Monthly Archives: August 2017

Presidential vacations and getaways

President Donald Trump listens to a high school marching band as he arrives at the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida, in February 2017. He and the first lady were spending a weekend away from the White House. Here's a look at how Trump and other US presidents have escaped the pressures of the Oval Office.

Presidential vacations and getaways

President Barack Obama prepares to putt as he plays golf with Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak at the Marine Corps Base in Hawaii in December 2014.

Presidential vacations and getaways

President George W. Bush rides a bicycle at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, in August 2007.

Presidential vacations and getaways

President-elect Bill Clinton plays volleyball on a Pacific Coast beach in November 1992.

Presidential vacations and getaways

President George H.W. Bush pauses to speak to the media while he plays golf in Kennebunkport, Maine, in August 1990.

Presidential vacations and getaways

President Ronald Reagan and first lady Nancy Reagan ride horses at their vacation home in Santa Barbara, California, in November 1982.

Presidential vacations and getaways

President-elect Jimmy Carter vacations at St. Simons, an island off the coast of Georgia, in November 1976.

Presidential vacations and getaways

President Gerald Ford opens a gift from his wife, Betty, during their usual Christmas vacation spot in Vail, Colorado, in December 1974.

Presidential vacations and getaways

President Richard Nixon and his wife, Pat, walk along the beach in San Clemente, California, in 1971.

Presidential vacations and getaways

President Lyndon B. Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird, often vacationed at the LBJ Ranch in Johnson City, Texas.

Presidential vacations and getaways

President John F. Kennedy vacations with his family in this undated photo. From left is daughter Caroline, first lady Jacqueline and son John Jr.

Presidential vacations and getaways

In 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower fishes the North Platte River at the Swan Hereford Ranch in Colorado. Eisenhower also enjoyed golf trips to Augusta, Georgia.

Presidential vacations and getaways

President Harry Truman holds a news conference during a vacation in 1951.

Presidential vacations and getaways

President Franklin D. Roosevelt swims in Warm Springs, Georgia.

Presidential vacations and getaways

President Herbert Hoover and his wife, Lou Henry, sit on the porch of their Radipan Camp retreat, which is now part of the Shenandoah National Park in Virginia. Hoover originally bought the land for the vacation spot in 1929.

Presidential vacations and getaways

President Calvin Coolidge poses in personalized chaps with his wife, Grace, at a party in South Dakota in 1927. The party celebrated the Fourth of July as well as Coolidge's 55th birthday.

Presidential vacations and getaways

President Warren Harding, right, goes camping with Firestone Tire founder Harvey Firestone in 1921.

Presidential vacations and getaways

President William H. Taft, center, enjoys a round of golf at the Chevy Chase Country Club in Maryland in 1909.

Presidential vacations and getaways

President Theodore Roosevelt's Sagamore Hill home, in Oyster Bay, New York, often served as his vacation retreat.

Presidential vacations and getaways

President Ulysses Grant enjoys the porch of his cottage by the sea in Elberon, New Jersey, in 1872.

Presidential vacations and getaways

President Abraham Lincoln's summer retreat was just a few miles from the White House, and he used to commute between the two on horseback. Now known as the Lincoln Cottage, it features a life-size statue of the 16th president.

Presidential vacations and getaways

President Thomas Jefferson liked to spend time at Monticello, his home in Virginia. In 1805, he spent nearly four months there while in office.

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Donald Trump is going on a 17-day vacation. Who cares? Except... - CNN

(WASHINGTON) Attorney General Jeff Sessions has pledged to clamp down on government leaks that he said undermine American security, taking an aggressive public stand after being called weak on the matter by President Donald Trump.

The nation's top law enforcement official is citing no current investigations in which disclosures of information had jeopardized the country, but says the number of criminal leak probes had more than tripled in the early months of the Trump administration.

Justice Department officials are reviewing guidelines put in place to make it difficult for the government to subpoena journalists about their sources, and aren't ruling out the possibility that a reporter could be prosecuted.

"No one is entitled to surreptitiously fight to advance their battles in the media by revealing sensitive government information," Sessions said Friday in an announcement that followed a series of news reports this year on the Trump campaign and White House that have relied on classified information. "No government can be effective when its leaders cannot discuss sensitive matters in confidence or talk freely in confidence with foreign leaders."

Media advocacy organizations condemned the announcement, with Bruce Brown, the executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, saying the decision to review existing guidelines was "deeply troubling."

