Political Irony

The White House can’s seem to keep their lies straight.

The lies around the firing of FBI director James Comey are just the latest example, but it is a particularly egregious one, and a double whammy. When Trump fired Comey, he released a statement that said he was just following the recommendations of Attorney General Jeff Sessions and deputy Rod Rosenstein. But in a televised interview, Trump contradicted himself and admitted that he had already decided to fire Comey before that.

The second whammy is that the White House also claimed that the majority of FBI agents had lost faith in Comey. But both the current acting FBI director and the president of the FBI Agents Association issued strong rebuttals to that lie.

Even worse, but when talking about the decision to fire Comey, Trump said “When I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made up story.” Trump firing Comey because of an FBI investigation into himself is obstruction of justice, and is a serious impeachable offense (indeed, it was the primary charge against both Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton).

Incidentally, Jeff Sessions had recused himself from the Russia investigation, and now it is clear that he is still deeply involved in it. That is a breach of legal ethics, and is grounds for having Sessions disbarred.

But the White House doesn’t seem interested in keeping their lies straight. Another example that just came up again is Trump’s Muslim bans. During the presidential campaign, Trump called for a “total and complete shutdown” of Muslims entering the US. That would clearly constitute a “Muslim Ban”, which would be unconstitutional. Trump’s two executive orders trying to implement this have been struck down by the courts largely because of this.

So earlier this week, a reporter was asking about Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric. Press Secretary Sean Spicer claimed “we’ve talked about this from the first day of this administration as a travel ban. … we’ve been very consistent since the first day of this administration on this.” The reporter called him on this:

If this White House is no longer calling this a Muslim ban, as the President did initially, why does the President’s website still explicitly call for ‘preventing Muslim immigration’ and it says, ‘Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States’?

And then something interesting happened. That quote was removed from the White House website, even before the press conference ended. And it was obviously done hastily, as they just removed the text and left the page template.

I guess when reality contradicts the lies coming out of the White House, they just try to change reality.