May 12, 2017


News and Views


VIDEO -- http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/exclusive-doj-won-t-say-if-sessions-is-recused-on-manafort-942096451556
THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW 5/11/17
Exclusive: DoJ won't say if Sessions is recused on Manafort
Rachel Maddow reports that contrary to popular belief, former Donald Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort has not registered as a foreign agent, and the DoJ won't say if A.G. Jeff Sessions is recused on Manafort matters. Duration: 22:14

VIDEO -- http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/new-fbi-director-mccabe-compromised-by-serious-conflict-941110851569?cid=eml_mra_20170511
THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW 5/10/17
New FBI director McCabe compromised by serious conflict
Rachel Maddow reviews how new Acting Director of the FBI, Andrew McCabe, improperly discussed the investigation into the Trump Camp's ties to Russia with Reince Priebus and became part of the Trump disinformation campaign. Duration: 20:06


VIDEO -- http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/lawmakers-asked-comey-to-speed-up-trump-russia-investigation-wsj-941148227671?cid=eml_mra_20170511
THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW 5/10/17
Lawmakers asked Comey to speed up Trump-Russia investigation: WSJ
Rachel Maddow shares breaking news from the Wall Street Journal that the Trump-Russia investigation was heating up with Comey concerned about potential evidence of collusion and lawmakers asking for the investigation to be accelerated. Duration: 2:18



OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE IS, BY TRADITION AT ANY RATE, AN IMPEACHABLE OFFENSE, THOUGH POSSIBLY NOT TECHNICALLY A CRIME ACCORDING TO THIS ARTICLE. I HAVE NO IDEA WHY IT ISN’T. IT’S ALWAYS USED IN THE CATEGORY WITH WITNESS INTIMIDATION, RACKETEERING, BRIBING JUDGES, ETC. IF IT ISN’T A CRIME, WE NEED TO REWRITE THE LAW. RIGHT?? RIGHT!

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/does-firing-james-comey-put-trump-in-legal-jeopardy/
By NANCY CORDES CBS NEWS May 12, 2017, 8:03 PM
Does firing James Comey put Trump in legal jeopardy?

WASHINGTON -- The FBI is investigating meddling by the Russians in the U.S. election and whether anyone on the Trump team colluded with them. Former FBI Director James Comey was heading that investigation, so does firing him put the president in legal jeopardy?

Within hours of President Trump's tape tweet, a pair of top Democrats had sent a letter to the White House counsel, requesting "copies of all recordings regarding this matter."

"The president's actions this morning," they warned, "raise the specter of possible intimidation and obstruction of justice."

White House officials give conflicting accounts for Comey firing
Play VIDEO
White House officials give conflicting accounts for Comey firing

They're just the latest Democrats to suggest that the president broke the law.

"There may be a cover-up," Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Connecticut, said in a press conference.

"He may be obstructing justice," Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Illinois, said.

"President Trump has fired this guy because the dragnet's tightening in the Russia investigation," Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Virginia, said.

The U.S. criminal code defines obstruction of justice as "corruptly or by threats or force" attempting "to influence, obstruct, or impede, the due administration of justice."

Exhibit A, Democrats say: Mr. Trump's own explanation for why he fired Comey.

Trump contradicts White House story on Comey firing
Play VIDEO
Trump contradicts White House story on Comey firing

"When I decided to just do it, I said to myself, this Russia-Trump thing is a made-up story," Mr. Trump told NBC News Thursday.

"I would go crazy if a client of mine said something like that," attorney Robert Bennett says.

The veteran lawyer has defended Republicans and Democrats, including former President Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

"It's so stupid what he's doing," Bennett says of Mr. Trump.

But based on what the public knows, Bennett doesn't believe there's enough evidence for an obstruction of justice case against Mr. Trump.

"If I were defending the case, I would say, he knows it's not going to end the investigation. If anything, the FBI will get more energized by this, which I believe they will," Bennett says.

"He is guilty, in my opinion, of violating every major principle of crisis management. He's certainly acting guilty," Bennett says.

It's important to note that the congressional standard for obstruction of justice is sometimes lower than the courts'. Neither Mr. Clinton nor Richard Nixon, for example, ever faced criminal charges for obstruction of justice, but they were both impeached for it.



COMEY DIDN’T THREATEN TO “LEAK,” BUT HE IS UNDER INVITATION (OR SUBPOENA?) TO TESTIFY BEFORE CONGRESS, WHICH I’M SURE TRUMP WON’T LIKE EITHER. HE HAS NOT ACCEPTED A TESTIMONY DATE YET, OR AT LEAST HE HADN’T AS OF THIS MORNING. TRUMP MIGHT DO BETTER TO SIT BACK AND WATCH THINGS UNFOLD THAN TO SEND OUT THESE TWEETS OVER EVERYTHING THAT IS SAID. THEY’RE UNPROFESSIONAL AND PROBABLY NOT LEGAL AS PROOF OF ANYTHING. CONGRESS OR A COURT WOULD LIKE FULLER INFORMATION I THINK. I HAVE NEVER TRIED TWEETING BECAUSE I CAN’T FIGURE OUT HOW TO BEGIN TO EXPRESS MYSELF IN THE SENTENCE OR SO THAT THE TWEETER IS ALLOWED. IF TRUMP’S STATEMENTS WERE LESS CRYPTIC THEY MIGHT SEEM LESS THREATENING/HOSTILE/BIZARRE.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/05/12/politics/donald-trump-james-comey-threat/index.html
Trump threatens Comey in Twitter outburst
By Eugene Scott, CNN
Updated 3:33 PM ET, Fri May 12, 2017

Story highlights

"James Comey better hope that there are no 'tapes' of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press," Trump tweeted

Trump didn't provide further details Friday on whether he was taping conversations

(CNN)President Donald Trump issued a thinly veiled threat Friday to fired FBI Director James Comey, apparently suggesting there are possibly recorded conversations between the two men that could be leaked to counter the former FBI director if necessary.

"James Comey better hope that there are no 'tapes' of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press," Trump tweeted.

The remark is an extraordinary development in the ongoing feud between the President and the agencies investigating alleged ties between his campaign and Russia.

Follow
Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump
James Comey better hope that there are no "tapes" of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!
8:26 AM - 12 May 2017
19,800 19,800 Retweets 56,061 56,061 likes

White House press secretary Sean Spicer said at an afternoon briefing that Trump's warning was "not a threat," adding, "The President has nothing further to say on that."

When he fired Comey earlier this week, Trump garnered comparisons to President Richard Nixon and his infamous decision to remove the special prosecutor investigating Watergate crimes in 1973. The Watergate scandal accelerated drastically when it was revealed Nixon taped conversations in the White House. Trump didn't provide further details Friday on whether he was taping conversations.

Asked whether Trump was recording conversations in the White House, Spicer repeated his statement that Trump had nothing further to add.

Comey is "not worried about any tapes" of conversations between him and Trump, a source familiar with the matter told CNN on Friday, adding that "if there is a tape, there's nothing he is worried about" that could be on it.

Democratic Reps. Elijah Cummings and John Conyers, the respective ranking members of the House oversight and judiciary committees, requested from White House counsel Donald McGahn copies of all recordings between Trump and Comey.

"It is a crime to intimidate or threaten any potential witness with the intent to influence, delay, or prevent their official testimony," the two wrote in a letter. "The President's actions this morning -- as well as his admission yesterday on national television that he fired Director Comey because he was investigating Trump campaign officials and their connections to the Russian government -- raise the specter of possible intimidation and obstruction of justice. The President's actions also risk undermining the ongoing criminal and counter-intelligence investigations and the independence of federal law enforcement agencies."

