Listen to “Dems Push to Nix ICE, Geithner Tied to Predatory Loans, Dems Advocate Court Packing” on Spreaker.
Jim Geraghty of National Review and Greg Corombos of Radio America tear apart the progressive left’s half-baked demand to abolish ICE. They also comment on the irony that a former Obama official who lashed out against loan sharks is now financing loan sharks. They also wonder why the Democrats want to add more seats to the Supreme Court while they are still out of power.
David French of National Review and Chad Benson of Radio America fill in for Jim Geraghty and Greg Corombos. They look at a U.S. district court decision that found the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to be unconstitutional in structure. They commend Justice Roberts for joining the four liberal justices to protect Americans’ civil liberties from warrantless cell phone searches. They also consider the affects of incessant and inappropriate protesting. And they compare Trump’s new family detention policy to Obama’s, finding a difference only in outrage from activists and the media.
Jim Geraghty of National Review and Greg Corombos of Radio America welcome the news that outspoken liberal Rep. Keith Ellison is leaving the House of Representatives to run for statewide office in Minnesota, a venture they sincerely hope ends in failure. They also lament that Medicare and Social Security are getting closer to insolvency and neither lawmakers nor most Americans seem all that concerned about it. They also highlight yet another lie perpetrated by the Obama administration in getting the Iran nuclear deal done, this time allowing Iran access to U.S. banks while adamantly telling lawmakers it would not do so.
The U.S. Army is rescinding its recently announced policy of allowing people with a history of mental illness to get waivers in order to serve in our military, a welcome move but one that should never have been necessary according to a former U.S. Army special forces commander.
Earlier this week, the Army announced it instituted a policy in August that allows waivers to be issued so that potential recruits could circumvent the ban on service members with a history of mental illnesses ranging from bipolar disorder to depression to self-mutilation and alcohol or drug abuse. The Army admitted the move was designed to boost sagging recruiting numbers.
On Wednesday, U.S. Army Chief of Staff Mark Milley said the Army is reversing course. Milley says the policy on waivers was never actually implemented but was being debates with the Army’s leadership.
Retired U.S. Army Lt. General William “Jerry” Boykin, who spent most of his career in special forces, says the Army is making the right call after entertaining a terrible idea.
“I will take the chief of staff of the Army’s word for the fact that it was still being studied but it’s disturbing that we’re even studying this,” said Boykin, who believes the Army’s sudden shift is due more to public relations than because it believes this was a terrible idea.
“I think they were unprepared for the blowback. I’m appalled that in a world that’s so transparent today you’d think you could do something like this and that this is not going to be a major story,” said Boykin.
He says the idea of allowing people with mental illness to serve in combat arms has never been embraced even when manpower was desperately needed.
“We didn’t even do this in Vietnam,” said Boykin, who says the biggest shift in standards was allowing GED recipients to serve rather than insist upon high school graduates.
“This is as low as the Army has ever dropped in terms of a lack of focus on readiness and quality people,” said Boykin. “It’s hard to brag that we have the highest quality people that we’ve ever had in our military – which our Army does regularly – and then look at the fact that we’re bringing people in that have a history of self-mutilation.”
Boykin says combat already takes a great toll on the mental health of our soldiers and that putting people with mental health problems into the fray is a recipe for disaster.
“Combat itself is probably the most stressful thing that a human can do. It;s not just the fear associated with it but it’s the long-term effects of seeing people that you care about die and be wounded in severe ways. That marks you.
“That has an effect on an individual that is different for each individual but ultimately becomes a very emotional thing. To bring people in that are already struggling is just insanity. It makes no sense,” said Boykin.
Boykin says the very top of our military’s chain of command can and must do better.
“I’m disappointed in the leadership of our military. Also, our president needs to step in and say, ‘Stop this nonsense. We’re not going to do this. We’ll do whatever we have to do to recruit a professional Army but we’re not going to do this nonsense,” said Boykin, who adds there is no way recruiters could weed out all the people with mental health issues who might pose a threat to themselves or members of their units.
One reason the military brass did not immediately kill the waivers idea is because they wouldn’t be tasked with dealing with problem recruits or the punishments related to their conduct.
