Tag: Trump

  • The President pointed his fingers at his head

    Chris Cilizza comments on some highlights from the memos:

    3. “The conversation, which was pleasant at all times, was chaotic, with topics touched, left, then returned to later, making it very difficult to recount in a linear fashion…..It really was conversation-as-jigsaw-puzzle in a way, with pieces picked up, then discarded, then returned to.”

    No observation anywhere in these memos rings truer of Trump than this one, which comes from the one-on-one dinner the two men at the White House eight days after Trump had been sworn in.

    Watch any Trump press conference or speech and you are immediately struck by the massively haphazard nature of it. Trump can jump — as he did earlier this week — from his Electoral College win to the situation in North Korea without blinking an eye. To his supporters, it shows an able mind unbound by needing to stay “on message.” To his critics it shows someone incapable of focusing on much of anything for any extended period of time.

    Comey’s recounting of the logical hops in the conversation — from Trump’s inaugural crowd size to the nastiness of the 2016 campaign to how tall his son, Barron, was is perhaps the most powerful moment in the memos. It captures Trump’s approach and mindset perfectly.

    It’s not just the inability to focus on one thing – it’s the absence of a coherent through-line, in other words it’s the absence of thought. Non-stop babblers like Trump are story tellers as opposed to diccussers; they’re all narrative and no analysis. That’s a really very drastic disability for a president.

    4. “I said I don’t do sneaky things. I don’t leak. I don’t do weasel moves.”

    Comey critics will fixate on these lines because we know that he leaked parts of these memos after he was fired in an attempt to have a special prosecutor appointed to examine whether — among other things — Trump was secretly taping conversations in the White House. By Comey’s own standard — as laid out above — his purposeful leak was ‘weasel move.”

    Wait. Comey said that as the FBI director. He said it on the job, in his official capacity. He was saying what his interactions with the president would be as head of the FBI. When he was no longer in that job and thus not reporting to the president, he was free to make his own rules.

    Plus, on a human level, Trump deliberately fired him in the most abrupt embarrassing caught in LA without a ride home way possible. I have a hard time seeing it as a “weasel move” for Comey to share his own memos after that.

    7. “He then went on to explain that he has serious reservations about Mike Flynn’s judgment….the President pointed his fingers at his head and said ‘the guy has serious judgment issues.’”

    Reminder: This comment by Trump comes just eight days after he has become President! Which means that he harbored doubts about Flynn long before January 20, 2017. And yet he still chose Flynn as a his national security adviser. Which is curious except when you remember that dogged loyalty is by far the most important thing to Trump. And there was no one more loyal to Trump in the campaign than Flynn.

    Yes. That one is just stunning.

  • Height clearance in submarines

    Reading the Comey memos this morning. Notice that they were no sooner handed over to Congress than they were leaked. So much for that whole pesky law and order idea that evidence from an ongoing investigation should not be handed over to Congress.

    On page 3 the memo of the dinner for two begins. Comey reports that he had a chance to chat with the two servers before Trump got there, and that they were both retired Navy submariners and the three of them “had a fun discussion about height clearance in submarines.”

    The conversation, which was pleasant at all times, was chaotic, with topics touched, left, then returned to later, making it very difficult to recount in a linear fashion.

    I bet. That’s the Trump we’ve come to know and to loathe more than we did before in the happy days when we knew little of him and cared less. He’s a very prolific talker, but a very bad one: he just takes off, as if he were in a competition for “how long can you keep talking?” He babbles. He makes you wish language had never been invented to be abused by a goon like him.

    The president spoke an overwhelming majority of the time.

    Sums.it.up.

    Trump asked, “So what do you want to do?” They talked about Comey’s job in detail.

    There was no acknowledgement by him (or me) that we had already talked about this twice.

    With a babbler like Trump it can be hard to tell if that’s just more babbling or early Alzheimer’s. Or both.

    Trump says Obama and Holder were close, and Comey agrees and then says that’s a thing presidents keep getting wrong – they think because problems come from the Justice Department that it’s a good idea to “try to bring Justice close” when in fact it’s a very bad idea. He cited Mitchell, Meese, Gonzales, and Trump added Bobby Kennedy.

    Then there’s a startling bit, with names redacted, where Trump tells Comey he (Trump) doubts Flynn’s judgement. Oh, really, sir?

  • The stories John Barron told

    Investigative journalist Jonathan Greenberg tells a long detailed story in the Post about Young Donald Trump’s obsessive campaign to get himself onto the Forbes 400 list by means of prolific lies about how many $$$ he really had.

    In May 1984, an official from the Trump Organization called to tell me how rich Donald J. Trump was. I was reporting for the Forbes 400, the magazine’s annual ranking of America’s richest people, for the third year. In the previous edition, we’d valued Trump’s holdings at $200 million, only one-fifth of what he claimed to own in our interviews. This time, his aide urged me on the phone, I needed to understand just how loaded Trump really was.

    The official was John Barron — a name we now know as an alter ego of Trump himself. When I recently rediscovered and listened, for first time since that year, to the tapes I made of this and other phone calls, I was amazed that I didn’t see through the ruse: Although Trump altered some cadences and affected a slightly stronger New York accent, it was clearly him. “Barron” told me that Trump had taken possession of the business he ran with his father, Fred. “Most of the assets have been consolidated to Mr. Trump,” he said. “You have down Fred Trump [as half owner] . . . but I think you can really use Donald Trump now.” Trump, through this sockpuppet, was telling me he owned “in excess of 90 percent” of his family’s business. With all the home runs Trump was hitting in real estate, Barron told me, he should be called a billionaire.

