Daily Archives: June 28, 2017

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's failure to ram through an Obamacare repeal bill before the July 4 recess does more than reveal tribal divisions ravaging the Republican Party.

It also highlights President Donald Trump's role -- or lack of one -- in forging a GOP majority to squeeze the bill through the Senate, on an issue that has grave implications for the fate of the rest of his presidency.

Almost as soon as McConnell shelved a bid to vote on the measure this week, senators piled into a blue Capitol Police bus to head down to the White House for a brainstorming session with Trump.

The contrast was obvious to the euphoric Rose Garden rally that Trump hosted with GOP House members after they passed their Obamacare repeal bill in May. This time, Republicans sat around tables in the East Room expressing frustration at negative ads being aired against moderate Sen. Dean Heller, who has opposed the bill.

The delay in the Senate vote represents a failure -- that could yet be temporary -- by the GOP that has a monopoly on power in Washington yet can't yet honor the fundamental promise it has made to its voters for years.

But in this Washington cloud, there could be a silver lining for Trump.

A significant effort to reshape argument on the bill, to breach deep party divides on the issue and to sell a vision of health care reforms to Americans, could do a lot of good to a presidency that has been under siege for months.

It would also suggest that the President has a decent chance of building support for the rest of his agenda, that includes a push for tax reform and a program to repair the nation's decaying infrastructure.

But early signs are not encouraging for those who hope that the President can mine a golden seam of political support to get the bill passed.

Before grim faced senators, the President spoke in vague terms about the bill, showing the lack of specificity that has hampered his attempts to wield political influence on Capitol Hill.

"We are going to try and solve the problem. So, I invited all of you. ... We are going to talk. We are going to see what we are going to do," Trump told the group, before offering an assessment that did not seem to reflect the aggravated state of Republican debate over the bill or address the specific concerns many senators have with the bill.

"We are getting very close," he said. "This will be great if we get it done," he said, before asking reporters to leave the room.

By now, everyone knows in Washington that the President is not keen on thrashing through the details of a bill to try to win wavering votes.

In fact, he's often seemed ready to embrace any measure that he could portray as a political win -- whatever it contains.

There's certainly no sense that he is driving the debate towards an outcome that would fit into any ideological vision of his presidency. More often, he's shown more appetite to simply slam Obamacare than offer solutions.

Even Trump's supporters would admit that the President is yet to impose his considerable persona on Washington or shown he has the political skills and stock of capital to pilot legislation through Congress.

His consistency is also in question, since he labeled the House health care bill "mean," hanging members out to dry after celebrating its passage with them.

"Here's what I would tell any senator: If you're counting on the President to have your back, you need to watch it," GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham said Monday.

"This President is the first president in our history who has had neither political nor military experience," Maine Sen. Susan Collins told reporters on Capitol Hill Monday.

That impression will have to change if the President is to play on the loyalty of Republican senators who are against the bill, who McConnell said used their White House meeting, to explain their reservations to Trump.

Trump is the most unorthodox President in memory, and has broken many political norms. But if he is to amass a significant legislative legacy, he may have to put more political skin of his own in the game.

"He would knock peoples' socks off if he came forward with a venture of his own proposing," said Bruce Buchanan, a presidential historian at the University of Texas at Austin, who doubts Trump has such a play "in his playbook."

The next few weeks, as McConnell and Trump seek to unpick the GOP deadlock over the Senate proposal, pose a stern test for the President.

He must calm moderate senators scared about the consequences of voting for a measure the Congressional Budget Office says will lead to 22 million more people without coverage over the next decade.

Senate Republicans are also split on issues like cuts to the Medicaid expansion under Obamacare, the prospect of rising premiums for low income and working class Americans, and fears that opioid addicts could lose vital treatment.

Bringing Republicans together will test the clout of a president whose approval rating has dipped below 40% and has little support outside his, albeit solid, base. It will also reveal just how much loyalty Republican senators feel towards a President who has often departed from the orthodoxies of his own party.

Trump's stock on Capitol Hill may have taken a dent after a group that supports him, America First Policies, started airing ads against Heller in Nevada.

At the White House Tuesday, Heller and other senators complained, calling for party unity. Heller, a source said, brought the issue up first, while joking that he was disappointed that they used Matt Damon's face instead of his in the ad.

