Tag: Trump

  • The president’s interference with law enforcement

    Jennifer Rubin says what we know, which isn’t much.

    So what does this all mean? “If it turns out that McCabe was pressed to accelerate his planned early retirement by a month or so by Sessions or on behalf of Trump, this would strengthen the argument for a pattern of obstruction of justice,” constitutional law scholar Laurence Tribe tells me. “But without proof of such pressure, this development isn’t likely to have major significance.”

    The main job for Congress now is to find out what happened. “It’s entirely possible that this was entirely McCabe’s decision, but given the president’s calls for his ouster and his constant meddling with the FBI and DOJ, we need to hear answers immediately,” says Matthew Miller, a former Justice Department spokesman. “Those answers need to come from Chris Wray, they need to come in person, and preferably they would come under oath to Congress. The president’s interference with law enforcement has infected the Justice Department, and we need to know whether this departure is a result of that interference.”

    McCabe is still a witness in the Russia probe, she points out.

    What she doesn’t touch on, and what I would like to know, is who will replace McCabe and who decides that.

    Meanwhile the intolerable Donald Trump Junior is talking smack on Twitter.

    A degrading day, all told.

  • McCabe is out

    It’s getting scary now. McCabe has resigned, and CBS says he was forced to. It looks remarkably like a scenario in which a corrupt and criminal president kneecaps law enforcement.

    FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe is retiring from the FBI, CBS News’ Pat Milton has confirmed.  According to Milton, a source familiar with the matter confirms that McCabe was forced to step down. He is currently on leave and will official[ly] retire in March.

    That’s bad. If Milton’s source is right that’s baaad.

    McCabe was under considerable scrutiny from Republicans, as special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election meddling and any ties to Trump associates continued. McCabe took temporary charge of the FBI after President Trump fired FBI Director James Comey earlier this year, and some skeptics viewed McCabe as too close to his former boss.

    Too close for what? His former boss shouldn’t have been fired in the way and by the person he was. (For his actions in October 2016? Maybe he should have. But that’s not why Trump fired him.) “Too close” can only mean “for Trump’s comfort” and that should not be the criterion. If that is the criterion we’re living in an authoritarian state, officially.

  • A classic intent case

    Jeffrey Toobin says it’s all about intent. Intent cases are about what’s in people’s heads, what they knew and how that related to what they did. Selling stocks in your company? Fine. Selling stocks in your company when you know it’s tanking and others don’t? Fraud.

    The issue of whether President Trump obstructed justice centers on his decision to fire James Comey, the F.B.I. director, last May. This is a classic intent case. The President clearly had the right to fire Comey, but he did not have the right to do so with improper intent. Specifically, the relevant obstruction-of-justice statute holds that any individual who “corruptly . . . influences, obstructs, or impedes, or endeavors to influence, obstruct, or impede, the due administration of justice” is guilty of the crime. “Corruptly” is the key word. Did Trump act “corruptly” in firing Comey?

    It’s funny, in a warped way, how Trump has been artlessly telling us he did all along. It’s warpedly funny how he artlessly told Lester Holt and the rest of us he did the very next day.

    It is this question of corrupt intent that makes the Times’srecent blockbuster scoop so important. According to the article, the President tried to fire Robert Mueller, the special counsel, last June, but he stopped when Don McGahn, the White House counsel, threatened to resign if Trump insisted on the dismissal.

    Well quite. It seemed obviously corrupt when he fired Comey, and it seemed obvious that it would be corrupt if he went on to fire Mueller. It seemed as if we talked about little else for weeks.

    McGahn recognized the key fact—that Trump wanted to fire Mueller for the wrong reasons. Trump wanted to fire Mueller because his investigation was threatening to him. This, of course, also illuminates the reasons behind Trump’s firing of Comey, which took place just a month before the President’s confrontation with McGahn regarding Mueller. Trump and his advisers have offered various tortured rationalizations for the firing of Comey—initially, for example, on the ground that Comey had been unfair to Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign. Trump himself came clean in an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt and in a meeting with Russia’s foreign minister. In both, Trump acknowledged that he fired Comey to stall or stop the Russia investigation—that is, the investigation of Trump himself and his campaign.

    Bozo is corrupt and Bozo is performing his corruption daily before our wondering eyes. He’s making life very difficult for any lawyer who tries to defend him.

  • Corrupt intent

    Painter and Eisen on the whole obstruction thing.

    Now there are reports that President Trump ordered the firing of Mr. Mueller last June. This is yet more evidence that the president is determined to block the investigation at all costs. It suggests Mr. Trump has something to hide about himself, his family or another associate. Therefore it goes to an element in any obstruction case, that of “corrupt intent” — whether a person’s actions were motivated by an improper purpose. An effort to fire Mr. Mueller would be particularly incriminating because it replicates the key moment when mere disgruntlement may have soured into illegality: Mr. Trump’s termination of Mr. Comey.

