Trump pardons Scooter Libby:

President Trump on Friday issued a pardon to Lewis “Scooter” Libby, a former chief of staff to Vice President Richard B. Cheney who was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice in connection with the leak of a CIA officer’s identity.

“I don’t know Mr. Libby,” Trump said in a statement, “but for years I have heard that he has been treated unfairly. Hopefully, this full pardon will help rectify a very sad portion of his life.”

Oh, well, if Trump has “heard” that, there’s no more to be said.

Libby was convicted of four felonies in 2007 for perjury before a grand jury, lying to FBI investigators and obstruction of justice during an investigation

The Wall Street Journal as usual normalizes Trump’s grotesque behavior.

Headline:

Trump Replies to Barbs in James Comey’s New Book on Twitter

Well, yes, that’s narrowly true, but it’s absurdly minimizing.

Imaginary parent-child dialogue:

Parent: Stop calling Jimmy a slime ball!

Child: I was replying to his barbs.

The parental reply would not be “Oh ok then.”

Subhead:

The president accused Comey of lying to Congress and leaking classified information, adding, ‘It was my great honor to fire James Comey!’

No, that’s not even narrowly true. Trump didn’t “accuse,” he announced as fact, and he did it while calling Comey a slime ball.

The first two paragraphs:

President Donald Trump took aim at former Federal Bureau of Investigation Director

The usual. Reward the rich and punish the poor. Pass a huge tax cut for the rich, blow up the deficit, then go to even greater lengths to make sure poor people starve and freeze and die when they get sick.

President Trump quietly signed a long-anticipated executive order on Tuesday intended to force low-income recipients of food assistance, Medicaid and low-income housing subsidies to join the work force or face the loss of their benefits.

The order, in the works since last year, has an ambitious title — “Reducing Poverty in America” — and is directed at “any program that provides means-tested assistance or other assistance that provides benefits to people, households or families that have low incomes,”

New details about the warrant: the Times has them.

The F.B.I. agents who raided the office and hotel of President Trump’s lawyer on Monday were seeking all records related to the “Access Hollywood” tape in which Mr. Trump was heard making vulgar comments about women, according to three people who have been briefed on the contents of a federal search warrant.

The search warrant also sought evidence of whether the lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, tried to suppress damaging information about Mr. Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign.

Also documents related to the efforts to silence two of Trump’s women on the side.

The new details from the warrant reveal that prosecutors are keenly interested in Mr. Cohen’s unofficial role

The Times editorial board to Trump: they’re cominna getcha.

Let’s take a step back and think about this, they suggest. What are we looking at here?

Early Monday morning, F.B.I. agents raided the New York office, home and hotel room of the personal lawyer for the president of the United States. They seized evidence of possible federal crimes — including bank fraud, wire fraud and campaign finance violations related to payoffs made to women, including a porn actress, who say they had affairs with the president before he took office and were paid off and intimidated into silence.

That evening the president surrounded himself with the top American military officials and launched unbidden into a tirade against the

Ah, that US Attorney for NY who recused himself is the one Trump weirdly interviewed last fall; I’d forgotten about that.

ABC News reported Tuesday that Geoffrey Berman, the interim US attorney for the Southern District of New York, recused himself from the investigation into Trump’s longtime personal lawyer, Michael Cohen.

Two sources told ABC News that Berman was not involved in the decision to raid Cohen’s office and residences on Monday because of that recusal, which Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein approved.

Other attorneys in the Southern District handled the FBI raid, which a federal judge approved, ABC News said.

It’s unlikely that Trump had such a situation in mind when he made the eyebrow-raising move to interview Berman

The Post performs contortions in the effort to frame Trump’s batshit tweet about Syria and Russia as a normal announcement of plans.

President Trump warned Wednesday that missiles “will be coming” toward Syria in response to a suspected chemical attack, and he taunted Russia for vowing to shoot down any incoming strikes.

That wasn’t a warning, it was a boast, an eruption, a look at me I can bomb things.

“Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and ‘smart!’” the president wrote on Twitter, referring to missile strikes that have appeared likely since the weekend deaths of more than 40 Syrian civilians, including children.

As if it were just normal for a president to “write on … Read the rest

Trump’s morning of crazy:

The Failing New York Times wrote another phony story. It was political pundit Doug Schoen, not a Ukrainian businessman, who asked me to do a short speech by phone (Skype), hosted by Doug, in Ukraine. I was very positive about Ukraine-another negative to the Fake Russia C story!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 11, 2018

Updating to add Maggie Haberman’s response to that:

Political pundit Doug Schoen, who works for that Ukrainian businessman, arranged the speech …as our story says. https://t.co/JCr0CYoPI5

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) April 11, 2018

/update

So much Fake News about what is going on in the White House. Very calm and calculated with a big focus on open and fair trade