The president took to Twitter today to prove even more to the American people that Andrew McCabe’s firing was his attempt to end the investigation into his campaign team’s alleged collusion with Russian government operatives. Tired of all the lies? Let’s review some truths.
Fact: the current Attorney General of the United States, the man Trump appointed to oversee law and order in this country, lied to Congress. There is no confusion nor debatable issue in that statement. He was caught repeatedly lying, which is why he was eventually forced to recuse himself from any investigation involving Russian collusion with the Trump campaign. He did not lose his job, nor did the president rail publicly about his lies, he was only furious that Sessions recused himself and didn’t “protect” him from the Russia investigation.
More truth: Russia attempted to subvert democracy in the United States in order to help Trump win the election. The president has done nothing to stop further cyberattacks by the Russians or to sanction them for their ongoing attacks. He has repeatedly said that he believes Russian President Vladimir Putin over our own intelligence community.
Trump has also pushed lies about the FISA warrant that allowed the FBI’s surveillance of Carter Page. In fact, the president has stated repeatedly that the FISA warrant constituted spying on the Trump campaign. That’s a little difficult to reconcile with the public statements by Trump’s campaign officials who have insisted that Page was never really a part of the campaign team. Let’s face it, if Carter Page were a brown-skinned man working to elect Barack Obama while traveling back and forth to Iran to bash the U.S. government in speeches to crowds of Muslims, Trump wouldn’t want him surveilled. He’d be screaming on Twitter and on Fox & Friends for him to be hung.
There have also been numerous lies by Trump about why that surveillance began. Page had been surveilled for a decade before Trump ran for the presidency, long before a dossier by former M16 agent, Christopher Steele, came to light. Nor is the GOP insistence that the application for renewal of the FISA warrant did not include information that the DNC paid for Christopher Steele’s opposition research that led to the dossier factually accurate. Even Republican Devin Nunes’ memo was forced to acknowledge that this is a lie.
Here’s a few more facts: Trump’s top advisers have leaked information to the media. That’s not debatable, either. Whether or not you believe anything from Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, there were quotes and specific details given to the author by Trump’s former White House chief strategist, Steve Bannon. If those quotes had no truth behind them, Bannon would have never apologized nor been forced to step down from his own disformation outlet, Breitbart News.
Trump and Fox News love to fuel the outrage machine by saying that Special Counsel Robert Mueller has Democrats on his investigative team. Six of the 17 have donated to Democratic campaigns. However, not even Fox News has pushed a lie that there are zero Republicans on the team. Not only is there a Republican legal expert, there is a registered Republican appointed by a Republican president heading the team. His name is Robert Mueller. Trump may want a team of majority Trump supporters leading the investigation, just like the one he got in the House Intelligence Committee, but that isn’t going to happen and would not be a fair investigative team. Mueller cannot choose his team based on their political affiliations, and while Trump insists that they are biased, he has never proven that any act they’ve carried out so far is based on disinformation.
In fact, there have been 19 indictments and three guilty pleas. Michael Flynn insisted he had no contact with Russian government operatives in the period between Trump’s election and his inauguration and that he never discussed sanctions with any Russian during that time. That was proven to be a lie; there are tapes of his conversations. That is why he pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, which is a crime.
Finally, Andrew McCabe’s wife never received a single penny in donations from Hillary Clinton or former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe, and there is absolutely no evidence that suggests she did. Dr. Jill McCabe’s campaign did receive donations from a Democratic super PAC founded by McAuliffe and from the Virginia Democratic Party. Both of those entities are expected to donate to Democratic campaigns. Not once has Trump provided any proof that those donations influenced the former acting FBI Director. Nor has he proven that James Comey was influenced by Democrats or working to help Hillary Clinton elected. If he tried to do so, he did a poor job of it since none of the information about Russia’s attempts to install a Manchurian candidate in the White House was released to the American voting public until after the campaign had ended. It did not help Hillary Clinton then; in fact, the actions and public statements by James Comey and Andrew McCabe hurt Clinton’s chance at the presidency.
Enough of the lies from a president who has told an unprecedented number of lies to the American people. Why is our country so divided at this point? It isn’t because of President Obama or any statement he made, nor can it be blamed on the “fake news” (read: trusted outlets who have been critical of Trump’s endless lies) mainstream media.
We can thank two things for this division, and that is Trump’s rise to political power with a racist lie to the American people about Obama’s birth certificate, his insistence that Democrats are criminals who need to be “locked up,” and his buddies at right-wing media outlets like Fox News who promote Trump’s lies and divisive statements that do nothing but cover for the incompetent administration currently residing in the White House.
Twitter had their own thoughts on Trump’s tweets. For some of their responses, see below:
Featured image via Getty/Pool