    All of this is persuasive, but not conclusive, proof of obstruction. Mr. Mueller is surely aware of additional evidence, of aggravating or mitigating facts, that the public does not know. He has most likely not made up his mind, because the most critical element of the analysis is still missing: Mr. Mueller’s sitting down with the president, looking Mr. Trump in the eye and judging his words, demeanor and credibility as the president answers questions about the matter, including his intent. (Those questions would most likely be posed by one of the other prosecutors on the team, so Mr. Mueller can observe and judge.)

    I wonder how tricky that is. I wonder if Trump is both stupid enough and egomaniacal enough to have the demeanor of innocence, simply because of his unshakable love of himself. Ya know? Trump is bottomlessly conceited, and to all appearances incapable of ever seeing himself as in the wrong.

    But then again he comes across as crooked as fuck anyway, so maybe that won’t make any difference.

    Then Mr. Mueller would make his decision about the obstruction of justice question under the criminal law after he concludes his investigation. He could elect to refer the matter to Congress, which has the power to decide that same question by applying its own separate standards under the impeachment clause of the Constitution.

    Whether that happens remains to be seen. We do know this: The argument that President Trump has the absolute right to fire Mr. Mueller is just plain wrong.

    It had better be. If he’s free to fire anyone who investigates him, he can do anything he wants to, and that’s called a dictatorship.

    Mr. McGahn knows that if Mr. Mueller or any subsequent prosecutor were to determine that such conduct did amount to obstruction of justice, he would be complicit if he relayed these shocking orders from Mr. Trump to the Justice Department, as Mr. Trump apparently requested him to do. He need only talk with one of his predecessors as White House counsel, John Dean, about the consequences of getting sucked into a president’s efforts to obstruct justice.

    Even if a White House lawyer were not prosecuted and sent to prison for obstruction of justice, he could still lose his bar license for assisting a client in a crime. Indeed, Mr. Trump himself might accuse Mr. McGahn of malpractice after the fact for failing to stop him.

    Yet Mr. McGahn’s forbearance in this instance offers only limited comfort to lawmakers and the public. He is reported to have pressured Mr. Sessions not to recuse himself, despite a clear legal duty to do so. He may have played a role in the misleading statement from Mr. Trump about the Trump Tower meeting. Moreover, Mr. McGahn has failed to prevent, or perhaps even enabled, other unethical or illegal behavior in the White House, from Kellyanne Conway’s promotion of Ivanka Trump’s clothing on television to high-ranking administration officials’ financial conflicts of interest.

    In short, he’s crooked. He’s Trump’s bought lawyer.

    Finally, these latest revelations make us even more worried that President Trump will in fact fire Robert Mueller, particularly as the investigation closes in on White House officials and perhaps members of the Trump family. Mr. Mueller gave Mr. Flynn a very favorable plea deal in exchange for cooperation against someone more senior, and that must mean those around the president or the president himself.

    When that shoe drops, or is about to, Mr. Mueller’s job will again be at risk. It is critically important that Congress act now to pass legislation protecting the special counsel from being fired before his investigation and the ensuing prosecutions are concluded.

    Will they? It’s not looking likely.

  • Putting out the hits

    Foreign Policy reports that last June Trump’s lawyer told him that Comey had talked to other senior FBI officials about Trump’s attempts to pressure Comey, and that Trump has as a result made a concerted effort to discredit them.

    President Donald Trump pressed senior aides last June to devise and carry out a campaign to discredit senior FBI officials after learning that those specific employees were likely to be witnesses against him as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, according to two people directly familiar with the matter.

    …

    Not long after Comey’s Senate testimony, Trump hired John Dowd, a veteran criminal defense attorney, to represent him in matters related to Mueller’s investigation. Dowd warned Trump that the potential corroborative testimony of the senior FBI officials in Comey’s account would likely play a central role in the special counsel’s final conclusion, according to people familiar with the matter.

    …

    Since Dowd gave him that information, Trump — as well as his aides, surrogates, and some Republican members of Congress — has engaged in an unprecedented campaign to discredit specific senior bureau officials and the FBI as an institution.

    The FBI officials Trump has targeted are Andrew McCabe, the current deputy FBI director and who was briefly acting FBI director after Comey’s firing; Jim Rybicki, Comey’s chief of staff and senior counselor; and James Baker, formerly the FBI’s general counsel. Those same three officials were first identified as possible corroborating witnesses for Comey in a June 7 article in Vox. Comey confirmed in congressional testimony the following day that he confided in the three men.

