President Donald Trump is an overachiever. Seriously. The ethics abuses and conflicts of interest in his administration are unprecedented. The Russian investigation, with Trump’s accompanying attacks on the media and Justice Department, is far more serious than Watergate. And the border orphans crisis is not Trump’s “Katrina moment.” It’s much worse because this is not only a tragedy, it’s one that the president created for political reasons. Separating children from parents was supposed to to be a deterrent, but people crossing the border didn’t know their kids would be taken. It was supposed to be a hallmark of a harsh zero tolerance policy, but judges typically slapped people with time served and a $10 ticket. It was supposed to strengthen Trump’s hand with Congress (yes, a bargaining chip) until pressure forced him not only to cave, but to urge no action at all on immigration.
And although family separation was — briefly — a pillar of administration policy, justified with Scripture no less, the government put no system in place to reunite families. Not even a simple system of bracelets to identify children and parents. That is unfathomable. How did Trump and his team think U.S. parents would react? Probably the way Fox & Friends did — it’s not like he’s doing this to kids in Idaho or Texas. But they were wrong. Most parents seem to be feeling vicarious panic and dread, and most Americans oppose the policy. Even if you’ve never lost sight of your child for a minute at a mall, it’s all too easy to imagine this. And then to read that some families might never be reunited? That Americans could end up adopting some of these children? Imagine that happening to you and your child, happening to any parents and children from anywhere on earth. And then imagine your country did that. On purpose.
This is the administration that, having thrown our immigration system, our alliances, our international trade and our foreign policy into chaos, now wants to reorganize the U.S. government. First on the list, combine the departments of Labor and Education. Raise your hand if you trust Trump or anyone on his team with that project. It’ll never get anywhere, because Congress has never warmed to this kind of thing. Still, the audacity — the idea that they think they are competent enough to remake government — is stunning. Amid all the tragedy there is black comedy: Leading administration figures on immigration hounded by protesters as they try to dine out at, wait for it, Mexican restaurants in Washington. Melania’s “I really don’t care, do u?” jacket worn on a trip meant to show she cares about immigrant children ripped from their parents. Trump’s cavalier treatment of his fellow Republicans in Congress, who have been struggling for days toward an immigration reform compromise.
“Republicans should stop wasting their time on Immigration,” he tweeted, until after the “Red Wave” pads their House and Senate majorities this fall (he and Newt Gingrich may be the only political figures in America who are expecting that wave). Trump is treating his GOP allies as if they’re Canada and Mexico: Like garbage. They can’t even trust him to accurately describe a meeting scores of them attended and saw with their own eyes. He said they “applauded and laughed loudly” when he insulted their colleague Mark Sanford, who lost his primary race this month to a Trump pick. They didn’t; they grumbled and booed and said he was way out of line. The next day the president abruptly canceled the traditional congressional picnic on White House grounds. “It didn’t feel exactly right to me,” he said. “We’ll make it another time when things are going extremely well.” Good luck with that.
A story came out over the weekend Senator Mark Warner, the ranking Dem on the Senate Intelligence Committee, was overheard saying this at a fundraiser; “If you get me one more glass of wine, I’ll tell you stuff only Bob Mueller and I know. If you think you’ve seen wild stuff so far, buckle up. It’s going to be a wild couple of months.” Even Fox News has a report on that quote, as seen in mark-warner-reportedly-
Don’t get me wrong — I’d give almost anything to have a boring president (of either party) who colors inside the constitutional lines. Given that we do not, however, we might think of the Trump presidency as a four-year course in constitutional and criminal law. (If we are diligent, perhaps we can finish in less than four.) Unfortunately, it seems to be a years-long class jammed into a few weeks. Just in the past month, we’ve had raging public debates about the pardon power, the emoluments clause, immigration law, witness tampering and the executive branch’s refusal to defend a statute, not to mention Supreme Court decisions that turned on standing (albeit as a mechanism to duck ruling on gerrymandering, which implicates several civil liberties), search and seizure, and the states’ taxing power with respect to online retailers. Some of this is the normal ebb and flow of legal issues, but this president presents unique issues given his contempt for democratic norms and the independence of the courts, along with his predilection to dehumanize immigrants. Forget “pushing the envelope” — President Trump seems to be feeding the Constitution into a shredder. (We hope it is a cheap shredder like Michael Cohen, allowing for us to tape it back together after Trump leaves office.)
