But the exchange with Ryan sure seemed to venture into different territory. Instructing her to stop shaking her head came off as demeaning, and a number of White House reporters took issue with it on social media.
.. What’s even more puzzling about it is that Spicer continues to point to the lack of evidence of collusion while ignoring the fact that the FBI is investigating possible ties between Trump and Russia. The idea that an FBI investigation involving the administration doesn’t amount to a hill of beans just doesn’t make much sense. Yet the mere premise that Russia is an issue for the White House seemed to set Spicer off.
Why the what-about-ism? James Comey says the FBI is investigating possible links between Trump and Russia
But the House intelligence committee’s Republican members seem more interested in leaks
.. The real issue which the FBI and NSA should be focused on, they suggested, the issue that threatens national security is this: who leaked the news of Mr Flynn’s meeting with the Russian ambassador? The journalists who allegedly published this classified piece of information should be prosecuted. The officials who provided the journalist with the information should be prosecuted too. And who were those officials anyway? Mr Gowdy provided a helpful list of suggestions for the FBI to investigate: Ben Rhodes (an adviser to Barack Obama), Susan Rice (the president’s National Security Adviser), Loretta Lynch (Mr Obama’s attorney-general), Sally Yates (the deputy attorney-general) and Mr Obama.
.. Had news of Mr Flynn’s conversations with the Russian government not been leaked, he would still be in his job. This would be good for the aforementioned Russia Today, which hosted Mr Flynn at a jamboree. It would be good for the Russian government, which Mr Nunes described as a menace to Western democracies. It would not be very good for Mike Pence, the vice-president, whom Mr Flynn deceived over his conversations with the Russian ambassador.
.. Faced with an accusation, for example that the Soviet Union worked political dissidents to death in prison camps, the propagandist would respond: well, what about those black men being forced to work on chain gangs in the South? This was effective, because by the time anyone had explained that the two are not, in fact, morally equivalent, the technique had done its work, changing the subject away from the gulag.
Yes, Trump Is Being Held Accountable
James B. Comey (a former colleague of mine at the Justice Department), has proved to be an independent actor
.. Mr. Trump could fire Mr. Comey on a whim, but that would not kill the F.B.I. investigation. Rather, just as President Richard Nixon hastened his impeachment with the Watergate-related firings known as the “Saturday Night Massacre,” canning Mr. Comey would only heighten the public’s and Congress’s suspicions about Mr. Trump’s guilt and increase pressure on the F.B.I. and others to get to the bottom of the Russia matter.
.. Those investigations will now be supervised by Rod J. Rosenstein, soon to be the deputy attorney general, who is a career prosecutor of undoubted independence and an expert on national security and public corruption.
.. Another reason to think the existing process is working to keep the president in check are the plentiful leaks from the executive branch that have revealed a great deal about the Russian imbroglio. Leaks of this sort are a predicable response to a perception of illegitimacy or overreach inside the executive branch.
.. one should not overlook what is truly remarkable here: In the second month of a new presidency, several bodies in a Congress controlled by the president’s party are conducting high-profile, politically fraught and hard-to-control investigations that potentially implicate current and former administration officials and former campaign officials.
.. All of these actors and institutions are holding the Trump presidency to account.
Lititz Server: FBI Investigating Trump’s Connection To Russian Bank
“An alleged computer server connection between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, an influential financial institution in Russia with connections to both the Russian and Ukrainian elite, is still being investigated by the FBI, according to a new report by CNN.
The FBI’s counterintelligence team, which is also looking into Russia’s suspected hacking of Democratic National Committee servers and the email account of her campaign chairman, is investigating why a computer server owned by Alfa Bank repeatedly looked up a computer server owned by the Trump Organization in Lititz, Pennsylvania. Eighty percent of the attempts to look up that Trump computer server were performed by Alfa Bank — 2,820 in total — with almost all of the rest being conducted by Spectrum Health, a medical facility chain for which Dick DeVos, the husband of Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos, serves as chairman of the board.
Although Alfa Bank insists that this unusual activity is probably the result of a spam campaign (an explanation they provided Salon in November), Indiana University computer scientist L. Jean Camp told CNN after studying the data, “If it were spam, then a lot of other organizations would be doing DNS lookups. There would be evidence of widespread connectivity with devices.””*
Read more here: http://www.salon.com/2017/03/10/trump…