Trump may also need to up his persuasion game because though he's been speaking to holdout senators it's not clear he has changed many minds.

Utah Sen Mike Lee, a conservative who opposes the bill because he believes it does not do enough to strip down Obamacare, spoke to Trump by phone on Monday.

An aide said the tone of the call was "positive" but was also at a "high level" with no sign Trump addressed specific policy details.

McConnell said Tuesday that the President had been helpful and engaged. But he also appeared to hint that Trump would have to do more.

"We always anticipated the president would be very important in getting us to a conclusion. After all, under our system, he's the man with the signature," he said, adding that for Trump to show his cards earlier would have been a waste of time.

But Trump's time is now.

"There have been presidents that have been able to break through and Senate Majority leaders that have been able to put together a coalition," said Julian Zelizer, a CNN political analyst.

"(But) McConnell has been dealing with a President who has not been totally invested in this fight and is not selling to Americans what the idea is, behind the change other than people are going to lose many benefits."

CNN's MJ Lee, Lauren Fox and Jim Acosta contributed to this report.

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Donald Trump has a chance to step up for a signature win - CNN

Paul Manafort, the onetime manager of the Trump presidential campaign, retroactively reported that his consulting firm had received more than $17 million in payments from a Ukrainian political party with ties to the Kremlin.

And in this weeks magazine, a Nixon biographer makes the case that President Trump has essentially misunderstood the F.B.I.s role. Since Watergate, the agency has come to view itself as an independent check on the president.

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Syrian and Russian officials rejected an American accusation that Syria was preparing for another chemical attack. Above, President Bashar al-Assad visiting troops at a Russian air base in western Syria.

President Trump conferred by phone with President Emmanuel Macron of France on finding a common response should the attack take place. Mr. Macron seized the opportunity to invite Mr. Trump to Paris for Bastille Day next month.

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Googles record 2.4 billion euro fine for violating European antitrust rules highlights the aggressive stance E.U. officials have taken in regulating many of the worlds largest technology companies.

Googles legal battle with the E.U. is far from over, but for now the focus will probably shift to changes the company will have to make to comply with the decision. Google is facing two separate antitrust charges related to Android, its mobile software.

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Its picnic season, and we have tips on how to make yours a success. (Two simple ones, often forgotten: Bring trash bags and enough water.)

Making a get-together a potluck, and moving it outside, instantly ensure things are more affordable and communal. Our food writer tagged along with a family that has perfected the art of the picnic in the park.

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Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and Wilbur Ross, the American commerce secretary, said they wanted to revive talks on a trans-Atlantic free trade deal.

Li Keqiang, Chinas premier, affirmed his countrys desire to be seen as the worlds new leader in free trade, in a speech at a World Economic Forum conference in Dalian, China.

Nestl said it was prepared to spend billions of dollars on stock buybacks and acquisitions. Heres a short history of the Swiss conglomerate, which sells more than 2,000 brands around the world.

Heres a snapshot of global markets.

Rogue police forces in Venezuela attacked the Supreme Court, dropping grenades from a helicopter, officials said. [The New York Times]

Few details have emerged in the car bombing in Kiev yesterday that killed a colonel in Ukraines military intelligence. [Kyiv Post]

The issue of same-sex marriage moved to the center of Germanys national election campaign. Martin Schulz, the left-wing candidate, demanded a parliamentary vote this week. [The New York Times]

Meanwhile, the Chaos Computer Club, a Hamburg collective, is working on hacker-proofing the German election in the fall. [Bloomberg Businessweek]

A court in the Netherlands ruled that the Dutch government was partly liable for the massacre of about 350 Muslim men in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica in 1995. [The New York Times]

Nicola Sturgeon, Scotlands first minister, postponed plans for a second independence referendum after her partys setback in Britains general election. [The Scotsman]

In Britain, the authorities identified more buildings with flammable facades, or cladding, similar to what was used on the London highrise that caught fire this month. The authorities in Germany evacuated a building with similar cladding. [The New York Times]

Tips, both new and old, for a more fulfilling life.

What prospective university students do online could have consequences in real life.

Ransomware is in the news. Heres how to protect yourself.

Recipe of the day: Somali-style rice, flavored by rich stock and an aromatic spice mixture.

Our photographer visited the charred countryside of Portugal, where survivors of the countrys worst wildfire in decades confronted anger and grief.

