Flynn didn’t hesitate

May 18th, 2017 5:24 pm | By

I missed this item in the torrent of news yesterday: Flynn sandbagged a military plan that Turkey didn’t like, having quietly banked the half million dollars Turkey had paid him.

The decision came 10 days before Donald Trump had been sworn in as president, in a conversation with President Barack Obama’s national security adviser, Susan Rice, who had explained the Pentagon’s plan to retake the Islamic State’s de facto capital of Raqqa with Syrian Kurdish forces whom the Pentagon considered the U.S.’s most effective military partners. Obama’s national security team had decided to ask for Trump’s sign-off, since the plan would all but certainly be executed after Trump had become president.

Flynn didn’t hesitate. According to timelines distributed by members of Congress in the weeks since, Flynn told Rice to hold off, a move that would delay the military operation for months.

Did he tell her he was a paid agent of the Turkish government? No he did not. He told no one.

If Flynn explained his answer, that’s not recorded, and it’s not known whether he consulted anyone else on the transition team before rendering his verdict. But his position was consistent with the wishes of Turkey, which had long opposed the United States partnering with the Kurdish forces – and which was his undeclared client.

But hey – he’s a good guy.

Now members of Congress, musing about the tangle of legal difficulties Flynn faces, cite that exchange with Rice as perhaps the most serious: acting on behalf of a foreign nation – from which he had received considerable cash – when making a military decision. Some members of Congress, in private conversations, have even used the word “treason” to describe Flynn’s intervention, though experts doubt that his actions qualify.

 

And yesterday Erdogan’s bodyguards were beating up protesters in DC.

You couldn’t make this shit up.

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A stalwart ally

May 18th, 2017 4:23 pm | By

Last night in DC:

WASHINGTON — Supporters of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, including his government security forces and several armed individuals, violently charged a group of protesters outside the Turkish ambassador’s residence here on Tuesday night in what the police characterized as “a brutal attack.”

Eleven people were injured, including a police officer, and nine were taken to a hospital, the Metropolitan Police chief, Peter Newsham, said at a news conference on Wednesday. Two Secret Service agents were also assaulted in the melee, according to a federal law enforcement official.

The State Department rebuked Turkey.

Photos and videos posted on social media by witnesses showed a chaotic scene of flying fists, feet and police batons — all in the middle of rush hour traffic along stately Embassy Row. The video showed two men bleeding from the head and men in dark suits punching and kicking protesters, some lying on the ground.

Erdogan is the guy Trump congratulated recently when he won a referendum granting him new authoritarian powers.

The confrontation came after President Trump welcomed Mr. Erdogan to the White House on Tuesday and praised him as a stalwart ally in the battle against Islamic extremism. Mr. Trump did not speak of Mr. Erdogan’s authoritarian crackdown on his own people.

The White House has thus far been silent on the episode. Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, referred reporters to the State Department and declined to comment further.

So we’ll conclude that Trump & Co like that sort of thing.

The episode was not the first time that Turkish security forces have ignited violence in the American capital. The police and members of Mr. Erdogan’s security team clashed with demonstrators last year outside the Brookings Institution, where Mr. Erdogan was giving a speech. Brookings wrote on its website that his bodyguards had “behaved unacceptably — they roughed up protesters outside the building and tried to drag away ‘undesired’ journalists, an approach typical of the Russians or Chinese.”

Aram Hamparian, the executive director of the Armenian National Committee of America, who posted a video of Tuesday’s clash on his organization’s Facebook page, said that when Mr. Erdogan and his entourage arrived at the ambassador’s residence around 4 p.m., the president’s supporters gathered and rushed across the street and into the park where the protest was taking place.

Several of the protesters said they were caught off-guard when the group rushed through the police and into their ranks, which included some small children. All nine demonstrators who were hospitalized have since been released, but Mr. Hamparian said many left with stitches.

And the White House people couldn’t bring themselves to say that’s not cool.

Lucy Usoyan of Arlington, Va. was among them. Ethnically Yazidi and raised in Armenia before moving to the United States, she said she had expected a mostly quiet afternoon expressing her displeasure at Mr. Erdogan’s government.

Instead, she said, she ended up knocked to the ground and kicked until she was briefly unconscious.

