There has never been more of an indication that Trump, his administration, his family, and his former campaign team are terrified of what Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation may turn up than their scramble to convince the American people that every institution they’ve ever relied on for law and order are corrupt and out to get the Trumps. The controversial Nunes memo is just one more attempt to discredit everyone with the power to take the president down, but this one could carry far deeper and more damaging consequences with its release.
So far, every conspiracy theory the far-right could drum up has been debunked. FBI agent Peter Strzok, one of Robert Mueller’s investigative team members, whose private texts expressing his distrust of Donald Trump were used to paint him as partisan and biased, was revealed to have co-written the letter to Congress announcing the reopening of the Clinton email investigation just a handful of days before the presidential election of 2016. Any attempt to paint him as a Clinton operative out to get Trump fell apart with that revelation, so it was on to the next one for the Trump team.
The text message between two FBI employees about a “secret society” meeting, which caused such a drumbeat of conspiracy and “deep state” panic among the right turned out to be a joke about a calendar the agents had received for Christmas. Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI), chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, was forced to admit after causing such a firestorm among the conspiracy theorists that the entire story was meaningless.
The right moved on. Next came missing text messages between FBI agents that surely proved a cover-up of major proportions, masterminded by Democrats like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton with the help of Trump’s most hated government officials: the FBI and the DOJ (both led by Trump appointees). Not only were the text messages later restored and their deletion turned out to be simply a glitch by the cell phone carrier, the messages showed that the FBI agents whose messages were being investigated were not only critical of Trump at times, but also of Hillary Clinton. Yet another conspiracy theory went down the drain.
In a last gasp attempt, a memo written by Devin Nunes regarding evidence he has never seen that supposedly proves that the Obama administration used false information in the Steele dossier to abuse his powers to obtain FISA warrants in order to spy on the Trump campaign is expected to be released on Friday. By all accounts, the memo will call into question the actions of three men: former FBI Director James Comey (who Trump fired), FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe (who Trump wanted and pushed to have fired but eventually resigned after months of pressure), and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein (who appointed Mueller to investigate Trump and who can give testimony on Trump’s attempts to find reasons to fire Comey when he refused to drop his investigation into Trump’s national security director, Michael Flynn).
The efforts to discredit these institutions were quickly losing steam when along came the memo. Never mind that the FBI director Trump appointed to replace Comey, Christopher Wray, says that the memo lacks clarifying facts that make the document misleading. Never mind that Congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle have said it is dangerous to release it to the American public and compromises national security. Trump will release it anyway to further discredit those his conspiracy theories have attempted to paint as corrupt.
Outside of the Russian bots and rabid Trump loyalists who cannot resist a good conspiracy story, Twitter was not buying Trump’s early morning statements against these American institutions. See some of their best comments below:
Featured image via Getty/Bloomberg