FIFA published an investigators top-secret report into the bidding for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups, which was widely reported to have been tainted by corruption.

Our Interpreter columnist explains why right-wing populism has not upended politics in Canada. (Theres no mention of Prime Minister Justin Trudeaus footwear, but our fashion team explored his sock diplomacy.)

In memoriam: Michael Nyqvist, the Swedish actor perhaps best known for the Dragon Tattoo trilogy, died at 56. And Alain Senderens, a founding father of nouvelle cuisine, died at 77.

Today is the 48th anniversary of the riots at the Stonewall Inn in New York City, a watershed moment in L.G.B.T. history.

The protests against a police raid helped galvanize the movement for gay rights. Former President Barack Obama made the bar an official U.S. monument last year, but Stonewall was already famous around the globe.

The name has come to be synonymous with gay pride. Among those invoking it: The Stonewall Hotel in Sydney, Australia, which is not actually a hotel, but a three-floor bar and club.

Theres also Stonewall in Britain, a charity that fights for the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals. Stonewall Japan says it has 2,000 members. Stonewall Javeriano, a student group in Colombia, has attracted attention outside the country for its existence at a Catholic university.

In the U.S., Stonewall is the name of a museum and archive in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., because the riots gave visibility to a community that had previously faced a life in the shadows, its executive director said.

And to make sure future generations learn its history, theres a new effort to record the oral histories of those who took part in the 1969 uprising, announced this month, with funding from Google.org.

Karen Zraick contributed reporting.

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BBC News

Irish reporter's unexpected encounter with Trump BBC News Irish reporter Caitrona Perry had an unexpected encounter with US President Donald Trump during his telephone conversation with Taoiseach (prime minister) Leo Varadkar. Mr Trump told Mr Varadkar Irish media were in the Oval Office and called over ... President Trump Was on a Diplomatic Call. He Paused It to Single Out a Female ReporterTIME Donald Trump Just Had The Weirdest Phone Call With Ireland's New LeaderHuffPost Did Donald Trump flirt with Irish reporter Caitriona Perry during diplomatic phone call?Telegraph.co.uk NDTV -Mirror.co.uk -NEWS.com.au all 135 news articles »

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Irish reporter's unexpected encounter with Trump - BBC News

Talk about fake news.

Time magazine has asked the Trump Organization to remove copies of a fake magazine cover featuring Donald Trump from its golf clubs walls.

The request came Tuesday after a Washington Post report found framed copies of Trump on the cover of Time displayed in at least five of Trumps clubs. The magazine cover, dated March 1, 2009, features the headline: Donald Trump: The Apprentice is a television smash!

However, there was no Time magazine published on March 1, 2009. Nor was Trump ever on the cover that year. And there are a number of design inaccuracies. I can confirm that this is not a real TIME cover, Time spokeswoman Kerri Chyka told the Post.

Just last year, Trump boasted about his Time magazine cover appearances. I think I was on the cover of Time magazine twice in my life and like six times in the last number of months, he said in July 2016. Perhaps he was counting the fake one before launching his presidential bid in 2015, Trump had only been on the cover once before, in 1989, according to Time.

Its not known who made the fake cover, but anyone with decent Photoshop skills could pull it off. There are also a number of websites that let users upload their own photos to make a mock magazine cover, usually to be used as gag gifts or to tout childrens athletic achievements.

Sports Illustrated, which also falls under the Time Inc. TIME, +0.00% umbrella, responded to the odd development with a wink Tuesday:

Fellow faux cover boy Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) also chimed in:

In real news, Trump could soon be on friendlier terms with Time. National Enquirer owner David Pecker, a longtime friend of Trumps, is considering buying the struggling publisher, according to a new report by The New Yorker.

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Time magazine wants Donald Trump's fake covers taken down - MarketWatch

(NEW YORK) President Trump's press aide Sarah Huckabee Sanders urged all Americans to watch an online video posted by a conservative provocateur with a CNN producer commenting on his network's coverage of Trump's connections to Russia.

Sanders, in the White House briefing, called producer John Bonifield's statements a disgrace to journalism. In the hidden camera video posted by James O'Keefe's Project Veritas, Bonifield is heard to say that the story was getting extensive coverage because it is good for the ratings.

