No doubt you’ve heard the old myth—or metaphor, if you prefer—that if you place a live frog in a pot of warm water and slowly raise the temperature, bit by bit, the frog won’t notice the change and consequently won’t jump out of the pot until it ends up fully cooked.
According to an old article from The Atlantic, this myth is bullshit and, in fact, the frog will actually jump out of the pot when he becomes uncomfortable enough, even if the temperature slowly rises. Be that is it may, it does raise the question of exactly where the ultimate “jump point” is when it comes to the general behavior of the cover-up artist who happens to currently reside in the White House.
He loudly whines that he’s been treated “unfairly” and more harshly than any other White House resident in history, while a treasonous, evil attempted coup has raged on against him costing $31 million, thousands of document requests, 2,800 subpoenas, and 500 people interviewed. He argues the results found “no collusion” and “no obstruction,” even though it found plenty of the former. He wasn’t exonerated or vindicated, he just barely escaped—so far.
The question that stands before America: Exactly when will so many who are currently content to remain in the pot as the temperature of corruption, incompetence, and malfeasance continues to rise, finally get so uncomfortable they reach the “jump” point?
A few reminders of the boiling, “corrupt” water that once made them fervently shout “Lock her up!” just might help for contrast.
There once was a time, way way back in 2012, when a certain set of Americans though that exaggerating or minimizing the causes and effects of a national or international tragedy was enough to get some people boiling mad.
They claimed that former UN Ambassador Susan Rice had lied when saying that the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans including the late Ambassador Chris Stevens wasn’t a planned attack implemented by al-Qaida, and was instead spontaneously inspired by other protests around the world. That included a rash of attacks on several U.S. embassies, which were themselves in response to a YouTube video promoting a film that slandered the Muslim prophet Muhammad as a pedophile.
Ten investigations were launched, including one by the FBI, one by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and six investigations by various Republican-led House committees. They went on for more than two years and in the end, here’s what all of these investigations found:
Despite numerous allegations against Obama administration officials of scandal, cover-up and lying regarding the Benghazi attack and its aftermath, none of the ten investigations found any evidence to support those allegations.
The Senate Select Committee found:
- The attacks were preventable.
- There were no protests in the area prior to the attack.
- Although the attack did not arise from prior protests, it "did not require significant amounts of preplanning."
- Terrorists who participated in the attacks included members of al-Qa'ida in the Lands of the Islamic Maghreb, Ansar al-Sharia, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and the Mohammad Jamal Network.
- The CIA talking points were flawed but still "painted a mostly accurate picture of the IC's analysis of the Benghazi attacks at that time, in an unclassified form and without compromising the nascent [FBI] investigation of the attacks".
- In general, the majority concluded "that the interagency coordination process on the talking points followed normal, but rushed coordination procedures and that there were no efforts by the White House or any other Executive Branch entities to 'cover-up' facts or make alterations for political purposes".[8]
The claim was that Ambassador Rice had lied to the American people about a horrible tragedy where four Americans were killed by al-Qaida in an ambush. But she wasn’t lying and there was no political spin applied just to spare the Obama administration from looking bad. That didn't happen.
This was a horrible, tragic terrorist attack, but it wasn’t pre-planned. It was a spontaneous event by several local groups that included different terrorist groups who were tangentially associated with al-Qaida in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where Bin Laden had been based, but didn’t normally operate together. The CIA talking points that were provided to Rice were not “massaged” for political reasons; she accurately described the situation as they understood it at the time, and their early assessments were “mostly accurate.”
Contrast that with how the Trump administration explained the tragic death of four U.S. troops in Niger who were ambushed by 50 members of an al-Qaida offshoot who somehow managed to know exactly where those troops were:
A 12-member Army special forces unit was accompanying 30 Nigerien forces when they were attacked in a densely wooded area by as many as 50 militants traveling by vehicle and carrying small arms and rocket-propelled grenade launchers.
Johnson was struck as many as 18 times from a distance by a volley of machine gun rounds, according to the U.S. officials, who said he was firing back as he and two Nigerien soldiers tried to escape.
All told, four U.S. soldiers and four Nigerien troops were killed in the ambush. Two U.S. and eight Nigerien troops were wounded.
Trump later lied about what he said to one of the widows of those fallen soldiers for purely political purposes.
