Hapless Goobers, Stooges, and Liars
#TrumpRussia will continue to engulf the White House, as it should. As we stagger from the fact that the President of the United States and his campaign are under investigation for their ties to Russia, including whether they coordinated with Russia in its interference in the United States election, and from the drip-drip-drip verification of the Steele dossier, the lies, the denials, the partial admissions, the changing stories, the truculent counter-attacks, and the attempts at deflection and obstruction only grow.
If this situation were not so dangerous, so corrupt, so potentially treasonous, so vital to the functioning of our democracy, we might be laughing about the fact that Trump and the people who flock to him are a pathetic bunch of clown-losers who are more akin to the Keystone Cops than powerful government officials. The lies are blatant, the cover-ups bumbling, the excuses preposterous, the faux-outrage a twisted joke. This is buffoonery, ignorance, hubris, and contempt for democracy on a scale we have never before seen on the national stage in this country, and it is stupefying. It is on a scale that far surpasses Watergate in its implications, and that also far surpasses the shitshow of incompetence that brought us “Heckuva job, Brownie!” after Katrina hit New Orleans. The latter would have been comical, too, if people hadn’t lost their lives and their homes and their livelihoods.
Josh Marshall had an excellent piece the other day discussing how the #TrumpRussia story keeps growing and drawing more and more Republicans, no matter how seemingly tangential, into the swamp of casual deceit and potentially illegal conduct, only to find their roles and lies exposed, and making each player , and ultimately Trump himself, look more and more guilty:
His essential thesis is that the type of self-immolating conduct we are seeing, over and over — from Flynn to Page to Sessions to Cohen to Nunes and now others in the White House — much of it hare-brained and bungling, doesn’t tend to happen when there is no “there” there. In other words, the best evidence that there is Trump-Russia collusion fire is not only the smoke swirling ever-thicker around him and his associates, but the fact that the smoke keeps spreading to other trees that are located far away, and it’s getting darker and denser and more outlandish by the day. He followed up his analysis yesterday after the Washington Post, yesterday morning, added to the New York Times’s March 30, 2017 reporting that the purported “whistleblower type” source for Nunes’s stealth visit to the White House for review of classified documents, and his PR conference on behalf of Trump the week before, were in fact White House employees. More on the players and the implications of this below, but bear with me for a minute.
Nunes As Hapless Goober
Marshall also neatly synthesized so much that is wrong with Republican House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes when he described him as a “hapless goober” in way over his head. Marshall’s assessment was a shorthand way of encapsulating the absurdity of Nunes’s clumsy obstruction of his committee’s investigation into #TrumpRussia, and his overall flagrant stooginess in sneaking to the White House, reviewing classified documents there that he claimed showed that Trump associates had been caught up in incidental collection arising out of lawful surveillance of foreign agents, then returning to the White House to “brief” Trump, holding a press conference about the documents he reviewed (without disclosing his stealth visit, which was revealed later), in a purely partisan effort to demonstrate that there was a scintilla of truth to Trump’s lying tweets about an Obama-ordered wire tapp [sic], even though the documents he reviewed provided no such support. But
in declining to inform his fellow committee members, in running to Trump, in holding a press conference on Trump’s behalf, in not telling the truth about his actions and motivations, and in failing to even recognize that the “evidence” he reviewed did not remotely support Trump’s libelous claim (which everyone knows is a patent and baseless attempt at deflecting from #TrumpRussia in any event), Nunes flouted the norms of his committee and in the process exposed himself as an irretrievably compromised water carrier for Trump with neither the inclination nor the capacity to conduct an objective investigation — effectively neutering the Committee’s investigation.
Is Devin Nunes An Imbecile?
Only an imbecile could possibly have believed that a stunt like his would be taken at face value by the press or the minority party, and that more information about Nunes’s source(s), and who sneaked him into the White House, and where the source got the information, would not come out. Nunes is obviously a stooge, but I’m not convinced he’s an imbecile, so what gives?Nunes’ reputation was not stellar, but he had managed to be working somewhat credibly with the Ranking Member on the House Intel Committee, Adam Schiff; why did he squander what reputation he has on a partisan sideshow that has only make him, Trump, and those around Trump look even worse? The only reason I can think of is that he wanted to tank the investigation, yet surely there were other ways to have done that which would have been less brazen. And if he wanted to do so, was that because he seeks to protect his party over his country, or does he have something personally to hide as well in connection with his role on the Trump transition team? Is Nunes not only a hapless goober, a liar, and a stooge, but an imbecile, as well?
