Pretending Comity trumps Comey, because hasn’t HRC been the real criminal.
We’re now at the bargaining stage where Trump’s repeating a prior claim that his being a Russian agent is “not a bad thing”, just like ordering the Treasury to lift Russian sanctions on Oleg Deripaska, the guy to whom Paul Manafort owes $16 million. Wotta tough guy POTUS* is:
It all seems like some basic ethics problem:
The shut/shakedown is not about the southern border wall, but trying to obstruct the work of Congress.
The Big Three — Jerrold Nadler on Judiciary, Elijah Cummings on Oversight, and Adam Schiff on Intelligence — have spent the past two years of the Trump presidency hamstrung as Republican chairs investigated anything but the man in the Oval Office and his team. Why worry about Russians corrupting the election process when you could be combing through Hillary Clinton’s e-mails, right?
Democrats now want to make up for lost time. Just to give a flavor of how much pent-up frustration Democrats have endured, Cummings, as the then-ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, submitted 64 subpoena requests during the past two years. None were approved by the then-Republican chair.
[...]
Among the subpoenas not issued by the former Republican Intelligence Committee chairman, Devin Nunes, was one that might answer an intriguing question: Who did Trump Jr. talk to on his cell phone between calls setting up the Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer offering dirt on Hillary Clinton? Trump Jr. insists he simply can’t recall, and Nunes was remarkably uncurious about it. Not so, Schiff.
Also of interest are “persistent allegations that the Trumps, when they couldn’t get money from US banks, were laundering Russian money,” Schiff told the Lawfare Podcast. “If that is true, that would be a more powerful compromise than any salacious videotape or any aborted Trump Tower deal.”