Daily Archives: June 16, 2017

And, man, did she have something to say Friday. Here's her full statement on President Donald Trump's latest tweets about the special counsel investigation being led by former FBI Director Bob Mueller:

"I'm growing increasingly concerned that the President will attempt to fire not only Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating possible obstruction of justice, but also Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein who appointed Mueller.

"The message the President is sending through his tweets is that he believes the rule of law doesn't apply to him and that anyone who thinks otherwise will be fired. That's undemocratic on its face and a blatant violation of the President's oath of office.

"First of all, the President has no authority to fire Robert Mueller. That authority clearly lies with the attorney generalor in this case, because the attorney general has recused himself, with the deputy attorney general. Rosenstein testified under oath this week that he would not fire Mueller without good cause and that none exists.

"And second, if the President thinks he can fire Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein and replace him with someone who will shut down the investigation, he's in for a rude awakening. Even his staunchest supporters will balk at such a blatant effort to subvert the law.

"It's becoming clear to me that the President has embarked on an effort to undermine anyone with the ability to bring any misdeeds to light, be that Congress, the media or the Justice Department. The Senate should not let that happen. We're a nation of laws that apply equally to everyone, a lesson the President would be wise to learn."

Just a few lines worth reading again:

* "The message the President is sending through his tweets is that he believes the rule of law doesn't apply to him."

* "If the President thinks he can fire Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein and replace him with someone who will shut down the investigation, he's in for a rude awakening."

* "It's becoming clear to me that the President has embarked on an effort to undermine anyone with the ability to bring any misdeeds to light."

* "We're a nation of laws that apply equally to everyone, a lesson the President would be wise to learn."

Any one of those lines is a 99-mile-an-hour fastball thrown way, way inside. Taken all altogether, it's a statement very clearly designed to send a message to Trump.

That message? Enough! Time to start acting like a president.

To be clear: Feinstein is a Democrat. She represents one of the most Democratic states in the country and risks absolutely nothing, politically speaking, by issuing a statement like this one that blisters Trump.

But she is also one of the institutions in the Senate, having spent the last 25 years in the chamber. Unlike her longtime colleague Barbara Boxer, who retired in 2016, Feinstein is not seen as terribly partisan and generally enjoys strong across-the-aisle relationships.

"Every conversation that I've had with her now that she's ranking member has been not only friendly, but has been productive, and these little heads-to-heads that you see us having when the committee's actually functioning, work things out right then."

In short: Feinstein isn't just a predictable partisan or someone who pops off at the slightest political provocation. This statement is a purposeful attempt to make clear that Trump has crossed a line and that he needs to take one big step back.

My prediction: He won't.

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Dianne Feinstein is done pulling punches when it comes to Donald Trump - CNN

"The Fake News Media hates when I use what has turned out to be my very powerful Social Media - over 100 million people! I can go around them," Trump tweeted.

If Trump believes this -- and he certainly seem to -- it shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how the media views the president's Twitter feed and how he employs it.

The reality is this: Every political journalist in the world is absolutely thrilled that Donald Trump not only tweets but does with the frequency and bluntness that he does. NO reporter wants Donald Trump to stop tweeting. Not one.

Trump's Twitter feed gives the political media -- and anyone else who follows him -- a direct look into his thought processes. We know what he is thinking about -- or angry about -- at all times of day. That's absolutely invaluable. It's "The President: Raw and Uncut."

Even as his White House will be excoriating the media for focusing too little on some policy roll-out or another, Trump will drop a series of tweets about the "witch hunt" Russia investigation or complain, as he did yesterday, about why the Justice Department isn't investigating alleged improprieties surrounding Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.

All presidents have private thoughts that sometimes (often?) run counter to the official message the White House is pushing in a given day, week or month. But, no past president has been willing to put those discrepancies on public display in front of the tens of millions of people who follow him on Twitter before Trump.

What sort of reporter would want that pipeline to end?

The people who do want Trump to stop tweeting or to tweet less aren't the media. They're Republicans and Trump loyalists who believe his willingness to tell people exactly what is on his mind at any minute of the day fundamentally undermines the White House's efforts to find some consistent messaging and build the momentum the administration has been sorely lacking to date.

"[Twitter is] a powerful tool, but I do believe that it can be used more effectively to achieve his purpose," New York Rep. Lee Zeldin, a Trump supporter, said on CNN Friday morning. "I don't know the strategy behind, you know, this morning -- this latest tweet you are asking me about. But if there is a bigger strategy that makes sense, I'm all ears."

If you're reading this, Mr. Trump, let me be crystal clear as a card-carrying member of the media: Please keep tweeting. It provides us insight into how you think that we have never had before and may never get again from a president. Period.