Chaffetz Is A Stooge
Of course, Nunes is not alone in compromising himself for Trump.
His counterpart on the House Oversight Committee, Utah Republican Jason Chaffetz, has repeatedly refused to address Trump’s business ties to Russia, overwhelming conflicts of interest, Constitutional violations of the Emoluments Clause, use of taxpayer money to fund weekly vacations to resorts and golf clubs he owns (thereby promoting his brand), his family’s exploitation of the presidency to build their brand and obtain taxpayer-funded business trips, his web of ties to shady Russian oligarchs and mobsters, the fact that multiple Russian money laundering operations were run out of Trump Tower, the fact that his company may have helped launder money for Iranian terrorists (prompting a Senate request for an investigation), and more. In spite of overwhelming evidence from the campaign and the transition, as well as Trump’s and his family’s conduct throughout his time in office, that Trump and his family are using the presidency to line their pockets. Chaffetz has refused to exercise oversight, offering up the argument that Trump is “already rich” — the facial absurdity of which the headline below nicely captures.
Only a fawning dipshit could give a statement like that, but Chaffetz’s fact-free dismissal is particularly troubling in the context of #TrumpRussia, where Trump’s financial ties to shady Russians are inextricably bound up in whether there is financial kompromat on him, and in his motives and opportunities for improper coordination with Russia during the election. Chaffetz’s refusal to acknowledge that Trump’s disclosed and undisclosed conflicts of interest make him national (and global) security threat is either naked partisanship or stupidity; either prospect is disturbing.
Separately, Chaffetz’s indifference to Trump’s brazen Constitutional violations makes a mockery of Chaffetz’s own oath of office; he is sworn to defend and uphold the laws of the Constitution, but he is allowing Trump to flout those laws, even in the face of mounting evidence of Trump’s corruption. Somehow, the fact that Trump went from admitting he has conflicts of interest, to promising to address them by putting his assets in a “blind trust” (which, as I and many others pointed out at the time, would not address them) administered by his kids, from refusing to divest any of his interests but claiming he would not be involved in “day-to-day operations”, to his sons saying they would brief him “probably quarterly”, is not a red flag for this miserable little sycophant. Nothing to see here, folks; just another Republican handmaiden to Putin-style corruption.
The fact that Chaffetz and Nunes have been independently elected by wide margins in their home districts makes their ham-handed eagerness to behave like paid-for stooges for Trump, bending over backwards to excuse his conduct and avoid following the money, all the more strange.
A Clown Car Of Liars And Stooges…And Worse
But there is no shortage of stooges, liars, and hapless goobers in the Trump orbit. Similar critiques have been offered of others in Trumpworld who have already lawyered up, including Carter Page, who has been eviscerated in interviews for his squirmy lies and inconsistencies, and Michael Flynn, Trump’s disgraced, short-lived National Security Adviser who was “forced to resign” — supposedly because he was caught lying to Vice President Michael Pence — although the reality seems to be that Flynn was only forced to resign after his lies were made public. (Trump and his administration were aware of the lies for weeks and did nothing until the lies were publicly exposed in the news; the White House’s explanation for the decision to get rid of Flynn is itself awash in lies.)
Flynn’s unhinged persona, screeching Islamophobia, paid-for commentary for Russian media known for its disinformation campaigns, and actions as a paid agent of Turkey while working for the Trump campaign (a fact unknown to the public at the time, but disclosed to Trump, who apparently had no problem with it) always made him an astonishingly poor choice for the role of National Security Adviser. Turns out that he wasn’t so great at disclosing his income from those activities, either:
But Trump is not one to let decency or the welfare of the country get in the way of employing family members and other sycophants who will flatter his fragile ego and apply whatever grease or willful blindness is necessary to enable his corruption and maintain his power. Though we knew from the campaign that Trump’s business conflicts, extraordinary personality flaws, lack of transparency, and pathological lying should have been disqualifying and would give rise to huge problems if he were elected, it turns out that he is also a spectacularly incompetent manager. His management “style” is a toxic and chaotic disaster, as his administration has been riven by leaks, self-created crises, factionalism, legislative failure, and mind-blowing hubris, incompetence, and cruelty since he was sworn in; he watches favorable rightwing TV news for hours a day and tweets about it without regard for truth or consequences; he golfs constantly and lies about matters great (Obama; job creation) and small (whether he golfed, size of inauguration,
etc). He rejects competence, knowledge, expertise, truth, and transparency in favor of flattery and perceived personal loyalty. The result is that a man who lies like he breathes requires, to maintain the lies, a coterie of liars willing to amplify and promulgate those lies; a man who disregards ethical and governing norms and rejects transparency hires to work with him others who do the same, so that his abuses of power have infested the entire White House and are starting to extend into the federal government and Congress itself.