Meanwhile, a White House adviser raised the possibility of lie detector tests for the small number of people in the West Wing and elsewhere with access to transcripts of Trump's phone calls. The Washington Post on Thursday published transcripts of his conversations with the leaders of Mexico and Australia.

Trump counselor Kellyanne Conway told "Fox & Friends" that "it's easier to figure out who's leaking than the leakers may realize." And might lie detectors be used? She said: "Well, they may, they may not."

Trump's outbursts against media organizations he derides as "fake news" have led to predictions that his administration will more aggressively try to root out leakers, and the timing of the Justice Department's announcement one week after the president complained on Twitter that Sessions had been weak on "intel leakers" raised questions about whether the attorney general's action was aimed at quelling the anger of the man who appointed him.

Sessions said in his remarks that his department has more than tripled the number of active leaks investigations compared with the number pending when President Barack Obama left office, and the number of referrals to the Justice Department for potential investigation of unauthorized disclosures had "exploded." The Justice Department under Sessions is prosecuting a contractor in Georgia accused of leaking a classified government report to a media organization.

"This nation must end this culture of leaks. We will investigate and seek to bring criminals to justice. We will not allow rogue anonymous sources with security clearances to sell out our country," Sessions said in his remarks.

Media organizations also had an often-tense relationship with the Obama administration, whose Justice Department brought more leaks cases than during all previous administrations combined and was criticized for maneuvers seen as needlessly aggressive and intrusive.

That included a secret subpoena of phone records of Associated Press reporters and editors following a 2012 story about a foiled bomb plot, and the labeling of a Fox News journalist as a "co-conspirator" after a report on North Korea. The Justice Department also abandoned a yearslong effort to force a New York Times journalist to reveal his source in the trial of a former CIA officer who was later found guilty of disclosing classified information.

Following consultation with media lawyers, the Justice Department in 2015 revised its guidelines for leak investigations to require additional levels of approval before a reporter could be subpoenaed, including from the attorney general.

But Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said Friday that they were reviewing how the department conducts leak investigations and whether current regulations impose too many hurdles on their work. Rosenstein declined to comment when asked whether the department would rule out prosecuting journalists.

Rosenstein said the department expected to consult with media representatives about possible changes to the regulations, though any efforts to undo protections for journalists or to make it easier to target sources will encounter deep opposition from news organizations.

"The current guidelines reflect a great deal of good-faith discussion between the news media and a wide range of interests from within the Department of Justice, including career prosecutors and key nonpolitical personnel," said Brown, of the press freedom group. "They carefully balance the need to enforce the law and protect national security with the value of a free press that can hold the government accountable to the people."

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Jeff Sessions: Active Leak Probes Have Tripled Under Donald Trump - TIME

Im the worlds greatest person that does not want to let people into their country.

So proclaimed Donald Trump to Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull in a January phone call, according a transcript published Thursday by the Washington Post. Presumably, he meant that he was the most recognizable immigration restrictionist in the world, although he may also have been complimenting his own virtue, crowning himself a great man of history on the strength of his restrictionism.

What is so striking about Trumps language is that it shows his own view of his authority and of his policymaking to be more royalist than republican. Law and order itself? That is nothing, compared to protecting the sovereigns image and obeying his personal wishes.

The contrast between these two men was also enlightening. Turnbull acknowledges the political realities confronting Trump, but speaks of the majesty of the law itself, not the ruler. He tries to explain how Australias consistent pattern of immigration enforcement accomplishes two things at once: 1) It insulates Australian immigration law from the pressure that such laws always face when facts on the ground make a mockery of them; and 2) It has a humanitarian benefit for potential migrants because it discourages the unscrupulous human smugglers who rush in to take advantage of the market opportunity that lax enforcement creates. Its a policy with a logic that Turnbull and other Australians have been saying will eventually become obvious to Europe as it continues to struggle with its own migration crisis.

So we said if you try to come to Australia by boat, Turnbull explained to Trump, even if we think you are the best person in the world, even if you are a Noble [sic] Prize winning genius, we will not let you in. He then tried to return to the point that this discourages people-smugglers, only to be interrupted by Trump, speaking with what the reader can only imagine must have been a note of admiration in his voice: Thats a good idea. We should do that too. You are worse than I am.

In these words are a whole worldview.

