Well, Donald Trump on Thursday morning called for House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff to resign from Congress and he also said the FBI and the Department of Justice will be “investigating” the Jussie Smollett case.
“Congressman Adam Schiff, who spent two years knowingly and unlawfully lying and leaking, should be forced to resign from Congress!”, Trump tweeted, lashing out at one of his staunchest critics on Capitol Hill.
Schiff – who has promised to subpoena the Mueller report – is leading a reinvigorated probe into whether Trump and/or his businesses are unduly influenced by foreign governments or foreigners in general. That investigation was snuffed out by Devin Nunes last year. Following the results of the Mueller report, the future of the investigation is unclear.
Trump has repeatedly accused Schiff of “presidential harassment”, a make-believe legal term that exists only in the president’s mind. Schiff is one of six committee chairs who signed the letter to William Barr demanding that the full, unredacted Mueller report be turned over to Congress by April 2. On Wednesday, Jerry Nadler said Barr will not meet that deadline.
Read more
‘We’re Not Happy, To Put It Mildly’: Barr Stonewalls Congress On Mueller Report
Can Trump actually force Schiff out? Two weeks ago that would have been a laughable question and tweets like the one cited above could be summarily ignored as just another paranoia-induced rant. But now, who knows. As a reminder, the Trump campaign’s communications director sent out an advisory “memo” earlier this week addressed to “television producers” laying out what amounted to the conditions under which Schiff, Nadler and others will be allowed on TV again following the Mueller report.
As far as the Jussie Smollett debacle is concerned, it’s probably safe to say that Trump’s DoJ won’t be investigating Jacob Wohl for filing a false police report or for, say, telling USA Today he intends to try and rig the 2020 election and trying to frame Robert Mueller.
The president’s Thursday morning tweets (which also found the president assailing the media and threatening to close the southern border), came on the heels of Wednesday evening’s farcical interview with Sean Hannity during which Trump said, among other things, that the FBI is guilty of treason. Here’s that clip:
Got that? Here it is again:
And what we were playing out until just recently was the insurance policy. They wanted to do a subversion. It was treason. It was really treason.
In the days since Barr released the summary conclusions of the Mueller report, Trump and Lindsey Graham have variously suggested that the administration will now embark on a quest to punish those responsible for the probe. Here’s a highly amusing passage from Bloomberg which is dripping with implicit sarcasm (the best thing about Trump is that you can lampoon him just by quoting him):
On Monday, Trump said “people out there” had done “treasonous things against our country” and called for an investigation into their actions, without specifying what he meant.
All us to go ahead and clear up “what he meant”, for anyone who is still having trouble reading between the lines or, perhaps more aptly, reading the writing on the wall.
Donald Trump, having run roughshod over America’s institutions and crumbled the country’s system of checks and balances, is going to launch an aggressive “investigation” and he’s (probably) going to charge some “people out there” with doing “treasonous things”.
What happens to those people after that will be a real test of America’s democracy.
It might be time to move to Canada
You’d be more than welcome. We may have our own problems (it turns out that Justin Trudeau is not the Second Coming) but at least we’re not governed by a bitter, spiteful toddler with near-dictator powers,
Costa Rica dude. They love Americans with money, from back in my old Cali days with the surfers. Not a second class country, good health care, decent government and easy to set up residence in.
Incidentally Heisenberg, I appreciate it when you print the money quote(s) along with video clips like you’ve done above. Watching videos/listening to audio in a non-starter for me when I’m at work, so the snippets of text are really helpful.
Heisenberg writes a very interesting blog when he sticks to discussing the underpinnings of the financial markets.
But when he discusses Trump he parrots the networks , which have been on an anti-Trump campaign since before the election. In many instances these networks have failed to verify the facts behind their reports and are just reporting fake news to juice up ratings.
Impeachment is a non starter now that collusion has been ruled out by the recent report. Nancy Pelosi has stated so. But Schiff goes on with hearings that are a waste of money and that no one listens to anymore. He is an example of why people have such little respect for Congressmen.
The reaction against the Smollett case is a bypartisan one and smells of inappropriate pressure by some Democrat.a
More Kool-aid, please. #MAGA
So obviously, for the sake of consistency, you would have wholeheartedly supported Obama if he had settled scores with Fox News for being on an anti-Obama campaign, and would have called for Devin Nunes and Trey Gowdy to quit following upteen fruitless Benghazi hearings. Because if there is one thing I know of Trump supporters, it is their uncompromised principles.
Comments like the one above generally emanate from people who refuse to accept, even after two years, that the tagline on this website, if you Google it, is “Daily financial and political snark.”
This site has always been and always will be, roughly 40% politics and 60% finance. That isn’t a secret. It is quite literally in the actual Google search results tagline for this website.
But some people just can’t accept that and like to pretend as though they are entitled to a politics-free version of the site.
That’s the first silly point.
The second point is the same one I always make which is that I was trained as a political scientist first and only in business, economics and finance later. I have nearly a decade of formal training in political science (literally), so if I am “parroting” anybody, it isn’t “the networks”.
And therein lies the real irony in this type of criticism — in some cases I am “parroting” political philosophers and, depending on the post, the actual Founders.
But people like “Rcohn” don’t realize it because they’ve never read any political philosophy and they don’t know anything about the history of this country.
By calling it “presidential harassment”, he’s trying to equate it to a real crime like sexual harassment. But we know he doesn’t think that is a crime…