“When I opened my eyes I saw people all around,” said Ms. Usoyan, 34. “Some were bleeding, and I could not get up.”

Sayid Reza Yasa, one of the organizers of the demonstration, said he lost at least one tooth and his nose was bloodied as he was knocked to the ground and kicked repeatedly before the police intervened.

Mr. Yasa, 60, an American citizen who was born in Turkey and is of Kurdish descent, said he was familiar with the brutality of Mr. Erdogan’s forces, but surprised by their audacity on Tuesday.

“This is not acceptable,” Mr. Yasa said. “This is America. This is not Turkey.”

Yet.

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Like the cockroaches they are

May 18th, 2017 12:04 pm | By

Via Brian Leiter – there’s this piece that Zoé Samudzi wrote a few days ago. I saw it and skimmed it at the time, but was too fed up with her to blog it, so I missed what Brian quotes:

Both Dolezal and Tuvel demonstrate the infallibility and virtuosity of cis white womanhood: despite the harm they enact, they are still always worthy of understanding, protection, kid-gloves…It is not enough to simply hope that Dolezal, or any other career appropriator, simply disappears. As long as there is a structural and systemic investment in discrediting gender non-conforming and Black identities and subordinating the understandings they possess, these gaslighting genealogies that define and regulate humanity will continue, and the Dolezals of the world (and their defenders, and their defenders’ defenders) will spawn and flourish like the cockroaches they are.

Cockroaches.

Cockroaches.

Cockroaches.

Katie Hopkins called migrants “cockroaches” in a column.

Some Hutus called Tutsis “cockroaches.”

In 1992, Leon Mugesera, a senior politician in Rwanda’s then-ruling Hutu party, told a crowd of supporters at a rally in the town of Kabaya that members of the country’s minority Tutsi population were “cockroaches” who should go back to Ethiopia, the birthplace of the East African ethnic group.

Der Sturmer compared Jews to cockroaches:

Der Sturmer ran contests encouraging German children to write in. One little girl wrote, “People are so bothered by the way we’re treating the Jews. They can’t understand it, because [Jews] are God’s creatures. But cockroaches are also God’s creatures, and we destroy them.”

This is not “social justice.”

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Hypatia’s statement

May 18th, 2017 11:30 am | By

The Board of Directors of Hypatia has issued a statement which is published at Daily Nous.

The Board of Directors of Hypatia would like to clarify the nature of the controversy, since there are misrepresentations in the press and on social media. Further, we would like to articulate the principles we are committed to as we move forward beyond this controversy.

1. The Board acknowledges the intensity of experience and convictions around matters of intersectionality, especially in the world of academic philosophy, which has an egregious history of treatment of women of color feminists and feminists from other marginalized social positions. To those unfamiliar with the issues, outrage about a particular academic publication is often dismissed as nothing more than the censoriousness of hypersensitive groups. The objectionable features of the particular case, considered in isolation, seem too minor to outsiders to warrant the degree of outrage focused upon it. Such dismissal reflects ignorance of the cumulative history of marginalization, disrespect, and misrepresentation of oppressed groups. Usually, objections to a particular academic publication reflect the objectors’ knowledge of a history of grievances of which outsiders are unaware. It is difficult to assess how much of the outrage is properly directed at Hypatia, and how much at other public, academic, or philosophical institutions. Nevertheless, the Board would like to take this opportunity to learn from the expressed outrage. Hypatia has always held itself to a higher standard of inclusion than most other philosophy journals. During the years in which Sally Scholz has served as editor, it has continued to develop these commitments to diversity (including organizing a major conference on diversifying philosophy, the solicitation of special issues and clusters specifically focused on diversity, and the creation of podcasts and video interviews to make Hypatia articles more widely accessible). Going forward, with consultation amongst those who perform various roles for our organization, Hypatia will review its governance structure, procedures, and policies, aiming to continue to improve its inclusiveness and respect for marginalized voices in a manner consistent with the continuation of Hypatia as a scholarly enterprise committed to feminist values.

I’m sorry but no. That gives too much credit to “the expressed outrage” without probing to ask whether the outrage was at all justified, whether it was worked up, whether it was a contagion, whether it was exaggerated, whether it was properly directed, and so on. Not all outrage is justified. The cause can be bad, or the outrage can be misdirected, or both. White supremacists express outrage. Trump expresses outrage. Theocrats express outrage. MRAs express outrage. The mere fact that outrage was expressed is not automatically a reason to “learn from” said outrage.

