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Go Ahead, be shocked by Trump's Russia Ties -- and Investigate

By Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on

A House Intelligence Committee hearing on Monday heard two bombshells dropped in testimony.

One, FBI Director James Comey asserted what other national intelligence leaders have now said: There is no evidence to back up President Donald Trump's outlandish -- and slanderous -- allegation that President Barack Obama ordered a "wiretapping" of Trump Tower.

Yet we see lots of defiance and no contrition coming from Team Trump on this matter. We have grown perhaps too accustomed to President Trump's casual attitude toward facts. We should be shocked and dismayed by his eagerness to believe off-the-wall allegations that he has heard on Fox News, as was the case here, yet eagerly disbelieve uncomfortable news from the nation's intelligence agencies.

Two, the bureau is investigating possible cooperation between President Trump's campaign and Russian officials to make Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton lose the election -- and help Republican nominee Trump to win.

That's a big deal. As Rep. Adam Schiff, a California Democrat and ranking committee member, observed, Russian meddling in our November election would be a serious crime and "one of the most shocking betrayals of our democracy in history."

Yet we have seen and heard so many shocks to our political norms with the rise of President Trump, who still apparently believes -- among other fables -- that he had a million-and-a-half people at his inauguration ceremony, that we run the risk in this instance of failure to be shocked enough.

 

Fox News benched its senior judicial analyst Andrew Napolitano, a former New Jersey Superior Court judge, amid backlash over his unfounded and now-discredited allegations that British intelligence last fall provided then-President Obama wiretapped conversations from Trump Tower, according to the Los Angeles Times. "Fox News knows of no evidence of any kind that the now-president of the United States was surveilled at any time, in any way," Fox News anchor Shepard Smith told viewers Friday.

Neither, Director Comey told Congress, did the FBI. But Comey did confirm long-running media reports that the FBI has been investigating possible coordination by the Trump campaign with dedicated and dangerous Russian adversaries.

Yet Chairman Devin Nunes of California and the Grand Old Party's other members on the Intelligence Committee sounded much less interested in Russia's actions than with exposing the leakers and journalists who enabled us, the public, to learn about those actions.

Compared to the Benghazi investigation, which House Republicans did not want to let go, the Russia mystery is one the GOP doesn't seem to want to touch.

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(c) 2017 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

 

 

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