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