Monthly Archives: May 2017

One of President Donald Trumps closest confidants, his personal lawyer Michael Cohen, has now become a focus of the expanding congressional investigation into Russian efforts to influence the 2016 campaign.

Cohen confirmed to ABC News that House and Senate investigators have asked him to provide information and testimony about any contacts he had with people connected to the Russian government, but he said he has turned down the invitation.

I declined the invitation to participate, as the request was poorly phrased, overly broad and not capable of being answered, Cohen told ABC News in an email Tuesday.

After Cohen rejected the congressional requests for cooperation, the Senate Select Intelligence Committee voted unanimously on Thursday to grant its chairman, Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina, and ranking Democrat, Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, blanket authority to issue subpoenas as they deem necessary.

"To date, there has not been a single witness, document or piece of evidence linking me to this fake Russian conspiracy," Cohen added. "This is not surprising to me because there is none."

While much of the media focus in recent days has fallen on Russian contacts made by Trumps son-in-law, Jared Kushner, there are few people closer to the president than his longtime lawyer.Insiders consider Cohen to be Trumps pit bull or consigliere for his role in threatening legal action against Trump critics, gaining notoriety for threatening and browbeating reporters investigating Trumps background.

He was quoted in 2015 telling Daily Beast reporters, I will take you for every penny you still dont have. And I will come after your Daily Beast and everybody else that you possibly know So Im warning you, tread very f---ing lightly, because what Im going to do to you is going to be f---ing disgusting.

In a 2016 appearance on CNN that went viral, the stone-faced attorney flashed anger when anchor Brianna Keiler said the Trump campaign was down.

Says who? he challenged. When she cited polls, he countered, Which polls? She replied, All of them. His final response in that exchange proved prescient:Youre going to all be very surprised when he polls substantially higher than what you all are giving him credit for.

Afterthe 2016 campaign,Cohenleft the Trump Organization tobecome the presidents personal attorney, a job he still holds. From that post, he has continued to weigh in on Trumps behalf on Twitter and during occasional television appearances.

After Trump dismissed FBI Director James Comey, for example, Cohen tweeted, I believe @POTUS was justified in terminating #Comey as @FBI director. #RT if you agree with me!

Cohen was also made a deputy national finance chairman of the Republican National Committee a position that gives him some sway on how money will be allocated to Republican candidates. And in April he announced he formed a strategic alliance with the powerful D.C. lobbying firm Patton Boggs, a firm whose clients include Russias third-largest bank, Gazprombank. The arrangement enables him to work out of Squire Patton Boggs offices in New York, Washington and London, according to the announcement.

The emergence of Cohen as a subject of the Senate probe brings renewed attention to a strident Trump advocate who was named in the unverified dossier prepared by a former British intelligence agent during the 2016 campaign and provided by the FBI to Sen. John McCain, which contains a number of unconfirmed allegations that Cohen played a role in working with the Russians on the hacking of Democratic National Committee computers during the campaign.

In January, Cohen told ABC News the allegations in the dossier were laughably false.His wife is Ukrainian, and he once worked with her family in Ukraine to establish an ethanol business. ABC News was able to debunk some references to him in the unverified document, such as theassertion in the that his Ukrainian-born father-in-law had a vacation home, or dacha, near Russian President Vladimir Putins.

I dont even think my father-in-law has ever been to Moscow, Cohen told ABC News earlier this year. I wonder whos living in the dacha.

Another suggestion in those documents that Cohen supposedly met with the Russians in Prague last August is also false, he said.Then-President-elect Trump pushed back against the claim in a wide-ranging news conference held in January, saying that he saw Cohens passport.

I said, I want to see your passport. He brings his passport to my office. I say, Hey, wait a minute. He didnt leave the country. He wasnt out of the country. They had Michael Cohen of the Trump Organization was in Prague. It turned out to be a different Michael Cohen, Trump said. Its a disgrace what took place. Its a disgrace, and I think they ought to apologize to start with Michael Cohen.

Democrats in Congress have argued itis conceivable he entered Europe through another country he was in Italy on vacation around the time the dossier alleges he was in Prague and his passport would not receive a stamp for crossing the border, but no proof of any such trip has been produced.

Ive never actually walked the land in Prague, Cohen told ABC News. And last August I was not in Prague.

Congressional investigators involved in the widening probehave already identified four Trump campaign advisers as people of interest because of their interactions with Russian officials. Only one of them, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, has received a subpoena for records. Flynn, who served briefly as Trumps national security adviser, declined to provide them, citing his Fifth Amendment rights.

Lawmakers have also askedformer Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, informal adviser Roger Stone and former foreign policy adviser Carter Page to voluntarily hand over relevant records. All three men have said publicly they are producing records and cooperating with investigators.

ABC News' Eric Avram and Pete Madden contributed to this report.

See the original post:

Congress expands Russia investigation to include Trump's personal attorney - ABC News

A top White House communications staffer has resigned as President Donald Trump considers a major staff overhaul amid intensifying inquiries into his campaign's dealings with Russia.

