Yet, despite this dubious send-off, the "scandal" careened into the area of "secondary" offenses, such as the conversation between Trump's National Security Adviser-designate Michael Flynn and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak which was intercepted by the National Security Agency on Dec. 29, 2016.
Rather than redact Flynn's name as "minimization" procedures usually require for an American citizen who is inadvertently picked up on an intelligence wiretap, the transcript was given to the FBI which then tested Flynn's memory of the conversation and found it wanting.
The Flynn case should be of particular concern to civil libertarians because it shows how NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden's warning of a "turnkey tyranny" could work, with the Surveillance State monitoring phone calls and then finding flimsy legal excuses to justify an FBI probe -- in Flynn's case the never-tested-in-court 1799 Logan Act was used -- and then manufacturing the crime of lying to the FBI if a person's memory doesn't match with the NSA transcript.
For Flynn, who was on vacation in the Dominican Republic when Kislyak called and thus didn't have his usual support network with him, the immediate penalty for lacking total recall of the conversation was to lose his job. But there is still pressure for him to be prosecuted.
Similar demands have come from Democrats who want Attorney General Jeff Sessions to resign and face prosecution for perjury over his clumsy answer to a question about the Trump campaign's possible collusion with Russia to which Sessions claimed he had not met with Russians (although it turned out he had two conversations with Kislyak, one a group meeting with several ambassadors at the Republican National Convention and the other in his Capitol Hill office with aides present.
Again, there is no evidence that Sessions conspired with Kislyak on any plans to have the Russians undercut Hillary Clinton's campaign, an unlikely possibility in either of the two settings. But Sessions is under fire for lying about the seemingly innocuous meetings -- and there are demands that the Sessions-Kislyak contacts be investigated, too. In this Russia case, the absence of evidence appears not to be evidence for the absence of a special prosecutor.
On "Meet the Press" on Sunday, President Obama's Director of National Intelligence James Clapper also said he was unaware of evidence that the Trump campaign had colluded with the Russians.
Moderator Chuck Todd asked, "Does intelligence exist that can definitively answer the following question, whether there were improper contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian officials?"
Clapper: "We did not include any evidence in our report, and I say, 'our,' that's N.S.A., F.B.I. and C.I.A., with my office, the Director of National Intelligence, that had anything, that had any reflection of collusion between members of the Trump campaign and the Russians. There was no evidence of that included in our report."
Todd: "I understand that. But does it exist?"
Clapper: "Not to my knowledge. ... at the time [of the report in early January], we had no evidence of such collusion."
Bill Clinton Echoes
In many ways, what is happening now to Trump reminds me of the situation in 1992-93 at the start of Bill Clinton's presidency when Republicans were furious that they had lost the White House after 12 years of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. They considered Clinton an unworthy interloper and sought to cripple his presidency from the outset by pursuing one investigation after another.
President Bill Clinton, First Lady Hillary Clinton and daughter Chelsea parade down Pennsylvania Avenue on Inauguration Day, Jan. 20, 1997.
(Image by (White House photo)) Details DMCA
During the campaign, President Bush and his team even suggested that the Arkansas governor may have been a KGB mole because of a student trip to Moscow in 1970. The idea was to portray the trip to the Soviet Union as prima facie evidence of Clinton's disloyalty even though there was no evidence of any wrongdoing by Clinton.
Back then, Bill Clinton countered that smear by accusing the elder President Bush of stooping to the tactics of Sen. Joe McCarthy, the infamous Red-baiter from the 1950s. But today's Democrats apparently feel little shame in whipping up an anti-Russian hysteria and then using it to discredit Trump, who -- like Bill Clinton in 1992 -- is being forced to fend off vague accusations that he is some kind of Manchurian candidate.
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