“Gina Haspel, President Trump’s nominee to become the next CIA director, sought to withdraw her nomination Friday after some White House officials worried that her role in the interrogation of terrorist suspects could prevent her confirmation by the Senate,” the Washington Post reports.

“Haspel told the White House she was interested in stepping aside if it avoided the spectacle of a brutal confirmation hearing on Wednesday and potential damage to the CIA’s reputation and her own.”

“Taken aback at her stance, senior White House aides… rushed to Langley, Va., to meet with Haspel at her office late Friday afternoon. Discussions stretched several hours, officials said, and the White House was not entirely sure she would stick with her nomination until Saturday afternoon.”

Ross Douthat: “As Donald Trump entered the second year in office, he seemed determined to destabilize his administration’s fragile status quo. He pushed out a cluster of advisers, replacing them with people he liked watching on TV. He forged ahead on his long-promised policy of trade war. He decided to take the starring, summit-organizing role in his own North Korean brinksmanship. And he stepped up — well, or just continued, it’s hard to make quantitative judgments — his rhetorical war against the Robert Mueller investigation.”

“For those of us who feared disaster from this presidency but saw the first year as a period when Trump was relatively constrained, his “I’m in charge here!” pivot was a worrying phenomenon. But it’s the nature of the Trump era to confound all expectations, so naturally what followed the Cohn-Tillerson-McMaster exits and the tariff announcements and the stock market wobbles was… the most politically successful six weeks of Trump’s presidency to date.”

Jonathan Karl: “With the shakeup of the president’s legal team, he is now all-in on a new strategy to deal with special counsel Robert Mueller: fight, delay, vilify.”

“The legal strategy dovetails with the Trump team’s political strategy: rallying the base with fear and loathing of the special counsel as a Democratic plot to nullify the 2016 presidential election.”

Said one Trump loyalist: “The only date that matters is November 6.”

“The Trump team had been pushing for a quick resolution of the special counsel’s investigation. Now they want to draw it out, attacking the investigating as a stalking horse for Democratic efforts to impeach the president.”