TRUMP CAN’T COMPLETE 4 WEEKS, & ALREADY WE HAVE “WATERGATE II”

…The national “House of Many Leaks”
 
Donald Trump is his own worst enemy.
 
OK, somebody please explain the following to me:
 
First we heard that the National Security Adviser, Retired General Michael Flynn had tendered his resignation.
 
Then the White House Press Secretary, Sean Spicer, in a press meeting he stated that Flynn had been asked to resign because the president had lost his trust in General Flynn.
 
Then during the questioning period of the visit of the Prime Minister of Israel, the president answered a reporter’s question by saying that the reason Flynn was gone, was he was a wonderful man that was gone because of the way he was treated by the media, or what the president called the “fake media”.
 
So, once again, there is more proof that nothing coming out of the President’s mouth, or from his administration, is such that we can assess its content as being anywhere near the truth.
 
If the retired general Flynn was driven out of his job by the treatment of the media, why was he asked to resign by the president because the president could no longer trust the general?,
 
As usual, what is coming out of the White House makes absolutely no sense.
 
President Trump’s removal of national security adviser Michael Flynn, and the circumstances leading up to it, have quickly become the latest major crisis for the new administration.  This is putting the White House on the defensive and is offering the first significant breach in relations between Trump and an increasingly hesitant Republican Congress.
 
But even with the difference of why and how the general had to leave the White House, even as the White House described Trump’s “immediate, decisive” action in demanding ­Flynn’s resignation late Monday, senior GOP lawmakers were buckling under growing pressure to investigate it.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said Tuesday that it was “highly likely” that the events leading to Flynn’s departure would be added to a broader probe into the Russian's meddling in the US presidential election.
 
McConnell’s comments followed the White House revelations that Trump was aware “for weeks” that Flynn had misled Vice President Pence and others about the content of his late-December talks with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
 
So, there he goes again. 
 
If the president was aware for weeks that the general had lied to the vice president and his own Chief of Staff, why the hell did it take weeks to ask for a resignation?  And why was the Vice President not told about this lying by Flynn until just last week?
 
The transcripts of the general’s conversations with the Russians proved that what the general had been saying was discussed with the Russians was not correct.
 
The White House legal counsel, Donald McGahn had told President Trump in a briefing as early as late last month that Flynn, despite his claims to the contrary, had in fact discussed US sanctions imposed on Russia by the Obama administration in late December.  This was also stated by the press secretary, Sean Spicer last week. That briefing, he said, came “immediately” after Sally Q. Yates, then the acting attorney general, informed McGahn on Jan. 26 about discrepancies between the transcripts of Kislyak’s phone calls and public statements by Pence and others that there had been no discussion of sanctions.
 
In other words General Flynn's statements were all bare-faced lies.  Or what we also call “Classic Trumpisms”.
 
 
And the president is upset with "the media's" treatment of a man that blatantly lied to us all about his talks with an enemy of the United States!!!!!!!!?
 
And, there were others in the White House that were brought into the facts that General Flynn had been lying about his discussions with the Russians.  Trump had also brought in senior strategist Stephen Bannon and White House Chief of Staff, Reince Priebus to join the discussion with McGahn.  This is according to two officials familiar with the conversations who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
 
McGahn had then conferred with the acting AG Yates again the following day, to try to glean more information. Within the White House, the matter was viewed skeptically, and Trump, Bannon, Priebus and McGahn for several days remained among the few knowledgeable people.
 
Over the next two weeks, Flynn was asked multiple times about what exactly he had said. He brushed aside the suggestion that he had spoken about sanctions with the ambassador.  These denials were what kept him afloat within the White House for those weeks, even as he was being actively evaluated.
 
As usual, all of this would have probably never gotten further than those few in the White House until a Washington Post report, in which Flynn was quoted as saying that he had no “recollection” of discussing sanctions, but couldn’t be sure that he hadn’t. This was the comment that finally culminated in Flynn’s forced resignation. 
 
You know, according to the president, that same resignation that was forced by the “fake media’s” treatment of a great man. Yeah right!  Of course it wasn’t because the man lied to two of the most important individuals on the globe.  Of course not!  It was that damned “fake media’s” fault.
 
And of course, inside the White House press room, secretary Spicer said an internal White House inquiry had concluded that nothing Flynn discussed with the Russian was illegal, but that he had “broken his trust” with the president by not telling the truth about the talks.
 
When asked why the president had waited nearly three weeks to act after the “heads-up” from the Justice Department, Spicer said that once the question of legality was settled, “then it became a case of determining whether or not [Flynn’s] action on this and a whole host of other issues undermined Trump’s trust”.
 
Of course, Spicer declined to specify what the “other host of Flynn issues” were.
 
Although Trump has not publicly mentioned his view of the Obama sanctions, Spicer said that the president “has made it very clear he expects the Russian government to de-escalate violence in the Ukraine and return the Crimea.”  Of course, as with the building of the border wall, there is also no idea as to how the president is going to get Putin to do all of these things.  Apparently, this is just more example of Trump being “an unpredictable president”.
 
Officials inside the National Security Council described how low the department's morale was and their concern about the future. There was a  worthless message at a five-minute staff meeting Tuesday morning” from  Flynn about his leaving.  One official said the message was: “Keep working hard. Don’t leave.”
 
Various accounts of the Flynn saga offered by White House officials in recent days have added to the confusion about how the administration viewed Flynn’s actions, and who knew what, and when they knew it.
 
These questions will probably become the big issues when the obvious future investigations start.
 
This is so reminiscent of those early days just before the Watergate scandal.
 
Stay tuned, this is just round one
 
Copyright G.Ater  2017
 
 

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