Clapper: There could be evidence

Soon after tweeting the threat to Comey, Trump invoked former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who testified before the Senate earlier this week that he was not aware of any evidence demonstrating collusion between Trump's campaign and Russia.

"When James Clapper himself, and virtually everyone else with knowledge of the witch hunt, says there is no collusion, when does it end?" Trump tweeted.

Follow
Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump
When James Clapper himself, and virtually everyone else with knowledge of the witch hunt, says there is no collusion, when does it end?
8:54 AM - 12 May 2017
14,180 14,180 Retweets 52,183 52,183 likes

Clapper, however, qualified his testimony by saying he had been unaware of an FBI investigation into the matter until Comey announced it to the public at a House hearing in March. It's also unclear how much Clapper would know about developments in the investigation after he left office earlier this year.

And speaking on MSNBC early Friday afternoon, Clapper would only say that the intelligence community lacked enough evidence to issue an assessment that represented a consensus of all the US intelligence agencies.

"That's not to say there wasn't evidence, but not that met that threshold," Clapper said.

"And you're not attempting to clear or convict anyone of collusion, it is just out of your scope?" MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell asked.

"That's correct," Clapper replied.

He added: "It would be in everyone's best interest to get to the bottom of this. And for the country. Otherwise, this is going to continue to linger as a dark cloud, in my opinion, over this administration."

It's not unheard of for presidents to record conversations, using different systems to do so, with and without participants' knowledge. Six presidents secretly recorded meetings and telephone conversations between 1940 and 1973, according to historian and CNN contributor Julian Zelizer.

John Dean, a former White House counsel under Nixon who served four months in prison for his role in the Watergate scandal, said it would be Trump, not Comey, with the most to lose were recordings of the two men to surface.

"Obviously, President Trump is confused. He is the one who must hope there are no tapes. Honest people don't have problems being taped," Dean tweeted.

Tapper: The real reasons Trump fired Comey 03:23

Trump's reasoning behind firing Comey

The initial, official White House version of how Comey came to be fired was that deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, fresh on the job, wrote a memo expressing concern about the way Comey had handled the Hillary Clinton email investigation.

But mounting evidence suggests Comey was actually fired because of the Russia probe.

Sources have told CNN that Trump's decision to ax Comey was made after he grew increasingly frustrated with him following a congressional hearing last week in which he said he was "mildly nauseous" over the idea that he helped sway the 2016 election. A source close to Comey told CNN's Jake Tapper Wednesday there are two specific reasons why Trump fired the FBI director:
1. Comey never provided the President with any assurance of personal loyalty.
2. Comey turmoil puts Trump's isolation on view

The FBI's investigation into possible Trump team collusion with Russia in the 2016 election was accelerating.

Trump's surrogates, including Vice President Mike Pence, have struggled to keep up with the shifting narrative on how and why the decision was made, and Trump tweeted Friday it was "not possible" for his team to recount details and talking points with "perfect accuracy."

On Thursday, Trump, discussing the firing of Comey, told NBC News that he was frustrated by the ongoing investigation and believed it was motivated by Democrats' fury at losing the election.

Trump told NBC's Lester Holt: "And in fact when I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said 'you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story, it's an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won.'"

Comey has not yet responded to the Senate intelligence committee's invitation to testify in closed session next week, Democratic and Republican spokespersons for the committee told CNN Friday.

Trump floats canceling briefings for accuracy 01:10

Trump threatens press

Comey was not Trump's only target of an apparent threat Friday -- he also suggested the possibility of ending White House press briefings.

"As a very active President with lots of things happening, it is not possible for my surrogates to stand at podium with perfect accuracy!" Trump tweeted. "Maybe the best thing to do would be to cancel all future "press briefings" and hand out written responses for the sake of accuracy???"

Deputy White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders faced backlash from the press Thursday during her briefing after her comments on the Comey timeline conflicted with Trump's remarks to NBC.

CNN's Mary Kay Mallonee, Pamela Brown, Brian Todd, Daniella Diaz and David Wright contributed to this report.


THERE IS A TURN OF MIND THAT CONSIDER’S TRUMP’S IDEA OF “LOYALTY,” TO BE A STATE OF THRALL, AND THE FBI IS SUPPOSED TO BE INDEPENDENT OF THE EXECUTIVE, AS A PART OF LAW ENFORCEMENT AND MORE LIKE THE SUPREME COURT. PRESIDENTS CAN TRY TO PACK THE SUPREME COURT, BUT THEY CAN’T FIRE A JUSTICE, AND THE COURTS AND LAW ENFORCEMENT ARE VERY SIMILAR IN THEIR FUNCTION. AS AN ARTICLE SAID YESTERDAY, THE PRESIDENT SHOULDN’T HAVE THE POWER TO FIRE THE HEAD OF THE FBI. IT WOULD BE A REAL PROBLEM (PERHAPS IS ALREADY) FOR THE FBI TO BECOME THE PRESIDENT’S OWN PRIVATE POLICE FORCE.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-says-it-would-not-be-inappropriate-to-ask-for-comeys-loyalty/
CBS NEWS May 12, 2017, 6:32 PM
Trump says it would not be "inappropriate" to ask for Comey's loyalty

President Donald Trump says that he did not ask ousted FBI Director James Comey for his loyalty -- but that it wouldn't be an "inappropriate" thing to ask.

"I don't think it would be a bad question to ask," Mr. Trump told Fox News' Jeanine Pirro in an interview airing Saturday. "I think loyalty to the country, loyalty to the US is important -- you know, it depends on how you define loyalty, number one."

Robert Gates weighs in on James Comey's firing
Play VIDEO
Robert Gates weighs in on James Comey's firing

Mr. Trump added that he doesn't know "it got out there" that he had asked Comey if he was loyal to him "because I didn't ask that question."

On Thursday, a law enforcement official told CBS News' Pat Milton that Mr. Trump had asked Comey if he would pledge his loyalty to the president in January. The source said the request was made while the two had dinner at the White House, and that Comey had declined to make the pledge.

In the interview with Pirro, Mr. Trump also pushed back on calls for an independent commission to investigate allegations that his campaign had links to the Russian government. Mr. Trump said that he would prefer the investigations into the matter currently going on in the House, the Senate, and the FBI "take their time."

"I don't think you need it," Mr. Trump said. "I mean honestly, whatever is going to do the best, but I don't think you need it."

Mr. Trump also told Pirro that it would be "a good idea" to not have daily press briefings at the White House due to "a level of hostility that's incredible" and "very unfair."

"Sarah Huckabee is a lovely young woman," Mr. Trump said, referring to his deputy press secretary, who helmed several briefings this week while press secretary Sean Spicer was on Naval reserve duty. "You know Sean Spicer. He's a wonderful human being. He's a nice man."

Asked by Pirro if Spicer would remain on the job, Mr. Trump said that "he's doing a good job but he gets beat up."

"Will he be there tomorrow?" Pirro asked. "He's been there since the beginning," Mr. Trump replied.


