Worse than Watergate?

Folks, if I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: whenever The Trumpster makes a seemingly outrageous claim, he’s pretty much telling the truth. The guy always has an ace up his sleeve.

The list of his verbal outrages is a long one and every time he’s been called on the carpet about it, he’s more or less been proven right. The most recent one was back in February when he tweeted out that Obama had bugged him.

The howls elicited by the media and the left (but I repeat myself) were loud and instantaneous. Not because he made an easily disprovable claim but because if what he said was true, then those who perpetrated that crime could go to prison.

We’re talking nothing less than a crime rising –and possibly surpassing–Watergate.

Well, it looks like The New York Times has vindicated him on one of these claims. The Paper of Record recently broke the story that the Obama Justice Department placed a wire on Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager some time before the election.

And here’s where it gets really delicious: Manafort rented an apartment in Trump Tower. And this is why it’s worse than Watergate: the wire-tapping of Manafort (and possibly six other campaign officials) was ordered by Obama’s Dept of Justice. Watergate on the other hand was a rogue operation with no official sanction.

Sherryl Attkisson has a brilliant synopsis of what was involved:
http://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/351495-it-looks-like-obama-did-spy-on-trump-just-as-he-did-to-me

We don’t know all the details yet but what we do know doesn’t paint a pretty picture. In time we’ll know more. But for now, we have yet another piece of evidence that Trump’s instincts are almost always spot on.

As to how Trump knew this we can only speculate. It’s possible that Manafort indicated to Trump via some subterfuge (like pointing to the wire). It’s just as likely that some Trump sympathizer within the Deep State alerted him.

I have a feeling that this is going to be huge. Don’t forget: Watergate started out as “a third-rate burglary”.

Comments

  1. George Michalopulos thinks that Manafort being under investigation before he even joined the Trump campaign somehow validates Trump’s baseless claim that Trump was personally wiretapped by Obama? Oh wait, it gets stupider:

    George Michalopulos wrote
    And this is why it’s worse than Watergate: the wire-tapping of Manafort (and possibly six other campaign officials) was ordered by Obama’s Dept of Justice.

    George Michalopulos has the scandal of this this backwards, of course. And the details, but what else is new! The irony is Devin Nunes has likely caused an incredible headache for the Trump Administration and I don’t think Mr. Michalopulos even understands why.

    Because in Mr. Michalopulos world, the people who were investigating Watergate were the actual criminals, not the people committing the criminal acts!

    • George Michalopulos says

      Nate, it’s a lot more complicated than you think. It wasn’t just Manafort who was bugged (although as campaign manager this raises huge legal problems for the Obama DOJ) but others as well.

      • First off, George Michalopulos seems to operate under a flawed assumption that Manafort and people associated with the Trump campaign could not have possibly engaged in any criminal behavior while working on the campaign. In the case of Manafort, there is also the real possibility of criminal behavior both before and after his involvement, not just during.

        Second, there are varying degrees of identification and communications collection of individuals, many of which do not support a blanket charge than an individual was ‘bugged’. It is more complicated than George Michalopulos thinks, and at this point I think the nuances are literally beyond his comprehension. Not that those nuances are even meaningful if he stakes out a position that a direct wiretap of an individual under court issued warrant upon finding of probable cause is a de facto political scandal versus a criminal investigation.

        George Michalopulos has ensconced himself in such a cozy bubble of epistemic closure that his mind is going to remain stubbornly resistant to absorbing any factual information supporting ongoing investigation efforts by the DOJ, Congress, or the Special Council. This will only get more pronounced as shoes continue to drop and indictments start.

  2. Hopefully more will come of this than Hillary’s emails, corruption, extortion, Arkancide, and Russian connections(Uranium) Doubt it! Obama is much more loved, than Clinton, and will be protected to the extreme ,by the left. Obama’s Halo will be protected at all costs!

    P.S. Anyone know what the big Emergency meeting, called by the GOA Archbishop, was all about? Apparently all the Metropolitans were called in.

  3. Jonathan and David. George and Donald Trump. “Behold, how beautiful when brothers dwell together as one!”

  4. http://www.realclearworld.com/articles/2017/09/20/the_constraints_that_define_donald_trump_112553.html

    I listen when George Friedman speaks, I don’t always agree with him, but his opinions are usually well thought out and substantiated with research and sturdy logic.