    Greenberg suspected some of that was untrue, and he did a lot of poking, and was proud for years of the job Forbes had done calling Trump on his distortions.

    But it took decades to unwind the elaborate farce Trump had built to project an image as one of the richest people in America. Nearly every assertion supporting that claim was untrue. Trump wasn’t just poorer than he said he was. Over time I have learned that he should not have been on the first three Forbes 400 lists at all. In our first-ever list, in 1982, we included him at $100 million, but Trump was actually worth roughly $5 million — a paltry sum by the standards of his super-monied peers — as a spate of government reports and books showed only much later.

    That’s Trump for you – he tells so many and such huge lies that he gets away with many of them because people don’t realize they’re only at the first level. It’s worked, in a sense, but at the cost of being a known asshole to anyone with working radar.

    I was a determined 25-year-old reporter, and I thought that, by reeling Trump back from some of his more outrageous claims, I’d done a public service and exposed the truth. But his confident deceptions were so big that they had an unexpected effect: Instead of believing that they were outright fabrications, my Forbes colleagues and I saw them simply as vain embellishments on the truth. We were so wrong.

    This was a model Trump would use for the rest of his career, telling a lie so cosmic that people believed that some kernel of it had to be real. The tactic landed him a place he hadn’t earned on the Forbes list — and led to future accolades, press coverage and deals. It eventually paved a path toward the presidency.

    It also got him the fortune he does have, because people believed enough of his lies that they wanted his name on their buildings, so now he gets to make millions just as a brand.

    Trump knew I had doubts about his assertions, so he had his lawyer, Roy Cohn, call me. Cohn spent most of his time threatening lawsuits, schmoozing with mobster clients and badgering reporters with off-the-record utterances that made his clients look good and their enemies look bad. Cohn surprised me at my Forbes desk that summer: “Jon Greenberg,” a scrappy voice bellowed, before I could connect my tape recorder. I took notes by hand. “This is Roy. Roy Cohn! You can’t quote me! But Donny tells me you’re putting together this list of rich people. He says you’ve got him down for just $200 million! That’s way too low, way too low! Listen, I’m Donny’s personal lawyer, but he said I could talk to you about this. I am sitting here looking at his current bank statement. It shows he’s got more than $500 million in liquid assets, just cash. That’s just Donald, nothing to do with Fred, and it’s just cash.” He concluded: “He’s worth more than any of those other guys in this town!”

    I offered to have a messenger pick up the bank statement at his office. Cohn protested that the document was confidential. “Just trust me,” he said. I told him I wouldn’t take his word without seeing the paperwork. “It’s confidential!” Cohn yelled.

    So, to sum up, Cohn calls up this investigative reporter to say Trump is MUCH richer than the reporter thinks, and he has the documentary evidence right there in his hand, and no way is he going to show it to the reporter, because it’s confidential, man.

    What self-respecting reporter would not take Roy Cohn’s word for it? Isn’t that what reporters do: take people’s word for things? Especially contested things, things that are the very core of the reporting and that the crooked lawyer is calling them up about?

    I was a leading New York real estate reporter through the 1980s. I left the Forbes staff in 1983 but continued to freelance for the magazine while writing major investigative features as a contributing editor for the new Manhattan, Inc. magazine, as well as New York, Avenue and New York City Business. I knew all the key players. I thought I had a handle on this material.

    But Trump was so competent in conning me that, until 35 years later, I did not know I had been conned. Instead, I have gone through my career in national media with a misinformed sense of satisfaction that, as a perceptive young journalist, I called Trump on his lies and gave Forbes readers who used the Rich List as a barometer of private wealth a more accurate picture of his finances than the one he was selling.

    The joke was on me — and everyone else. Trump’s fabrications provided the basis for a vastly inflated wealth assessment for the Forbes 400 that would give him cachet for decades as a triumphant businessman.

    Which is how he got to play one on tv and thus how he got to be president.

    “The more often Forbes mentioned him, the more credible Donald’s claim to vast wealth became,” O’Brien said, arguing that Trump and the list were “mutually reinforcing”: “The more credible his claim to vast wealth became, the easier it was for him to get on the Forbes 400 — which became the standard that other media, and apparently some of the country’s biggest banks, used when judging Donald’s riches.”

    He wasn’t wrong to be hell-bent on getting onto the Forbes list; it worked for him.

    (Also, tip of the hat for naming his son “Barron.” The kid is named after a gigantic fraud. That will be nice for him.)

  • Make him an offer he can’t

    Oh gawd these people. Rudy Giuliani has joined Trump’s “legal team.”

    Former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, a combative former prosecutor and longtime ally of President Trump, told The Washington Post on Thursday that he has joined the president’s legal team dealing with the ongoing special counsel probe.

    “I’m doing it because I hope we can negotiate an end to this for the good of the country and because I have high regard for the president and for Bob Mueller,” Giuliani said in an interview.