Also, that part suggests that Tuvel really did do something wrong that set off this outrage. The Board should not be suggesting that.

Ok but people will say you’re not trans so you can’t judge. True, but I’m also not a white supremacist, and yet I judge. The “lived experience” thing is not a conversation-ender.

Eventually they do tepidly defend the publication of Tuvel’s article.

6. The Board stands behind the judgment of Hypatia’sEditor, Sally Scholz, concerning the publication of Professor Tuvel’s paper. On May 6, 2017, Professor Scholz released a statement to the Chronicle of Higher Education affirming that Professor Tuvel’s paper went through the usual double-masked peer review process and was accepted by the reviewers and by the Editor. We endorse her assessment that, barring discovery of misconduct or plagiarism, the decision to publish stands. We also approve her willingness to refer the matter to Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).

The Board also recognizes Professor Tuvel for her work and condemns any ad hominem and personal attacks that may have been directed against her. As a scholarly publication, Hypatia supports our authors and appreciates their contributions to advancing understanding of contemporary social issues.

That is very tepid. It is inadequate. It’s especially inadequate since they promptly all but withdraw it.

7. We regret the harms to current and prospective authors, editors, and peer reviewers of Hypatia that were created by this controversy. We are working hard to respond responsibly to this troubling and difficult controversy. We acknowledge the history and continuation of injustices around matters of intersectionality, and know that many of us have much to learn from those who have lived in and worked on intersections of marginalized racial and gender identities.

That implies that Tuvel committed an injustice around matters of intersectionality. That’s crap.

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He’s a human Failure to Read the User’s Manual

May 18th, 2017 10:09 am | By

Alexandra Petri on what Trump is.

The Trump presidency is the discovery that what you thought was a man in a bear suit is just a bear. Suddenly the fact that he wouldn’t play by the rules makes total sense. It wasn’t that he refused to, that he was playing a long game. It was that he was a wild animal who eats fish and climbs trees, and English words were totally unintelligible to him. In retrospect, you should have suspected that after he just straight-up ate a guy. But at the time everyone cheered. It was good TV. Also, he was your bear.

…

Who can help? The people in there with him are the people who did not realize that what they had on their hands was an animal. Now they are trying to whisper him, like a horse. Do horses understand whispering? Horses probably think that people are just conspiring against them all the time. Horses are probably quite paranoid and delusional. But at least a horse would not fire the FBI director.

…

It is bringing your drunk relative to a party where you need to impress people for work, but 24 hours a day, and your co-workers are the entire world, and some of them have nukes.

It is like expecting a cardboard cutout of a pro wrestler to perform open-heart surgery.

It is like watching a golden retriever try to disable a bomb. The dog can’t determine which is the red button and which is the green button. It can’t see color. It’s a dog, for Pete’s sake. What did you expect?

…

He’s a human Failure to Read the User’s Manual.

He’s a cartoon character. He only looks real on TV. When real things are put into his hands he drops them, and people get hurt.

Confidence is good, up to a point. Now here is someone who thinks juggling hand-painted Fabergé eggs will impress you. Not because he is so supremely confident in his ability to juggle, but because he literally doesn’t know what they are. That they’re breakable. Only your house is in the egg. You are in the egg. Everything you care about is in the egg.

Obviously, you should read the whole thing. Genius.

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Sir yes sir

May 18th, 2017 9:50 am | By

Trump knew Flynn was under investigation when he hired him. As his national security adviser.

Michael T. Flynn told President Trump’s transition team weeks before the inauguration that he was under federal investigation for secretly working as a paid lobbyist for Turkey during the campaign, according to two people familiar with the case.

Despite this warning, which came about a month after the Justice Department notified Mr. Flynn of the inquiry, Mr. Trump made Mr. Flynn his national security adviser. The job gave Mr. Flynn access to the president and nearly every secret held by American intelligence agencies.

So does that seem like a wise and responsible move? No it does not.

