Donald Trump has spent more than 60 percent of his time in the last month in “unstructured executive time,” meaning hours in which he watches Fox News and tweets his unfiltered tantrums. He got an early start at it on Thursday morning, complaining about investigations and renewing the threats he made during the State of the Union.
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Trump started off by naming House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff, saying that Schiff wanted to look into “every aspect of my life.” In fact, Schiff did announce an expanded investigation on Wednesday. As CNN reports, that investigation will now look beyond Russia to “credible allegations of leverage” by other foreign connections to Trump’s business, campaign, and inauguration. Considering the discovery that Trump hid from everyone the real extent of his plans for a tower in Moscow, the emerging story of how Michael Cohen and others brokered foreign contributions for Trump, and the massive loans that saved Jared Kushner following extraordinary actions in the Middle East, all of that seems entirely reasonable. Even mandatory. But according to Trump, these investigations are “Unlimited Presidential Harassment” that has “never happened before.”
The Dems and their committees are going “nuts.” The Republicans never did this to President Obama, there would be no time left to run government. I hear other committee heads will do the same thing. Even stealing people who work at White House! A continuation of Witch Hunt!
“Stealing people who work at White House” would apparently be Trump’s way of saying that officials are actually going to be called to testify, and handed a subpoena if they don’t comply voluntarily.
While Barack Obama was president, Republicans spent more than three years on an investigation of the IRS over a fabricated story of bias. And they spent over a year investigating Planned Parenthood over a video faked by a Republican operative. Then they investigated it again. And they investigated Benghazi. And they investigated it again. And again. And in 2014 they got a “definitive” answer. Then they investigated it twice more, during which time actual House Intelligence Committee member Michelle Bachmann acted as a conduit for right-wing conspiracy theories. And there was that other thing that was investigated over and over … her emails.
Trump is right in saying that Congress didn’t spend time looking at how international connections worth millions of dollars may have assisted Barack Obama’s campaign or influenced his actions in the White House. Because there were no such connections.
Instead, Republican legislators like Bachmann, and Mike Coffman, and David Vitter, and Nathan Deal, and Jean Schmidt, and Roy Blunt, and Richard Shelby all just argued that Obama was foreign. That he was a secret Kenyan, or Muslim, or “no true American.” They were joined in this ridiculous conspiracy by someone named Donald Trump, who constantly promoted the idea and even funded his own investigation into “the missing birth certificate” that was never missing. In fact, it was Trump—coordinating with Michael Cohen and David Pecker’s National Enquirer—who was largely responsible for growing and sustaining the ridiculous story by constantly claiming to have found evidence that he never produced.
But Democrats aren’t looking at Trump’s birth certificate. They’re looking at whether he took millions, or hundreds of millions, or billions in what can best be described by the rather old-fashioned word “bribes.” His international connections are genuine, and they are worth investigating exactly because they have so much value to him, and so much consequence for everyone else. It’s precisely the kind of thing that demands an investigation.
Though Trump continues to demand that they stop.