Day 398: Trump Blasts Sessions For Not Investigating Obama
Trump tweet had five massive issues and lies in just five lines of text.
Donald Trump’s Twitter habit seems to be ramping up in frequency and fervor as the Robert Mueller investigation ensnares more people. At this point, members of the Trump team have been indicted, some have pleaded guilty, others appear moving in that direction and Mueller has indicted 13 Russians for conspiring to defraud the U.S., amid other charges. That last bit has forced Trump to change his story from calling the investigation a hoax to falsely claiming it proved there has been no collusion.
As he is apt to do, he has also decided to blame others.
What makes this tweet so incredible — outside of the fact that Trump initially called his attorney general “Jeff Session” — is the breadth of its lies and danger in just a few lines of text.
Trump is asking his attorney general to investigate a political opponent. If any president said something like this in private, and it came out, it would be a scandal of epic proportions. There would likely major consequences, including potential impeachment. However, Trump tweets it out like it’s nothing, and the world is dismayed about the erosion of norms but moves on.
There are a number of things that are patently wrong about the tweet:
- Trump claims that all of the Russian meddling occurred during the Barack Obama years. It didn’t. The nation’s top intelligence officials continue to assert that Russia has meddled, is meddling and will meddle in the 2018 elections and beyond. This is going on under Trump’s nose and he simply does not care.
- Trump calls for the investigation of the Obama administration — which, as noted above, is dangerous and unprecedented — but it’s unclear what they’d even be investigated for. Is Trump actually claiming that the Russians and Obama were in cahoots to undermine the election and Hillary Clinton?
- Trump asks why Obama didn’t do anything about the meddling. Well, he did. After the election, Obama ejected 35 Russian operatives from the U.S. and ordered substantial sanctions on Russian intelligence services. The Obama-led State Department also seized two properties that they assert were used for intelligence activities. But before the election, Obama tried too. Understanding the nature of what was known in intelligence circles, he sought bipartisan support on going public in order to avoid appearing to use the information for political gain. “But Republican leaders, especially Mitch McConnell, refused. McConnell, the Post reports, ‘raised doubts about the underlying intelligence and made clear to the administration that he would consider any effort by the White House to challenge the Russians publicly an act of partisan politics.’” After his inauguration, meanwhile, Trump tried to roll back the Obama-implemented sanctions and refused to implement additional sanctions on Russia, despite passing Congress by a 517–5 margin. Trump appears to be doing less than nothing about Russia meddling: his actions of preventing sanctions appear to encourage more of it.
- Trump cites “Dem crimes,” but again, there are no crimes that anyone knows about. The information presently in the public domain reveals literally zero crimes attributable to Obama or his administration. As the most partisan shout, “Uranium One!” or whatever the theory du jour is, realistically, these have all been investigated and have already been debunked.
- Trump shouts to, “Ask Jeff Sessions!” for the answers to these questions. Sessions is Trump’s attorney general and he can ask him all of these questions — and surely already has — whenever he wants. Sessions has likely laid out while investigating Obama and his administration is untenable, but Trump doesn’t like the answer. So he blasts him on Twitter while attacking a political rival.
398 days in, 1064 to go
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