Seppuku is an option, members of the press.
The betrayal narrative was not reported as metaphor. It was not “Trump likes the Russians so much, he might as well be a spy for them.” It was literal spying, treason, and election-fixing – crimes so severe, former NSA employee John Schindler told reporters, Trump “will die in jail.”
In the early months of this scandal, the New York Times said Trump’s campaign had “repeated contacts” with Russian intelligence; the Wall Street Journal told us our spy agencies were withholding intelligence from the new President out of fear he was compromised; news leaked out our spy chiefs had even told other countries like Israel not to share their intel with us, because the Russians might have “leverages of pressure” on Trump.
CNN told us Trump officials had been in “constant contact” with “Russians known to U.S. intelligence,” and the former director of the CIA, who’d helped kick-start the investigation that led to Mueller’s probe, said the President was guilty of “high crimes and misdemeanors,” committing acts “nothing short of treasonous.”
Hillary Clinton insisted Russians “could not have known how to weaponize” political ads unless they’d been “guided” by Americans. Asked if she meant Trump, she said, “It’s pretty hard not to.” Harry Reid similarly said he had “no doubt” that the Trump campaign was “in on the deal” to help Russians with the leak.
UPDATE: I just want to say one thing about this fiasco. The whole thing began with General Flynn, who was fired as NSA for having spoken to the Russian ambassador about a possible
quid pro quo relationship going forward and then not reporting that fact to the Vice President. The fact that the Russians felt the need to pursue a relationship like that going forward meant that one wasn't already established prior to the election.
The original grounds of the investigation logically entailed an absence of pre-election collusion. That no intelligence officer would ever recruit a man like Donald Trump -- reckless, careless of speech, impulsive, undisciplined -- requires experience to know. That the Flynn accusations contradicted an already-established relationship should have been instantly apparent to anyone with clarity of thought.
Comey was fired, we think, because he wouldn't let go of an investigation that logic should have forestalled. Two years of investigation followed to try to establish what was clearly not the case, just based on the very thing that the Flynn investigation was supposedly about.
This is a huge failure of the press; it is a huge failure of the security state. But it is also a failure of our education system. What do they teach in these schools on which we spend so much money?
