Rudy Giuliani signaled the White House is losing patience with special counsel Robert Mueller and tweeted that the Department of Justice “should require Mueller to submit his report before September 7.”

He told Bloomberg that Mueller should “write the damn report so we can see it and rebut it.”

“Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. And, perhaps, your potential leakers closer yet,” the AP reports.

“President Trump’s political operation has made a regular practice of providing soft landing-pads for discarded staffers, offering nebulous jobs at big salaries to aides who have been pushed out of his West Wing.”

“The all-in the-family approach to taking care of stalwarts is nothing new. But the systematic approach with which Trump White House veterans have been offered plush gigs is. According to aides, it reflects a reality that for some the lucrative private sector jobs that are typically available to exiting White House officials never materialized, while for others, it serves as a way keep them nearby and quiet.”

Jonathan Last: “The Trump presidency is oddly dependent on tapes. Trump’s entire existence is so strange and outside the norms of decent behavior that many of his foibles simply cannot be believed, absent hard evidence. Who would believe that Donald Trump would call reporters pretending to be a publicist in order to brag about himself? If you didn’t have the tapes, no one would. Who would believe that Trump would admit—almost to a total stranger, while wearing a microphone—to grabbing women by their genitals and forcing them to do whatever he wanted? Without the tapes, no one would. People have speculated for almost two years about a Russian pee tape that almost certainly doesn’t exist. And everyone will continue to view it as a fantasy. Unless it surfaces. At which point we will all shake our heads and say, ‘Actually, we should have known…'”

“The other factor in why you need documentary materials is that the president, his advisers, and his supporters in the media use gaslighting as their primary means of defense. They make frictionless transitions from ‘no one ever met with Russians,’ to ‘the meeting with Russians was about adoption,’ to ‘of course they met with Russians about getting oppo on the Clintons and why do you have have a problem with that?'”

“Without tapes, or emails, or hard evidence, Trump World simply denies everything as a matter of course.”