Trump Is F*cking Crazy (This Is Not a Joke)

by Keith Olbermann

  The Republican chairman, Mr. Burr, asked about Comey’s conversation with Trump about General Flynn. Comey’s reply: “I don’t think it’s for me to say whether the conversation I had with the president was an effort to obstruct. I took it as a very disturbing thing, very concerning, but that’s a conclusion I’m sure the special counsel will work toward, to try and understand what the intention was there and whether that’s an offense.”

  Second logic exercise: How could Special Counsel Robert Mueller do that? By investigating. Whom would he have to investigate to do that? Donald Trump. Thus, what is he investigating? Whether or not Trump obstructed justice.

  If it is obstruction of justice, it was directed at least in part at James Comey, to get him to, at minimum, as Comey quotes Trump, “let Flynn go.” The Republican senator Jim Risch asked whether Trump directed Comey to do that. Comey answered: “Not in his words, no.” Risch followed up: “He did not order you to let it go?” Comey answered, “Those words are not an order,” and later added, “I took it as a direction. This is a president of the United States, with me alone, saying, ‘I hope this.’ I took it as: this is what he wants me to do. I didn’t obey that, but that’s the way I took it.” And Comey added that he was so clear about what Trump was trying to do that he didn’t want to tell his FBI “troops” what Trump had said, for fear that his words would have a chilling effect on their investigation.

  And for the completion of the attempt to obstruct justice, its intended victim had no doubt about the cause and effect. “I take the president at his word . . .” Later, he said, “I was fired because of the Russia investigation. I was fired in some way to change, or the endeavor was to change, the way the Russia investigation was being conducted.” Fired, it seems, not just because he would not close the Flynn investigation but also, perhaps, because he would not publicly proclaim that Trump was innocent of all suspicion, innocent of collusion with the Russians, innocent of everything about the election, innocent about everything in the Steele dossier, down to “hookers in Russia.” Fired because he was ordered, in words that, out of context, would not seem like an order, to close at least the Flynn investigation in a manner that reminded him of the infamous phrase attributed to King Henry II of England about the Archbishop of Canterbury. Quoting Comey again, “It rings in my ear as kind of ‘Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?’” Fired, and left to the mercies of Republican senators who somehow went into this hearing seemingly thinking that if they could get Comey to say that Trump only tried to obstruct the Flynn investigation, Trump would somehow be vindicated; who somehow went into this hearing thinking that if Comey told Trump there was no investigation of him in January, then Trump couldn’t be guilty of trying to obstruct anything; who somehow, seemingly, at this hearing, managed to ask questions that permitted Comey to pronounce the most damning things ever spoken about any president in our history; who somehow, at this hearing, made it urgently necessary to know if Trump did indeed tape his conversations with Comey; tapes—the mere threat of which Comey said induced him to reveal that he had taken notes on some of his conversations in hopes that a special counsel would then be appointed; tapes about which he testified: “Lordy, I hope there are tapes.” And then, later, “The president surely knows whether he taped me. If he did, my feelings aren’t hurt. Release all the tapes, I’m good with it.”

  Trump’s attorney, the one who misspelled “president,” now says he believes Comey all but cleared Trump. Based on Comey’s testimony, it looks all but certain that the actions of the president of the United States are under investigation; under investigation by the Justice Department’s special counsel on Trump and Russia; under investigation as possible collusion with the Russians and possible attempts to obstruct justice; perhaps under investigation right now; and that a target of some of that attempt to obstruct justice completely believed—in the moment—that Donald Trump was trying to obstruct him from pursuing justice.

  These are the only possible conclusions after the testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee by former FBI director James Comey.

  WHAT WAS THAT AGAIN ABOUT RUSSIAN HOOKERS?

  Post date • MONDAY, JUNE 12

  An afterthought on the testimony Thursday of former FBI director James Comey. Not what he said that appropriately grabbed all the headlines, but what he put only in his written testimony that never directly came up at the hearing.