    What is this “negotiate an end” shit? It’s not a war, it’s not a strike, it’s not a boycott – it’s a criminal investigation, and suspects / targets / subjects don’t get to “negotiate an end” to investigations. That’s now how that works. If Trump is criminally involved in what Mueller is investigating, then we need to stop him, not back off and tell him to have a nice day.

    “Rudy is great,” Trump said in the statement issued by Sekulow. “He has been my friend for a long time and wants to get this matter quickly resolved for the good of the country.”

    Please. For the good of the Trump, he means. He doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the good of the country.

  • The president grew angry

    Speaking of Trump and tv and temper and tantrums…

    President Trump was watching television on Sunday when he saw Nikki R. Haley, his ambassador to the United Nations, announce that he would impose fresh sanctions on Russia. The president grew angry, according to an official informed about the moment. As far as he was concerned, he had decided no such thing.

    It was not the first time Mr. Trump has yelled at the television over something he saw Ms. Haley saying. This time, however, the divergence has spilled into public in a remarkable display of discord that stems not just from competing views of Russia but from larger questions of political ambition, jealousy, resentment and loyalty.

    Or, less tactfully, from the fact that the president is an out of control egomaniac.

    …the episode highlighted the crossed circuits over foreign policy in an administration with no secretary of state, an increasingly marginalized White House chief of staff and a national security adviser who has only been on the job for a week and has pushed out many of the senior national security officials in the White House but has yet to bring in his own team.

    A situation which only an out of control egomaniac could or would engineer. Nobody in the administration told Haley that Trump had changed course on the Russia sanctions.

    “It damages her credibility going forward and once again makes everyone, friend and foe alike, wonder that when the United States says something, approves something, calls for something, opposes something, is it for real?” said Representative Gerald E. Connolly, Democrat of Virginia and a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “Should we wait to see what Trump does the next day?”

    The clash was reminiscent of various occasions when Mr. Trump has directly undercut subordinates, as when Mr. Tillerson broached the idea of negotiations with North Korea and the president scolded him on Twitter not to waste his time. Many in Washington and at the United Nations were riveted by the sharp exchange on Tuesday between the White House and its senior international diplomat.

    It’s like an episode of The Apprentice but with nukes.

    Beyond the immediate disconnect, though, is a deeper strain between Mr. Trump and Ms. Haley, according to administration officials and other insiders. Ms. Haley has been perhaps the most hawkish voice on Russia on a team headed by a president who has emphasized his fervent desire for friendship with President Vladimir V. Putin.

    At times, that serves the president’s interests because she can say what he will not. But at other times, he has grown exasperated by her outspokenness.

    At one point recently, he saw Ms. Haley on television sharply criticizing Russia over its intervention in Ukraine. “Who wrote that for her?” Mr. Trump yelled angrily at the screen, according to people briefed on the moment. “Who wrote that for her?”

    A former governor of South Carolina, Ms. Haley has assumed a more prominent role than most of her predecessors, at times eclipsing the secretary of state. And along the way, Mr. Trump has grown suspicious of her ambition, convinced that she had been angling for Mr. Tillerson’s position and increasingly wondering whether she wants his own job.

    Well somebody ought to be doing it.

    Aides to both scoff at such suggestions, but the slightest hint of such a pairing would be likely to enrage Mr. Trump, who has made it clear that he plans to run for re-election. The talk was exacerbated in recent days when Mr. Pence named Jon Lerner, Ms. Haley’s deputy, as his new national security adviser, while allowing him to keep his job at the United Nations.

    That plan collapsed within 48 hours when Mr. Trump grew angry at reports that Mr. Lerner had made anti-Trump ads for the Club for Growth, an economic conservative advocacy group, during Republican primaries in 2016. Mr. Lerner stepped down from the job in Mr. Pence’s office.

    He’s like a rabid dog that no one can get rid of.

  • He wanted to be seen as backing up a series of bellicose tweets

    Oh god. I suppose I knew this but seeing it spelled out is another story. Trump rushed to bomb Syria so that his tweets would be true.

    Defense Secretary Jim Mattis urged President Trump to get congressional approval before the United States launched airstrikes against Syria last week, but was overruled by Mr. Trump, who wanted a rapid and dramatic response, military and administration officials said.

    Because he’s mentally a toddler. Rapid and dramatic=illegal and reckless and authoritarian.

    Mr. Trump, the officials said, wanted to be seen as backing up a series of bellicose tweets with action, but was warned that an overly aggressive response risked igniting a wider war with Russia.

    He wanted to be seen as backing up a series of bellicose tweets with action.

    He wanted to be seen as backing up a series of bellicose tweets with action.

    Think about that, and notice how doomed we are.

    He could bellicosely tweet anything. He could threaten to nuke North Korea or China or Russia or anywhere else. He could threaten to declare war, he could threaten invasion, he could threaten to firebomb Mexico or Iran or Germany or any other country he takes a dislike to. He could, and it’s not even unlikely. He talks smack every single day on Twitter, and now we know he wants to be seen as backing that shit up. Why isn’t this code red everywhere?

    What inspired the bellicose tweets in the first place? You’ll never guess.

    Last Tuesday — amid reports that the U.S. was considering a strike against the Assad regime, in response to an alleged chemical weapons attack against civilians in Douma — Russia’s ambassador to Lebanon Alexander Zasypkin warned that “if there is a US missile attack, we … will shoot down U.S. rockets and even the sources that launched the missiles.”