The departure of Michael Dubke, Trump's communications director, comes as aides and outside advisers say Trump has grown increasingly frustrated by allegations of Russian meddling in the 2016 election and revelations of possible ties between his campaign and Moscow.

Trump tweeted Tuesday: "Russian officials must be laughing at the U.S. & how a lame excuse for why the Dems lost the election has taken over the Fake News."

Dubke wrote in a statement that it had been an honor to serve Trump and "my distinct pleasure to work side-by-side, day-by-day with the staff of the communications and press departments."

Dubke offered his resignation earlier this month, White House counselor Kellyanne Conway told The Associated Press on Tuesday, but offered to stay on during the president's first foreign trip. His last day has not yet been determined.

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A Republican consultant, Dubke joined the White House team in February and has served only three months on the job. The position had gone unfilled after campaign aide Jason Miller Trump's original choice for communications director backed out of the job in December before the president's inauguration. Dubke founded Crossroads Media, a GOP firm that specializes in political advertising.

Dubke is the latest White House staffer to leave this administration as scrutiny intensifies over contacts Trump staffers may have had with Russian government officials during the campaign and transition period.

It's unclear whether other staff moves are imminent. Trump has entertained bringing his former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, and former deputy campaign manager, David Bossie, more formally back into the fold.

Bossie told Fox News' "Fox & Friends" that the Trump administration has reached out to him but hasn't offered him a job yet.

"They have talked to many people, including me," Bossie said. He later added: "It's an ongoing conversation and that's a fair way to put it."

In an interview on Fox News on Tuesday, Conway said Dubke "made very clear that he would see through the president's international trip, and come to work every day and work hard even through that trip because there was much to do here back at the White House."

Dubke's hiring was intended to lighten the load on Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, who had also been handling the duties of communications director during Trump's first month in office. Trump has privately and publicly pinned some of the blame for his administration's rough start on the White House's communications strategy.

While overseas, Trump's longtime lawyer, Marc Kasowitz, joined a still-forming legal team to help the president shoulder the intensifying investigations into Russian interference in the election and his associates' potential involvement. More attorneys with deep experience in Washington investigations are expected to be added, along with crisis communication experts, to help the White House in the weeks ahead.

The latest revelations to emerge last week involved Trump's son-in-law and top aide, Jared Kushner. Shortly after the election, Kushner allegedly discussed setting up a secret communications channel with the Russian government to facilitate sensitive discussions about the conflict in Syria.

The intent was to connect Trump's chief national security adviser at the time, Michael Flynn, with Russian military leaders, a person familiar with the discussions told the AP. The person wasn't authorized to publicly discuss private policy deliberations and insisted on anonymity.

Flynn handed in his resignation in February after it was revealed he misled top White House officials about his contacts with Russian officials.

The disclosure of the back channel has put the White House on the defensive. Just back from his nine-day trip to the Middle East and Europe, Trump dismissed recent reports as "fake news."

Trump also has renewed his criticism of Germany following Chancellor Angela Merkel's suggestion that her country needs to adopt a more independent stance in world affairs.

Trump posted a tweet Tuesday saying "we have a MASSIVE trade deficit with Germany, plus they pay FAR LESS than they should on NATO & military. Very bad for U.S. This will change."

See more here:

Donald Trump's Communications Director Quits After 3 Months on the Job - Fortune

Aside from the odd punctuation -- why is "TAX CUTS" capitalized?? -- the message is simple: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell should change the rules of the Senate to eliminate the filibuster on legislation. What that would mean in practical terms is that any debate on a bill could be ended by a simple majority vote and then the legislation could be passed -- or voted down -- with a simple majority.

Let's start here: Getting rid of the legislative filibuster would make the way the Senate works entirely indistinguishable from the way the House works.

The House is -- and was designed to be -- a majority-rule entity. From its founding in Article 1, Section 3 of the Constitution, which establishes that members of the House must stand for new terms every two years, the whole idea was that the House was the direct voice of the people -- reflecting what they wanted at a given time.

That same Constitution -- you may have heard of it -- established six-year terms for senators, an attempt to differentiate it from the House and create the idea of the Senate as a more deliberate institution.

Now, put the history aside for a minute. Trump's tweet is also wrong on the specifics of the two pieces of legislation -- health care and tax reform -- he is insisting would pass the Senate if not for its 60-vote rule.

Which means that, for all intents and purposes, the change Trump is insisting the Senate make is already governing the two pieces of legislation he is tweeting about.

Donald Trump is either blithely unaware of these things or simply doesn't care. He is and always has been someone who believes that he makes the rules while other people follow them. And, if they don't suit him -- if it's a bad deal, say -- he either adjust the rules or walks away from them.

In Trump's mind, he's the President so everyone -- the Senate included -- should be doing what he says and passing the legislation he wants passed.

Which, of course, is a gross misunderstanding of the separation of powers, the history of the Senate and the current legislative processes governing tax reform and the American Health Care Act.

Many people know that. Donald Trump doesn't seem to be one of them.

Read more:

Donald Trump doesn't seem to understand how the Senate works - CNN

So this week, he warns us, the president is going to announce his decision on whether the United States will remain a party to the Paris climate accord. I guess the delay is meant to dupe us into believing that hes been studying the substance of the issue.

