Who Is “the Enemy of the American People”?

As soon as President Donald Trump returned from his summit in Singapore with North Korean Supreme Leader Kim John Un, the president again said the American press is “the enemy of the American people.” He had said the same thing on February 17th, 2017, about four weeks after his inauguration as president. And he constantly labels the U.S. news media, both expressly and with his Twitter account, “Fake News.”

Wrong! The enemy of the American people is President Donald Trump. He does not believe in democracy. By constantly denigrating our news media, Donald Trump shows that he does not believe in our First Amendment of free speech. And he constantly berates our democratic institutions such as the FBI, CIA, the Justice Department, and even our entire intelligence community which I think consists of eleven departments.

The Inspector General’s report just came out minutes ago. It strongly criticizes former FBI Director James Comey as being “insubordinate” for his handling of the Hilary Clinton investigation regarding her use of a private server for classified government information. But the IG’s main criticism is that Comey should not have reported to Congress (eleven days before the presidential election) that the FBI had re-opened the Clinton investigation due to receiving Anthony Weiner’s computer that had some of Clinton’s emails on it.

When Comey did that, the next day I posted my opinion and more days later that he had misacted in doing that. And I said if he was going to do that, he should have also revealed that the FBI was investigating the Trump campaign on possible acting with Russia to get Trump elected.

The IG’s report of about 500 pages clears Comey of any political bias in that action. Indeed, Comey thought he was protecting the FBI when he really was hurting it according to the IG.

The trouble is that now President Trump and some Republican members of Congress will unjustly cite this IG report to impugn the integrity of the FBI and Justice Dept. They will do this to further criticize Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of possible Russian interference in our election, with the possibility of collusion between Russians and President Trump’s political campaign. The health of our democracy may depend on this Mueller investigation. Trump trying to end it makes him even more “the enemy of the American people.”