Donald Trump took his reflexive posturing about his superior capacity for empathy a step further on Monday morning. Minutes after Myeshia Johnson, the widow of U.S. Army Sergeant La David Johnson, who was killed in Niger earlier this month, appeared on Good Morning America to say she was upset because the president struggled to “remember my husband’s name” during his condolence phone call last week, Trump took to Twitter to accuse Johnson of lying about their conversation. “I had a very respectful conversation with the widow of Sgt. La David Johnson, and spoke his name from beginning, without hesitation!” he tweeted.
But there was a U.S. congresswoman who was in the limo with Myeshia Johnson when Trump’s condolence call came through.
Florida Congresswoman Frederica Wilson, who was accompanying Johnson to Dover Air Force Base last Tuesday when the president called, heard parts of Trump’s phone call with the grieving Gold Star widow over speakerphone and later accused Trump of making insensitive comments. “She was crying the whole time, and when she hung up the phone, she looked at me and said, ‘He didn’t even remember his name.’ That’s the hurting part,”
That’s when former Trump chief of staff John Kelly jumped into the situation to personally attack Rep. Wilson for listening in on the conversation, even though she had been invited by the Johnson family since she had been his mentor and the person who encouraged him to join the military. Kelly then claimed she was some type of “empty barrel” showboat who had previously and selfishly bragged about getting the funding for the new FBI Building in her Florida district back in 2015.
It turns out there was video of the event and Wilson didn’t take credit for wrangling the funding of the building: she gave credit to President Barack Obama, FBI director James Comey, Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, and then-House Speaker John Boehner for having the building named after a group of fallen FBI agents who were from the district.
Rep. Frederica Wilson said Friday that White House chief of staff John Kelly lied when he criticized her for allegedly taking credit for securing funding for an FBI field office two years ago.
Kelly,
speaking at a briefing Thursday afternoon, denounced Wilson after the Democratic congresswoman publicly criticized President Donald Trump's comments during a phone call with the widow of a fallen soldier.
"I was not even in Congress in 2009 when the money for the building was secured," the Florida Democrat said Friday on CNN's "New Day." "So that's a lie. How dare he. However, I named the building at the behest of (then-FBI Director James Comey) with the help of (then-House Speaker John Boehner), working across party lines. So he didn't tell the truth." She
earlier denied Kelly's claim to the Miami Herald Thursday night.
Kelly was referring Thursday to an FBI field office in Miramar, Florida, that was dedicated in 2015 to two FBI agents who were killed during a gunfight with drug traffickers. The chief of staff said he was "stunned" by Wilson's public comments at the ceremony dedicating the building.
It was an understandable difference of perspective that Trump and Gold Star widow Myeshia Johnson had about the condolence call since Trump, being a text book psychopath and malignant narcissist, was working with borrowed lines about how her husband “knew what he was getting into.” But then Trump called her a liar for no good reason and followed that up by having Kelly call Rep. WIlson a liar for no good reason other than political reasons.
Since then, John Kelly has said that he’ll never apologize to Rep. Wilson.
Classy! Not.
All of this was much worse political manipulation than what Rice was accused of.
Then there was the national tragedy of the assault on Charlottesville, Virginia, by “Unite the Right” protesters, which included neo-Nazis and KKK members who opposed moving various Confederate monuments to private rather than public spaces. They physically assaulted counter protestors, ultimately murdering Heather Heyer and injuring dozens of others.
Trump’s very first statement in response to this event didn’t mention white supremacy, even though the violence had been specifically sparked by and for the cause of white power and supremacy, just as the Civil War monuments they were protesting were erected in the midst of the rise of the KKK in the early 20th century and to intimidate the civil rights movement in the ‘60s. Instead, he said there was violence “on many sides, many sides,” without getting specific.
The man who had harangued Barack Obama for supposedly being afraid to say “radical Islamic terrorism” or that al-Qaida was involved in the Benghazi attack was now apparently afraid to say “radical white supremacist terrorism.” It wasn’t until his second statement that Trump finally mentioned white supremacy, but very reluctantly. But he still said there was fault “on many sides,” after which it’s reported he privately was “desperate to say something nice about white supremacists” and railed that attacking them was “the biggest fucking mistake I’ve made.”
