Trump 39: The Return of the Wall

[47of74]

I just saw the suit a number of states filed against Fuck Face

And of course Fuck Face hasn't learned that his running his mouth is likely to show up in court filings against him.

Dumbass.

[onekidanddone]

12 minutes ago, 47of74 said:

I just saw the suit a number of states filed against Fuck Face

And of course Fuck Face hasn't learned that his running his mouth is likely to show up in court filings against him.

Dumbass.

I’ll once again ask how we went from a Constitutional law scholar to this walking talking tweeting shit stain?

[K'Z'K]

14 hours ago, AmazonGrace said:

How long until Rosenstein gets the boot

Done and dusted. He resigned today. Or maybe "resigned."

Rosenstein plans to leave Justice Dept. next month

Spoiler

Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein plans to leave the Justice Department in mid-March, an official familiar with the matter said Monday night, and an announcement on his successor is expected imminently.

Rosenstein, the No. 2 Justice Department official who has spent nearly two years in the hot seat after he appointed Robert S. Mueller III to lead an investigation into whether President Trump’s campaign conspired with Russia to interfere in the 2016 election, had made it known in recent weeks that he planned to leave if and when a new attorney general was confirmed by the Senate.

With William P. Barr’s swearing in to that post last week, Rosenstein has set a more precise timeline for departure — though the official stressed his plan could shift if needed to ensure a smooth transition.

People familiar with the matter said the administration also has decided to nominate Jeffrey Rosen, the deputy secretary of transportation, to take over the job. He will need to be confirmed by the Senate, which probably would occur after Rosenstein leaves.

The news of Rosenstein’s expected departure date comes as the deputy attorney general is again facing allegations from former acting FBI director Andrew McCabe that he talked about taking dramatic steps against Trump after the president fired James B. Comey as FBI director in May 2017. McCabe said in an interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes” Sunday that Rosenstein broached the idea of ousting Trump using the 25th Amendment, or wearing a wire to secretly record him in the White House.

“He said, ‘I never get searched when I go into the White House. I could easily wear a recording device. They wouldn’t know it was there,’ ” McCabe said, describing what he said Rosenstein told him. “He was not joking.”

The interview sparked an angry reaction from Trump, who said on Twitter it appeared Rosenstein and McCabe were “planning a very illegal act.” The official, though, said Rosenstein’s departure was expected before that, and the timeline was not affected by McCabe’s recent comments.

Rosenstein has vaguely disputed McCabe’s allegations. In response to the “60 Minutes” interview, a Justice Department spokeswoman said: “The deputy attorney general never authorized any recording that Mr. McCabe references. As the deputy attorney general previously has stated, based on his personal dealings with the president, there is no basis to invoke the 25th Amendment, nor was the DAG in a position to consider invoking the 25th Amendment.”

The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), has said he wants to investigate McCabe’s claims.

 

[47of74]

3 hours ago, onekidanddone said:

I’ll once again ask how we went from a Constitutional law scholar to this walking talking tweeting shit stain?

That's insulting to shit stains to compare them to Fuckface von Grand Wizard.  He is so much lower than shit. 

[AmazonGrace]

 

Get him out before he has Putin bomb us out here

[AmazonGrace]

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[smittykins]

NEW RANDY RAINBOW SONG!

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[apple1]

9 minutes ago, AmazonGrace said:

 

This (in addition to the obvious disrespect and complete disregard for the law) is the kind of thing that terrifies me.

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[HerNameIsBuffy]

1 hour ago, apple1 said:

This (in addition to the obvious disrespect and complete disregard for the law) is the kind of thing that terrifies me.

Me too.  I need someone to explain to me how his base can fan wank this stuff away.

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[Howl]

14 hours ago, KZK said:

Done and dusted. He resigned today. Or maybe "resigned."

Rosenstein plans to leave Justice Dept. next month

He'll only be there a week or two more. Like Mattis, he'll be sent packing soon; his lack of loyalty caused a deep narcissistic injury.  They have a some sycophant waiting in the wings and Rosenstein might get in the way of whatever crap William Barr is getting ready to do. I so truly hope there is no Saturday Night Massacre in store.  It will truly tear this country apart.

While reviewing the spelling for "sycophant" I enjoyed a stroll through some synonyms: toady, creep, crawler, fawner, flatterer, flunkey, truckler, groveller, doormat, lickspittle, kowtower, obsequious person, minion, hanger-on, leech, puppet, spaniel, Uriah Heep (!). 

Holy moly, @AmazonGrace, I just scrolled up and saw your post. The corruption NEVER stops.  

[Dandruff]

1 hour ago, HerNameIsBuffy said:

Me too.  I need someone to explain to me how his base can fan wank this stuff away.

Maybe there's an email list for propaganda?  I know two people who voted for him (and the relationships are too close to sever).  When the conversation occasionally turns to current events, and I point out the appalling, they're both too quickly ready with some pat excuse/reason for the behavior + "witch hunt" + "but Hillary or but Obama" BS.  Neither one is stupid, by other objective measures.  One is very religious and the other isn't.  

