Trump the lying despot
Stuff reports:
US President Donald Trump, in an apparent warning to his fired FBI director, has said James Comey had better hope there are no “tapes” of their conversations.
Trump’s tweet came the morning after he asserted Comey had told him three times that he wasn’t under FBI investigation.
So Trump fired the FBI Director because of the Russia investigation. He admitted this in an interview contradicting all his staff who had been told to blame it on the Clinton investigation.
Comey has been professional and discrete, refusing to comment. Yet Trump the despot now threatens him with secret tapes.
If Trump wasn’t so incompetent, he would be dangerous.
Trump told NBC he had planned to fire Comey all along, regardless of whether top Justice Department officials recommended the stunning step.
The White House initially cited a US Justice Department memo criticising Comey’s handling of last year’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails as the impetus for Trump’s decision. But Trump on Thursday acknowledged for the first time that the Russia investigation – which he dismissed as a “made-up story” – was also on his mind as he ousted the man overseeing the probe.
The shifting accounts of the decision to fire Comey, whom Trump derided as a “showboat” and “grandstander”, added to a mounting sense of uncertainty and chaos in the West Wing, as aides scrambled to get their stories straight and appease an angry president. Not even US Vice President Mike Pence was spared the embarrassment of having told a version of events that was later discredited by Trump.
I don’t think Trump did collude with Russia. But having the President sack the FBI Director because he was sick of headlines about the investigation (ironically creating many mroe headlines) is an awful precedent.
Also reported:
US President Donald Trump has threatened to end White House press briefings, arguing that “it is not possible” for his staff to speak with “perfect accuracy” to the American public.
Trump’s comments come after his description of his decision to fire FBI director James B. Comey in an NBC News interview on Thursday [Friday NZ Time] flatly contradicted the accounts provided earlier by White House officials, including Vice President Mike Pence, exposing their explanations as misleading and in some cases false.
In a pair of tweets on Friday, Trump suggested he might do away with the daily press briefings at the White House and instead have his spokesmen communicate to the public only via “written responses”.
It certainly is not possible for his staff to speak with perfect accuracy when the President either lies to his staff or tells his staff to lie on his behalf.