The lies are catching up with Trump – a presidency imperiled

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By William H. Freivogel

Opinion

False and misleading statements from President Donald Trump and the White House pile up day-by-day, week-by-week, steadily undermining the president’s credibility and making him the most unpopular president in modern history at the six-month mark.

Trump claims to have signed more bills than any other modern president. He hasn’t.

He blames the Democrats for killing the GOP health bill when it was the Republicans who couldn’t muster a majority.

His son first denies ever meeting with Russians about campaign issues, then admits meeting a Russian lawyer but says it wasn’t about the campaign, then admits he was promised a Russian government lawyer had dirt on Hillary Clinton, then releases emails expressing delight at the prospect of the dirt, then claims to have told everything about the meeting but leaves out other Russians in attendance.

Trump defends his son’s decision to meet with the Russians tweeting, “Most politicians would have gone to a meeting like the one Don jr attended in order to get info on an opponent. That’s politics!” But political operatives from both parties say it isn’t just politics to collude with agents of America’s chief adversary and the proper response would have been to call the FBI.

Trump’s lawyers say he is not under criminal investigation even though they have no way of knowing and the claim is difficult to believe. Robert Mueller was appointed special counsel after fired FBI Director James B. Comey disclosed the president asked him to drop the investigation of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn – an act that is arguably obstruction of justice. And now there are reports Mueller is investigating the Trump Jr. meeting.

All of this lying and misleading is in the last 10 days alone. Before that Trump lied about President Barack Obama tapping Trump tower, about millions of illegal voters for Clinton, and of course there was the big lie that was a cornerstone of his campaign – that Obama wasn’t born in the United States.

One might have thought Trump would take a vacation from his refrain about the “dishonest” mainstream media and “fake news” as his son was the source of the documents about the Russia meeting. But there’s no stopping this president who tweeted a day later, “Remember, when you hear the words ‘sources say’ from the Fake Media, often times those sources are made up and do not exist.”

And this week, when the media disclosed that Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin had an undisclosed meeting on the side of the G-20 summit – in which Trump spoke to Putin through the Kremlin interpreter – Trump complained bitterly “The Fake News is becoming more and more dishonest!”

Some of conservative commentators finally have lost patience. Last week Fox’s Chris Wallace said any fair-minded citizen should worry “about the fact that we were repeatedly misled about what this meeting concerned.” And Fox anchor Shepard Smith told Wallace, “Why is it lie after lie after lie? … My grandmother used to say … Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive. The deception, Chris, is mind-boggling.”

Then this week the Wall Street Journal editorial page called for “radical transparency” criticizing the Trumps for having “created the appearance of a conspiracy that on the evidence Don Jr. lacks the wit to concoct. And they handed their opponents another of the swords that by now could arm a Roman legion…. Denouncing leaks as ‘fake news’ won’t wash as a counter-strategy beyond the President’s base, as Mr. Trump’s latest 36 percent approval rating shows.” The brutal realities of Washington, the Journal warned, will “destroy Mr. Trump, his family and their business reputation unless they change their strategy toward the Russia probe.”

It is true that a PPP poll shows more than half of Trump’s supporters think Trump Jr. never met with the Russians, even though he admits it. But Trump’s low approval ratings show the lies have had a cost. As Trump’s overall approval rating has slipped, the percentage of strong Trump supporters has declined while the percentage of strong opponents has grown.

It will take months for Mueller to complete his investigation, but it isn’t too soon to say this presidency is imperiled.

The biggest bombshell: ‘I love it.’

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opinion

by William H. Freivogel

The New York Times’ story about Donald Trump Jr.’s enthusiastic reaction to the prospect of getting dirt from Russia on Hillary Clinton is the biggest bombshell among the many big newspaper disclosures published during the first six months of the Trump presidency.

Since the Russian scandal began, Trump has insisted that it was “fake news” and that there had been no collusion between the campaign and the Russians.

Now comes proof his son enthusiastically agreed to meet with a Russian lawyer last summer to get “ultra sensitive” information on Hillary Clinton after he was told explicitly the information was “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”

If the letter had been sent to Trump Jr. as part of an FBI sting, it couldn’t have been written more clearly:  Russia was trying to elect the presumptive Republican nominee and was ready to give Trump and his father damaging information about the Democrat.