[GreyhoundFan]

"Intimidation, Pressure and Humiliation: Inside Trump’s Two-Year War on the Investigations Encircling Him"

Spoiler

WASHINGTON — As federal prosecutors in Manhattan gathered evidence late last year about President Trump’s role in silencing women with hush payments during the 2016 campaign, Mr. Trump called Matthew G. Whitaker, his newly installed attorney general, with a question. He asked whether Geoffrey S. Berman, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York and a Trump ally, could be put in charge of the widening investigation, according to several American officials with direct knowledge of the call.

Mr. Whitaker, who had privately told associates that part of his role at the Justice Department was to “jump on a grenade” for the president, knew he could not put Mr. Berman in charge because Mr. Berman had already recused himself from the investigation. The president soon soured on Mr. Whitaker, as he often does with his aides, and complained about his inability to pull levers at the Justice Department that could make the president’s many legal problems go away.

Trying to install a perceived loyalist atop a widening inquiry is a familiar tactic for Mr. Trump, who has been struggling to beat back the investigations that have consumed his presidency. His efforts have exposed him to accusations of obstruction of justice as Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, finishes his work investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Mr. Trump’s public war on the inquiry has gone on long enough that it is no longer shocking. Mr. Trump rages almost daily to his 58 million Twitter followers that Mr. Mueller is on a “witch hunt” and has adopted the language of Mafia bosses by calling those who cooperate with the special counsel “rats.” His lawyer talks openly about a strategy to smear and discredit the special counsel investigation. The president’s allies in Congress and the conservative news media warn of an insidious plot inside the Justice Department and the F.B.I. to subvert a democratically elected president.

An examination by The New York Times reveals the extent of an even more sustained, more secretive assault by Mr. Trump on the machinery of federal law enforcement. Interviews with dozens of current and former government officials and others close to Mr. Trump, as well as a review of confidential White House documents, reveal numerous unreported episodes in a two-year drama.

White House lawyers wrote a confidential memo expressing concern about the president’s staff peddling misleading information in public about the firing of Michael T. Flynn, the Trump administration’s first national security adviser. Mr. Trump had private conversations with Republican lawmakers about a campaign to attack the Mueller investigation. And there was the episode when he asked his attorney general about putting Mr. Berman in charge of the Manhattan investigation.

Mr. Whitaker, who this month told a congressional committee that Mr. Trump had never pressured him over the various investigations, is now under scrutiny by House Democrats for possible perjury.

A Justice Department spokeswoman said Tuesday that the White House had not asked Mr. Whitaker to interfere in the investigations. “Under oath to the House Judiciary Committee, then-Acting Attorney General Whitaker stated that ‘at no time has the White House asked for nor have I provided any promises or commitments concerning the special counsel’s investigation or any other investigation,’” said the spokeswoman, Kerri Kupec. “Mr. Whitaker stands by his testimony.”

The story of Mr. Trump’s attempts to defang the investigations has been voluminously covered in the news media, to such a degree that many Americans have lost track of how unusual his behavior is. But fusing the strands reveals an extraordinary story of a president who has attacked the law enforcement apparatus of his own government like no other president in history, and who has turned the effort into an obsession. Mr. Trump has done it with the same tactics he once used in his business empire: demanding fierce loyalty from employees, applying pressure tactics to keep people in line and protecting the brand — himself — at all costs.

It is a public relations strategy as much as a legal strategy — a campaign to create a narrative of a president hounded by his “deep state” foes. The new Democratic majority in the House, and the prospect of a wave of investigations on Capitol Hill this year, will test whether the strategy shores up Mr. Trump’s political support or puts his presidency in greater peril. The president has spent much of his time venting publicly about there being “no collusion” with Russia before the 2016 election, which has diverted attention from a growing body of evidence that he has tried to impede the various investigations.

Julie O’Sullivan, a criminal law professor at Georgetown University, said she believed there was ample public evidence that Mr. Trump had the “corrupt intent” to try to derail the Mueller investigation, the legal standard for an obstruction of justice case.

But this is far from a routine criminal investigation, she said, and Mr. Mueller will have to make judgments about the effect on the country of making a criminal case against the president. Democrats in the House have said they will wait for Mr. Mueller to finish his work before making a decision about whether the president’s behavior warrants impeachment.

In addition to the Mueller investigation, there are at least two other federal inquiries that touch the president and his advisers — the Manhattan investigation focused on the hush money payments made by Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, and an inquiry examining the flow of foreign money to the Trump inaugural committee.

The president’s defenders counter that most of Mr. Trump’s actions under scrutiny fall under his authority as the head of the executive branch. They argue that the Constitution gives the president sweeping powers to hire and fire, to start and stop law enforcement proceedings, and to grant presidential pardons to friends and allies. A sitting American president cannot be indicted, according to current Justice Department policy.