According to a leaked excerpt obtained by the Washington Post, Trump deeply resented being forced to come out and specifically condemn white nationalists after being advised by aides that he needed to do so to make clear that he was opposed to racism.
“That was the biggest f*cking mistake I’ve made,” Trump told advisers shortly after giving a speech that condemned Nazis, according to Woodward’s sources, who also say Trump called the speech “the worst” he’d ever given.
So it made sense that in his third statement, Trump went off the rails and decided it was time to attack the “radical alt-left whom came charging with their sticks” which frankly didn’t happen. Then he said that there were “very fine people on both sides,” apparently imagining that there were invisible non-Nazis somewhere who were also protesting in favor the Robert E. Lee statues remaining even though nobody else could see them.
Trump and his administration have continued to ignore the recent rise of white supremacist terrorism by claiming that it’s only a “small group of people,” by disbanding the Homeland Security unit which had focused on them, ending grants to an organization that had successfully fought the rise of white supremacist movements, and then refusing sign on to the international effort to fight the growth of white supremacy online.
Are you starting to see a pattern here?
Also, when the U.S. Navy requested money for cybersecurity, Trump gave them $20 billion for an aircraft carrier instead, and still hasn’t even bothered to have a serious principles meeting on cyber threats (particularly from Russia) because he goes into a rage whenever the subject is brought up.
That right there is failing his first constitutional duty: to protect the nation.
At a certain point in time, people thought Susan Rice’s statements were massively disrespectful to Americans who were tragically killed in a terrorist ambush, even though she was basically correctly saying what was known and believed at the time. But somehow they don’t feel that way about what Trump said about the widow of Sgt. La David Johnson, what John Kelly said about Rep. Wilson, or how Trump continues to fail in protecting the nation from white supremacist terrorism and Russian cyber-threats.
Apparently, Trump’s and Kelly’s statements (and their lack of action) hasn’t made us uncomfortable enough—not yet.
There was a time when a certain set of Americans where outraged, OUTRAGED, at the idea that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had been using a personal private email account on her own personal email server in order to do her official business at the State Department.
They argued that this was purely an attempt to maintain secrecy and hide her “true agenda” by violating rules on government communications in order to hide her “shady” activities.
Well, recent reports reveal that Education Secretary Betsy Devos has been using four private email accounts to do her official government business.
Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos was revealed to have committed the same mistake for which Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was lambasted during the 2016 election — using her private email account for government work.
The Department of Education's Office of Inspector General found "fewer than 100" emails linked to four of DeVos' personal accounts had appeared in the department's email systems, according to the Associated Press. The majority of those emails were sent in the first six months of 2017 and came from a single individual who was writing to recommend various candidates for agency jobs. Overall, the probe found six emails had been sent by DeVos on private accounts, five of which involved official agency business.
But Devos isn’t alone is making this mistake. It was also made by Mike Pence when he was governor of Indiana and used an AOL account for official business. It was made by Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, who are using private accounts located on Trump Company servers for their official business within the White House. Also Steve Bannon; Reince Priebus; Gary Cohn; Stephen Miller; K.T. McFarland; Kris Kobach and other former members of Trump’s bogus voter fraud commission; John Gore, to correspond with members of the president’s bogus voter fraud commission; and Scott Pruitt (as EPA administrator and Oklahoma attorney general) had personal email accounts for official business.
Even former FBI director James Comey used a private personal email account for official government business while he was investigating Hillary Clinton for using a private personal email account for official government business.
Former FBI Director James Comey frequently used his personal email account for official FBI business, according to the Department of Justice Inspector General report on the FBI’s handling of the Hillary Clinton probe.
The Clinton investigation, of course, hinged on the former secretary of state’s use of her personal email account for official — and sometimes classified — business.
In Comey’s case, he regularly used his personal email to conduct unclassified FBI business, which was found to be inconsistent with DOJ policy, according to the report. The report cites five instances in which Comey forwarded emails from his work account to his personal account. Those emails included sensitive documents, such as requests from the special counsel’s office, all-staff messages and drafts of the opening statements he planned to make during his March 2017 testimony before the House Intelligence Committee.
When asked about his use of private email, Comey said it had to do with a technical issue — he didn’t have an unclassified FBI connection at home. He said he did it infrequently and took pains to follow records-keeping laws.