    The Fox & Friends morning crew took exception to this bluster, with one host arguing, “What we should be doing is telling the Russians, ‘Every Syrian military base is a target and if you’re there, it is your problem.’”

    Minutes later, one of the program’s most dedicated viewers echoed that belligerent note.

    So Fox News holds everyone’s fate in its evil hands.

  • He likes it

    Trump is at his Palace of Golf with Shinzo Abe. They did a press conference. What does Trump do there?

    On Tuesday, President Donald Trump used a press opportunity with Japanese President Shinzo Abe to tout Mar-a-Lago as the southern White House.

    “Many of the world’s great leaders request to come to Mar-a-Lago and Palm Beach. They like it. I like it. We’re comfortable. We have great relationships as you remember,” Trump said seated on a couch next to Abe at the start of the bizarre presser at Trump’s Florida club Tuesday afternoon.

    Glad we can be an advertising opportunity, Don. I guess we’d rather have you doing that than fumbling around with actual government.

    https://youtu.be/4No4OBiExPA

  • Poking the enraged bear suffering from gout and a migraine

    The lawyers are not happy.

    https://twitter.com/waltshaub/status/986363806665334785

    McConnell has said NO we’re not ever going to have a bill to protect the Mueller investigation, no no NO, now stop bothering him.

    Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Tuesday thwarted a bipartisan effort to protect special counsel Robert Mueller’s job, saying he will not hold a floor vote on the legislation even if it is approved next week in the Senate Judiciary Committee.

    McConnell said the bill is unnecessary because President Donald Trump will not fire Mueller.

    That is such a grotesquely stupid excuse for a “reason.” He doesn’t know that; it’s highly unlikely to be true; Trump has planned to fire Mueller twice and been talked out of it, just barely; thinking something won’t happen is not a good reason to insure against it in any case.

    It’s so stupid it’s like saying “because magic.” Where does he get off saying dogmatically that Trump will not fire Mueller? Given the hundreds of reasons Trump has given us to think that’s exactly what he’ll do? That’s like saying Trump won’t insult anyone on Twitter, or Trump will talk cogently and rationally at a meeting, or Trump cares more about the public good than about himself. What possible reason is there to be confident that Trump won’t fire Mueller?

    In any case why not vote on the bill anyway? Why not just make sure?

    His comments came amid widespread opposition to the bill among members of his caucus, with several GOP senators saying the bill is unconstitutional. Others said it’s simply not good politics to try and tell Trump what to do, likening the legislation to “poking the bear.”

    If he’s a bear, he really shouldn’t be president. We’re not supposed to have bears as presidents. Bears are not good at presidenting. Bears will eat you.

  • A high likelihood of rampant criminality

    Adam Davidson at the New Yorker says the investigation of Trump is in the final stage. Bottom line: he’s a crook and always has been.

    I am unaware of anybody who has taken a serious look at Trump’s business who doesn’t believe that there is a high likelihood of rampant criminality. In Azerbaijan, he did business with a likely money launderer for Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. In the Republic of Georgia, he partnered with a group that was being investigated for a possible role in the largest known bank-fraud and money-laundering case in history. In Indonesia, his development partner is “knee-deep in dirty politics”; there are criminal investigations of his deals in Brazil; the F.B.I. is reportedly looking into his daughter Ivanka’s role in the Trump hotel in Vancouver, for which she worked with a Malaysian family that has admitted to financial fraud. Back home, Donald, Jr., and Ivanka were investigated for financial crimes associated with the Trump hotel in SoHo—an investigation that was halted suspiciously. His Taj Mahal casino received what was then the largest fine in history for money-laundering violations.

    Listing all the financial misconduct can be overwhelming and tedious. I have limited myself to some of the deals over the past decade, thus ignoring Trump’s long history of links to New York Mafia figures and other financial irregularities.

    He’s not a genius negotiator who cut a few corners here and there; he’s just dirty, all the way through.

    The narrative that will become widely understood is that Donald Trump did not sit atop a global empire. He was not an intuitive genius and tough guy who created billions of dollars of wealth through fearlessness. He had a small, sad operation, mostly run by his two oldest children and Michael Cohen, a lousy lawyer who barely keeps up the pretenses of lawyering and who now faces an avalanche of charges, from taxicab-backed bank fraud to money laundering and campaign-finance violations.

    Cohen, Donald, Jr., and Ivanka monetized their willingness to sign contracts with people rejected by all sensible partners. Even in this, the Trump Organization left money on the table, taking a million dollars here, five million there, even though the service they provided—giving branding legitimacy to blatantly sketchy projects—was worth far more.

    Oh that’s what they were doing. Duh. It’s always been presented as charging a high price for the bogus “glamor” of the name – when actually it was a low price for laundering sleaze with the name.

    There are important legal questions that remain. How much did Donald Trump and his children know about the criminality of their partners? How explicit were they in agreeing to put a shiny gold brand on top of corrupt deals? The answers to these questions will play a role in determining whether they go to jail and, if so, for how long.

    There is no longer one major investigation into Donald Trump, focussed solely on collusion with Russia. There are now at least two, including a thorough review of Cohen’s correspondence. The information in his office and hotel room will likely make clear precisely how much the Trump family knew. What we already know is disturbing, and it is hard to imagine that the information prosecutors will soon learn will do anything but worsen the picture.