  What was that again about Russian hookers? “On the morning of March 30, the President called me at the FBI. He described the Russia investigation as ‘a cloud’ that was impairing his ability to act on behalf of the country. He said he had nothing to do with Russia, had not been involved with hookers in Russia, and had always assumed he was being recorded when in Russia.”

  Wait—what?

  I know this was covered when Comey’s opening statement was released in advance, and during and after his testimony, but isn’t there something even more amiss here than has yet been publicly recognized? You call up a guy whom you’re desperately trying to convince to publicly clear you, whom you will later fire, whom you will later threaten with a vague claim that you may have taped your conversations with him, and who will thus be required to talk about what you said to him, in public venues and probably under oath, and you say something like “I have not been involved with hookers in Russia and I always assumed I was being recorded when in Russia”?

  Seriously?

  Even in the cascading madness of the seven months since the election—is this not just the craziest thing ever attributed to any president of the United States, but the craziest choice of topics ever raised by any president of the United States? Is it not evidence that, within Trump’s desperate obsession to get somebody to clear him personally about Russia—and, boy oh boy, do you and I understand Trump’s desperate need to get somebody to clear him personally about Russia—inside that, doesn’t it seem there is an obsession within an obsession? I mean: What? The whole election thing isn’t true, but Mr. FBI Director, make sure you clear me about the Russian hooker thing?

  And this wasn’t even the first time that Trump brought this up to Comey. January 27: “During the dinner, the President returned to the salacious material I had briefed him about on January 6, and, as he had done previously, expressed his disgust for the allegations and strongly denied them. He said he was considering ordering me to investigate the alleged incident to prove it didn’t happen. I replied that he should give that careful thought because it might create a narrative that we were investigating him personally, which we weren’t, and because it was very difficult to prove a negative.”

  To be fair, as Comey said in his statement, it was he who brought this up first. He brought the Steele dossier—including the Russian hypothetical hookers, in all their glory—to Trump’s attention when they first met in New York on January 6. But three weeks later, Trump was going to order Comey to disprove it somehow? To have the FBI conclude something didn’t happen? And in Russia? And that’s still one of Trump’s first concerns when he phones Comey eighty-three days later? “He said he had nothing to do with Russia, had not been involved with hookers in Russia, and had always assumed he was being recorded when in Russia.”

  And in a speech in Australia, overnight, between Comey’s statement and Comey’s testimony, the former director of national intelligence, James Clapper, said he had phoned Trump on January 11 to encourage him to stop comparing the American intelligence community to the Nazis, and, quoting Clapper, “ever transactional, he simply asked me to refute the infamous dossier, which I couldn’t and wouldn’t do.”

  I am not for a moment suggesting that this detail from this rancid presidency is as important as all the times Comey’s words supported accusations of obstruction of justice against Trump, or Comey’s joy at the prospect that there might be tapes of his meetings with Trump, or his implication that Trump is under investigation now by the special counsel, or certainly the weight that Comey’s testimony
added to the evidence necessitating Trump’s impeachment, not even Trump’s attorney misspelling “president” in his response to the hearing and thus calling him “Predisent Trump.”

  But it’s not just that there’s something wrong here. There’s something wronger here! When Comey’s opening statement was first released, Trump attorney Marc Kasowitz issued a forty-three-word victory lap that included the phrase “The President feels completely and totally vindicated.” And before the paint was dry on that statement from that Trump attorney, another statement came from another Trump attorney: “Comey’s statement released today needs to be carefully scrutinized,” Michael Cohen asserted, “as his testimony claims the president was concerned about the dossier. It must be noted that the dossier has been debunked even by the author himself, Christopher Steele.”