They argued Hillary Clinton had improperly placed classified information on her email server, and that having it within her home made that classified material more vulnerable to exposure to the public and foreign hackers, which could provide treasonous “aid and comfort” to enemies of the United States.”
First of all, Hillary Clinton is a former first lady and she still has 24/7 Secret Service protection, which includes her home and even her basement. So the idea that some unauthorized person was going to waltz into her house and mess with the server is just flat-out ridiculous.
Also, the fact is that any “classified” data on her emails was actually sent to her by her staff for her review, usually with any indications of classification stripped off, which was and still is a common process with the Department of State. This type of info is usually considered “born classified,” because we don’t want to share what one country has told us in private confidence with anyone else. In fact, Comey's own FBI report on Clinton’s emails notes that two out of the three emails with a (C) for “Confidential” included those markings by mistake.
Information marked Top Secret or Special Access was not sent to or from Clinton’s email. The Statement Department told the FBI this and they included it in their report that only a few emails marked (C) for “Confidential” had been sent to Clinton and that two of those markers were included by mistake.
Three problematic emails (two of which were mistakenly flagged) out of 33,000, and all of which were sent to Clinton, not created by Clinton, is less than the five that Comey produced with his personal account. or the “nearly 100” that Betsy DeVos apparently created. Cue the screaming outrage.
No? Oh well. I’m just saying, we all should have some perspective, people.
Using a private email account while working for the government isn’t wrong or illegal, as long as you forward relevant emails to your government account so that it gets archived to comply with government records requirements. When Colin Powell left office as secretary of State Office he didn't forward or print anything from his AOL account; he just closed it and argued anything they needed officially would already exist on the state.gov servers when he sent emails or replied to them. This was actually the same advice he gave Clinton, and he wasn’t technically wrong, so we can cut all these people, from Clinton to Pence, a bit of slack here.
But only one of them was investigated for more than a year about it.
When it comes to sharing potential classified data with our foreign adversaries, the FBI did not determine that Clinton’s server was ever breached by hackers, even though they thought that some attempts were made.
And there were no breaches or malware found on her server.
Clinton’s server, largely because she had two personal IT staff members supporting it 24/7, was actually much more secure than AOL (which was used by Mike Pence and her predecessor Colin Powell). Meanwhile, Yahoo mail was breached by Russian hackers.
Two Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) officers were indicted Wednesday for what the Justice Department said amounted to directing and facilitating a massive hack on Yahoo in 2014 that compromised roughly 500 million accounts using a relatively simple method of attack.
"The defendants [Dmitry Dokuchaev and Igor Anatolyevich Sushchin, of the FSB, and Alexsey Alexseyevich Belan and Karim Baratov] used unauthorized access to Yahoo's systems to steal information from about at least 500 million Yahoo accounts and then used some of that stolen information to obtain unauthorized access to the contents of accounts at Yahoo, Google and other webmail providers, including accounts of Russian journalists, U.S. and Russian government officials and private-sector employees of financial, transportation and other companies. One of the defendants also exploited his access to Yahoo's network for his personal financial gain, by searching Yahoo user communications for credit card and gift card account numbers, redirecting a subset of Yahoo search engine web traffic so he could make commissions and enabling the theft of the contacts of at least 30 million Yahoo accounts to facilitate a spam campaign."
It’s highly likely that this breach was used by FSB to facilitate creating the troll and bot accounts on Facebook and Twitter that they later used to disrupt the 2016 election.
They also tried to breach the State Department email system that year in a very aggressive hacking attack.
Over a 24-hour period, top U.S. cyber defenders engaged in a pitched battle with Russian hackers who had breached the unclassified State Department computer system and displayed an unprecedented level of aggression that experts warn is likely to be turned against the private sector.
[...]
“It was hand-to-hand combat,” said NSA Deputy Director Richard Ledgett, who described the incident at a recent cyber forum, but did not name the nation behind it. The culprit was identified by other current and former officials. Ledgett said the attackers’ thrust-and-parry moves inside the network while defenders were trying to kick them out amounted to “a new level of interaction between a cyber attacker and a defender.”
[...]