Sanders said, "if the media can't be truthful and report the news, then that's a dangerous place for America."

During her briefing, she did not take any question from CNN correspondent Jeff Zeleny.

The video of Bonifield was released after three CNN journalists resigned Monday following the network's retraction of a story Friday about a supposed investigation into a pre-inaugural meeting between a Trump associate and the head of a Russian investment fund.

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Donald Trump's Press Aide Attacks CNN During Briefing - TIME

McCord had been carrying wiretapping gear at the Watergate. This was evidence of a federal crime the illegal interception of communications which meant the break-in was a case for the F.B.I. Wiretapping was standard practice at the F.B.I. under J. Edgar Hoover, who had ruled the bureau since 1924. But Hoover died six weeks before the Watergate break-in, and L. Patrick Gray, a lawyer at the Justice Department and a staunch Nixon loyalist, was named acting director. I dont believe he could bring himself to suspect his superiors in the White House a suspicion which was well within the Watergate investigating agents world by about the third or fourth week, Mindermann said.

A month after the break-in, Mindermann and a colleague named Paul Magallanes found their way to Judy Hoback, a Creep accountant. The interview at her home in suburban Maryland went on past 3 a.m. By the time Mindermann and Magallanes stepped out into the cool night air, they had learned from Hoback that $3 million or more in unaccountable cash was sloshing around at Creep, to finance crimes like the Watergate break-in. Both men sensed instinctively that people in the White House itself were involved, Magallanes, who is now 79 and runs an international security firm near Los Angeles, told me. Mindermann said he felt a dark dread that this is happening in our democracy. By 10:45 that morning, the agents had typed up a 19-page statement that laid out Creeps direct connections to Nixons inner circle.

Mindermann, the young ex-cop with five $27 department-store suits to his name, remembers the presidents men who stonewalled the investigation throughout 1972 and early 1973 as Ivy Leaguers in their custom-fitted finery these privileged boys born to be federal judges and Wall Street barons. They were gutless and completely self-serving. They lacked the ability to do the right thing. By late April 1973, however, the stonewalls were crumbling. On Friday, April 27, as Nixon flew off to Camp David for the weekend, mulling his dark future, the F.B.I. moved to secure White House records relevant to Watergate.

At 5:15 p.m., 15 agents arose from their dented metal desks in the Old Post Office building and marched in tight formation, fully armed, up Pennsylvania Avenue. On Monday, a highly agitated Nixon returned to the White House to find a skinny F.B.I. accountant standing watch outside a West Wing office. The president pushed him up against a wall and demanded to know how he had the authority to invade the White House. Mindermann laughed at the memory: What do you do, he said, when youre mugged by the president of the United States?

I take the president at his word that I was fired because of the Russia investigation, James Comey, the former F.B.I. director, said in June, testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee a month after his abrupt dismissal from his post by the president. Comey was referring to the account Trump gave in an NBC interview on May 11 and Comey fought back on the rest of the story as Trump told it. Trump, he said, chose to defame me and, more importantly, the F.B.I. by saying that the organization was in disarray, that it was poorly led, that the work force had lost confidence in its leader. Those were lies, plain and simple.

Trump, Comey said, had asked his F.B.I. director for his loyalty and that seemed to shock Comey the most. The F.B.I.s stated mission is to protect the American people and uphold the Constitution of the United States not to protect the president. Trump seemed to believe Comey was dutybound to do his bidding and stop investigating the recently fired national security adviser, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn. The statue of Justice has a blindfold on because youre not supposed to be peeking out to see whether your patron is pleased or not with what youre doing, Comey said. It should be about the facts and the law.

Trump might have been less confused about how Comey saw his job if he had ever visited the F.B.I. director in his office. On his desk, under glass, Comey famously kept a copy of a 1963 order authorizing Hoover to conduct round-the-clock F.B.I. surveillance of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It was signed by the young attorney general, Robert F. Kennedy, after Hoover convinced John F. Kennedy and his brother that King had Communists in his organization a reminder of the abuses of power that had emanated from the desk where Comey sat.