A retired senior non-commissioned officer who served in Operations Desert Storm, Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom who prefers to remain anonymous says it’s young officers and enlisted men who would be tasked with diagnosing these issues.
“The lowest level leadership are corporals, SGTs, SSGs, SFCs, lieutenants. All guys 18-24 years old, have no inkling how to spot a potential suicide or mass shooter. They’re also the guys that the command is going to hang out to dry if something happens for being “poor leaders” and not spotting something in time,” the Army veteran said.
He also says there is no protocol for dealing with mental health issues once a person is in the service.
“The low level leadership hasn’t been trained to deal with these people. There is “suicide prevention training” which is a joke, but it’s more oriented towards a normal guy that’s had too many deployments, combat stress or family issues – it’s not tailored at all to somebody that already mentally ill,” he said.
Boykin also also appalled that at the very time when mental health problems tend to be an issue in many mass shooters, yet the Army either decided or was close to deciding to give guns to people with some of those same diagnoses.
Boykin also says this slide in standards is an ongoing symptom of the way the Obama administration treated the military.
“It is a reflection of eight years under a commander-in-chief who paid no attention whatsoever to readiness of our military. That’s why you’re having trouble recruiting,” said Boykin.
“It’s because moms and dads during those eight years, when their son or their daughter had to give up their faith for example, or had to come in a military that was being used for social experiments, people got turned off to coming into the military,” said Boykin.
He says parents will have the same reaction to the Army considering allowing to people with a history of mental illness to take up arms.
Boykin urges the military to make all decisions based on one simple criteria.
“No decision regarding our military should be made until the question has been asked, ‘How does this impact the readiness?’ Is it a positive? If it’s a positive, it’s OK to do it. Is it a negative, it’s not alright to do it. If it’s neutral, then it could go either way. In this case, you have to know that this is a negative,” said Boykin.
But what if recruitment numbers aren’t met? Boykin says there are more important things.
“I’d rather go into combat with ten good men that were reliable that I could trust than a thousand that were questionable,” he said.
Boykin says a laser focus on readiness will make the U.S. military the dominant fighting force it always ought to be.
“We can turn this around. Stop the social experiments. Change the rules of engagement, where men and women can go into combat to win and restore the military budget to where they know that they have the necessary equipment to fight the nation’s wars and be victorious,” said Boykin.
An Obama-era plan to drastically reduce carbon emissions is on its way to the regulatory scrap heap after the Environmental Protection Agency Tuesday announced a repeal of the Clean Power Plan.
For Americans already struggling with much higher energy costs, this news will be welcome in many households trying to make ends meet.
“This was designed to cause electricity rates, according to [Obama] to necessarily skyrocket. So that won’t happen. The seniors, the poor on low and fixed income who had to choose between heating and eating will now, we hope, not have to,” said Horner.
The Trump administration projects this move will result in $33 billion in avoided costs due to the proposed policy. Horner suspects the actual number is much higher.
Even though the plan was never implemented, Horner says it still exacted a heavy toll on blue collar America.
“He put a lot of people out of work. A lot of communities were devastated. There’s an inescapable connection between the opioid epidemic in that region and the devastation that was wrought by what was clearly a political and not an environmental agenda,” said Horner.
“He thought he was punishing corporations. He harmed badly many communities and the people in them,” added Horner.
Horner says the outlook is getting brighter and will be helped by Tuesday’s EPA action. But he says a lot of the damage is permanent.
“Employment in that industry is rebounding. I don’t know that it will ever get to where it was before it faces the awesome power of the federal government,” said Horner.
What makes the toll even more tragic, according to Horner, is that the Obama administration freely admitted the crackdown on carbon emissions wouldn’t actually accomplish anything.
“The former EPA administrator under President Obama (Gina McCarthy), who is decrying the climate impact of this decision, testified that there was no detectable climate impact from this rule. There is actually a consensus on this,” said Horner.
So what was the point of the tougher emissions standards if they weren’t going to improve our climate? Horner says Obama was very clear about it.
“He said in four speeches, in the exact same deliberate phrase, ‘This to finally make renewable energy profitable in America. That’s what this was about. It was never about the climate,” said Horner.