I will ignore Sean Spicer, whose role as lying lapdog mouthpiece for his lying boss is one he has embraced, and focus instead on those involved more directly in #TrumpRussia.
Take Jeff Sessions, Trump transition member, former senator and now Attorney General, who refused to recuse himself from the #TrumpRussia investigation until he was exposed as having likely perjured himself in his misleading confirmation testimony when he claimed never to have had any contacts with “the Russians” during the campaign.
Sessions’s shifting explanations for his response didn’t pass the smell test, which may be why he kept changing them, and ultimately recused himself — though he should have resigned or been impeached.
Then again, Sessions, with his history of false voter suppression prosecutions, has no business being the Attorney General of the United States, just as Flynn had no business being on the National Security Council, just as the white supremacist, disinformation-disseminators, and hate mongers Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller have no business being in the White House at all, just as Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner — both devoid of qualifications beyond their inherited wealth and family relationship to Trump — likewise have no business being in the White House, just as Rex Tillerson, with his deep ties to Russia, has no business being Secretary of State, just as Betsy DeVos, public-school-despiser with no education experience or knowledge, has no business being Secretary of Education (as even charter school proponents recognize), just as the self-admittedly unqualified Ben Carson has no business being Secretary of HUD (P.S. — how absurd is it that Carson knows he is unqualified to run a federal agency, but still thought he should be President of the entire United States, and thus responsible for ALL federal agencies?), just as fossil fuel stooge and climate change denier and flagrant liar Scott Pruitt has no business being the head of the EPA, just as ….Well, I could go on, couldn’t I? But a president is entitled to his unqualified choices, no matter whether they lie during their confirmations (DeVos, Pruitt, Mnuchin, Price, Sessions….) and no matter how much they endanger people’s lives and undermine domestic and international security…amirite?
But there is a difference, however slight, between horrendous cabinet picks who would be horrendous irrespective of #TrumpRussia, and cabinet picks who may be implicated in #TrumpRussia. The cloud of illegitimacy that is rightfully choking this administration makes every connection look suspect. Are Wilbur Ross’s connections to the Bank of Cyprus (he is its former Vice Chairman) and Russia an incidental part of his resume, or are they an important piece of the #TrumpRussia puzzle and the reason why Trump nominated him to be Secretary of Commerce?
Is it simply a coincidence that Trump chose for his cabinet the man who ran the Bank of Cyprus, which services Russian oligarchs such as its major investor, Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev, who may have laundered money by purchasing Trump’s Palm Beach property in 2008 at an inflated price while the real estate market was tanking, or was there a deeper motive related to Trump’s own ties to Russian oligarchs?
If Trump and his campaign in fact colluded with Russia, of course, none of these appointments is valid. Trump is painfully aware that over seven million people voted for someone other than him, and that he lost to Hillary Clinton by nearly three million votes, narrowly taking the presidency by 78,000 votes across three states that may have been micro-targeted by Russia to suppress Clinton’s support. And the Republican majority in Congress knows that the increasingly unpopular Trump’s legitimacy, already tenuous, will be eviscerated (and worse) if his and his surrogates’ repeated denials about coordination with Russia turn out to be lies.
It is difficult, at this stage, after there have already been so many lies about claimed lack of contact with Russians exposed as lies, to believe that there is no additional “there” there. We need to remember that Trump has repeatedly lied stating that he had no interests in Russia, that he had nothing to do with Russia (he literally stated “I don’t know Putin” after previously bragging that he knew Putin, among other whoppers), and that he and his campaign had no contacts with Russia. He lied about all those things. Spicer lied on his behalf. Now we know there re were multiple contacts with Russia and pro-Russian Ukrainians by a number of Trump’s people during both the campaign and the transition (Manafort, Cohen, Kushner, Flynn, Page, etc.); that Trump and others he has appointed to positions in the government — Flynn, Tillerson, Ryan Zinke, Ross, Sessions, Kushner etc. — have extensive contacts and relationships with Russia and pro-Russian Ukrainians, as well; and that the contacts and relationships of Trump and those in his orbit are themselves highly suspect (just a few examples here, here, here, and here). The White House has also continued to lie about more recent contacts between those in its administration and Russians. In other words, all the Trump/Spicer denials to date have proven to be false and more false.