Mr. Trump’s lawyers add this novel response: The president has been public about his disdain for the Mueller investigation and other federal inquiries, so he is hardly engaged in a conspiracy. He fired one F.B.I. director and considered firing his replacement. He humiliated his first attorney general for being unable to “control” the Russia investigation and installed a replacement, Mr. Whitaker, who has told people he believed his job was to protect the president. But that, they say, is Donald Trump being Donald Trump.

In other words, the president’s brazen public behavior might be his best defense.

The first crisis

The investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and whether the Trump campaign aided the effort presented the new White House with its first crisis after only 25 days. The president immediately tried to contain the damage.

It was Feb. 14, 2017, and Mr. Trump and his advisers were in the Oval Office debating how to explain the resignation of Michael T. Flynn, the national security adviser, the previous night. Mr. Flynn, who had been a top campaign adviser to Mr. Trump, was under investigation by the F.B.I. for his contacts with Russians and secret foreign lobbying efforts for Turkey.

The Justice Department had already raised questions that Mr. Flynn might be subject to blackmail by the Russians for misleading White House officials about the Russian contacts, and inside the White House there was a palpable fear that the Russia investigation could consume the early months of a new administration.

As the group in the Oval Office talked, one of Mr. Trump’s advisers mentioned in passing what Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, then the speaker of the House, had told reporters — that Mr. Trump had asked Mr. Flynn to resign.

It was unclear where Mr. Ryan had gotten that information, but Mr. Trump seized on Mr. Ryan’s words. “That sounds better,” the president said, according to people with knowledge of the discussions. Mr. Trump turned to the White House press secretary at the time, Sean Spicer, who was preparing to brief the news media.

“Say that,” Mr. Trump ordered.

But was that true, Mr. Spicer pressed.

“Say that I asked for his resignation,” Mr. Trump repeated.

The president appeared to have little concern about what he told the public about Mr. Flynn’s departure, and he quickly warmed to the new narrative. The episode was among the first of multiple ham-handed efforts by the president to carry out a dual strategy: publicly casting the Russia story as an overblown hoax and privately trying to contain the investigation’s reach.

“This Russia thing is all over now because I fired Flynn,” Mr. Trump said over lunch that day, according to a new book by Chris Christie, a former New Jersey governor and a longtime Trump ally.

Mr. Christie was taken aback. “This Russia thing is far from over,” Mr. Christie wrote that he told Mr. Trump, who responded: “What do you mean? Flynn met with the Russians. That was the problem. I fired Flynn. It’s over.”

Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, who was also at the lunch, chimed in, according to Mr. Christie’s book: “That’s right, firing Flynn ends the whole Russia thing.”

As Mr. Trump was lunching with Mr. Christie, lawyers in the White House Counsel’s Office met with Mr. Spicer about what he should say from the White House podium about what was a sensitive national security investigation. But when Mr. Spicer’s briefing began, the lawyers started hearing numerous misstatements — some bigger than others — and ended up compiling them all in a memo.

The lawyers’ main concern was that Mr. Spicer overstated how exhaustively the White House had investigated Mr. Flynn and that he said, wrongly, that administration lawyers had concluded there were no legal issues surrounding Mr. Flynn’s conduct.

Mr. Spicer later told people he stuck to talking points that he was given by the counsel’s office, and that White House lawyers expressed concern only about how he had described the thoroughness of the internal inquiry into Mr. Flynn. The memo written by the lawyers said that Mr. Spicer was presented with a longer list of his misstatements. The White House never publicly corrected the record.

Later that day, Mr. Trump confronted the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, in the Oval Office. The president told him that Mr. Spicer had done a great job explaining how the White House had handled the firing. Then he asked Mr. Comey to end the F.B.I.’s investigation into Mr. Flynn, and that Mr. Flynn was a good guy.

Mr. Comey responded, according to a memo he wrote at the time, that Mr. Flynn was indeed a good guy. But he said nothing about ending the F.B.I. investigation.

By March, Mr. Trump was in a rage that his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, had recused himself from the Russia inquiry because investigators were looking into the campaign, of which Mr. Sessions had been a part. Mr. Trump was also growing increasingly frustrated with Mr. Comey, who refused to say publicly that the president was not under investigation.

Mr. Trump finally fired Mr. Comey in May. But the president and the White House gave conflicting accounts of their reasoning for the dismissal, which only served to exacerbate the president’s legal exposure.

A week after the firing, The New York Times disclosed that the president had asked Mr. Comey to end the Flynn investigation. The next day, the deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, appointed Mr. Mueller, a Republican, as special counsel.

Instead of ending the Russia investigation by firing Mr. Comey, Mr. Trump had drastically raised the stakes.

Boiling frustration

Mr. Mueller’s appointment fueled Mr. Trump’s anger and what became increasingly reckless behavior — triggering a string of actions over the summer of 2017 that could end up as building blocks in a case by Congress that the president engaged in a broad effort to thwart the investigation.

On Twitter and in news media interviews, Mr. Trump tried to pressure investigators and undermine the credibility of potential witnesses in the Mueller investigation.

He directed much of his venom at Mr. Sessions, who had recused himself in March from overseeing the Russia investigation because of contacts he had during the election with Russia’s ambassador to the United States.