But while Horner and his allies celebrate Tuesday’s decision, he says the fight is far from over.
“We will start a rule making process. Today begins the repeal, a 60-day comment period to be followed by another request for comments about what to replace it with if anything,” said Horner, who is urging Trump and EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt to scrap another Obama-era finding.
“They also made a declaration that carbon dioxide, a marginal greenhouse gas produced at the margins by man – not just through exhaling but by combusting hydrocarbon energy, the stuff that works, the reliable, affordable, abundant stuff. The administration now has to determine whether that really does endanger human health and welfare,” said Horner.
In urging the EPA to go further, Horner also applauds Trump and Pruitt for a move on Tuesday that he believes many other Republicans would be reluctant to take.
“We say pull it out root and branch. This is a very good start. I have to say most establishment Republicans would have shied from it and hoped for the best from the courts. We’re asking, now that these people have shown that they’re serious, fix the problem and undo the endangerment finding,” said Horner.
He says that explicit step is critical since domestic activists and even the United Nations are asking the courts in the U.S. to effectively make policy instead of the executive branch.
“You will have to replace it because this doesn’t have to go through Congress anymore. There’s enough on the books that the courts will take this over. The UN is issuing reports calling on attorneys general and private parties to ask the courts to take over this policy now, including the United States, to impose the Paris Treaty on us and so forth,” said Horner.
He says defenders of freedom need to stand in the gap against that unconstitutional effort and any future efforts to repeat Obama’s moves.
“It was a cruel gesture. It was virtue signaling. Thank God the EPA has said, ‘We’re going to formally repeal this rule.’ Let’s fix the problem and make it more difficult for someone like a President Warren to just come in and do this again,” he said.
On Monday, Americans observed a solemn remembrance of the lives lost in the horrific terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, but retired U.S. Air Force Lt. General Tom McInerney says victory will be tough to achieve unless the U.S. gets serious about specifically identifying the enemy as radical Islam and getting Muslim leaders to publicly condemn the perpetrators.
“We still have not identified the threat’s ideology, that is radical Islam. Until you do that, you can’t defeat the threat,” said McInerney, who rose to the number three position in the U.S. Air Force and also served as vice commander of U.S. Air Forces Europe.
He says President Trump did identity the ideology correctly on the campaign trail but has not been nearly as bold since taking office.
“We do not use the term ‘radical Islam’ very much in this administration. I’m a little disappointed in the Trump administration because the president was using it quite a bit and then has since restricted his use of the term,” said McInerney.
Another reason he can’t call the war a success is the volatile state of the entire Middle East.
“Now you have the Middle East. It’s the most unstable it has ever been in its history, so that’s why I’m not giving us high marks for being successful,” said McInerney.
Another major priority after 9/11 was the state of American intelligence capabilities. Here again, McInerney sees disappointment compared to what was possible.
“They haven’t identified these threats. They haven’t articulated the issues. Our special ops are good at getting high-value targets, so our intelligence people are doing a good job with all of our censors, etc. But we haven’t bundled it in the proper way, so our leaders can properly express the threat and the ideology I talked about earlier,” said McInerney.
So how can the U.S. prosecution of the war become more effective? McInerney says it all starts with prominent Muslims clearly and frequently denouncing terrorism.
“The only people that can really defeat radical Islam are the Muslims themselves. So we need fatwas out of Mecca and Medina. We need Arab leadership to declare those radical Islamists to be unholy warriors and that they will forever live in damnation for attacking the West,” said McInerney.
McInerney says critical mistakes from both George W. Bush and Barack Obama made the fight more difficult. He says Bush’s decision, through Amb. L. Paul Bremer, to disband the Iraqi army after toppling Saddam Hussein was a major error that only teed up experienced fighters to be part of the subsequent insurgency.
He says Obama’s decision to withdraw all U.S. forces in 2011 then created the vacuum that fostered the rise of ISIS.
McInerney says to pursue stability now requires a concerted confrontation of Iran.
“We cannot have the mullahs running wild over there. They’re developing ICBM’s and nuclear weapons covertly. We cannot accept that,” said McInerney.