This next news story shows Trump’s abuse of power & corruption spilling over to Congress in the House. Trump’s henchmen, pundits & echo-messengers have sold their fans on a ridiculous notion of the need to pilfer documents from the DOJ/FBI, since it checks off a lot of boxes in their relentless quest to obstruct & tarnish the Mueller probe. The president’s House cronies want to gather secret info they can pass onto the White House in helping them build a defense against any crimes they committed. Nutjobs like Nunes (we’ve seen Nunes’ act many times before & we really need an investigation of him) keep asking for more documents only for the purpose of wanting to trample over the rule of law: nunes-endless-requests. Some of the info is part of an ongoing investigation &/or was revealed to a grand jury, so they can’t be released. But plenty of documents were handed over, so Trump lapdogs are pouring through about a million of them looking for some isolated needle-in-the-haystack, where they can twist the narrative in blaming some FBI agents of bias, then make the giant leap such discoveries somehow taint the credibility of Mueller’s work. Or it’s just as ridiculous thinking the reason the Russian probe was even launched was because of FBI bias, patently absurd, but that’s the fairy tale they’re trying to weave. Plus the FBI may have cost Hillary the election, so where’s the bias? See these articles: trump-justice-
Asked about lawmakers obtaining additional FISA records related to the Russia investigation, one former senior FBI official said it was “hard to put into words” how “damaging it could to be to national security if details about the US’s most sensitive intelligence-gathering process leaked out.” “It would be catastrophic,” they added. “Look at the damage that’s already been done.” The immediate concern, said former CIA operative Glenn Carle, is that turning over information related to FISA records could compromise sources and methods. “Congressional oversight is not operational control, it’s policy control,” Carle said. “So it’s not really appropriate for an oversight body and its members to have detailed knowledge of sources and methods, because they are not trained in how to handle that.” Republicans said Friday that the DOJ still has not complied with all their requests and indicated that they would be open to using all tools at their disposal to compel document production.
Meanwhile, Republican threats to penalize Rosenstein have attracted significant media coverage and speculation about what it could mean for the DOJ if its No. 2 official is held in contempt. In all likelihood, it would mean very little. When either chamber of Congress votes to hold an official in contempt, the case goes to the US attorney’s office in Washington, DC for criminal prosecution. In other words, if the House votes to hold the deputy attorney general in contempt, “they’d essentially be referring Rosenstein to himself for prosecution,” said Jeffrey Cramer, a longtime former federal prosecutor who spent 12 years at the DOJ.
As Robert Mueller’s investigation has amassed more indictments, Donald Trump has increasingly retreated from any defense of the facts to insisting Mueller has no right to investigate him at all. This weekend, Trump praised a Wall Street Journal op-ed by David Rivkin and Elizabeth Price Foley, two conservative legal apparatchiks. If you want to have a road map for where Trump’s defense is headed, and the radical actions he is likely to take, Rivkin and Foley are laying it out in plain view.
1. The jumping-off point for their defense of Trump is the recent FBI Inspector General report, which lambasted former director James Comey for evading Bureau protocol and announcing the reopening of the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails. While they concede that the report “found no evidence that then-FBI Director James Comey was trying to influence the election,” Comey confessed “that his election-eve decision to reopen the Clinton email investigation was motivated by a desire to protect her assumed presidency’s legitimacy.” This finding of “bias” is the foundation for the argument. What they authors don’t acknowledge is that it was bias against Hillary Clinton. Yes, Comey was trying to safeguard the legitimacy of her presumably certain election. But what was he trying to safeguard it against? The conspiracy theories of the Republican Party, which was already ginning up a postelection campaign to discredit the election as “rigged.” Comey erred by bending over backward to placate their paranoia. Now the far right is using Comey’s decision to break FBI protocol in order to placate Republicans as a rationale to demand breaking FBI protocol to help Republicans again, this time by quashing an investigation of Trump. You f-ed up – you trusted us!
2. They proceed to argue that texts between Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, expressing a wide array of centrist political views including heavy criticism of Donald Trump, reveal a fatal bias in the department: The inspector general concludes that the pervasive bias “cast a cloud over the FBI investigations to which these employees were assigned,” including Crossfire [Hurricane, the codename for the investigation of Trump’s ties to Russia.] And if Crossfire was politically motivated, then its culmination, the appointment of a special counsel, inherited the taint. All special-counsel activities—investigations, plea deals, subpoenas, reports, indictments and convictions—are fruit of a poisonous tree, byproducts of a violation of due process. There are two problems with this line of argument. First, the report only details the personal views of Page and Strzok, and not any other FBI agents. Why is that? Because Page and Strzok were having an affair, and using FBI devices to communicate, making their personal views open to public scrutiny. But you’d have to be insane to think they were the only FBI agents who had strong partisan beliefs. Lots of FBI agents had preferences in 2016, and the strongest leanings reportedly were those in favor of Trump. If two other random FBI agents happened to have their texts seized, you could just as easily construct a bias narrative pointing the other way. Second, as the IG report states, the personal views of those agents did not affect their work. Rivkin and Foley quote the scolding line about their texts “casting a cloud.” They ignore the previous sentence from the report: “our review did not find documentary or testimonial evidence directly connecting the political views these employees expressed in their text messages and instant messages to the specific investigative decisions.” In other words, there’s no evidence at all they let their views alter their investigation. It merely casts “a cloud.” But the cloud only exists because the public happens to see their frank, private exchange of political views. The normal procedure is for FBI agents to express political opinions and have those never become known the the public. The unusual thing about this election was that two agents had an affair that exposed their political beliefs. The idea that this proves the investigation of Trump was fatally poisoned assumes that FBI agents have never expressed strong political opinions before, which is is obvious nonsense.