If past is prologue, the denials about coordination will also be proven to false. Additional hints that those denials may be also be false come in the form of Roger Stone, long time master of dirty tricks and adviser to Trump, whose
statements about his relationship with Julian Assange, and his apparent foreknowledge of the leaks of hacked DNC and Podesta emails, smack of coordination to sabotage the election for Trump at a minimum.
The constancy and the brazenness of Trump’s lies seems to pervade his administration and those who support him. It isn’t just him — it’s so many who are in his orbit. When people lie so often, in such a self-sabotaging and transparent manner, offering up foolish nostrums that a child could poke a hole in, it suggests (as Marshall has noted), that something deeper is afoot. And when the lies turn out to be cover for additional contemporaneous and likely illegal behavior at the center of the White House that is over and above the #TrumpRussia inquiry itself, the clown car has driven off the cliff.
Nunes And The Three White House Stooges
This brings us back to hapless goober Nunes and the White House staff his amateur-hour shenanigans have now implicated. As you know, Nunes was a member of the Trump transition team, making him unfit to lead an impartial inquiry into #TrumpRussia from the get-go. His apparent pre-judging of the issues, rush to the defense of Trump, and eagerness to comment on the investigation when it had barely even begun made clear he would not be impartial and would simply act as a cheerleader for Trump. All of those problems pale, however, next to the press conference episode. The Hill offers a useful timeline here:
Nunes’s press conference — which he held on march 22, 2017, two days after James Comey testified at Nunes’s own committee’s hearing that the FBI was in fact investigation the Trump campaign’s potential collusion with Russia in the 2016 election — and in which he announced that Trump transition team members had been caught up in incidental collection of information by the intelligence community, and his later press avail, immediately raised a storm of questions. Those included who his “whistleblower-type” source was, why he briefed Paul Ryan before the press conference, why he briefed Trump after the press conference, why he bypassed his own committee, why he held a press conference at all, where the source got the documents, whether he revealed classified information at the press conference, etc. When challenged on why the chair of the committee investigating the president’s potential collusion with Russia raced to the White House to brief the target of that inquiry about that very investigation, Nunes offered the risible excuse that he had a “duty” to do so. Of course, rather than a duty to update Trump, Nunes had a duty not to update him on the status of an ongoing, incomplete, and classified investigation into Trump’s own activities.
Nunes’s claim of a duty to brief Trump on these supposed revelations from a “whistleblower type” was not only facially incredible, it was willfully misleading. Reporters and Democrats immediately wondered whether the source was the White House, but Spicer, true to form, mocked the idea:
When it was later revealed that Nunes had been sneaked onto White House grounds to review the documents, heightening the probability of White House involvement, Nunes offered another risible explanation for the secrecy and the decision to go to the White House — that he needed to review classified documents in a secure location. Reporters quickly demolished that excuse.
Significantly, Nunes also denied that anyone from the White House was involved, falsely stating in an interview with Eli Lake of Bloomberg News that
“his source was not a White House staffer and was an intelligence official.”
As the New York Times also emphasized,
Since disclosing the existence of the intelligence reports, Mr. Nunes has refused to identify his sources, saying he needed to protect them so others would feel safe going to the committee with sensitive information. In his public comments, he has described his sources as whistle-blowers trying to expose wrongdoing at great risk to themselves.
On Thursday, we learned from the NYT that, contrary to being whistleblowers who had come forward to expose wrongdoing at risk to themselves, Nunes’s sources were two White House officials:
According to the Times:
Several current American officials identified the White House officials as Ezra Cohen-Watnick, the senior director for intelligence at the National Security Council, and Michael Ellis, a lawyer who works on national security issues at the White House Counsel’s Office and was previously counsel to Mr. Nunes’s committee. Though neither has been accused of breaking any laws, they do appear to have sought to use intelligence to advance the political goals of the Trump administration.
