THE “CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS” IS HERE!

…This document is going to be seriously tested

More proof that Donald Trump thinks he’s a dictator

The very first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, once made a speech where he said:

“There are two kinds of politicians.

Those that support the concept of the United States as a democratic republic,

and those that want to tear it down.”

I think we know as to what group our current president belongs.

It is time to stop waiting for the Constitutional Crisis that this president was sure to provoke, because it’s already here.

As expected, it came to us via Twitter. 

That was when President Trump demanded that the Justice Department conduct a political investigation.  But Trump’s real aim was to smear the department’s and the FBI’s veteran professionals while continuing to throw mud at the Obama administration.

It is obvious that Trump’s must try to cast doubt on the current probe by special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, which continues to be closing in on the president.

Trump just continues to misuse his presidential authority which is a dangerous departure from the long-standing norms of former presidents.  However, the way Trump is acting today is more in line with authoritarian strongmen like Russia’s Putin, and the way they use their justice systems to punish their enemies.

Trump did this by making a presidential demand in his Tweet saying: “I hereby demand, and will do so officially tomorrow, that the Department of Justice look into whether or not the FBI/DOJ infiltrated or surveilled the Trump Campaign for Political Purposes, and if any such demands or requests were made by people within the Obama Administration!”

This is going way beyond the normal presidential authority.  The justice department should have pushed back and said that this was out of order and it was not within the normal rule of law.  It is improper for this to occur during the middle of an on-going investigation.

But instead, the acting AG decided to appease the president by at appearing to give him what he demanded. And the AG wasn’t the only one that crossed over the line.  The Republican leadership in Congress, which should be the check on the executive branch, they stayed totally silent.

This is how un-crossable lines get crossed.

It appears that the acting AG, Rod Rosenstein, was just trying to protect both his position and the role of the special counsel.  That being, to prevent a so called “Saturday Night Massacre”.

One would hope that Trump’s lawyers have made him aware that even if he were to fire Rosenstein or Robert Mueller, it would not stop, but only postpone the Russian investigation.

The direction that Trump had taken is the idea that the FBI source, Stefan Halper, had improperly made contact with three Trump campaign associates before the election as part of the FBI’s initial investigation into Russian meddling.

With the backing of right-wing media such as Fox and Rush Limbaugh, the Trump lie is that he has described this person as a “spy” who was “implanted, for political purposes”, into his campaign for president. 

This claim is completely unsupported by the facts, but Trump wants everyone to believe this lie.

Halper was an “informant”, not a “spy”, that’s a big difference.  He was not “embedded or implanted or otherwise inserted” into the campaign. He was asked to contact several campaign figures whose names had already surfaced in the FBI’s counterintelligence probe.

It would have been a serious dereliction of duty not to take a look at Trump advisers with Russia ties, such as Carter Page and George Papadopoulos, at the time that a Russian campaign to influence the election was just emerging.

Trump’s claim is that this was the nation’s “all time biggest political scandal” because, “Justice Department officials and the FBI used a spy to try to frame him and his campaign”, in an effort to boost his opponent, Hillary Clinton’s chance of winning the election.

This Trump conspiracy theory is seriously full of holes.

If the aim of the conspiracy was to make Trump lose, why wasn’t all the known information about the Trump campaign’s Russia connections leaked out “before the election”, when it would have had some real impact?

The record suggests that Justice and the FBI were so uncomfortable investigating a presidential campaign in the weeks and months before an election that they tiptoed around the campaign.  They did everything to not appear to be taking a side. The FBI director at the time was James Comey, and while we heard plenty about Clinton’s emails before the vote, we had no idea that a major investigation of the Trump campaign was already underway.

As usual, the truth appears to be precisely the opposite of anything that Trump says.

Now, the president appears to be in a panic mode, especially since the federal authorities raided the homes and office of his personal attorney, Michael Cohen.

The president has spent a full year in attacking the special counsel’s probe.  The Deputy Attorney General, Rosenstein, was hoping that his meeting with the congressional “Gang of Eight” would be enough to avoid a showdown with the president.  I personally doubt that was the case.

One of the bedrock principles of our system of government is that no one is above the law, not even the president.  But a gutless Congress has refused, so far, to protect this sacred rule.

Trump is apparently determined to use the Justice Department and the FBI to try and punish those he sees as political enemies.

This is already a real Constitutional Crisis, and I can guarantee that it will get much worse.

Copyright G.Ater  2018