Archives for January 2018

“On Wednesday, as Republicans were clamoring to make public a secret document that they think will undercut the investigation into Russian meddling, President Trump made clear his desire: release the memo,” the Washington Post reports.

“Trump’s directive was at odds with his own Justice Department, which had warned that releasing the classified memo written by congressional Republicans would be ‘extraordinarily reckless’ without an official review.”

”Trump and his Republican allies have placed special emphasis on the classified memo, which was written by staff for House Intelligence Committee chairman Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) and suggests that the FBI may have relied on politically motivated or questionable sources to justify its request for a secret surveillance warrant in the investigation’s early phase. Democrats have characterized the memo as misleading talking points designed to smear the FBI and said it inaccurately summarizes investigative materials that are also classified.”

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.”