    Of course Trump is raging and furious and terrified. Prosecutors are now looking at his core. Cohen was the key intermediary between the Trump family and its partners around the world; he was chief consigliere and dealmaker throughout its period of expansion into global partnerships with sketchy oligarchs. He wasn’t a slick politico who showed up for a few months. He knows everything, he recorded much of it, and now prosecutors will know it, too. It seems inevitable that much will be made public. We don’t know when. We don’t know the precise path the next few months will take. There will be resistance and denial and counterattacks. But it seems likely that, when we look back on this week, we will see it as a turning point. We are now in the end stages of the Trump Presidency.

    But only a little way into the shame of it.

  • Frenetic morning

    Introduction:

    https://twitter.com/waltshaub/status/985517835446341632

    Main event:

    So he wasn’t able to read the whole passage…or he read it and didn’t understand it.

    Not enough bizarro quotation marks in that one. Let’s try again.

    Comey “throws” AG Lynch “under the bus!” Why can’t we all find out what happened “on the tarmac” in the “back of the plane” with “Wild Bill” and Lynch? Was she promised a “Supreme Court seat”, or AG, in order to “lay off” Hillary. No golf and grandkids talk (give us all “a break”)!

    That’s better.

    It’s a fabulous fabulous Military term. I involuntarily salute every time I hear it.

    Yeah you did. We can see you, you know.

    Epilogue:

    https://twitter.com/waltshaub/status/985517835446341632

  • The White House is preparing talking points

    The buzz is that they’re getting closer to firing Rosenstein.

    The White House is preparing talking points designed to undermine Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s credibility, according to sources familiar with the plan.

    The plan calls on President Donald Trump’s allies to cast Rosenstein as too conflicted to fairly oversee the Russia investigation.

    Too “conflicted” how? Because Trump has been so busy trashing him for months? That’s how this mob operates: “he can’t testify against me, I’ve given him far too many reasons to hate me!”

    Efforts to undermine Rosenstein in the media come as the President is weighing whether to fire the top official overseeing the Russia investigation.

    Trump is still livid about the raid on his private attorney Michael Cohen — “He’ll be pissed about it until he dies,” another source said — and he and his allies are increasingly convinced that Mueller and Rosenstein have overstepped their bounds.

    Well, “convinced” – what does that mean in Trump’s case? He doesn’t have enough ratiocination to be anything properly called “convinced” – he’s just more or less devoted to any particular lie.

    One area of conflict the White House wants its surrogates to highlight: Rosenstein’s role as a key witness to the Comey firing, sources said. Rosenstein wrote the memo justifying Comey’s dismissal. It centered on his conduct in investigating Hillary Clinton’s use of private email.

    In a somewhat illogical pairing, the White House is also looking for Trump’s allies to cast Rosenstein and Comey as close colleagues — even though Rosenstein helped provide the basis for Comey’s firing.

    What I’m saying. Trump doesn’t think, he just throws stuff at the wall, and his “allies” follow suit.

    Trump himself has remained preoccupied with the Russia investigation, even as his administration weighs launching strikes in Syria in response to a chemical gas attack. Twelve minutes before Sean Hannity was set to hit the airwaves on Wednesday, his most powerful regular viewer seemed to know what was in store.

    “Big show tonight on @seanhannity!” Trump wrote on Twitter. “9:00 P.M. on @FoxNews.”

    As presidents do.

    What followed was a nearly hour-long screed on the swirl of perceived Justice Department offenses against Trump and a preemptive strike against James Comey, the FBI director Trump fired who embarks next week on a book tour.

    Thirty minutes into the television program that Trump promoted on Wednesday, attorney Joseph DiGenova — who nearly joined Trump’s legal team before withdrawing because of conflicts — barked his instructions.

    “Rod Rosenstein is so incompetent, compromised and conflicted that he can no longer serve as deputy attorney general, and Jeff Sessions now has an obligation to the President of the United States to fire Rod Rostenstein,” he said, his voice raised in anger.

    He wasn’t alone. Earlier on Fox, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich described Rosenstein as ineffective at keeping Mueller within bounds.

    “The fact is Rod Rosenstein has not done his job. He has not supervised Mueller. This whole thing is an absurdity,” Gingrich declared on “Fox and Friends,” the regular soundtrack of Trump’s early mornings. “The fact is, this is a left-wing bureaucracy at Justice. It is anti-Trump. It is anti-Republican.”

    Left-wing ffs.

    If he does…we won’t have time to do anything else.

  • A very sad portion

    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 into the disclosure of the work of Valerie Plame Wilson, a former covert CIA agent and the wife of former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV.

    Libby was sentenced to 30 months in prison and fined $250,000, but his sentence was commuted by then-President George W. Bush. Although spared prison time, Libby was not pardoned.

    Bush, whom Trump often derides in caustic terms, could not be persuaded to pardon Libby. He was lobbied aggressively by Cheney, and his refusal was said to have caused a strain in the relationship between the two men.

    They never went hunting together again.

    Given the nature of Libby’s crimes, Trump came under fire from critics on Friday after he took to Twitter to accuse former FBI director James B. Comey of leaking classified information and lying to Congress.

