The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Taking on President Trump’s claim of ‘no collusion’
“No collusion” has become the president’s mantra on the question of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Trump campaign dealings with Russia in what amounts to a Vladimir Putin-directed effort to swing the 2016 election in Donald Trump’s favor.
Trump uttered the phrase 16 times in an interview at Mar-a-Lago with the The New York Times.
So for some Conn-centric commentary on the president’s claim, we turn to Rep. Jim Himes who, depending on your point of view, is blessed or cursed with a seat on the House Intelligence Committee.
The committee is conducting its own politically challenged probe on the very question of collusion.
If its members can survive their own internal grenade lobs, the committee one day may come up with the definitive soup-tonuts account of what exactly happened between the Trumpeters and Putin’s apparatchiks.
Himes takes a bit of a smell-like-a-cow/walk-likea-cow/it’s-a-cow position when it comes to Trump and “no collusion.”
Trump is “not behaving like someone who believes he’s innocent,” said Himes. “If you’re convinced you’re wholly innocent, you’d treat (the Mueller investigation) like a distraction, not Satan’s entry into the known universe.”
And it’s not like Mueller or anyone else made up the epic June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between Don Jr., son-in-law Jared Kushner and Connecticut’s own Paul Manafort with a “Russian government” lawyer who was said to be a conduit for Hillary Clinton “dirt.”
The House investigation and its Senate analog have agendas distinct from that of Mueller. The bipartisan intel committees are supposed to be gathering facts into a coherent timeline in order to tell the American people a full story. Mueller, on the other hand, is looking at actions that fit within the narrow confines of crimes as defined by law.
“Whether you call it ‘collusion’ is less interesting to me than the fact that it happened at all,” said Himes. “It’s a pretty ugly story whether you want to call it ‘collusion’ or not.” Fun in the sun?
Tuesday, my first day back from vacation, I wrote what I considered to be a fairly innocuous story about Connecticut Sens. Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy’s two-day inspection tour of hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico.
It seemed a little nobraineresque: impoverished island whose residents are U.S. citizens dealt a double whammy of devastating destruction and snail’space cleanup and infrastructure repair.
Four months after Hurricane Maria, 50 percent of housing still lacks electricity? Not enough tarps to cover torn-off roofs and repel the rain?
As they say on ESPN, “C’mon, man!”
But I still managed to get a few emails questioning just what the heck these two guys were doing there, and whose dime was it on?
“Why were both of those senators in Puerto Rico?” said one reader. “Getting out of the cold? Any resort time? PR was an infrastructure disaster prior to the hurricane. Corruption is rampant there.”
The reader said that as a reporter, I “need to challenge them, not rollover.”
OK, well, that prompted some further inquiry and here’s what I have: The trip indeed was paid for through Senate funds set aside for official travel. Yes, that’s fancy talk for taxpayer money. You’re spending this whether they go to Puerto Rico, or the front lines in Afghanistan or some fancy European security conference.
They stayed governmentrate at the Hyatt House San Juan, which is nice enough but inland — hardly the Caribe Hilton or Condado Plaza Hilton, both of which front the Caribbean.
Their schedule included visits to a hospital and a hard-pressed neighborhood, as well as meetings with Puerto Rico’s governor and officials of FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers.
The only unanswered question: Did Blumenthal, an avid swimmer, get in an early morning dip before 8:30 a.m. checkout Wednesday? The two senators were en route back to D.C. and not landing until after deadline. So I’ll have to track that one down. Stay tuned!