He calls the Iran nuclear deal another major mistake by the Obama administration and says extensive collaboration with allies in the region will be need to to neutralize Iran.
“We need to take care of Iran, because they are the most destabilizing group in the Middle East. They are driving a lot of this (radical Islam-inspired terrorism),” said McInerney.
McInerney also asserts that 2016 campaign tactics are hampering our ability to work with Russia, which is a key player in any effort to stabilize the region.
“The Russian collusion was always a deceptive move by the Democratic Party to shield the wrongdoings that the Democrats under Obama did, with the unmasking, with a whole host of other things – Hillary Clinton’s emails, which was a violation of the Espionage Act,” said McInerney.
So now our relationship with Russia is tense. If we’re going to solve the problems over there, we need to be working with the Russians. All those things coupled together can bring the stability we need, but we must replace the current Iranian regime,” said McInerney.
Since 9/11, terrorist attacks in the West feature fewer grand, sweeping plots and many are carried out by individuals or small cells. McInerney says our intelligence efforts should be able to sniff out these plots much better because we know where to look for the potential terrorists.
“When you look at the incidents we’ve had in Europe and the United States, it always goes back to the mosques. We have not taken the appropriate actions to infiltrate them and to get rid of the bad ones,” said McInerney.
While the media and former Obama administration officials wring their hands over President Trump’s tough talk on North Korea, retired Navy Captain Chuck Nash says the president is not only charting the right policy but is already reaping results from it.
Nash is also blasting the Obama administration for it’s handling of the North Korean threat in recent years and it’s “insane” recommendations now.
Trump roiled the political establishment by promising “fire and fury” in response to any acts of North Korean aggression against the U.S. or our interests. His comments came in the wake of revelations that North Korea has miniature nuclear weapons that can be placed inside missiles.
On Thursday, Trump waved off suggestions that his remarks were too incendiary and even suggested they hadn’t gone far enough. But while critics on both sides of the aisle worried that his words were “reckless” and could trigger horrific actions from North Korea, Nash says Trump is playing this exactly right.
“The administration is taking the exact right messaging tone, which is not just to Kim Jong-Un. That message is to Russia and specifically to China. And this president is saying, ‘Look, if that guy does anything to make me itch, you’re not going to like it because we’re going to do something,'” said Nash.
And Nash says it’s clear China already got the message. On Thursday, the Chinese announced they would stay neutral in any conflict between the U.S. and North Korea unless the U.S. struck first.
“It’s clear that it’s working because the Chinese just backed off by telling the North Koreans, ‘If you do something stupid, you’re going to get the results and we’re not going to stand up for you,” said Nash.
Nash is pleased to see Trump, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and Defense Secretary James Mattis staying on message. He says everyone underneath them needs to stay on script as well.
“The last thing that the United States needs now is for anybody to break ranks and, as [former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher] said to George Bush, ‘This is no time to go wobbly.’ We don’t need that right now. Too much political capital is on the line here,” said Nash.
Nash points to a Washington Post story this week revealing the U.S. knew North Korea had deployable miniature nukes four years ago. But instead of confronting the crisis, Obama tried to pretend it didn’t exist.
“The Obama administration did everything it could to downplay it and in fact made it disappear because they were trying to pursue a policy of what was termed strategic patience,” said Nash.
And he says leaving the nuclear threat unaddressed was a major error.
“We’re starting to come to the realization that they do have a capability, that the intelligence community did know about it but that the Obama administration buried that information. As we say in the Navy, bad news does not get better with age. This is aging out and it’s starting to stink,” said Nash.
Former National Security Adviser Susan Rice is actively condemning the Trump approach. While acknowledging that Obama failed to stop the North Korean nuclear program, she says any conflict with North Korea would be catastrophic and believes the world must simply come to grips with the communist regime being a nuclear state.
“That absolutely insane,” said Nash, likening Rice’s posture to deciding to accept living near a crazy neighbor who threatened to kill you and then accumulated the weapons to do it.
