Just dropped · Trial Balloon · Ep. 194
What Just Happened?
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“Democrats who thought the sudden dismissal of FBI Director James Comey would finally jolt Republicans to back a special prosecutor to investigate Russian meddling in the 2016 campaign are going to be sorely disappointed,” Politico reports.
“Even Republicans who’ve criticized the timing behind the abrupt firing aren’t yet willing to trigger a confrontation with the Trump administration by demanding an independent counsel.”
“No such wall exists on the home front, which helps explain unexplainable mistakes like the handling of the Comey firing. So governing by grievance runs unimpeded.”
“Attorney General Jeff Sessions has a new directive for federal prosecutors across the country: charge suspects with the most serious offense you can prove,” CNN reports.
“Friday’s announcement follows a line of several other significant departures from Obama-era domestic policies at the Justice Department, but this decision crystalized Sessions’ position in the criminal justice realm.”
Chicago Sun Times: “That takes in spending for start-up construction, programming, staff and other operating expenses from 2015 to 2021… Obama is so confident of his fund-raising abilities that he intends to opt out of the National Archives and Records Administration system… Groundbreaking is expected sometime next year with the Center to open in 2022.”
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The New York Times reports on a private dinner President Trump had with FBI Director James Comey just seven days into the new administration.
“As they ate, the president and Mr. Comey made small talk about the election and the crowd sizes at Mr. Trump’s rallies. The president then turned the conversation to whether Mr. Comey would pledge his loyalty to him.”
“Mr. Comey declined to make that pledge. Instead, Mr. Comey has recounted to others, he told Mr. Trump that he would always be honest with him, but that he was not ‘reliable’ in the conventional political sense.”
“In a short period of time I understood everything there was to know about health care. And we did the right negotiating, and actually it’s a very interesting subject.”
— President Trump, in an interview with Time.
A source tells CBS News that the Russia investigation is considered to be “a crisis” within the FBI and “there is a whole lot of interfering.”
“The succession of events surrounding Comey’s firing is not considered to be a coincidence by the agency. In the week before he was terminated, Comey asked Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein for additional resources to pursue the Russia investigation.”
HuffPost: “The breadth of the president’s interference in the investigations of his own campaign has shocked officials at law enforcement agencies and on Capitol Hill, both for the extent to which it disregards political norms and the potential it has to upend legitimate oversight. And it’s forced a major readjustment within those agencies to try and immunize themselves from White House influence.”
For members: Trump’s Crisis Is About to Get Much Worse
In an interview with Time, President Trump said he has told the Navy to return to decades-old steam-powered catapult technology to launch aircraft from aircraft carriers, rather than use a new digital launch system.
You know the catapult is quite important. So I said what is this? Sir, this is our digital catapult system. He said well, we’re going to this because we wanted to keep up with modern [technology]. I said you don’t use steam anymore for catapult? No sir. I said, “Ah, how is it working?” “Sir, not good. Not good. Doesn’t have the power. You know the steam is just brutal. You see that sucker going and steam’s going all over the place, there’s planes thrown in the air.”
It sounded bad to me. Digital. They have digital. What is digital? And it’s very complicated, you have to be Albert Einstein to figure it out. And I said–and now they want to buy more aircraft carriers. I said what system are you going to be–”Sir, we’re staying with digital.” I said no you’re not. You going to goddamned steam, the digital costs hundreds of millions of dollars more money and it’s no good.
New York Times: “The House Republican campaign arm is increasingly at odds with the White House over how best to retain the party’s congressional majorities and, more broadly, who is in charge of the midterm campaign effort as Republicans spend millions of dollars in special elections to retain House seats in conservative-leaning districts.”
A new NBC News/Survey Monkey poll finds 54% of Americans think President Trump’s dismissal of FBI Director James Comey was not appropriate, while 38% say it was appropriate.
In addition, 46% think Trump fired Comey due to his handling of the Russia investigation, another 24% think the dismissal was due to the Clinton email investigation and 22% said it was something else.
“The White House has abandoned the idea of President Trump visiting FBI headquarters after being told he would not be greeted warmly,” administration officials tell NBC News.
“And FBI agents said that, while many of them voted for Trump, after the president unceremoniously fired a very popular director James Comey few were ready to meet him at the bureau with open arms.”
“When you’re attacking FBI agents because you’re under criminal investigation, you’re losing.”
— Deputy White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, retweeting a Political Wire link several days before the November presidential election.
The White House said Thursday that removing FBI Director James Comey from his post may hasten the agency’s investigation into Russian meddling,” CNN reports.
Said Deputy press secretary Sarah Sanders: “We want this to come to its conclusion, we want it to come to its conclusion with integrity. And we think that we’ve actually, by removing Director Comey, taken steps to make that happen.”
“The statement was a surprising admission from the White House that Comey’s sudden dismissal on Tuesday may have an effect on the Russia probe.”
Washington Post: Trump just decimated the White House’s entire Comey narrative.
Jeffrey Toobin: “On Monday, President Trump announced his first group of lower-court nominations to the federal bench. The list illustrates how differently Democratic and Republican Presidents have approached the task of making judges: it comes down to ideology versus diversity.”
“Republicans since Ronald Reagan have recognized the power of federal judges to move the country in a conservative direction. Trump’s nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court showed that the new President belongs to the same tradition, and his ten judicial nominees—five to the circuit courts of appeals and five to the district courts—reveal that he will continue to use the courts to advance his political agenda.”
“The FBI confirms agents are executing a search warrant at an office of a GOP fundraiser/consulting firm in Annapolis,” WBAL-TV reports.
“The investigation is being run out of Washington, not locally… The firm is touted for pioneering the use of technology in political campaigns, and it represents GOP candidates nationwide.”
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein pressed White House counsel Don McGahn “to correct what he felt was an inaccurate White House depiction of the events surrounding FBI Director James Comey’s firing,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“Mr. Rosenstein left the impression that he couldn’t work in an environment where facts weren’t accurately reported… The deputy attorney general objected to statements by White House aides citing Mr. Rosenstein’s critical assessment of Mr.Comey’s job performance to justify the firing.”
Taegan Goddard
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire -- which for more than two decades has been one of the nation's most influential political news sites.
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