Nor could Trump Jr.’s response have been clearer. “If it’s what you say I love it,” he responded in an email to a trusted intermediary.

Those three words – I love it – will go down in history. The president’s son was ready to accept information from a hostile government as part of that government’s secret intelligence operation to help elect Trump.  Not only did Trump Jr. meet with the Russian, but he also brought along his important brother-in-law Jared Kushner and then campaign chair Paul Manafort.

In their wildest dreams, Clinton campaign officials never imagined such clear proof that the highest levels of the Trump campaign sought to collude with the Russians to beat Clinton.

It’s not treason, as Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine suggested.  That requires a plot to aid an enemy.  But there are plenty of potential legal violations for Special Counsel Robert Mueller to investigate, including campaign violations for accepting a thing of value from a foreign national.  Mueller already is investigating other aspects of the Russia story and Trump’s firing of FBI director James B. Comey, which raises obstruction of justice questions.

Many Republicans suggested Tuesday that the disclosure of the Trump Tower meeting was a “nothing-burger.” The repetition of the obviously scripted phrase became comical as the day wore on.

Fox’s Martha Martha MacCallum, playing defense for Trump, tried to get conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer to say the meeting was not important because Trump Jr. says he didn’t receive damaging information. Krauthammer wouldn’t play ball:

“It’s a hell of a defense to say your collusion might be incompetent.  If you get a call to go to a certain place in the middle of the night to pick up stolen goods and it turns out the stolen goods don’t show up but the cops show up, I think you’re going to have a very weak story saying, ‘Well, I got swindled here.’”

The White House says the president didn’t know about the meeting.  The president himself tweeted Wednesday that his son is innocent and the victim of “the greatest Witch Hunt in political history. Sad!”

But if it turns out that the president knew his son, son-in-law and campaign manager were meeting the Russian in an office near his in Trump Tower that day in June, the “nothing-burger” email could become a “smoking gun,” like the tape from 45 Junes ago that forced Richard M. Nixon from office.

McCaskill’s town hall pitch for media literacy

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by Terry Ganey

Photo by Terry Ganey

TIPTON, Mo.—Sen. Claire McCaskill held 10 town hall meetings across Missouri last week, fielding hundreds of questions about issues like health care, sanctions against Russia, and the sharing of voters’ information.

But it was at a forum in Tipton, a small town in the middle of the state, where McCaskill was asked about something other than congressional policy.

Shawn Meintz, a high school teacher from Kirksville, wondered what the senator would suggest teaching young people, 17 and 18-years-old.

The question prompted one of the longest responses McCaskill would give at the forum.

“Teach young people where they should go to find facts,” McCaskill replied. She said people today go to certain television networks to find affirmation, rather than information.  She said 15 percent of her constituents watch FOX News to get affirmation for their right-wing beliefs, while another group on the other side watches MSNBC to get their own assurance that they are right.

“The rest of the state is watching ‘Dancing with the Stars,’ and can’t stand either side,” McCaskill said.

McCaskill told Meintz that students need to know where to go to find fact-based journalism.

“They need to learn that there are no editors on social media like there are at newspapers. During the political campaign, hundreds of Russians created Facebook news feeds and people were repeating them as if they were true.

“One of the challenges we have in America today is simply learning what are the facts,” McCaskill added. “The notion that everything is fake news is not good for democracy.”

Meintz teachers U.S. government to 12th graders, and newspapers to 11th and 12th graders.  He also teaches an advanced placement class in world history.

On the day of McCaskill’s forum in Tipton, Meintz was just ending a vacation with his family at Lake of the Ozarks.  On their way back to their home in Kirksville they stopped by the senator’s hour-long town hall session.  Meintz was accompanied by his wife, Angela, and their three children: Jackson, 10, Kennedy, 6 and Pierce, 2.

Asked what he thought about McCaskill’s response, Meintz said, “I wish I had recorded it.  It was good.  I’m going to talk more in class about where to go to get real news.  She’s right.  There’s too much misinformation out there and public schools can address that.”

 

Terry Ganey covered the Missouri Legislature for 35 years for the Associated Press, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Columbia Daily Tribune. He is the former St. Louis editor of the Journalism Review.  He is also the author of “Innocent Blood, a true story of obsession and serial murder,” and co-author of “Under the Influence” about the Anheuser-Busch dynasty and “Pretty Ladylike,” McCaskill’s memoir.

