SUNDAY READER –
By Glynn Wilson –

Another Sunday morning, another disjointed show on Face the Nation, with moderator and CBS News senior foreign affairs correspondent Margaret Brennan misframing the issues in the never ending pretense of mainstream media to be “fair and balanced” and appeal to Democrat and Republican viewers and please corporate advertisers.

It’s a bit of a mystery how someone as young as Margaret Brennan could end up making $300,000 a year and hosting such an important show considering her background, unless you consider that she was a rich kid from Stamford, Connecticut — a “company town.”

I mean how do you end up on the Council on Foreign Relations, become a John C. Whitehead Fellow with the Foreign Policy Association, serve on the alumni advisory board at the University of Virginia School of Politics, become a member of the Economic Club of New York and serve on the Advisory Board of the Smurfit School of Business at the University College of Dublin — after studying Arabic languages while serving as an Emmerich-Wright scholar at Yarmouk University in Irbid, Jordan — and then become a broadcast journalist?

Her resume is not the resume of a journalist. It is the resume of someone who wants to work for the CIA and become part of the U.S. “war on terror.”

She must have tried out and failed, but someone at Langley must have thought she looked pretty good on TV so she gravitated to Bloomberg TV and then CBS. I mean she even received an honorary doctor of letters degree from Niagara University. Do they even have a journalism school there?

According to a puff piece on her in the Fashion section of the New York Times, she married a lawyer and Major in the U.S. military named Ali Iyad Yakub who works at the Pentagon. Clearly this is a Washington, D.C. power couple, and more power to them. But he’s probably hooked up with Army Intelligence too.

Maybe she decided a career in broadcasting stateside would be a lot safer than working in the Middle East, since you know what they do to CIA agents pretending to be journalists there: They behead them.

The idea of a smart, young woman rising to stardom at CBS is not a problem in and of itself, but you would expect to see someone with a history of toughness in dealing with politicians in Washington — at least that’s how it used to work. A look at Brennan’s performance so far does not inspire confidence that she can stand up to Senators and presidents. Look at what’s been happening on the show of late. She clearly bends over backwards to please the president and the Republican Party by allowing stories to reel out of control in the totally wrong direction.

You don’t have to believe me and my suspicious mind after nearly 40 years in the American news business, who has run up against the CIA, Naval Intelligence, other intelligence agencies and all manner of politicians on stories before. Any discerning news reader and viewer should be able to spot the problem here.

Look at how she let South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham totally turn her around in questioning about allegations from former FBI direct Andrew McCabe. The allegation is that Trump’s behavior toward Russia was so suspicious that the director and deputy director of the FBI considered wiretapping Trump and investigated finding a way to cite the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from power.

The question is not if the FBI did something wrong. The question is what did the president do to inspire such suspicion by long-time, experienced, dedicated FBI agents, including McCabe, a life-long Republican?

Look at how she loses control of the narrative, either because she is a weak journalist, or worse, a tool of the CIA now hosting a major network news show.

Even the way the text version of the story is framed is problematic — unless the intent is to compete with Fox News. Is that the intent of the new chairman at CBS, Strauss Zelnick, CEO of the video game company Take Two Interactive? Viewers beware.

Graham vows to hold hearing on McCabe’s “stunning” 25th Amendment comments

“Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said he will hold a hearing about comments made by former Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe about an apparent discussion of the possibility of using the 25th Amendment to remove President Trump from office. In an interview with ’60 Minutes’ set to air Sunday evening, McCabe said Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein raised the issue shortly after the firing of FBI Director James Comey in 2017. The 25th Amendment provides a process for removing a president who is ‘unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.’

Instead of focusing on what the president did wrong to inspire this investigation, Republicans loyal to Trump are now turning the story against the FBI itself.

“The whole point of Congress existing is to provide oversight of the executive branch,” Graham said on ‘Face the Nation’ Sunday. “So through good reporting by ’60 Minutes,’ there’s an allegation by the acting FBI director at the time that the deputy attorney general was basically trying to do an administrative coup, take the president down to the 25th Amendment process. The deputy attorney general denies it. So I promise your viewers the following, that we will have a hearing about who’s telling the truth, what actually happened.”

After laughing out loud at Brennon’s questioning, Graham added, “I’m going to do everything I can to get to the bottom of the Department of Justice FBI behavior toward President Trump and his campaign.”