“The time for pussyfooting around and being really diplomatic is over, just as Tillerson said. Strategic patience, that’s over. We’re now at the point of having kicked the can down the road. The road has come to a fork. As [Yogi Berra] said, ‘When you come to a fork in the road, take it,'” said Nash.
“Something’s going to happen. Either we are going to acquiesce to having a madman with nuclear weapons, who is only going to continue to pursue and refine that capability, or we’re going to do something different than what we have been doing, which is kicking a can down the road, hoping – which is not a strategy – that things would get better,” said Nash.
Nash says North Korea’s current threat of aiming four missiles near Guam would meet the threshold of a first strike by the enemy. He also expects the U.S. would try to bring down those missiles rather than hoping they don’t hit Guam.
“You can’t just sit there and hope that he wouldn’t really target Guam when you’ve got missiles that could be nuclear-armed headed in that direction, an intolerable situation,” said Nash.
Nash says one other major problem in the this standoff lies squarely at Obama’s feet, namely that rogue nuclear states have no incentive to give up their arms or ambitions.
“I think Iran and North Korea took the lessons of recent history. What happened to Moammar Ghaddafi when he gave up his weapons of mass destruction, mostly chemical but he also gave up some nuclear material. When he gave up those programs, that didn’t help him. In fact, the United States partnered with NATO and went and deposed him,” said Nash.
And it’s not just Libya.
“Look at the Russians with Ukraine. The Brits, the United States, and the Russians all signed an agreement that they would protect the political and territorial integrity of Ukraine if they gave up the nuclear weapons after the USSR fell. How’d that work out for them?” asked Nash.
He says rogue nations learned the exact opposite lessons we hoped they would learn from those examples.
“The lesson is if you’ve got nuclear weapons capability, don’t give them up. Because if you do, you’re in trouble,” said Nash.
With Senate Republicans unable to pass a health care bill, President Trump might be able to shake up the debate and motivate swift congressional action by ordering the end of the Obamacare exemption for lawmakers and their staff members.
As Obamacare was debated in 2009 and 2010, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, proposed an amendment that would require all members of Congress and their staff members to be subject to the new law. Eventually, that amendment got watered down to allow exemptions for committee staff members.
Columnist John Fund says lawmakers and office staffers soon realized they didn’t like how the new law impacted them.
“They quickly discovered as the exchanges were being set up that the exchanges were going to prohibit the payment of subsidies to anyone with an exchange policy who was getting that policy from their employer. In other words, you could have your own policy, but you couldn’t have your employer pay for it,” said Fund.
Before long, lawmakers and their employees were looking for special favors from the president.
“That meant that Congress would lose about 70 percent of its subsidies for health care. They were, of course, traumatized by this. They went behind the scenes to President Obama, who quietly made a call to the Office of Personnel Management. That’s the group that manages all federal employees,” said Fund.
“[The Office of Personnel Management, or OPM,] decided that the exchange would include Congress and its staff, that Congress qualified for a ‘small business exemption,’ which meant that it had fewer than 50 employees. Well, Congress has a thousand employees, so that’s preposterous. This was clearly an illegal interpretation of the law,” said Fund.
Of course, Congress has no interest in addressing that misinterpretation of the law.
“It has persisted because Congress doesn’t want to go and vote on reimposing the same restrictions that all Americans labor under with Obamacare on itself. In other words, it doesn’t want to do it in public. It wants to do it more sneakily behind the scenes,” said Fund.
Fund says if Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, really wanted to take a principled stand on Obamacare, he would have focused on this issue instead of his vote to kill the so-called skinny repeal last week.
“Rather than John McCain voting against Obamacare reform and shutting the whole process down, if John McCain had really been courageous what he would have done is offered an amendment on the Senate floor, saying whatever happens, Congress should not be exempt from Obamacare. He didn’t do that,” said Fund.
After Obama directed the OPM to exempt Congress and the staffers, then-Sen. David Vitter, R-Louisiana, repeatedly pushed legislation to reinstate the requirement for the rules of Obamacare to apply to everyone on Capitol Hill.
Not only did neither party act on his efforts, but some lawmakers were so irate that they asked staffers to draft legislation to remove the exemption for any lawmakers who supported Vitter’s bill, as well as the staffers for those members.
