When and Why Did the FBI Start Investigating Candidate Trump?

Until this month, the official story was that the FBI began their investigation of the Trump campaign in the Fall of 2016 after John McCain turned over the Steele Dossier to them. That timeline changed considerably with the revelation of Operation Crossfire Hurricane. Now it's being alleged that the FBI started investigating the Trump campaign much earlier.

Under the new timeline, Trump was under pressure from the Washington Post's endorsement panel to name some foreign policy advisors. The seasoned professionals were boycotting Trump so he had to settle for 3rd string back-benchers - people who had done business overseas. That set off alarms because at least two of these advisors "had ties with Russia".

Personally, I think it went back even further. Fairly early in 2016, Vladimir Putin was asked about Trump and said that he was clever (later translations say that he may only have called Trump colorful). Reporters demanded that Trump repudiate Putin, something that Trump's ego was not going to allow. Instead Trump accepted the compliment and said a couple of complimentary things about Putin. The pundits went crazy insisting that this somehow proved that Trump was Putin's puppet and that Trump was planning on overthrowing the US government and installing himself as an authoritarian leader.

Keep in mind that no one batted an eye when SoS Clinton met with Russia to reset relations or when POTUS Obama did his own reset. Or when Obama premised flexibility after the next election to the Russian ambassador over a hot mic Or when Obama made fun of Romney for calling Russia our biggest geo-political rival.

It's been pretty well established that the FBI and Justice Department were being run by Obama loyalists. I'm guessing that they were among those never-Trumpers who believed that Trump was colluding with Putin and looking for any excuse to open an investigation. Then Trump added some people with "ties to the Kremlin" to his advisors. Russia is pay-to-play. Anyone doing business there has ties with the Kremlin and these advisors had done nothing illegal. But that's all the excuse the FBI needed.

The New York Times article that broke the store about Operation Crossfire Hurricane admitted that the FBI considered quietly meeting with the Trump campaign. They decided against it. Why? Because they wanted to catch the Trump campaign doing something with the Russians.

In a Sunday morning news show, Comey claimed that it was all about Russia but why have FBI informants meet with the Trump campaign if things were as innocent as Comey claimed (and remember that Comey lied under oath to Congress about wiretapping so he is not a reliable source).

I think that rather than the FBI investigating the Russians and their connections with Trump, they were investigating Trump and his connections with Russia. The focus of the investigation was not Russia, it was Trump.

And that's why it's a scandal.

Trump and North Korea

Earlier this week North Korea reacted to statements by Vice President Pence about pursuing a Libyan model for denuclearization and to joint military maneuvers with South Korea. They threatened to break off talks and to respond with force.

On Thursday, President Trump made his own response by cancelling the summit and reminding that we can also use force.

Naturally the pundits went crazy. In the Washington Post's afternoon email summary, there was an editorial plus columns by five columnists on what a poor negotiator Trump is. By the end of the day, North Korea released a statement that they are still willing to talk.

The irony here is that most of these same pundits had been worried that Trump was too caught up with the idea of winning a Nobel Prize and wanted the summit too much. They insisted that North Korea's Kim would be able to take advantage of Trump.

Trump came to office with the reputation of being a master negotiator and he is showing it here. He's proving that he's willing to walk away from a bad deal, or from someone who is unwilling to deal. That's important with North Korea. They've gotten the better of the US in previous negotiations.

It's also not as unusual as the pundits claim. Reagan walked away from a deal with the USSR only to have them restart negotiations. During negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, the head of the PLO, Yasser Arafat constantly walked out, forcing Secretary of State Madeline Albright to run after him in high heels.

It's a nice change from President Obama's approach to Iran. It was obvious from the start that he wanted a deal more than they did and they used that to negotiate a bad deal.

In reality, the biggest obstacle to an agreement with North Korea is the actions of President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton. They are also the reason that mentions of Libya set off warnings from North Korea.

During the George W. Bush administration and after the overthrow of Iraq, Libya voluntarily gave up its nuclear program in exchange for promises of normalized relations.

That lasted until the next American administration and the Arab Spring. A group of Islamists associated with the Arab Brotherhood met with Hillary Clinton and convinced her that they could be trusted to run Libya. She in turn convinced Obama and the US joined the effort to overthrow the Libyan government.

Pundits have complained that Trump announcing the Iran agreement will hurt negotiations with North Korea but Libya is a much bigger issue. We are reapplying sanctions on Iran because they are not in compliance with the agreement.

But we overthrew Libya after they gave up their nuclear program. The reason we gave, that we were protecting women and children refugees, was a lie. We were protecting Islamic rebels. But we'd almost certainly left Libya alone if they were nuclear-armed.

So now Trump has to convince Kim that he will be safe from the US, even after the next change of administrations. That's going to be far more difficult than it would have been if we'd stayed out of Libya. But I do think that the Trump administration is the best equipped for the job in a generation.

Who Moved?

A recent article in the Washington Post examines how whites have left the Democratic Party in favor of the Republicans. It attributes a lot of this movement to polarization within the parties. Southern conservatives used to be welcome in the Democratic party but these days they align with the Republicans. The same is true in reverse with Northern intellectuals who have left the Republicans to become Democrats. All of this is well and good, but I take issue with one phrase, "As most whites shift rightward, they perceive the Democratic Party to be shifting leftward".

I'm continually amazed that anyone can fail to see how far the Democratic Party has moved in the last decade. Here are some examples:

• In 2008, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were both against gay marriage.
• Both candidates were for a moderate rise in the minimum wage.
• Clinton was running as a return to her husband's administration and policies.
• Obama made fun of Clinton's health care plan because it included an individual mandate.

How have things changed since then?