Mr. Flynn’s disclosure, on Jan. 4, was first made to the transition team’s chief lawyer, Donald F. McGahn II, who is now the White House counsel. That conversation, and another one two days later between Mr. Flynn’s lawyer and transition lawyers, shows that the Trump team knew about the investigation of Mr. Flynn far earlier than has been previously reported.

Which means they acted even more recklessly than has been previously reported.

And now the breaking news is that Flynn is refusing to honor the Senate Intelligence Committee’s subpoena.

Retired Gen. Michael Flynn will not cooperate with the Senate intelligence committee’s subpoena request for documents regarding the former national security adviser’s interactions with Russian officials.

Gen. Flynn’s lawyers said he would not honor the subpoena, and that’s not a surprise to the committee, but we’ll figure out on Gen. Flynn what the next step, if any, is,” committee chairman Richard Burr, a North Carolina Republican, told reporters Thursday morning.

Just another day in Trump’s America.

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What we say v what we do

May 18th, 2017 9:20 am | By

The Times a couple of days ago on Bashir’s invitation to the Saudi summit.

If President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan attends the meeting this weekend with Mr. Trump, human rights advocates said, it would be a destructive breach of longstanding American policy.

The United States is not a member of the International Criminal Court but has long sought to ostracize defendants who defy the court’s arrest warrants, including Mr. Bashir, who has led Sudan for nearly three decades.

He was indicted in 2009 and 2010 on charges of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity in Sudan’s Darfur region. In refusing to honor the indictments, he has come to symbolize impunity toward the Hague-based court.

The White House had no comment, the Times said politely. My guess is that that’s because they have no clue what the problem is.

Rights advocates expressed alarm at the possibility.

“Any interaction by President Trump with al-Bashir in Saudi Arabia, should al-Bashir attend the meeting, would send a terrible signal to the victims of the crimes and raise major questions about U.S. commitment to justice for them,” said Elise Keppler, associate director of the International Justice Program at Human Rights Watch. “Al-Bashir belongs in The Hague facing the charges against him, not hobnobbing with officials in Saudi Arabia.”

Mind you, we’d be in a better position to express outrage if we hadn’t refused to join the ICC ourselves.

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Road trip

May 18th, 2017 9:00 am | By

Saudia Arabia still loves Donnie Twoscoops. They’re excited about his trip.

The Saudis have internationalized the event, organizing a sprawling “Arab Islamic American Summit” with leaders from dozens of Muslim countries, as well as talks with the king, the inauguration of a counterterrorism center, and public forums for business executives and young people.

Saudi Arabia, home to some of Islam’s holiest sites, will be pulling out all the stops for a man who has declared “Islam hates us” and said the United States is “losing a tremendous amount of money” defending the kingdom.

But Saudi Arabia and its Persian Gulf allies were so angry over former President Barack Obama’s policies toward the Middle East that they appear prepared to dismiss Mr. Trump’s remarks as campaign rhetoric, and to see in him a possibility of resetting relations.

Yes, secretly he’s a big fan of Islam. I’m sure this will go swimmingly.

There are three summit meetings planned: between Mr. Trump and King Salman, the Saudi monarch; between Mr. Trump and the leaders of Persian Gulf states; and between Mr. Trump and more than 50 leaders and representatives from across the Muslim world.

Mr. Trump and King Salman will also inaugurate the Global Center for Combating Extremist Ideology, where Mr. Trump is to give a speech about Islam.

A speech about Islam. Trump. In Saudi Arabia. Oh yes, that should go well.

I mock, but they do in fact have a lot in common.

Some aspects of Mr. Trump’s tenure that have caused criticism in the United States do not seem to bother the Saudis.

His reliance on his daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner — both of whom will join him in Riyadh — for policy advice is business as usual in a monarchy where princes run the government and the king has appointed one son as defense minister and another as ambassador to Washington.

And worries that Mr. Trump could use his presidency to benefit Trump hotels and golf courses get little traction in a country that is named after its royal family, and where the line between public and private wealth is vague.

Mr. Trump’s apparent lack of interest in human rights also suggests that he is unlikely to complain about the Saudi justice system or the limited rights of Saudi women.

Nepotism, corruption, and contempt for human rights: friendship glue.

Also invited to Riyadh is President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan, who has been indicted by the International Criminal Court for crimes including genocide, although it remains unclear whether he will attend or, if he does, whether he will meet Mr. Trump.