What?

If I had been sitting in her desk, I would have stopped him, and asked: “But sir, what do you have to say about the president’s behavior in office that top officials with the FBI launched an investigation into what it would take to remove the president from office because he was so compromised by his relationships with Russia? Are his actions not tantamount to treason? Will your committee investigate that?”

Real News

The real news of this week — other than Trump’s diversionary declaration of a non-existent national crisis and emergency to misappropriate DOD money to build his damn wall — was what McCabe said in his new book: The Threat: How The FBI Protects America In The Age Of Terror And Trump.

You won’t find much about this on CBS, although you can watch the “60 Minutes” interview Sunday night. But even the advance clips from that appear to go after McCabe and the FBI’s “impartiality,” not Trump and his behavior. The point seems to be that Trump IS the threat. That seems to go right over the heads of the poor talking heads.

More valuable if you want to know the facts, readers should check out the reviews of the book in the New York Times and Washington Post.

The Times praises McCabe’s lean prose, while pointing out that he didn’t really write the book himself, and quotes the first sentence as if it “demands to be read in the voice of Jack Webb from ‘Dragnet’: “Between the world of chaos and the world of order stands the rule of law.”

McCabe is the former acting and deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation who was fired last March only hours before his scheduled retirement. He has been berated by Trump on Twitter on numerous occasions.

“This lawman, a registered Republican for the entirety of his adult life, may have been driven out of Dodge,” the Times reviewer writes. “But he has dusted off his white hat and returned with a memoir that’s better than any book typed this quickly has a right to be.

“Let me state the proposition openly,” McCabe writes. “The work of the FBI is being undermined by the current president.”

Yes, that is clear.

McCabe made news recently after advance clips began surfacing from the “60 Minutes” interview. He confirmed that top Justice Department officials — alarmed by Trump’s firing of James Comey as FBI director — discussed exploring invoking the 25th Amendment to remove the president from office with members of Trump’s cabinet. He confirmed a New York Times report that the deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, talked about wearing a wire in his meetings with the president.

These stories are in the TV interview but not in the book. Reviewers acknowledge that McCabe held back in the book, in part because of a pending lawsuit.

According to the Washington Post review, the book “includes disturbing new detail about Trump’s subservience to Russian President Vladimir Putin. During an Oval Office briefing in July 2017, Trump refused to believe U.S. intelligence reports that North Korea had test-fired an intercontinental ballistic missile — a test that Kim Jong Un had called a Fourth of July ‘gift’ to “the arrogant Americans.”

Trump dismissed the missile launch as a “hoax,” McCabe writes. “He thought that North Korea did not have the capability to launch such missiles. He said he knew this because Vladimir Putin had told him so.”

“Between the world of chaos and the world of order stands the rule of law,” McCabe writes. “Yet now the rule of law is under attack, including from the president himself.”

Yes, and this should not be understated, or dismissed by broadcast journalists, worried about their access to Trump.

Jeff Sessions

What’s interesting to reviewers and to me is McCabe’s accounts of dealing with Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the former attorney general, which the Times says, “would be high comedy if they were not so dire.”

“They are a highlight, or a lowlight, of this book,” the Times reviewer says.

McCabe describes Sessions as openly racist, which is consistent with the Jeff Sessions I have known since covering his tenure as a U.S. Attorney in Mobile back in the 1980s, back when U.S. Senator Howell Heflin cast the deciding vote on the Judiciary Committee against confirming him as a federal judge. Sessions has long been obsessed with stopping people from immigrating to the United States, and backed a state law that tried to accomplish it a few years ago, a law that was ultimately struck down as unconstitutional by the courts.

“Back in the old days,” Sessions reportedly said to McCabe, “you all only hired Irishmen. They were drunks, but they could be trusted.”

That’s not even a true statement, since the FBI has been hiring Ivy Leaguers from Harvard and Yale as long as the CIA has been doing the same thing, many from rich families in Connecticut, like Margaret Brennan.

Sessions comes off as almost as big an idiot as the president he so loyally served for such a short time.

McCabe provides evidence that Sessions didn’t read the daily intelligence briefings, any more than Trump did, and he writes that Sessions, like Trump, had “trouble focusing” and “seemed to lack basic knowledge about the jurisdictions of various arms of federal law enforcement.”