The president humiliated Mr. Sessions at every turn, and stunned Washington when he said during an interview with The Times that he never would have named Mr. Sessions attorney general if he had known Mr. Sessions would step aside from the investigation.

Privately, he tried to remove Mr. Sessions — he said he wanted an attorney general who would protect him — but didn’t fire him, in part because White House aides dodged the president’s orders to demand his resignation. Mr. Trump even called his former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, over the Fourth of July weekend to ask him to pressure Mr. Sessions to resign. Mr. Lewandowski was noncommittal and never acted on the request.

One of Mr. Trump’s lawyers also reached out that summer to the attorneys for two of his former aides — Paul J. Manafort and Mr. Flynn — to discuss possible pardons. The discussions raised questions about whether the president was willing to offer pardons to influence their decisions about whether to plead guilty and cooperate in the Mueller investigation.

The president even tried to fire Mr. Mueller himself, a move that could have brought an end to the investigation. Just weeks after Mr. Mueller’s appointment, the president insisted that he ought to be fired because of perceived conflicts of interest. Mr. Trump’s White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, who would have been responsible for carrying out the order, refused and threatened to quit.

The president eventually backed off.

A new strategy: discrediting an investigation

Sitting in the Delta Sky Lounge during a layover in Atlanta’s airport in July 2017, Representative Matt Gaetz, a first-term Republican from the Florida Panhandle, decided it was time to attack. Mr. Gaetz, then 35, believed that the president’s allies in Congress needed a coordinated strategy to fight back against an investigation they viewed as deeply unfair and politically biased.

He called Representative Jim Jordan, a conservative Republican from Ohio, and told him the party needed “to go play offense,” Mr. Gaetz recalled in an interview.

The two men believed that Republican leaders, who publicly praised the appointment of Mr. Mueller, had been beaten into a defensive crouch by the unending chaos and were leaving Democrats unchecked to “pistol whip” the president with constant accusations about his campaign and Russia.

So they began to investigate the investigators. Mr. Trump and his lawyers enthusiastically encouraged the strategy, which, according to some polls, convinced many Americans that the country’s law enforcement apparatus was determined to bring down the president.

Within days of their conversation, Mr. Gaetz and Mr. Jordan drafted a letter to Mr. Sessions and Mr. Rosenstein, the first call for the appointment of a second special counsel to essentially reinvestigate Hillary Clinton for her handling of her emails while secretary of state — the case had ended in the summer of 2016 — as well as the origins of the F.B.I.’s investigation of Mr. Flynn and other Trump associates.

The letter itself, with the signatures of only 20 House Republicans, gained little traction at first. But an important shift was underway: At a time when Mr. Trump’s lawyers were urging him to cooperate with Mr. Mueller and tone down his Twitter feed, the president’s fiercest allies in Congress and the conservative media were busy trying to flip the script on the federal law enforcement agencies and officials who began the inquiry into Mr. Trump’s campaign.

Mr. Gaetz and Mr. Jordan began huddling with like-minded Republicans, sometimes including Representative Mark Meadows, a press-savvy North Carolinian close to Mr. Trump, and Representative Devin Nunes of California, the head of the House Intelligence Committee.

Mr. Nunes, the product of a dairy farming family in California’s Central Valley, had already emerged as one of Mr. Trump’s strongest allies in Congress. He worked closely with Mr. Flynn during the Trump transition after the 2016 election, and he had a history of battling the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies, which he sometimes accused of coloring their analysis for partisan reasons. In the spring of 2017, he sought to bolster Mr. Trump’s false claim that President Barack Obama had ordered an illegal wiretap on Trump Tower.

Using Congress’s oversight powers, the Republican lawmakers succeeded in doing what Mr. Trump could not realistically do on his own: forcing into the open some of the government’s most sensitive investigative files — including secret wiretaps and the existence of an F.B.I. informant — which were part of the Russia inquiry. House Republicans opened investigations into the F.B.I.’s handling of the Clinton email case and a debunked Obama-era uranium deal indirectly linked to Mrs. Clinton. The lawmakers got a big assist from the Justice Department, which gave them private text messages recovered from two senior F.B.I. officials who had been on the Russia case. The officials — Peter Strzok and Lisa Page — repeatedly criticized Mr. Trump in their texts, which were featured in a loop on Fox News and became a centerpiece of an evolving and powerful conservative narrative about a cabal inside the F.B.I. and Justice Department to take down Mr. Trump.

The president cheered the lawmakers on Twitter, in interviews and in private, urging Mr. Gaetz on Air Force One in December 2017 and in subsequent phone calls to keep up the House Republicans’ oversight work. He was hoping for fair treatment from Mr. Mueller, Mr. Trump told Mr. Gaetz in one of the calls just after the congressman appeared on Fox News, but that did not preclude him from encouraging his allies’ scrutiny of the investigation.

Later, when Mr. Nunes produced a memo alleging that the F.B.I. had abused its authority in spying on a former Trump campaign associate, Carter Page, Mr. Trump called Mr. Nunes a “Great American hero.” (The F.B.I. said it had “grave concerns” about the memo’s accuracy.)