    “On the day the President wrongly attacks Comey for being a ‘leaker and liar’ he considers pardoning a convicted leaker and liar, Scooter Libby,” Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) wrote on Twitter. “This is the President’s way of sending a message to those implicated in the Russia investigation: You have my back and I‘ll have yours.”

    On the other hand they all probably know what Trump is, and know he won’t live up to his side of the deal if he doesn’t feel like it.

  • Replies

    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 James Comey on Friday, calling him a “weak and untruthful slime ball” days ahead of the publication of a new book by Mr. Comey that refers to the president as a “deeply flawed person and leader.”

    In a pair of early morning posts on Twitter, the president used a series of derogatory adjectives and nouns to describe Mr. Comey while also accusing him of lying to Congress and leaking classified information, and called for him to be prosecuted.

    More truthful, but still far too normalizing.

  • The toxic consequences of lying

    A Times review of (or essay on) Comey’s book. The headlines in the margin indicate there are several, so I don’t say the Times review. It’s interesting.

    Decades before he led the F.B.I.’s investigation into whether members of Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia to influence the 2016 election, Comey was a career prosecutor who helped dismantle the Gambino crime family; and he doesn’t hesitate in these pages to draw a direct analogy between the Mafia bosses he helped pack off to prison years ago and the current occupant of the Oval Office.

    A February 2017 meeting in the White House with Trump and then chief of staff Reince Priebus left Comey recalling his days as a federal prosecutor facing off against the Mob: “The silent circle of assent. The boss in complete control. The loyalty oaths. The us-versus-them worldview. The lying about all things, large and small, in service to some code of loyalty that put the organization above morality and above the truth.” An earlier visit to Trump Tower in January made Comey think about the New York Mafia social clubs he knew as a Manhattan prosecutor in the 1980s and 1990s — “The Ravenite. The Palma Boys. Café Giardino.”

    Creepy, and enlightening, and creepy.

    It’s interesting how in recent history Democrats in the White House have been lawyers, while Republicans have been nothing in particular. Trump is a huckster, Bush 2 was a…?, Reagan was a former movie star; Obama and Clinton were lawyers. There are a lot of implications to that. The people who are making life difficult for Trump are lawyers – mostly Republicans, but lawyers. Everything about Trump is antipathetic to lawyers, and vice versa. (Dershowitz is an exception here.) One relevant polarity is order versus chaos. Another is law versus crime. Another is precision versus slop. Another is the loyalty versus morality opposition that Comey cites. Impersonal v personal; the whole v the ego.

    The central themes that Comey returns to throughout this impassioned book are the toxic consequences of lying; and the corrosive effects of choosing loyalty to an individual over truth and the rule of law. Dishonesty, he writes, was central “to the entire enterprise of organized crime on both sides of the Atlantic,” and so, too, were bullying, peer pressure and groupthink — repellent traits shared by Trump and company, he suggests, and now infecting our culture.

    Just so. The open shameless bullying is one of the worst aspects. It’s obliging of Trump, in a way, to have underlined the point this morning by publicly calling Comey a “slime ball.”

    Comey, who was abruptly fired by President Trump on May 9, 2017, has worked in three administrations, and his book underscores just how outside presidential norms Trump’s behavior has been — how ignorant he is about his basic duties as president, and how willfully he has flouted the checks and balances that safeguard our democracy, including the essential independence of the judiciary and law enforcement.

    Because he thinks of all that kind of thing as “the swamp” and himself as the magical Unswamp.

    Comey is what Saul Bellow called a “first-class noticer.” He notices, for instance, “the soft white pouches under” Trump’s “expressionless blue eyes”; coyly observes that the president’s hands are smaller than his own “but did not seem unusually so”; and points out that he never saw Trump laugh — a sign, Comey suspects, of his “deep insecurity, his inability to be vulnerable or to risk himself by appreciating the humor of others, which, on reflection, is really very sad in a leader, and a little scary in a president.”

    Or, to flip it, of his giant ego that can find only his own “jokes” funny. Maybe it’s insecurity, maybe it’s such hypertrophied security that it blots out everything except The Self.

    During his Senate testimony last June, Comey was boy-scout polite (“Lordy, I hope there are tapes”) and somewhat elliptical in explaining why he decided to write detailed memos after each of his encounters with Trump (something he did not do with Presidents Obama or Bush), talking gingerly about “the nature of the person I was interacting with.” Here, however, Comey is blunt about what he thinks of the president, comparing Trump’s demand for loyalty over dinner to “Sammy the Bull’s Cosa Nostra induction ceremony — with Trump, in the role of the family boss, asking me if I have what it takes to be a ‘made man.’”

    Sheds a whole new light, don’t it. I hadn’t known Comey was a mob prosecutor.

    Put the two men’s records, their reputations, even their respective books, side by side, and it’s hard to imagine two more polar opposites than Trump and Comey: They are as antipodean as the untethered, sybaritic Al Capone and the square, diligent G-man Eliot Ness in Brian De Palma’s 1987 movie “The Untouchables”; or the vengeful outlaw Frank Miller and Gary Cooper’s stoic, duty-driven marshal Will Kane in Fred Zinnemann’s 1952 classic “High Noon.”

    One is an avatar of chaos with autocratic instincts and a resentment of the so-called “deep state” who has waged an assault on the institutions that uphold the Constitution.

    Aha, just what I thought. (Yes, I usually start a post before I finish reading whatever it is. I like to annotate as I go.) Trump is chaos.