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The one big thing Donald Trump gets totally wrong about the media - CNN

New York Times

Donald Trump, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, 'All Eyez on Me': Your Friday Briefing New York Times Steve Garvey, a former major league star, led a prayer before the congressional baseball game in Washington on Thursday. Credit Al Drago/The New York Times. (Want to get this briefing by email? Here's the sign-up.) Good morning. Here's what you need to ... and more »

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Donald Trump, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, 'All Eyez on Me': Your Friday Briefing - New York Times

The yearning in the character of Donald Trump for dominance and praise is bottomless, a hunger that is never satisfied. Last week, the President gathered his Cabinet for a meeting with no other purpose than to praise him, to note the great honor and blessing of serving such a man as he. Trump nodded with grave self-satisfaction, accepting the serial hosannas as his daily due. But even as the members declared, Pyongyang-style, their everlasting gratitude and fealty to the Great Leader, this concocted dumb show of loyalty only served to suggest how unsustainable it all is.

The reason that this White House staff is so leaky, so prepared to express private anxiety and contempt, even while parading obeisance for the cameras, is that the President himself has so far been incapable of garnering its discretion or respect. Trump has made it plain that he is capable of turning his confused fury against anyone in his circle at any time. In a tweet on Friday morning, Trump confirmed that he is under investigation for firing the F.B.I. director James Comey, but blamed the Deputy Attorney General, Rod Rosenstein, for the legal imbroglio that Trump himself has created. The President has fired a few aides, he has made known his disdain and disappointment at many others, and he will, undoubtedly, turn against more. Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, Jared Kushner, Jeff Sessions, Sean Spicerwho has not yet felt the lash?

Trumps egotism, his demand for one-way loyalty, and his incapacity to assume responsibility for his own untruths and mistakes were, his biographers make plain, his pattern in business and have proved to be his pattern as President.

Veteran Washington reporters tell me that they have never observed this kind of anxiety, regret, and sense of imminent personal doom among White House staffersnot to this degree, anyway. These troubled aides seem to think that they can help their own standing by turning on those around themand that by retailing information anonymously they will be able to live with themselves after serving a President who has proved so disconnected from the truth and reality.

I thought about Trump and his aides and councillors while reading The Last of the Presidents Men , Bob Woodwards 2015 book about Alexander Butterfield, a career Air Force officer who took a job as an assistant to Richard Nixon. He made the move less for ideological reasons than to indulge a yearning ambition to be in the smoketo be at the locus of power, where decisions are made.

As an undergraduate, at U.C.L.A., Butterfield knew H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, and, after serving in Vietnam and being stationed in Australia, he called on Haldeman, who was Nixons most important assistant. Haldeman made Butterfield his deputy. Butterfield got what every D.C. bureaucrat craves mostaccess. He worked on Nixons schedule, his paper flow, his travel; he offered advice, took orders, no matter how bizarre or transitory. Butterfield could not have been more in the smoke than he was then. He quickly discovered that Nixon was a fantastically weird and solitary manrude, unthoughtful, broiling with resentment against the Eastern lites who had somehow wounded him, be it in his imagination or in fact. Butterfield had to manage Nixons relations with everyone from his Cabinet members to his wife, Pat, who on vacations resided separately from the President. Butterfield carried out Nixons most peculiar orders, whether they involved barring a senior economic adviser from a White House faith service or making sure that Henry Kissinger was no longer seated at state dinners next to the most attractive woman at the occasion. (Nixon, who barely acknowledged, much less touched, his own wife in public, resented Kissingers public, and well-cultivated, image as a Washington sex symbol.)

Butterfield experienced what all aides do, eventually, if they have the constant access; he was witness to the unguarded and, in Nixons case, the most unattractive behavior of a powerful man. Incident after incident revealed Nixons distaste for his fellow human beings, his racism and anti-Semitism, his overpowering personal suspicions, and his sad longings. Nixon, the most anti-social of men, needed a briefing memo just to make it through the pleasantries of a staff birthday party. One evening, Butterfield recounts to Woodward, he sat across from Nixon on a night trip back to the White House from Camp David on Marine One, and watched as Nixon, in one of the more discomfiting passages in the literature of sexual misbehavior, kept patting the bare legs of one of his secretaries, Beverly Kaye:

And hes carrying on this small talk, but still patting her. Because I can see now, Nixon being Nixon, he doesnt quite know how to stop. You know, to stop is an action in itself. So hes pat, pat, patting her. And looking at her. And feelingI can see hes feeling more distressed all the time now about the situation hes got himself into. So he keeps trying to make this small talk, and I can see him saying [to himself], you know, when the small talk is over, what the hell am I going to do? . . . Shes petrified. Shes never had this happen before. The president of the United States is patting her bare legs.