And yesterday morning, WaPo reported that now it’s “at least three” White House employees who were involved in the secret meetings on White House grounds that Nunes lied about, because John Eisenberg, the top lawyer for the National Security Council, was also directly involved:
Every day reveals more evidence that Nunes’s various explanations, which kept shifting and none of which has passed the smell test, are lies. And Spicer’s denials appear also to be lies.
The Times also reports:
The “obsession with who talked to whom, and when, is not the answer,” Mr. Spicer said. “It should be the substance.”
Spicer seems to have offered this platitude without any since of irony. His statement is an about-face from the administration’s standard attempts to deflect from the steady stream of #TrumpRussia leaks that have revealed the White House’s denials of Russian contacts and connections to be lies. In those cases, Trump attacks the leaks and claims the substance is “fake news”; but when his own White House orchestrates a leak and a Congressman lies about that orchestration to try to bolster Trump’s prior wire tapp [sic] lie, suddenly the “substance” is what matters and the source irrelevant. The level of contempt Trump and his lackeys must have for the rest of us, to think anyone would buy their patent bullshit, is hard to get one’s mind around.*
*Given the willingness of slavering suckbutt professional haters like Sean Hannity, Alex Jones, Newt Gingrich, and other members of the rightwing feverswamp to say anything and do anything to cover for Trump and seize on any theory, no matter how preposterous and fraudulent, to support him, perhaps it is in fact contempt for Trump’s own base, and not the rest of us, that animates their continuous stream of lies and deflection. They know they don’t fool us; the performance is for the ones who want and need to believe, and on whose support and fealty their power depends.
As for the rest of us, there is literally no point to repeating or quoting a word that comes out of the mouth of anyone affiliated with this corrupted White House except to contrast it with the truth that emerges later.
Why The White House Role In The Nunes Affair Matters
The new information about the roles of three White House officials is of real significance, for four reasons (in no particular order):
First, it demonstrates conclusively that Nunes is a liar, and a liar who appears to have has colluded with the White House to obstruct the work of the House Intelligence Committee. He viewed classified information offered to him for the political purpose of bolstering Trump’s lies about Obama; he used it to do so; he lied about his actions; he broke his committee’s norms; he compromised his committee’s investigation; and then he shut down his committee’s hearings when his conduct was exposed. He should resign from his role on the House Intel Committee — and frankly from Congress.
Second, beyond exacerbating all the concerns about the House Committee’s lack of independent leadership, the information raises the specter that Nunes and Trump were (as a friend of mine noted) “both palming off this information, obscuring the source to exaggerate its probity. Nunes lied that the information came from a whistleblower to him, seemingly in his capacity as Committee chair, [for the purpose of] allowing Trump to gain more cover for his false tweet about wiretapping.”
Third, the information that Sean Spicer and the Trump White House are lying again, as they have lied all along about the White House’s and Trump’s supposed lack of a role in anything related to #TrumpRussia.
Fourth, the involvement Cohen-Watnick and Eisenberg raises the question of whether the National Security Council has been in effect expropriated by Trump political operatives in service of Trump’s political needs. Let’s break this down further:
Cohen-Watnick is a 30-year-old protege of the disgraced Michael Flynn, and apparently a family friend of notorious Islamophobe Frank Gaffney. When Flynn’s replacement, one of the few solid appointments by Trump, Lt. General H.R. McMaster, tried to oust Cohen-Watnick, Bannon and Kushner intervened and got Trump to force McMaster to keep Cohen-Watnick in the position.
As Josh Marshall explains, this raises alarm bells:
having two aides with no national security experience overrule the National Security Advisor on a key NSC personnel decision is rather remarkable — even more so when the person in question apparently had the job only due to the influence of the former national security advisor who resigned in disgrace and now is reportedly the target of multiple criminal and counter-intelligence probes.
That set of facts in itself raises a lot of alarm bells. Did Flynn’s influence still extend into the White House’s inner circle early this month, weeks after he was fired? Is Cohen-Watnick that important a loyalist that Bannon and Kushner would refuse to see him dismissed? Was he doing work at their behest?
It bears repeating: why are two political operatives with no national security experience whosoever overruling the National Security Adviser on who should serve in the role of Director of Intelligence for the National Security Council? Why are Bannon and Kushner so keen to have Cohen-Watnick in that position? Remember, one of TrumpBannon’s first actions was to install Bannon on the Principals Committee and politicize our national security.