    Round and round and round we go. Trump’s efforts to pressure Comey started days after he was inaugurated, and his efforts to slime McCabe et al. probably began minutes after that conversation with Dowd.

    In the past, presidents have attacked special counsels and prosecutors who have investigated them, calling them partisan and unfair. But no previous president has attacked a long-standing American institution such as the FBI — or specific FBI agents and law enforcement officials.

    Trump loves to innovate.

    Mueller has asked senior members of the administration questions in recent months indicating that prosecutors might consider Trump’s actions also to be an effort to intimidate government officials — in this case FBI officials — from testifying against him.

    Ya think?

    I suppose we should be grateful that Trump is stupid enough to do his intimidating on Twitter so that we can all see it. On the other hand…Trump is that stupid. It’s hard to be really grateful for that.

  • From the magic box

    Richard Wolffe at the Graun points out another cognitive deficit that hinders Trump.

    Donald Trump has a problem with reality. To be specific, he has a problem distinguishing reality television from reality. With each passing news cycle, it’s alarmingly clear that he believes in his own character from the fantasy show known as The Apprentice.

    Now, most viewers above the age of four have already figured out there’s a certain artifice to the world of TV. There’s the dramatic music and the heavy editing, the make-up and the lights, and of course the word “show”, which gives away the whole game.

    But our commander-in-chief sees something else when he stares into the screen during his many daily hours of executive time inside the White House. He sees a window on the world in which he can utter his catchphrase and people just disappear, along with all their problems.

    “You’re fired!” worked so well on The Apprentice. Why shouldn’t it work so well with the multiple investigations into all these allegations of collusion with the Russian government, money laundering through his real estate business, obstruction of justice and his chaotic management of the executive branch of government?

    Remember that time he got to say the magic words when he was raging about the kneeling football players?

    “He’s fired. HE’S FIRED.”

    There is a precedent for this kind of presidential delusion: Ronald Reagan. The now-beloved conservative hawk served in the second world war at a motion picture unit in Los Angeles. But he watched the footage of the liberation of the concentration camps, and later told several people that he personally had filmed at Buchenwald.

    One of Reagan’s favorite stories, retold multiple times, was about a heroically doomed tail gunner. It was almost certainly ripped from a wartime movie he loved.

    Both Reagan and Trump are figures from show biz, not politics or law or government or human rights or any other line of work that involves laboring for the greater good as opposed to self.

  • He knows nothing

    Yasmeen Serhan at the Atlantic has more details:

    Morgan tweeted triumphantly late Thursday night that “President Trump has publicly apologized for retweeting far-right group Britain First.” But when the preview came out Friday morning, it wasn’t quite that. The four-minute clip showed Morgan pressing Trump on his controversial retweets of the far-right ultranationalist British political group “Britain First” in November—a move that prompted outrage in the U.K., and a rare rebuke from Trump’s British counterpart, Prime Minister Theresa May. But Trump’s response was more deflection than admission.

    Morgan: You retweeted an organization called Britain First, one of the leaders, three times.

    Trump: Well, three times. Boom, boom, boom. Quickly. Yeah.

    Morgan: But this caused huge, huge anxiety and anger in my country because Britain First is basically a bunch of racist, fascist—

    Trump: Of course I didn’t know that.

    Morgan: Well that’s what I wanted to clarify with you. What did you know about them when you did those retweets?

    Trump: Well I know nothing about them and I know nothing about them today, other than I read a little bit. And I guess—and again I’m in the United States so I don’t read as much about it. Perhaps it was a big story in Britain, perhaps it was a big story in the U.K., but in the United States, it wasn’t a big story.

    Yes it was. He means it wasn’t a big story with his “base,” it wasn’t a big story on Fox News, it wasn’t a big story in his tiny brain. It’s his crap theory of mind yet again – he thinks what he knows is what everyone knows and what he doesn’t know is what everyone doesn’t know, with the possible exception of some weirdo foreigners far away somewhere over there [waves in a direction].

    While Trump insisted in his conversation with Morgan that his retweets were not an endorsement of the group —“I wasn’t endorsing anybody, I knew nothing about them”—he stopped short of actually apologizing. The regret he offered was hypothetical and conditional.

    Morgan: Can I get an apology out of you just for the retweets of Britain First? I think it would go a long way.

    Trump: Here’s what’s fair: If you’re telling me they’re horrible people, horrible racist people, I would certainly apologize if you’d like me to do that. I know nothing about them.

    Morgan: And you would disavow yourself of people like that?

    Trump: I don’t want to be involved with people. But you’re telling me about these people, because I know nothing about these people.

    Or about anything else.

