisers J.D. Gordon, Carter Page, and Jared Kushner are outed as to having met Kislyak also. So by the early hours of Saturday morning, Trump is ready to start kicking puppies down the street. And so we get this:
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Notice that the first tweet is not about Obama's alleged wiretapping, but about Jeff Sessions meeting the Russian ambassador under circumstances set up by the Obama administration. So right off the bat, there is an attempt to bring Obama into something that had nothing to do with him. If ever there was an indicator of where Trump's head was at ten minutes before he started in on Obama, that's it. But clearly, that tweet wasn't going to accomplish what Trump actually wanted, which is to drag Obama into scandal along with him. So 9 minutes later, we get the "Terrible!" tweet. 7 minutes later, he makes a poor attempt to draw an equivalency of Sessions meeting in the campaign season leading up to the election to all the times the White House met the ambassador over the entirety of Obama's second term. Then he muses legal questions in the next two tweets 7, and again 3, minutes later. The last tweet was 10 minutes later, in which he calls Obama a sick person and equates him to Nixon and Watergate.
The legal tweets are the most amusing, because there's a real argument that could be made against Trump for libel. The Nixon v. Fitgerald opinion states that the president is only protected from civil liability if his actions are done in an official capacity, and he doesn't have protections if his actions, even if official, are criminal. Trump might try to claim that his tweets were in an official capacity, but the argument that tweeting is an official presidential action would have to be made to a judge. He might also try to frame "official actions" around the request that Congress investigate the claims. But even that is questionable, since it wasn't Trump that voiced that request - it was Sean Spicer from his Twitter account the next day:
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So Trump has himself a bit of a dilemma. He has accused President Obama of having committed a major felony. He provided no evidence that his building was wiretapped; provided no evidence as to which agency was responsible for physically wiretapping his building; provided no source of the information to which the claim is (not) attributed; provided no evidence that the order, if one was given, came from Obama himself. And that last part is highly unlikely. A judge would have had to issue a warrant, and that judge would most likely have to be in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), under the authority of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). We can all be assured Trump would not have known that little fact, or he would have probably picked something else to manufacture out of thin air to drag Obama into his misery. Instead, the Senate Intelligence Committee now has to request evidence, because they can't ignore that the claim was made. And all of this is made worse, in that Trump never fact-checked his claim with his own people. As NBC reported:
In addition, it seems that Trump did not try to ask his own administration whether the scenario was true. A senior U.S. official in a position to know told NBC News that Trump "did not consult with the people inside the U.S. government who might know before making this claim.
All of this speaks to a complete lack of discipline on Trump's part, something that goes back years, and was prevalent throughout the entirety of his presidential campaign. Ironically, Trump has been regularly frustrated with the lack of discipline among several agencies since he took office. Clearly, the example is set at the top.
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