Tag: Trump has to lie to be re-elected

Obamagate’ is fake — the real scandal is what happened to Hillary Clinton

AlterNet logoPoliticized investigations, interference in elections, and abusive targeting by law enforcement are all the makings of a juicy political scandal. And President Donald Trump would like us to believe that such a scandal, with each of these components, is real and — even if he can’t name any crime that might have been committed — directed at him. That’s why he has promoted the lazy moniker “Obamagate,” an all-encompassing term for the vague allegations of wrongdoing surrounding the conduct of the previous administration and the investigators probing the ties between his campaign and the Kremlin’s interference in the 2016 election.

On Friday, another arm of the Trump administration revealed yet another inquiry into the “Obamagate” haze. FBI Director Christopher Wray, apparently under pressure from the president himself, has opened an internal review of the handling of the case of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.

But this Trump-driven obsession has thus far proved quite wide of the mark. The only serious wrongdoing uncovered came in the applications for surveillance of Carter Page, who had a low-level and short-lived position advising the Trump campaign. The FBI had legitimate reason to be suspicious of Page — he had previously been the subject of recruitment efforts by Russian intelligence, and some of his ties to Moscow remain unexplained — but DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz found that officials made voluminous errors when applying to surveil him. Yet Horowitz also found there was no indication of political bias against Page in the decision-making, and that the investigation of the Trump campaign in 2016 more broadly was properly predicated. What errors there were, he found, often stemmed from lack of proper oversight; further work from Horowitz has indicated that the errors in the Page surveillance may be common in the FBI’s conduct, raising yet more troubling questions. Continue reading.

FBI director stuck in the middle with ‘Obamagate’

The Hill logoFBI Director Christopher Wray is sitting in an increasingly hot seat as Republicans and the White House press forward with investigations into what President Trump is calling “Obamagate.”

Congressional Republicans are pressing Wray to provide more information after recently released FBI field notes showed officials debating how to handle the case against former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

The controversy over the notes contributed to Attorney General William Barr’s contentious decision to drop charges against Flynn, despite his guilty plea. Continue reading.

Acting DNI Deploys Pseudo-Document To Promote ‘Obamagate’ Melodrama

Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell, a former Fox News contributor and Republican Party stalwart who was appointed to lead the U.S. intelligence community because of his loyalty to President Donald Trump, provided a document of his own devising to Congress on Wednesday. It promptly leaked to the press. Republicans, including Trump himself, immediately seized on the content in the document as evidence of vast Obama administration malfeasance. Fox hosts spent the next two days incessantly declaring that it vindicated their conspiracy theories, turning their attention away from the coronavirus pandemic. And more credible media outlets, buffeted by the partisan claims, responded with a flurry of stories, at times failing to properly contextualize the story.

Trumpists have declared Grenell’s document a smoking gun showing that disgraced former Trump national security advisor Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty for lying to the FBI about his calls with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, was a victim of an Obama administration conspiracy, and Fox is hyping that narrative with wall-to-wall coverage. In reality, the document provides almost no information whatsoever. It is simply a list of senior Obama administration officials who received Flynn’s name after they followed the National Security Agency’s standard process and asked the agency to unmask the identity of an individual generically referenced in an NSA report they were authorized to read. It does nothing to establish that any of the individuals named acted improperly in any way — or even how many unmaskings were related to the Kislyak calls.

We’ve seen misinformation campaigns, where false or deceptive information is distributed, and disinformation campaigns, when that distribution is done with the full knowledge of its inaccuracy. Grenell is engaged in a noninformation campaign. He deliberately crafted and propagated a data point so vague that it is virtually meaningless on its own. But pro-Trump partisans — particularly at Fox — have easily picked up, misread (deliberately or not), and promoted the point, aligining it with their wild assumptions. Those furious misinterpretations have in turn spurred attention from the mainstream press, driving the conspiratorial thinking into the broader public. Continue reading.

Prescription For A Sick Country

Before June 1, we will almost certainly have lost 100,000 Americans to the coronavirus, along with 25 million jobs. Without powerful government action, this national catastrophe, unlike anything seen here for a hundred years, will continue to ravage the United States. And there is every reason to fear that we will see yet more pandemic disease as this century unfolds.