  • He would apologize, if only he could find the time

    Question of the hour: can Trump apologize? Answer: no. If he tried his head would snap off his neck and roll away.

    The ineffable Piers Morgan asked him to in a cozy little chat they had.

    In an interview with the “Good Morning Britain” television program, Trump was pressed by Piers Morgan, the presenter, about his November retweet of three videos by a far-right fringe party called Britain First. The retweets caused outrage in Britain and brought a rebuke from Prime Minister Theresa May, who described the president’s posts as “wrong.”

    Trump said repeatedly Friday that he knew “nothing” about the group’s politics. He said the tweets showed his concern over the threat of radical Islamic terrorism.

    His exact words were pure Trump:

    It was done because I am a big believer in fighting radical Islamic terra. This was a depiction of radical. Islamic. terra.

    It was done because – not I did it because, but it was done because. That’s the weasel right there: he will not use the first person pronoun when he’s talking about a shitty thing he said or did. The first person pronoun is The Holiest Word to him, and he will not sully it with any vocalization of wrongdoing. The Trump “I” cannot do a Bad Thing. The Bad Thing he did always becomes a thing that was done, with no agent present.

    When Morgan outright asked him to apologize, he didn’t. He did another verbal feint – this time the sacred “I” was uttered but the tense changed to the conditional. He would apologize…some far off day when we’re all dead and gone.

    “If you are telling me they’re horrible people, horrible, racist people, I would certainly apologize if you’d like me to do that,” the president told the ITV broadcaster.

    Morgan didn’t have the wit to say “When?” or “Do it now.”

    Reaction in Britain was mixed to Trump’s rare offer to concede a mistake. Many Britons noted that it wasn’t really an apology; others said it was close enough.

    Well the actual apology never did take place, unless it happened off camera and out of anyone’s hearing. Trump just said he would apologize and then proceeded not to. That’s definitely a notpology.

    Trump listened as the interviewer described Britain First, which presents itself as a political party but is widely seen as an extremist group targeting Muslims, as “racist.”

    He denied having any knowledge of the group when he shared three videos from Jayda Fransen, its deputy leader.

    “Of course I didn’t know that. I know nothing about them, and I know nothing about them today other than I read a little bit,” Trump said. “I don’t know who they are. I know nothing about them, so I wouldn’t be doing that.”

    He added, “I am often the least racist person that anybody is going to meet.”

    He always says that (without the “often” qualification), and he’s not. Nope. He’s not the least racist person that anybody is going to meet, not often, not ever. Of course nobody knows what that would even be, but given the ease with which we can find scorching examples of Trump’s explicit racism, we don’t need to understand what “least racist” would be; we know he’s not it.

  • The president had strong views on all of them

    Speaking of Don and Terry…Bloomberg revisits their first meeting a year ago.

    Over a meal of blue cheese salad and beef ribs in the White House banqueting room, Trump held forth on a wide range of topics. “The president had strong views on all of them,” recalls Chris Wilkins, then May’s strategy director, who was among the aides around the table. “He said Brexit’s going to be the making of us. It’s going to be a brilliant thing.”

    Oh god oh god can’t you just see it? We’ve all been stuck next to that guy – the one who Holds Forth on a Wide Range of Topics that he knows nothing about. The pompous bore who thinks he has valuable opinions on every subject and that he gets to force them on anyone within range. The guy who thinks a loud voice is all that’s required for an interesting opinion. The guy who has Strong Views and insists on making you a present of them.

    Trump turned to May and told her he believed there were parts of London that were effectively “no-go areas” due to the number of Islamic extremists. May chose to speak up to “correct him,” Wilkins said.

    Trump no doubt thought she was flirting with him as opposed to correcting him.

    Trump also discussed his British golf courses and his hopes that the relationship with May would be stronger than the Thatcher-Reagan alliance. “It was an hour of the president holding court and the PM being very diplomatic and not many other people saying anything,” Wilkins said.

    Mr Empty-Head “holding court” while everyone else listened and prayed to die soon.

    It shows the contrast in personalities that make for an unusual relationship, albeit one still underpinned by enduring strategic military cooperation and cultural links. As one British official observed, Trump is a larger than life character and May is almost the complete opposite.

    Well, “larger” in the way a Macy’s parade balloon character is larger. He’s loud, he’s noisy, he’s shouty – but so is a thunderstorm.

    During formal phone calls between the two leaders, May finds it almost impossible to make headway and get her points across, one person familiar with the matter said. Trump totally dominates the discussion, leaving the prime minister with five or ten seconds to speak before he interrupts and launches into another monologue.

    He loves to talk. One of his people said that the other day, I forget who or where. You might think he wouldn’t, since he has so little to say and so few words…but then again we all know people like that, so there you go.

