With friends like these...

"He's an outsider...a New York businessman."  (Chris Christie)  "He's not a Washington guy or politician" (Sen. James Lankford, R-OK) "He's new to government so he probably wasn't steeped into the long going protocols that establish the relationship between the DOJ, FBI and White House" (Paul Ryan).  In other words, ignorance of the law is no excuse unless you are president.   

This sounds a lot like the Firefly Defense:  "Chicolini may look like an idiot and act like an idiot, but don't let that fool you.  He really is an idiot."  (Rufus T. Firefly, president of Freedonia)

Roughly speaking, this was the defense Trump's supporters offered to rebut the testimony of James Comey before the Senate Intelligence Committee + One today.  (The plus-one was John McCain, who opted for confusion and obfuscation, which we will pass over in silence.)  That obstruction of justice is wrong is one of those things nobody could possibly know, like the complexity of health care, or the party affiliation of Abraham Lincoln, or the exact whereabouts of this guy Frederick Douglass.  So no harm, no foul, right?  And this whole Russia thing is a giant witch hunt.

There was no running rebuttal because, according to the New York Times, Trump's keepers top aides kept him "occupied, even-keeled and away from Twitter."  James Mattis and his lawyer Marc Kasowitz baby-sat him until it was time to read a couple of pages to a "Faith or Freedom" conference and played keep-away with his iPhone.  So we may never know what he meant when he said to Comey, "Besides, I have been very loyal to you, very loyal, we had that thing, you know."  Since they had just met, Comey says he had no idea what any of this meant -- "that thing"?  We'll always have Paris?  Pittsburgh?   Curiouser and curiouser. 

This just in:  Trump will hold a "news conference" tomorrow.  Really?  That's the way you want to go?