• No one who is against gay marriage is allowed in the Democratic Party.
• There is a vocal wing in the party for raising the minimum wage to $15/hour - more than doubling it.
• in 2016 Bernie Sanders was mainly running against the major achievements of Bill Clinton
• ObamaCare had an individual mandate.
• There is a vocal wing in the party that is for Medicare for all and free collage
• A socialist made a strong challenge to Hillary Clinton. Granted he calls himself a "democratic socialist" but he also took his honeymoon in Soviet Moscow
• A number of honest-to-god Marxists won primaries
• A majority of Democrats distrust capitalism and would prefer socialism
  

Serious, socialists and Marxists are now accepted in the Democratic Party and people are still saying that the shift is only perceived?

The Cynical Reason the Santa Fe Shooting Won't Get as Much Press as the Stoneman Dougals Shooting

On May 18th, a student in Santa Fe, Texas killed 10 students and injured another 10. This was the deadliest school shooting since the Valentine's day shooting at Stoneman Douglas, Florida. The Stoneman Douglas shooting led to nationwide school walkouts and a massive protest in Washington DC. I'm going to go out on a limb and predict that none of that will happen with the Santa Fe shooting.

My reasoning is that the Stoneman Douglas shooting was politically beneficial to the Democrats and the gun control crowd (which has a huge overlap). The gun used in the Florida shooting was an "assault weapon" and some of the survivors from the shooting immediately blamed Republicans and the NRA for not banning that class of gun. This was magical thinking - the insistence that the shooting would not have happened if only the shooter had been denied a particular class of weapon.

Democrats and anti-gun activists rallied in the hope that this tragedy would add to the predicted "blue wave". The NRA was condemned as a near-terrorist organization and Democrats began running on an anti-gun platform for the first time in a generation.

But the Texas shooter changed all that. he used a shotgun and a 38-special revolver. None of the "common sense gun control" provisions being demanded would have touched these weapons. An old-fashioned six-shooter does not have a high-capacity magazine. I haven't heard any details about the shotgun but they seldom hold more than five or six shots.

These are weapons that date back to the 19th century. All of the arguments about military-style weapons being too dangerous for civilians evaporate when presented with this shooting. The only argument left is a total ban on all guns. That moves well beyond what's reasonable.

A second reason that we will not see a repeat of the activism from the Florida shooting is the counter-protest. The NRA got a huge membership and fund-raising bonus from all of the anti-NRA activism. This is important because gun owners are more motivated to vote on a single issue than non-gun owners. Having someone propose taking your property away is a concrete action. Wanting to take away someone else's property is abstract. Concrete beats abstract in the polls. This will be even more urgent if Democrats propose going after revolvers and shotguns.

So, there will be no mass nationwide demonstrations, no marches on Washington, no student activists.

A few thoughts about the shootings in general. In Texas, things worked as they should - the shooter was stopped by the school safety officer. There was no indication that the police were cowering outside the school until the shooting ended.

In both cased plus Sandy Hook, the shooters got their weapons through their parents. The Florida shooter's mother bought him his AR-15 and at least one pistol because he was on the school shooting team. The Santa Fe and Sandy Hook shooters took their parents' guns. People were referring to the Bushmaster rifle the Sandy Hook shooter used as the "mass murderer's weapon of choice" but it wasn't. It was the gun his mother used for target practice. The lesson here is that when a parent owns weapons then provisions need to be made to keep those weapons out of the hands of disturbed teenagers.

The Santa Fe shooter was apparently emulating the Columbine killers. He wore a black trench coat and had some bombs. Initial reports are that the bombs were dummies but that still shows the futility of trusting in gun control to stop school killings. Disturbed teems will find a way.  Note: Columbine was supposed to be a bombing. The killers started shooting after their bomb failed to explode. And they were not wearing black trench coats during the shooting. They weren't even part of the "Trench Coat Mafia".

Questions for Comey

I doubt that I'll ever get to ask former FBI Directory Comey any questions but there are a few I'd love to ask:

1) You said that you announced that the investigation into Hillary Clinton's email server was reopened because you feared that it would cast aspersions on her presidency if people found out after the election that an active investigation had been kept secret. You believed the polls showing that Clinton was going to win and worried that the news would affect the legitimacy of her presidency.

However, informing President-elect Trump about the Pee Tape provided a "news hook" and allowed the media to report on the Steele Dossier. This undercut the legitimacy of Trump's presidency. If you were dispassionately serving the office of the President then why didn't you find some way to brief Trump on the dossier without undercutting his legitimacy? Or were you hoping to undercut him?

2) You said that you didn't want the FBI to investigate the Pee Tape because you didn't want it to go on record that the President was being investigated. However, the press was reporting that the President was being investigated for collusion with Russia. One of the reasons that the President fired you was that you refused to publicly state that the President was not under investigation.

Given that you were willing to let the press claim that the President was under investigation when he was not, why were you so worried about the harm it would do him if an actual investigation was opened? If it is harmful to the country for people to hear that the President is under investigation then why didn't you shoot down the various rumors? And if it is alright then why not open an investigation as the President asked you to do several times?

3) Given that the FBI was using the Steele Dossier to spy on the President Elect's staff, why were you so uninterested in the origins of the information? To this day you seem to be surprisingly ignorant about who paid for what. Specifically, Republicans paid Fusion for opposition research but Steele was not involved until the Clinton campaign was paying the bills.

4) As soon as you met Donald Trump for the first time you decided that you needed to memorialize all meetings with him. What was the reason for this? Your first meeting was when you briefed him on the Pee Tape. You say that he praised you earlier and asked you to stay on and that he seemed shocked by the tape. Outside of passing judgement on the state of his marriage, what happened that made you decide to memorialize this meeting? Or are you rationalizing partisan dislike for the President-Elect? Had you already judged him based on campaign material and the Access Hollywood tape?