Tag: Trump

Benjamin Wittes analyzes Trump’s horrifying interview with the Times.

He says Sessions should resign, because he shouldn’t stay in the office with Trump’s naked disdain for him on the record.

The president is evidently distraught at Sessions’s recusal from the Russia investigation “right after he gets the job.” (Sessions recused himself on March 2—three weeks after his swearing-in and fifteen weeks after his nomination.) The Attorney General gave the president “zero” heads up, Trump says. In Trump’s view: “Sessions should have never recused himself, and if he was going to recuse himself, he should have told me before he took the job, and I would have picked somebody else.” He twice describes Sessions’s decision as “unfair to the president,” seemingly unaware that his recusal was almost surely compelled by Justice Department recusal rules. That is, the President is openly expressing bitterness toward his attorney general for following the rules—because the rules don’t favor Trump’s interests. He wants an attorney general who will actively supervise the Justice Department, and the Russia investigation, in a fashion congenial to his interests, and he has no compunction about saying so explicitly. He made perfectly clear that he regrets appointing Sessions. He made equally clear that Sessions’s job is, in his mind, a personal service contract to him and that if Sessions couldn’t deliver on service to Trump, he shouldn’t have taken the position.

Trump seems to think, literally, that the members of his cabinet work for him in the same sense that employees of his business work for him. He seems to have no idea that they work for the country, not for him.

Sessions has hardly shrouded himself in glory over the past few months, but it is wildly improper for the President to talk about the attorney general in this fashion. The attorney general serves at his pleasure. If he is dissatisfied with Sessions’s performance, Trump can remove him. Unlike the FBI director, Sessions does not have a ten-year term that creates some normative expectation of retention. It would be, of course, inappropriate to fire the attorney general for having the temerity to follow Justice Department recusal policies on the advice of career lawyers, but it’s also inappropriate to whine publicly about his conduct without removing him. For those who need a reminder, the proper thing for a President to say publicly about a recusal in a live investigative matter—one that involves him directly and personally—is nothing whatsoever.

But Trump thinks he’s there to defy any notion of what’s proper, and instead do whatever his id prompts him to do.

Trump also dissed Rosenstein, and then there is Mueller.

The president declares bluntly, “I have done nothing wrong. A special counsel should never have been appointed in this case.” And he regards Mueller as conflicted because he was briefly considered to replace Comey.

Trump describes his meeting with Mueller while interviewing him for the job of FBI Director as “wonderful” and says that “of course … he wanted the job.” And he seems to regard this as some kind of conflict of interest on Mueller’s part. Trump does not seem to understand or even be able to imagine that Mueller might have been talking to him out of a sense of public service, not personal interest, with respect to an agency he had led for a long time and treasures and which Trump had plunged into crisis.

That’s because he has a tiny, sordid, empty mind. There’s nothing in there. There’s only Self, which dwells more in the intestines than in the mind. A guy with a a tiny, sordid, empty mind thinks everyone is as sordid and empty as he is.

And to top it off, the President apparently feels no compunction either about commenting on the proper scope of Mueller’s investigation substantively. When asked whether a potential investigation of the Trump family finances “unrelated to Russia” would constitute a “red line” in the investigation, Trump stated, “I think that’s a violation.” And he didn’t say no when asked whether such conduct would lead him to fire Mueller; rather, he hedged, stating that “I can’t answer that question because I don’t think it’s going to happen.”

He thinks he can tell them all what to do at any moment – even when they’re investigating his potential corruptions and crimes.

If, on reading this, it sounds like the President believes that law enforcement should be at his personal beck and call, that’s because that is, in fact, exactly what he believes. We know this because he made this belief perfectly clear in the interview as well. At one point, he offered an extraordinary account of the history of the FBI and its relationship to the Justice Department. He indicated that around the time of the Nixon administration, “out of courtesy, the F.B.I. started reporting to the Department of Justice.” He continued: “But there was nothing official, there was nothing from Congress. There was nothing — anything. But the FBI person really reports directly to the president of the United States, which is interesting. You know, which is interesting.”

Indeed.

Trump’s logic isn’t easy to follow here, but his core claim is unmistakeable—and “interesting” is a generous word for it: the FBI director serves the president. As a matter of constitutional hierarchy, this is of course true. But in investigative matters, the FBI director does not, or should not, serve the president by reporting to him. He serves the president by leading law enforcement in an independent and apolitical fashion. And it is fundamentally corrupt for any president to be asking him to do otherwise.

Yes but as he likes to tell us, he’s the president and we’re not.

In a foundational 1978 speech that has shaped subsequent Department policy, Jimmy Carter’s attorney general, Griffin Bell, affirmed the independence of the Justice Department and its constituent entities, including the FBI. Bell declared, “it is improper for any Member of Congress, any member of the White House staff, or anyone else, to attempt to influence anyone in the Justice Department with respect to a particular litigation decision, except by legal argument or the provision of relevant facts.”

The astonishing implication of Trump’s view is that he believes the president may shut down an FBI investigation that displeases him. Indeed, Trump went so far as to say that too: when explaining why it would not be a problem even if he had told Comey to drop the Flynn investigation, he stated, “other people go a step further. I could have ended that whole thing just by saying—they say it can’t be obstruction because you can say: ‘It’s ended. It’s over. Period.’”

In an environment in which the President of the United States, in a single interview, expresses no-confidence in the attorney general, the deputy attorney general, the special counsel, the acting FBI director, and the special counsel’s staff, and in which he makes clear that the FBI should be his personal force and that all of law enforcement should be about serving him, the principle protection is having people with backbone who are willing to do their jobs and stand up for one another in the elevation of their oaths of office over political survival.