That idea went nowhere but Fund says it typifies the attitude of too many officials in Washington.
“What’s sauce for the goose is not sauce for the gander. They believe they’re above the law. They don’t come out and say that because it sounds awful in a democracy. But the bottom line in Washington is you watch what people do, not what they say,” said Fund.
The good news, says Fund, is that President Trump can reverse this policy just as easily as President Obama put it in place.
“It wasn’t even an executive order. Believe it or not, it was just a phone call to the Office of Personnel Management saying, ‘You work for me. You issue this,'” said Fund. “Donald Trump could literally pick up the phone tomorrow and declare Congress is now covered by Obamacare fully and completely.”
A poll conducted by Independent Women’s Voice just prior to Obamacare’s implementation in 2013 shows 93.7 percent of American voters wanted Congress to abide by the rules along with every other American.
“The only ones who don’t think it’s unfair are the friends and family of Congress,” quipped Fund.
However, Fund says there is one condition under which Trump should consider allowing the exemption to continue.
“I think the best way to get Congress to, shall we say, see the light is to reform Obamacare for everyone. Let Congress keep its exemption if other Americans can do the same thing,” said Fund.
But given the entrenched polarization in Congress, would threatening to remove the exemption really move the needle?
“If Donald Trump took this issue to the people and said, ‘I am sending a bill to Congress that will transform health care and reform Obamacare, and included in it is the provision that Congress should be covered by Obamacare and I demand a vote on it,’ Congress is going to have to do something,” said Fund.
Fund says Trump would be wise to give Congress fair warning rather than to rescind the exemption in a surprise, but he believes the president needs to hang this threat over lawmakers’ heads.
“Before Trump did it publicly, he should meet privately with members of Congress and say, ‘Look, I’m putting you on notice. Fair warning. I might do this. Let’s work out something now and let’s get something to the floor that we can vote on, so I don’t have to do this,'” said Fund.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions is pulling the plug on a Justice Department policy instituted during the Obama years that effectively forced corporations to settle lawsuits by, in part, donating to leftist political organizations, a practice many critics considered a liberal slush fund.
“When the federal government settles a case against a corporate wrongdoer, any settlement funds should go first to the victims and then to the American people—not to bankroll third-party special interest groups or the political friends of whoever is in power,” said Sessions in a statement.
Former Justice Department official Hans von Spakovsky is now with the Heritage Foundation. He is also co-author of “Obama’s Enforcer: Eric Holder’s Justice Department.” He calls the former policy nothing more than the government stealing from the American people.
“It’s pretty clear the Obama administration figured out a way to rob the public and help their political allies,” said von Spakovsky, who adds that we’re talking about a lot of money going to Obama’s political friends.
“We’re not talking about chump change here. My understanding is in the last 30 months before the new administration came in, the Justice Department had funneled about a billion dollars to outside third party groups,” said von Spakovsky.
And who exactly received the money?
“Environmental groups, civil rights groups, ACORN-type groups, that’s who was getting this money,” said von Spakovsky.
He then explained how the process worked.
“When the Justice Department sued defendants such as Volkswagen or the Bank of America claiming they had violated federal law, they entered into settlement agreements with those defendants, in which the defendants agreed to pay a large sum of money to end the litigation,” said von Spakovsky.
“The Obama Justice Department would come in and say, ‘We want you to give a portion of this money to such-and-such organization.’ These were not organizations that had anything to do with the lawsuit. They weren’t parties to the lawsuit. They didn’t have members who were injured by whatever the misbehavior was of the company,” said von Spakovsky.
“These are simply third-party, mostly advocacy organizations who were big political allies of the administration. That, frankly, is really stealing money that is due to the American taxpayer and funneling it to political friends of the government,” added von Spakovsky.
He says this wasn’t just unethical but illegal.
“I actually think it was illegal. There is a federal law called the Miscellaneous Receipts Act, which requires DOJ lawyers to deposit settlement checks into the U.S. Treasury Department. That was not happening, so I think it was illegal. Thanks goodness Attorney General Jeff Sessions has said this is not going to happen anymore,” said von Spakovsky.