“…NEARLY ALWAYS HAVE AN UNKNOWN EXPIRATION DATE ….” THIS IS SO VERY WELL PUT! I’VE BEEN TRYING VALIANTLY TO FOLLOW ALL THIS, BUT IT’S LIKE A FOREST FIRE. AS SOON AS YOU PUT OUT THE ENCROACHING LINE OF FLAMES THEY POP UP SOMEWHERE ELSE. STILL, I HAVE FAITH THAT, AS TRUMP IS 99.99% LIKELY TO BE A BLACKGUARD AND A ROGUE, HE WILL BE PUT OUT OF OFFICE WITHIN THE NEXT YEAR OR LESS. I DO HOPE THAT’S TRUE, BECAUSE WHATEVER HIS RELATIONSHIP WITH THE RUSSIAN MAFIA OR WHOEVER HIS CONTACTS ARE, HE HAS DONE THINGS THAT ARE UNACCEPTABLE TO SOMEONE WITH A CONSCIENCE. THAT PARTICULAR MANNER OF TOUCHING A WOMAN IS OFF THE SCALE ON DISGUST PRODUCTION. IT’S NOT ONLY GROTESQUELY CRUDE, IT’S VICIOUS. I DON’T SEE HOW ANYONE COULD HAVE VOTED FOR HIM AFTER THAT, BUT ALL TOO MANY DID. I GUESS THEY’RE LOOKING FOR SOMETHING ELSE IN A PRESIDENT.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/in-service-to-trump-pence-keeps-saying-things-that-arent-true/2017/05/12/690c4bc0-3682-11e7-b4ee-434b6d506b37_story.html?utm_term=.b7c280648ab3&wpisrc=nl_politics-pm&wpmm=1
Politics
In service to Trump, Pence keeps saying things that aren’t true
By Abby Phillip May 12 at 4:57 PM

PLAY VIDEO -- From the 2016 presidential campaign to James Comey's firing, Vice President Pence has repeatedly had his official statements defending the Trump administration contradicted - often by the president himself. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)

Once again, Vice President Pence was out on a limb.

A day after President Trump fired FBI Director James B. Comey, his vice president stared into a television camera, surrounded by a gaggle of reporters on Capitol Hill, and cited the president’s decision to rely on the counsel of his advisers as proof of his “strong” leadership.

“President Trump made the right decision at the right time to accept the recommendation of the deputy attorney general and the attorney general to ask for the termination” of Comey, Pence said.

But that wasn’t true.

Trump told NBC News in an interview the next day that he had not relied on the lengthy letter written by Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein to make his decision, but rather that his mind had been made up before the letter existed.

Trump's shifting story on Comey turns to threats Embed Share Play Video2:47

Video -- Since President Trump fired FBI Director James Comey on May 9, the explanations for the dismissal have been getting murkier. Now Trump has tweeted a threat to cancel press briefings and a suggestion about "tapes" of his private conversations with Comey. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)

Pence also had insisted that Trump’s decision was not influenced by his disapproval of the ongoing investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia — another statement contradicted by Trump in the NBC interview.

“In fact, when I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said, ‘You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story, it’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won,’ ” the president said.

Aides declined to comment about when the vice president learned that Trump had decided to fire Comey.

Since his selection as vice president, Pence has been unflagging in his loyalty and deference to Trump. But in return, the president and White House aides have repeatedly set Pence up to be the public face of official narratives that turn out to be misleading or false.

It is a risk that comes with this high-wire presidency, where talking points and game plans nearly always have an unknown expiration date and where missing meetings can mean being out of the loop when critical decisions are made. The greatest disrupter of all is the president himself, who regularly — and without warning — throws out the communications playbook in favor of his own approach.

“He’s obviously been playing a ‘Mike Pence, cleanup on Aisle 5’ role quite a bit,” said Doug Heye, a Republican strategist. “When Trump won, we had a sense that things like this might happen, and we have now had 111 days of crises du jour.”

On Capitol Hill, Pence — a former House member — is still viewed as a steady hand in an unstable situation. He regularly attends the weekly Senate Republican lunch and can often be seen coming and going from his office in the Capitol.

Photograph -- The vice president “has obviously been playing a ‘Mike Pence, cleanup on Aisle 5’ role quite a bit,” one GOP strategist said. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

Republicans involved in health-care talks said Pence emerged as a key point of contact when Trump and some House Republicans jump-started negotiations over the replacement bill that passed the House this month. They say he worked the phones and served as a salesman for the plan the White House and GOP lawmakers were pushing.

In the lead-up to Trump’s inauguration, Pence likewise became something of an ambassador to skittish Capitol Hill Republicans who had apprehensions about Trump’s management and governing style.

But Friday, Trump essentially acknowledged in a series of tweets that his surrogates had at times gone public with false information — in part because he is “a very active President with lots of things happening.”

“Where that leaves the No. 2 guy is, he’s following the talking points, and the No. 1 guy is using his own talking points,” said a Republican strategist who has worked with Pence for more than a decade. “His understanding of how they were going to explain the background leading up to the decision was different from how Donald Trump decided to explain it.”

“In the end, the president knows what’s in his head, and not everyone else does,” the strategist added.

Like most White House aides who flock to meetings and photo-ops with the president so they won’t miss out when critical decisions are made, Pence has made a habit of having a regular presence in the West Wing. Being physically absent from meetings in the Trump White House can mean being locked out of key decisions.

“I have spent a fair amount of time in the West Wing in the last three-plus months — I have never seen a vice president who was in the West Wing going in and out of meetings as much as I’ve seen Mike Pence,” said a prominent conservative who works closely with Pence and who spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly discuss Pence’s role.

Pence communications director Jarrod Agen said the vice president was simply applauding Trump’s decisive action and highlighting how the decision aligned with the recommendations of senior Justice Department officials.

“The Vice President values his close relationship with the President and considers it the greatest privilege of his life to have such a strong working relationship with President Trump,” Agen said in a statement.

But this is the second high-profile instance in which Pence has found himself out front with comments that don’t stand up to scrutiny.

In January, Pence repeatedly denied that then-national security adviser Michael Flynn had spoken to Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, statements that turned out to be false.

After White House counsel Donald McGahn and Trump learned that Flynn had misled the vice president, Pence was kept in the dark for weeks, until just before media reports about the misrepresentations were published.

People close to Pence say he has developed a relationship of trust with Trump in part because he has used his proximity and influence sparingly. He has learned to avoid agitating the president with public stories about his influence and has maintained an unflappable attitude when Trump leaves him exposed.

“The thing that Pence has figured out is, the thing that gives him the influence is the fact that we don’t know it,” said the conservative with close ties to the White House. “This guy is discreet in a town where everybody promotes themselves. . . . He’s playing to an audience of one.”

Sean Sullivan and Robert Costa contributed to this report.



IT’S PROBABLY PARTLY BECAUSE OF ALL THOSE TV SHOWS LIKE “THE UNTOUCHABLES,” BUT I DO TEND TO TRUST THE FBI OVER MOST LOCAL POLICE FORCES. I FEEL THEM TO BE COMPETENT AND MOSTLY HONEST. NOTICE I DID NOT GO TO THE POINT OF SAYING THAT I “THINK,” THAT, BECAUSE I’M VERY CYNICAL BY NOW, AND I “BELIEVE” EVEN LESS THAN I “THINK.”

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/source-there-is-whole-a-lot-of-interfering-in-russia-investigation/
By JEFF PEGUES CBS NEWS May 11, 2017, 6:10 PM
Source: There is "whole lot of interfering" in Russia investigation

Although President Trump has now stated and written that fired FBI Director James Comey told him on three separate occasions that he was not the subject of an investigation, sources cast doubt on that claim.

It would be out of character for Comey to have made that statement even once, much less three times, to the president, one law enforcement source told CBS News. Along with his firing, the source noted a high level of "interfering" in the Russia probe.