This is the backhanded way that Trump talks about his own position on immigration. He practically admits that he does not think his own policy is good or just in its own right. In fact, he comes close to letting on that he thinks it is immoral.

Perhaps he believes that being a restrictionist is necessary all the same. Sometimes, a king has to greet lawlessness with mercy; other times, he has to show strength. It can depend on the sovereigns mood or on what is most expedient in a given moment. Trump is simply being tough. Hes misbehaving himself, but in the national interest. He looks up to Turnbull, because Turnbull has managed to be an even worse guy than he has.

It must be a burden for Trumps counterparts across the world to deal with his overly familiar and overly personal form of diplomacy. Turnbull tries to talk Trump down, noting that the agreement they are discussing essentially a swap of refugees between our two countries is already in place, implying that any trouble that came from their conversation could be blamed on the Obama administration. Trump says the deal to accept migrants is bad for his image. As if Australia were just one more television studios makeup room, and its head of state responsible for keeping the shine off Trumps chin.

Whatever his faults, President Obama never commented on his personal relationships with foreign leaders in real time. He soberly reflected on the shared interests between one nation, which he represented, and another, which his counterpart did. By contrast, Trump says he gets along with leaders as individuals, or has a great relationship with them.

You are in Trumps graces, or you are out of his graces. One week, China is trying to help with North Korea, and Beijing gets a kind tweet. A few weeks later, North Korea fires a few missiles into the Sea of Japan, and Beijing gets an unkind tweet.

The people who held their noses and voted for Trump in the hopes that he would bring sanity to American immigration policy should have new doubts after reading the Posts transcriptabout whether he has the stamina or strength of will to see the job through. If there was no real principle behind Trumps restrictionism if he was just telling his voters what they wanted to hear during the campaign then he is just as likely to abandon the position as hold onto it in the future.

We all know he is capable of turning on a dime. Even in the campaign, he went from saying that Mexico was sending bad hombres our way to whining that he had to hire foreign workers because America was too hot for Americans to work in during the busy season at his Florida hotels. If anything is clear about the man at this late date, its that no stance is truly non-negotiable.

Everyone acknowledges that Trump is a wildcard. He may believe hes a king, and act like it. But look again: Hes actually a Joker.

READ MORE: A Leak That Really Hurts Trump: The Series the Comedy We Want Invites the Tragedies We Dont Trumps Circular Firing Squad

Michael Brendan Dougherty is a senior writer at National Review.

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The president's conversation with Malcolm Turnbull offers a troubling window into his mind. - National Review

The Trump administration began the formal process to withdraw from the Paris climate accord, but says its willing to "re-engage" if terms more favorable to the U.S. are met.

The State Department said it notified the United Nations that the U.S. will pull out of the global agreement as soon as it can under the terms of the 2015 accord, but President Donald Trump would agree to remain in the deal was reconfigured to be better for U.S. interests.

As the President indicated in his June 1 announcement and subsequently, he is open to re-engaging in the Paris Agreement if the U.S. can identify terms that are more favorable to the United States, its businesses, its workers, its people, and its taxpayers, the State Department said.

The U.S. will continue to participate in international climate negotiations, including the upcoming UN meeting on climate change "to protect U.S. interests and ensure all future policy options remain open to the administration."

The filing by the State Department kicks off a withdrawal process that will take years to unfold and is largely symbolic. Under terms of the deal, the earliest the U.S. can formally remove itself from the accord is in November 2020 -- just after the next presidential election.

The Secretary General welcomes any effort to reengage in the Paris agreement by the United States, said Stphane Dujarric, spokesman for UN Secretary-General Antnio Guterres.

Trump announced in June that the U.S. would leave the Paris climate pact, saying it favors other nations at the expense of American workers, but remained open to seeking a better deal. That stance drew umbrage from world leaders, including those from France, Germany and Italy who have called the agreement "irreversible."

"We firmly believe that the Paris Agreement cannot be renegotiated, since it is a vital instrument for our planet, societies and economies," they said in a statement then.

Observers said they doubted the administration truly intended to renegotiate the climate deal.

"This reckless move by President Trump demonstrates that he has no real intent to renegotiate the Paris climate agreement, and would rather walk back from our international climate commitments altogether," Oxfam Americas Climate and Energy Director Heather Coleman said in a statement.

Continued here:

Donald Trump Notifies UN of Paris Exit While Keeping Option to Return - TIME