But Rosenstein is not acting as if he’s one of those people.

We are in a dangerous moment—one in which the President, with his infinite sense of grievance, feels entitled publicly to attack the entire federal law enforcement apparatus, and that apparatus, in turn, lacks a single person with the stature, the institutional position, and the fortitude to stand up to him. Sessions has not done so. While Rosenstein did the country an enormous service when he appointed Mueller, he acted as an enabler of the Comey firing in the first instance and did not do himself credit yesterday. Mueller certainly has the stature, but by the nature of his position he cannot say anything publicly; he is investigating the President and thus cannot also confront him. And McCabe, who has been both able and courageous in the aftermath of Comey’s firing, is in an acting capacity.

The man who had the stature, the institutional position, and the moral fiber to confront the President on such matters was Comey, who is no longer there and whom the President also slimed in his interview yesterday.

The result is an environment in which the President can say these things without obvious consequence, at least for now.

So we descend more steps down into the muck.

Trump told the Times that he simply went to say hi to Melania at that dinner, and then had a few words with Putin who just happened to be sitting there too oh gee Vlad I didn’t even know you were there.

Starting at 47 seconds you can watch Trump signaling to someone – witnesses say it was Putin – in schoolboy gesture language: You, me, we talktalk? You want to? Me, you? Ok?

There’s also Deutsche Bank.

Most banks steer clear of Trump; Deutsche Bank is the big exception.

Regulators are reviewing hundreds of millions of dollars in loans made to Mr. Trump’s businesses through Deutsche Bank’s private wealth management unit, The New York Times reported, citing three people briefed on the review. The regulators are examining whether the loans might expose the banks to heightened risks.

New York regulators have paid particular attention to personal guarantees Mr. Trump made to obtain the loans.

There is no formal investigation of the bank, and personal guarantees are often required for big loans from wealth managers. The regulators are focused on whether these guarantees could create problems for Deutsche Bank should Mr. Trump fail to pay his debts, leaving it with a choice of suing him or risking being seen to have cut him a special deal. The concern is not hypothetical: Mr. Trump sued the bank to delay paying back an earlier loan.

You’d think that would make them want to terminate the relationship, wouldn’t you.

Separately, Deutsche Bank has been in contact with federal investigators, and it is likely eventually to have to provide information on the Trump accounts to the special counsel in the Russia inquiry, Robert S. Mueller III.

I’m sure he’ll find that everything is on the up and up.

Linda Qiu points out some of Trump’s lies and buffoonish errors in his interview with the “failing” Times. My favorite is the last item, to do with Napoleon and Paris.

Mr. Trump may have been confusing Napoleon Bonaparte with his nephew, Louis Napoleon or Napoleon III, when he claimed that Napoleon “designed Paris.” In 1853, about 30 years after the first Napoleon died, Napoleon III appointed Georges-Eugène Haussman to carry out his reconstruction project, envisioned to accommodate rapid population growth and to discourage future revolutions, according to the Museum of the City.

“His one problem is he didn’t go to Russia that night because he had extracurricular activities, and they froze to death,” Mr. Trump continued.

Quite right! He was with some French floozie that night so they all froze to death so that was the end of his brilliant plan to conquer Russia in an evening.

While he identified the correct Napoleon, his version of the 18th century conqueror’s failed attempt to invade Russia is garbled. Napoleon’s 1812 campaign into Russia lasted about six months, not, as Mr. Trump suggested, one night. And the French emperor did take Moscow in September, before withdrawing a month later as food supplies began to dwindle. Of nearly half a million men under his command, about 6,000 returned home from a combination of battle, disease and the weather.

Well yeah okay but Trump’s version is much funnier.

Oof, he’s landed us with a whole new plateful of headlines.

He sat down for a cozy chat yesterday with the “failing” “fake news” New York Times. He said he was very very mad at Jeff Sessions for recusing himself, and that he never would have given him the job if he’d known he was going to recuse himself for cryin out loud. He seems to think Sessions knew all along that he’d be recusing himself, that it was a plan, like planning to go to Hawaii on vacation next year.

In a remarkable public break with one of his earliest political supporters, Mr. Trump complained that Mr. Sessions’s decision ultimately led to the appointment of a special counsel that should not have happened. “Sessions should have never recused himself, and if he was going to recuse himself, he should have told me before he took the job and I would have picked somebody else,” Mr. Trump said.

It was very unfair to him, Trump said mournfully.

In a wide-ranging interview with The New York Times, the president also accused James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director he fired in May, of trying to leverage a dossier of compromising material to keep his job. Mr. Trump criticized both the acting F.B.I. director who has been filling in since Mr. Comey’s dismissal and the deputy attorney general who recommended it. And he took on Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel now leading the investigation into Russian meddling in last year’s election.

See, it wasn’t like this on The Apprentice. On The Apprentice Trump was the Top Dog and that was the end of it – there weren’t all these people getting in his way and investigating him and recusing themselves. The presidency should be like that too. It should be The Donnie Show, on which Donnie gets whatever he demands, and everyone jumps when he says jump, and there are frequent opportunities for everyone to gather round and say how awesome Donnie is. That’s how a presidency should be. Except when it’s Obama of course, but that’s a whole other thing.

Instead there’s all this annoying policy and procedure, all these rules and constraints, all these people cluttering up Donnie’s photo ops. It’s such a crappy third-rate loser kind of presidency when it should have been so golden and awesome.

Asked if Mr. Mueller’s investigation would cross a red line if it expanded to look at his family’s finances beyond any relationship to Russia, Mr. Trump said, “I would say yes.” He would not say what he would do about it. “I think that’s a violation. Look, this is about Russia.”