    Trump seems to be setting his sights on blowing up the system as we know it, for lack of any better option. Now it is a question of the strength of the respective narratives. Whose story will carry the day and play out as history? That Mueller’s digging is uncovering evidence of an attempted coup d’etat only makes sense if that is actually what was in the works. Obviously there is no love lost between Mueller and Trump.

    Nor between Trump and congressional Republicans. That is the point of Friedman’s piece above. Trump is pulling a Goldwater/Reagan type move. He’s having to rout the powers that be in his own party in order to move forward and survive. Democrats will help him because he intends to give them a fair taste of what they want and they have no other good options either.

    The Democrats are betting that the Republicans can take Trump down and that they, in turn, can take down the Republicans in the next election cycles. That may be the case. But this is one of those “teachable moments” and narrow “windows of opportunity” in American politics to reorder the American political system to a more traditional model albeit with a much stronger executive.

    Trump has nothing to lose. He’s rich and 71 years old. I’m sure he has a parachute ready if he needs it.

    http://time.com/4951191/divided-democratic-party-debates-its-future/

    “Progressive”, if we can dispense with the euphemisms, means “socialist”. What the “progressive” wing of the Democratic Party (which Warren Beatty famously called the “Democratic wing of the Democratic Party”) does not understand is that in a mixed-market economy such as we have here in America with both a robust private and public sector, where we print and thus intentionally value/de-value our own money which is the touchstone of the world economy, non-totalitarian socialist measures do not necessarily further the goal of divesting private ownership of the means of production. A healthy taste of socialism here and there can prime the pump and preserve capitalism. So, regardless of whether ideologues in the Republican Party like it or not, Trump can afford to agree to a $15/hr minimum wage, impose reciprocal trade measures (or something incrementally approximating that) do a bi-partisan infrastructure bill and get re-elected winning 50 states, not 49.

    What you call the political result of all that is up to you. He seems to be trying to hold a line on moral issues and pursuing a policy of “disengage but carry a big stick” regarding foreign policy. That his economics – not his social/moral politics – but just his economics, are a socialist-capitalist mix is simply par for the course. Republicans have a phobia about that but the fact is that the idea of libertarian economics is every bit as dead as Marxism. Nobody’s going to defund and deconstruct the welfare state. Nobody really wants to any more despite the rhetoric. That idea is just an ideological remnant or artifact.

  5. “Today the core problem in American foreign policy remains the disconnect between the establishment’s ambitious global agenda and the limited engagement that voters appear to support. As Washington’s challenges abroad become more urgent and more dangerous, the divide between elite and public opinion grows more serious by the day. The establishment is now beginning to discover what many voters intuitively believed back in the 1990s. Building a liberal world order is much more expensive and difficult than it appeared in a quarter century ago, when America was king. Further, Washington’s foreign policy establishment is neither as wise nor as competent as it believes itself to be. Meantime, the world is only becoming more dangerous …. And the U.S. still lacks a strong consensus on what its foreign policy should be. Washington’s foreign policy needs more than grudging acquiescence from the American people if it is to succeed. How to build broad support? First, the Trump administration should embrace a new national strategy that is more realistic than the end of history fantasies that came at the Cold War’s conclusion. The case for international engagement should be grounded in the actual priorities of American citizens. Second, Mr. Trump and other political leaders must make the case for strategic global engagement to a rightfully skeptical public. For much of the establishment, focusing on the Trump administration’s shortcomings is a way to avoid a painful inquest into the failures and follies of 25 years of post-Cold War foreign policy. But Mr. Trump’s presidency is the result of establishment failure rather than the cause of it. Until the national leadership absorbs this lesson, the internal American crisis will deepen as the world crisis grows more acute.” – Congressional Research Service, U.S. Role in the World, Background and Issues for Congress – https://fas.org/sgp/crs/row/R44891.pdf

    I think the foreign policy establishment, America’s IS, may be committed to a coup. Unable to replace the American public who elected Trump, the only choice they see is to replace the government.

  6. I’m taking President Trump’s advice and am boycotting the NFL for the rest of the season including the Super Bowl. The last thing I want to see is hypocritical, grotesquely overpaid, multi-millionaire jocks politicizing a stupid game. I’ve always been against playing the National Anthem at sporting events. Sports entertainment has nothing to do with patriotism. Bye, bye NFL….And bye, bye jock sniffing, billionaire owners.