He got our attention.

No big thing: Just the Secretary of State saying the President of the United States kept wanting to break the lawhttps://t.co/xj03TyQfwn

— Chris Cillizza (@CillizzaCNN) December 7, 2018

Tillerson says Trump was a “pretty undisciplined” man who “doesn’t like to read” and often had to be reminded about the law https://t.co/mybdx3xX7S

— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) December 7, 2018

Rex Tillerson breaks his silence: Trump is impulsive, hates reading, and floated illegal plans https://t.co/wohskbjrTu

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) December 7, 2018

These statements by Rex Tillerson on @POTUS are quite extraordinary. If @realDonaldTrump tried to do illegal things AS PRESIDENT, what makes anyone think he didn't do illegal things when he wasn't yet president? https://t.co/jWzDbCKVxJ

At the Post, more on Tillerson’s observations of Trump:

“What was challenging for me coming from the disciplined, highly process-oriented ExxonMobil corporation,” Tillerson said, was “to go to work for a man who is pretty undisciplined, doesn’t like to read, doesn’t read briefing reports, doesn’t like to get into the details of a lot of things, but rather just kind of says, ‘This is what I believe.’ ”

Not even “kind of”; that’s exactly what he says. He said it just the other day in response to a question about the climate change report. “I don’t believe it,” he said, like an idiot. He doesn’t not believe it for reasons, he just “doesn’t believe it” as in he … Read the rest

Last night Rex Tillerson did his first public gig since being so abruptly dropped nine months ago.  He talked to a reporter at the event and said some intriguing things.

The honeymoon didn’t last long, Tillerson said. The relationship between him and Trump became strained after the president grew tired of the former Exxon Mobil CEO telling him that he could not do things the way he wanted.

Tillerson said the two had starkly different styles and did not share a common value system.

“So often, the president would say here’s what I want to do and here’s how I want to do it and I would have to say to him, Mr. President I understand what you want

The NY Times reports that Trump has decided on Barr as Attorney General.

Mr. Barr has criticized aspects of the Russia investigation, including suggesting that the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, hired too many prosecutors who had donated to Democratic campaigns. Mr. Barr has defended Mr. Trump’s calls for a new criminal investigation into his 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton, including over a uranium mining deal the Obama administration approved when she was secretary of state.

“There is nothing inherently wrong about a president calling for an investigation,” Mr. Barr told The New York Times last year. “Although an investigation shouldn’t be launched just because a president wants it, the ultimate question is whether the matter warrants

Rebecca Solnit notes that Trump’s crimes are so many and various that we lose track of them.

The current head of the federal government, the person who is supposed to somehow embody the rule of law, is in violation of a host of little laws and some major constitutional ones. USA Today reported in June 2016 that Trump and his businesses “have been involved in at least 3,500 legal actions in federal and state courts during the past three decades. Just since he announced his candidacy a year ago, at least 70 new cases have been filed, about evenly divided between lawsuits filed by him and his companies and those filed against them. And the records review found at

Asha Rangappa on what’s really at stake:

Cohen’s guilty plea on Thursday demonstrates that Trump’s behavior is fundamentally incompatible with the vision of government expressed by the Constitution itself. To wit, Trump not only believes it’s OK to profit from the presidency, but he’s also willing to put the U.S. under a foreign adversary’s thumb to do it.

…

Candidate Trump’s secret attempt to enrich himself through a business deal with a hostile foreign adversary is the embodiment of the twin evils the Constitution seeks to prevent. That the deal didn’t materialize is immaterial from a constitutional point of view: They may still have influenced Trump’s weirdly favorable view of Russia, or the inexplicable change in the Republican Party

Barry Berke and Norman Eisen spell out how Trump’s tweets yesterday are evidence of his obstructing justice.

Monday, Trump edged closer to an open display of obstruction and witness tampering: He urged potential witnesses against him to refuse to cooperate with law enforcement — and implied threats against those who do.

Trump began by publicly attacking Michael Cohen, his former attorney and fixer, who pleaded guilty last week to lying to Congress about a Trump real estate project in Moscow and who has been cooperating with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.

Trump suggested in a series of tweets not only that Cohen is lying but also that he should receive no benefit for cooperating, as Cohen’s lawyers have

Charles Blow says it’s only going to get worse.

I expect Trump to admit nothing, even if faced with proof positive of his own misconduct. There is nothing in the record to convince me otherwise. He will call the truth a lie and vice versa.

I also don’t think that Trump would ever voluntarily leave office as Nixon did, even if he felt impeachment was imminent. I’m not even sure that he would willingly leave if he were impeached and the Senate moved to convict, a scenario that is hard to imagine at this point.

I don’t think any of this gets better, even as the evidence becomes clearer. I don’t believe that Trump’s supporters would reverse course in

Greg Sargent at the Post reminds us what we now know:

I’m talking about the seven weeks or so that began in June 2016, when Donald Trump Jr. planned the infamous Trump Tower meeting with Russians, and ended in late July, with GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump publicly calling on Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails.

What we now know is this. During much of that period, the Trump Organization was secretly pursuing a business deal in Russia that required Kremlin approval — even though the most senior members of Trump’s own campaign, and possibly Trump himself, knew at the time that Russia was waging an attack designed to sabotage our democracy on Trump’s behalf, which they eagerly sought

Adam Schiff sums it up: Flynn and Trump and Cohen all said things about when the Trump Tower Moscow deal ended that were not true, and the Russians knew they were not true, so they were all compromised. Trump was arguing for doing away with sanctions while he campaigned and while he was working on a deal that would require an end to sanctions for him to make money. The corruption is broader and deeper than we knew.

At the same time candidate Trump publicly urged sanctions relief for Russia, he was privately putting together a business deal in Moscow that required lifting US sanctions. Then President Trump and his confederates misled the country about it, in a way

Sharon LaFraniere at the Times notes that one thing Mueller has for sure exposed is what an entrenched determined liar Trump is and how that has shaped his gang. They all know he expects lying-for-Trump and they all oblige.

Mr. Trump looks for people who share his disregard for the truth and are willing to parrot him, “even if it’s a lie, even if they know it’s a lie, and even if he said the opposite the day before,” said Gwenda Blair, a Trump biographer. They must be “loyal to what he is saying right now,” she said, or he sees them as “a traitor.”

Part of what’s so odd and extreme it is is how obvious it is. He … Read the rest

The Times reported Thursday that Giuliani was claiming that Trump’s written answers to Mueller were consistent with what Cohen is now admitting.

Although Mr. Trump’s lawyers have long worried that the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, is trying to catch Mr. Trump in a lie, they said Mr. Cohen’s new account of the Trump Organization’s abortive hotel project in Moscow essentially matches what Mr. Trump himself stated in written answers delivered to prosecutors just nine days ago.

Mr. Cohen might have lied to the authorities about aspects of the deal, as the complaint charges, they said, but the president did not.

“The president said there was a proposal, it was discussed with Cohen, there was a nonbinding letter