Sessions also believed, according to McCabe, “that Islam — inherently — advocated extremism” and Sessions ceaselessly sought to draw connections between crime and immigration. “Where’s he from?” was his first question about a suspect. The next: “Where are his parents from?”

Perhaps McCabe didn’t realize that’s a Southern thing, sort of like racism itself.

Robert Mueller

Special Counsel Robert Mueller is in the book, and is portrayed favorably as “punctual, determined, the antithesis of casual, with a special loathing for people who speak when they don’t know what they are talking about.”

I think I would like Mueller. I feel the same way.

Hillary Clinton

McCabe spends a “good deal of time” talking about Hillary Clinton and her email server in the book. He argues that Comey, whom he admires, made crucial mistakes in how he handled the matter.

“As a matter of policy, the FBI does everything possible not to influence elections,” McCabe writes. “In 2016, it seems we did.”

That echos my own critic of Comey at the time.

Trump and the FBI inspector general attack his credibility, simply because his wife, Jill, ran for State Senate in Virginia as a Democrat in 2015. He also got in trouble for allegedly making false statements about his contacts with the media.

But hey, so what? We like him for that. That’s not a bad thing, at least according to any news outlet that needs to know what’s really going on in Washington and requires sources of information, including those inside the intelligence community and the FBI.

Trump and Graham may criticize him for it, but the press should come down on his side on this. But not Brennon and CBS.

There were texts uncovered between Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, McCabe FBI subordinates, criticizing Trump. But why not? The press was already writing all kinds of critical things about Trump. There were already investigations into Trump’s collusion with Russia, his obstruction of justice, violations of the emoluments clauses, and other things, although apparently not treason, the word no one in Washington or the MSM dare utter.

“Yet if McCabe has made mistakes, his basic decency shines through in this memoir,” according to the Times.

“He adds to our understanding of how deeply Trump remains under Vladimir Putin’s sway. After a North Korean ballistic missile test, Trump told an F.B.I. briefer that reports of the test were a hoax. McCabe writes, incredulously: ‘He said he knew this because Vladimir Putin had told him so.’

“What more could a person do to erode the credibility of the presidency?” McCabe writes about Trump.

In the Post, the reviewer has praise for McCabe, yet criticism, for not standing up to the president.

“But for all of the understandable alarm and indignation that McCabe registers, he seems, like other Trump dissidents, never to have found reason or opportunity to stand up to the president. There are paragraphs in ‘The Threat’ that recount in detail McCabe’s inner outrage — but no indication that those thoughts escaped his lips in the presence of Trump.”

“What is it that makes otherwise proud public servants, Comey included, willing to subject themselves to Trump-inflicted indignities?” the Post reviewer asked. “Deference to the office? A determination to cling to power? A view of oneself as an indispensable institutional savior? At one point, McCabe puts his odds of getting the FBI director’s position at ‘one-in-ten-million,’ but he goes through a job interview with Trump that feels like a charade from the outset.”

But what is an FBI agent to do in dealing with a president who gets all his news from Fox News, believes in alt-facts, and Tweets openly about FBI agents as if they were just mere applicants for jobs on The Apprentice reality show?

Would you stand up to the son-of-a-bitch, knowing your career would be over? How about if you knew it was going to be over anyway?

Clearly we should be considering invoking the 25th Amendment to get rid of Trump and end this disastrous presidential reality show.

Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank had the best piece on this for Sunday that I saw.

This Trump performance is why people talk about the 25th Amendment

“His topic demanded utmost solemnity: The situation on the border is so dire, such a crisis, that he must invoke emergency powers to circumvent Congress, testing the boundary between constitutional democracy and autocracy. But with the nation watching, Trump instead delivered a bizarre, 47-minute variant of his campaign speech.

“On Thursday came reports that former acting FBI director Andrew McCabe had confirmed that Justice Department officials discussed the possibility of removing Trump under the 25th Amendment for incapacity. The president then spent the next 30 hours showing exactly why some people think him incapacitated.”

I’ve been convinced of this for more than a year. What will it take to get Margaret Brennan and the rest the broadcast media onboard?

Will Scott Pelley get this right on “60 Minutes” tonight? Or will this just be another attack on the FBI on behalf of Trump and the Republicans? We will be watching. We will see.