However, Sessions appears content to end the program. Von Spakovsky suspects there will be no legal danger for anyone who created or operated this program.
“It sounds like he’s just going to end the practice and move on. There doesn’t appear to be an effort by the Justice Department to apply this [retroactively], in other words to go backwards and go to some of these settlements of lawsuits, open them, and try to get the money back. I don’t think they’re going to do that,” said von Spakovsky.
Politicians and media are salivating over Wednesday’s Senate testimony from the top figures in the intelligence community and the opening testimony expected Thursday from former FBI Director James Comey concerning the investigation into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential campaign, but a former House intelligence committee chairman says so far nothing has really changed.
On Wednesday, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein joined Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and National Security Agency Director Adm. Mike Rogers before the Senate Intelligence Committee.
While each of the men seemed reluctant to say there had been no prodding from the Trump administration on the Russia investigation, all of them rejected the idea that Trump or his team did anything inappropriate.
“In the three-plus years that I have been director of the National Security Agency, to the best of my recollection, I have never been directed to do anything I believe to be illegal, immoral, unethical or inappropriate,” said Adm. Rogers. “And to the best of my collection, during that same period of service, I do not recall ever feeling pressured to do so.”
Former House Permanent Select Intelligence Committee Chairman Pete Hoekstra says that is the most important takeaway from Wednesday.
“What the senators did learn is exactly what they needed to learn, that the heads of these agencies and these departments did not feel any pressure at all from the president or from the White House to stop their investigations of what Russia did in the 2016 election, said Hoekstra, who served 18 years in the House. He is now chairman of Hoekstra Global Strategies.
He says those hoping for a room full of smoking guns came up empty.
“It really ended up being all about nothing. I think there were people expecting that they’d hear more about conversations between President Trump and some of these individuals who work with him and that there might have been a revelation that said they felt pressure from the president. Really, nothing materialized today,” said Hoekstra.
However, Hoekstra says he is glad to see strong bipartisan cooperation from the Senate committee, a process he says ought to bring confidence to the American people that the investigation is being handled responsibly.
That’s also what Hoekstra expects to materialize on Thursday, when the immensely hyped Comey testimony takes place before the same Senate committee. On Wednesday, the committee released Comey’s opening statement for Thursday.
Both parties are already seizing on different passages. Trump critics cite Comey’s contention that Trump demanded loyalty from Comey and repeatedly asked Comey to find a way to ease up on former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.
At the same time, Comey seems to confirm that Trump himself was never personally under investigation and that Trump’s comments to him, while awkward and possibly inappropriate, did not constitute obstruction of justice or any other crime.
In the end Hoekstra suspects few minds will be changed.
“What the American people will probably see as a result is that the talking heads, for the next 24-48 hours, will both claim victory and some justification for their points of view. Then we’ll get to next week and something else will take over the headlines,” said Hoekstra, who says investigators should then focus on where the evidence is screaming for them to go.
“(Special Counsel Robert) Mueller’s got to focus on what the original intent of this investigation was: the Russians. What did the Russians do, not what did Trump do or what did Hillary do, what did their teams do or anything. What did the Russians do? That’s where the focus will hopefully now move to,” said Hoekstra.
Hoekstra says the American people will be the ultimate judges on whether the Democrats take their accusations too far. He admits Republicans would be fiercely critical if Comey had ever suggested President Obama had asked for his loyalty or to go easy on a political ally.
Still, he says Republicans could do themselves a world of political good by actually doing what they promised to do, rather than letting the Russia story suck all the oxygen out of Washington.
“They’d like to have better roads, better bridges, more income, more jobs and those sorts of things. They’re sick and tired of Washington,” said Hoekstra, who says there’s not reason for the GOP not to plow ahead on its legislative agenda.
As for the ongoing intelligence probe, Hoekstra says we also need to dig deeper into reports of extensive Obama administration surveillance on American citizens.
“I think there should be a lot of focus on the surveillance issue. This is an issue that I’m not totally comfortable with. I’d really like to better understand where NSA has evolved in terms of monitoring and unmasking Americans, where that has evolved to over the last seven to eight years since I’ve left the Hill,” said Hoekstra.