Comey asked for more Russia investigation resources
Play VIDEO
Comey asked for more Russia investigation resources

As for the White House assertions that "countless" FBI rank-and-file employees wanted Comey out, the source said that was a "load of cr*p" to think that agents wanted to see him ousted. That sentiment is shared by acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe in less colorful language. He told a congressional panel Thursday, "Director Comey enjoyed broad support within the FBI and still does to this day. We are a large organization. We are 36,500 people across this country, across this globe. we have a diversity of opinions about many things, but I can confidently tell you that the majority, the vast majority of employees enjoyed a deep and positive connection to Director Comey."

This was the case in spite of the divided opinion within the agency over Comey's July 2016 announcement that he would not recommend Hillary Clinton be charged for mishandling classified information, in the investigation into her use of a private server for her email.

Within the FBI, the Russia investigation is considered to be "a crisis," the source said, and "there is a whole lot of interfering." The succession of events surrounding Comey's firing is not considered to be a coincidence by the agency. In the week before he was terminated, Comey asked Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein for additional resources to pursue the Russia investigation.

Further, his firing came a day after former acting Attorney General Sally Yates had testified before a Senate panel that she had warned the White House that National Security Adviser Michael Flynn "essentially could be blackmailed" because he apparently had lied to his bosses about his contacts with Russian Envoy Sergey Kislyak.

On the same day that Comey was fired, federal prosecutors probing Russian meddling issued grand jury subpoenas for business records of Flynn associates.

And a day later, President Trump held his highest-level meeting with a Russian official, an Oval Office sit-down with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. Also present -- Sergey Kislyak -- who was at the center of the conversations leading to Flynn's firing in February. No U.S. press were allowed into the meeting with Lavrov and Kislyak. U.S. reporters were forced to look at the Kremlin's social media feeds for posted photos of the president conversing with Lavrov and shaking hands with Kislyak.

The images, especially the photo of Kislyak and Mr. Trump shaking hands, "were laughed at" by law enforcement, the source said.

Even without Comey, the Russian investigation continues at a heightened pace. "FBI Agents are good at keeping their heads down and taking the evidence where it leads," the source said. I asked, "Even now" are they working at this? The response came back: "Yes, they are now."



THE FIRING OF JAMES COMEY HAS, IN ITSELF, PROVEN THE NEED FOR A SPECIAL PROSECUTOR (WHOM TRUMP WILL NOT FIRE ALSO.)

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/question-of-special-prosecutor-still-splitting-congress-in-wake-of-comey-firing/
By NANCY CORDES CBS NEWS May 11, 2017, 7:10 PM
Question of special prosecutor splits Congress in wake of Comey firing

WASHINGTON -- President Trump's "showboat" comment regarding ousted FBI Director James Comey in his NBC News interview got immediate pushback Thursday from the leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

"I trusted Jim Comey," said Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the committee's vice chairman.

Sen. Klobuchar says Comey firing was not a coincidence
Play VIDEO
Sen. Klobuchar says Comey firing was not a coincidence

"I found him to be one of the most ethical, upright straight-forward individuals that I have had the opportunity to work with," said North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr, the chairman.

Comey's firing has consumed the Capitol, prompting rare bipartisan agreement.

"I do have questions about the rationale and the timing. Certainly I've communicated that to the White House," said Republican Sen. Marco Rubio.

But the two sides still part ways over the need for a special, independent prosecutor. "We need the support of Republicans in Congress," said Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin.

Sen. Rand Paul on Comey firing, Russia foreign minister at W.H.
Play VIDEO
Sen. Rand Paul on Comey firing, Russia foreign minister at W.H.

"Every time there's a controversy around here, they want to have a special prosecutor. We have a Justice Department, it's very capable," said Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch.

Ultimately, the decision isn't up to Congress. It's up to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who wrote a memo critical of Comey which the White House initially used to justify his firing.

Democratic leader Sen. Chuck Schumer sent Rosenstein a list of 27 questions Thursday, including whether Mr. Trump or anyone else directed him to write that memo.

ap-629059038058.jpg
Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein AP

Rosenstein met with the Intelligence Committee leaders Thursday behind closed doors.

When asked about whether they discussed Rosenstein's alleged threat to resign over the handling of the Comey firing, Burr said, "We didn't ask him about, he didn't share it. We were focused on deconfliction."

The term "deconfliction" refers to their efforts to make sure the Russia investigations being conducted by the Senate and the FBI don't interfere with each other.

Late Thursday afternoon, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell invited Rosenstein to come back next week to brief the entire Senate behind closed doors.



I REALLY DISLIKE ARTICLES THAT ARE WRITTEN IN ONE LONG, UNBROKEN PARAGRAPH LIKE THIS. IT REMINDS ME OF ULYSSES. I DIDN’T LAST BEYOND THE FIRST THREE PAGES ON THAT ONE, AND I’M NOT SORRY. I’M MUCH MORE FINICKY THAN SOME ON WHAT I WANT TO READ – FREEFORM POETRY, YES, BUT NOT PROSE, AND WHEN THE WRITER IS PRESENTING DIALOGUE OR COMMENTARY IN THE PAST TENSE, THEY SHOULD NOT WRITE IT IN THE PRESENT. JOHN “SAYS” FOR JOHN “SAID” IS NOT, TO ME, AT ALL ACCEPTABLE UNLESS IT IS THE CHARACTER’S PARTICULARLY IGNORANT WAY OF TALKING. I’M TOO TRADITIONAL AND TOO IMPATIENT FOR THAT KIND OF THING. I WANT TO BE ABLE TO FIND OUT WHAT THE AUTHOR IS TRYING TO SAY, RATHER THAN SPENDING MY TIME INTERPRETING HIS QUIXOTIC METHOD OF SAYING IT.

HOWEVER, HERE IS BERNIE’S COMMENTARY, PRESENTED BY CHARLES COOKE. THE WRITER CLEARLY LIKES SANDERS, OR RESPECTS HIM AT ANY RATE. SANDERS HAS A WAY OF ALMOST ALWAYS TALKING IN TERMS OF GOOD COMMON SENSE, AS LONG AS YOU BELIEVE THAT LEVELING THE VAST GULF BETWEEN THE BILLIONAIRES’ CLUB AND THE REST OF US.

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/447542/bernie-sanders-correct-question-replacing-comey
Bernie Sanders Is Correct on the Question of Replacing Comey
by CHARLES C. W. COOKE
May 11, 2017 12:28 PM @CHARLESCWCOOKE

