Political Irony

Donald Trump is trying to push a new scandal, which he calls “Obamagate”. There’s just one problem. Even Trump can’t say what the crime is. When asked by a Washington Post reporter, Trump said “It’s been going on for a long time. It’s been going on from before I even got elected. And it’s a disgrace that it happened.” The reporter pressed Trump to name what the crime actually was, Trump said “You know what the crime is. The crime is very obvious to everybody. All you have to do is read the papers, except yours.”

You can watch him avoid answering the questions here, in 51 seconds:

Trump has given up on even bothering to make up any “alternative facts” this time, he’s just claiming that there is a scandal, and that it has Barack Obama’s name on it, and Biden was somehow involved in whatever it is. And he keeps saying that it is “the biggest political crime in American history, by far!”

What Trump is doing is just the latest attack on the rule of law. If you are interested, the best account of what is actually going on was published last night from political historian Heather Cox Richardson. If you are curious, I highly recommend that you read it.

One thing Cox points out that is significant is that the FBI served a search warrant on Senator Richard Burr (R-NC) yesterday because he did some insider trading the same day he attended a private briefing for Senators about the coronavirus. However, that’s probably not why the FBI (now controlled completely by Trump) is going after Burr. If it were, then why aren’t they going after the other senators who did the same thing?

The reason they are going after Burr is because he chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, who agreed with the Mueller investigation and confirmed that the Russians interfered with the 2016 election and are already doing it for the 2020 election. The final volume of their report is supposed to be released very soon.

Just a couple hours ago, Burr announced that he was stepping down as the chairman of that committee, and now Mitch McConnell gets to pick his replacement. What’s the chance that there will be a new version of the report that suddenly decides that the Russians are innocent of meddling?

Again, using the FBI to force people to kowtow to the president is the height of corruption and puts yet another nail in the coffin of the Rule of Law.