I've been trying to stay away from writing about the management of our country lately (bad for blood pressure) and stick to writing about the management of business, but this recent piece of (mis)management seems so odd, reckless and bizarre that I can't help myself.
The day after former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI and agreed to cooperate with the Mueller investigation, President Donald Trump, not surprisingly, took to Twitter.
"I had to fire General Flynn," Trump's tweet read, "because he lied to the Vice President and the FBI. He has pled guilty to those lies. It is a shame because his actions during the transition were lawful. There was nothing to hide!"
The tweet caused a frenzy in the legal community as it appeared to introduce a serious added dimension of legal exposure for the president.
As The Hill noted earlier today, "The tweet caused shockwaves, as legal experts suggested that if Trump knew that Flynn had lied to the FBI and then asked James Comey to drop the investigation, as the former FBI director has testified to Congress, it could amount to obstruction of justice."
Nice kettle of (self-inflicted) fish. But lucky for the president there was a mitigating factor. Turns out the ill-advised tweet, according to the White House (as was reported by The Washington Post, CNN and others), wasn't actually written by President Trump but by his personal lawyer John Dowd.
Whew, that was a close one. There are only three problems with this strange explanation.
1. It suggests Trump's attorneys are encouraging him to tweet on sensitive legal matters. (Yep, sounds like a solid legal strategy to me.)
2. Mr. Dowd would need direct access to the president's private Twitter account. Well, I suppose that's possible, but it would also suggest:
3. Mr. Dowd didn't realize that the commonly used past tense of "plead" is "pleaded," not "pled," as most first-year law students would know, and "pled" was the wording used in the tweet. (Well, I suppose Dowd could have been a young, inexperienced lad, but turns out he was born in 1941 and played a key role in the Iran-Contra affair, among many other cases. Not exactly a young legal pup.)
Seems a whole lot more likely to me that the loyal attorney, sensing Mr. Trump's legal jeopardy increasing by the second, took a bullet for his boss. Or maybe a grenade.
"One lies and the other swears to it."
Sorry, but there's only so much lying, misremembering, "can't recalls" and nonsensical explanations a body can stand. This all rather sadly reminds me of a story from my youth. I was 8 years old, living in the Boston area. A group of neighborhood urchins, myself included, was playing baseball in a small dirt backyard that passed for a ball field. One of us hit a foul ball that went backward, smashing a glass window in a nearby apartment building.
A few minutes later the building's janitor appeared, in his dark green janitor shirt and pants, walking over to us slowly in that world-weary way he had from having witnessed too much bad behavior for too many years.
"Well, what happened?" he asked. It wasn't our first broken window.
At first no one said anything, but then one of us (I can no longer remember who) came up with some cockamamie story that miraculously absolved all of us.
Then another one of us chimed in with, "Yeah, that's it, that's just how it happened."
The janitor didn't say anything for a minute. He looked at all of us long and hard and then shook his head slowly and said in his tired disappointed voice: "Great kids. One lies and the other swears to it."
Today it's 57 years later and I'm the janitor, and that's pretty much how I feel about the whole Trump administration.
My current focus is on coaching and developing new managers. My book is The Type B Manager.
Original article and pictures take www.forbes.com site
Комментариев нет:
Отправить комментарий