Yet there is still no sign that the Trump administration is prepared to act with the determination, skill and urgency that the hour demands. Instead, the president consistently demonstrates his mental and moral unfitness to lead — as he did again this week when he idiotically declared that we have so many COVID-19 cases because we have done so many tests.

Which is why perhaps the world’s most respected medical journal has now prescribed a first step toward restoring America’s health. Continue reading.

Trump touts accelerated push on coronavirus vaccines

The Hill logoPresident Trump on Friday unveiled the team leading a federal effort that he hopes will produce a coronavirus vaccine by the end of the year, an accelerated timeline that has been met with skepticism from health experts.

“When I say quickly, we’re looking to get it by the end of the year if we can, maybe before,” Trump said in remarks from the White House Rose Garden, officially laying out the objectives of “Operation Warp Speed,” a public-private partnership to accelerate the development of a vaccine for the novel coronavirus.

Trump described the project as “a massive scientific industrial and logistical endeavor unlike anything our country has seen since the Manhattan Project.” He said the project would begin to manufacture vaccines as they go through trials so that a proven vaccine would be ready to distribute once trials are completed. Continue reading.

What is ‘Obamagate,’ anyway? And how does it involve Michael Flynn?

The unmasking battle over Flynn may help explain the nebulous alleged scandal, for which Trump was unable to name any specific crimes this week.

This past week, President Trump threw out a major, unfounded allegation out there about former president Barack Obama without much explanation of what he’s actually alleging. The gist of the allegation is that before he left office, Obama’s administration committed some sort of crime to undermine Trump’s presidency. #Obamagate, he called it, in a tweet on Mother’s Day and several since.

Donald J. Trump

✔@realDonaldTrump

He got caught, OBAMAGATE! https://twitter.com/mikandynothem/status/1259556010408075264 …

Michael Nöthem@mikandynothem

Barack Hussain Obama is the first Ex-President to ever speak against his successor, which was long tradition of decorum and decency.
Should anyone really be surprised?#TrumpsJealousOfObama? I SERIOUSLY doubt it…#ObamaGate #MAGA#KAG #FoxNews

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It seems Trump is keeping his allegation intentionally vague. “You know what the crime is,” he said Monday when asked by reporters what he meant and what specific crimes he was alleging. Pressed, Trump was unable to name any.

But we got some clues on Wednesday that it may be connected to two things close to Trump’s heart:

  1. Trump’s full-scale effort to undermine the Russia investigation that dominated nearly the first two years of his presidency and swept up many of his top aides, including former national security adviser Michael Flynn.
  2. Trump’s reelection efforts

Trump Ad’s Misleading Use of CNN Interview

A Trump campaign ad misleadingly edits a CNN interview to suggest 2 million people would have died from the novel coronavirus were it not for President Donald Trump’s China travel restrictions.

In the one-minute ad, Wolf Blitzer, anchor of CNN’s “The Situation Room,” is heard asking chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta, “Is it accurate that if these steps had not been put in place … it could’ve been 2 million people dead here in the United States?” While Blitzer speaks, the ad shows images of an Air China plane and signs saying airline flights had been canceled. “Yes,” Gupta is shown saying.

The impression is that Trump’s travel restrictions, which went into effect Feb. 2, were responsible for saving those lives. Continue reading.

Trump’s comments on Democrats and ‘late-term abortion’

Washington Post logo“Virtually every Democrat candidate has declared their unlimited support for extreme late-term abortion, ripping babies straight from the mother’s womb, right up until the very moment of birth.”

— President Trump, at a campaign rally in Charlotte, March 2, 2020

Trump has repeated this fiery claim dozens of times in campaign rallies, speeches and tweets. The wording never changes. The verb is always “rip.” The womb is always mentioned. He never leaves out the “moment of birth.”

We keep adding it to our database of everything false or misleading from Trump, but the claim is so visceral and deceptive that it deserves its own fact check.

The Facts

Most abortions are performed in the earlier stages of pregnancy. About 1 percent happen after the fetus reaches the point of viability. In short, the president is describing something that rarely happens and that no Democrat is calling for anyway. Continue reading.