    There are few things that drive me crazier, I have to say. WHY are you talking so much when you have so NOTHING to say, I always think. The ones with oft-repeated Anecdotes are the worst.

    It all goes back to Barney Frank’s rule: be interesting or shut up.

  • One of the greatest

    Here’s one for the books: Trump’s people are bragging to the press about how “unprecedentedly” transparent Trump and his gang are being. Transparent – oh sure, the guy who won’t release his tax returns, the guy who can’t utter a sentence without a lie in it, the guy who told the head of the CIA to “lean on” the head of the FBI to back off investigating him (Trump), the guy who composed a lying version of what happened when Don Junior met with the Russians – do tell us all about how transparent he is.

    On Wednesday, Trump said at his impromptu appearance that not only did his campaign not collude with the Russians who attacked the election, but the contacts between campaign aides and Russians or Russian agents didn’t matter.

    “I can tell you, there’s no collusion,” Trump said. “I couldn’t have cared less about Russians having to do with my campaign. The fact is — you people won’t say this, but I’ll say it: I was a much better candidate than her. You always say she was a bad candidate. You never say I was a good candidate. I was one of the greatest candidates.”

    Well, he is transparent about what a good opinion he has of himself.

  • Nothing random

  • Demands for fealty

    Ruth Marcus at the Post explains why the head of state is not supposed to ask the top cop how he voted.

    In my country — in our country — the ruler does not call in the head of the state police and demand proof of loyalty. That is because in our country the ruler is an elected, term-limited official, and the state police is, or is supposed to be, an independent, professionalized entity.

    The importance of that distinction becomes starkly obvious when the elected official is incompetent and malign in every possible way. A head of state who has integrity and a conscience is less likely to try to make the head of the police into a personal servant, while a head of state who is incompetent and malign is far more likely to do that. We’re getting to see what happens when a head of state who needs that rule the most is the least inclined to pay attention to it. Trump needs the rule against meddling with the FBI because he’s exactly the kind of guy who will meddle with the FBI.

    As Andrew Kent, Susan Hennessey and Matthew Kahn, writing in Lawfare, reminded us after President Trump took the extraordinary step of firing FBI Director James B. Comey — just the second time that had happened in the history of the bureau — the 10-year term was established in the wake of Richard Nixon’s abuses of the FBI during Watergate. The Lawfare post notes, “Nixon’s acting FBI Director and nominee for the permanent post, L. Patrick Gray, had resigned in 1973 after it was revealed that he was giving the White House daily briefings on the FBI’s Watergate investigation and that he destroyed documents relevant to the inquiry.” Now that was loyalty.

    So that explains Mark Felt aka Deep Throat, I guess. I need to brush up on Watergate.

    Trump, as we know from Comey’s testimony, pressed Comey to pledge similar fealty before firing him. And now we know, from The Post’s Ellen Nakashima, Josh Dawsey and Devlin Barrett, that Trump summoned Comey’s temporary successor, shortly after Comey’s firing, for a get-to-know-you session in which the pleasantries quickly turned sinister: In the dark wake of Comey’s ouster, Trump wanted to know whether Andrew McCabe had voted for him or for his opponent, Hillary Clinton. This was stomach-churningly inappropriate.

    It’s inappropriate in the terms Marcus is talking about but it’s also stomach-churning on another level, a level I don’t know exactly how to name. It’s personally disgusting; it underlines how disgusting Trump is as a person. That kind of sky-blotting-out egotism is profoundly repellent. He might as well have asked McCabe, “Do you think I’m awesome?”

    A reminder about the history of FBI directors: President Jimmy Carter named a Republican, William H. Webster, to head the FBI. President Bill Clinton named a Republican, Louis Freeh, to the job. President Barack Obama extended the term of then-FBI director Robert S. Mueller III, a Republican, for two years. Then he named another Republican, Comey.

    Of course, for appropriate positions, the president gets to name political appointees and to take into account, when naming those political appointees, their personal politics.  But our country has a civil service that provides a continuing corps of expertise from administration to administration — what Trumpists demean as the “deep state.” Nowhere is the independence of that group more essential than in the arena of law enforcement; nowhere has that independence more rankled Trump.

    Since the election of Trump has underscored our reckless and destructive hostility to expertise, we need that independence more than ever.

    The reason Trump is not supposed to be involved with the Justice Department or the FBI involves the power these institutions wield to investigate and prosecute crimes, the imperative that this power not be used to punish political enemies or shield political allies, and the accompanying imperative that the public be able to trust in the department’s impartiality.

