{"id":388088,"date":"2018-12-07T00:46:10","date_gmt":"2018-12-06T23:46:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/trumps-timidity\/"},"modified":"2018-12-07T00:46:10","modified_gmt":"2018-12-06T23:46:10","slug":"trumps-timidity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/trumps-timidity\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump\u2019s Timidity"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Because President Donald Trump has again pulled the rug out from under them, House Republicans face Mission Impossible on Friday when they try to hold ex-FBI Director James Comey accountable for his highly dubious authorization of surveillance on erstwhile Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.<\/p>\n<p>Comey let go his unprecedented legal maneuver to have a court quash a subpoena for him to appear behind closed doors before the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee before the Democrats take over the committee in January. The current committee chair, Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), decried Comey\u2019s use of \u201cbaseless litigation\u201d in an \u201cattempt to run out the clock on this Congress.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The Judiciary Committee has jurisdiction over the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA); so the still secret FISA application \u201cjustifying\u201d surveillance of Page is almost sure to come up.<\/p>\n<p>Comey had wanted a public hearing so he could pull the ruse of refusing to respond because his answers would be classified. He has now agreed to a closed-door meeting on Friday, with a transcript, likely to be redacted, to appear soon after.<\/p>\n<p>In an\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/nypost.com\/2018\/11\/28\/trump-threatens-to-declassify-devastating-docs-about-democrats\/\">interview<\/a>\u00a0with\u00a0<i>The New York Post\u00a0<\/i>last Wednesday,\u00a0Trump acknowledged that he could declassify Comey\u2019s damning Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant request to show how devastating those pages likely are, but said he would not do so \u201cuntil they were needed,\u201d namely, if a Democratic House starts going after him.\u00a0\u201cIf they go down the presidential harassment track, if they want go and harass the president and the administration, I think that would be the best thing that would happen to me. I\u2019m a counter-puncher and I will hit them so hard they\u2019d never been hit like that,\u201d Trump told the paper. He added:\u00a0\u00a0\u201cIt\u2019s much more powerful if I do it then,&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.lewrockwell.com\/2018\/12\/no_author\/trumps-timidity-is-letting-comey-off-the-hook\/\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Because President Donald Trump has again pulled the rug out from under them, House Republicans face Mission Impossible on Friday when they try to hold ex-FBI Director James Comey accountable for his highly dubious authorization of surveillance on erstwhile Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. Comey let go his unprecedented legal maneuver to have a court [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-388088","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/388088","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=388088"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/388088\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=388088"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=388088"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=388088"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}