Trump had a second, secret conversation with Putin at the G20 meeting.

The hourlong conversation in Hamburg, Germany, took place at a private dinner among world leaders at a concert hall on the banks of the Elbe River during the Group of 20 economic summit meeting, with only a Kremlin interpreter present to listen to the exchange. It followed a formal meeting between the two presidents that lasted more than two hours earlier in the day, and included their foreign ministers for a fraught discussion about Moscow’s attempts to interfere in the 2016 American elections.

Only a Kremlin interpreter – so it’s like when Trump had the private meeting with Kislyak and Lavrov in the Oval Office…only more so, because this is Putin, and there was no one else there except the Kremlin interpreter.

This guy. I swear.

But the intimate dinner conversation, of which there is no official United States government record, because no American official other than the president was involved, is the latest to raise eyebrows. Foreign leaders who witnessed it later commented privately on the oddity of an American president flaunting such a close rapport with his Russian counterpart.

“Pretty much everyone at the dinner thought this was really weird, that here is the president of the United States, who clearly wants to display that he has a better relationship personally with President Putin than any of us, or simply doesn’t care,” said Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group, a New York-based research and consulting firm, who said he heard directly from attendees. “They were flummoxed, they were confused and they were startled.”

I wonder what he gave away. Did he tell Putin to help himself to the Baltics? Say the US really doesn’t care what he does to his own people? Offer him a few spare nukes?

In a statement, a White House official on Tuesday described the meeting as routine and brief, and explained the lack of an American translator by noting that the president was accompanied by a Japanese interpreter who did not speak Russian. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that any insinuation that the White House has tried to hide the encounter was false.

A second White House official confirmed that the meeting had occurred but did not offer any details, and insisted on anonymity because the discussion was private.

Private?? What do they mean private? He doesn’t get to go having “private” secret just-him meetings with Putin. They’re not lovers, they’re heads of rival states.

Russia specialists said such an encounter — even on an informal basis at a social event — raised red flags because of its length, which suggests a substantive exchange, and the fact that there was no American interpreter, note taker or national security or foreign policy aide present.

“We’re all going to be wondering what was said, and that’s where it’s unfortunate that there was no U.S. interpreter, because there is no independent American account of what happened,” Stephen Pifer, a former ambassador to Ukraine who also specializes Russia and nuclear arms control.

“If I was in the Kremlin, my recommendation to Putin would be, ‘See if you can get this guy alone,’ and that’s what it sounds like he was able to do,” added Mr. Pifer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

Because Trump is that stupid…or treasonous.

This time it’s a fire truck. A made in America fire truck. Boop boop.

The Wall Street Journal has stern advice for Don and Fam: spill everything.

Mr. Trump seems to realize he has a problem because the White House has announced the hiring of white-collar Washington lawyer Ty Cobb to manage its Russia defense. He’ll presumably supersede the White House counsel, whom Mr. Trump ignores, and New York outside counsel Marc Kasowitz, who is out of his political depth.

Mr. Cobb has an opening to change the Trump strategy to one with the best chance of saving his Presidency: radical transparency. Release everything to the public ahead of the inevitable leaks. Mr. Cobb and his team should tell every Trump family member, campaign operative and White House aide to disclose every detail that might be relevant to the Russian investigations.

That means every meeting with any Russian or any American with Russian business ties. Every phone call or email. And every Trump business relationship with Russians going back years. This should include every relevant part of Mr. Trump’s tax returns, which the President will resist but Mr. Mueller is sure to seek anyway.

That’s the best chance of saving his presidency? I’m not seeing it. If he released everything, that would probably end his presidency. The WSJ seems to be assuming he hasn’t actually done anything criminal or incompatible with being president, but that’s a huge and rather perverse assumption. I think the reason Trump is hiding as much as he can is because the truth would discredit him. The bits of truth that have been leaked have certainly done a lot to discredit him, and the full truth would do that more thoroughly. The likelihood of some miraculous Innocent Explanation is…slight.

Then release it all to the public. Whatever short-term political damage this might cause couldn’t be worse than the death by a thousand cuts of selective leaks, often out of context, from political opponents in Congress or the special counsel’s office. If there really is nothing to the Russia collusion allegations, transparency will prove it. Americans will give Mr. Trump credit for trusting their ability to make a fair judgment. Pre-emptive disclosure is the only chance to contain the political harm from future revelations.

But that’s true only if this release of all of it shows him to be not a liar, thief, fraud, cheat, and corrupt operator.

Mr. Trump somehow seems to believe that his outsize personality and social-media following make him larger than the Presidency. He’s wrong. He and his family seem oblivious to the brutal realities of Washington politics. Those realities will destroy Mr. Trump, his family and their business reputation unless they change their strategy toward the Russia probe. They don’t have much more time to do it.

But it’s not the brutal realities of Washington politics that caused Trump to be a fraud, cheat, thief, liar, bully, and sleaze – he did that himself years ago. I don’t see how admitting it all is going to save his presidency.

Maggie Haberman reports that Trump is again confiding in us about just how sleazy and morally empty he really is.

“Most politicians would have gone to a meeting like the one Don jr attended in order to get info on an opponent,” Mr. Trump posted on his Twitter account just after 10 a.m. “That’s politics!”

Of course. That’s what sleazy morally empty people do – they say everybody does it, they say you would do it in a heartbeat if you had the chance, they say everybody is as sleazy and morally empty as they are. It’s a lie – a sleazy and morally empty lie. Donald Trump is a moral vacuum, but that does not mean that everyone else is. Even in the US, where that brand of “character” is cheered on, it’s not universal.