3. Rivkin and Foley go on to assert that the investigation of Trump was opened up in order to prevent him from winning. They do not explain why the FBI kept its investigation hidden, even going so far as to disinform the public by telling the New York Times they saw no connection between Trump’s campaign and Russia. They infer this anti-Trump motive from the fact that Trump’s campaign was being investigated despite there being no evidence of anything shady going on. “There appears to have been no discernible evidence of Trump-Russia collusion at the time Crossfire was launched,” they write, “further reinforcing the notion that it was initiated ‘for the purpose’ of affecting the presidential election.” This is completely false. Crossfire Hurricane was opened up on July 31, 2016. By that point, there were four Trump campaign officials under FBI scrutiny for their ties to Russia: Michael Flynn, who had been paid to attend a dinner with Vladimir Putin; Paul Manafort, who had been paid to run a pro-Russian cut-out campaign in Ukraine; Carter Page, whom the FBI believed had been recruited as a Russian spy; and George Papadopoulos, who had met with Russian agents. That is not even to mention the financial ties between Trump, his inner circle, and the Russian Mafia, or the intelligence intercepts of Russian officials describing their inroads in the Trump campaign, all of which predate the investigation.
Rivkin and Foley argue that Mueller is probing whether Trump colluded with Russia on the theft of Democratic emails, but “despite massive surveillance and investigation, there’s still no public evidence of any such exchange.” The absence of public evidence does not mean the evidence does not exist. Maybe Mueller has the evidence and isn’t leaking it. (If Mueller had made any of this evidence public, his leaking would also be used as a reason to stop his investigation.) Or maybe he’s trying to get somebody who can testify to this collusion to hand over the evidence. Rivkin and Foley don’t want to take any chances of letting Mueller produce this evidence. They propose “that the special counsel’s activity be paused.” Then of course there won’t be any evidence of collusion, and they can kill the investigation for good, and conclude that Trump was innocent.
The One Sane One Shoved Aside
Defense Secretary James Mattis learned in May from a colleague that President Donald Trump had made the decision to withdraw the U.S. from the Iran nuclear deal, and scrambled to get his boss on the phone before a formal announcement was made. It wouldn’t be the last time he was caught off guard by a presidential announcement. A month later, Mattis was informed that Trump had ordered a pause in U.S. military exercises with South Korea only after the president had already promised the concession to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Last week, Trump again blindsided and overruled his defense secretary by publicly directing the Pentagon to create a sixth military branch overseeing operations in space. The way these recent presidential decisions on major national security issues have played out, as detailed by current and former White House and defense officials, underscores a significant change in Mattis’s role in recent months. The president is relying less and less on the advice of one of the longest-serving members of his cabinet, the officials said.
“They don’t really see eye to eye,” said a former senior White House official who has closely observed the relationship. It’s a stark contrast to Trump’s early enthusiasm for the retired four-star Marine general he proudly referred to as “Mad Dog.” And while the two men had disagreements from the start — on the use of enhanced interrogation techniques on terrorism suspects, for instance — Trump still kept Mattis in the loop on major decisions and heeded his counsel. “He’s never been one of the go-tos in the gang that’s very close to the president,” a senior White House official said. “But the president has a lot of respect for him.” In recent months, however, the president has cooled on Mattis, in part because he’s come to believe his defense secretary looks down on him and slow-walks his policy directives, according to current and former administration officials.
The government’s top ethics official said some of President Trump’s business dealings “raise serious concerns” but that the office lacks the authority to launch an investigation requested last month by congressional Democrats. More than 60 Democrats, led by Rep. David N. Cicilline of Rhode Island, had written to the Office of Government Ethics in May asking that the agency investigate reported Chinese government support of an Indonesian real estate development that will include several Trump-brand properties. David J. Apol, acting director and general counsel at the ethics office, responded last week that he thought concern was warranted. But because the president is not bound by the same conflict-of-interest laws as most federal employees, he said Congress is responsible for holding the president in check. “Under the Constitution, the primary authority to oversee the President’s ethics rests with Congress and ultimately, with the American people,” Apol wrote in his Monday response.
At issue is a report in the South China Morning Post saying the Chinese government is issuing $500 million in loans for the project in Jakarta, Indonesia. Days later, Trump announced his support for Chinese-backed telecommunications firm ZTE, a departure from his previously aggressive stance toward Chinese industry. The Democrats raised concerns about the deal that amplify arguments being made against the president and his company, the Trump Organization, in a series of court cases. In their letter, they argued that the loan may be a violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clauses that forbid the president from accepting gifts or payments from foreign governments. The Trump administration has “completely failed to address the suspicious timing between this policy reversal and the Chinese government’s loan to a Trump-backed project,” they wrote.
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