    The other is a straight-arrow bureaucrat, an apostle of order and the rule of law, whose reputation as a defender of the Constitution was indelibly shaped by his decision, one night in 2004, to rush to the hospital room of his boss, Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, to prevent Bush White House officials from persuading the ailing Ashcroft to reauthorize an N.S.A. surveillance program that members of the Justice Department believed violated the law.

    One uses language incoherently on Twitter and in person, emitting a relentless stream of lies, insults, boasts, dog-whistles, divisive appeals to anger and fear, and attacks on institutions, individuals, companies, religions, countries, continents.

    And even that doesn’t pin it all down, because as we’ve discussed many times he’s also the bore beside you on the plane, the guy who won’t shut up, the guy who does all the talking, the guy who talks your fucking arm off and won’t let you get a word in.

    One is an impulsive, utterly transactional narcissist who, so far in office, The Washington Post calculated, has made an average of six false or misleading claims a day; a winner-take-all bully with a nihilistic view of the world. “Be paranoid,” he advises in one of his own books. In another: “When somebody screws you, screw them back in spades.”

    The other wrote his college thesis on religion and politics, embracing Reinhold Niebuhr’s argument that “the Christian must enter the political realm in some way” in order to pursue justice, which keeps “the strong from consuming the weak.”

    …

    Long passages in Comey’s thesis are also devoted to explicating the various sorts of pride that Niebuhr argued could afflict human beings — most notably, moral pride and spiritual pride, which can lead to the sin of self-righteousness. And in “A Higher Loyalty,” Comey provides an inventory of his own flaws, writing that he can be “stubborn, prideful, overconfident and driven by ego.”

    Someone should invite Trump to provide an inventory of his flaws.

  • Pee brain wakes up

    Good morning to you too, Don.

    Such equanimity, such restraint, such reasoned argument.

    The Post explains his casus belli:

    Trump’s tirade came in response to news stories Thursday on leaked copies of “A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies and Leadership,” a 304-page tell-all by Comey that describes Trump’s presidency as a “forest fire” and portrays the president as an ego-driven congenital liar.

    Among the many revelations is that Trump fixated on unconfirmed allegations in a widely circulated intelligence dossier that Russians had filmed him interacting with prostitutes in Moscow in 2013.

    In attempt to blunt the impact of the new book, the Republican National Committee is waging a widespread campaign to undercut Comey’s credibility, including a new website that dubs the former FBI chief as “Lyin’ Comey.”

    So the restraint and thoughtful engagement of Trump spreads to the entire Republican operation.

    The RNC effort was launched in advance of a media blitz by Comey that began Friday morning as ABC News aired segments of a longer interview scheduled for Sunday night. During the segment, Comey said he didn’t know whether to believe Trump’s denial that he had spent time with prostitutes in Moscow before he became president.

    “I honestly thought these words would never come out of my mouth, but I don’t know whether the current president of the United States was with prostitutes peeing on each other in Moscow in 2013. It’s possible, but I don’t know,” Comey told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos.

    …

    The dossier included intelligence suggesting the Kremlin was engaged in an effort to assist Trump’s campaign for president. Comey said Trump was most fixated on the allegations about the prostitutes and said that Trump later asked him if he could investigate those claims.

    “He said if there’s even a 1 percent chance my wife thinks that’s true, that’s terrible,” Comey recalled. “And I remember thinking, ‘How could your wife think there’s a 1 percent chance you were with prostitutes peeing on each other in Moscow?’ I’m a flawed human being, but there’s literally zero chance that my wife would think that was true.”

    Picture poor Donald tucked up in bed watching the tv this morning as that conversation aired. Picture him lunging for his phone and with trembling thumbs carefully spelling out “slime ball”…

    Some of the early news coverage of Comey’s memoir has made a mockery of Trump, including the cover of Friday’s Daily News in New York. Its lead headline is “PEE BRAIN!” — a reference to unconfirmed allegations in the dossier that Trump had watched prostitutes urinate on themselves in a Moscow hotel suite.

    Daily News headlines tend to be rather conspicuous.

    [goes to Google images] Ah yes. That’s gotta hurt.

    Image result for pee brain

  • He calls all of them “welfare”

    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,” according to the order’s text.

    As if Trump had the slightest interest in reducing poverty in the US.

    The order gave all cabinet departments 90 days to produce plans that impose work requirements on able-bodied aid recipients and block ineligible immigrants from receiving aid, while drafting “a list of recommended regulatory and policy changes” to push recipients off the rolls and into jobs.

    “President Trump has directed his administration to study policies that are failing Americans,” said Andrew Bremberg, the president’s domestic policy chief, who briefed reporters on the order’s contents in a telephone call late Tuesday. Journalists were not provided with copies of the document beforehand.

    The aim, Trump aides said on the call, is to prod federal and state officials to take a tougher stance with aid recipients — millions of whom currently receive exemptions from existing work requirements because they are in training programs, provide care for relatives or volunteer their labor.

    Get tough with those bastards! Meanwhile, get cuddly with polluters, frauds, exploiters, crooks.

    The order — signed in private on a frenzied news day dominated by congressional testimony from Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook chief executive, a potential military response in Syria and the president’s rage at the raid on Monday on his personal lawyer’s office — tries to redefine “welfare” to fit the catchall term Mr. Trump used in campaign speeches.