The president has insisted he learned of the meeting only a few days before The Times article. His aides helped write his son’s initial statement describing the meeting as they flew back with the president from the Group of 20 summit meeting in Europe.

His son’s initial statement that was a lie and had to be revised as soon as the Times reported again.

The US government is a moral sewer at present. All we can do for now is try to keep track.

Trump again casually told a random lie about a public official, for no apparent reason apart from floating malice and aggression. The Times put it more politely, as “falsely blames” and “wrongly blamed,” but what they mean is he lied and defamed.

Defending his son’s meeting with a Russian lawyer during the 2016 presidential campaign, President Trump wrongly blamed former Attorney General Loretta Lynch for admitting the lawyer to the United States in the first place.

“Somebody said that her visa or her passport was approved by Attorney General Lynch,” Mr. Trump said Thursday at a joint news conference with President Emmanuel Macron of France. “She was here because of Lynch.”

And that “somebody” was Donald Trump, lying again.

Anderson Cooper was blistering about that “Somebody said” last night, pointing out that if reporters tried to cite “somebody said” as a source they’d be fired. He does that all the time, Trump does – somebody said, everybody says, people are saying, I just learned, I heard, everybody knows – variations on the theme of generic nameless meaningless placeholder where a source should be. That’s ok in conversation when it’s a matter of information whose source you can’t remember, but it’s not at all ok when it’s a matter of claiming Real Person With Name did something illegal or immoral – it’s not at all ok but it’s habitual with Trump. It’s a good signal to the nature of the man, that it comes so easily to him. That right there is a man with no scruples or conscience or sense of decency whatsoever – a psychopath perhaps, but at any rate a selfish immoral shit.

Veselnitskaya entered the US in June 2016 through a visitor’s visa issued by the State Department. Loretta Lynch was not the Secretary of State, she was the Attorney General.

Oh by the way there was someone else at that meeting.

The Russian lawyer who met with Donald Trump Jr. and others on the Trump team after a promise of compromising material on Hillary Clinton was accompanied by a Russian-American lobbyist — a former Soviet counterintelligence officer who is suspected by some U.S. officials of having ongoing ties to Russian intelligence, NBC News has learned.

The lobbyist, first identified by the Associated Press as Rinat Akhmetshin, denies any current ties to Russian spy agencies. He accompanied the lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, to the June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower attended by Donald Trump Jr.; Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law; and Paul Manafort, former chairman of the Trump campaign.

Huh. Interesting. Don Junior was being so transparent and innocent and good boy and all, yet he didn’t tell us that.

[G]iven the email traffic suggesting the meeting was part of a Russian effort [to] help Trump’s candidacy, the presence at the meeting of a Russian-American with suspected intelligence ties is likely to be of interest to special counsel Robert Mueller and the House and Senate panels investigating the Russian election interference campaign.

Yes, that seems pretty likely.

The Associated Press quoted Akhmetshin saying that Veselnitskaya brought with her to the meeting a plastic folder with printed-out documents that detailed what she believed was a flow of illicit funds to the Democratic National Committee.

The lobbyist said Veselnitskaya presented the contents of the documents to the Trump team, suggesting it could help the Trump campaign, he said.

“This could be a good issue to expose how the D.N.C. is accepting bad money,” The AP quoted Akhmetshin recalling her saying.

Nothing to see here, all a witch hunt, how about that electoral college win, MAGA.

Contacted by NBC News, representatives for Kushner and Manafort declined to comment.

On April 4, Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, wrote a letter to the Homeland Security department seeking information about Akhmetshin, saying that Akhmetshin admitted to being a Soviet counterintelligence officer.

Grassley said Akhmetshin had failed to register as a foreign agent even though he had been lobbying in the U.S. for Russian interests. Grassley also charged that Akhmetshin had been working with Fusion GPS, an opposition-research firm that had compiled a highly disputed dossier on Donald Trump.

Fusion GPS has also worked on the campaign to raise questions about the story behind the Magnitsky Act.

Never mind that, Don Junior is a good boy, a good boy, a good boy.

On the plane over to Paris Trump talked to the reporters. They thought it was off the record until the White House asked why they hadn’t reported it. The Times shares the White House transcript along with some bits the White House left out.

Q When were you last in Paris? When were you last in France?

THE PRESIDENT: So I was asked to go by the President, who I get along with very well, despite a lot of fake news. You know, I actually have a very good relationship with all of the people at the G20. And he called me, he said, would you come, it’s Bastille Day — 100 years since World War I. And I said, that’s big deal, 100 years since World War I. SO we’re going to go, I think we’re going to have a great time, and we’re going to do something good. And he’s doing a good job. He’s doing a good job as President.

I wonder if he thinks “Bastille Day” is French for 100 years since World War I.

How about that China place, huh?

A big thing we have with China was, if they could help us with North Korea, that would be great. They have pressures that are tough pressures, and I understand. And you know, don’t forget, China, over the many years, has been at war with Korea — you know, wars with Korea. It’s not like, oh, gee, you just do whatever we say. They’ve had numerous wars with Korea.

They have an 8,000 year culture. So when they see 1776 — to them, that’s like a modern building. The White House was started — was essentially built in 1799. To us, that’s really old. To them, that’s like a super modern building, right? So, you know, they’ve had tremendous conflict over many, many centuries with Korea. So it’s not just like, you do this. But we’re going to find out what happens.

Apparently Trump has only just learned that some countries in the world are more than 200 years old.

