Monthly Archives: June 2017

The testimony, which Comey is set to deliver Thursday in one of the most highly-anticipated Congressional hearing in decades, reads like a point-by-point dismissal of Trump's version of events -- casting Comey as wary from the get-go of a chief executive who seemed to presume too much and know too little.

In the wake of their first interaction, ever, on January 6, Comey decided that it was necessary to have written documentation of any time he spent with Trump.

"I felt compelled to document my first conversation with the President-Elect in a memo. To ensure accuracy, I began to type it on a laptop in an FBI vehicle outside Trump Tower the moment I walked out of the meeting. Creating written records immediately after one-on-one conversations with Mr. Trump was my practice from that point forward. This had not been my practice in the past. I spoke alone with President Obama twice in person (and never on the phone) -- once in 2015 to discuss law enforcement policy issues and a second time, briefly, for him to say goodbye in late 2016. In neither of those circumstances did I memorialize the discussions. I can recall nine one-on-one conversations with President Trump in four months -- three in person and six on the phone."

It only gets worse from there for Trump in Comey's opening statement.

Comey says that he was surprised to learn that a dinner invitation extended to him by Trump on Jan. 27 was for just the two of them ("It turned out to be just the two of us, seated at a small oval table in the center of the Green Room," Comey writes. "Two Navy stewards waited on us, only entering the room to serve food and drinks.") and that the goal of the meeting was "an effort to have me ask for my job and create some sort of patronage relationship."

Twice in that meeting Trump, recounted Comey, made a direct request for loyalty from the FBI director. "I need loyalty, I expect loyalty," Trump told Comey. Later, he returned to the subject. Here's Comey's recollection:

"He then said, 'I need loyalty.' I replied, 'You will always get honesty from me.' He paused and then said, 'That's what I want, honest loyalty.' I paused, and then said, 'You will get that from me.'"

Comey also confirmed in his written testimony that Trump directly asked him to "let go" of the investigation into deposed national security adviser Michael Flynn. Quoting Trump, Comey writes of the Feb. 14 meeting in the Oval Office: "I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go."

I mean. Holy crap.

Then there is this, from Comey's after-action report of that meeting: "I had understood the President to be requesting that we drop any investigation of Flynn in connection with false statements about his conversations with the Russian ambassador in December."

While Comey noted that he did not believe Trump was asking for the entire Russia investigation to disappear, that the sitting FBI director did believe the sitting president was asking to have a federal investigation of any sort dropped is, well, stunning.

In their final conversation -- a phone call from Trump to Comey on April 11 -- the president again sought to secure Comey's loyalty, according to the former FBI Director's re-telling.

After Comey tells Trump that he should contact the deputy Attorney General's office in regards to his repeated request to "get out" the news that he was not a target of the federal investigation, here's how Comey remembers the president's response:

"He said he would do that and added, 'Because I have been very loyal to you, very loyal; we had that thing you know.' I did not reply or ask him what he meant by 'that thing.' I said only that the way to handle it was to have the White House Counsel call the Acting Deputy Attorney General. He said that was what he would do and the call ended."

"We had that thing you know."

If there is a single sentence that will become the symbol of Comey's testimony -- or even of Trump's broader interactions with the FBI director -- it's that. Trump trying to establish some rapport or, really, some sense of "you owe me" while Comey stares blankly.

The broader picture presented by Comey's testimony is deeply damaging to Trump.

That Trump and Comey had nine one-on-one conversations in the space of just over three months -- as opposed to the two one-on-one chats Comey had with Obama in eight years -- is hugely telling. And, in those conversations Trump is repeatedly cast as attempting to secure Comey's loyalty -- and, at times, suggesting his job depends on it. (FBI directors are appointed for 10 year terms but, as we know, can be fired at any time by a president.) That he asks for Comey to end the probe into Flynn is, at minimum a massive breach of protocol.

Trump and his allies will work to dismiss Comey's testimony -- and his answers in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee tomorrow -- as, at best, a "he said, he said" situation and, at worst, "fake news."

Continued here:

James Comey just went nuclear on Donald Trump - CNN International

No more.

Why? It's simple: Sessions admitted he did something wrong. He made a concession that, in Trump's mind, is the root of many of the Russia-related problems he is now dealing with.

