It’s easy to figure out what President Trump is attempting to do to his opponents by parsing his words carefully. Trump has a fairly simple formula — he does whatever he is accusing his opponents of doing.
Case in point: the “Witch Hunt” that he accuses anyone investigating any of his actions of waging against him.
With Trump’s decision to sic his compliant attack dog Attorney General William Barr on the entire U.S. intelligence community to investigate the origins of the probe into his own campaign’s links to Russia — placing the confidentiality of American intelligence sources and methods in grave peril — the president has begun a unjustified and vindictive campaign against the FBI, the CIA, and the other agencies that help protect America against foreign attacks and internal treason.
In giving Barr unprecedented powers to declassify documents that could compromise the safety of informants working for our intelligence agencies, Trump has made it clear that he has already determined that crimes have been committed and where the guilt lies — anywhere but with himself, clearly.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the president’s nominal Press Secretary — if you could call someone who’s spent more time shilling for Trump on Fox News than holding press briefings a press secretary — ventured to the studios of another media outlet today to confirm that Trump has already prejudged the outcome of Barr’s investigation.
Appearing on NBC‘s Meet The Press this morning, Sanders repeated the lies that the president used to excuse his extraordinary attack on our law enforcement and intelligence gathering branches of government.
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Pointing to a tweet from President Trump that definitively claimed that his campaign was spied on and that that meant the FBI was guilty of “TREASON”, Meet The Press host Chuck Todd asked the press secretary why Trump would order the attorney general to investigate the issue when:
“he’s already come to a conclusion, already decided what the penalties should be, and has already determined what the jail sentences should be. Isn’t this the president playing judge and jury and putting his thumb on the scale here for whatever investigation he claims he wants Mr. Barr to do?”
Todd continued questioning whether President Trump would accept a conclusion from Barr’s investigation that determined that the investigating agencies acted legally and properly at all times during their investigation.
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Sanders reply proved his point.
“We already know that there was an outrageous amount of corruption that took place at the F.B.I. They leaked information. They lied. They were specifically working trying to take down the president, trying to hurt the president,” Sanders told Todd.
“We’ll leave the final call up to the attorney general and he’ll get to the bottom of it. But we think Americans deserve the truth. The president’s asked for that. And we should expect nothing less,” the press secretary continued.
With such an obvious bias in the reasons for launching an investigation designed to distract the public from Trump’s own crimes of obstruction — as detailed extensively in the Mueller report — the Meet the Press host felt the need to question Sanders again about the president’s prejudice in a probe that seems to have a predetermined outcome.
“It doesn’t sound like you want him to do his job,” Todd saidd, speaking about Barr.
“Chuck, that’s the reason that he’s granted the attorney general the authority to declassify that information, to look at all the documents necessary is so that we can get to the very bottom of what happened,” Sanders replied.
“Once again, we already know about some wrongdoing. The president’s not wrong in that. But he wants to know everything that happened and how far and how wide it went.”
The imaginary “wrongdoing” that Sanders refers to is the fact that some of the FBI agents involved in the initial stages of the investigation into the Trump campaign’s suspicious links to Moscow dared to discuss their legitimately-held political opinions with each other.
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While the president and his eager Republican toadies in Congress have yet to provide any evidence of those opinions leading to any flaws in the work or finding of those agents in regards to their investigatory work, the fact that Trump is now exemplifying the exact bias that he is accusing these former FBI agents of having actually proves that either their actions in the inquiry were legitimate or that Trump’s current probe is illegitimate.
You can watch Sarah Huckabee Sanders dissembling on NBC‘s Meet The Press in the video excerpt below.
WATCH: Would Trump accept exoneration if that's what Barr finds? #MTP #IfitsSunday@presssec: "I think you're trying to muddy the waters too much here. We already know there was wrongdoing." @chucktodd: "I think what's rich is who's muddying waters." pic.twitter.com/tN7j3S85Nv
— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) May 26, 2019
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Original reporting by Chris Moran at Newsweek and by Chris Mills Rodrigo at The Hill.