For how long? Woodward asks.

It seems like half the way to Washington but Id say a long time, minutes.

When it appeared, The Last of the Presidents Men did not receive the attention that was paid to some of Woodwards early investigative books, but its intimacy and strangeness are very much worth returning to in the Trumpian momentespecially so if you are blessed with serving the current President. It is instructive.

Butterfield, who is ninety-one and spent dozens of hours with Woodward recounting his experiences in proximity to a President who ran what was essentially a criminal operation from the White House, emerges from the telling as a man of complex motivations. He hardly charged forward in the early days of the scandal to tell what he knew. After Nixons relection, Butterfield left the White House to lead the Federal Aviation Administration. But no matter how hard Butterfield worked to swallow his hurt feelings or to submerge his knowledge of the various enemies lists and the criminal cover-up that took shape all around him during Watergate, no matter how hard he tried to rationalize Nixons venality with his achievements, particularly the diplomatic opening to China, he came to an almost inevitable moment of reckoning.

In February, 1971, Nixon came up with the idea of putting a voice-activated taping system in his offices. Butterfield was charged with the installation. Haldeman told Butterfield that Nixon wanted the system installed on his telephones and in the Oval Office, his office in the Executive Office Building, the Cabinet Room, and the Lincoln Sitting Room. Kissinger was not to know; neither was his senior-most secretary, Rose Mary Woods. Only a few aides and the President were aware that no conversation was now truly confidential. Tiny holes were drilled into the Presidents desktop to make way for the microphones. A set of Sony 800B tape recorders was set up in the White House basement.

It was all for the sake of history, Nixon said. Kennedy and Johnson had taped selectively, but Nixon wanted it all for the recordhis own recordsbut no one was to know. Goddamn it, this cannot get out, Nixon told Butterfield. Mums the word.

In the end, of course, the tapes were Nixons undoing. In July, 1973, when Senate Watergate investigators asked Butterfield point-blank whether the White House taped conversations, Butterfield decided that his loyalty was not to the cesspool of Nixons White House but to the truth. And by confirming what so few knewthat there were tapes of Nixon and his cronies discussing Watergate and its cover-upButterfield helped end a Presidency.

Donald Trump now faces an investigation led by Robert Mueller, late of the F.B.I., and it could last many months. There is hardly any guarantee that the Administration will be found guilty of collusion with Russia, or with Russians, on any score; to predict that is to leap ahead of any publicly available evidence. Nor is there any guarantee, despite the testimony of Comey, and the testimony coming from other top national-security figures, that there will be a charge of obstruction of justice. This is bound to take some time.

But, while Trumps personality is different from Nixons, there is little evidence that the show of bogus loyalty performed last week has any basis in real life. Will Bannon, Spicer, Conway, Sessions, Kushner, and many others who have been battered in one way or another by Trump keep their counsel? Will all of them risk their futures to protect someone whose focus is on himself alone, the rest be damned? Will none of them conclude that they are working for a President whose honesty is on a par with his loyalty to others? The government is already filled with public servants and bureaucrats who have found ways to protest this Presidents actions and describe them to investigators and reporters. Will the inner circle follow? Have they already?

Alexander Butterfield, day after day, would hear Nixon say, Were going to nail those sons of bitches. He heard the lies; he watched the President try to crush his opponents with surveillance and dirty tricks. It disgusted him, but, for a good while, he assumed that the Presidency would endure; it was too powerful an institution to fall. But then momentum toward the truth began to build a wave, as Butterfield called it. He was, all along, ambivalent, torn between loyalty to the Presidentor, at least, to the idea of the Presidencyand a desire to do the right thing. When his time came, though, Butterfield testified.

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Who in the White House Will Turn Against Donald Trump? - The New Yorker

Trevor Noah addressed a crowd while standing inside a recreation of the Oval Office with a Russian flag flanking him and an open golden toilet directly behind him.

Welcome to what I hope will become a place we live to remember for a very long time, Noah said into a microphone. The Donald J. Trump Presidential Twitter Library.

Thursday night,The Daily Show finally debuted their pop-up library thats dedicated to Donald Trumps tweets. In many ways, its like a typical presidential library, with immersive exhibits and placards adding context to historical artifacts. In other ways, it is not.

You can sit on a gold shitter! Daily Showcorrespondent Jordan Klepper explained to HuffPost at the event.

One could only guess at whether this library would be hilarious, a disaster, or a hilarious disaster earlier this year when The Daily Show announced their plan. But it turned out to be arguably the most impressive satire of the current administration to date.

