Good morning. I’m Paul Thornton, and it is Saturday, Dec. 22, 2018. Let’s take a look back at the week in Opinion.
Most of the news recently regarding
This gets at what the president’s fiercest critics have long believed: that Trump doesn’t need a Russian collusion scandal to render him hopelessly unqualified for the job he holds. His temperament, his reflexive dishonesty, his general indecency and his disdain for any restraint on his authority would all be evident without the Russia investigation dogging the White House.
And yet, there’s still something there worth investigating vigorously. How do we know this? Seth Hettena, an investigative journalist who has written extensively about Trumpworld and Russia, says it’s about the lies:
It’s hard to see all these Russia lies as coincidences, given the extraordinary help Russia provided to elect Trump — the hacking of the Democratic National Committee, the WikiLeaks email dumps, the divisive social media messaging that, according to reports released by the Senate on Monday, reached millions of unsuspecting Americans.
[Former national security advisor Michael Flynn’s] case may suggest what Russia got, or hoped to get, in return.
Easing the pressure of U.S. sanctions was a key priority for the Kremlin, and Flynn’s conversation with the Russian ambassador left the impression that the incoming administration would be willing to do just that after the inauguration. Indeed, the Trump administration continues to soften the United States’ approach to Russia, as it did Wednesday when the Treasury Department announced plans to lift sanctions imposed on companies owned by
Oleg Deripaska , a Russian oligarch close to Putin who also happens to be one of Manafort’s former business partners.The agents interviewing Flynn in his White House office pulled on a thread that may lead to extraordinary and perhaps criminal political offenses: an American presidential campaign and a hostile foreign power doing favors for each other. Flynn may have lied, almost reflexively, to keep the plot from unraveling.
One way or another, it will be the Trump administration’s lies about Russia that lead us to the truth.
About that
Trump had a terrible week on immigration, although the outcome was entirely predictable. The administration’s policy of processing asylum seekers only at official ports of entry was obviously illegal, so the president got sued, lost the case, and this week he was shot down by the Supreme Court without comment. “At some point
Trump made the right call on Syria. Criticize the president for impulsiveness all you want, writes Defense Priorities fellow Akhilesh Pillalamarri, but pulling U.S. forces out of Syria is something Trump’s voters — and most Americans, in fact — have wanted for some time. “The skies won’t fall, and we won’t be fighting ISIS in Kansas if we leave Syria,” he writes. L.A. Times
L.A.’s public school students really don’t need a teachers strike. The two sides in the dispute — the Los Angeles Unified School District, and United Teachers Los Angeles — are still far enough apart in contract talks to make a strike that would begin Jan. 10 all but certain. Still, a fact-finder’s report on the contract talks provided a way forward for both sides to come together and avoid a strike. L.A. Times
Source: latimes.com – Los Angeles Times