Posted on January 2, 2018 by John Hinderaker in Donald Trump

Trump’s Twitter Storm [Updated]

President Trump opened the new year by lighting up Twitter with a series of tweets. Here, I will mention only the controversial ones.

Trump’s first tweet, early this morning, related to Iran. Scott wrote about it here. His second was classic Trump: cryptic, but with enough transgressive content to cause hysteria on the Left:

This requires a little decoding. How did Huma Abedin “put Classified Passwords into the hands of foreign agents?” The reference apparently is to this Daily Caller story, which says that by forwarding emails that included State Department passwords to her personal Yahoo Mail account, Abedin exposed them to the foreign hackers who did, in fact, invade Yahoo Mail. As is so often the case, Trump’s point is overstated but essentially valid. The indifference to security among Hillary Clinton and her staff was literally criminal.

I assume the “sailors pictures on submarine” refers to the American sailors who were captured by the Iranians last year after inadvertently straying into Iranian waters, although I don’t recall a submarine figuring in that episode. [UPDATE: See update below. This makes sense, but I had forgotten the incident.] How that relates to Abedin’s email practices, I have no idea.

The last part of Trump’s tweet is my favorite:

Jail! Deep State Justice Dept must finally act? Also on Comey & others

I don’t know whether Huma Abedin should go to jail for her gross negligence in handling classified information, but jail is indeed the statutory penalty for such violations. This is the fate that Hillary Clinton so notoriously avoided. And the Department of Justice is, indeed, an important part of the Deep State, having been thoroughly corrupted by Barack Obama, Eric Holder et al. Then there is the parting shot at James Comey. I don’t know of any reason why he should go to jail, but as I have written before, the squelching of the Uranium One investigation needs to be thoroughly investigated, and crimes may well have been committed by Comey and others.

Was Trump trolling liberals with this tweet? Undoubtedly, and they took the bait. I especially enjoy this response by Chris Cillizza at CNN: “The stunning abnormality of Donald Trump’s war on Justice (and justice).”

Consider what’s being alleged here: That the Justice Department is refusing to prosecute criminals — including the former director of the FBI! — because the deep state is protecting those people.

That sounds a little off, right? Like, if your uncle spent 15 minutes at Christmas dinner bending your ear with that exact theory, you would ask your mom afterward: “What is the deal with Uncle Harold?”

Except we know that the Department of Justice refused to prosecute Hillary Clinton, who indisputably committed gross negligence in handling classified information. DOJ changed its original “gross negligence” characterization to “extreme carelessness,” which means the same thing but doesn’t quote from the criminal statute and therefore justified, in DOJ’s highly partisan eyes, a failure to prosecute. Far from being a fever-swamp conspiracy theory, the deep state’s protecting criminals rather than prosecuting them is more or less an established fact.

But President Trump wasn’t done! Later in the day he tweeted this:

Fair comment, I think. You can never go wrong by attacking the New York Times. Next the president went after liberals on DACA:

Here again, I think the president has a point. He is willing to trade a continuation of DACA (only statutory this time, and therefore legal) against construction of his border wall, but the Democrats are inert. They appear to be boycotting any effort to negotiate with the president or with Congressional Republicans, because they see pure obstruction–resistance!–as politically advantageous. They deserve to be ripped for this, so it is good to see the president ripping them.

Next up was the Palestinians (again, I am not mentioning non-controversial tweets interspersed during the day):

Good question! I agree with the president. There is no reason why American taxpayers should finance the Palestinians’ dysfunction.

Finally–so far, anyway, the day still has several hours to go–Trump turned to North Korea:

I am sure this tweet is causing consternation in North Korea, although probably not as much as Trump’s attack on the deep state has caused among American liberals. Unlike Kim Jong-Un, they aren’t used to having their power challenged.

One can debate whether the president’s tweets are a net positive or negative–I think the answer clearly is, a net positive–but it is more fun to sit back and enjoy them.

UPDATE: Chuck McKenna, whose memory is better than mine, writes:

Trump’s reference to “sailors pictures on submarine” pertains to the Navy sailor who was prosecuted and actually served prison time for transmitting a casual photo that included the interior of the submarine, in violation of security protocols. So this is Trump’s way of saying (correctly, I believe) that if the sailor was prosecuted, convicted and jailed for that unintentional disclosure of secret government information, then it makes no sense that Hillary and Huma have dodged prosecution for their intentional conduct related to the email scandal – setting up the private server, knowingly sending classified info back and forth, etc., all in the calculated effort to get around government email system.

And, in particular, to dodge Freedom of Information Act requests. Thanks for that clarification!

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