But hey, Obama was much worse, right?

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The clue

May 18th, 2017 8:05 am | By

The new Jesus and Mo:

clue

Mo reminds me of someone…

J and M on Patreon

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Donnie Twoscoops is back

May 18th, 2017 7:55 am | By

They let Donnie have his phone back for a bit. He managed two tweets.

Well no, because it’s not a witch hunt at all. It’s an investigation, authorized by the Acting Attorney General (because the compromised Attorney General had to recuse himself), and overseen by a former FBI head.

Is Donnie Twoscoops being unfairly singled out by mean bad people who are just jealous of how awesome and huge he is?

No. Donnie Twoscoops is corrupt and incompetent and reckless, and there is plenty to investigate.

Says the guy who just blabbed sensitive intelligence to his Russian besties because he needed to brag about how important he is.

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Trump’s Waco

May 17th, 2017 4:42 pm | By

The Times reports a lot of fervent endorsement of the choice of Mueller as Special Counsel.

Members of both parties view Mr. Mueller as one of the most credible law enforcement officials in the country. He served both Democratic and Republican presidents, from 2001 to 2013, and was asked by President Barack Obama to stay on beyond the normal 10-year term until Mr. Comey was appointed.

…

“He’s an absolutely superb choice,” said Kathryn Ruemmler, a former prosecutor and White House counsel under Mr. Obama. “He will just do a completely thorough investigation without regard to public pressure or political pressure.”

She added: “I cannot think of a better choice.”

John S. Pistole, who served as the F.B.I.’s deputy director under Mr. Mueller, also praised the appointment.

“You need an independent assessment of what the president has done, how he has done it and perhaps why he has done it,” said Mr. Pistole, who is now president of Anderson University in Indiana. “The appointment of Director Mueller is exactly what is needed to attempt to bring credibility to the White House when there are so many questions about the president’s actions and motives.”

The order to appoint Mr. Mueller was signed by Mr. Rosenstein on Wednesday, drawing on a regulation granting the attorney general the authority to appoint a special counsel for only the second time in history. The first time it was used was in 1999 by Janet Reno, who appointed Jack Danforth, a former Republican senator from Missouri, to lead an investigation into the botched federal raid on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Tex., in 1993 that killed 76 people.

People are pointing out that Trump could fire him. Am I naïve to think even Trump would see the problems with doing that?

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As Kelly laughed

May 17th, 2017 4:18 pm | By

The Post on some high points today:

Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the House minority leader, praised the pick of Robert Mueller as a special prosecutor, calling him a “a respected public servant of the highest integrity.”

She said that did not go as far, however, as the creation of an independent commission. Pelosi said that would be more free of the Trump administration.

“The Trump Administration must make clear that Director Mueller will have the resources and independence he needs to execute this critical investigation,” Pelosi said in a statement.

Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) was more positive, though [he] echoed Pelosi’s praise of Mueller.

“Former Director Mueller is exactly the right kind of individual for this job. I now have significantly greater confidence that the investigation will follow the facts wherever they lead,” Schumer said in a statement.

Plus he’s a former FBI head. I have a feeling people who fit that description don’t like seeing a corrupt dishonest president messing with the FBI to protect his own lies and corruption.

On Wednesday, President Trump spoke at the commencement ceremony at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in New London, Conn.

There, the president — who is currently mired in controversies — railed against the media and claimed that “no politician in history” had been “treated worse or more unfairly.”

During the commencement, Trump was presented with a ceremonial saber. After accepting it to applause, he returned to his seat next to Secretary of Homeland Security Gen. John F. Kelly.

Smiling, Kelly leaned over the president and said, of the saber, “You can use that on the press.”

“Yeah, that’s right,” said Trump, as Kelly laughed.

Then Kelly gave Trump a few affectionate licks on the face.

 

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Meet the new special counsel

May 17th, 2017 3:21 pm | By

Special counsel appointed.

The Justice Department on Wednesday appointed former FBI Director Robert Mueller as special counsel to oversee the federal investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, including potential collusion between Trump campaign associates and Russian officials.

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed Mueller to the position in a letter obtained by CNN.

Sessions of course has recused himself, and occasionally remembers that he has.

