What little legitimacy Donald Trump and Mike Pence may have had should have evaporated in the space of a few hours on Thursday. First, word got out that a number of top American intelligence officials had warned their Israeli counterparts not to share any classified information with Trump unless they got assurances Trump had not been compromised by Russia. Apparently the nation’s intelligence community believed that there was definitely something to the “golden showers” affair, and felt compelled to take the unprecedented step of telling one of our strongest allies to tread carefully with an incoming administration.
A few hours later, the Department of Justice’s inspector general announced an investigation into the events leading up to FBI director James Comey’s game-changing letter about Hillary Clinton’s email server. As we now know, there is virtually uncontestable evidence that the events leading up to that letter were shot through with conduct on the part of FBI agents that can only be described as unethical, unprofessional, and criminal. It is also clear that conduct ultimately derailed what looked like a certain Hillary Clinton victory.
So by the close of business on Thursday afternoon, we learned that a number of very senior officials were asking questions that should never, ever, have to be asked about a president-elect and the manner in which he was elected. Those questions are serious enough that we really have to wonder–do Trump and Pence have any business being sworn in next Friday? It is now clear that they don’t, and should be persuaded to stand down at least until we get some answers.
Trump has spent the better part of this week bleating and screeting that all of the talk about the “golden showers” dossier was just fake news. Well, maybe it’s just me, but when the two largest newspapers in Israel–that country’s counterparts of The New York Times and The Washington Post–both report that American intelligence has gone as far as to sound the alarm with one of our strongest allies about the incoming president, you can no longer credibly dismiss it as fake news.
Apparently Trump and friends know this as well. Salon and Slate picked up the story by Friday–a day after Rolling Stone became the first mainstream American outlet to do so. And so far, no angry tweets from Trump, Sean Spicer, Kellyanne Conway, or anyone on the Trump team.
But even before then, the BBC’s Paul Wood reported that multiple intelligence sources believe the Kremlin has compromising information about Trump. Watch Wood talk more about what he learned here.
Wood spoke with an intelligence agent who told him that there was video and audio evidence to support the “golden shower” allegations. Reportedly, this evidence shows the encounters documented in that memo took place “on more than one date, in more than one place, in Moscow and St. Petersburg.”
That may explain why American intelligence agents felt like they had to sound the alarm to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. If that’s the case, then this alone would call for Trump’s inauguration to be delayed at the very least until these questions can be resolved.
But there’s another very good reason for this runaway transition train to be stopped in its tracks. The events leading up to the Comey letter are littered with red flags. For one thing, it is now clear that when agents investigating Anthony Weiner found the email exchange that supposedly triggered the letter on Huma Abedin’s computer, at least two people close to the Trump campaign–Rudy Giuliani and Jim Kallstrom–knew about them before Comey did. There is literally no good-faith explanation for why two political operatives would know about a potentially politically explosive investigation before the FBI director knew about it.
It is also clear that the warrant for those emails should have never been granted. The “probable cause” for that warrant was the fact that Hillary and Abedin exchanged emails–a rationale that has been roundly denounced as hackery at best and a Fourth Amendment violation at worst. Additionally, the agents stripped out a number of dates that would have revealed they had found the emails far sooner than claimed–and that they were duplicates of emails that the FBI already had.
So now we know that the Comey letter was tainted by unethical and criminal conduct. And apparently it was so egregious that it ended any chance of derailing Trump in the Electoral College. Attorney E. Randol Schoenberg sued the FBI to force it to unseal the warrant. However, Abedin contended that she never got a copy of the warrant–a blatant violation of longstanding rules of criminal procedure. Unless I’m very wrong, the time it took for Abedin to review the warrant prevented it from being unsealed before the Electoral College convened.
Legal expert and Huffington Post columnist Seth Abramson, who until the IG review was the only third party to review the events leading up to the Comey letter, told me last month that unlike the Russian attempt to put a thumb on the scale in favor of Trump, Comeygate was “a discrete event (that) could be captured in/by domestic polling.”
The polls bear this out. Nate Silver crunched the numbers last month, and concluded the Comey letter flipped Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan to Trump.
There's more evidence, too: Late-deciding voters broke strongly against Clinton in swing states, enough to cost her MI/WI/PA. pic.twitter.com/8r801ahDQO
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) December 11, 2016
Sam Wang of the Princeton Election Consortium concluded that the Comey letter swung just enough voters in those three states to change the outcome of the election.
https://twitter.com/SamWangPhD/status/807943268529041414
In other words, it can be proven with mathematical certainty that the Comey letter changed the outcome of the election. it is now clear that change was influenced by rogue FBI agents who took the law into their own hands–and that their actions were so egregious that critical information was kept from the electors’ hands.
In the face of such egregious and potentially criminal behavior, basic standards of fairness call for Trump not to take office next week, at least until the IG’s investigation is complete. And since Pence was elected on the same ticket, it should rule him out as well–at least for now.
Now, what is the best way forward? Preferably, I would rather see Hillary Clinton sworn in, given that she clearly won the popular vote. But that ship sailed when the Electoral College rubber-stamped Trump’s victory. As it stands now, the most preferable option would be a national unity government of sorts. Paul Ryan is Speaker of the House, and is therefore second in line for the presidency after Pence. Given that this nation is in dire need of healing, one would hope that Ryan would take off his red blinders long enough to appoint a Democrat as vice president.
After all, it is now clear that this election was tainted–perhaps irrevocably so. It is equally clear that the campaign cycle exposed divisions in this country that are far deeper than anyone could have imagined. It is going to take a rare outbreak of bipartisanship to ensure that there is never a next time for this.
(featured image courtesy Trump’s Facebook)
