Memogate is back in the news!

Washington is leaking like a sieve. For the investigative reporters in The New York Times and Washington Post this is manna from heaven. A criminal investigation into Trump and his associates alleged collusion with Russia during 2016 presidential elections is on the cards. Rod Rosenstein, the Deputy Attorney General for the United States Department of Justice, has appointed Robert Mueller, former FBI director, as special counsel for Russia investigation.

He is authorised to investigate the charges that have circulated around the White House since Trump fired the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director, James Comey recently.

We are told that Comey was close to finding Trump and his associates alleged collusion with the Russians. Therefore he had to be fired! Trump, of course, is loudly denying this, even threatening Comey that he may have recorded him over their discussions. Naturally, Comey is hitting back. His friends are coming out to tell the media that Comey always kept memos of his meetings/interactions with Trump. They clearly show the president urged the FBI director to drop investigations against General Mike Flynn whom Trump appointed as his national security adviser. The American intelligence has in its possession phone conversations between Flynn and the Russian ambassador in Washington allegedly discussing sanctions against Russia that Obama put in place before he left the White House.

At the heart of the whole affair is a memo that the deputy attorney general wrote to Trump recommending the firing of the FBI director. Why and who made him write this memo is the big question. I am reminded of our Memogate scandal in 2011, where a ‘senior diplomat’ (read the then ambassador in Washington, Husain Haqqani) alleged that the ‘boss’ had authorised him to send a memo to Admiral Mike Mullen, the then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to say that the Pakistan Army was trying to destabilise a democratically-elected government. “The boss was an obvious reference to President Zardari,” Mansoor Ijaz wrote in the London-based Financial Times. If this was proven to be true, then the highest in the land was guilty of treason. Impeachment was the punishment. President Trump is in the same boat as Asif Zardari was. But in Pakistan, a president enjoys presidential immunity and can technically not be impeached. Only a full disclosure would have cleared the mystery. Mansoor Ijaz was declared an enemy by the followers of the Zardari camp after his October 10, 2011 Financial Times column. Climbing atop the bully pulpit, the jiyalas demonised Ijaz as a con man. A carpetbagger, wheedling his wares to anyone willing to fall in his trap. If truth be told, Mansoor Ijaz did come across as a “smarmy” and “dodger,” but many of us didn’t think he was a liar or a fraud. But many of us in the media wondered why Ijaz was not coming out in the open to end the mystery? Was he a second Julian Assange, who like the WikiLeaks founder was slowly leaking out the contents?

Ijaz’s November 13, 2011 rejoinder carried in full by the media wondered whether the then president was in the know. “There is growing desperation within the government of President Asif Ali Zardari to cover its tracks in what a certain Pakistani official did, apparently with the president’s consent or perhaps just in his name, outside the knowledge of the country’s military leaders, intelligence department and even its Foreign Office,” he wrote. “This cabal within Pakistan’s civilian government will stop at nothing to prevent me from telling the truth by attempting to discredit me — a miscalculation of epic proportions…I have the facts.”

Today, the most powerful man in the world is caught up in the same web of confusion that Zardari got into but managed to extricate himself. Can Trump, too, survive the Memogate?

Published in The Express Tribune, May 21^st, 2017.

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