I think we all expect that hell pull the United States out of the agreement, signed by 195 nations (and unsigned by just Nicaragua and Syria, if you want an idea of the company Donald Trump would be putting us in). Indeed Axios reported Monday that Trump has already told several associates that hes giving it the heave-ho. The thin reed of hope here is that a slew of major U.S. corporationsincluding the CEO of Exxon!have told him to stay in Paris.

So maybe theres the slimmest of chances that he might pleasantly surprise us. But come on. He knows hed have a mutiny on his hands if he doesnt reject the accord. The three key elements of the Republican Party these days are the hardest-right members of Congress (look, for example, at how the House Republicans rewrote the health bill to placate the Freedom Caucus); Rush Limbaugh and the other media propagandists, and the rabid pro-Trump base. Each of these overlapping groups would be enraged if Trump stuck with Paris.

As a matter of politics, hes already lost more or less the entire country except for these people. If he starts losing themby doing things like coming around to Barack Obamas position on climate changetheyll start thinking the words President Pence sound just fine. And they, unlike the rest of us, have the power to make it happen.

So lets assume that by weeks end the United States is out of the Paris accords. There are two contexts in which we need to understand the gravity of the moment.

The first is the domestic political context. Republicans will be hailing this as a great victory for the American people, who dont want to be bound by these onerous and heavy-handed international treaties. However, the truth as far as we can discern is that the American people do in fact want to be bound by these treaties.

First of all, most Americans believe that climate change is a real problem that the human race has caused or contributed to and must do something about. Gallup found a little more than a year ago that public concern about climate change was at an eight-year high. Fully 64 percent said they worried about climate change, and nine in 10 said the effects are either now being felt or will certainly be felt in the future, leaving the hoax dead-enders at 10 percent of the population (but about 52 percent of the Congress; oh well).

Which brings us to the Paris agreement. It hasnt been polled much, but last November the Chicago Council on Global Affairs commissioned a survey that found that 71 percent of Americansand even 57 percent of Republicansback the accord.

In other words, the GOP position is deeply unpopular. So if Trump moves in the expected direction, it will lower his own popularity, and the congressional GOPs. Pretty much every major item on the GOP agenda, from getting out of Paris to repealing Obamacare to giving the rich more tax cuts, is wildly unpopular. Yet they keep doing it, and keep wondering why theyre so unpopular. Its not complicated. They are carrying out the will of their huge donors and about a third at best of the population. So the political fallout for them will be negative, and that of course is all to the good.

In the second context, however, the political fallout is likely to be extremely harmful to the United States. I refer of course to the international context. We saw Trump complete a disastrous overseas trip, which started with him outing the Mossad, built toward his alarming non-defense of NATO, and ended with this puffy and low-energy old man unable to join his fellow heads-of-state and walk a few hundred feet.

That was funny, in a pathetic sort of way. But Angela Merkels speech in southern Germany Sunday wasnt funny. As Henry Farrell observed in The Washington Post, Merkels rhetoric about the EU needing to go its own way was a stark departure from the past, indicating that Germany and Europe are likely to take on a much more substantial and independent role than they have in the past 70 years.

To hear American conservativesand Trumptell it, the EU is a hidebound and sclerotic institution that cant approve golf courses fast enough. But guess which economy is bigger, the EU or the United States? In 2016, China was first, the EU second, and America third.

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To those of you who say that getting out of Paris will unleash the American tiger, I say stop reading InfoWars. Theres a reason the Exxon CEO wants us to stay in. Its called a global marketplace in which the rules are standardized. For the United States of America, which has led every major international concert since World War II, to stand down from that role and go its own way is humiliating and, more to the point, self-marginalizing. The Paris agreement expands markets, creates new energy technologies, and spurs growth. Were really going to say we want no part of that, are we?

And just imagine how it will feel three years from now, say, when theres another major international accord of some kind, and the two people standing up front are Angela Merkel and Xi Jinping, with the president of the United States absent. Donnie Two Scoops will be down in Palm Beach, tweeting away, eating his favorite dessert. And the world will be eating our lunch.

See original here:

Donald Trump Deals Away America's Prestige, and His Own Position - Daily Beast

Peter Capaldi stars as the Doctor in the "Doctor Who" episode "The Pyramid at the End Of The World."

Simon Ridgway/BBC

The 2016 U.S. presidential election had the same results in the "Doctor Who" universe, apparently, with Donald Trump sitting in the oval office both on TV and in reality.

During the most recent episode of the hit BBC sci-fi adventure, the Doctor's current companion, Bill (played by Pearl Mackie) is tracked down by the U.N. and asked to help find "the president."

"How would I know the president? I mean I wouldn't have even voted for him," Bill responded. "He's ... orange."

Mr. Trump -- or an actor portraying him -- doesn't appear in the episode, but the writers have made it clear he exists in their world.

It turned out the U.N. was looking for another president: the Doctor himself, played by Peter Capaldi. Several seasons back, the character was given the title President of Earth.

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The rest is here:

Doctor Who slams Donald Trump - CBS News