Stephen Colbert, Samantha Bee, Seth Meyers and John Oliver are going to have to really consider their next move if they want the elusive Trump mockery crown. Noah and The Daily Show crew have vanquished, destroyed, eviscerated, ethered and slammed insert other destructive verbs here the president with this ridiculous library.

TIMOTHY A. CLARY via Getty Images

This Trump Twitter library is right around the corner from Trump Tower in Manhattan, but somehow neither Klepper nor fellow correspondent Hasan Minhaj have ever been inside the latter.

How would an American version of Jafar live? Thats probably the inside of Trump Tower, in my mind, Minhaj guessed to HuffPost about what the presidents former residence is like. Despite never stepping foot in Trump Tower, The Daily Show crew certainly hopes the president stops by their pop-up over the weekend.

The library didnt appear to have any books, but has plenty of artworks, interactive activities and small Easter eggs to discover. A large television screen features a live update of Trumps Twitter. If he tweets during the time the library is open this weekend, a bing bing bong bong, bing bing, bong bong alarm, as Noah described, will go off.

The stated goal of the library besides jokes is to put the presidents tweets into a historical context. I think over time, they will lose context, said Noah during his speech in front of the golden toilet. And people will assume that theyre misinterpreting them. They will say, Surely, that was not what the president wrote back in that day, maybe language has changed. They will then find ways to distill them and turn them into coherent language, which is partly why we are holding this beautiful Twitter library experience because we do not wish for that to take place.

Noah continued, saying the president was at his best when experienced in his purest form.

Thats what this library is about, he continued. We are living in history, people. This is the beginning ... and possibly the end.

Rob Kim via Getty Images

The library is located at 3 West 57th Street in New York and is open Friday, June 16, throughSunday June 18, from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Theadmission is free.

HuffPost reporter Bill Bradley sat on the golden toilet and asked Noah what hed say to Trump if he ever slid into his DMs on Twitter. Well, the obligatory, u up? Noah responded. And then #followback.

Presumably Noah and Klepper and Minhaj wont be on the premises this weekend, but who knows, maybe Trump will stop by to bask in this monument to his writing.

This is real history, Minhaj said to HuffPost at one point in the night. We are living through history.

Below is a transcript of Noahs entire opening remarks:

Brad Barket via Getty Images

Well, good evening, everybody. And welcome, welcome to what I hope will become a place we live to remember for a very long time. The Donald J. Trump Presidential Twitter Library.

You know, at The Daily Show, we faced a lot of criticism from people whove said we are haters of the President. We are not. We are admirers. We are honest. We are fake news. And he promotes us more than most. And to show our appreciation of that, we decided to tackle an issue that is near and dear to our hearts, and that is the Presidents Twitter.

Weve noticed that there is a concerted effort by many people within the administration and from without who wish to silence the Presidents tweets. Say what you want about Donald Trump, he may not be good at president-ing or leading or geo-politics, but he is a damn fine Twitterer. Probably the best that ever lived.

And so we thought at The Daily Show we would take a moment to honor the President of the United States and the King of Twitter with this library.

Now some people would say, Trevor, why would you have this Twitter library now? Shouldnt a presidential library be at the end of a presidents term? Yes, that is true. Unfortunately, we do not know when the term will end. Could be next week, could be never. So we decided to do it now. Tell the ones you love you love them when theyre still around.

And thats what this Twitter library is about. Its about giving context to the tweets. Not absorbing them one bite at a time, but rather looking at them as a body of work. Some of the greatest moments, some of the greatest ideas that have ever been shared in 140 characters or less.

Weve invited you here today to share it with us and I know many of you, fake and mainstream, will strive to paint this as a negative affair, which it was not. I know that the President himself will appreciate this. Its around the corner from where he once lived. And I hope that everyone who is a fan and lover of Donald Trump what he tweets everyday will come and enjoy this experience with us.

So thank you very much. Its an exhibit, as you can see, that contains just a little bit of the mastery, just a little bit of the panache. Everything from birtherism through to deleted tweets that we have not forgotten. And we tried, but we could not. We have some of the survivors of his Twitter feuds.

But most importantly, we have an opportunity for people to take the position of Commander in Tweet and try to respond to a crisis as only the president would. Some people would see this as an insult, but it is not. We thought to ourselves, where do we send most of our tweets from. The president, who is a man of the people, probably shares in that experience.

So welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to The Daily Show Presents: Donald J Trump Twitter Presidential Library.

TIMOTHY A. CLARY via Getty Images

TIMOTHY A. CLARY via Getty Images

Brad Barket via Getty Images

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Trevor Noah And 'The Daily Show' Just Took Donald Trump Mockery To The Next Level - HuffPost