I recall him explaining for his supporters, perhaps at one of the rallies, why Hillary wasn’t under arrest. He mentioned some things about rules of evidence and such.
Reading between the lines, my impression was that he had asked someone about why she wasn’t arrested and he was just relaying the reasons.
I wish I could recall where and when that happened but, alas, no links.
More than vast majority of articles out there McCabes article, capture the essence just how strange and unimaginably awful Trump is. The boss from hell for sure.
I don’t think he views them as employees, citizens or even humans; he sees them as adversaries. That’s exactly how he teaches his base to see everyone else too, and they gobble it up like they’ve been starving.
Has someone posted this epic fail by Pence to get anything but deafening silence around the 23-4 second mark? It’s brutal. But GOOD that the maximum politeness this shitshow of an Administration can elicit is the lack of active booing. That ought to tell them something:
House Oversight Committee will subpoena former WH Chief Of Staff John Kelly over the security clearance order regarding Jared Kushner. They also want any related memoranda.
This makes me so happy. Just seeing somebody
who’s in a position to take action and actually gives a shit makes my day. Even if it’s just adding to the list of ongoing investigations for now.
My family doesn’t believe in stuff like abuse of power or corruption delegitimizing the actions of a sitting, un-impeached president, especially when “a president is lawfully allowed to give top secret clearance to whomever he wants. So as long as he’s there, either let him do his job or impeach him already.”
It’s gonna be interesting to see how Kelly handles himself now that he’s not actually working for Trump.
He played the role of a good soldier for Trump, but I don’t think he likes or respects Trump at all. On some level, I can’t imagine how he could. Kelly is a marine… and that makes him essentially the opposite of everything Trump is. I think that he, like Mathis, must have an utter lack of respect for Trump as a man.
The way that Trump fired him is really just icing on that shit cake.
I think people like Kelly will find it hard to sustain the ‘they were adults in the room who moderated Trump’ narrative as more and more things are revealed.
The military builds people who follow orders and respect hierarchy. If you could depend on them to temper the excesses of their superiors, there would be no war crimes.
Well yeah because if you’re in the adult in the room, you’re the one taking responsibility. That’s not going to be fun if things happened that shouldn’t have and now you can’t even blame the POTUS for it since you took that responsibility away.
Gerry’s my congressman!
Famous memos of the past:
Date: 16 September 1939
From: Kliment Voroshilov, Marshall of the Soviet Union
To: File
Subject: Invasion of Poland
Today Comrade Stalin ordered me to invade Poland in collaboration with the German fascist counterrevolutionaries and enemies of the People. As the politically reliable adult in the room, I advised Father Stalin against this order, but he would not be dissuaded. Reluctantly I agreed; what else can I do but write this memo for the record in the hopes that future generations will observe the manner in which I stood up for the Revolution and defended the Rodina as the vanguard of its world-historical significance?
Probably not, but I’m learning more about Andrew Johnson by reading the Chernow biography of U.S. Grant, and I think he’s up there. The section leading up to Johnson’s impeachment recounts a number of episodes in which Johnson seems extremely sensitive to perceived slights and breaches of protocol, and is constantly trying to bully his associates and subordinates into showing their loyalty to him.
Another bad thing Kelly didn’t manage to prevent:
Enough already with this deification of Kelly. He was NOT a good guy. I don’t care what he comes out and says now.
LOL. I’m not deifying him; rather the opposite. He’s a bad fucker, and the he agreed to serve in order to moderate the worst impulses of Trump argument always struck me as a kind of Nuremberg defense.
Yeah I didn’t mean you, sorry. Just from the start everyone seemed to suggest that Kelly would be the “adult in the room” and save us from Trump.
One of the things that allows Trump to apparently get away with so much is that he blusters, and implies without actually telling outright someone to do something they shouldn’t do. A great example is the Cohen original congressional testimony thing. Trump implies and blusters and Cohen gets the message: here’s what I am saying to congress, even if I know it isn’t true. And then when it gets back to Trump (if it gets back), he and his defenders can say “I never said that” or “It’s just Trump being Trump…”
So apparently–per both Haberman at the Times and Leopold at BuzzFeed–with Kelly on the Kushner security clearances, Trump tried to do the same thing, and Kelly resisted. And resisted again. And finally Kelly told Trump that the president would have to explicitly give the order…which Trump did, and which Kelly put into his contemporaneous memo.
None of this is new. It’s why there is so little documentary evidence directly linking Hitler to the Final Solution. (i.e. to my understanding, there is no document saying “Go systematically kill the Jews” signed by Hitler, or even Himmler for that manner. The best we have is stuff from the Wannsee Conference prepared by people a few steps down, and some audio recorded of Himmler without his knowledge speaking generally about the thing they are doing being very hard but necessary, etc.)
When people do horrible things, they very often speak in euphemisms, and exert pressure on underlings to go take responsibility for what the superior clearly wants done, but is too smart to just say outright.
It’s utterly unsurprising that Trump may never have directly said, “I’m ordering you to stop this investigation.” He’s just a fucking dirtball who twists arms.
Except in this case, Trump may have given a sworn statement that he didn’t order Kushner’s security clearance, and in this one case, he did, and there’s documentary evidence of it… And that could be an issue for him.
Oh, I hope so. The one thing we have going for us here is that Trump is far dumber than he thinks he is. And grandiose - his narcissism let’s him think he’ll get away with anything he wants.