    Thus the George W. Bush Justice Department brought charges against Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska, a Republican. Thus the Obama Justice Department brought charges against former Democratic vice presidential nominee John Edwards. That both these cases were flawed does not undercut my point about the need for apolitical justice — it strengthens it. Now the Trump Justice Department has decided to seek a retrial in the case of Sen. Robert Menendez, the New Jersey Democrat originally indicted during the Obama administration. How can the public, given the behavior of this administration, be confident that this move is untainted by politics?

    The question answers itself.

  • Reasons

    So a woman who had the good sense and reasoning abilities to marry Eric Trump thinks the women who marched last Saturday are too stupid to know why they did it.

    Lara Trump, President Trump’s daughter-in-law, appeared on the president’s favorite cable network Tuesday to offer her opinion on the hundreds of thousands of women who participated in marches that took place this past weekend in cities across the country.

    “It was more of a hateful, anti-Trump protest, which I think is really sad because this president has done so much for women. . . . Women’s unemployment is at a 17-year low right now. And, yet, these women out there are so anti-Trump. And I don’t even think they know why. They just think that’s the thing to do,” Lara Trump told the “Fox & Friends” hosts.

    Ah no. We know why. We know so many reasons. His noisy public shameless contempt for women is reason enough all by itself, given the office he holds. “Pocahontas” is reason enough; “Crooked Hillary” is reason enough; “you can grab her by the pussy” is reason enough. His address to the anti-abortion march last week. His reinstatement of the global gag rule on abortion is reason enough. The whole of his administration is reason enough times a million.

  • A pointed question

    Oh lord.

    Shortly after President Trump fired his FBI director in May, he summoned to the Oval Office the bureau’s acting director for a get-to-know-you meeting.

    The two men exchanged pleasantries, but before long, Trump, according to several current and former U.S. officials, asked Andrew McCabe a pointed question: Whom did he vote for in the 2016 election?

    You know why the tenure of the FBI director is normally ten years? So that the job won’t be dependent on the favor of one president. The goal is to have a Justice Department and FBI that are separate from the presidency, even though the DoJ is part of the Executive Branch. They need to operate independently to do the job properly. Trump’s question is insanely out of bounds. It’s also, to put it simply, none of his fucking business.

    McCabe said he didn’t vote, according to the officials, who, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk candidly about a sensitive matter.

    Trump, the officials said, also vented his anger at McCabe over the several hundred thousand dollars in donations his wife, a Democrat, received for her failed 2015 Virginia state Senate bid from a political action committee controlled by a close friend of Hillary Clinton.

    Again – none of his business.

    McCabe, 49, who had been FBI deputy director for a little more than a year when James B. Comey was fired, is at the center of much of the political jockeying surrounding the investigation into potential coordination between Trump associates and the Kremlin. He has for months been the subject of Trump’s ire, prompting angrytweets suggesting that the Russia probe is politically motivated by Democrats sore about losing the election.

    Meanwhile the angry tweets are motivated by fear and corruption, so there’s that.

    McCabe, who has spent more than two decades at the bureau, found the conversation with Trump “disturbing,” said one former U.S. official. Inside the FBI, officials familiar with the exchange expressed frustration that a civil servant — even a very senior agent in the No. 2 position — would be asked how he voted and criticized for his wife’s political leanings by the president.

    When the president is an unreconstructed bully, that’s what you get.

    A year into his presidency, it is clear Trump still harbors a deep dislike of McCabe. Another White House official said Trump frequently complained about the FBI official, labeling him a Democrat. Over the past seven months or so, Trump has tweeted criticisms of McCabe, erroneously saying McCabe headed the Clinton investigation while his wife was taking Clinton money for her state Senate campaign.

    Classic bully.

  • See mee werk

    Desperation.

  • Without much backlash

    It looks as if Trump won’t be able to make it to his own party tonight, but at least he will still get to make a big profit from it.

    President Trump’s posh Mar-a-Lago Club is set to host a high-priced gala on Saturday night intended to celebrate Trump’s first year in office and raise money for his reelection campaign and the Republican National Committee.

    Tickets start at $100,000 per couple, Bloomberg News reported.

    Posh. Hm. I don’t really think of anything connected to Trump as posh. Expensive, yes, but posh, no.

    The guest of honor, however, may not be there. With the government shut down and Congress in negotiations, Trump postponed his scheduled departure from Washington on Friday afternoon. But he will still make money.

    By holding the event at his own club, Trump will be able to collect tens of thousands of dollars in fees for food, ballroom rental and other costs. In effect, he will have transformed his supporters’ political donations into revenue for his business.

    Again.

    Since Trump began running for president in summer 2015, he has repeatedly used his hotels and golf courses as venues for his campaign events — and paid himself for the privilege.