Bernie Sanders suggests that whomever President Trump nominates to replace James Comey as F.B.I. director should get at least 60 votes in the Senate. Procedurally and legally speaking, this is a non-starter; with his customary shortsightedness, Harry Reid made a post-nuclear bed for the Democrats, and the party must now spend some time in it. Politically, though, Sanders is correct: It would be better for America if the new director got 60 votes. It would be better still if he got more. As a rule, there is nothing wrong with Republicans in the Senate pushing through nominees without Democratic help. That is the system now, and to decline to use it would be to unilaterally disarm. But there are two key differences in this instance that make Sanders’s suggestion a solid one. First, the F.B.I director is supposed to be — and should, by rights, be — a non-partisan figure. As such, it doesn’t matter if he’s a Republican or a Democrat or somewhere in between; unlike the DOJ or the Supreme Court, the bent that a nominee brings to the role is mostly irrelevant to his duties. Second, there is now an extraordinary degree of mistrust in our political system — mistrust that threatens to undermine the institutions on which we must rely. As I have said repeatedly, I am skeptical of the timing of Trump’s decision to fire Comey. I don’t believe the stated reasoning either. But I am not hysterical, because there are a whole host of other explanations for the move besides “Trump is Richard Nixon.” Donald Trump is an impulsive, vindictive, chaotic man who is broadly out of his depth, and it is not beyond the realm of possibility — indeed, it seems more likely than not — that this latest foray into messmaking was merely the latest product of his caprice. Still, not everyone is me, and there are many on both sides of the aisle who are extremely worried today, and who thus need to have their suspicions and their fears allayed. What better way could there be to achieve this than by ensuring that Comey’s replacement is broadly admired and accepted? It would one thing for 52 Republicans to say, “we put in a good figure, so you have nothing to worry”; it would be quite another for them to be joined in this assessment by a collection of senators from the other side. If the Republican party is smart, it will make sure to build a coalition. Ultimately, such an arrangement is also in the interests of President Trump. Unless there really is a massive Russia conspiracy lurking in the background — and if there is, Trump is toast anyway — it will behoove the president to put someone in place to whom he credibly point and say, “see?” A Rudy Guiliani or a Chris Christie will not be able to fulfill that role; a Joe Lieberman, a Merrick Garland, or even a Kelly Ayotte almost certainly will. It has been said by both Trump’s critics and his fans that the best explanation of his canning Comey is that he wants the cloud presented by the Russia allegations to go away. If that is true — and if he has nothing to fear — he will do well to listen to the socialist senator from Vermont.



THE HOUSE PROVED VERY DISAPPOINTING IN THEIR INVESTIGATION, BUT THE SENATE IS DOING BETTER, AS THEY ALMOST ALWAYS DO. JUST AS I TRUST THE FBI OVER THE CIA, I TRUST THE SENATE MORE THAN THE HOUSE. GO, DEMS!!

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/burr-warner-pledge-to-continue-russia-investigation-amid-fbi-shakeup/
By EMILY TILLETT CBS NEWS May 11, 2017, 1:59 PM
Burr, Warner pledge to continue Russia investigation amid FBI shakeup

Following a meeting with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, Senate Intelligence Committee chairs Sen. Richard Burr, R-North Carolina, and Sen. Mark Warner, D-Virginia, said they will continue their investigation into Russian meddling in the presidential election, in the wake of FBI Director James Comey's firing.

Is Comey's firing a constitutional crisis?
Play VIDEO
Is Comey's firing a constitutional crisis?

The meeting with Rosenstein, arranged prior to Comey's departure, comes amid reports that Rosenstein was threatening to resign over how the firing was handled, a claim the Department of Justice denies.

"Since the committee has an investigation going on that is very similar to what the Department of Justice has going on, we felt there was a great need to set up a process for de-confliction, so that when we had witnesses we needed to talk to, we made sure we weren't stepping on top of anything that may be an active investigation," Burr told reporters.

Burr said that he and Warner told Rosenstein that their investigation "could not go forward without an understanding of the rules of the road."

Burr added that whatever course the FBI decides to take in its Russia probe, the Intelligence Committee's investigation will "continue as aggressively as we're able to."

While Warner called the meeting a "productive session," he told reporters he still had concerns about Rosenstein in terms of his exact role in Comey's departure.

Warner added the timing of Comey's dismissal and the testimony provided by former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates on Monday, were "very troubling," which he expressed to Rosenstein.

Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe took the place of Comey at Thursday's Intelligence Committee hearing. Burr and Warner have invited Comey to brief the committee on Tuesday.



https://www.vox.com/world/2017/5/9/15516278/north-korea-more-rational-than-you-think
North Korea is more rational than you think
The assumption that the country is run by a lunatic is not only incorrect — it’s dangerous.
Updated by Zeeshan Aleem@ZeeshanAleemzeeshan.aleem@vox.com May 9, 2017, 9:10am EDT

Photograph – Photograph of Un and military men

North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un is suspected of assassinating his half-brother with VX nerve agent, starves and tortures his people, and regularly threatens to bombard the United States with nuclear missiles. But does that make him a madman?

Many US policymakers certainly seem to think so. “We are not dealing with a rational person,” US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley warned in March. “This is not a rational person, who has not had rational acts, who is not thinking clearly.”

Sen. John McCain, chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, recently bashed Kim as “a crazy fat kid.” Republican Rep. Bradley Byrne summed up the quandary after returning from a trip to Asia in April: “I don’t believe the leadership in North Korea is rational. How do you deal with someone that is irrational?”

This line of commentary has very real consequences for how the United States deals with North Korea: If Washington believes that Kim is truly irrational, then it will be more inclined to use force to stop him.

If the foreign policy establishment is convinced that Kim is not mentally stable, then the idea of him firing nuclear-tipped missiles at the West Coast with no concern that he might be wiped off the map himself in a retaliatory strike becomes a plausible scenario. That could in turn make the Trump administration more likely to consider launching an extraordinarily risky preventive or preemptive strike against Kim’s nuclear facilities in order to prevent that from happening. McCain has said he thinks such a strike must be an option, and the Trump administration has said that it’s on the table.

But when I spoke to scholars and historians of North Korea, they uniformly rejected the idea that Kim is a lunatic. His ruthlessness and fierce rhetoric should not be confused with irrationality, they explained. Instead, he should be understood as extremely calculating and disciplined when it comes to maintaining his grip on power — just as his predecessors (his father, Kim Jong Il, and his grandfather and the country’s founder, Kim Il Sung) were.

To most North Korea experts, Kim Jong Un is far from erratic. If anyone is unpredictable in this scenario, it’s Donald Trump.

Rational doesn’t mean easy to get along with

Kim Jong Un inspecting defense facilities. Getty Images

When we talk about a country or a leader being “rational” in the context of international relations, we’re not using it in the casual sense of “sensible.”

The term “rational” here means that a country’s government is capable of making logical calculations about its goals and interests and determining how to achieve them based on the resources — economic, military, diplomatic, etc. — at its disposal.

Countries have lots of different interests, but the most crucial one is self-preservation. A rational leader can take risky actions, but they wouldn’t purposely do something that would foreseeably lead to the total annihilation of their country.

And that’s really what we’re asking when we ask whether Kim Jong Un (or his father and grandfather before him) is rational: Is he bound by that fundamental survival instinct? Because if not, that essentially means he can’t be deterred.

Deterrence works by convincing your opponent that you can hurt them — and perhaps even destroy them — if they hurt you. But if your opponent doesn’t care about being destroyed, there’s nothing stopping them from hurting you.

So the fear is that North Korea’s leader, blinded by ideological zeal or illusions of his own power, won’t be kept in check by the principle of deterrence and would attempt a nuclear strike without regard for the retaliatory strikes that would effectively eradicate it.

North Korea is a careful student of history

But here’s the thing: North Korea has been deterred by the US for decades.

In the 64 years since the end of the Korean War in 1953, North Korea hasn’t launched a war to retake South Korea. And that’s largely because the US has tens of thousands of troops and serious firepower parked in South Korea and Japan to ensure that any attempt by North Korea to actually start a war would be catastrophically costly for it.

Even when South Korea has shown extreme vulnerability — such as when it underwent military coups in 1961 and 1980 and some of its military units were moved away from the border with North Korea — North Korea has not launched a war. Clearly, deterrence has worked.

THE SMALLNESS OF THE PENINSULA HAS A WAY OF CLARIFYING THE HIGH STAKES OF ANY WAR: MILLIONS OF PEOPLE ARE VULNERABLE TO BEING MASSACRED BY EITHER SIDE

The North has, however, taken other hostile actions against the US and its allies over the decades, including shooting down American spy planes and killing people in the demilitarized zone that marks the boundary between North and South Korea. And it’s continued to develop a nuclear arsenal and the ballistic missiles needed to deliver them, all while openly threatening the United States with nuclear war.

