On Friday morning, amid the veritable media feeding frenzy that’s engulfed Matthew Whitaker following his appointment as Acting Attorney General, Donald Trump lost his cool with reporters.
Whitaker is under all manner of scrutiny for his long history of acrimonious comments about Robert Mueller and Hillary Clinton. Long story short, Whitaker needs to recuse immediately if he wants to avoid accusations that he’s attempting to assist the White House in obstruction of justice.
That is not a partisan assessment. Whitaker has, at various intervals, penned Op-Eds for major national news outlets calling for, among other things, the indictment of Hillary Clinton and the deliberate curtailment of funding to Mueller in the interest of rendering the Russian investigation unable to proceed.
In other words, even you agree with him he’s not the right person to oversee the investigation.
In addition to his Op-Eds, Whitaker has appeared on all manner of television and radio talk shows to insist there was no collusion and, in at least one instance, that Russia did not meddle in the 2016 election, an assessment that is at odds with the U.S. intelligence community.
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Additionally, Whitaker is close friends with Sam Clovis, who was co-chair of Trump’s 2016 campaign and has himself testified before a grand jury in the Mueller probe.
Given all of that, you’d have to be a special kind of naive not to think Trump wasn’t fully aware of Whitaker’s stance on Mueller when the President appointed him to replace Sessions earlier this week.
But that’s what Trump thinks you are – a special kind of naive.
Because when asked on Friday morning whether he intends to effectively instruct Whitaker to interfere with Mueller, the President said this:
You know what? He’s right. It is a “stupid question.”
Because we all know the answer.
So Maxine Waters has called for impeachment proceedings – Should she recuse herself?
Recuse herself from what? lol. She’s a lawmaker, she’s not the Attorney General. Don’t be a moron, ok?
An interesting related question is, did Trump just precipitate a constitutional crisis in appointing Whitaker as acting AG? See the NY Times article co-authored by George T. Conway III, the husband of Kellyanne Conway. (Kellyanne Conway, of course, has at various times acted as the President’s attack dog or stooge.)
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/08/opinion/trump-attorney-general-sessions-unconstitutional.html
Recently, ‘the Donald’ claimed he knew Whitaker and he was, “a really good guy” (or equivalent). At today’s media scrum he claimed, “I don’t know the guy” and said reporters should ask Kelly Ann Conway as maybe she knows him. Trump needs to keep his lies straight as he’s now over 6,000 lies and counting.