The president became an active participant in the campaign. He repeatedly leaned on administration officials on behalf of the lawmakers — urging Mr. Rosenstein and other law enforcement leaders to flout procedure and share sensitive materials about the ongoing case with Congress. As president, Mr. Trump has ultimate authority over information that passes through the government, but his interventions were unusual.

By the spring of 2018, Mr. Nunes zeroed in on new targets. In one case, he threatened to hold Mr. Rosenstein in contempt of Congress or even try to impeach him if the documents he wanted were not turned over, including the file used to open the Russia case. In another, he pressed the Justice Department for sensitive information about a trusted F.B.I. informant used in the Russia investigation, a Cambridge professor named Stefan Halper — even as intelligence officials said that the release of the information could damage relationships with important allies.

The president chimed in, accusing the F.B.I., without evidence, of planting a spy in his campaign. “SPYGATE could be one of the biggest political scandals in history!” Mr. Trump wrote, turning the term into a popular hashtag.

Most Senate Republicans tried to ignore the House tactics, and not all House Republicans who participated in the investigations agreed with the scorched-earth approach. Representative Trey Gowdy, a South Carolina Republican and former federal prosecutor who had led Republicans in the Benghazi investigation, felt that figures like Mr. Gaetz and, in some cases, Mr. Nunes, were hurting their own cause with a sloppy, overhyped campaign that damaged Congress’s credibility.

Former Representative Thomas J. Rooney, a Republican who sat on the Intelligence Committee and retired last year, was similarly critical. “The efforts to tag Mueller as a witch hunt are a mistake,” he said in an interview. “The guy is an American hero. He is somebody who has always spouted the rule of law in what our country is about.”

But Mr. Gaetz makes no apologies.

“Do I think it’s right that our work in the Congress has aided in the president’s defense?” he asked, before answering his own question.

“Yeah, I think it is right.”

Ultimately, his strategy was successful in softening the ground for a shift in the president’s legal strategy — away from relatively quiet cooperation with Mr. Mueller’s investigators and toward a targeted and relentless frontal attack on their credibility and impartiality.

The president opens a new front

Last April, Mr. Trump hired Rudolph W. Giuliani, his longtime friend and a famously combative former mayor of New York, as his personal lawyer and ubiquitous television attack dog. A new war had begun.

In jettisoning his previous legal team — which had counseled that Mr. Trump should cooperate with the investigation — the president decided to combine a legal strategy with a public-relations campaign in an aggressive effort to undermine the credibility of both Mr. Mueller and the Justice Department.

Mr. Mueller was unlikely to indict Mr. Trump, the president’s advisers believed, so the real danger to his presidency was impeachment — a political act that Congress would probably only carry out only with broad public support. If Mr. Mueller’s investigation could be discredited, then impeachment might be less likely.

Months of caustic presidential tweets and fiery television interviews by Mr. Giuliani unfolded. The former mayor accused Mr. Mueller, without evidence, of bias and ignoring facts to carry out an anti-Trump agenda. He called one of Mr. Mueller’s top prosecutors, Andrew Weissmann, a “complete scoundrel.”

Behind the scenes, Mr. Giuliani was getting help from a curious source: Kevin Downing, the lawyer for Paul Manafort, who had been the president’s 2016 campaign chairman. Mr. Manafort had agreed to cooperate with the special counsel after being convicted of financial crimes in an attempt to lessen a potentially lengthy prison sentence. Mr. Downing shared details about prosecutors’ lines of questioning, Mr. Giuliani admitted late last year.

It was a highly unusual arrangement — the lawyer for a cooperating witness providing valuable information to the president’s lawyer at a time when his client remained in the sights of the special counsel’s prosecutors. The arrangement angered Mr. Mueller’s investigators, who questioned what Mr. Manafort was trying to gain from the arrangement.

The attacks on the Mueller investigation appeared to have an effect. Last summer, polling showed a 14-point uptick in the percentage of Americans polled who disapproved of how Mr. Mueller was handling the inquiry. “Mueller is now slightly more distrusted than trusted, and Trump is a little ahead of the game,” Mr. Giuliani said during an interview in August.

“So I think we’ve done really well,” Mr. Giuliani added. “And my client’s happy.”

The F.B.I. raids Michael Cohen

But Mr. Giuliani and his client had a serious problem, which they were slow to comprehend.

In April the F.B.I. raided the Manhattan office and residences of Mr. Cohen — the president’s lawyer and fixer — walking off with business records, emails and other documents dating back years. At first, Mr. Trump wasn’t concerned.

The president told advisers that Mr. Rosenstein assured him at the time that the Cohen investigation had nothing to do with him. In the president’s recounting, Mr. Rosenstein told him that the inquiry in New York was about Mr. Cohen’s business dealings, it did not involve the president and was not about Russia. Since then, Mr. Trump has asked his advisers if Mr. Rosenstein was deliberately misleading him to keep him calm.

