Tweet ConFusion

Tweet Barrage:  Last year, one of the candidates for president said that “a man you can bait with a tweet is not a man you can trust in the oval office.”  That candidate lost and the man that she was referring to is finishing up his first year in the oval office.  Trump arrived in Washington from what was supposed to be a calming week of golf at Mar a Lago but instead landed very wound up, possibly about the Russian investigation that his lawyers had promised would be over by 2018, so he went off on a tweet tirade, harping on old rivals and new bogeymen.  He began by calling for the “Deep State Justice Department” to throw “Crooked Hillary Clinton’s top aid, Huma Abedin” in jail along with “Comey & others,” because it’s his Justice Department and he gets to tell it what to do and who to jail. As to the deep state, later in the day Press Secretary Huckabee Sanders said that if Trump says there is a deep state, then there is a deep state.  After dissing the Clinton crowd and the FBI, Trump then moved on to Iran and Obama, applauding Iranians for “acting against the brutal and corrupt Iranian regime” but also throwing in a dig at Obama for “all the money” he “so foolishly gave” the government that “went into terrorism and into their pockets.”  Next he got in a slam at the fake press, focusing on the “failing” NY Times, congratulating their newly appointed publisher, A.G. Sulzberger but admonishing him that he’d better “give the news impartially, without fear or FAVOR, regardless of party, sect, or interests involved,” in other words he’d better give him better press, or else he will be sent to jail alongside Abedin and Comey. To make his point about the penalties of purveying “fake news” even clearer, he tweeted that everyone should tune in next Monday at 5 pm when he will be “announcing THE MOST DISHONEST & CORRUPT MEDIA AWARDS OF THE YEAR,” because that’s what disruptive modern presidents do.  He also told everyone to be prepared to tune in to Sean Hannity next Tuesday night for a “huge investigative report” about something that the corrupt media will not tell you about his accomplishments, but subsequently and uncharacteristically deleted that tweet. Then, having caught a story about the safety of commercial aviation he switched gears for a moment and tweeted “Since taking office I have been very strict on Commercial Aviation. Good news - it was just reported that there were Zero deaths in 2017, the best and safest year on record!”  Trump has done nothing to improve airline safety, 2017 is not an outlier, there have been no commercial airline fatalities in the US since 2009, however experts are concerned that his deregulatory efforts might have the opposite effect.  Moreover, tweeting about airline safety the day after the tragic death of ten Americans in Costa Rica is pretty tone deaf, even for Trump. He saved his scariest missive for the end of the day, engaging in a mine is bigger than yours challenge with Pyongyang by tweeting “North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the ‘Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times.’ Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!” A game of “whose is bigger” with nukes between two thin skinned, temperamental leaders, what could go wrong?

Smith and Jones:  Later today, two new Democratic senators will be sworn into office.  Tina Smith will replace the outgoing sacrificial Democrat, Al Franken, becoming the junior Senator from Minnesota and  Doug Jones will shift the Senate balance by becoming the new Senator from Alabama, replacing Luther Strange who had temporarily replaced Jeff Sessions. Despite Trump’s best efforts to convince Utah’s Orrin Hatch to run for reelection in 2018, Hatch who had recently become one of Trump’s most fawning supporters, has announced his plans to retire, leaving his seat open to Trump’s nemesis Mitt Romney.  Romney, who is very popular in Utah, hasn’t formally announced that he’s running, but following Hatch’s announcement he changed his twitter location from Massachusetts to Utah, so its fair to assume that he will announce his plans very soon. Though Romney shares many of Trump’s conservative views on policy issues, he’s a long time never Trumper, and except for that brief moment when he tried to sidle up to Trump in the hope of becoming Secretary of State, he’s been a consistent critic of Trump’s hateful politics and other antics.  The specter of Romney, the man who said that “dishonesty is Trump’s trademark,”  in the Senate, combined with what  is expected to be a rough 2018 midterm election cycle, may be another one of those things that caused Trump’s tweet barrage.  However, he may find some solace in knowing that Michele Bachmann, the former Minnesota Tea Party Republican Congresswoman and presidential candidate, is now considering running against Tina Smith for the Al Franken seat.  The thought that Bachmann, whose political views fall somewhere between crazy and irrational could ascend to Franken’s seat is almost as scary as Trump and Kim Jong Un squaring off over the size of their red buttons.

The Dossier Boys:   Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch, former respected journalists and the founders of Fusion GPS, the firm that retained Christopher Steele to research Trump’s Russian activities, have written a scathing op-ed which appears in today’s New York Times.  In it they challenge the House and Senate Committees to release their over 20 hours of testimony about the Steele dossier and what they told the committees about Trump and his team’s Russia connections during that testimony.  They report that they hired Steele but told him only to find out why Trump sought to do “deals in a notoriously corrupt police state that most serious investors shun.”  They were shocked when Steele’s investigation led to the conclusion that the Kremlin was engaged in an “effort to help elect Trump president.” They said that they told the committees that Steele felt compelled to go to his contacts in the FBI, contacts that he had built up during his years with British Intelligence, because he felt that he was “witnessing a crime in progress.”  They also write that they told the various committees that they did not believe that the Steele dossier instigated the FBI’s Russia investigation, but that it did confirm a lot of what the FBI already knew or suspected, a statement that is corroborated by the recent disclosure that the FBI opened their investigation into Trump after the Aussies told them about the “coffee boy” Papadopoulos and his drunken assertions about Russia’s Hillary dirt.  They also report that they pointed the Committees to look further into Trump’s illegal financial activities, encouraging them to follow the Deutsche money trail, something that they didn’t seem all that interested in pursuing though fortunately Special Counsel Mueller understands and, despite Trump’s warnings, is deep into those financial weeds.  Lastly, they write that the intelligence committees have known “for months about credible allegations of collusion between the Trump team and Russia” but are instead waging a “cynical campaign” to portray them as the “unwitting victims of Kremlin disinformation in order to avoid facing the truth about Trump.” They published the op-ed because they’ve grown tired of listening to various members of the Congressional committees lie about what they know and what they know that the Committees know.  No reaction to the Fusion team’s remarks yet from erstwhile House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devon Nunes or any of his like-minded buddies.  Nunes,  no doubt, is busy plotting his response with the White House, continuing to deny any Trump collusion while pursuing his investigation into the FBI team investigating those Trump team Russia connections.  And so it goes.