Trump’s nonsense won’t undermine the First Amendment

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opinion

by William H. Freivogel

President Donald J. Trump can spend his entire presidency threatening the press, calling it the enemy, branding real news fake and fake news real.  He can tweet crude attacks on female journalists and post nonsensical videos like the one of him beating up CNN in a parody of Wrestlemania.

But he never will succeed in diminishing the power of the press to hold him to account, nor will he diminish the First Amendment protection that the Constitution and an independent judiciary guarantee to the press as a check on presidential power.

The only thing that President Trump will diminish is himself as he cheapens the highest office in the land and the symbol of American democracy and might.

But many people are worried.

Over the weekend, I was at a party on a front porch in North Carolina enjoying the fireflies and the company.  A group of musicians wondered out loud whether Trump could undermine the press and stifle dissent as authoritarians do in other countries.

The next day, Jim Rutenberg, the New York Times’ excellent media columnist, wrote a gloomy Independence Day piece stating “one of the pillars of our 241-year-old republic – the First Amendment – is under near-daily assault from the highest levels of the government.”

Rutenberg had plenty of examples:

– Trump’s CNN attack parody.

– Trump’s crude tweet describing Mika Brezinski “bleeding badly from a facelift.”

– Trump’s veiled threat toward Jeff Bezos, head of Amazon and the Washington Post: “The #AmazonWashingtonPost, sometimes referred to as the guardian of Amazon not paying internet taxes (which they should) is FAKE NEWS!”

– Sean Hannity’s suggestion that reporters be required to submit questions to the White House in writing and Newt Gingrich’s call to close the White House press room to the media altogether because they have become “a danger to the country right now.” http://www.mediaite.com/online/gingrich-trump-needs-to-close-white-house-press-room-because-the-media-is-corrupt/

– The incendiary NRA commentary of former St. Louisan and conservative radio host Dana Loesch saying liberals “use their media to assassinate real news” leading to a “violence of lies” that needs to be combated with “the clenched fists of truth.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtGOQFf9VCE

And that was just last week.

Almost every week of his short presidency Trump has found a way to demean himself and cheapen the presidency.

He has done it when he lies, as with his claim that President Obama tapped Trump Tower. He has done it when he tells the truth, as when he said he was thinking about the Russia investigation when he fired FBI director James B. Comey.

He does it when he calls reliable news organizations such as The New York Times and Washington Post “fake” and then treats conspiracy theorists, such as Alex Jones and Hannity, as reputable.

He does it when he calls the Russia investigation fake news in the face of the unanimous intelligence assessment that Russia interfered in the presidential election to try to help elect Trump, thus subverting the most important quadrennial act of the most important democracy in history.

But Americans need not fear Trump will scare off professional journalists.  The tireless work of the Times, Post and other mainstream media dispels that fear.  Every journalistic instinct is to challenge politicians who abuse power.  Bullies like Trump don’t frighten journalists, they inspire them to dig deeper.

Nor does Trump have power to undermine the constitutional protection that the First Amendment explicitly provides the press.

The First Amendment protection for the press has grown steadily through American history as the Supreme Court has recognized broader and broader protections for all forms of media.

There was a time when newspaper editors criticizing President John Adams were jailed.  When Abraham Lincoln had draft resisters arrested and newspapers censored. When socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs could be locked up for advocating resistance to the draft during World War I. When burning an American flag could get a protester jailed. When the Nixon administration could try to stop the publication of the Pentagon Papers, the secret history of the Vietnam War. And when Southern segregationists could threaten the national press with expensive libel trials before sympathetic juries to make it too expensive to cover the evils of segregation.

Thanks to the Pentagon Papers decision of 1971, the government can’t stop publication of national security secrets absent “direct, immediate, and irreparable damage to the nation.” Thanks to New York Times v. Sullivan in 1964, politicians’ ability to use libel suits to intimidate the press is mostly a thing of the past.  And there is nothing Trump can do about it because the courts can be counted on to enforce the constitutional standard protecting the press.

President Ronald Reagan is well remembered for speaking eloquently about America as a shining city on the hill. How sad the person elected to protect that shining city has dimmed its bright promise.