So how is that rational? Why pick a fight with a vastly more powerful country whose nuclear arsenal makes yours look like child’s play?

According to James Person, a North Korea expert at the Wilson Center in Washington, while this might seem at first glance to be completely irrational, it’s not: It’s actually an effective way of getting America’s attention — and often, a way of gaining an upper hand over it.

Person contends that Pyongyang “carefully studies” US responses to all its actions and has learned that it can often get the US to yield when it carries out some of its edgier provocations.

Here’s a good example: In 1968, North Korea seized the US naval intelligence ship USS Pueblo with 83 crew members aboard. It was one of the most audacious actions the North had ever taken against the US, and the crisis had the potential to erupt into a full-on war.

But that’s not what ultimately happened. Not only did the Pueblo’s seizure not spark a huge military clash, but the North was actually able to turn the move into a political win.

The US sat down and negotiated with North Korea for nearly a year over the imprisoned sailors. At the end of the negotiations, North Korea returned the 83 sailors (who were tortured during their time in captivity) — but it also got the US to admit to having hostile intentions toward North Korea. And it kept the ship. In other words, not only did North Korea come out of the encounter unscathed, it got a trophy out of it.

Members of the crew of the USS Pueblo greet relatives upon returning from captivity in North Korea, where they were imprisoned and tortured. Getty Images

Another incident just a year later highlights a similar dynamic. When in 1969 North Korean fighter jets shot down an American spy plane, killing the 31 people aboard the aircraft, the Nixon administration considered a variety of military options — including a nuclear strike — but ultimately chose to refrain from using force altogether.

So North Korea got away with the attack without facing repercussions. The reason? “The US was being prudent because of potential risks of retaliation against South Korea,” Person said.

The US’s decision to not retaliate after both of these high-profile provocations underscores something crucial to understanding why war hasn’t broken out on the Korean Peninsula since the end of the first war in 1953: Both North Korea and its opponents are deeply afraid of setting off a broader war that would wreak havoc across the region. The smallness of the peninsula has a way of clarifying the high stakes of any war: Millions of people are vulnerable to being massacred by either side.

North Korea’s leaders — including Kim Jong Un — aren’t blind to this. In fact, they’re exceptionally sensitive to it. They’re very mindful of the fact that their ability to inflict huge damage on South Korea with great speed is a big deterrent to any major US strike against the North. And because of that, they know they have a bit of leeway in taking provocative action against South Korea and the US.

Nobody actually wants to go to war, so North Korea gets away with a lot of bad behavior.

North Korea’s acts of belligerence aren’t insane outbursts, but deliberate gestures grounded in careful observations about how the outside world responds to it. And when it carries them out, it looks strong and powerful to its own population, intimidates South Korea, and broadcasts to the global community a highly aggressive posture that makes military intervention against it seem all the more daunting.

Nuclear weapons are key to maintaining power

So how do North Korea’s nuclear ambitions fit into all this? With nuclear weapons, North Korea believes it will have license to act even more provocatively in the region without fear of repercussions. If the US already lets North Korea get away with adversarial behavior now because it fears provoking an all-out war, just imagine how much more it will put up with to avoid an all-out nuclear war.

When North Korea looks at other authoritarian dictators that failed to secure nuclear weapons, it sees a legacy of failure.

“They saw Iraq, which had an unrealized nuclear program, get taken out,” Person explains. “They saw [Libyan dictator] Muammar Qaddafi voluntarily give up his nuclear program in exchange for integration and improved relations with the world — only for the NATO-backed rebels to take him out in the street in 2011.”

Pyongyang’s thoughts about the power of nuclear weapons are shaped by those regime collapses. The North sees nuclear weapons as the one bulwark that can prevent similar things from happening to them. “Kim thinks that the ‘treasured sword of justice’ protects them and guarantees the survival of their system,” Jonathan Pollack, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who specializes in US strategy in Asia and the Pacific, tells me.

Person says the fact that the Trump administration has threatened to tear up the Iran nuclear deal — in which Iran agreed to restrict many of its sensitive nuclear activities in exchange for the lifting of sanctions — only makes North Korea more resolute about clinging to its weapons. “It sends the signal to them, you may get an agreement today — but then the next president may not agree with it,” Person says.

Kim is not just a “crazy fat kid”

Outside of nuclear program, Kim Jong Un has shocked many with some of his more brutal actions in recent years. He had his uncle executed in 2013; he appears to have assassinated his exiled half-brother in a Malaysian airport this year. From a distance, this proclivity for violence against family members can come across as unhinged to Western observers.

But analysts say that while Kim’s behavior is brutal, it’s not irrational. His executions have been attempts at consolidating power and eliminating threats decisively — a necessary kind of practice when you’re running a totalitarian state.

“If Kim was totally out of touch, there’s no way he could’ve lasted this long,” says David Kang, a scholar at the University of Southern California who specializes in security in East Asia. “You have to be good at figuring out what you want, how to reward friends, get rid of enemies.”

None of this is to say that Kim’s actions are not morally abhorrent. But there’s a logic to them that can be discerned quite clearly by experts.

“North Korea is remarkably predictable,” Pollack said. “Tactically they can surprise us ... but strategically, they rarely surprise me.”

Arguably it’s the Trump administration now that is less predictable than Kim’s regime. Trump has sent deeply mixed signals on how to approach North Korea, at times taking a harder line by refusing to rule out a preemptive strike but other times openly stating that he’d be open to talking to Kim.

Trump also quickly pulled major reversals on his China policy in his first 100 days in office, in large part because he appears to be desperate to have them help rein in North Korea. But nobody — including the dozens of senators he invited to a briefing on North Korea policy in April — seems to know what the actual plan is.

You can count North Korea’s leadership among those who are in the dark. In the meantime, they’re going to keep gunning for the things they see as crucial to the survival of their regime.




https://www.vox.com/world/2017/5/11/15624544/fbi-trump-comey-war
Why the FBI might wage “war” on Trump — and how they would actually do it
Updated by Zack Beauchamp@zackbeauchampzack@vox.com May 11, 2017, 4:00pm EDT

Photograph -- (Matt McClain/The Washington Post/Getty Images)

It’s not often that you hear members of the FBI threatening to go to war with the president. But that’s where we are after Donald Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey.

“[Trump] essentially declared war on a lot of people at the FBI,” an anonymous FBI official told the Washington Post. “I think there will be a concerted effort to respond over time in kind.”

There’s every reason to believe that the FBI is as angry as this official says. Interim FBI Director Andrew McCabe on Thursday told Congress that “the vast majority of employees enjoyed a deep, positive connection to Director Comey.” Reports from inside the bureau suggest horror and rage after the firing; one agent told the Daily Beast that “everyone feels like there has been a death in the family.”

The FBI values its independence from the political branches above all else, an independence directly threatened by Trump firing Comey in retaliation for the Russia investigation. Historically, the bureau has been willing to fight — and fight dirty — to stay independent.

“The FBI is a tribal organization,” Ben Wittes, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, tells me. “You screw with the FBI, you screw with the institution of the FBI, and ... a lot of people are gonna be angry.”

So let’s say that the official’s comments to the Washington Post are right: that we’re about to see elements of the FBI launch a full-scale offensive against Trump in retaliation for the Comey firing.

I asked both Wittes, who’s very familiar with the current FBI’s practices, and Douglas Charles, a historian of the FBI at Penn State, what the FBI could actually do — in practical terms — to undermine and weaken the Trump presidency.

Their answer? Quite a lot.