One of historys great what-ifs is whether the Watergate investigation would have gone forward if Hoover hadnt died six weeks before the break-in. When Hoover died, Nixon called him my closest personal friend in all of political life. Along with Senator Joseph McCarthy, they were the avatars of anti-Communism in America. Hoovers F.B.I. was not unlike what Trump seems to have imagined the agency still to be: a law-enforcement apparatus whose flexible loyalties were bent to fit the whims of its director. In his half-century at the helm of the F.B.I., Hoover rarely approved cases against politicians. In the 1960s, he much preferred going after the civil rights and antiwar movements and their leaders, and his agents routinely broke the law in the name of the law.

In 1975, however, Congress, emboldened by Watergate and newly attuned to its watchdog responsibilities, began its first full-scale investigation of this legacy, and of similar abuses at the C.I.A. Edward Levi, Gerald Fords attorney general, gave the F.B.I. an unprecedented assignment: investigating itself. Fifty-three agents were soon targets of investigations by their own agency, implicated in crimes committed in the name of national security. Mark Felt, the agencys second-in-command (who 30 years later revealed himself to have been Bob Woodwards source Deep Throat), and Ed Miller, the F.B.I.s intelligence director, were convicted of conspiring to violate the civil rights of Americans. (President Ronald Reagan later pardoned them.) The F.B.I.s rank and file felt it was under attack. Every jot of wrongdoing whether real, imagined or grossly exaggerated now commands an extraordinary amount of attention, Clarence Kelley, the F.B.I. director under Presidents Nixon, Ford and Jimmy Carter, said in 1976. The American people, he argued, could not long endure a crippled and beleaguered F.B.I.

The Iran-contra scandal provided the bureau with its first great post-Watergate test. On Oct. 5, 1986, Sandinistas in Nicaragua shot down a cargo plane, which bore an unassuming transport-company name but was found to contain 60 Kalashnikov rifles, tens of thousands of cartridges and other gear. One crew member was captured and revealed the first inklings of what turned out to be an extraordinary plot. Reagans national-security team had conspired to sell American weapons to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and, after marking up the price fivefold, skimmed the proceeds and slipped them to the anti-Communist contra rebels in Nicaragua. This was a direct violation of federal law, as Congress had passed a bill cutting off aid to the rebels, which made Iran-contra a case for the F.B.I.

In a major feat of forensics, F.B.I. agents recovered 5,000 deleted emails from National Security Council office computers, which laid out the scheme from start to finish. They opened a burn bag of top-secret documents belonging to the N.S.C. aide Oliver North and found a copy of elaborately falsified secret testimony to Congress. They dusted it for fingerprints and found ones belonging to Clair George, chief of the clandestine service of the C.I.A. In short order, an F.B.I. squad was inside C.I.A. headquarters, rifling through double-locked file cabinets. Almost all the major evidence that led to the indictments of 12 top national-security officials was uncovered by the F.B.I.

George H.W. Bush pardoned many of the key defendants at the end of his presidency, on Christmas Eve 1992 just as Reagan pardoned Mark Felt and Ford pardoned Nixon. This was the limit of the agencys influence, the one presidential power that the F.B.I. could not fight. But over the course of two decades and five presidents, the post-Hoover relationship between the F.B.I. and the White House had settled into a delicate balance between the rule of law and the chief of state. Presidents could use secrecy, and sometimes outright deception, to push their executive powers to the limit. But the F.B.I., through its investigative brief, retained a powerful unofficial check on these privileges: the ability to amass, and unveil, deep secrets of state. The agency might not have been able to stop presidents like Nixon and Reagan from overreaching, but when it did intervene, there was little presidents could do to keep the F.B.I. from making their lives very difficult as Bill Clinton discovered in 1993, when he appointed Louis J. Freeh as his F.B.I. director.

Freeh was an F.B.I. agent early in his career but had been gone from the agency for some time when he was named to run it so he was alarmed to discover, shortly after he started his new job, that the F.B.I. was in the midst of investigating real estate deals involving the Clintons in Arkansas. Freeh quickly turned in his White House pass. He saw Clinton as a criminal suspect in the Whitewater affair, in which the F.B.I. and a special prosecutor bushwhacked through the brambles of Arkansas politics and business for four years and, through a most circuitous route, wound up grilling a 24-year-old former White House intern named Monica Lewinsky in a five-star hotel. The bureau, through the White House physician, had blood drawn from the president to match the DNA on Lewinskys blue dress evidence that the president perjured himself under oath about sex, opening the door to his impeachment by the House of Representatives.