Well, yeah, when I say reciprocal — you make reciprocal deals, you’re talking about hundreds of billions of dollars. But before I did that, I wanted to give it a good shot. Let’s see. And they helped us. I have a very good relationship with him. I think he’s a tremendous guy. But don’t forget. He’s for China. I’m for the U.S. So that’s always going to be.

So he could be a tremendous guy, but he’s going to do what’s good for China. And he doesn’t want 50 million people pouring across his border. You know, there are a lot of things. I understand the other side. You always have to understand the other side.

He’s doing an awesome job of understanding the other side, by belatedly grasping the fact that other heads of state don’t put America First. It’s awkward that he thinks no one else knew that either, but whatever.

They ask if he was joking about a solar wall.

No, not joking, no. There is a chance that we can do a solar wall. We have major companies looking at that. Look, there’s no better place for solar than the Mexico border — the southern border. And there is a very good chance we can do a solar wall, which would actually look good. But there is a very good chance we could do a solar wall.

One of the things with the wall is you need transparency. You have to be able to see through it. In other words, if you can’t see through that wall — so it could be a steel wall with openings, but you have to have openings because you have to see what’s on the other side of the wall.

Ohhh, that’s what they think “transparency” means. Well no wonder then.

Q Are you mad that Putin lied about the meeting that you had with him, especially about —

THE PRESIDENT: What meeting?

Q At the G20, when he said that you didn’t — you know, you accepted that the hacking wasn’t real.

THE PRESIDENT: He didn’t say that. No. He said, I think he accepted it, but you’d have to ask him. That’s a big difference. So I said, very simply — and the first 45 minutes, don’t forget, most of the papers said I’d never bring it up. Had to be the first 20 to 25 minutes.

And I said to him, were you involved with the meddling in the election? He said, absolutely not. I was not involved. He was very strong on it. I then said to him again, in a totally different way, were you involved with the meddling. He said, I was not — absolutely not.

He said it in a totally different way. I long to know how it was different. Standing on his head, yodeling, rhyming couplets? I want to know.

I also wouldn’t mind knowing how he manages to think Putin’s denials are genuine while the Times, the Post, and CNN are all fake.

They wanted to know how it was different too.

Q Do you remember what the different way was that you asked —

THE PRESIDENT: Somebody said later to me, which was interesting. Said, let me tell you, if they were involved, you wouldn’t have found out about it. Okay, which is a very interesting point.

Q But did you say, okay, I believe you, let’s move on?

THE PRESIDENT: What I said, I asked him, were you involved? He said, very strongly — said to him a second time — totally different — were you involved? Because we can’t let that happen. And I mean whether it’s Russia or anybody else, we can’t let there be even a scintilla of doubt when it comes to an election. I mean, I’m very strong on that.

And I’m not saying it wasn’t Russia. What I’m saying is that we have to protect ourselves no matter who it is. You know, China is very good at this. I hate to say it, North Korea is very good at this. Look what they did to Sony Studios. They were the ones that did the whole deal to Sony. You know, we’re dealing with highly sophisticated people.

So, China is very good. You have many countries. And you have many individuals that are very good at this. But we can’t have — and I did say, we can’t have a scintilla of doubt as our elections and going forward.

Q Have you told him that?

THE PRESIDENT: I told him. I said, look, we can’t — we can’t have — now, he said absolutely not twice. What do you do? End up in a fistfight with somebody, okay?

He’d make one hell of a prosecutor.

Then he says he has a great relationship with everyone in the G20, which of course is nonsense.

Then he says yes he would invite Putin to the White House, because it would be stupid not to.

And, by the way, I only want to make great deals with Russia. Remember this, I have built up — we’re getting $57 billion more for the military. Hillary was going to cut the military. I’m a tremendous fracker, coal, natural gas, alternate energy, wind – everything, right? But I’m going to produce much much more energy than anyone else who was ever running for office. Ever. We’re going to have clean coal, and Hillary wasn’t. Hillary was going to stop fracking. She was going to stop coal totally. Hey, in West Virginia I beat her by 42 points. Remember, she went and sat with the miners and they said get the hell out of here. So, I was going to — if Hillary got in, your energy prices right now would be double. You’d be doing no fracking. You’d be doing practically no fossil fuels.

So Putin, everything I do is the exact opposite. I don’t believe — in fact, the one question that I didn’t ask him that I wish I did — but we had so many other things going, and really the ceasefire was a very complicated talk, it was a very important talk to me because I wanted to see if we could start a ceasefire.

Later he explains about the witch hunt.

What pressure? I didn’t — I did nothing. Hey, now it’s shown there’s no collusion, there’s no obstruction, there’s no nothing. Honestly, the whole thing, it is really a media witch hunt. It’s been a media witch hunt. And it’s bad for the country. You know, when you talk about Russia, if Russia actually did whatever they want to do, they got to be laughing, because look at what happens — how much time. . . .

They feel it’s a witch hunt, the people. There are a lot of people. And those people vote. They don’t stay home because it’s drizzling. We proved that. But every single party chairman said that my base is substantially stronger than it was in November. That’s a big compliment. That’s a big compliment. And I feel it.

And I think what’s happening is, as usual, the Democrats have played their card too hard on the Russia thing, because people aren’t believing it. It’s a witch hunt and they understand that. When they say “treason” — you know what treason is? That’s Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for giving the atomic bomb, okay? But what about all the congressmen, where I see the woman sitting there surrounded by — in Congress.

Happy Bastille Day.

Trump is getting a little consolation for the difficulties of life as president. He gets to visit some soldiers and see some big guns.

