The Observer offers a crisp take on Trump’s suitability for a state visit to the UK.

Donald Trump is not a fit and proper person to hold the office of president of the United States. That is a view widely held in the US and among America’s European allies, by politicians and diplomats in government and by rank-and-file voters repelled by his gross egoism, narcissism and what Boris Johnson, the foreign secretary, has rightly termed his “stupefying ignorance”. It is a view we wholeheartedly share and have repeatedly expressed, before and after Trump’s narrow election victory last November.

Trump is an habitual liar, as evidenced again in last week’s sworn congressional testimony by his sacked FBI

Patrick Wintour at the Guardian reports that Trump is having doubts about that visit to the UK, but the White House has issued a statement saying Nuh-uh.

Donald Trump has told Theresa May in a phone call he does not want to go ahead with a state visit to Britain until the British public supports him coming.

The US president said he did not want to come if there were large-scale protests and his remarks in effect put the visit on hold for some time.

The call was made in recent weeks, according to a Downing Street adviser who was in the room. The statement surprised May, according to those present.

May’s people refuse to comment.

“We aren’t going to

Asha Rangappa writes that the real shocker in Comey’s testimony is Trump’s total indifference to the damage Russia did to us and continues to do.

[A]s a former FBI counterintelligence agent, what I saw as the most explosive aspect of the testimony didn’t involve any legal violation of the U.S. code or questions about whether Comey had broken established Department of Justice protocols. Instead, it was the prima facie evidence that Comey presented that Trump appears unwilling to uphold his oath “to preserve, protect, and defend” the country — which puts the security of our nation and its democracy at stake. In the nine times Trump met with or called Comey, it was always to discuss how the investigation into

Trump’s European jaunt was even worse than we knew.

After a public showing on May 25 in which Trump refused to endorse NATO’s collective defense clause and famously shoved the Montenegrin leader out of the way, leaders of the 29-member alliance retired to a closed-door dinner that multiple sources tell Foreign Policy left alliance leaders “appalled.”

Trump had two versions of prepared remarks for the dinner, one that took a traditional tack and one prepared by the more NATO-skeptic advisors, Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon. “He dumped both of them and improvised,” one source briefed on the dinner told FP.

During the dinner, Trump went off-script to criticize allies again for not spending enough on defense. (The United

Ana Marie Cox notes that some people think of John Dean as the parallel to Comey but she has been thinking of Anita Hill.

To be completely honest, I didn’t just think of Hill’s experience, either. I thought of mine. Indeed, anyone who has been the target of sexual harassment or sexual abuse would have trouble not hearing echoes of their own story in what Comey had to say about the president. When I noted on Twitter that Trump’s behavior with Comey sounded a lot like that of a sexual predator, my timeline exploded with grim confirmation. And I wasn’t the only one making that connection.

…

The president went out of his way to let Comey know he

Scalzi:

Do you still think James Comey wasn’t very good at his job?

Kind of? I think what his testimony solidified for me is that James Comey was probably pretty good at the day to day minutiae of his former gig, and also that within the context of that gig he was pretty ethical. But I also think he made some high-profile bad calls, and that very same desire for ethical action caused him to exacerbate rather than mitigate some of those bad calls.

At this point I’ve gotten used to thinking of Comey as something of a tragic figure, whose greatest virtue — a desire to act ethically and above the usual boundaries of politics in the execution

Trump’s lawyer Marc Kasowitz:

Kasowitz worked for the law firmMayer Brown. In 1993 Kasowitz, 18 lawyers and two clients left Mayer Brown to establish the Kasowitz Benson Torres law firm.^[4][12]

He has also defended Bill O’Reilly from allegations of sexual harassment,^[13] and is defending Sberbank of Russia. Additionally, Kasowitz represents a company run by a Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, who is a very close friend of Vladimir Putin and who employed Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort for several years.^[14]

I think we’re done here.… Read the rest

Another thing I’ve been wondering is how reckless it is or is not for Trump’s lawyer to make sweeping assertions of fact that he can’t possibly know. The Times yesterday:

Before firing Mr. Comey, Mr. Trump was dogged by the F.B.I. inquiry into his campaign’s ties to Russia. But he was never personally under investigation.