Fortunately, Ledgett said, the NSA, whose hackers penetrate foreign adversaries’ systems to glean intelligence, was able to spy on the attackers’ tools and tactics. “So we were able to see them teeing up new things to do,” Ledgett said. “That’s a really useful capability to have.”
The State Department had to shut down its unclassified email system for a weekend, ostensibly for maintenance purposes. That was a “cover story,” to avoid tipping off the Russians that the government was about to try to kick them out, said one former U.S. official.
If Clinton had had her email on the State Department servers instead of her private server, if not for the active efforts of the NSA, her account would have been breached just as Yahoo and the White House email servers were breached by the GRU.
Speaking of getting hacked: Trump’s hotels and golf courses had their credit card systems hacked twice in 2016.
On Monday, the Trump Hotel Collection acknowledged that its computers fell under attack. But it wouldn't release any details about what happened.
The FBI and Secret Service are now investigating the incident, according to Eric Trump, the son of billionaire Donald Trump.
U.S. Secret Service agents investigate hacks that involve theft of credit card data, which hints at what kind of case this is. A spokesman for the Secret Service said the agency declines to comment on active investigations. FBI did not immediately respond with a comment.
"Like virtually every other company these days, we are routinely targeted by cyber terrorists whose only focus is to inflict harm on great American businesses," Eric Trump said in a prepared statement sent to CNNMoney.
He added that the company is "committed to safeguarding all guests' personal information and will continue to do so vigilantly."
That might fall flat with customers. Just six months ago, the company was forced to publicly admit that hackers snuck a computer virus into Trump hotels across the United States and Canada, potentially stealing customer credit card data for an entire year.
Cyber security at Mar-a-Lago and Trump’s other resorts is woefully inadequate.
We parked a 17-foot motor boat in a lagoon about 800 feet from the back lawn of The Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach and pointed a 2-foot wireless antenna that resembled a potato gun toward the club. Within a minute, we spotted three weakly encrypted Wi-Fi networks. We could have hacked them in less than five minutes, but we refrained.
A few days later, we drove through the grounds of the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, with the same antenna and aimed it at the clubhouse. We identified two open Wi-Fi networks that anyone could join without a password. We resisted the temptation.
We have also visited two of President Donald Trump’s other family-run retreats, the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., and a golf club in Sterling, Virginia. Our inspections found weak and open Wi-Fi networks, wireless printers without passwords, servers with outdated and vulnerable software, and unencrypted login pages to back-end databases containing sensitive information.
So isn’t it great that a possible Chinese spy showed up at Mar-a-Lago with a cell phone full of malware when the resort has security issues?
According to the Miami Herald, a federal counterintelligence probe into possible Chinese intelligence operations targeting Trump spearheaded by the FBI was already underway, and now, it’s been “turbo-charged.”
The probe is also looking at Li “Cindy” Yang, a Florida massage parlor owner who allegedly sold access to President Trump and his family. According to the Herald, the investigation is a broader probe into Chinese nationals doing business in the area and predates both the revelations about Yang and Zhang’s entry attempt.
This isn’t the first time concerns about potential lax security around the president, or his accessibility at Mar-a-Lago, have been raised. Shortly after his inauguration, for example, Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe discussed their response to a North Korean ballistic missile test within full view and earshot of Mar-a-Lago guests.
Speaking of sharing classified information with our foreign enemies, there was that incident in the Oval Office where Drumpf blurted out information to Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov and Ambassador Kislyak about potential ISIS laptop bombs on airplanes which had been discovered by Israeli hackers. This intel was classified Top Secret/Special Access Required.
President Trump revealed highly classified information to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador in a White House meeting last week, according to current and former U.S. officials, who said Trump’s disclosures jeopardized a critical source of intelligence on the Islamic State.
The information the president relayed had been provided by a U.S. partner through an intelligence-sharing arrangement considered so sensitive that details have been withheld from allies and tightly restricted even within the U.S. government, officials said.
In this case, they really didn’t need to do any hacking at all: Trump just openly told them while Russian media agency TASS was right there listening.
The argument made in defense of this was that Trump is the ultimate “Official Classification Authority,” meaning that he has the ability to declassify anything he wants to without federal approval. The argument is that he can determine that it is essentially “unclassified” as soon as he says so. Well, it just so happens that Hillary Clinton, as head of the Department of States, was an OCA, too. James Comey was also an OCA as head of the FBI, and the two memos he released to the media via his friend Ben Wittes were both specifically marked “Unclassified.”