Mr. Trump arrived in Paris just after 8:30 a.m. on Thursday, beginning his second European trip in two weeks. The visit was set in motion by a call Mr. Macron had made to discuss Syria, in which he invited Mr. Trump to Bastille Day celebrations on July 14. The president and the first lady, Melania Trump, landed at Paris Orly Airport on Air Force One to the reception of a 10-car motorcade.

Mr. Trump loves the trappings of the presidency, whether in the United States or in another country. That includes occupying the most prestigious seats at the Bastille Day ceremony, a pomp-filled parade steeped in military tradition and hardware.

Whee, whee, whee! Almost as much fun as getting to sit at the wheel of the big truck and blow the horn.

Mr. Trump, for his own inaugural parade, had expressed a desire to include tanks and fighter jets. That wish was not granted, but Mr. Trump remains transfixed by displays of military power.

Missile envy.

The Atlantic underlines how passages from the emails demonstrate that Don Junior was lying in his previous accounts of that meeting.

In a June 3, 2016, email, Rob Goldstone, a music publicist and acquaintance of Trump Jr. wrote to him:

The Crown prosecutor met with [musician Emin Agalarov’s] father Aras this morning and in their meeting offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father.

This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.

The final sentence is essential because it shows that Trump Jr. knew going into the meeting that the purpose was to receive information damaging to the Clinton campaign. Trump Jr. had previously denied that he knew what the meeting was going to be about before he entered it.

He’s been lying, you see. Lying and lying and lying. Not lying about sex in the president’s study, but lying about meeting with a representative of a hostile power to get information damaging to the rival candidate. He’s been lying his face off about that.

In a later email, dated June 7, Goldstone wrote to Trump Jr. that he wished to “schedule a meeting with you and The Russian government attorney who is flying over from Moscow.” That’s important because Trump Jr. previously claimed that he did not know that the woman, Natalia Veselnitskaya, was Kremlin connected.

Lying and lying and lying. He’s a big ol’ liar, as well as a bully.

Finally, the emails make clear that Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and a White House senior adviser, and Paul Manafort, then Trump’s campaign chairman, were both copied in, meaning they too would have been aware of the purpose of the meeting and of Veselnitskaya’s identity. Kushner failed to disclose the June 9 meeting when applying for security clearance, but more recently did disclose it, as did Manafort. Both Kushner and Manafort are under investigation for business dealings and in relation to a broader investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia.

For being sleazy fucks, in short.

Trump Jr.’s decision to release the full emails, after previously lying about his discussions, is yet another watershed moment. It provides the most solid evidence yet that members of the Trump campaign’s inner orbit were ready and willing to collude with the Russian government, and it proves that the Trump campaign knew that the Kremlin supported Trump’s campaign against Hillary Clinton. (In mid-July, weeks after the meeting, Trump Jr. appeared on CNN, where he blasted the notion that Russia backed his father as “phony” and “disgusting.”)

Because he’s a lying liar who tells lies.

The Post says yes, this is a big deal.

The emails between President Trump’s oldest son and an intermediary for the Russians provide the clearest indication to date that Trump campaign officials and family members were at least prepared to do business with a foreign adversary in the mutual goal of taking down Hillary Clinton.

No one should presume to draw definitive conclusions from the contents of the emails as to possible jeopardy for Donald Trump Jr., where the overall investigation that includes various threads is heading, or most specifically how it will end. That remains the purview of special counsel Robert Mueller and investigators for the House and Senate intelligence committees. But in terms of public disclosures, what came out Tuesday was as stunning as anything to date, described by people closely watching on the outside as both breathtaking and surreal.

One thing the news does, Dan Balz writes, is blow away Big Don’s claim last weekend

that “nobody really knows” whether the Russians meddled in the U.S. election and if they did whether they did so with the intent of helping him and hurting Clinton.

Funny, Little Don knew that was bullshit at the time, but did he alert anyone? He did not.

The emails read like something out of a cheap spy thriller or perhaps even as a falsified document designed to lure and entrap a willing but unsuspecting victim.

That’s what I said. I said it read like something a CIA agent might say to test someone.

They also happen to lay out information that is transparently damaging and that undermines those who have dismissed suggestions of possible collusion or cooperation between Trump associates and the Russians as fanciful or deliberately misleading.

But her emails!

Oh wait, that won’t work any more, will it.

The language in the messages to Donald Trump Jr. is conspiratorial and explicit. The president’s son was offered “official documents” that would “incriminate Hillary Clinton” and that would be “very useful to your father.” Trump’s son was also informed in the email that the information being offered was “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”

That’s why I italicized it and then bolded it.

Trump’s son said Tuesday he was releasing the emails in the interest of transparency, but that decision came after the New York Times informed him that their reporters had the contents and were preparing to publish. Day by day, thanks to the Times’s reporting, Donald Trump Jr. has been dissembling about how and why a meeting with a Russian lawyer came about.

And after Don Senior has always been so nice to the Times, too.

When reporters from the Times first approached him about the meeting, he said it was primarily about adoption, then later conceded that he had been told the purpose was to present damaging information about Clinton. Now it turns out there was an explicit connection to the Russian government. His rapidly changing explanations left White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus hung out to dry with his comment on Sunday that it was a meeting about adoption.

Well, lie down with Trumps, get up with syphilis and a 50 year prison sentence.

Republicans in Congress are assuring us there’s nothing to see here, move along.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, said any time you’re in a campaign and you get an offer from a foreign government the answer is “no.”

Some Republicans — including Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley — defended Trump Jr.’s tweet as an example of transparency.

“I think the transparency is the proper thing to do and I think he’s shown that he wants everybody to know what the situation is, as I have found them on so many stories since the election,” Grassley told CNN.