As special counsel, Mueller is “authorized to prosecute federal crimes arising from the investigation of these matters,” according to the Justice Department order Rosenstein signed.

Mueller was Bush Junior’s FBI Director and stayed on in the Obama admin until 2013, when Comey took over.

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Things will work out just fine

May 17th, 2017 12:33 pm | By

Don from the outer boroughs gave a commencement address at the Coast Guard Academy just now. He talked about himself.

President Donald Trump, amid his own swirling controversies, advised United States Coast Guard Academy graduates that while things aren’t always fair, “you have to put your head down and fight, fight, fight.”

The comment was a clear reference to the fact that Trump’s White House is now besieged by bipartisan questions about his alleged request that former FBI Director James Comey to halt an investigation into his former top national security aide.

“Never, never, never give up. Things will work out just fine,” he said in New London, Connecticut, Wednesday.

Right. Good advice. Always assume you’re right, no matter what; always assume that any disagreement is wildly unfair and that you should fight fight fight fight fight fight fight fight. Unless of course you’re disputing Donald Trump, in which case you should prostrate yourself and beg for clemency.

Then he went to directly talking about himself – as he always does.

“Look at the way I have been treated lately, especially by the media,” he said. “No politician in history, and I say this with great surety, has been treated worse or more unfairly. You can’t let them get you down, you can’t let the critics and the naysayers get in the way of your dreams.”

No politician in history is it.

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He keeps reading if he’s mentioned

May 17th, 2017 12:23 pm | By

Trump has to go Abroad now. He’s not the most cosmopolitan head of state we’ve ever seen, so it may be difficult for him. His aides have been working hard to prepare him.

White House advisers insisted Trump was up to speed on the Middle East, having already hosted Arab, Israeli and Palestinian leaders at the White House.

“His way of doing diplomacy, which really contrasts with President Obama’s approach, is to … prioritize the personal relationship,” said Michael Singh, a foreign policy adviser to former Republican President George W. Bush.

In other words his way of doing diplomacy contrasts with the sane adult approach. The personal relationship is largely beside the point, even though a good one doubtless does make discussion and negotiation easier. But of course Trump is Trump. It’s not that prioritizing the personal relationship is a considered approach, it’s that it’s all he knows.

Conversations with some officials who have briefed Trump and others who are aware of how he absorbs information portray a president with a short attention span.

He likes single-page memos and visual aids like maps, charts, graphs and photos.

National Security Council officials have strategically included Trump’s name in “as many paragraphs as we can because he keeps reading if he’s mentioned,” according to one source, who relayed conversations he had with NSC officials.

Of course he does.

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The necessary separation of the president and his Justice Department

May 17th, 2017 9:36 am | By

The Post’s Daily 202 points out that all this underlines how clueless Trump always was and still is about what exactly his job entails.

The same president who allegedly asked James Comey to drop the FBI’s probe into Michael Flynn – potentially imperiling his grip on power – has also said “nobody knew health care could be so complicated,” volunteered that he only learned containing North Korea is “not so easy” when the Chinese president tutored him on the region’s history and expressed surprise that government cannot be run like a business.

He seems to have thought it was like being a pretend boss on tv – you just give orders and say “you’re fired” when you feel like it. The end.

— Only an amateur would be surprised that Comey took notes after a meeting like this and that they would emerge if he got fired while the investigation in question was still ongoing. How the last several days have played out was entirely foreseeable for anyone who has even a basic grip of how Washington works and how Comey operates.

Dud theory of mind yet again. Trump saw it all from his point of view and didn’t even pause to remember that Comey has one too and it won’t consist solely of “must do whatever Trump wants because Trump awesome.”

Why did the president ask Pence and Sessions to leave the room when he talked to Comey? “This is the kind of conversation that rational, experienced presidents know not to have,” Ruth Marcus writes. “It is the kind of conversation that a White House counsel should make sparklingly, crystal clear to a president that he is not to engage in, not even close. It is the kind of conversation that seems completely in character for Trump, who, over the course of the campaign and now in office, has betrayed no — zero — understanding of the necessary separation of the president and his Justice Department when it comes to making independent judgments about political matters and political opponents.”