    The word “welfare” — politically loaded and often pejorative, especially among the president’s conservative supporters — has historically been used to describe cash assistance programs such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.

    The Trump administration wants to change the lexicon. On Tuesday, Mr. Bremberg sought to stretch the term to encompass food aid and Medicaid — programs even many conservative lawmakers view as a necessary safety net for families and individuals on the economic margins through no fault of their own.

    “Our country suffers from nearly record high welfare enrollments,” Mr. Bremberg said. But Temporary Assistance for Needy Families payments to poor people are approaching record lows.

    Mr. Trump, several aides said, is unconcerned — or perhaps even unaware — of the distinction between cash assistance and other safety-net programs.

    He calls all of them “welfare,” they said.

    What does he call all the money we spend on his trips to Florida and his sons’ trips all over the globe to market his businesses?

  • It’s not personal

    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 in the Trump campaign. And they help explain why Mr. Trump was furious about the raid. People close to Mr. Trump and Mr. Cohen regard the warrant as an attempt by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, to pry into Mr. Trump’s personal life — using other prosecutors as his proxy.

    Mr. Trump’s personal life, as in trying to silence women who had sex with him. That’s not really entirely personal, is it, since it’s about things he did (allegedly) to other people.

  • He cuts corners, he lies, he cheats

    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 top American law enforcement officials — officials of his own government — accusing them of “an attack on our country.”

    You see what they’re saying there – they’re saying that Trump’s behavior bordered on trying to nudge the military into staging a coup. They’re saying that it has a whiff of the treasonous to talk that way to an audience of military boffins. They’re saying, at least, that it’s wildly inappropriate for a president to talk about civilian law enforcement and justice that way to a bunch of generals.

    Mr. Trump has spent his career in the company of developers and celebrities, and also of grifters, cons, sharks, goons and crooks. He cuts corners, he lies, he cheats, he brags about it, and for the most part, he’s gotten away with it, protected by threats of litigation, hush money and his own bravado. Those methods may be proving to have their limits when they are applied from the Oval Office. Though Republican leaders in Congress still keep a cowardly silence, Mr. Trump now has real reason to be afraid. A raid on a lawyer’s office doesn’t happen every day; it means that multiple government officials, and a federal judge, had reason to believe they’d find evidence of a crime there and that they didn’t trust the lawyer not to destroy that evidence.

    On Monday, when he appeared with his national security team, Mr. Trump, whose motto could be, “The buck stops anywhere but here,” angrily blamed everyone he could think of for the “unfairness” of an investigation that has already consumed the first year of his presidency, yet is only now starting to heat up. He said Attorney General Jeff Sessions made “a very terrible mistake” by recusing himself from overseeing the investigation — the implication being that a more loyal attorney general would have obstructed justice and blocked the investigation. He complained about the “horrible things” that Hillary Clinton did “and all of the crimes that were committed.” He called the A-team of investigators from the office of the special counsel, Robert Mueller, “the most biased group of people.” As for Mr. Mueller himself, “we’ll see what happens,” Mr. Trump said. “Many people have said, ‘You should fire him.’”

    Everyone is bad and crooked and wrong except him…according to him.

    Among the grotesqueries that faded into the background of Mr. Trump’s carnival of misgovernment during the past 24 hours was that Monday’s meeting was ostensibly called to discuss a matter of global significance: a reported chemical weapons attack on Syrian civilians. Mr. Trump instead made it about him, with his narcissistic and self-pitying claim that the investigation represented an attack on the country “in a true sense.”

    No, Mr. Trump — a true attack on America is what happened on, say, Sept. 11, 2001. Remember that one? Thousands of people lost their lives. Your response was to point out that the fall of the twin towers meant your building was now the tallest in downtown Manhattan. Of course, that also wasn’t true.

    The tackiest?

  • People in the room were stunned

    Well this should be interesting. (I suppose Trump will start shelling Syria at 9:55 Eastern on Sunday night.) Stephanopoulos sits down for a heart to heart with Comey. A source who was there says it’s going to shock King Donald.

    The source said Comey’s comments, in his first interview since being fired by President Trump last May, will generate headlines and “certainly add more meat to the charges swirling around Trump.”

    • In an ABC promo, Stephanopoulos says Comey compared Trump to a mob boss.

    According to the source:

    • The Comey interview left people in the room stunned — he told George things that he’s never said before.
    • Some described the experience as surreal. The question will be how to fit it all into a one-hour show.
    • Comey answered every question.
    • If anyone wonders if Comey will go there, he goes there.

    Should be interesting, if we’re still alive.

  • Recused

    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 personally for the job, Politico reported in October.

    Eyebrow-raising because 1. presidents don’t do that, and 2. Southern District of New York is where Trump does his corrupt business.

    The report said Trump interviewed candidates for the Southern District of New York and the Eastern District of New York, as well as for Washington, DC — three locales that could prove instrumental in any investigation involving the president.

    Politico reported that Trump had not personally interviewed candidates for any other jurisdiction.

    Not that there’s anything at all suspicious about that.

    Berman, meanwhile, worked at the same law firm as Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor who’s a close ally of Trump’s, and donated to Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

    Also he’s Trump’s half-brother.

    Just kidding, but he might as well be.