Mr. Giuliani initially portrayed Mr. Cohen as “honest,” and Mr. Trump praised him publicly. But Mr. Cohen soon told prosecutors in New York how Mr. Trump had ordered him during the 2016 campaign to buy the silence of women who claimed they had sex with the president. In a separate bid for leniency, Mr. Cohen told Mr. Mueller’s prosecutors about Mr. Trump’s participation in negotiations during the height of the presidential campaign to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.

Mr. Trump was now battling twin investigations that seemed to be moving ever close to him. And Mr. Cohen, once the president’s fiercest defender, was becoming his chief tormentor.

In a court appearance in August, Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty and told a judge that Mr. Trump had ordered him to arrange the payments to the women, Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal. Mr. Cohen’s descriptions of the president’s actions made Mr. Trump, in effect, an unindicted co-conspirator and raised the prospect of the president being charged after he leaves office. Representative Jerrold Nadler, the New York Democrat who in January became the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, which has jurisdiction over the matter, said the implied offense was probably impeachable.

The president struck back, launching a volley of tweets that savaged Mr. Cohen and his family — insinuating that Mr. Cohen’s father-in-law had engaged in unexamined criminal activity. He called Mr. Cohen a “rat.” The messages infuriated Democratic lawmakers, who claimed the president was trying to threaten and intimidate a witness ahead of testimony Mr. Cohen planned before Congress.

“He’s only been threatened by the truth,” the president responded.

Another attorney general takes office

As the prosecutors closed in, Mr. Trump felt a more urgent need to gain control of the investigation.

He made the call to Mr. Whitaker to see if he could put Mr. Berman in charge of the New York investigation. The inquiry is run by Robert Khuzami, a career prosecutor who took over after Mr. Berman, whom Mr. Trump appointed, recused himself because of a routine conflict of interest.

What exactly Mr. Whitaker did after the call is unclear, but there is no evidence that he took any direct steps to intervene in the Manhattan investigation. He did, however, tell some associates at the Justice Department that the prosecutors in New York required “adult supervision.”

Second, Mr. Trump moved on to a new attorney general, William P. Barr, whom Mr. Trump nominated for the job in part because of a memo Mr. Barr wrote last summer making a case that a sitting American president cannot be charged with obstruction of justice for acts well within his power — like firing an F.B.I. director.

A president cannot be found to have broken the law, Mr. Barr argued, if he was exercising his executive powers to fire subordinates or use his “complete authority to start or stop a law enforcement proceeding.”

The memo might have ingratiated Mr. Barr to his future boss, but Mr. Barr is also respected among the rank and file in the Justice Department. Many officials there hope he will try to change the Trump administration’s combative tone toward the department as well as the F.B.I.

Whether it is too late is another question. Mr. Trump's language, and allegations of “deep state” excesses, are now embedded in the political conversation, used as a cudgel by the president’s supporters.

This past December, days before Mr. Flynn was to be sentenced for lying to the F.B.I., his lawyers wrote a memo to the judge suggesting that federal agents had tricked the former national security adviser into lying. The judge roundly rejected that argument, and on sentencing day he excoriated Mr. Flynn for his crimes.

The argument about F.B.I. trickery did, however, appear to please the one man who holds great power over Mr. Flynn’s future — the constitutional power to pardon.

“Good luck today in court to General Michael Flynn,” Mr. Trump tweeted cheerily on the morning of the sentencing.

There are many good graphics in the article that I couldn't copy here.

[AmazonGrace]

Nothing he won't lie about 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"His Presidents’ Day tweets showed why Trump is unfit to be president"

Spoiler

Presidents’ Day weekend is traditionally a time for relaxation — and perhaps a little contemplation of two of our greatest presidents, Abraham Lincoln and George Washington. In President Trump’s case, it was an opportunity to play golf in Florida and to tweet up a storm. He published 40 tweets from Saturday morning to Monday night. Taken together, they tell a story of just how “unpresidented” his behavior remains as he enters his third year in office.

Simply the fact that he sent so many tweets, and they were so personal and vituperative, is an anomaly. Twitter was founded only in 2006 and President George W. Bush never used it while in office. The first presidential tweet was sent by President Barack Obama in 2010 — an innocuous message to promote disaster aid for Haiti. Trump is the first president to unburden his id on Twitter in a way that Richard M. Nixon did only on the White House tapes.

By Trump’s standards, his first tweet of the weekend — at 11:43 a.m. on Saturday — was tame: It was a video clip of his declaration of a state of emergency on Friday. His second one was a little weirder: a clip from his State of the Union address with Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” blasting in the background. At 7:10 p.m. on Saturday, Trump for some reason felt compelled to write “BUILDING THE WALL!” — his first lie of the weekend, since the border wall is not being built. Lie No. 2 followed just seven minutes later when he tweeted: “Billions of Dollars are being paid to the United States by China in the form of Trade Tariffs!” As a first-year economics student would know, tariffs are paid by domestic consumers, not by foreign governments.