Apparently his decision caught Trump by surprise. And the President was not happy. You can tell that by reading the statement he put out at the time. Here it is:

"Jeff Sessions is an honest man. He did not say anything wrong. He could have stated his response more accurately, but it was clearly not intentional. This whole narrative is a way of saving face for Democrats losing an election that everyone thought they were supposed to win. The Democrats are overplaying their hand. They lost the election and now, they have lost their grip on reality. The real story is all of the illegal leaks of classified and other information. It is a total witch hunt!"

Remember -- because Jeff Sessions apparently didn't -- that one of the cardinal rules of Trumpism is that you never ever apologize or concede anything. Give them an inch and they'll take a mile -- and all that.

To Trump's mind, you can draw a straight line between what he believes was Sessions' very dumb decision to recuse himself and the fact that former FBI Director Robert Mueller is now leading a special counsel investigation into Russia's meddling and the possibility of collusion between the Russians and elements of the Trump campaign.

Sessions' recusal, in Trump's mind, led to then-FBI Director James Comey leading the investigation. Comey's aggressiveness on the Russia probe -- wholly misguided to Trump's mind -- led the President to fire him using the pretext of a memo bashing Comey written by deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. And, because Rosenstein wrote that memo, he felt the need to appoint a special counsel to oversee the investigation for fear his reputation was on the line. Hence, Mueller.

See? It all makes sense! Right? Right???

Donald Trump is big on scapegoats. Usually the media fills that role nicely. But, as it relates to the trouble he finds himself in on Russia, it's Sessions who has become the fall guy for Trump.

The truth, of course, is that a large chunk of Trump's Russia problems are his own fault. Had he, from the start, welcomed the investigation with open arms or, I don't know, not fired the guy leading it, he would be in a much better place than he finds himself today.

It's a self-inflicted wound that Trump is blaming someone else for inflicting. Which, come to think of it, is the story of his presidency to date.

Read this article:

Jeff Sessions committed the one sin Donald Trump can't forgive - CNN

Its Infrastructure Week at the White House. Theoretically.

On Monday, the administration announced a plan to spend $200 billion on infrastructure and overhaul U.S. air traffic control. There was a high-profile signing in the East Wing before dozens of cheering lawmakers and industry titans. It was supposed to be the beginning of a weeklong push to fix Americas roads, bridges, and airports.

But in the next two days, Trump spent more energy burning metaphorical bridges than trying to build literal ones. He could have stayed on message for several hours, gathered Democrats and Republicans to discuss a bipartisan agreement, and announced a timeframe. Instead he quickly turned his attention to Twitter to accuse media companies of Fake News while undermining an alliance with Qatar based on what may be, fittingly, a fake news story.

Its a microcosm of this administrations approach to public policy. A high-profile announcement, coupled with an ambitious promise, subsumed by an unrelated, self-inflicted public-relations crisis, followed by nothing.

The secret of the Trump infrastructure plan is: There is no infrastructure plan. Just like there is no White House tax plan. Just like there was no White House health care plan. More than 120 days into Trumps term in a unified Republican government, Trumps policy accomplishments have been more in the subtraction category (e.g., stripping away environmental regulations) than addition. The president has signed no major legislation and left significant portions of federal agencies unstaffed, as U.S. courts have blocked what would be his most significant policy achievement, the legally dubious immigration ban.

The simplest summary of White House economic policy to date is four words long: There is no policy.

Consider the purported focus of this week. An infrastructure plan ought to include actual proposals, like revenue-and-spending details and timetables. The Trump infrastructure plan has little of that. Even the presidents speech on Monday was devoid of specifics. (An actual line was: We have studied numerous countries, one in particular, they have a very, very good system; ours is going to top it by a lot.) The ceremonial signing on Monday was pure theater. The president, flanked by politicians and businesspeople smiling before the twinkling of camera flashes, signed a paper that merely asks Congress to work on a bill. An assistant could have done that via email. Meanwhile, Congress isnt working on infrastructure at all, according to Politico, and Republicans have shown no interest in a $200 billion spending bill.

