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Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse
- Thread starter CdnGuy
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"There can be no question that Cohen testified that he engaged in a criminal conspiracy with Trump, Trump Jr., and Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg. How in the heck is this not huge news?"
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Trump may not have thought this one through
Note that Trump took this step way back in May 2018, long before Democrats took control of the House. At that time, the notion that Congress might exercise real oversight on Trump was probably very far from his mind.
In this case, we’re talking about an act of astonishing corruption and recklessness — with an unusual capacity for doing Trump political damage. Just to be very clear, the Times report notes that intelligence officials didn’t want to grant Kushner top-secret security clearance.
It’s not entirely clear why this was so — the Times says officials had concerns about contacts between Kushner’s and his family’s business ties to foreign investors and governors. But the mere fact that intelligence officials were concerned itself will now invite intensified scrutiny from House Democrats. That will throw Trump’s decision to override those officials into sharper relief.
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As Hennessey said, the Oversight Committee should subpoena the Kelly memo in particular, because it is focused on detailing how he was “ordered” to grant Kushner the security clearance. Kelly probably wrote this memo precisely because he wanted to create a “paper trail,” Hennessey noted.
“Kelly didn’t just decide to create a contemporaneous memo like this for his own records,” Hennessey told me, adding that he might have been “motivated by an underlying fear that Kushner somehow presents a national security threat.” Hennessey added that this should lead Democrats to treat this as an “urgent” oversight matter, including subpoenaing the document to “share it with the public.”
To be sure, the White House will fight hard against such a release, invoking executive privilege and national security. “But these committees were set up to be able to review sensitive documents, and they’ve got all kinds of ways to do that,” Bookbinder said.
Trump rage-tweeted a command Friday morning that Congress must find ways of discrediting the devastating testimony offered by his former lawyer Michael Cohen, suggesting Trump still inhabits a mental universe where the House functions as his 24/7 bodyguard against accountability. But now that Democrats control the House, some of the things Trump did during his first two blissful oversight-free years may be transforming into ticking time bombs.