I offered a toast to my friends in North Carolina on this 4th of July to be grateful we live in a country that has a free and fearless press.

Fooling some of the people

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Opinion

By William H. Freivogel

 

Two stories by mainstream media – an excellent one by the Washington Post and a terrible one by CNN – have provided President Trump more material for his fairy tales on Twitter.

The Post reported a heavily sourced and deeply researched story showing that President Obama reacted cautiously to the high-grade intelligence he received last August showing “Russian President Vladimir Putin’s direct involvement in a cyber campaign to disrupt and discredit the U.S. presidential race and help elect….Donald Trump.” The story reported Obama was slow releasing the information because he did not want it to appear he was trying to help Hillary Clinton win the election. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/world/national-security/obama-putin-election-hacking/?utm_term=.1c2d1b0eadff

Meanwhile, CNN retracted its story suggesting contact between a Trump associate and the Russians. The story has just one source. Three reporters and editors have now submitted their resignations for their involvement in the poorly sourced story, including Eric Lichtblau who won a Pulitzer Prize at The New York Times.

Trump pounced. Using his talent for semantic jujitsu, Trump tweeted that the Post story showed it was Obama who had failed to respond to Putin’s cyber attack and was guilty of collusion and obstruction – not he.

The president tweeted, “The reason that President Obama did NOTHING about Russia after being notified by the CIA of meddling is that he expected Clinton would win…and did not want to ‘rock the boat.’ He didn’t ‘choke,’ he colluded or obstructed, and it did the Dems and Crooked Hillary no good.”

This was an extraordinary switch of positions for a man who called during the campaign for Putin to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails, who suggested at a presidential debate the culprit may have been a 400-pound hacker or China and who, as president has called the Russia investigation a “witch hunt,” “phony” and a “Dem HOAX.”

About a week ago, Press Secretary Sean Spicer said he couldn’t say whether the president thought Moscow interfered in the election. “I have not sat down and talked to him about that specific thing.” Later Spicer said the president had accepted that there was some Russian involvement in the election but wouldn’t say whether he agreed with the intelligence assessment that Putin wanted Trump to win. Other countries might have been involved in the hack, Spicer said, without providing proof.

So we have the remarkable spectacle of a president who has been in full charge of the government for five months still hedging on the unanimous intelligence assessment that Putin tried to help Trump win. And we have a president who has done nothing to respond to the Russian interference in the election criticizing his predecessor for not having responded forcefully enough.

When late last week CNN retracted its story linking a Trump transition official to the Russia investigation, Trump tweeted it showed the mainstream media was peddling fake news.

“Wow, CNN had to retract big story on ‘Russia,’ with 3 employees forced to resign,” he tweeted. “What about all the other phony stories they do? FAKE NEWS!”

He followed with another Tweet taking after other mainstream news organizations. “They caught Fake News CNN cold, but what about NBC, CBS & ABC? What about the failing @nytimes & @washingtonpost? They are all Fake News!”

CNN definitely violated important standards of journalism in publishing the story based on one source. It deserves the criticism.

But the New York Times and the Washington Post have provided strong, traditional investigative reporting, including the Post’s report revealing that Michael Flynn had talked to the Russian ambassador last December about easing sanctions, even though Flynn had denied it. The Post story led to Flynn’s resignation as national security adviser and the president’s improper request to then-FBI Director James Comey to let go of its criminal investigation of Flynn. That, in turn, is an important part of a possible obstruction of justice case against Trump.

Trump’s twisting of the truth into convenient fairy tales recalls a quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln. “You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.”

Lost in a credibility canyon

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Commentary

by William H. Freivogel

 

During the Johnson and Nixon presidencies, the press talked about the credibility gap, first relating to Vietnam and later Watergate.

During the Trump administration there is the credibility canyon.

We begin with a president who has lied more than any other president over such a short time.  Armies of fact trackers work overtime on whoppers like President Obama tapping Trump Tower and the phantom millions of fraudulent voters who denied him a popular vote victory.

Yet even this incredible, uncredible president turns out to be more truthful at times than his lawyers.

Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow was entirely unbelievable in his appearances on last Sunday’s TV talk shows when he claimed Trump wasn’t under investigation for obstruction of justice, while the president himself had tweeted he was under investigation.  Sekulow didn’t help himself when he began talking about the obstruction investigation as something that was occurring.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/06/19/trumps-lawyers-very-confusing-sunday-annotated/?hpid=hp_hp-more-top-stories_fix-sekulow-915am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&tid=a_inl&utm_term=.f7cf02508478

Chris Wallace, the nearest thing Fox has to a professional journalist, called Sekulow on the contradiction and extracted from him the admission he had no way of knowing whether the president is under investigation for obstruction.  No one from the special counsel had talked to Sekulow and it is not standard practice to inform a person he is a target at the outset of an investigation.

Sekulow was reprising unfounded comments from a week earlier on ABC’s “This Week” when he grossly misstated the testimony of fired FBI director James B. Comey.  Sekulow claimed then “it was made very clear from the FBI director on multiple occasions that the president had not been and was not under investigation for obstruction of justice.”

In fact, Comey said no such thing. Comey declined to make a conclusion about whether Trump engaged in obstruction of justice, leaving that legal judgment to Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III.  “I don’t think it’s for me to say whether the conversation I had with the president was an effort to obstruct,” Comey testified.  “I took it as a very disturbing thing, very concerning, but that’s a conclusion I’m sure the special counsel will work towards to what the intention was there and whether that’s an offense.”

In the week between Sekulow’s two appearances, not only had Trump tweeted he was under investigation, but the Washington Post had reported that five unnamed officials said Mueller was pursuing an obstruction investigation of the president.  Sekulow, however, was undeterred.

Maybe it’s just that the Trump White House believes the president’s supporters will believe anything it puts out.  Or maybe it’s just the bad habit of lawyers thinking they can make an argument for the most spurious assertions.

Sekulow has been a pretty successful advocate on religious freedom issues before the United States Supreme Court. He made a name for himself arguing his Jews For Jesus organization has a religious right to distribute literature at an airport. Later he claimed Muslims don’t have a religious right to build a community center near Ground Zero.

Sekulow once said appearing before the Supreme Court made him feel like Rocky, the heroic prizefighter. But his answers to Wallace were gibberish.  He claimed Comey had violated his lawyer-client relationship with Trump, which probably didn’t exist because Comey was serving as the nation’s top investigator, not its top lawyer.

Sekulow also said Trump had the constitutional power to fire Comey partly because the president was just acting on the recommendation of the Justice Department.  But Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who wrote a memo criticizing Comey’s handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation, testified the memo was not written to justify Comey’s firing.

It was pointed out to Sekulow that Trump himself admitted to having decided to fire Comey before the Rosenstein memo and had been thinking about the Russia investigation at the time he fired him.  In fact, it’s pretty clear Trump’s firing of Comey combined with Comey’s account of Trump pressuring him on the Russia investigation are the reasons Rosenstein appointed Mueller as special counsel.

Just as Nixon faced the greatest legal peril for obstructing the investigation of a Watergate burglary he may not have known about, Trump faces greater legal jeopardy for possibly obstructing the Russia investigation than for his aides’ contacts with the Russians during the election.

Living in a Fox-Limbaugh-Breitbart fantasy

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Opinion

By William H. Freivogel

 

Many Americans are living in a fantasy world constructed by Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Breitbart News and right-wing bloggers.

In this fantasy world:

  1. President Donald Trump has more credibility than James B. Comey, the man he fired as FBI director.
  2. Comey has perjured himself by first testifying he wasn’t ordered to drop any investigation into Trump associates and then testifying last week that Trump asked him to drop the criminal investigation of former national security adviser Michael Flynn.
  3. It is Comey, not Trump, who committed a crime, leaking his contemporaneous notes of Trump’s request to drop the investigation.
  4. Comey has cleared the president of obstruction of justice.
  5. And then there was the surreal cabinet meeting at which, Trump said he was just about the most successful president in history and his cabinet and staff kowtowed with statements of how blessed they were to work for him.

Now take off those Fox-colored glasses and re-enter the reality.

  1. Comey is a truthteller. Trump has lied more over a short time than any president in history.

Comey – a registered Republican longer than Trump – has lived the life of a straight-arrow lawyer and law enforcement official. As George W. Bush’s deputy attorney general he rushed to John Ashcroft’s hospital bedside to make sure the White House didn’t pressure the ill attorney general to reauthorize a warrantless surveillance program the Justice Department thought was illegal.