It’s not clear to me either how explicit that necessary separation is. News talkers keep pointing out that the president can fire anyone in the DOJ, the DOJ works for the president, the DOJ is part of the executive branch, yadda yadda. The message seems to be that Trump can do whatever he likes when it comes to the Justice Department and no one can stop him. They don’t talk nearly as much about this necessary separation.

Clearly though there should be such a separation when it comes to questions about the president’s own actions, because the president should be accountable and subject to the law. It’s pretty appalling seeing all these “actually, legally speaking, he has the right to ______” – to fire anyone in the DOJ, to declassify information on the spur of the moment while chatting with Russians with only Russian state media present, to fire prosecutors, to…what? Apparently asking the FBI director to let something go is a step too far, but it’s not clear to me where that bright line is.

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Children of the Self-absorbed

May 17th, 2017 8:45 am | By

Nicely done.

Via Facebook:

No automatic alt text available.

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These are the costs of working for Trump

May 16th, 2017 6:08 pm | By

Benjamin Wittes at Lawfare points out what Trump did to Rod Rosenstein and what Rosenstein did to himself.

Trump happily traded the reputation of Rosenstein, who began the week as a well-respected career prosecutor, for barely 24 hours of laughably transparent talking points in the news cycle. The White House sent out person after person—including the Vice President—to insist that Rosenstein’s memo constituted the basis for the President’s action against the FBI director. The White House described a bottom-up dissatisfaction with Comey’s leadership, which Rosenstein’s memo encapsulated and to which the President acceded. And then, just as casually as Trump and his people set Rosenstein up as the bad guy for what was obviously a presidential decision into whose service Rosenstein had been enlisted, Trump revealed that Rosenstein was, after all, nothing more than a set piece.

Trump used Rosenstein, Wittes says. Rosenstein knew it. He got the White House to correct the record and say that Rosenstein’s memo wasn’t the reason for firing Comey.

But.

The trouble is that while Rosenstein got what he wanted, Trump’s idea of correcting the record was to say publicly exactly the thing about a law enforcement officer that makes his continued service in office impossible: That Trump had used his deputy attorney general as window dressing on a pre-cooked political decision to shut down an investigation involving himself, a decision for which he needed the patina of a high-minded rationale.

Once the President has said this about you—a law enforcement officer who works for him and who promised the Senate in confirmation hearings you would show independence—you have nothing left. These are the costs of working for Trump, and it took Rosenstein only two weeks to pay them.

Wittes had a high opinion of Rosenstein, and thought his presence would keep the DOJ from being too terrible despite Jeff Sessions.

I was profoundly wrong about Rosenstein.

Rosenstein’s memo in support of Comey’s firing is a shocking document. The more I think about it, the worse it gets. I have tried six ways from Sunday to put an honorable construction on it. But in the end, I just cannot find one. The memo is a press release to justify an unsavory use of presidential power. It is also a profoundly unfair document. And it’s gutless too. Because at the end of the day, the memo greases the wheels for Comey’s removal without ever explicitly urging it—thus allowing its author to claim that he did something less than recommend the firing, while in fact providing the fig leaf for it.

Just one of Trump’s incidental kills.

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Senior aides shouting from behind closed doors

May 16th, 2017 5:37 pm | By

Ok Trump is in a really really bad mood now and he’s not going to take it any more. You people have got to stop fucking up this way. Heads are gonna roll!

Mr. Trump’s appetite for chaos, coupled with his disregard for the self-protective conventions of the presidency, have left his staff confused and squabbling. And his own mood, according to two advisers who spoke on the condition of anonymity, has become sour and dark, turning against most of his aides — even his son-in-law, Jared Kushner — and describing them in a fury as “incompetent,” according to one of those advisers.

Seriously! And they all have ridiculous hair, too!

He called his PR peeps in on Monday to tell them to shape up and stuff, but he also said they could still keep their jobs. He told other people a different thing though.

Even as Mr. Trump reassured advisers like Mr. Spicer that their jobs were safe at the morning meeting, he told other advisers he knew he needed to make big changes but did not know which direction to go in, or whom to select.

Why that sounds kind of like…incompetence.

Also there’s another problem: nobody is going to want that job. Nobody.

Later, reporters could hear senior aides shouting from behind closed doors as they discussed a defense after Washington Post reporters informed them of an article they were writing that first reported the news about the president’s divulging of intelligence.

