Donald Trump sees a plus in keeping Clintons in the news
President Donald Trump is seen in the East Room of the White House in Washington, Thursday, Oct. 12, 2017. Credit: AP
The Clintons just never seem to vanish from the news. One person to thank is their former social acquaintance Donald Trump, now president, who continues even now to find the first family from way back in the 1990s an indispensable foil.
Trump’s clearest success in public life so far remains his defeat last year of Hillary Clinton, who shared his low popularity and faced family foundation transactions that served to offset Trump’s family business conflicts.
Facing an onrush of probes and questions about Russian dalliances of his own campaign and business, Trump and GOP loyalists are re-raising an issue that first surfaced years ago involving the sale of a Canadian uranium company.
The president, who made undocumented charges about this last year, now has gotten his Justice Department to ask prosecutors to probe the Clinton Foundation, clearly hoping to find something illegal involving the company, Uranium One.
The GOP narrative is based on the company’s acquisition in 2010 by a Russian state-owned firm, Rosatom. The deal had to be approved by government agencies including Hillary Clinton’s State Department. The political goal is to link this approval to a $145 million donation to the foundation and other funds.
Predictably, Hillary Clinton calls this in an interview with the magazine Mother Jones “a disastrous step into politicizing the Justice Department” and an abuse of power.
“If they send a signal that we’re going to be like some dictatorship, like some authoritarian regime, where political opponents are going to be unfairly, fraudulently investigated, that rips at the fabric of the contract we have, that we can trust our justice system,” Clinton said.
The useful what-aboutism doesn’t end there.
Trump, for instance, could have a problem denouncing Roy Moore, a Senate candidate he supports, over sexual accusations by multiple women.
The difficulty is obvious, since the president has been accused himself. Trump deflected this in debate last year by touting Bill Clinton’s transgressions.
And now, it is widely reported that liberals are “rethinking” their past defense of Bill Clinton just as the Moore scandal simmers. Once again, the former president creates a big, fat target for GOP partisans and defenders of Trump alike to shout “Hypocrisy!”
Then there’s interim Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Donna Brazile’s hot book “Hacks: The inside story of the break-ins and breakdowns that put Donald Trump in the White House.”
Candidate Clinton’s 2016 highhanded subordination of the party to her campaign, about which Brazile tells, offers respite from today’s nasty internal Republican wars.
The current president has tweeted about that with relish, to the point where you wonder how Trump would handle it if the Clintons fell out of the public eye.
Dan Janison is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