  Well, except (a) Christopher Steele did not debunk his dossier; he wrote, as he submitted it, that a lot of it was unverified. That it was raw intelligence that needed further investigation. And (b) what the hell!? The dossier? That’s what you want to underline after a statement from the fired FBI director about how he was to testify under oath to facts that could conceivably end a presidency? The dossier? You just put the dossier, and the Russian hypothetical hookers back under the public nose again? Why? Because Comey referenced them only twice and somehow that wasn’t enough times?! Why? Because you wanted to make sure every news organization in the world has to bring up the Steele dossier and the hookers, even the ones who never mentioned them in the first place?

  I mean, what’s hidden within the Steele dossier that could conceivably be more damaging to Trump than, you know, impeachment or evidence of treason, or both? What could it contain, that on January 27 and March 30 and June 7, the president—and then one of his attorneys—seem more concerned with it than with anything else? What could possibly be in the Steele dossier?

  Well . . . Russian hypothetical hookers.

  Move over, Richard Nixon. Before all this ends, “I am not crook” may be replaced in presidential lore by “I am not a john.”

  SELF-DESTRUCTION

  Post date • MONDAY, JUNE 19

  The president of the United States is self-destructing.

  We need to give him all the help we can in his task.

  This is not said lightly. Even with this president, even in this atmosphere of daily if not hourly crisis—this is an issue of deep regret. Ordinarily, the last thing in the world any American would want is a leader bent on destroying himself and ending his presidency. But the threat to our freedoms, our heritage, our way of life—our lives themselves—is so overwhelming and unprecedented that, putting aside the almost immeasurable anger and resentment that this childish, petulant, selfish man engenders, it is still with genuine sadness that we must look at his self-destruction and say it simply and resolutely:

  Better him than our country.

  “Trump advisers and confidants describe the president as increasingly angry over the investigation, yelling at television sets in the White House carrying coverage,” wrote Julie Pace and Jonathan Lemire of the Associated Press on June 16. “He has watched hours of TV coverage every day—sometimes even storing morning news shows on his TiVo to watch in the evening—and complained nonstop,” wrote Josh Dawsey of Politico on June 15.

  We will ignore for a moment the thought that somebody still has a TiVo.

  The president is yelling at television screens, evoking the probably apocryphal story of Richard Nixon, in his last days, arguing with the White House paintings of Kennedy and Lincoln. Yelling at television screens. Let’s just hope the sets are actually on.

  “Trump, for months, has bristled almost daily about the ongoing probes,” Dawsey continued. “He has sometimes, without prompting, injected ‘I’m not under investigation’ into conversations with associates and allies.”

  That was written Thursday, June 15. On Friday, June 16, Trump threw the ship fully into reverse in a tweet that seemed to confirm the opposite of that and included the direct quote “I am being investigated for firing the FBI Director by the man who told me to fire the FBI Director!” After ceaseless denials about this, Trump could now adjust his inaccurate worldview to accept what has been obvious to everybody else since at least the appointment of Robert Mueller as special counsel.

  And then he couldn’t.

  By Sunday, June 18, Trump had to have one of his mouthpieces go on three network shows and tell one of them that Trump is being investigated and then, when pressed for detail, say that, no, Trump isn’t being investigated. Same interview. Yes and no. Trump is so sick that he cannot continue to accept on Sunday what he had seemed to have begun to accept on Friday. Trump still had to preserve a corner of his fantasy world in which not only is he never at fault, but if indisputable reality disagrees with his delusions, indisputable reality must be wrong in some way. In the June 16 tweet, Trump blamed a “man who told me to fire the FBI Director!” On May 11, Trump had claimed, “Regardless of recommendation, I was going to fire” the FBI director. Now, in his mind, that first statement never happened.

  You know, of course, about the subsequent terrifying cabinet meeting in which Trump claimed, “Never has there been a president, with few exceptions . . . who has passed more legislation, who has done more things,” when in fact next to nothing has passed or been done. And you know about the twenty-three minutes of praise he asked for and got from such reeking toadies, such Self-Servatives, as Rick “My Hat Is Off to You” Perry and Reince “Blessing to Serve You” Priebus and Mike “The Greatest Privilege of My Life” Pence—although in Pence’s case, that might be true.