The other attack on Clinton was that she had defied a congressional subpoena by deleting all her remaining emails, even after she had already provided thousands of her emails to and from the State Deparment that had been filtered for being related to her official duties, as well as any references to “Benghazi.”
In point of fact, the deletion had been decided by Cilnton’s attorneys prior to the subpoena, because they asked her if she still needed the rest of them and she said “No.” Unfortunately, the IT support person changed the retention date to just 30 days and removed backup copies, but forgot one version of the email archive and never knew anything about the subpoena when he remembered later in an “Oh shit!” moment that he hadn’t deleted the final backup.
This was clumsy, but it wasn't a crime. This was not a knowing and deliberate willful plot to defy a congressional subpoena, and that’s why with all these factors in context the FBI investigation of Clinton’s email server did not find that she knowingly violated the law. They said she was “reckless,” which is now hilarious in hindsight, but she didn't deliberately break the law, much like Mueller found that Don Jr. was basically reckless and clueless to have a meeting at Trump Tower with a Russian government agent and her GRU tag-along, but he didn’t knowingly violate campaign finance law by trying to accept an illegal gift from a foreign country.
Strangely, we’re supposed the treat the later situation as “case closed,” but not the former. And we’re supposed to completely ignore and forget exactly who Individual 1 is, while his lawyer Michael Cohen rots in prison for the next three years.
All of that stands in contrast to Trump’s repeated attempts to defy congressional subpoenas for his taxes, which were ignored by Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin even though the law on this is crystal clear, as explained in an internal draft memo by the IRS.
Trump’s attempt to block his financial managers, Mazar’s USA LLP, from complying with congressional subpoenas has been struck down by a federal court, as has his attempt to block Deutsche Bank, which apparently loaned Trump more than $2 billion even after his six bankruptcies, from also complying with a lawful federal subpoena. In fact, the judge said Trump’s case wasn’t “serious.”
During the hour-long read of his opinion on Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Edgardo Ramos drew a distinction between the “serious political ramifications” of the investigation into a president’s finances, and what constitutes a “serious” question to be considered by a judge.
“The court concludes that the plaintiffs have not raised any serious questions,” Ramos said.
He added that, “even if the questions were sufficiently serious, injunctive relief would be unwarranted.”
Similarly, New York state has paved the way for Trump’s state taxes to be released soon while blocking his ability to escape criminal state scrutiny via federal pardons; Michael Cohen’s testimony revealed that Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow knew his original congressional testimony was filed with lies about the Trump Tower Moscow project; and the DOJ has agreed to release the background intelligence data to Adam Schiff’s committee about Trump’s other attempts at obstruction in blocking the testimony of Don McGahn.
That’s all on top of the fact that the GAO found that HUD Secreyary Ben Carson’s purchase of a $30,000 dining set for his office was illegal because expenses over $5,000 had to be reported to Congress.
EPA investigators have said that former EPA administrator Scott Pruit may owe the government $124,000 for all his first-class flights. And what about that creepy “cone of silence” in his office? Is that still there?
The Obama administration, along with the entire Clinton administration, were harassed for everything from Whitewater to Filegate, Travelgate, Troopergate, Vince Foster-gate, Monica-gate, then on to Benghazi, Uranium One, Email-gate, and eventually Pizza Gate, to the overall tune of $100 million in taxpayer-funded witch hunts that never produced any meaningful examples of wrongdoing.
These ongoing investigations of Trump and his administration are not “witch hunts.” Regardless, it seems that at least 25 Russian and six American “witches” have already been caught, indicted, and/or prosecuted, no matter what signs Trump tapes to a podium or how many petulant temper tantrums he throws about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi saying he’s part of a “cover-up.”
She says that because he is part of a cover-up—actually, several cover-ups.
The temperature is steadily rising on the Trump crime family. Meanwhile, his supporters who remain in denial of his corruption (even without the Mueller report) are getting more and more uncomfortable. The heat is not going to go back down: it’s only going to get worse. Eventually, more and more of them, besides Rep. Justin Amash, are going to jump out of the pot.
It’s only a matter of time.