Ah yes the transparency! So transparent, very forthcoming, much clarity. That’s why he told us all about it right after the New York Times told us all about it. It just doesn’t get any more transparent than that.

Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah described Trump Jr. as “a very bright young man,” but not a member of his father’s administration. He responded to Kaine’s accusations of treason with, “You got to be kidding.”

“He’s not in the administration,” Hatch said. “He may be the son of the president but he doesn’t have the authority to speak for the president. Look, I think this is overblown.”

Oh yes, definitely, Trump obviously keeps his adult children scrupulously separate from his presidency.

I was planning to go in a less-Trump-allthetime direction today but the Times’s latest cannot be ignored.

The June 3, 2016, email sent to Donald Trump Jr. could hardly have been more explicit: One of his father’s former Russian business partners had been contacted by a senior Russian government official and was offering to provide the Trump campaign with dirt on Hillary Clinton.

The documents “would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father,” read the email, written by a trusted intermediary, who added, “This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”

Boom. There go all Don 2’s lies about what they told him and how he saw the offer. This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.

Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.

If the future president’s elder son was surprised or disturbed by the provenance of the promised material — or the notion that it was part of a continuing effort by the Russian government to aid his father’s campaign — he gave no indication.

He replied within minutes: “If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.”

Four days later, after a flurry of emails, the intermediary wrote back, proposing a meeting in New York on Thursday with a “Russian government attorney.”

You know…it’s what you would do if you were a CIA agent testing a citizen’s willingness to work with a hostile foreign power. Spelling it out like that basically tells young Don: be very clear about what you’re getting into, Junior. Make no mistake about who we are and what we want.

So what did young Don do? He said hooray yes let’s do this thing.

Donald Trump Jr. agreed, adding that he would most likely bring along “Paul Manafort (campaign boss)” and “my brother-in-law,” Jared Kushner, now one of the president’s closest White House advisers.

On June 9, the Russian lawyer was sitting in the younger Mr. Trump’s office on the 25th floor of Trump Tower, just one level below the office of the future president.

…

…the email exchanges, which were reviewed by The Times, offer a detailed unspooling of how the meeting with the Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, came about — and just how eager Donald Trump Jr. was to accept what he was explicitly told was the Russian government’s help.

what he was explicitly told was the Russian government’s help.

The Justice Department, as well as the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, is examining whether any of President Trump’s associates colluded with the Russian government to disrupt last year’s election. American intelligence agencies have determined that the Russian government tried to sway the election in favor of Mr. Trump.

And two days ago Don Senior told us that he “strongly pressed” Putin on the subject twice but that Putin “vehemently denied” it – as if that meant Putin were telling the truth. Hours later his son flips over the apple cart. Russia was involved and Don Junior has provided the evidence.

…in recent days, accounts by some of the central organizers of the meeting, including Donald Trump Jr., have evolved or have been contradicted by the written email records.

After being told that The Times was about to publish the content of the emails, instead of responding to a request for comment, Donald Trump Jr. tweeted out images of them himself on Tuesday.

“To everyone, in order to be totally transparent, I am releasing the entire email chain of my emails” about the June 9 meeting, he wrote. “I first wanted to just have a phone call but when that didn’t work out, they said the woman would be in New York and asked if I would meet.”

Brilliant. Just really brilliant.

On Monday, Donald Trump Jr. said on Twitter that it was hardly unusual to take information on an opponent. And on Tuesday morning, he tweeted, “Media & Dems are extremely invested in the Russia story. If this nonsense meeting is all they have after a yr, I understand the desperation!”

Is there not a single competent lawyer on the payroll? Not one lawyer to tell him to shut the fuck up this instant? It’s like watching a child climb onto a windowsill on the 25th floor.

Updating to add: the Times has updated the story with a game-changer from Don Senior:

At a White House briefing on Tuesday, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the deputy press secretary, read a statement from President Trump in which he defended his son. “My son is a high-quality person, and I applaud his transparency,” the president said.

There ya go. End of story.

Trump has been busy on Twitter this morning. Lashings of retweets of Fox & Friends, and libeling of James Comey, and lying about what he said about Putin – and the absurd claim that putting his clothing merchant daughter in his seat at the G20 was “standard.”

When I left Conference Room for short meetings with Japan and other countries, I asked Ivanka to hold seat. Very standard. Angela M agrees!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 10, 2017

“Very standard” my ass. If it were very standard you would see other heads of state doing it, and you don’t. If it were very standard you would have seen other US presidents doing it, and you didn’t. It’s not standard at all, it’s grotesque, it’s Ruritanian, it’s Marx brothers territory.

Also what’s this “Angela M” shit? Is he so clueless that he even thinks it’s ok to refer to heads of state who are women in that condescending way? Funny otherwise that there’s no chat about Vladimir P, isn’t it.

If Chelsea Clinton were asked to hold the seat for her mother,as her mother gave our country away, the Fake News would say CHELSEA FOR PRES!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 10, 2017

If cats took over the State Department the dish would run away with the spoon. I can think of meaningless counterfactuals all day long; what’s his point?

Good morning Mr. President. It would never have occurred to my mother or my father to ask me. Were you giving our country away? Hoping not. https://t.co/4ODjWZUp0c

— Chelsea Clinton (@ChelseaClinton) July 10, 2017

Laurence Summers is not impressed by Trump’s latest junket.

[T]he president’s behavior in and around the summit was unsettling to U.S. allies and confirmed the fears of those who believe that his conduct is currently the greatest threat to American national security.