He came to believe that I was trying to undo his presidency, Freeh wrote of Clinton in his memoir. Clintons allies complained after the fact that Freehs serial investigations of the president were not just a headache but also a fatal distraction. From 1996 to 2001, when Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden bombed two American Embassies in Africa and plotted the Sept. 11 attacks, the F.B.I. spent less time and money on any counterterrorism investigation than it did investigating claims that Chinese money bought influence over President Clinton though illegal 1996 campaign contributions an immense project that eventually became a fiasco on its own terms. One of the F.B.I.s informants in the investigation was a socially prominent and politically connected Californian named Katrina Leung. At the time, Leung was in a sexual relationship with her F.B.I. handler, James J. Smith, chief of the bureaus Los Angeles branchs China squad. Smith had reason to suspect that Leung might be a double agent working for Chinese intelligence, but he protected her anyway.

The F.B.I. buried the scandal until after Clinton left the White House in 2001. By the time it came to light, Freeh was out the door, and President George W. Bush had chosen Robert Mueller as the sixth director of the F.B.I.

Born into a wealthy family, Mueller exemplified the tradition of the muscular Christian that came out of the English public-school world of the 19th century, Maxwell King, Muellers classmate at St. Pauls, the elite New England prep school, told me. Mueller arrived at F.B.I. headquarters with a distinguished military record he earned a bronze star as a Marine in Vietnam and years of service as a United States attorney and Justice Department official. It was a week before the Sept. 11 attacks, and he was inheriting an agency ill suited for the mission that would soon loom enormously before it. Richard A. Clarke, the White House counterterrorism czar under Clinton and Bush, later wrote that Freehs F.B.I. had not done enough to seek out foreign terrorists. Clarke also wrote that Freehs counterterror chief, Dale Watson, had told him: We have to smash the F.B.I. into bits and rebuild it.

Mueller had already earned the respect of the F.B.I. rank and file during his tenure as chief of the criminal division of the Justice Department. When he started work at the Justice Department in 1990, the F.B.I. had been trying and failing for two years to solve the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. The F.B.I. was not set up to deal with a major investigation like this, Richard Marquise, an F.B.I. intelligence analyst who became the leader of the Lockerbie investigation under Mueller, said in an F.B.I. oral history. I blame the institution.

Mueller used his power under law to obliterate the F.B.I.s byzantine flow charts of authority in the case. We literally cut out the chains of command, Marquise said. We brought in the C.I.A. We brought the Scots. We brought MI5 to Washington. And we sat down and we said: We need to change the way were doing business. ... We need to start sharing information. It was a tip from the Scots that put Marquise on the trail of the eventual suspect: one of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafis intelligence officers, whose cover was security chief for the Libyan state airlines. Qaddafis spy, Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, was indicted in 1991. It took until the turn of the 21st century, but he was convicted.

It meant a great deal to Mueller, in the Lockerbie case, that the evidence the F.B.I. produced be deployed as evidence in court, not justification for war. In a speech he gave at Stanford University in 2002, concerning the nations newest threat, he spoke of the balance we must strike to protect our national security and our civil liberties as we address the threat of terrorism. He concluded: We will be judged by history, not just on how we disrupt and deter terrorism, but also on how we protect the civil liberties and the constitutional rights of all Americans, including those Americans who wish us ill. We must do both of these things, and we must do them exceptionally well.

These views made Mueller something of an outlier in the Bush administration; five days after the Sept. 11 attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney was warning that the White House needed to go over to the dark side to fight Al Qaeda. Among the darkest places was a top-secret program code-named Stellar Wind, under which the N.S.A. eavesdropped freely in the United States without search warrants.

By the end of 2003, Mueller had a new boss: James Comey, who was named deputy attorney general. Comey was read into the Stellar Wind program and deemed it unconstitutional. He briefed Mueller, who concurred. They saw no evidence that the surveillance had saved a single life, stopped an imminent attack or uncovered an Al Qaeda member in the United States. In the first week of March, the two men agreed that the F.B.I. could not continue to go along with the surveillance programs. They also thought Attorney General John Ashcroft should not re-endorse Stellar Wind. Comey made the case to Ashcroft.

