‘You would have [thought] that he was talking about watching—and giving commentary on—a video game…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Piling onto the rampant politicization of the U.S. intelligence community, Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif. claimed, without evidence, that the special forces who brought down a top ISIS terrorist were similar to deep-state, partisan operatives who have repeatedly sought to undermine President Donald Trump.
Harris, currently polling in the single digits in the Democratic presidential primary, has been a regular on the late-night talk shows of left-wing comedians Seth Meyers, Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert.
She returned to Meyers’s show on Monday and proceeded to flip the narrative on the killing of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the most wanted man in the world, by covert U.S. military operations over the weekend.
The death of al-Baghdadi drew obvious parallels to that of Al Qaeda ringleader Osama bin Laden in 2011, during Barack Obama’s presidency.
Reaction from the Left to al-Baghdadi’s death has been mixed, with some, like The Washington Post, eulogizing the Islamic fundamentalist as a pious “scholar” rather than a terrorist.
However, all have been unified in their efforts to deny Trump of any political capital that could be gained from the victory.
“First of all, I want to just praise our special forces, the American intelligence community,” Harris told Meyers.
“You know, I work closely with them in connection with my service on the Senate Intelligence Committee, and they tirelessly and selflessly do incredible work—and they never really get any credit for it as individuals,” she said.
Harris implied that the special forces were similar in their anonymity to members of the left-wing ‘Resistance’ embedded in the Washington, DC, bureaucracy, whom Trump has often accused of trying to thwart his promise to “drain the swamp.”
Congressional Democrats, currently conducting secretive House impeachment hearings based on the complaint of an anonymous CIA whistleblower, have subpoenaed several career civil-servants in the State Department to bolster the case that Trump sought an improper arrangement with Ukraine to expose misconduct by former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter.
Meanwhile, the Justice Department is criminally investigating leaders of the intelligence community from the Obama era who, in 2016, allegedly helped the Hillary Clinton campaign to engineer and spread false claims that Trump had colluded with Russia.
While Trump has delineated between the corruption in the top ranks of the previous administration and the honest work of those in the trenches, Harris made no such distinction.
“It’s really important, at this moment, to also credit them knowing that you’ve had Donald Trump as the commander-in-chief, who also spent full time attacking the integrity and the professionalism and the sacrifice of those professionals,” she claimed. “So, I think about it in that regard and thank them for their service and for their dedication and for being, you know, smart…”
She continued to snipe at the president over his reaction to the news of al-Baghdadi’s defeat, but quickly steered the discussion back to her own campaign.
“Donald Trump— that press conference was extraordinary. You would have think [sic] that he was talking about watching—and giving commentary on—a video game,” Harris told Meyers, pausing for effect to a few uncomfortable chuckles from the audience.
She tried to cut the awkwardness with an old standby gimmick, inverting the gender of pronouns to suggest the president was—or should be—a female.
“The commander-in-chief of the United States of America has as her highest priority the responsibility to concern herself …” Harris said, to audience delight, “with our nation’s security…”
A Cover-Up in ‘Plain Sight’
Harris went on to offer her take on the impeachment hearings, charging that the Trump administration had engaged in a cover-up effort on the transcript of a call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy—while also, paradoxically, trying to conceal the president’s guilt in plain sight.
“We have a clear display of consciousness of guilt, when they were then attempting to put the transcript in some secret computer,” said Harris, a former San Francisco district attorney and California attorney general.
“We have a cover-up, that is that—and we have a confession,” she added.
Trump authorized the full public release of the transcript a few days after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., declared that she was initiating Democrats’ latest impeachment investigation.
Republicans have criticized House Democrats, by contrast, for their lack of transparency and failure to extend due process during the impeachment hearings.
“As a former prosecutor, I know a confession when I see it,” Harris said. “And the fact that Donald Trump does what he does in plain sight—maybe he thinks that it should in some way, you know, absolve him…”
Pelosi has yet to hold a formal vote to initiate the impeachment proceedings, only announcing late Monday evening that she planned to schedule one after saying last week that she would not.
Notwithstanding, Harris suggested that Trump should be conducting himself with the assumption of guilt by exercising the Miranda rights normally afforded to those under arrest.
“The American public, we know what we see,” she said, “and frankly, somebody ought to tell Donald Trump he has a right to remain silent.”