The bureau could leak damaging information to the press. It could work more closely with Congress to strengthen the legislative probes into Russia. It could intensify its own Russia investigation, or even open new investigations into Trump and his allies.

Any one of these actions, theoretically, could do serious damage to Trump’s already chaotic and politically vulnerable administration. And, according to Charles, one of them is “probably” inevitable.

This is one fight the president may soon regret picking.

Leaks, leaks, leaks

The first and most obvious thing the FBI could do is talk to the press.

“The FBI has a really long history of leaking to various outlets who could advance their own bureaucratic interests,” Charles says. “There could be some very good amount of leaking happening soon, if there’s not already.”

The most famous leaker in US history — the pseudonymous Deep Throat, who gave sensitive information on the Nixon administration to Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in 1972-3 during the Watergate scandal — was later revealed to be Mark Felt, who was associate FBI director at the time.

Interestingly, Felt’s motivation for leaking about Watergate wasn’t whistleblowing: He wasn’t motivated by some patriotic sense of duty to protect American democracy. Rather, he believed he was acting to protect the FBI’s independence from Nixon’s attempts to rein it in.

“He was doing that because Nixon appointed a sycophant, L. Patrick Gray, as FBI director,” Charles explains. “He wasn’t leaking out of some sympathy for Woodward and Bernstein or Watergate, but for his own interests — to undermine Gray.”

It “wouldn’t surprise me whatsoever,” Charles continued, if this were to happen again in this case. A senior FBI official decides that Trump is a threat to the FBI, and begins leaking damaging information that the FBI has on the president to reporters.

That could start, obviously, with any troubling facts the FBI may have uncovered so far in the Russia investigation.

In late March, CNN reported that “the FBI has information that indicates associates of President Donald Trump communicated with suspected Russian operatives to possibly coordinate the release of information damaging to Hillary Clinton's campaign.”

CNN didn’t say what that information was, exactly — was it a phone call between a Trump ally and Russian intelligence? Compromising emails? — but it’s pretty likely that its release would be embarrassing for the Trump administration. And presumably there’s more where that came from, given that the FBI’s investigation into Trump and Russia has only grown in the past month and a half.

“THEY COULD DO THAT WITHOUT EVER GETTING CAUGHT”

These leaks wouldn’t necessarily have to be authorized at the highest levels. A few disgruntled agents with access to the right information could contact the press on their own. Indeed, that’s what appeared to happen last summer, when information about the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails kept drip-drip-dripping out of the bureau’s New York field office.

“I have not seen a lot of evidence of leaks out of this Russia investigation. In fact, I haven’t really seen any,” Wittes says. But “I don’t deny the possibility that you could imagine individual agents doing that stuff [now].”

Assuming the FBI investigation is as serious as it seems — and given that acting FBI Director McCabe testified Thursday that the investigation was “highly significant,” it probably is — the information it has is likely far more specific and damning than what we’ve seen so far.

Fighting them would consume huge amounts of Trump’s time and energy — and could potentially grind his legislative agenda to a halt, as Congress holds hearing after hearing on whatever the FBI tells the press.

It’d be especially painful since FBI investigations usually take a long time to conclude, which means the information could continue to drip out for quite a while. The sooner it started to come to light, the sooner it would start messing up Trump’s political agenda.

Working with Congress
Democratic Senators Meet On Capitol Hill
Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)

The FBI is technically part of the Justice Department — and thus the executive branch. But in reality, it operates sort of like a freestanding bureaucracy, with conduits to other parts of the government that don’t involve going through the White House or the attorney general.

The most important of these bureau relationships, for present purposes, is with Congress. Both the House and Senate Intelligence Committees are currently conducting investigations into Trump’s ties with Russia. The House investigation is a bit of a mess — remember Devin Nunes? — but the Senate’s is pretty serious. Its biggest problem is that the Senate has given it limited funding and limited access to trained investigators.

The FBI can help with that.

“There’s a thousand ways in which, for example, the Senate Intelligence Committee investigation depends on cooperation institutionally from the intelligence community,” Wittes says. “That cooperation can be more or less robust. An FBI that really believes its independence is under attack is going to have a deeper relationship with its overseers, whose job, among other things, is to protect its independence.”

Wittes thinks this is one of the most likely ways that post-Comey resistance will manifest. The FBI will devote more resources to helping along the congressional investigations, which will help those investigations become more credible and more effective. The more Trump is being pressured on Russia by Congress, the harder it will be for him to try to install a crony atop the FBI and get Senate consent for it.

Even if this doesn’t happen, the FBI has ways of working with Congress outside of official channels. This is a different sort of leaking, where information uncovered by the bureau just so happens to end up in the hands of a friendly member of Congress, who then either leaks this information to the press herself or threatens the president with it behind closed doors.

This used to happen a lot more frequently in the days of the legendarily vicious FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover had dossiers on everyone, and contacts in all different parts of the government for disseminating them.

In 1953, in the midst of a moral panic about gays in government known as the Lavender Scare, Hoover had set up specific contacts in each branch of government for leaking information that someone was a “Sex Deviate” — an operation explicitly authorized via an executive order signed by President Dwight Eisenhower.

When Hoover wanted to get rid of someone or block their nomination, he would discreetly hand off that person’s file to the relevant contact at the White House or the Capitol. That tactic torpedoed a number of careers, including that of Arthur Vandenberg Jr., whom Eisenhower had picked to be his top aide.

After Hoover died in 1972, Congress put in place a number of reforms aimed at limiting the FBI’s influence — and since then, that kind of super-shady stuff has presumably happened a lot less frequently. But the FBI still knows how to discreetly hand off information to Congress if need be.

Charles floated a hypothetical in which Trump appointed someone the FBI didn’t like to be its new director. You could easily imagine, in that scenario, the bureau handing off damaging information it has about that person to a cooperative senator — and that senator using the information to prevent Trump’s nominee from ever being confirmed.

“They could do that without ever getting caught, and it would perfectly fit their history as well,” he says.

Ramping up investigations into Trump — even beyond Russia

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Bradd Jaffy ✔ @BraddJaffy
Q: Did Comey's firing impede any investigation?

McCabe: “you cannot stop the men and the women of the FBI from doing the right thing”
10:59 AM - 11 May 2017
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Of course, the most obvious way to defy Trump is to do the opposite of what he wants: to ramp up the Russia investigation, devoting more staff and resources to it rather than fewer. Acting FBI Director McCabe already signaled that he would do just that in his testimony to the Senate (embedded above), telling Sen. Marco Rubio that “you cannot stop the men and the women of the FBI from doing the right thing.”

But the ways in which the FBI could mess with Trump directly go well beyond Russia.

Trump has done a lot of things that might invite law enforcement scrutiny, but weirdly haven’t. My colleague Matt Yglesias lists them:

Over the years, Trump seems to have been mixed up with the Mafia, and his casinos have paid civil fines for evading money laundering rules. He’s been involved in empty-box tax scams, and his shenanigans with the Trump Foundation may have constituted criminal tax evasion. Still, as Edward Ericson Jr. details, he’s never faced a serious criminal investigation despite repeatedly bumping up against one.
And that’s to say nothing of Trump’s sketchiest associates, like Michael Flynn, Carter Page, and Roger Stone.

Now, the FBI can’t just decide to investigate any one of these Trump-related issues because it wants to. It needs a piece of information that gives it cause to believe criminal activity or some kind of national security threat is present. In FBI language, this is called “predication.”

