Will anyone investigate President Blabby?
by digby
Paul Waldman has a great piece up today about Trump’s unsecured iPhone recalling all the garment-rending over Hillary Clinton’s email server. And he notes how ineffectual calling out hypocrisy is in this era:
I realize that it’s too much to ask for Republicans to work themselves up into paroxysms of rage over this the way they did over Hillary Clinton’s email, for the simple reason that information security isn’t something they ever cared much about, so naturally they stopped pretending to care once the 2016 election was over. But you’d think that at the very least they’d muster up some mild disapproval of the fact that the president is allowing foreign governments to listen to his conversations. Can you imagine what they would have said if President Obama had done this?
But no. No Republican members of Congress are calling for an investigation, no conservative pundits are shaking their fist at the cameras and saying this is a national crisis, and there will be no round-the-clock denunciations of the president on Fox News. (One National Review writer did note that “If Trump was a Dem, Fox might try to bend the space/time continuum to put Hannity on for 25 hours a day to chase the story.”)
You could call it “hypocrisy,” but that word doesn’t quite cover it. It’s become so expected that we’ll drop it and move on in by tomorrow; all Republicans will have to do is avoid the cameras for a few hours so they don’t have to answer any uncomfortable questions, and then they can go back to saying how mad they are that Brett Kavanaugh had to answer some uncomfortable questions before getting his lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court.
So what should our response be to this kind of story? Obviously, the most important thing is that the problem gets fixed. If Trump were capable of embarrassment, I’d say that he might be embarrassed into using only secured phones. But since he isn’t, and White House aides seem incapable of convincing him to do so, the only remaining means to encourage him to change his practices would be some action by Congress, like an oversight hearing or two.
Oversight, however, is something this Congress no longer bothers with. Despite the deluge of Trump administration scandals, they’re not bothering; if you look at the October calendar of the House Oversight Committee, you’ll find it’s completely blank.
I’m not saying that Trump’s appalling phone security practices require a thousand hearings to address. But maybe … one? Would that be too many?
It actually requires a real investigation. It’s a major security breach. And Trump seems to know it.
Early this morning he tweeted this:
Then he came back to it three hours later:
Those tweets confirm it’s true.
Update: They don’t have time because they are busy doing this:
Senate Judiciary committee chair Chuck Grassley has called for an FBI investigation into lawyer Michael Avenatti and Julie Swetnick, one of the many women who have accused Brett Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct, reported John King Thursday on CNN.
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