Monday morning on Capitol Hill brought us House Intelligence Committee hearing day, as FBI Director James Comey and NSA Director Adm. Mike Rogers were brought in to answer questions on the alleged links between Russian officials and the inner circle of President Donald Trump's campaign, as well as some of the more outlandish claims that have recently been made by Trump concerning "wiretaps" that were allegedly dropped on Trump Tower by President Barack Obama.
It was the latest moment in a strange and ongoing saga that has necessitated the involvement of government officials who all probably have much more important things to tend right now. At one point, the committee's ranking member, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif) was just reading Trump's tweets to Comey and Rogers, hoping that they would, perhaps, explain whether or not they were, you know, true. Tweets like this:
Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my "wires tapped" in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!
It was really quite a spectacle, hearing Trump's early-morning anger-tweets, intoned aloud by a member of Congress, as if something more important than crazy rumors on the internet were being discussed. But Comey, offering the straight-facedness that remains a requirement despite the surreal comedy of the situation, offered up a fairly blunt assessment: "I have no information to support those tweets."
Well, who would've thought it?
America does not have a long history of coming to grips with a president who uses Twitter. It's a fairly recent development in our lives, and to my reckoning, it's a very bad development. A prudent statesman would do two things with a presidential twitter account: 1) never tweet and 2) delete their account. That's probably what everyone should do, with their twitter account, to be honest.
But if we're to have presidents using twitter, then Comey has offered us a useful rubric to apply to any president's 140-character offerings. Is there information to support that tweet?
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Now, Trump is actually not a wholesale disaster on Twitter. Just mostly. Still, there are times when his tweets essentially pass the "there is information to support this" test.
72% of refugees admitted into U.S. (2/3 -2/11) during COURT BREAKDOWN are from 7 countries: SYRIA, IRAQ, SOMALIA, IRAN, SUDAN, LIBYA & YEMEN
These are some good tweets. You can maybe tinker on the margins, or bring in some additional context that maybe offers a more nuanced view, but these tweets basically succeed in having information that supports them. Nice!
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But many of Trump's more famous tweets are famous precisely because there is no information to support them. Not good!
In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally
Here's one that actually went out on the official "@POTUS" account. But it's a bad and sad tweet: Only nine of the aforementioned GITMO detainees were released during "the Obama administration."
It is so pathetic that the Dems have still not approved my full Cabinet.
Senate Democrats did occasionally give Trump's Cabinet appointees static, and there were occasional delays in confirmation. But on March 3, the only Cabinet appointees who were awaiting confirmation were Trump's pick to run the Department of Agriculture, Sonny Perdue, and his Labor secretary nominee, Alexander Acosta. In both cases, the foot-dragging was entirely the White House's fault.
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If the ban were announced with a one week notice, the "bad" would rush into our country during that week. A lot of bad "dudes" out there!
No one really knows where Trump got this idea that "bad dudes" could "rush" into the country, given everything we know about the long and torturous process by which refugees and immigrants are admitted into the country. This claim was somewhat undercut by the president himself, who delayed his second attempt at a Muslim travel ban because he wanted to bask in the brief good-news cycle that followed his joint address to Congress.
Speaking of...
Only 109 people out of 325,000 were detained and held for questioning. Big problems at airports were caused by Delta computer outage,.....
Yikes! Well, look, Judge James Robart, who overturned the first travel ban, is definitely a bona-fide judge, appointed by President George W. Bush at that.
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I have tremendous respect for women and the many roles they serve that are vital to the fabric of our society and our economy.
In the above video, Admiral Rogers responds to a series of questions from Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) about whether "Russian actors" managed to change the actual vote tallies in a number of states. In all cases, Rogers said that the answer was "no." But Trump has now tweeted (again, using the official @POTUS account) that the consensus view of "the NSA and FBI" is that "Russia did not influence [the] electoral process." There is actually a lot more to the "electoral process" than mere vote tallies, and in fact, the big news made during this hearing was that Comey was, in fact pursuing an investigation into just such an investigation:
James Comey's formal confirmation of the probe on Monday follows months of news reports quoting anonymous government officials discussing the FBI-led, multi-agency probe into communications between Trump allies and Moscow in the lead-up to the 2016 election. Comey is the first to publicly confirm those reports.
"I have been authorized by the Department of Justice to confirm that the FBI, as part of our counterintelligence mission, is investigating the Russian government's efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election," Comey told the House Intelligence Committee. "That includes investigating the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government, and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia's efforts."
So, another Trump tweet falls short of the mark.
Naturally, in the end, the FBI might determine that there was not any "coordination between the [Trump] campaign and Russia's efforts." That would probably be the best possible outcome for the country, to be honest. But regardless of what Comey does from here, today he's given us something useful ― a mantra with which the press can greet every single one of Trump's twitter utterances: "Do you have any information that would support that tweet." Headlines and ledes can thus be written with that context in mind.
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Jason Linkins edits "Eat The Press" for The Huffington Post and co-hosts the HuffPost Politics podcast "So, That Happened." Subscribe here, and listen to the latest episode below.
