Category Archives: Trump

To be honest, I only read Thomas Friedman’s column if I’m really trying to procrastinate. I lost patience with him back in the “Friedman Unit” days.

But today’s column is a doozy. Maybe the best column he’s ever done. It’s called Mike Pompeo Is the Worst Secretary of State Ever and it’s got two devastating points.

The first one actually goes back to Pomepeo’s days as Director of the C.I.A:  “while Pompeo was C.I.A. director, the first foreign-planned terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11 was being organized here and abroad, and while he was secretary of state it was carried out.”

Hell, if that were me — if the first foreign-planned terrorist attack on American soil since 9/11 developed on my watch and if I had just gotten rid of the State Department inspector general without explanation — I’d also be trying to distract attention.
I mean, if it were me, I might even claim that China concocted the coronavirus in a lab in Wuhan. Wait — that’s what Pompeo did!

The second point is that, Pompeo “has been the worst secretary of state in American history, without a single diplomatic achievement. …. Pompeo’s two most notable accomplishments as secretary of state are, metaphorically speaking, shooting two of his senior State Department officials in the back.”  One was US Ambassador to the Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch . “The other was the department’s inspector general, Steve Linick, whom Pompeo got Trump to fire, reportedly because he was investigating — wait for it now — Pompeo’s own efforts to evade a congressional ban on arms sales to Saudi Arabia and for improperly asking a State Department employee to run errands for him and his wife.”

But read the whole thing.  I think it almost left scortch marks on the breakfast table.

Apparently, the official policy of the Justice Department at this moment is that if you are a Trump administration member, the following conduct is not worth prosecuting:

Mr. Flynn … was not forthcoming with Vice President Mike Pence about his conversations with Mr. Kislyak.

Mr. Flynn eventually admitted that those discussions were part of a coordinated effort by the president’s aides to make foreign policy before they were in power, which undermined the policy of President Barack Obama.

Mr. Flynn also lied in federal filings about his lobbying work for the Turkish government, court papers show.

And, furthermore, the FBI should not treat Trump administration members suspected of colluding with foreign governments as if they were — wait for it — suspects.  As the Justice Department revealed in its court filing, by asking about meetings with foreign government representatives,

the [FBI] questioning “was untethered to, and unjustified by, the F.B.I.’s counterintelligence investigation into Mr. Flynn” and that the case did not meet the legal standard that Mr. Flynn’s lies be “materially” relevant to the matter under investigation.

And let’s not even talk about Flynn’s apparent perjury in court and maybe out of it too.

Is it any surprise, therefore, that

In a possible sign of disagreement with the Justice Department decision, Brandon L. Van Grack, the department lawyer who led the prosecution of Mr. Flynn, abruptly withdrew from the case on Thursday.

Add it all to the list.

You know, on days like today, I don’t care what happened in a hallway in 1993, or whether Biden is as sharp as butter.  Maybe I’m a bad person. Or maybe there really is too much at stake.

Update: More details about just how weird and horrible today’s decision to (attempt to) abort the Flynn case — after he’d had guilty pleas accepted twice — can be found in this excellent analysis by Marcy Wheeler.