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

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

The official

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

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

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

What is this “negotiate an end” shit? It’s not a war, it’s not a strike, it’s not a boycott – it’s a criminal investigation, and suspects / targets / subjects don’t get to “negotiate … Read the rest

Speaking of Trump and tv and temper and tantrums…

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

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

Or, less tactfully, … Read the rest

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

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

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

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

He wanted to be seen as backing … Read the rest

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

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

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

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

https://youtu.be/4No4OBiExPA… Read the rest

The lawyers are not happy.

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

Shame! https://t.co/SPU1QFwCPp

— Norm Eisen (#TryingTrump out now!) (@NormEisen) April 17, 2018

Look, I’m glad @SenateMajLdr believes @realDonaldTrump would be wrong to fire Special Counsel Mueller, but we need the bill to protect Mueller, and we need it now. https://t.co/7gB7hBokQp

— Chuck Schumer (@SenSchumer) April 17, 2018

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

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

McConnell said

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

I am unaware of anybody who has taken a serious look at Trump’s business who doesn’t believe that there is a high likelihood of rampant criminality. In Azerbaijan, he did business with a likely money launderer for Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. In the Republic of Georgia, he partnered with a group that was being investigated for a possible role in the largest known bank-fraud and money-laundering case in history. In Indonesia, his development partner is “knee-deep in dirty politics”; there are criminal investigations of his deals in Brazil; the F.B.I. is reportedly looking into

Introduction:

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

Main event:

Unbelievably, James Comey states that Polls, where Crooked Hillary was leading, were a factor in the handling (stupidly) of the Clinton Email probe. In other words, he was making decisions based on the fact that he thought she was going to win, and he wanted a job. Slimeball!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 15, 2018

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

The big questions in Comey’s badly reviewed book aren’t answered like, how come he gave up Classified Information (jail), why did he lie to Congress (jail), why did the DNC refuse to give Server to the FBI (why didn’t they TAKE it), why the

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

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

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

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

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

Trump is still livid about the raid on his private

Trump pardons Scooter Libby:

President Trump on Friday issued a pardon to Lewis “Scooter” Libby, a former chief of staff to Vice President Richard B. Cheney who was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice in connection with the leak of a CIA officer’s identity.

“I don’t know Mr. Libby,” Trump said in a statement, “but for years I have heard that he has been treated unfairly. Hopefully, this full pardon will help rectify a very sad portion of his life.”

Oh, well, if Trump has “heard” that, there’s no more to be said.

Libby was convicted of four felonies in 2007 for perjury before a grand jury, lying to FBI investigators and obstruction of justice during an investigation

The Wall Street Journal as usual normalizes Trump’s grotesque behavior.

Headline:

Trump Replies to Barbs in James Comey’s New Book on Twitter

Well, yes, that’s narrowly true, but it’s absurdly minimizing.

Imaginary parent-child dialogue:

Parent: Stop calling Jimmy a slime ball!

Child: I was replying to his barbs.

The parental reply would not be “Oh ok then.”

Subhead:

The president accused Comey of lying to Congress and leaking classified information, adding, ‘It was my great honor to fire James Comey!’

No, that’s not even narrowly true. Trump didn’t “accuse,” he announced as fact, and he did it while calling Comey a slime ball.

The first two paragraphs:

President Donald Trump took aim at former Federal Bureau of Investigation Director

The usual. Reward the rich and punish the poor. Pass a huge tax cut for the rich, blow up the deficit, then go to even greater lengths to make sure poor people starve and freeze and die when they get sick.

President Trump quietly signed a long-anticipated executive order on Tuesday intended to force low-income recipients of food assistance, Medicaid and low-income housing subsidies to join the work force or face the loss of their benefits.

The order, in the works since last year, has an ambitious title — “Reducing Poverty in America” — and is directed at “any program that provides means-tested assistance or other assistance that provides benefits to people, households or families that have low incomes,”

New details about the warrant: the Times has them.

The F.B.I. agents who raided the office and hotel of President Trump’s lawyer on Monday were seeking all records related to the “Access Hollywood” tape in which Mr. Trump was heard making vulgar comments about women, according to three people who have been briefed on the contents of a federal search warrant.

The search warrant also sought evidence of whether the lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, tried to suppress damaging information about Mr. Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign.

Also documents related to the efforts to silence two of Trump’s women on the side.

The new details from the warrant reveal that prosecutors are keenly interested in Mr. Cohen’s unofficial role

The Times editorial board to Trump: they’re cominna getcha.

Let’s take a step back and think about this, they suggest. What are we looking at here?

Early Monday morning, F.B.I. agents raided the New York office, home and hotel room of the personal lawyer for the president of the United States. They seized evidence of possible federal crimes — including bank fraud, wire fraud and campaign finance violations related to payoffs made to women, including a porn actress, who say they had affairs with the president before he took office and were paid off and intimidated into silence.

That evening the president surrounded himself with the top American military officials and launched unbidden into a tirade against the

Ah, that US Attorney for NY who recused himself is the one Trump weirdly interviewed last fall; I’d forgotten about that.

ABC News reported Tuesday that Geoffrey Berman, the interim US attorney for the Southern District of New York, recused himself from the investigation into Trump’s longtime personal lawyer, Michael Cohen.

Two sources told ABC News that Berman was not involved in the decision to raid Cohen’s office and residences on Monday because of that recusal, which Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein approved.

Other attorneys in the Southern District handled the FBI raid, which a federal judge approved, ABC News said.

It’s unlikely that Trump had such a situation in mind when he made the eyebrow-raising move to interview Berman