    During the 2016 election cycle, Trump’s campaign spent at least $791,000 to hold events at 12 Trump-branded venues: three hotels, seven golf courses, a condo building and Mar-a-Lago, federal campaign filings show. That was on top of millions more that Trump’s campaign paid his businesses for other expenses such as hotel stays, meals and rent for office space at Trump Tower.

    The experts say that doesn’t break the relevant laws unless the campaign is paying more than fair market value. It’s not illegal, but is it sleazy and gross? Oh yeah.

    At any rate, word is he’s livid that he doesn’t get to go.

  • There’s always time to subordinate women further

    We’re apparently lurching into a government shutdown but Trump found the time to underline his support for stripping women of their right to decide what happens in their own bodies.

    President Trump and Vice President Pence signaled their support as thousands of anti-abortion activists rallied on the National Mall at the annual March for Life on Friday.

    “Under my administration, we will always defend the very first right in the Declaration of Independence, and that is the right to life,” Trump said in the White House Rose Garden, in a speech that was broadcast to the marchers gathered near the Washington Monument.

    The march — which typically draws busloads of Catholic school students, a large contingent of evangelical Christians and poster-toting protesters of many persuasions — falls each year around the anniversary of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that recognized a legal right to abortion and intends to pressure Congress and the White House to limit legal access to the procedure.

    Trump said he was “really proud to be the first president to stand with you here at the White House;” Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush addressed the march by telephone when they were in office.

    Yes, a proud moment, standing up in person in public to say women have no rights over their own bodies.

  • Trump’s sacred religious family values

    The hypocritical rat has done it.

    The Trump administration announced on Thursday that it was expanding religious freedom protections for doctors, nurses and other health care workers who object to performing procedures like abortion and gender reassignment surgery, satisfying religious conservatives who have pushed for legal sanctuary from the federal government.

    The new steps, which include the creation of an oversight entity within the Department of Health and Human Services called the Conscience and Religious Freedom Division, are the latest efforts by President Trump to meet the demands of one of his most loyal constituencies. They coincide with Mr. Trump’s planned address on Friday to abortion opponents at the annual March for Life in Washington.

    …

    Eric D. Hargan, the acting secretary of health and human services, said that the creation of the new civil rights unit carried out an executive order issued last year by Mr. Trump, who said that religious people would no longer be “bullied by the federal government because of their religious beliefs.”

    Cool. So if their religious beliefs tell them they have to whip their children for disobedience and anything else they consider wicked, Trump would protect them too? He thinks religious people should not be subject to any laws if their religious beliefs don’t match the laws?

    How about that interesting couple in California who’ve been starving and torturing their many children for years? If they have a Religious Belief that they get to do that, does Trump think ok then?

    Social conservatives said the new unit would be a bulwark of religious liberty.

    “President Trump’s promises are becoming a reality,” said Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council. “Americans should not be forced to choose between their faith and their desire to help patients.”

    But they don’t desire to help patients if they think those patients are doing something a church doesn’t like. They’re not campaigning to be allowed to help patients, they’re campaigning to be allowed to refuse to help patients. If they have a desire to help patients then why are they so eager to be able to refuse to do so?

    Outside the religious conservative movement, the recent moves have won little applause.

    Fatima Goss Graves, the president of the National Women’s Law Center, a research and advocacy group, said that, far from protecting religious liberty, the new unit would protect health workers who “use their religious or moral beliefs to deny patients care.”

    My point exactly. Let us hear no more about the refuseniks’ desire to help patients.

  • For they are shameful, repulsive statements

    Republican Senator Jeff Flake, who is forthright about his low opinion of Trump but still backs him in his actions because Republican, gave a speech yesterday about Trump’s war on journalism and thus on truth. I’m interested in truth and in journalism and in the relationship between the two.

    Speaking of which, it’s ironic and semi-funny and tragic that the chief takeaway, that apparently all news sources are echoing, is that Flake compared Trump to Stalin. The Post itself says it three times before we even get to the body of the speech – in the headline, in the caption to the photo, and in the link in the right margin. Imagine my surprise to find that it’s not true. What was that about truth, again?

    Here’s what Flake in fact says, the only time he mentions Stalin:

    2017 was a year which saw the truth — objective, empirical, evidence-based truth — more battered and abused than any other in the history of our country, at the hands of the most powerful figure in our government. It was a year which saw the White House enshrine “alternative facts” into the American lexicon, as justification for what used to be known simply as good old-fashioned falsehoods. It was the year in which an unrelenting daily assault on the constitutionally-protected free press was launched by that same White House, an assault that is as unprecedented as it is unwarranted. “The enemy of the people,” was what the president of the United States called the free press in 2017.

