A House Intelligence Committee hearing on Monday heard two bombshells dropped in testimony.
One, FBI Director James Comey asserted what other national intelligence leaders also have expressed: There is no evidence to back up President Donald Trump’s outlandish — and slanderous — allegation that President Barack Obama ordered a "wiretapping" of Trump Tower during the 2016 presidential race.
Yet we see lots of defiance and no contrition coming from Team Trump on this matter. We have grown perhaps too accustomed to President Trump’s casual attitude toward facts. We should be shocked and dismayed by his eagerness to believe off-the-wall allegations that he has heard on Fox News, as was the case here, yet eagerly disbelieve uncomfortable news from the nation’s intelligence agencies.
Two, the bureau is investigating possible cooperation between President Trump’s campaign and Russian officials to make Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton lose the election — and help Republican nominee Trump win.
That’s a big deal. As Rep. Adam Schiff, a California Democrat and ranking committee member, observed, Russian meddling in our November election would be a serious crime and "one of the most shocking betrayals of our democracy in history."
Yet, we have seen and heard so many shocks to our political norms with the rise of President Trump, who still apparently believes — among other fables — that he had 1.5 million people at his inauguration ceremony, that we run the risk in this instance of failure to be shocked enough.
Fox News benched its senior judicial analyst Andrew Napolitano, a former New Jersey Superior Court judge, amid backlash over his unfounded and now-discredited allegations that British intelligence last fall provided then-President Obama wiretapped conversations from Trump Tower, according to the Los Angeles Times. "Fox News knows of no evidence of any kind that the now-president of the United States was surveilled at any time, in any way," Fox News anchor Shepard Smith told viewers Friday.
Neither, Comey told Congress, did the FBI. But Comey did confirm long-running media reports that the FBI has been investigating possible coordination by the Trump campaign with dedicated and dangerous Russian adversaries.
Yet Chairman Devin Nunes of California and the Grand Old Party’s other members on the Intelligence Committee sounded much less interested in Russia’s actions than with exposing the leakers and journalists who enabled us, the public, to learn about those actions.
Compared to the Benghazi investigation, which House Republicans did not want to let go, the Russia mystery is one the GOP doesn’t seem to want to touch.
Yet Rep. Schiff, mustering up all the oratorical power he could as a member of the minority party (and hinting at further classified details without disclosing them), delivered a devastating litany of suspicious "coincidences" that, heard together, present a damning portrait of possible collusion.
His nine-minute monologue is worth watching on the web. Among other issues, Schiff speaks of payments on behalf of Russian leader Vladimir Putin to Michael Flynn, who briefly became Trump’s national security adviser until disclosure of his conversations with the Russian ambassador and his other Russian ties.
A look at the links between Russian officials and Donald Trump’s campaign and White House administration.
There also was a deletion from the Republican Party platform of a section that supports the provision of "lethal defensive weapons" to Ukraine, an action that would be contrary to Russian interests.
Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager in midsummer and formerly on the payroll of pro-Russian Ukrainian interests, categorically denies involvement by the Trump campaign in altering the platform. But the Republican Party delegate who offered the language in support of providing defensive weapons to Ukraine said that it was removed at the insistence of the Trump campaign, Schiff pointed out.
Could these and other suspicious events be mere coincidence? Sure, Schiff allowed, but "it is also possible, maybe more than possible, that they are not coincidental, not disconnected and not unrelated, and that the Russians used the same techniques to corrupt U.S. persons that they have employed in Europe and elsewhere. We simply don’t know, not yet, and we owe it to the country to find out."
Indeed, we do. It has long been known that Russia has interfered in Ukraine’s elections and elsewhere, including ours. Whether they changed any votes, which is doubtful, or not, we owe it to ourselves to have serious and thorough investigations, preferably by a special prosecutor, not a political circus. The future of our democracy depends on it.
Clarence Page, a member of the Tribune Editorial Board, blogs at www.chicagotribune.com/pagespage.
cpage@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @cptime
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