  It evoked the councils of North Korea, or perhaps the flattering of the Roman emperor Caligula to keep him from killing everybody in the room, or maybe images from the episode of The Twilight Zone where the six-year-old boy has the power to destroy everything on earth merely by wishing it, and the remaining adults vie to appease him. Or—less chillingly and perhaps more in accordance with the farce of this administration—the governor that Mel Brooks plays in Blazing Saddles who tells his cabinet they must protect their “phony-baloney jobs,” and they all join him in saying, “Harrumph, harrumph.” And then Brooks stops and points at one of them and says, “I didn’t get a ‘harrumph’ out of that guy!” and the holdout finally says “Harrumph,” and Brooks stares and points at him and says, “You watch your ass.”

  You know of his meeting this week with the president of Panama, in which he said, “The Panama Canal is doing quite well; I think we did a good job building it,” as if it had just been finished. It opened on August 15, 1914.

  And maybe most disturbing of all, there is this. Buried in a June 13 opus from Glenn Thrush, Maggie Haberman, and Julie Hirschfeld Davis of The New York Times, what would have been, in any other time, in any other presidency, a sign of desperate personal, emotional, psychological, or physical distress, but which in this one—this presidency of self-destruction—was almost an afterthought. About the conflicting stories wafting out of the White House that he might or might not fire the special counsel: “The president was pleased by the ambiguity of his position on Mr. Mueller and thinks the possibility of being fired will focus the veteran prosecutor on delivering what the president desires most: a blanket public exoneration.”

  This is where the sane, patriotic people of this country must see that we are dealing not with a president who occasionally strays into madness, but with a madman who occasionally successfully pretends to be sane. To look at a special counsel, a man with a long, respected, and lucrative career behind him and, if he wants it, more of the same ahead after this assignment, and to think for a moment that you could get him to clear you, even if you are guilty, by threatening to fire him from a job he did not want and does not need—to assume that your only motive, money, is also everybody else’s only motive—is as rational as going to the roof of the White House and, to prove yourself invincible, jumping off—because you’ve
always believed that when it was necessary, you could fly, because you have a lot of money.

  And right now, in this atmosphere of daily if not hourly crisis, his critics, his sycophants, his Self-Servatives are not going to be able to convince Trump that he cannot fly.

  So the country will have to hope for the best. And let him jump.

  DOES TRUMP HAVE TAPES? DOES ANYBODY?

  Post date • TUESDAY, JUNE 20

  Are there tapes of Donald Trump’s White House meetings and phone calls with James Comey and perhaps others, or not?

  If there are, what do they say?

  If there are not, did Trump destroy them?

  It is now more than five weeks since this issue was first raised by, naturally, Trump tweeting his mouth off. May 12: “James Comey better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!” Since then, we have gotten from Trump and his sycophants misdirection, obfuscation, and cuteness, when it is for this man’s presidential life or death to either produce tapes that validate his versions of conversations with Comey and others, or prove that tapes never existed in the first place, and thus he has not destroyed possible evidence in a criminal case.

  There seemed to be new insight into this during the wall-to-wall coverage given last Sunday of a part-time radio host, part-time guitarist, and full-time Nathan Thurm look-alike named Jay Sekulow. Mr. Sekulow, one of Trump’s attorneys, is the man who told Chris Wallace of Fox News that the president was indeed being investigated for firing Comey, and then, in literally the next breath, said no, he wasn’t being investigated for firing Comey. Sekulow also appeared the same morning on CBS. John Dickerson asked, “The president said last week he would release the tapes of—if there were tapes—of his conversation this week. That hasn’t happened. Where is that?” Sekulow replied, “I think the president is going to address that in the week ahead. There were a lot of issues this past week; this issue will be addressed in due course and, I suspect, next week.”