The Comey testimony will be riveting for what he says and of course for what he doesn’t say. The stage is set for him to climb out of his mud pit, the one he threw Hillary into while soiling himself. That Comey still has his job is remarkable. The only FBI director in modern American history to overtly influence an American Presidential election will be testifying in front of a Congressional committee while the Department of Justice IG is supposedly investigating him. The chief investigator under investigation as he lays out elements of the investigation. This is Washington but it sounds like Moscow, except in Putin’s village Comey’s detractors would have fallen to the wayside with sudden organ failure. ( Never mind that seven Russians in delicate jobs have been murdered or died suddenly since the Christopher Steele dossier surfaced).
In an FBI where its director can “lose control” of the New York field office and fall victim to the cult of Giuliani, how is one to believe that he has control of very much, if not everything. How sturdy are the marble columns and how balanced are the scales of justice as they support and serve a man who prosecuted Marc Rich, worked in Ken Starr’s witch hunt factory and hid in the electoral bushes until the last minute so he could rush out and throw Hillary under the bus ?
Today we get a glimpse. The real story will unfold in the classified briefing, but in a city where trust has no good name even that is a parlor game. The vaunted director of the FBI can’t tell the gang of eight lest they go Jason Chaffetz on him and trigger strategic and tactical leaks, today’s weapons of choice.
Trump has done everything in his power to sidetrack the investigations coming out of the so-called intelligence agencies, law enforcement and in Congress. He cooked up the Big Lie about Obama to distract everyone and gave red necks and big bellied people across all red state America a new crutch to prop up their already baked notions that those elitists in Washingont are out to destroy their man from Manhattan before he can save them from the rubble of Wall Street and anything with the word global in it.
All Comey has to do is say “we can find no evidence” on the matter of the Big Lie and he has given the Democrats the lead before the first TV time out. “Yep, Big Jim is playing the game the right way,” folks will say quietly. Then we’ll hear lots about 10,000 paid Russian internet trollers, hackers and manipulators who savaged the feckless Democrats and sidestep the “opposition research” done by MI-6 because “we can’t get into that in a public forum Mr. Chairman” and the score will be tied going into the commercial break, dizzy from tales of computer back doors and server farms in Siberia.
Comey may even bring some bar charts and pie charts and sit beside some big thick reports that show how hard he’s been working overtime. Carter Page will watch ever so closely as will Roger Stone and Paul Manafort – and Steve Bannon – plus the Trump boys and gals as they individually and collectively try to gauge who is in trouble, who needs a lawyer and who needs a better story. Back in Nevada, Harry Reid will punch a hole in his nice den wall, maybe two.
Some genius will come out and ask, “what did the President know and when did he know it?” And therein lies the game. The four men under arrest in Russia and the overlapping four men indicted here for the massive Yahoo hack will smirk at all of this drama and wonder just how stupid the Americans really are.
Somewhere in Washington Jeff Sessions will take a phone call and say quietly into the phone, “well you know I can’t dirty my hands with any of that but thanks for the call.” Click. And the person on the other end of that real or implied conversation will know whether or not to start measuring Page and Stone for new striped suits. They’ll let the Ukrainians spend the next five years trying to prosecute Manafort and the US Justice Department will refuse all extradition requests after he’s indicted for crimes against their state. Walk off to prison quietly, Page and Stone will be told and a Presidential pardon and $10 Million will soften the blow when all of this dies down.
Big Jim will have done the job, on the Russian interference but mostly on the American people. Trump will spend the next three years gutting our country and working on his orange skin and orange hair In Mar-a-largo all the while narrowly dodging the orange suit he so richly deserves.
Oh there are plausible variations to all of this, about a dozen of them. There’s even one where Comey and Company already have The Donald on his way to an arraignment and the question is how many will join him in the perp walk. Only then does Comey get to balance the scales and the ledgers. The bookies in Britain probably have that at about 1000 to 1 against.
There will be no balanced budget. More than 20 million will lose their health care. The environment will once again be an industrial dumping ground. The military will get to be 16 times stronger instead of a measly 15 times stronger than the next force on earth. Tillerson will get his arctic oil deal and the sanctions on Vlad the Impaler will slowly disintegrate. And Paul Ryan will make America great again, he and his buddy Mitch, by stopping that reckless infrastructure bill from growing the deficit. After all, they are fiscal conservatives. The new wall will look better than the old wall no more, and no less illegals will come in as more go out via Canada or any other sane country that values hard work, courage and ambition.
The red state stiffs who put Trump in office will fatten up on bowls of bluster until 2020 when the Big Trump Train will crush Elizabeth Warren beneath its tracks however many months before we slip into a recession and in 2024 a Democrat will soak up plenty of angry votes from states red and blue and walk into the White House looking for more mops, soap and a hope that Americans, not a President, will make us feel great again.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/fbi-director-to-testify-on-russian-interference-in-the-presidential-election/2017/03/20/cdea86ca-0ce2-11e7-9d5a-a83e627dc120_story.html?hpid=hp_rhp-top-table-main_fbidirector-750a%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.193758e0c2f2