Elijah Cummings: There are legit reasons why 60 Dems sat out inauguration … but they’re secret

Elijah Cummings: There are legit reasons why 60 Dems sat out inauguration … but they’re secret

And here you thought that the one third of Democrats in Congress who boycotted the peaceful transfer of power from the last president to the current one were acting out of childish petulance and spite. Think again, says Rep. [score]Elijah Cummings[/score] (D-Md.), who also explained that if the American people knew what Congress knows, they would have skipped the inauguration, too.

So what is it that Congress knows. Ah, therein lies the rub. If Cummings revealed that information, he’d have to kill you.

During an interview with CNN’s Chris Cuomo on Thursday, the day before Donald Trump took the oath of office, Cummings said cryptically:

Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?

You’ve got to understand that members of Congress have a lot of information that the public does not have. And I can tell you over the last week or two, the classified briefings that I have been to, and if the public knew what members of Congress know—

When Cuomo interrupted to ask what the public is kept in the dark, adding, “If it’s that important that it’s going to make people not go to the inauguration … shouldn’t people know?”

Cummings wasn’t ready to give up the inane notion that Congress had something on Trump, so he claimed that the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee had new information on the role that Russia and FBI Director James Comey played in influencing the outcome of the U.S. election.

The only problem with that claim is that the FBI and CIA already conducted exhaustive investigations in attempts to ferret out a smoking gun. On Oct. 31,  the New York Times reported on the FBI’s progress following a summer-long probe. Here is what they determined:

[They] looked for financial connections with Russian financial figures, searched for those involved in hacking the computers of Democrats, and even chased a lead — which they ultimately came to doubt — about a possible secret channel of email communication from the Trump Organization to a Russian bank.

Law enforcement officials say that none of the investigations so far have found any link between Mr. Trump and the Russian government. And even the hacking into Democratic emails, F.B.I. and intelligence officials now believe, was aimed at disrupting the presidential election rather than electing Mr. Trump. [Emphasis added]

But that didn’t deter Cummings from asserting that “we need a 9/11-type panel” or from insisting:

It seems as if the Republicans are sort of letting President-elect Trump sort of just move forward with regard to the conflict of interest issues [and] this whole hacking issue. And I’m really concerned that we as Democrats have to push harder on Republicans to do something so that our standards are met and that he gets rid of these conflicts and he also deals with the hacking.

 

But once again, he is ignoring the reality that until two days ago, there was a Democrat in the White House.

Here is Cummings’s performance, should you care to watch.

https://youtu.be/U0Tqbi1wAog

Ben Bowles

Ben Bowles

Ben Bowles is a freelance writer and regular contributor to "Liberty Unyielding."

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