There are certain standards for what information can “predicate” an investigation. But the FBI, Wittes says, has “a fair bit of discretion” among “individual agents [and] field offices” as to when to start looking at something. He said he could easily imagine that some agents, furious about Comey’s firing, might start looking into other allegations about Trump that the FBI may have received tips about — be they on Russia or something else.

“If you think about how sprawling the allegations are about this group of people, and you imagine that the bureau is more rather than less angry,” Wittes says, “that might very well shade the way you understand allegations that may drift in your door: how seriously you take them, how you weigh them against traditional predication standards.”

Wittes suggests an analogy to the way the FBI investigates organized crime, the arrest of Al Capone on tax evasion charges being the most famous example. When someone is a target of suspicion on one set of charges that the FBI can’t necessarily make, the bureau is more likely to go after them on whatever case it can conceivably put together.

“If you believe someone’s dirty, and you get what would otherwise be a tip that you might not investigate against another person — well, it’s a mobster,” he says.

The point, in short, is that Trump is vulnerable and the FBI is extremely powerful. Starting a fight with the bureau is inadvisable for every president, and especially so for a president with a history of legal problems. But by firing Comey, Trump has invited war.



A NEW FACE IN THE GROUP, BUT SHE SAYS THE SAME OLD PARTY LINES. LIKE PICKUP LINES, THEY GET STALE AFTER AWHILE.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/sarah-huckabee-sanders-is-suddenly-the-star-of-the-feel-bad-story-of-the-day/2017/05/11/1269bec2-35c1-11e7-b412-62beef8121f7_story.html?utm_term=.2cb4269b24ad
Sarah Huckabee Sanders is suddenly the star of the feel-bad story of the day
By Paul Farhi May 11 at 5:14 PM

Photograph -- Deputy White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders speaks during a briefing at the White House the day after President Trump fired FBI Director James B. Comey. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

Sarah Huckabee Sanders tried to square an impossible circle on Thursday. It didn’t help that her boss, President Trump, got in her way.

With White House press secretary Sean Spicer sidelined, Sanders, Spicer’s deputy, has spent three days in the barrel trying to explain why the president fired FBI Director James B. Comey.

That’s been no easy task. On Wednesday, Sanders told White House reporters that the president had done so on the recommendation of his deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein. Trump himself had claimed as much in a letter to Comey relieving him of his job.

Except then on Thursday, Trump told NBC News that he would have fired Comey “regardless” of the recommendation.

Which forced Sanders to, um, clarify what she’d said the day before. Pressed by ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl whether she was “in the dark” about Trump’s actions, Sanders acknowledged that she might have been. “I think it’s pretty simple,” she said. “I hadn’t had a chance to have the conversation directly with the president. I’d had several conversations with him, but I didn’t ask that question directly, ‘Had you already made that decision?’ ”

But never mind, she argued, dismissing the contradictory stories as “semantics” since Trump and Rosenstein agreed on the need to dump Comey.

It was an inauspicious moment in the spotlight for Sanders, who typically plays the understudy to Spicer. She stepped in to become the White House’s chief spokesperson this week after Spicer took leave to fulfill a Navy Reserve commitment at the Pentagon.

Among her other assertions, she told reporters Thursday that the FBI’s rank-and-file employees had lost faith in Comey’s management of the agency. That one raised eyebrows, too; only two hours earlier, acting FBI director Andrew McCabe told the Senate Intelligence Committee that Comey enjoyed “broad support” inside the bureau. Sanders told the press that she’d heard otherwise.

“We’ll have to agree to disagree,” she said.

Play Video 2:14
White House: Trump considered firing Comey since election

White House principal deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders on May 10 said President Trump had considered dismissing FBI Director James B. Comey since winning the presidential election. Trump fired Comey on May 9. (Reuters)

The spin from Sanders — whose official title is principal deputy press secretary — may not have been wholly different from what you might have expected from Spicer. But her manner certainly was. In two days of briefings, Sanders has kept her answers short and crisp, her voice steady and calm and inflected with her Arkansas upbringing. She has rarely interrupted her questioners with Spicer-ian interjections of “Hold on!” — lending a somewhat less combative and adversarial quality to the briefings.

Sanders, 34, is the daughter of Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor and two-time Republican presidential candidate. Her official baptism in politics came through her father; as a college student, she was the field coordinator for his 2002 reelection campaign.

She subsequently worked for Republican candidates, including for George W. Bush’s reelection campaign in 2004, former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty’s unsuccessful presidential run in 2012, and the successful 2014 Senate campaign of Tom Cotton (R-Ark.).

She became a senior adviser to Trump in 2016 after managing her father’s second presidential bid, which attracted just one delegate.

Sanders, who did not respond to requests for comment for this article, first tried out her talking points about Comey on Tuesday night. This was shortly after the White House communications staff was caught so far off guard by the news that Spicer briefly ducked behind White House shrubbery to avoid talking with reporters.

Photogtrph -- (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

Her relative poise in the face of a skeptical news media immediately gave rise to speculation among journalists that Sanders was in line to replace Spicer as Trump’s chief spokesperson. There’s nothing to support that notion, but that didn’t stop CNN from mulling over the possibility.

Another kind of buzz started up Wednesday on Twitter: Just as comedian Melissa McCarthy has created a franchise by parodying Spicer on “Saturday Night Live,” Sanders’s newly elevated profile must mean that cast member Cecily Strong (who resembles Sanders) is surely going to play her on Saturday’s program.

Sanders took her first crack at heading off the metastasizing criticism of Comey’s firing during an interview Tuesday evening on Tucker Carlson’s program on Fox News Channel, a safe venue.

“My gosh, Tucker,” she said, with mild pique, “when are [critics] going to let that go?” she said of the Russia investigation. “It’s been going on for nearly a year. Frankly, it’s kind of getting absurd. There’s nothing there. We’ve heard that time and time again. . . . There is no ‘there’ there. It’s time to move on.”

Carlson didn’t challenge her, but the same general line didn’t work so well on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Wednesday.

Sanders first claimed that host Joe Scarborough had once said that there was no evidence tying Trump’s campaign to the Russian government, bringing a swift retort from Scarborough.

“I said there’s no obvious evidence of collusion out there right now,” he said. “If there were that obvious evidence of collusion, it would have already been leaked by now. I also said there have to be in-depth investigations because it may take, I think, probably an independent prosecutor to figure out the financial ties between Donald Trump and Russia.”

He added, “I’m surprised you’re twisting my words.”

When Sanders proceeded to argue that committees in the House, the Senate and the FBI have looked into Trump’s Russia connection and “everyone comes to the same conclusion,” co-host Mika Brzezinski cut her off. Brzezinski noted that no such conclusion had been reached. “You’re not actually telling the truth right now,” she told Sanders.

After Thursday’s briefing, one White House reporter opined that Sanders had seriously harmed her credibility. But others say they generally like Sanders, who honed her messaging skills as a TV surrogate for Trump during the campaign.

“She’s remarkably poised for her age,” said one who, like several interviewed, spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid crossing a key White House source. “She has her father’s sense of humor, which is a good thing. People who’ve held that job before are humorless.”

Another reporter noted on Wednesday that Sanders was dealt a poor hand but played it about as effectively as she could.

“You can only do so good of a job if you’re spinning on behalf of a president whose story changes minute to minute,” she said. “She remained calm. . . . She has a steadiness that Spicer evidently lacks.”

But that’s not to say the reporter is rooting for Sanders to replace Spicer. “He’s a very complex character, and he makes a lot of fun mistakes,” she said. “And you can see, on his face nearly every day, that he struggles with this job. . . . There’s a lot going on there, and so he’s a rich subject.