January 26, 2018

Jeffrey Toobin: “Mueller and his team surely have evidence on obstruction of justice that has not yet been made public. But even on the available evidence, Trump’s position looks perilous indeed. The portrait is of a President using every resource at his disposal to shut down an investigation—of Trump himself. And now it has become clear that Trump’s own White House counsel rebelled at the President’s rationale for his actions.”

“Abundant questions remain about Trump’s fate in the Mueller investigation. Can or will a sitting President be indicted? What, if anything, will the House of Representatives do with respect to its impeachment powers? In what forum and format will the public see the full range of the evidence against the President? But on perhaps the most important question of all—whether the President of the United States committed the crime of obstruction of justice—the answer now seems clear.”

President Trump “pressed senior aides last June to devise and carry out a campaign to discredit senior FBI officials after learning that those specific employees were likely to be witnesses against him as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation,” Foreign Policy reports.

“In testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee on June 8, recently fired FBI Director James Comey disclosed that he spoke contemporaneously with other senior bureau officials about potentially improper efforts by the president to curtail the FBI’s investigation of alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.”

Matthew Yglesias: “President Trump’s first non-Fox television interview in a long time, conducted with CNBC’s Joe Kernen from Davos, Switzerland, is in many respects weirdly devoid of substance. And much of the substance that’s there consists of misstatements of fact.”

“But lurking in that is an important insight: Trump is holding the office of president, but he’s not doing the job of president. He seems to have no real idea what’s going on, even with his own signature policy moves.”

“Listening to him talk is interesting from an entertainment perspective (he did once host a popular television show), but it conveys no information about the world, the American government, or the Trump administration’s policies. If Kernen wanted to help his viewers understand what’s going on, he’d have been better off interviewing someone else.”

Renee Graham: “Melania has seemed more reluctant than most women thrust into this odd, undefined space. There’s no indication that she’s a calming influence on her erratic husband or his chaotic presidency, which seems the most basic thing the nation could want from this first lady.”

“Make no mistake: Melania is not a hostage. She is a grown woman who has made her choices — terrible ones, no doubt — but, for her own reasons, she continues to live with the embarrassing consequences. The Trumps don’t have a marriage so much as an assembly line of gifs and memes ready made for social media.”

“Michelle Obama once said that ‘the presidency doesn’t change who you are. It reveals who you are.’ That observation is also applicable to presidential couples. Nothing about the Trump presidency adheres to protocol or decorum. Neither, it appears, does the first couple, with their marital dysfunction on display while the whole world — however reluctantly — is watching.”

Washington Post: “There are two bills in Congress, both of which have some Republican support, that would protect Mueller from being fired by Trump. But neither bill has been seriously considered by leadership.”

“Up until this point, Republicans had given Trump the benefit of the doubt that he wouldn’t launch a constitutional crisis. From their perspective, why take action and cause a confrontation with the president (and jeopardize their agenda) if they don’t absolutely have to?”

“Now they may now have to.”