Peace in Our Time?

The Oxymorons:  The House Intelligence Committee, the very example of an oxymoron, issued its one-sided report on Friday.  One sided because the report was issued by the committee’s Republicans since the committee had long given up even pretending to be bipartisan.  The heavily redacted report basically cleared Trump and his team of wrongdoing while accusing the intelligence community and the FBI of failures in how they assessed and responded to the Kremlin’s interference in the 2016 election.  Oddly enough though it says investigators found “no evidence that the Trump campaign colluded, coordinated, or conspired with the Russian government,” the report details many contacts between campaign officials and Russians or Russian intermediaries but concludes that they must have just been exchanging borscht recipes.  The committee’s Democrats issued a rebuttal detailing how the committee’s Republican leadership refused to really do their job, didn’t interview all of the players, and accepted half-truths and convenient silence from those they interviewed.  They specifically pointed out an ID blocked call that they believe took place between Don Jr and Don Sr right before Don Jr finalized plans for the infamous Trump Tower meeting as something that the Republicans refused to look into.  The Democrats assert that the Republicans had rushed to end their work prematurely in “a systematic effort to muddy the waters and to deflect attention away” from Trump.  To no one’s surprise, Trump seized on the report to once again call the investigation a witch hunt and screamed to all who would listen, and his base was definitely listening, that there was no collusion, except at the FBI.  He also called for the arrest of the usual cast of characters.  One of those characters, former FBI Director Jim Comey, said that the House probe became politicized "and it wrecked the committee, and it damaged relationships with the FISA Court, the intelligence communities. It's just a wreck." He also said that based on what he knew, the report was inaccurate. Around the same time that the report was issued,  the New York Times reported that Natalia Veselnitskaya, the lawyer at the center of the infamous Trump Tower meeting, the one hosted by Don Jr, was even more closely tied to the Kremlin than initially recognized and NBC aired a segment in which, after she was shown some of her newly obtained correspondence, she pretty much admitted that she was an FSB (Russian security agency) spy.  For their part, the House Intelligence Committee Republicans have no interest in further investigating that admission or anything else.  Over the weekend   Trey Gowdy, one of those Republicans questioned the value of his own committee’s report by saying that Congress isn’t really good at investigating anyway because that’s not really its job.  Though he defended parts of the report, he also said that it didn’t vindicate Trump, that Comey shouldn’t be arrested and that he was waiting for the results of Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation to learn what really happened.  Last night, Independent Maine Senator Angus King said that the Senate Intelligence Committee was still toiling away and that based on what he’s seen, that their report will contradict many of the House committee’s conclusions.      

Stupidity Abounds:  While the White House correspondents held their annual dinner, Trump flew off to Michigan to engage in some counter programming.  Though the correspondents were suppose to be celebrating their collective Pulitzer Prizes and trumpeting the importance of the First Amendment, they instead found themselves mired in controversy after the featured comedienne, Michelle Wolf, crossed the line with some of her jokes, by targeting Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Kellyanne Conway, both of whom were in attendance.  That said, Wolf’s rude jokes paled in comparison to Trump’s speech, where he lambasted the Democrats, awarded himself the Nobel Prize for solving the as yet unsolved Korean situation, and went after Montana’s Senator Tester for going public with the list of accusations against one time VA Secretary nominee, Rear Admiral Ronny Jackson.  Trump insisted that he knew things about Tester that would blow up his reelection campaign.  It’s not clear that he knows anything about Tester, but he certainly is now making him his number one enemy at least for this week, if not longer.  Although he is a Democrat in a heavily Republican, Trump friendly state, Tester is fairly popular.  The Republicans don’t yet have a candidate to run against him, but after Trump’s speech a few may be lining up for the chance.  As to Dr. Jackson, though some of the accusations against him may be incorrect, especially the one that said he’d had crashed a government car while under the influence, he’s out and not only won’t he move forward to any VA confirmation hearings, he is also not returning to the White House physician position. Though Trump wants all the blame for Jackson’s demise to rest with Senator Tester, many Republicans blame the White House for proposing an unqualified and possibly unfit nominee, for failing to do any vetting and then for providing him with little or no support.  The suggestion is that as the Jackson situation started to blow up, Trump abandoned Jackson instead coming up with an alternative strategy, one that hung Jackson out to dry while allowing Trump to turn the mess into an attack against Tester.

Peace in Our Time:  No one really knows what’s motivating North Korea’s Kim Jong Un and whether or not he really is serious about giving up all his testing facilities and his nuclear arsenal.  That said, he is making all the right moves for now.  Only time will tell, what happens next.  Trump remains incredibly optimistic, so much so that others in the region, especially Japan, are worried that he is so eager for success that he will settle for an end to North Korea’s long range inter ballistic missile program, leaving Japan and South Korea vulnerable to the shorter distance missile delivery system that North Korea has already perfected.  To the extent that Kim Jong Un is serious  he might be just a little put off by statements from John Bolton, the new national security director.  Bolton has taken to comparing North Korea to Libya, citing that experience as a good model. Kim Jong Un is well aware that the Libya model didn’t turn out all that well for that country’s former leader the very late Moammar Khaddafy.  The Iran nuclear deal is also treading water.  Many expect that Trump will blow it up on May 12, though there is a very small chance that he will continue to press Iran to cut out its bad behavior and to limit its missile program instead of completely trashing the agreement.  Newly appointed Secretary of State Pompeo went to the Middle East for meetings with leaders in Israel, Saudi Arabia and Jordan to drum up support for whatever the administration does on Iran.  While there he has no plans to meet with any Palestinian leaders to try to defuse the rapidly growing tensions on the Gaza border.  The trade war is also likely to heat up this week, the temporary tariff exemptions that Trump granted to several countries are due to expire and no one seems to know what’s next.  So much for peace everywhere.