Appearing on Morning Joe with hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman hyperventilated that the supposed hacking of the 2016 election by Russia was a “9/11 scale event,” a “Pearl Harbor scale event.”
The conversation revolved around the resignation of Ret. Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn as National Security Adviser after the revelation he had likely spoken to the Russian Ambassador about sanctions Barack Obama imposed on Russia in late December and given possibly false information to Vice-President Pence about the conversation. The White House had been warned Flynn might be a target of blackmail by the Russians roughly a month before his resignation.
Scarborough asked, “Is it credible that there’s any way this president could not have known about this, the conversation that White House had been warned about it a month ago?
Friedman answered, “Well, this is a question I’ve been asking since I’ve been reading the stories yesterday, Joe. I share Mika’s real outrage on this issue; I don’t care what he told Pence. We only care what he told Pence because Pence went out and basically misled the public on Face the Nation.”
He continued:
The issue is what did he tell Trump? Did he and Trump actually cook up this whole thing after the Russians did not respond harshly to the eviction of their spies and diplomats? Trump actually tweeted out some positive encouragement of this. Did the two of them cook this up all along? And it gets, Joe, to two other issues. The first is we have never taken seriously from the very beginning Russia hacked our election. That was a 9/11 scale event. They attacked the core of our very democracy. That was a Pearl Harbor scale event. Can you imagine if Hillary Clinton were where Trump was, what the right would be doing on this issue? This goes to the very core of our democracy.
The second point . . . my philosopher friend, Dov Seidman, likes to make the distinction between formal authority and moral authority. Trump has formal authority. In fact, that Steven Miller guy kept telling us and Kellyanne Conway keeps telling us, “We won. Get over it.” But Trump has no moral authority; he has squandered his moral authority by repeatedly lying and his people repeatedly lying on issues of fact that we know about. Why is that important? Because there’s gonna be a point in the next few weeks or months, whether it’s on an issue like North Korea or whatever where Donald Trump is gonna have to make a very hard call on the basis of intelligence. It may go bad; it may not go bad, but he’s gonna have to look the American people in the eye and say, “Trust me.” And the fact that he has formal authority and no moral authority is gonna be a real problem for him. All this lying is going to add up.
Friedman, of course, never questioned former president Barack Obama’s “moral; authority,” despite his Administration’s repeated lies o the American people, whether it revolved around his promises on ObamaCare, the administration’s lies about Benghazi, (about which he said, “To me, this is an utterly contrived story in the sense that ‘this is the end of,’ you know, ‘Obama’s foreign policy,’”) the lies about the Iran nuclear deal, the stonewalling in the fast and Furious affair, the IRS scandal, any of it.