    Mr. President, it is a testament to the condition of our democracy that our own president uses words infamously spoken by Josef Stalin to describe his enemies. It bears noting that so fraught with malice was the phrase “enemy of the people,” that even Nikita Khrushchev forbade its use, telling the Soviet Communist Party that the phrase had been introduced by Stalin for the purpose of “annihilating such individuals” who disagreed with the supreme leader.

    That is not just straightforwardly “comparing Trump to Stalin.” Pointing out that Trump is using a ploy and even a phrase that Stalin used is not the same as saying Trump is like Stalin. Part of getting a handle on truth is being careful not to oversimplify.

    Anyway – the speech is interesting.

    This alone should be a source of great shame for us in this body, especially for those of us in the president’s party. For they are shameful, repulsive statements. And, of course, the president has it precisely backward – despotism is the enemy of the people. The free press is the despot’s enemy, which makes the free press the guardian of democracy. When a figure in power reflexively calls any press that doesn’t suit him “fake news,” it is that person who should be the figure of suspicion, not the press.

    …

    According to the International Federation of Journalists, 80 journalists were killed in 2017, and a new report from the Committee to Protect Journalists documents that the number of journalists imprisoned around the world has reached 262, which is a new record. This total includes 21 reporters who are being held on “false news” charges.

    He gives examples of other heads of state who talk about “fake news” (or, presumably, the equivalent in their own languages).

    “In February…Syrian President Bashar Assad brushed off an Amnesty International report that some 13,000 people had been killed at one of his military prisons by saying, “You can forge anything these days, we are living in a fake news era.”

    In the Philippines, President Rodrigo Duterte has complained of being “demonized” by “fake news.” Last month, the report continues, with our President, quote “laughing by his side” Duterte called reporters “spies.”

    In July, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro complained to the Russian propaganda outlet, that the world media had “spread lots of false versions, lots of lies” about his country, adding, “This is what we call ‘fake news’ today, isn’t it?”

    There are more:

    A state official in Myanmar recently said, “There is no such thing as Rohingya. It is fake news,” referring to the persecuted ethnic group.

    Leaders in Singapore, a country known for restricting free speech, have promised “fake news” legislation in the new year.”

    And on and on. This feedback loop is disgraceful, Mr. President. Not only has the past year seen an American president borrow despotic language to refer to the free press, but it seems he has in turn inspired dictators and authoritarians with his own language. This is reprehensible.

    Bad company.

  • Word is he’s fuming in private

    Aw, now it’s Kelly that Trump is on the outs with. Poor Donny, he does have such a hard time getting along with all the children in the sandbox.

    President Trump on Thursday publicly pushed back against a characterization by White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly that his views on a southern border wall had “evolved” and privately fumed about the episode.

    “The Wall is the Wall, it has never changed or evolved from the first day I conceived of it,” the president said in a morning tweet. “Parts will be, of necessity, see through and it was never intended to be built in areas where there is natural protection such as mountains, wastelands or tough rivers or water.”

    Tough rivers? Are those the ones that call Africa a shithole?

    Trump’s comments on Twitter came a day after Kelly told Democratic lawmakers that some of the hard-line immigration policies Trump advocated during the campaign were “uninformed,” that the United States will never construct a wall along its entire southern border and that Mexico will never pay for it, according to people familiar with the meeting.

    …

    Trump associates said the president was furious with Kelly both for what he said and for the tone he used, which Trump thought made it appear he was a child who had to be managed.

    Well he’s not a literal child, or not a child in body, but mentally and temperamentally? Decidedly a child, and not a very nice child at that.

    One Trump associate who spoke to the president Wednesday night said Trump thought Kelly’s comments made him look bad and that he was giving in to Democrats.

    The president, this person said, particularly disliked [that] the word “uninformed” appeared in news reports and has chafed for weeks at the characterization of him as not intelligent and flighty in the best-selling book about his presidency by author Michael Wolff.

    Weeks? It hasn’t even been weeks. It has literally, but only just, which means it hasn’t in that non-literal sense. Two weeks doesn’t count as “weeks” in that usage. In short, Trump has chafed for a couple of weeks. Then the question becomes, did he not notice before that many people say he’s stupid, a fucking moron, ignorant, and impetuous as a bull in rut?

    Another Trump associate familiar with the president’s reaction to Kelly said his rage was similar to his response in the summer of 2016 when Paul Manafort, then his chief strategist, told an RNC meeting in Florida that Trump had been playing a “part” on the campaign trail but was starting to pivot toward presenting a more businesslike and presidential “persona.”

    “Kelly thinks he knows what policies are important and what aren’t, but Donald Trump is the president of the United States,” said the associate, who also requested anonymity to speak more candidly.

    Sure sure, we have to keep up the pretense that Trump is a normal reasonable thoughtful adult who is wholly on top of the job. You bet.