In short, this plan is not a plan, so much as a Potemkin policy, a presentation devised to show the press and the public that the president has an economic agenda. The show continued on Wednesday, as the president delivered an infrastructure speech in Cincinnati that criticized Obamacare, hailed his Middle East trip, and offered no new details on how his plan would work. Infrastructure Week is a series of scheduled performances to make it look as if the president is hard at work on a domestic agenda that cannot move forward because it does not exist.

Journalists are beginning to catch on. The administrations policy drought has so far been obscured by a formulaic bait-and-switch strategy one could call the Two-Week Two-Step. Bloomberg has compiled several examples of the president promising major proposals or decisions on everything from climate-change policy to infrastructure in two weeks. He has missed the fortnight deadline almost every time.

The starkest false promise has been taxes. Were going to be announcing something I would say over the next two or three weeks, Trump said of tax reform in early February. Eleven weeks later, in late April, the White House finally released a tax proposal. It was hardly one page long.

Arriving nine weeks late, the document was so vague that tax analysts marveled that they couldnt even say how it would work. Even its authors are confused: Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has repeatedly declined to say whether the plan will cut taxes on the rich, even though cutting taxes on the rich is ostensibly the centerpiece. Perhaps its because he needs more help: None of the key positions for making domestic tax policy have been filled. There is no assistant secretary for tax policy, nor deputy assistant secretary for tax analysis, according to the Treasury Department.

Once again, the simplest summary of White House tax policy is: There is no plan. There isnt even a complete staff to compose one.

The story is slightly different for the White House budget, but no more favorable. The budget suffers, not from a lack of details, but from a failure of numeracy that speaks to the administrations indifference toward serious public policy. The authors double-counted a projected benefit from higher GDP growth, leading to $2 trillion math error, perhaps the largest ever in a White House proposal. The plan included hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue from the estate tax, which appears to be another mistake, since the White House has separately proposed eliminating it.

Does the presidents budget represent what the presidents policies will be? It should, after all. But asked this very question, Mick Mulvaney, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, made perhaps the strangest claim of all: I wouldnt take whats in the budget as indicative of what our proposals are, he said.

This haphazard approach extends to the repeal of Obamacare, which may yet pass the Senate, but with little help or guidance from the president. Trump has allowed House Speaker Paul Ryan to steer the Obamacare-replacement bill, even though it violates the presidents campaign promises to expand coverage and protect Medicaid. After its surprising passage in the House, he directly undercut it on Twitter by suggesting he wants to raise federal health spending. Even on the most basic question of health-care policyshould spending go up, or down?the presidents Twitter account and his favored law are irreconcilable. A law cannot raise and slash health care funding at the same time. The Trump health care plan does not exist.

It would be a mistake to call this a policy-free presidency. Trump has signed several executive orders undoing Obama-era regulations, removing environmental protections, and banning travel from several Muslim-majority countries. He has challenged NATO and pulled out of the Paris Accords. But these accomplishments all have one thing in common: Trump was able to do them alone. Signing executive orders and making a speech dont require the participation of anybody in government except for the president.

Its no surprise that a former chief executive of a private company would be more familiar with the presumption of omnipotence than the reality of divided powers. As the head of his own organization, Trump could make unilateral orders that subordinates would have to follow. But passing a law requires tireless persuasion and the cooperation of hundreds of representatives in the House and Senate who cannot be fired for insubordination. Being the president of the United States is nothing like being a CEO, especially not one of an eponymous family company.

Republicans in the House and Senate dont need the presidents permission to write laws, either. Still, they too have struggled to get anything done. Several GOP senators say they may not repeal Obamacare this yearor ever. It is as if, after seven years of protesting Obamacare, the party lost the muscle memory to publicly defend and enact legislation.

In this respect, Trump and his party are alikeunited in their antagonism toward Obama-era policies and united in their inability to articulate what should come next. Republicans are trapped by campaign promises that they cannot fulfill. The White House is trapped inside of the presidents perpetual campaign, a cavalcade of economic promises divorced from any effort to detail, advocate, or enact major economic legislation. With an administration that uses public policy as little more than a photo op, get ready for many sequels to this summers Infrastructure Week.

Read more here:

The Potemkin Policies of Donald Trump - The Atlantic