In remarkable congressional testimony in 2007, Comey would describe what happened next: Hours later, Ashcroft keeled over with gallstone pancreatitis. He was sedated and scheduled for surgery. Comey was now the acting attorney general. He and the president were required to reauthorize Stellar Wind on March 11 for the program to continue. When Comey learned the White House counsel and chief of staff were heading to the hospital of the night of March 10 to get the signature of the barely conscious Ashcroft, Comey raced to Ashcrofts hospital room to head them off. When they arrived, Ashcroft lifted his head off the pillow and told the presidents men that he wouldnt sign. Pointing at Comey, he said: There is the attorney general.

Bush signed the authorization alone anyway, asserting that he had constitutional power to do so. Mueller took meticulous notes of these events; they were partly declassified years later. On March 11, he wrote that the president was trying to do an end run around Comey, at the time the nations chief law-enforcement officer. At 1:30 a.m. on March 12, Mueller drafted a letter of resignation. I am forced to withdraw the F.B.I. from participation in the program, he wrote. If the president did not back down, I would be constrained to resign as director of the F.B.I. And Comey and Ashcroft would go with him.

Seven hours later, with the letter in the breast pocket of his suit, Mueller sat alone with Bush in the Oval Office. Once again, the F.B.I. had joined a battle against a president. Muellers notes show that he told Bush in no uncertain terms that a presidential order alone could not legalize Stellar Wind. Unless the N.S.A. brought Stellar Wind within the constraints of the law, he would lose his F.B.I. director, the attorney general and the acting attorney general. In the end, Bush relented it took years, but the programs were put on what Mueller considered a defensible legal footing.

Trumps showdown with Comey and its aftermath is the fifth confrontation between the F.B.I. and a sitting president since the death of J. Edgar Hoover, and the first in which the presidents principal antagonists, Mueller and Comey, have been there before. When Bush faced the same two men, he was acutely aware of the history that attended their confrontation. He wrote later that he realized their resignations could be the second coming of the Saturday Night Massacre, the penultimate disaster of Nixons presidency, when the embattled president keelhauled the special prosecutor pursuing the secret White House tapes and lost his attorney general and deputy attorney general in the process. The question is whether Trump cares enough about the consequences of history to avoid repeating it.

For the Watergate veterans John Mindermann and Paul Magallanes, the news of recent weeks has come with a certain amount of professional gratification. When I spoke with them on June 14, both agents said they wanted the bureaus role as a check on the president to be in the public eye. For years, they felt that their own work had gone unacknowledged. We never got an attaboy letter from our superiors, Mindermann said. But we changed history, and we knew it. Magallanes had always been bothered by how, in the collective American memory, Nixons downfall was attributed to so many other authors: Woodward and Bernstein, crusading congressional committees, hard-nosed special prosecutors. To the agents who were present at the time, it was first and foremost an F.B.I. story. We were the people who did the work, Magallanes told me. It was we, the F.B.I., who brought Richard Nixon down. We showed that our government can investigate itself.

Tim Weiner was a reporter for The Times from 1993 to 2009. His work on national security has won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. His books include Enemies: A History of the F.B.I.

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A version of this article appears in print on July 2, 2017, on Page MM27 of the Sunday Magazine.

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How Donald Trump Misunderstood the FBI - New York Times

President Donald Trump arrives for a rally on June 21, 2017 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Trump spoke about renegotiating NAFTA and building a border wall that would produce solar power during the rally.

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When Donald Trump chatted with three Reuters reporters in April, he handed each of them a map memorializing his win over Hillary Clinton. Its pretty good, right? the president asked before adding, The red is obviously us. This was not an outlier. Trump also bragged about his election victory at a Republican Party retreat in Philadelphia days after the inauguration, during an appearance with the president of Romania, and in response to a question about anti-Semitism.

Slates Donald Trump Election Brag Tracker keeps a close watch on the presidents penchant for praising his own remarkable performance in the 2016 election, a contest in which he lost the popular vote.

Want to know the last time Trump bragged about the election?

Type inwhenwasthelasttimetrumpbraggedabouttheelection.comand youll be redirected to this page.

We cant do this tracking without your help. If we missed any Trump election brags, or if you hear a new one, let us know by filling out this form.

Torie Bosch is the editor of Future Tense, a project of Slate, New America, and Arizona State that looks at the implications of new technologies.

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The Donald Trump Election Brag Tracker - Slate Magazine