President Donald Trump apparently couldn’t make up his mind on what he wanted to tweet about Saturday morning, so he decided to tweet about everything. In a long string of tweets, Trump ranted against the news media, leaks, and Hillary Clinton while defending his son, Donald Trump Jr, and his newly appointed communications director, Anthony Scarmucci. And those are just the highlights in the series of 10 tweets.
At a time when the president’s power to pardon is in the news following a report that the issue is coming up in White House meetings, the president seemed to confirm that it’s at least on his mind. Even though everyone agrees the “President has the complete power to pardon,” Trump insisted the issue is irrelevant: “Why think of that when only crime so far is LEAKS against us.”
The president began his Twitter rant by complaining of a “new INTELLIGENCE LEAK from the Amazon Washington Post,” referring to a piece that claims Attorney General Jeff Sessions talked about the campaign with Russia’s ambassador to the United States. He used the opportunity to once again push his oft-repeated lie that fired FBI director James Comey was guilty of leaking classified information.
The commander in chief then went on to blast the “Failing New York Times,” accusing the newspaper that he gave an interview to earlier in the week of foiling “U.S. attempt to kill the singlemost wanted terrorist, Al-Baghdadi.” It was unclear exactly what the president was referring to but the New York Times has an idea:
Mr. Trump did not specify what he meant, but he may have been referring to a Fox News report, a version of which aired about 25 minutes before the president tweeted, about comments by a top commander at a conference on Friday. Gen. Tony Thomas, head of the military’s Special Operations Command, said on Friday at the Aspen Security Forum that American forces were “particularly close” to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State, after a 2015 raid recovered information about the militant group.
“That was a very good lead,” General Thomas said, according to the Fox report. “Unfortunately, it was leaked in a prominent national newspaper about a week later and that lead went dead.”
Fox reported that the general appeared to be referring to a Times report in June 2015 that said American intelligence agencies had “extracted valuable information” from the raid. The story reported that American forces recovered “laptops, cellphones and other materials,” including four to seven terabytes of data. It also said that Mr. Baghdadi and other Islamic State leaders had used their wives to pass information to one another to avoid electronic surveillance.
The Pentagon raised no objections with the Times before publishing the story in 2015 and no senior American official ever complained publicly about it until now.
The president then took a break from complaining to write a simple tweet announcing that he’ll be attending a “commissioning ceremony for the largest aircraft carrier in the world.”
That didn’t last long though as Trump quickly followed up with his tweet about pardons before jumping straight into criticizing his opponent in the presidential race. How is Hillary Clinton relevant? Well it turns out that “many people are asking” why the attorney general “or Special Council” looking at the “many Hillary Clinton or Comey crimes.” Specifically, Trump once again raised questions about Clinton’s deleted emails and “all of the Clinton ties to Russia.” Trump continued criticizing Clinton by comparing her to his son, noting that Donald Trump Jr. gave his emails to “media & authorities” while Clinton “deleted (& acid washed) her 33,000 e-mails!”
Merely 10 minutes later, the president jumped to another topic, seemingly defending his new communications director, Anthony Scaramucci, from claims that he wasn’t always a Trump supporter.
And then seven minutes later, the commander in chief was changing topics yet again, switching to health care reform and calling on GOP senators to “step up to the plate and after 7 years, vote to Repeal and Replace.” Even though “ObamaCare is dead,” the president said Democrats “are obstructionists” so “it is solely up to the 52 Republican Senators!”
