Archives for 2019

A must-read piece from the New York Times:

“Mr. Trump’s public war on the inquiry has gone on long enough that it is no longer shocking. Mr. Trump rages almost daily to his 58 million Twitter followers that Mr. Mueller is on a ‘witch hunt’ and has adopted the language of Mafia bosses by calling those who cooperate with the special counsel ‘rats.’ His lawyer talks openly about a strategy to smear and discredit the special counsel investigation. The president’s allies in Congress and the conservative media warn of an insidious plot inside the Justice Department and the F.B. I to subvert a democratically elected president.”

Washington Post: “The chatterbox in chief has eschewed the traditional way that presidents communicate with members of Congress, calling lawmakers at all hours of the day without warning and sometimes with no real agenda. Congressional Republicans reciprocate in kind, increasingly dialing up the president directly to gauge his thinking after coming to terms with the fact that ultimately, no one speaks for Trump but Trump himself.”

“Longtime senators who have served through multiple administrations say they have never seen a president so easily accessible to lawmakers. The calls are part of what occupies the wide swaths of ‘executive time’ on Trump’s schedule — an unstructured stretch of the day he uses to call allies and hold meetings that are otherwise not publicly announced.”

Former White House director of legislative affairs Marc Short will return to President Trump’s administration as Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, CNBC reports.

Short will replace longtime Pence advisor Nick Ayers, who left the administration at the end of 2018. Ayers had turned down an offer to become Trump’s chief of staff after the departure of retired Marine Gen. John Kelly.

From the lawsuit filed by 16 states opposing President Trump’s declaration of a national emergency:

At a press conference announcing the Executive Actions, President Trump acknowledged that Congress provided more than enough funding for homeland security, and that the Administration has “so much money, we don’t know what to do with it.” In explaining his rationale for the Executive Actions, the President candidly admitted that the emergency declaration reflected his personal preference to construct the wall more quickly, rather than an actual urgent need for it to be built immediately: “I could do the wall over a longer period of time. I didn’t need to do this. But I’d rather do it much faster.”