The answer seems quite clearly to be that Cohen-Watnick was kept there to fee intelligence to the Trump team for political purposes. Look at the timing, and look at Trump’s own comments (with thanks again to Josh Marshall):
- Trump’s incendiary and fabricated wire tapp [sic] accusation occurs on March 4, 2017;
- there is no evidence and the WH is scrambling as even Republican politicians absorb the irresponsibility and gravity of a sitting president who is himself under investigation, overtly stooping to politically motivated fabrication impugning his predecessor in a transparent and grotesque attempt at deflection;
- McMaster axes Cohen-Watnick six days later, on March 10, 2017;
- Trump overrules McMaster and reinstates Cohen-Watnick at Kushner/Bannon’s urging on March 13 or 14, 2017;
- on March 15, 2017, Trump tells Tucker Carson:
wiretap covers a lot of different things. I think you’re going to find some very interesting items coming to the forefront over the next two weeks.
- And then, a week later, Cohen-Watnick just happens to come across some evidence that is funneled over to Ellis to disseminate to Nunes, who goes running to the press.
The revelation that at least three White House officials were behind this affair raises the very serious concern that classified information is being misused for the purposes of buttressing false claims made by Trump about Obama — i.e., for purely political purposes, unrelated to national security. Surely this conduct is criminal.
Further,
The information itself, which Nunes trumpeted so wildly last week, appears to be near meaningless in terms of validating President Trump’s claims of being wiretapped by President Obama. It seems to be highly, highly classified surveillance intelligence which is routinely collected on top foreign diplomats in the United States. It doesn’t lend any weight to Trump’s claims.
Sean Spicer claimed the material was uncovered “in the ordinary course of business”. But that sounds improbable unless Cohen-Watnick’s ordinary business was sifting through highly classified material looking for stuff to defend Trump’s inane tweets. In fact, it seems like that’s just what he was doing — and that’s the more innocent explanation (we’ll get to the less innocent one in a moment). Cohen-Watnick and whoever else was working with him found this stuff and passed it on to Devin Nunes. Whether Nunes was taken in by the ruse and reported it back to the President or was himself a participant in the ruse isn’t clear. Nunes had claimed he got his information from a “whistleblower type.” Clearly that’s not true, though, unless we now consider White House officials disseminating information on the President’s behalf to be ‘whistleblowers.’
But even if we were to accept that Cohen-Watnick just happened to come across this information innocently in the course of his regular duties (the NYT article has at least one source disputing this claim), Cohen-Watnick took his findings to John Eisenberg, the top lawyer for the National Security Council. It appears Eisenberg then contacted Michael Ellis, a staffer in the White House counsel’s office who works on intelligence issues and who previously worked with Nunes on the House Intel Committee, and that it was Ellis called who Nunes and arranged for the viewing with Eisenberg’s knowledge and/or blessing — though the article is not entirely clear on Eisenberg’s and Ellis’s specific roles. What is clear is that classified information was provided to Nunes for the political purpose of assisting Trump in his false claim about wire tapping (a self-serving claim that was itself a naked attempt to deflect the narrative away from #TrumpRussia). And laws may have been broken in the process.
In summary, l’affaire Nunes indicates, yet again, that this White House’s flagrant disregard for law, truth, or the well-being of the United States extends well beyond Trump and is engulfing nearly everyone who works with or stands with him. And they do it in the most bumbling and bungling of ways. This level of incompetence, of obstruction, of absurd coordination, of stealth visits in the night to the White House, of refusing to make public logs of White House and Mar-a-Lago visitors so that the people can know who is influencing Trump and how, is never going away. With or without actual treason, these people are traitors to the very notion of a democratic state; they are aiders and abettors of corruption, of Soviet-style propaganda, and of the corrosive and potentially ineradicable defilement of institutions that are meant to serve the interests of the public, not line the greed-infested pockets of the grifters in the White House who are acting every day to undermine and destroy our commonwealth and its ideals.
Other than Matthis and McMaster, is there a single person in the Trump orbit who is not a duplicitous stooge, an hubristic opportunist, a democracy-hating white nationalist, or worse? The absence of anything even passing for integrity is staggering. Meanwhile, the prospect that this repulsive coterie has also committed multiple crimes, from perjury and obstruction of justice to treason, grows every single day.
