Dude it appears that not only is Trump more intelligent then you give him credit. He is also a darn good inside fighter.
RELH
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TRUMP?S CAMPAIGN AGAINST JUSTICE, FBI IS WORKING
It would seem that President Trump?s effort to discredit the FBI and the Justice Department amid the investigation into his 2016 campaign is working.
Just 46 percent of respondents in a new CBS News poll thought that Special Counsel Robert Mueller?s investigation into ?dealings between Trump associates and Russia? is justified, while 48 percent believed the probe to be ?politically motivated.?
Why is that? It would seem that many Republicans and Republican-leaning independents simply don't care if the allegations are true.
Consider that 67 percent in the same survey, including 43 percent of Republican respondents, believe ?senior Trump advisors had improper dealings with Russia,? and yet, only half as many GOPers thought the probe was justified.
You could see why in watching Republicans questioning of FBI Director Christopher Wray today. It would have been easy to forget that Wray was only recently selected by Trump himself and confirmed in August with unanimous support of Senate Republicans.
Starting with House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte, Wray found himself peppered with questions about corruption and political bias in the agency, forcing him to repeatedly defend the integrity of the agents who serve under him.
This reflects the success of a two-pronged strategy by the White House. While the president's criminal defense team and official spokespeople take a position of trust and cooperation with Mueller, Trump and his outside public defenders have been waging an all-out campaign against federal law enforcement agencies in a tit-for-tat battle with Mueller.
Most effectively, Trump has zeroed in on not the way his own case has been handled, but rather what he says is corruption in the other direction and highlighting what Trump says is the cover-up of his 2016 opponent's criminal conduct.
This is key because it doesn't require Trump to depend on him and his team to be eventually cleared in the probe. Rather, it suggests that the entire system is so shot through with corruption that it would be unfair to penalize one party but not the other.
A posting to Trump?s Twitter account summed it up neatly: ?Rigged system, or just a double standard?? Either way, Trump?s telling his supporters that they can disregard Mueller?s findings.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes has been a one-man wrecking crew on this front, bringing attention to instances that suggest political bias inside the FBI and Department of Justice.
He?s been pushing hard on the story of the agent who got yanked off the Trump probe over anti-Trump texts sent to a girlfriend last year and today we learned the story of Nunes? pressure on the Justice Department over a lawyer who had previously undisclosed meetings with the head of a research firm hired by Democrats to dig dirt on Trump.
Both stories have helped Trump?s supporters shift the focus away from last week?s revelation that the president's former national security adviser was cooperating with the Mueller probe. As it has been since we first learned of the Russian meddling a year ago, attacks on institutional corruption within federal law enforcement remain the best counteroffensive for the GOP.
Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy is among those who have cautioned about the dangers of conflating political bias with corruption. The argument is that if we accept the idea that individuals with their own political views cannot investigate individual on the other side there are plenty of cases that have to be thrown out.
But the imperative now for Republicans is to kick up enough dust around federal law enforcement agencies to offer some much-needed political cover. Not only do polls show that it's working, history also agrees. Democrats successfully tarred the probe into corruption in the Clinton White House as a partisan witch hunt.
To be sure, it's part of a larger trend. In 2015, the WSJ/NBC News poll found that 49 percent of American adults held positive views of the FBI. By this time last year, just 37 percent felt the same way, with 28 percent going as far as to express negative views about the federal police.
So we could say that the drop in esteem for federal law enforcement is just part of a larger trend of Americans losing confidence in institutions, but there is something else going on here. Republicans, after all, have typically been the ones most willing to trust police at every level.
Look for this trend to intensify in the New Year as Muller?s probe enters its terminal phase.