For the purposes of this week's column, it's expedient to cover the last major segment first, which was the interview with the Speaker of House, Paul Ryan (R-WI). In good faith, you can respect Mr. Ryan's desire to spend more time with his family, which played a major factor in his reasoning to not seek reelection. However, in equally large part, Mr. Ryan is jumping ship before his party sinks beneath the Trumpian sea. The Republican party's complicity with the president and his cabinet's many ethical violations, not to mention the seediness of the various allegations of the president's affairs along with the general daily chaos in the White House have left the prospects dim for Republicans controlling the House after the midterms. There is no way that Paul Ryan wants to be minority leader and neither does he want to have to defend this president another two years. The writing is on the wall.
And the tapes are in the drawer...
Though Michael Cohen fashions himself a Ray Donovan style fixer, he is a lawyer and more specifically Donald Trump's lawyer. For FBI agents to conduct surveillance leading up to this week's search of his office, home, and hotel room, the threshold needs to be very high with a high degree of certainty that Mr. Cohen may destroy potential evidence. Unbelievably, Mr. Cohen recorded many conversations and it's known that he's used those recordings as leverage on the president's behalf. If anyone knows which closet all of Mr. Trump's skeletons are located it would be Michael Cohen. No matter what filing Mr. Cohen's lawyer offers for an injunction, it will fail and now the District Attorney in the Southern District of New York and the FBI will know as well. Plausible deniability on the part of the president is thin, at best.
Not only will this collected evidence play a part in the more salacious stories of pay-outs to women for their silence, but could also play a part in the Russia investigation as well. As John Brennan said today in his interview with Chuck Todd, the revelation that Michael Cohen did in fact travel to Prague as confirmed by McClatchy news service, after Paul Manafort stepping aside as campaign chairmen, could be "explosive." Mr. Trump's lawyer, already known to make shady payments, may have met with a Russian contact in Prague, to pay 'cut-outs' for the Kremlin to meddle in the 2016 election. If proven, it's direct evidence that Mr. Trump and his campaign subverted American democracy with the help of a foreign government.
Let that sink in for a moment.
That opens up the possibility of the President of the United States being blackmailed by a foreign government, not just of any country but Russia and Vladimir Putin.
At a rally about a week and half ago, the president stated that the American military would be getting out of Syria and said that it should be left to others. When the Syrian dictator Bashar Al-Assad heard that, he took it as a green light to commit another atrocious act in the form of using chemical weapons. Then on Monday, the FBI seized evidence from the president's personal lawyer. On Friday night, in cooperation with Britain and France, targeted airstrikes took out Assad's chemical weapon capabilities.
There was talk about a 'wag the dog' situation, in which the president was conducting a military operation to distract from all these domestic investigations. It would seem that way, but that's a degree of cynicism that this column cannot indulge in. Without a response, the use of chemical weapons would become normalized and that just cannot stand.
The New York Times Magazine's Mark Leibovich rightly said that the president doesn't get to define the red line when it comes to investigations of Russian meddling and potential illegal payments made by his fixer. However with regard to Syria, the president can and should draw this line. One would have to agree with Mr. Brennan that despite the many criticisms one could throw at this administration, it has acted in a measured, appropriate way in response to Assad's use of chemical weapons.
Panel: Kristen Welker, NBC News; Carol Lee, NBC News; Mark Leibovich, The New York Times Magazine; Al Cardenas, Republican strategist
One more thing...
With regard to fmr. FBI Director James Comey's book, Chuck Todd asked the a key rhetorical question. What does it say about a president that the former FBI director would characterize him the way he did? It also needs to be said that the president calling him an 'untruthful slime ball' and the president's press secretary calling him a 'partisan hack' just shows the American people the quality of this administration, or the sore lack thereof. Both comments are contemptible.
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