Reflections on one crazy week
In any other time, you’d say the week past will not soon be forgotten. But these are not ordinary times. The seismic tremors of the Trump White House come so suddenly and tightly packed that there is no time to absorb it all. Thursday was no different. The socalled “Super Bowl of Politics” delivered a spectacle unprecedented in our nation’s history: a former FBI chief unloading damning testimony on a sitting president of the United States who had only recently fired him.
The word “impeachment” reverberated in Georgetown and came crashing into another word: “vindication.”
No one seemed sure what it all meant, and before you could focus on any one thing, here came another: one of the world’s leading statesmen, speaking in words completely unmoored from reality.
The gibberish of U.S. Sen. John McCain blew up social media and raised fresh doubts about his fitness to hold office.
Books could be written on the week that was, but so what? Books could be written about virtually any day of the Trump White House, where every day is DEFCON 1.
To demonstrate how easily amnesia floods the mind right now, Democrats lionized former FBI Director James Comey this week while unconscious of the fact that only months ago, they were ready to draw and quarter him.
Where to start in such careening dysfunction? What is real? What is not?
Fortunately, facts have weight and don’t shift easily in the storm, and after 21⁄2 hours of Comey testimony, it was clear the facts had produced rock-hard evidence that the president had acted in ways dishonest and reprehensible.
We learned that President Donald Trump used his authority to clear the Oval Office, isolate his FBI director and strongly suggest that he should drop his investigation of former National Security Adviser Michael T. Flynn.
“I hope you can let this go,” the president told Comey, according to Comey’s testimony. The former FBI director heard those words as anyone would after the dramatic clearing of the room.
“I took it as a direction,” Comey testified. “I mean, the president of the United States, with me alone, saying, ‘I hope this’ — I took it as this is what he wants me to do.”
Flynn is a slick operator who had contacts with the Russians during an American election that had all the filthy handprints of Russian hackers and propagandists.
For years, he was a lose cannon in the American security establishment. And after an erratic career, he took a huge speaking fee from Russia Today, the marketing arm of the Kremlin.
During the campaign, he led chants of “Lock her up” at the GOP convention. Many military men found it smarmy and unbecoming a former officer.
The sirens should have gone off in the Trump transition office warning that Flynn was trouble. But Trump gave him one of the most important posts in the federal government.
Eventually, the Russia connections grew so thick, and Flynn’s lies to the vice president so untenable, that Trump had to fire him.
It was on behalf of this man that Trump put his administration in jeopardy by intervening in an FBI investigation. He told Comey that Flynn is “a good guy.”
Trump’s personal lawyer Marc Kasowitz told the Washington press corps that “the president never, in form or substance, directed or suggested that Mr. Comey stop investigating anyone, including suggesting that Mr. Comey ‘let Flynn go.’ ”
But there is a price to pay when your White House lies so casually that the Toronto Star can count 212 falsehoods in your first 95 days. No one believes you anymore.
As for McCain, his mental lapse in the biggest Senate hearing of the year cannot be taken lightly. McCain made no sense as he confused the former FBI director with a question about inconsistent approaches to investigations of Trump and Hillary Clinton.
McCain will be under intense scrutiny from here out, as the national media puts him under the microscope. His office needs to take this seriously and make sure steps are taken to understand exactly what happened.
If this was caused by momentary fatigue and not something more serious, the McCain office needs to make this clear to the public with evidence.
In the meantime, John McCain deserves our patience and respect. He is a genuine war hero who has been a tireless public servant for years. Age can produce lapses in acuity that are temporary and out of character. We can only hope this is the case with McCain and that he continues to serve this state well for years to come.