Things started to get really weird late on Saturday night. At 10:51 p.m., Trump tweeted a demand that “Britain, France, Germany and other European allies” take back 800 Islamic State fighters captured in Syria. He warned: “The alternative is not a good one in that we will be forced to release them........ The U.S. does not want to watch as these ISIS fighters permeate Europe, which is where they are expected to go.” This is the president as mob enforcer: Nice country you have there; it’d be a shame if we had to release some terrorists there!

Near midnight on Saturday, Trump retweeted a tweet from the president of the far-right legal group Judicial Watch claiming “Strzok/Page Docs Show More Collusion to Protect Hillary Clinton.” This was the first of many weekend tweets in which the president attacked his own Justice Department — unthinkable for any other president, routine for him. He would go on to quote Rush Limbaugh: “These guys, the investigators, ought to be in jail.” Then: “The Mueller investigation is totally conflicted, illegal and rigged!” Followed by: “Disgraced FBI Acting Director Andrew McCabe pretends to be a ‘poor little Angel’ when in fact he was a big part of the Crooked Hillary Scandal & the Russia Hoax - a puppet for Leakin’ James Comey.”

Trump was particularly exercised by McCabe’s confirmation that Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein had talked of invoking the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from office. “He and Rod Rosenstein, who was hired by Jeff Sessions (another beauty), look like they were planning a very illegal act, and got caught.....,” Trump wrote at 7:15 Sunday morning, adding at 7:29 a.m.: “This was the illegal and treasonous ‘insurance policy’ in full action!” An hour later, he quoted a commentator on his favorite show, “Fox and Friends,” accusing Rosenstein of “an illegal coup attempt.” Pay no attention: It’s just the president accusing his own deputy attorney general of treason and coup-plotting. This type of vitriol has become so commonplace that it barely registered as news — yet in any other administration it would have produced front-page headlines for weeks.

The only group that Trump seems to hate as much as his own Justice Department is the news media. At 7:52 a.m. on Sunday, he complained about a “Saturday Night Live” skit poking fun at him: “Nothing funny about tired Saturday Night Live on Fake News NBC! Question is, how do the Networks get away with these total Republican hit jobs without retribution?” So the president thinks that a satirical sketch calls for “retribution”? What country is this anyway? It’s hard to tell, because four minutes later Trump echoed Josef Stalin’s attacks on the press: “THE RIGGED AND CORRUPT MEDIA IS THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!” Just six days earlier, a BBC cameraman had been violently attacked at a Trump rally. But Trump continues to incite his supporters against the media.

If someone were ranting and raving like this on the street, you would walk quickly away. Yet somehow we have become inured to this ranting and raving from the most powerful man in the world. We shouldn’t be. Over Presidents' Day weekend, Trump again demonstrated why he remains as unfit as ever to follow in the footsteps of Washington and Lincoln — or even of Millard Fillmore and Warren Harding. The fact that we tolerate his disgraceful conduct makes all of us complicit in this ongoing diminution of our democracy.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"‘He just picks up’: Trump and the lawmakers he loves to talk to on the phone"

Spoiler

One surprise call came from Air Force One as President Trump was leaving Iraq, startling Sen. James M. Inhofe (R) as he was chopping wood back home in rural Oklahoma with his grandson. When Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) recently stepped off a plane, a White House voice mail was waiting for him, saying Trump was “available for the rest of the evening” for another round of their regular phone conversations.

Another recent call from Trump — this time, to Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) — was so unexpected that he crashed a Skype session between Manchin and a group of West Virginia high school students.

The chatterbox in chief has eschewed the traditional way that presidents communicate with members of Congress, calling lawmakers at all hours of the day without warning and sometimes with no real agenda. Congressional Republicans reciprocate in kind, increasingly dialing up the president directly to gauge his thinking after coming to terms with the fact that ultimately, no one speaks for Trump but Trump himself. 

“I never called President Bush or President Obama,” said Barrasso, who has served in the Senate since 2007. “I just feel comfort in calling President Trump. He calls me regularly to talk about issues. He’s always helpful for both of us.” 

Longtime senators who have served through multiple administrations say they have never seen a president so easily accessible to lawmakers. The calls are part of what occupies the wide swaths of “executive time” on Trump’s schedule — an unstructured stretch of the day he uses to call allies and hold meetings that are otherwise not publicly announced.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell — whom Trump has called while the Kentucky Republican was attending a Nationals baseball game — is among the most frequent of the president’s phone partners. But Trump also speaks often with Sens. David Perdue (R-Ga.), Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) and Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), according to people familiar with the conversations. 

Rep. Mark Meadows (N.C.), who is chairman of the House Republicans’ conservative faction and was once considered for White House chief of staff, also chats several times per week with Trump, mostly in impromptu calls. 

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” said one GOP senator who occasionally calls Trump, chuckling.

“It’s a different world,” said Sen. John Thune (S.D.), the No. 2 Senate Republican who is not one of Trump’s regular phone partners but encourages senators to talk to the president directly.

Congressional Republicans patch through to Trump multiple ways. 