In the rare instance where Comey makes a factual mistake in testimony, he quickly corrects the record.

Meanwhile when Trump lies, he refuses to admit it – think Obama wiretap charges.

Most Americans get this. A YouGov poll shows 46 percent of Americans believed Comey was more trustworthy and 26 percent Trump. But in the alternative media universe inhabited by Trump voters, 70 percent thought Trump more trustworthy as compared to 7 percent who believed Comey.

  1. Comey did not lie or perjure himself. That false news story began with right-wing conspiracy theorist, Jack Posobiec, who styles himself a White House correspondent. In the weeks before last fall’s election, it was Posobiec who spread the dangerous nonsense about Hillary Clinton running a child sex ring out of the back rooms of Comet Pizza in Washington, D.C.

This time, Posobiec tweeted that in testimony in early May Comey had “said under oath that Trump did not ask him to halt any investigation.”

Actually, Comey had been asked if “the attorney general or senior officials at the Department of Justice” had ever tried to halt an investigation. He said no. He was not asked if Trump had asked him to halt an investigation. So when he testified last week that the president had asked him to drop the investigation of Flynn, he was not contradicting earlier testimony.

Facts be damned; the Posobiec tweet ricocheted through conservative media. The New York Times traced its path. Breitbart published a story headlined: “Comey Under Oath: ‘Have Not Experienced Any Requests to Stop FBI Investigations.’” GotNews.com, a Trump favorite that has distorted reports on the Russia investigation, upped the ante by suggesting Comey may have perjured himself.

InfoWars, run by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, picked up the perjury angle. Jones is the “journalist” who says 9/11 was a U.S. black bag job and that no children died at the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre. Then Limbaugh read the GotNews.com article on air and called the Russia investigation a “witch hunt.” And Fox’s Sean Hannity picked up the story, claiming it showed Comey himself had admitted the Trump request to drop the Flynn investigation “never happened.”

  1. Comey did not commit a crime by leaking his notes of the Trump meeting.

Comey acknowledged the leak without hesitation during testimony. This is not an illegal leak, such as revealing classified information. The memo was not classified and did not contain national security secrets. Comey’s leak of the memo is better understood as whistleblowing than leaking.

https://lawfareblog.com/sharing-memos-comey-did-nothing-wrong-former-official-and-everything-right-whistleblower

  1. Comey never said Trump was not under investigation for obstruction of justice.

On last Sunday’s “This Week” program, Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow, who moonlights as a Fox legal analyst, challenged the credibility of Comey and Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III and baldly asserted “it was made very clear from the FBI director on multiple occasions that the president had not been and was not under investigation for obstruction of justice.”

In fact it wasn’t clear or even implied. Comey declined to make a conclusion about obstruction of justice, properly leaving that legal judgment to Mueller. “I don’t think it’s for me to say whether the conversation I had with the President was an effort to obstruct,” he testified. “I took it as a very disturbing thing, very concerning, but that’s a conclusion I’m sure the special counsel will work towards to what the intention was there and whether that’s an offense.”

Comey said he had leaked his memo to trigger the appointment of a special counsel. So the gist of Comey’s testimony was the opposite of Sekulow’s claim. Rather than saying the president is not under investigation for obstruction, Comey made it clear he thought the act was so disturbing that there needed to be a special counsel to investigate the president on possible obstruction. In other words, even though the White House ballyhooed the claim that Comey had cleared Trump, Comey’s testimony strongly suggest Mueller is investigating the president for possible obstruction.

As former Watergate prosecutor Philip Allen Lacovara wrote in the Washington Post, “Any experienced prosecutor would see….a prima facie case of obstruction of justice.”

Trump puts Comey’s job in play, demands loyalty, repeatedly asks him to remove the cloud of the Russia investigation, asks him to drop the Flynn criminal investigation, reportedly asks intelligence chiefs to intervene with Comey, fires Comey because of the Russia investigation and tells the Russians the firing relieves the pressure of the investigation.

Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard law professor who is Fox’s favorite commentator of late, claims the president can shut down any investigation he wants and can fire anybody he wants because he is totally in charge of the executive branch. This may have been the case before Watergate, but the Supreme Court rejected that view in 1988 in saying it was not “so central to the functioning of the executive Branch” for the president to be able to torpedo investigations of himself and aides. https://lawfareblog.com/view-supreme-court-alan-dershowitz-wrong-about-powers-president

  1. A cabinet meeting like no other.

The most surreal moment of the week, however, was not the made up charges of the right-wing media, but rather the actual video of Trump’s first full cabinet meeting.

The president who has yet to get a major bill through the GOP Congress, bragged “Never has there been a president, with few exceptions…who has passed more legislation….” As cabinet and staff heaped praise on Trump, Chief of Staff Reince Priebus’s comment stood out as he thanked Trump for “the blessing that you’ve given us to serve your agenda.”

In the real world, one of those blessings was Trump’s reported ultimatum that Priebus had until July 4 to clean up the White House’s dysfunctional staff. http://www.politico.com/story/2017/06/11/donald-trump-reince-priebus-deadline-239411

 

Trump, twitter, transparency and trouble

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Commentary

by William H. Freivogel

During the presidential election, critics of the media maintained the press paid too much attention to Donald Trump’s tweets. Focusing on the tweets let Trump set the day’s news agenda and gave him oodles of free coverage, the critics said.

Five months into Trump’s presidency it is the president’s lawyers, spokespeople, diplomats and other White House aides who wish the president would pipe down.

But Trump won’t be silenced. Even though it is his aides telling him to limit his tweets, Trump blames his usual foil for trying to shut him up – the dishonest mainstream media. “The FAKE MSM is working so hard to get me not to use Social Media,” he tweeted this week. “They hate that I can get the honest and unfiltered message out.” Trump also points out he wouldn’t have won the election without his tweets reaching tens of millions of people.

But winning the election is one thing. Running the world’s leading democracy and most powerful country is another.

Some of the biggest controversies and setbacks of the Trump presidency trace back to Trump tweets – the false claim that President Obama tapped Trump Tower, his warning to fired FBI director James Comey there might be tapes of their conversations and his insistence that his executive order is a travel ban even though his lawyers have labored assiduously to say it isn’t.

Kellyanne Conway blamed the media this week for “this obsession with covering everything he says on Twitter and very little of what he does as president.”

Conway had reason to be in a bad mood. Her husband George, a well-know conservative lawyer, criticized the president’s tweet on the travel ban in a tweet of his own. Conway said Trump’s tweet won’t help “get 5 votes in SCOTUS, which is what actually matters. Sad.”

Many legal observers thought the conservative majority on the Supreme Court would be more inclined than lower courts to buy the administration argument that judges should consider only the four corners of the executive order rather than looking at Trump’s statements as a presidential candidate. But it’s hard not to look at the words Trump is writing today about the intention to impose a travel ban on predominantly Muslim countries.

The White House had conflicting guidance on whether the tweets are official policy. Sebastian Gorka, a senior White House national security official, told CNN that “It’s not policy. It’s social media.” But press spokesman Sean Spicer said the tweets were official statements.

Trump’s tweet war was a world war by mid-week as he repeatedly misquoted and insulted the mayor of London after terrorists attacked his city. And Trump took credit for Saudi Arabia’s move to close the border to Qatar, even though his secretary of state had said he wanted to mediate the dispute.

Trump even may live tweet his criticism of Comey’s testimony on Thursday, a prospect that must give his lawyers indigestion. Trump might have had a decent argument to block Comey’s testimony based on executive privilege, but for his tweets and public statements about his discussions with Comey. Those comments waived any privilege that might have existed.

One could argue that the public and the media should be happy. No other president has been so open about what he is thinking in real time. Isn’t transparency what we’re always demanding? And don’t we want the president to speak directly to the American people?

Also, it seems Trump occasionally commits truth in his tweets – or what he thinks is true, often an entirely different matter. If Trump’s tweets were vetted by his lawyers and his diplomats, we never would have seen the tweets about Comey or the Russia investigation or the mayor of London.

And there’s the entertainment value. The tweets amuse loyal supporters, serve up delicious outrage to opponents and provide wonderful late night comedy.

Still, this is no way to form policy and run a government. It is chaotic and makes the United States a laughing stock. All the world can see that the one thing that animates the most powerful man in the world is to always be the center of attention. Trump would be more effective if he got a little more sleep and stayed off the 8 a.m. twitter cycle.