The existence of the G-20 as an annual forum arose out of a common belief of major nations in a global community with common interests in peace, mutual security, prosperity and economic integration, and the containment of global threats, even as there was competition among nations in the security and economic realms. The idea that the United States should lead in the development of international community has been a central tenet of American foreign policy since the end of World War II. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the aspiration to international community has been an aspiration to global community.

Trump’s rhetoric has rejected the concept of global community and expressed a strong belief that the United States should seek better deals rather than stronger institutions and systems. It has become clear that Trump’s actions will match his rhetoric.

It’s a sleazy, self-centered, small-minded worldview as well as policy. “Deals” aren’t the answer to everything, and a deal-maker is not automatically equipped to understand every issue. The current president has a small parochial mind, along with a galloping case of narcissism, so he understands almost nothing about his job.

The president chose hours before meeting with Russian President Vladi­mir Putin to cast doubt on judgments of the U.S. intelligence community regarding Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. On the brink of the most important set of international meetings of his presidency so far, he put forward the absurd idea that a main G-20 discussion item involved Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta, in the process making demonstrably false assertions about Podesta’s role.

It is rare for heads of government to step away from the table during major summits. When this is necessary, their place is normally taken by foreign ministers or other very senior government officials. There is no precedent for a head of government’s adult child taking a seat, as was the case when Ivanka Trump took her father’s place at the G-20 on Saturday. There is no precedent for good reason. It was insulting to the others present and sent a signal of disempowerment regarding senior government officials.

Along with a lot of other signals, none of them good. It sent a signal that knowledge and experience are considered entirely irrelevant and useless by the current administration, which in turn sends a signal that brute power is all there is. Ivanka Trump plunked herself down at that table because she could, because Daddy, and for no other reason. That’s just naked rude belligerent power, dressed up as a blonde princess.

The president’s pre-G-20 speech in Poland expressed the sentiment that the primary question of our time was the will of the West to survive. Such a sentiment is inevitably alienating to the vast majority of humanity that does not live in what the president considers to be the West. Manichaean rhetoric from presidents is rarely wise. George W. Bush’s reference to an “axis of evil” is generally regarded as a serious error, not because the regimes he referenced were not evil but because his rhetoric drew our adversaries together. Invoking the idea of “the West against the rest,” as President Trump did, is a graver misstep.

A corporate chief executive whose public behavior was as erratic as Trump’s would already have been replaced. The standard for democratically elected officials is appropriately different. But one cannot look at the past months and rule out the possibility of even more aberrant behavior in the future. The president’s Cabinet and his political allies in Congress should never forget that the oaths they swore were not to the defense of the president but to the defense of the Constitution.

The president’s Cabinet and his political allies in Congress are not going to lift a finger to stop him.

The Ivanka Trump thing really annoys me…probably partly because it’s such a grotesque inversion of feminism. No no no no no no no, feminism is not about boosting unqualified inexperienced daughters into jobs in the Executive Branch because their daddies are president. No. That’s the opposite of feminism. It’s a grotesque leering parody of feminism. It’s insulting.

And it’s just all wrong. Heads of state don’t bring their toddlers with them to global meetings, and have them “sit in” while they’re away for a few minutes. They don’t bring their adult children either, or their cousins or siblings or any other relatives. That’s not how any of this works. It’s a break from diplomatic protocol.

Former NATO ambassador Nicholas Burns, who served as a diplomat under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, said the incident was a breach of protocols for such summits. Those traditions are intended to send a clear message to world leaders about who has power in the government.

Burns said in his experience at summits, the secretary of state would take the president’s place at the table.

Of course Trump’s Secretary of State is also grossly underqualified, but at least he’s not a relative.

“This is a group of the 20 most powerful leaders in the world in the 20 most powerful countries in the world,” Burns said. “It conveys that impression and we are a democracy and that’s also important here.”

“Authority is not conferred upon family members because of the president’s position,” he added.

And normally, everybody knows that. Everybody.

Trump and other world leaders of the G-20 sat around a massive table for a working session on “Partnership With Africa, Migration and Health” when Ivanka relieved her father, who had to leave the room for additional meetings. The move placed her squarely between British Prime Minister Theresa May and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

“Yes, it stuck out,” said a senior European official who took part in the G-20 talks and who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly. “The very fact that his daughter is senior adviser smacks of the kind of nepotism not seen since John F. Kennedy named Robert F. Kennedy as attorney general.”

At least Robert Kennedy wasn’t a fashion marketer.

Some critics online compared Ivanka Trump’s presence at the table to a “banana republic” and argued that she is both “unelected” and “unqualified” to step into a role usually filled by officials with policy expertise.

What need is there to argue? Of course she’s neither elected nor qualified, and of course a job like that requires policy expertise. Ivanka Trump sells shoes and jewelry. She’s not qualified.

There were some tweets.

Ivanka Trump, unelected, unqualified, daughter-in-chief, is representing the US at the G20 summit next to May, Xi, Merkel. Photo @LanaLukash pic.twitter.com/fvs0EMy8z7

— Brian Klaas (@brianklaas) July 8, 2017

Ivanka fills in for her dad beside Xi Jinping. To me, it feels banana-republicky for the US to be represented by an inexperienced daughter. https://t.co/lDDlyCeFp9

— Nicholas Kristof (@NickKristof) July 8, 2017

https://twitter.com/espiers/status/883675815262683136

Why the hell is Ivanka Trump sitting in for daddy at G20 meetings?! What are her qualifications? Who voted for her?

— Charles M. Blow (@CharlesMBlow) July 8, 2017

Having Princess Ivanka represent US at G20 table a slap in face to other G20 leaders, other top admin officials, American people. Grotesque.

— David Rothkopf (@djrothkopf) July 8, 2017