One common route is through Madeleine Westerhout, the White House’s director of Oval Office operations and a close aide to Trump who once served as the “greeter girl” for visitors at Trump Tower during the presidential transition. Senators call her directly, and although Trump has given some Republican lawmakers his phone number, he tells most of them “just to call Madeleine.” 

For instance, Manchin has told others that he can reach the president directly by calling Westerhout, and that he is uninterested in talking to other White House staff members. 

Other lawmakers go through the White House switchboard. For instance, Meadows primarily calls Trump that way for the sake of process, although he has used Trump’s direct line before. And still others choose to dial Trump directly. 

Although Republican senators who call the president say they usually do so with a specific agenda, his calls to them sometimes seem to have little point other than just to chat.

Trump regularly calls senators if he sees news about their states. Other times, he talks about what he just saw on television or asks about golf. Barrasso said their calls, usually about 10 minutes or so, span several topics and sometimes are prompted by a Barrasso appearance on cable television or a Sunday political talk show. 

The president’s penchant for trying to contact senators after watching them on television has forced his aides to scramble at times — White House officials who are unsuccessful reaching senators directly will often then track down their aides to say the president wants to talk. 

When he calls, Trump bats around ideas with senators, asking for their thoughts about a policy move or a particular nomination. The day after his State of the Union address, Trump dialed at least one senator to get feedback.

And people around the senators when Trump calls often get the presidential touch. 

When Trump called Inhofe from Air Force One as he returned from al-Asad Air Base in Iraq, the Senate Armed Services Committee chairman was with his grandson Jonah in Oklahoma, splitting logs. After Trump and Inhofe talked business, Jonah, 20, had a turn on the phone with the president, who effusively praised his grandparents.

Republican senators say they also have called Trump just to offer positive reinforcement and praise. Inhofe recalled going on a tour of rural towns throughout his state recently and hearing from voters about how much they adored the president. 

“So I said, ‘Mr. President, if . . . there are days when you’re depressed because you think everybody hates you, I had this experience today,’ ” Inhofe said, recalling a conversation he had with Trump about a month ago. “Not one person was out there who didn’t say, I love you.”

One freshman senator who speaks with Trump regularly is Rick Scott (R-Fla.), who has known Trump since before his political ascent and talks with him regularly on state-specific issues such as Everglades funding, hurricane aid and Venezuela policy. The two also talk about their shared background as executives, with Scott often sympathizing with Trump when he is stymied by lawmakers.

“I try to tell him . . . how I look at it and give him some ideas about how I look at things,” Scott said. But “always understanding that he’s the president and he gets to make his decisions.” 

Lawmakers rarely have to wait for Trump to return their calls — if they have to wait at all. 

“The vast majority, he just picks up,” said another GOP senator, who regularly calls Trump and spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. “If he doesn’t . . . he’ll return them within an hour.” 

Trump’s phone habit is a clear departure from that of President Barack Obama, his immediate predecessor, who preferred formally arranged calls with a clear agenda rather than the freewheeling conversations favored by the current occupant of the White House.

Under Obama, calls with lawmakers were usually planned in advance through a brief discussion with the chief of staff or the legislative affairs office, said a senior Obama White House official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss how calls with lawmakers are handled. After the call, Obama would read out the conversation to aides — although White House staff members would often listen in on the calls — and the information was shared among the relevant officials. 

“I cannot recall Obama phone bombing people for anything substantive,” the senior official said.

While Obama and President George W. Bush had a more formal approach to discussions with lawmakers, President Bill Clinton was known for calling members of Congress, sometimes late at night, to discuss policy debates.

The conversations between GOP lawmakers and Trump also reflect doubt among Senate Republicans about whether they can get an accurate read on Trump’s thinking from anyone but Trump himself — a dynamic that became painfully acute as Washington barreled into a shutdown in December. 

Back then, Senate Republicans came away from a private meeting with Vice President Pence assured that Trump would sign a short-term spending bill without a significant boost in border wall money, only to have Trump reverse course less than 24 hours later. 

And Pence and acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney also privately floated a smaller figure for wall funding to Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) — only to have Trump reject that figure publicly days later.

GOP senators say that although Trump’s main legislative liaison, Shahira Knight, is responsive, she is generally unable to speak for the president. During one recent meeting on Capitol Hill, Knight called Trump twice to ask whether certain proposals being floated would be acceptable, according to a person at the meeting. She was told no both times. 

Mulvaney, despite his familiarity with Capitol Hill, cannot speak for Trump, either, aides said. 

“That’s the reason I call him,” said one of the GOP senators who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “Because I can’t be sure where everybody is.” 

 

[AmazonGrace]

Just imagine what all everyone and their cat knows. Even if his phone is secure, all you have to do is to bug Hannity's phone and a bunch of Mar-a-Iago members.

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[AmazonGrace]

This is 2019: a former FBI hotshot is on a late night comedy show saying he thinks the president is a Russian agent

 

Why is it taking so long to get rid of Trump?

[AmazonGrace]

 

[fraurosena]

Facts are for Dems. Fake Facts are for Repugs. Yep, sounds about right.

 

[AmazonGrace]