They turned the tv up to drown out the yelling.

A dozen of Mr. Trump’s aides and associates, while echoing Mr. Trump’s defiance, privately agreed with Mr. Corker’s view. They spoke candidly, in a way they were unwilling to do just weeks ago, about the damage that was being done to the administration’s standing and the fatigue that was setting in after months of having to defend the president’s missteps, Twitter posts and unpredictable actions.

“After months” – people keep saying that. Yes technically it is months, since it’s more than one, but that would usually suggest a bigger number than three. Almost four. It’s only been almost-four. It’s a short time.

There is a growing sense that Mr. Trump seems unwilling or unable to do the things necessary to keep himself out of trouble, and that the presidency has done little to tame a shoot-from-the-hip-into-his-own-foot style that characterized his campaign.

What did they think would happen? Why did they expect anything else? He’s a bad, stupid, malevolent man; what the fuck made them think he would be anything else after he took office?

There is a fear among some of Mr. Trump’s senior advisers about leaving him alone in meetings with foreign leaders out of concern he might speak out of turn. General McMaster, in particular, has tried to insert caveats or gentle corrections into conversations when he believes the president is straying off topic or onto boggy diplomatic ground.

Can you imagine? Can you imagine being a serious grownup and having to try to manage that out-of-control monstrosity?

This has, at times, chafed the president, according to two officials with knowledge of the situation. Mr. Trump, who still openly laments having to dismiss his first national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, has groused that General McMaster talks too much in meetings, and the president has referred to him as “a pain,” according to one of the officials.

He keeps telling Don to turn off the tv.

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He’s a good guy

May 16th, 2017 4:33 pm | By

So Trump took Comey aside and asked him to drop the investigation into Flynn.

President Trump asked the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, to shut down the federal investigation into Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, in an Oval Office meeting in February, according to a memo Mr. Comey wrote shortly after the meeting.

“I hope you can let this go,” the president told Mr. Comey, according to the memo.

You see he was being nice about it. He asked him nicely, in a nice way. He must be such a nice man.

The existence of Mr. Trump’s request is the clearest evidence that the president has tried to directly influence the Justice Department and F.B.I. investigation into links between Mr. Trump’s associates and Russia.

Mr. Comey wrote the memo detailing his conversation with the president immediately after the meeting, which took place the day after Mr. Flynn resigned, according to two people who read the memo. The memo was part of a paper trail Mr. Comey created documenting what he perceived as the president’s improper efforts to influence a continuing investigation. An F.B.I. agent’s contemporaneous notes are widely held up in court as credible evidence of conversations.

This is awful. This is just fucking awful – being dragged into the sewer like this with no one stopping him. We don’t have a good system; if we did this wouldn’t be happening.

Comey shared his memo with a number of people in the FBI.

“I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go,” Mr. Trump told Mr. Comey, according to the memo. “He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.”

“Let this go” – let being in the pay of a hostile foreign rival, and lying to government officials about it, go. As if it were a parking ticket. Trump’s been a criminal his whole adult life; that’s how criminals think. We’re good guys; it’s cool that we can get away with this.

The White House issued an insultingly dishonest statement:

While the president has repeatedly expressed his view that General Flynn is a decent man who served and protected our country, the president has never asked Mr. Comey or anyone else to end any investigation, including any investigation involving General Flynn,” the statement said. “The president has the utmost respect for our law enforcement agencies, and all investigations.”

The hell he does.

Mr. Comey created similar memos — including some that are classified — about every phone call and meeting he had with the president, the two people said. It is unclear whether Mr. Comey told the Justice Department about the conversation or his memos.

Well that should be interesting. He’s refused to testify in secret, but he wants to testify in public.

Mr. Comey had been in the Oval Office that day with other senior national security officials for a terrorism threat briefing. When the meeting ended, Mr. Trump told those present — including Mr. Pence and Attorney General Jeff Sessions — to leave the room except for Mr. Comey.

Alone in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump began the discussion by condemning leaks to the news media, saying that Mr. Comey should consider putting reporters in prison for publishing classified information, according to one of Mr. Comey’s associates.

Remember during the debate when he told Hillary Clinton she’d be in prison if he won?

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