Now, he faces the prospect of an obstruction investigation, inquiries by emboldened congressional officials and questions from both parties about whether he tried inappropriately to end the F.B.I. inquiry into Michael T. Flynn, his former national security adviser.

Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, Marc E. Kasowitz, flatly denied any obstruction. “The president never, in form or substance, directed or suggested that Mr. Comey stop

The Times reported yesterday that Trump is feeling all happy and fighty about the Comey hearing.

President Trump dipped in and out of the small dining room off the Oval Office on Thursday to monitor a television as James B. Comey, the ousted F.B.I. director, told a tortured tale — and to insist to his huddled legal team, “I was right.”

Many Democrats and some legal analysts predicted big trouble for the president after Mr. Comey’s blow-by-blow description to the Senate Intelligence Committee of Mr. Trump’s efforts to steer the investigation of his former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, behavior they think amounted to obstruction of justice.

But Mr. Trump and many of his aides believe that Mr. Comey’s

He’s back, unimproved by his day off from the tweet-machine.

Despite so many false statements and lies, total and complete vindication…and WOW, Comey is a leaker!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 9, 2017

He accuses Comey of lies – he does, the guy who lies to our faces about stuff we’ve watched him do and say.

And it’s not “leaking” to share your own unclassified notes.

Great reporting by @foxandfriends and so many others. Thank you!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 9, 2017

Yeah, great reporting by the most dishonest major “news” outlet we’ve got.

After that he retweeted Dershowitz:

We should stop talking about obstruction of justice. No plausible case. We must distinguish crimes from pol

The Times is understandably proud of the part it played.

James B. Comey, the recently fired F.B.I. director, said Thursday in an extraordinary Senate hearing that he believed that President Trump had clearly tried to derail an F.B.I. investigation into his former national security adviser and that the president had lied and defamed him.

Mr. Comey, no longer constrained by the formalities of a government job, offered a blunt, plain-spoken assessment of a president whose conversations unnerved him from the day they met, weeks before Mr. Trump took office. His testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee provided an unflattering back story to his abrupt dismissal and squarely raised the question of whether Mr. Trump tried to obstruct justice.

Answering that

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on Thou art more deranged, and intemperate.

He hasn’t failed yet, so I’m not assuming he ever will.

Nope, me neither. Whenever I hear people talk about how quickly he is going to get impeached or forced to resign, it sounds to me like more of the same kind of thinking that led people to predict that he would never make it past the primaries, and later that he would never actually get elected. As I have previously stated, I won’t be the least bit surprised if he is able to serve for 8 years only to be replaced by some of his deplorable offspring (or someone equally bad).

First of all, the … Read the rest

Honestly he really does have one hell of a fucking nerve.

I mean to me they’re not even people, it’s so so sad, I mean morality’s just gone, um, morality’s flown out the window, we deserve so much better than this as a country…

Morals. Morality. Morals.

Trump cheats contractors and workers out of money he owes them.

Trump attacks people on Twitter, thus inspiring some o-f his millions of followers to pile on Trump’s targets.

Trump has been accused of various forms and degrees of sexual assault many times.

Trump settled fraud claims against his “university” – really just a seminar to teach real estate tricks – for $25 million before he took office.

Trump charged his … Read the rest

So the hearings have begun, and Coats, Rogers and McCabe all refused to answer some of the questions, without being able to offer any legal justification for doing so.

Senators flashed anger on Wednesday as the Trump administration officials repeatedly refused to answer questions about whether the president had tried to interfere with the Russia investigation.

Senator Angus King, an independent of Maine, pressed Mr. McCabe on why he would not comment on conversations he may have had with Mr. Comey about his interactions with Mr. Trump. Mr. McCabe said he could not discuss anything “within the purview” of the Justice Department investigation being run by Robert S. Mueller III, who was appointed special counsel last month.

“Why does