Month: December 2018

Trump has ordered a full withdrawal of US troops from Syria, and a withdrawal of half of our troops from Afghanistan. There was confusion on Wednesday because it was announced via tweet and all the usual stakeholders were blindsided by the decision. There was harsh and immediate disapproval from Congress, including Trump’s usual allies.

Mattis resigned in protest on Thursday. In his letter he wrote: “our strength as a nation is inextricably linked to the strength of our unique and comprehensive system of alliances and partnerships….NATO’s 29 democracies demonstrated that strength in their commitment to fighting alongside us following the 9-11 attack on America. The Defeat-ISIS coalition of 74 nations is further proof. …we must be resolute and unambiguous in our approach to those countries whose strategic interests are increasingly in tension with ours. It is clear that China and Russia, for example, want to shape a world consistent with their authoritarian model — gaining veto authority over other nations’ economic, diplomatic, and security decisions… on treating allies with respect and also being clear-eyed about both malign actors and strategic competitors… Because you have the right to have a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours on these and other subjects, I believe it is right for me to step down from my position. “

Reports indicate he went to the White House prepared to resign but tried to persuade Trump not to withdraw from Syria and Afghanistan. When he returned to the Pentagon he distributed his letter.

Blowback from GOP members in Congress was immediate. Most telling was from McConnell: “It’s essential that the United States maintain and strengthen the post-World War II alliances that have been carefully built by leaders in both parties. We must also maintain a cleareyed understanding of our friends and foes, and recognize that nations like Russia are among the latter. So I was sorry to learn that Secretary Mattis, who shares those clear principles, will soon depart the administration. But I am particularly distressed that he is resigning due to sharp differences with the president on these and other key aspects of America’s global leadership.”

The Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue has released a rule the imposes work requirements on food stamp recipients. The farm bill that Trump signed this week dropped the very same requirement after bipartisan negotiations.

The Education and Justice Departments are planning on rescinding Obama-era rules that “advised schools on how to dole out discipline in a nondiscriminatory manner and examine education data to look for racial disparities that could flag a federal civil rights violation.” A draft of a letter from Devos’s office says “The guidance burdened local school districts, potentially exceeded the departments’ legal authority and may have made students less safe.”

An injunction earlier this week against Trump’s stricter asylum policies–that limited the reasons people could request asylum–was upheld by the Supreme Court. Roberts joined the four liberal justices.

Finally, due to an impasse over spending $5 billion on Trump’s border wall, Congress and the White House could not agree to a spending bill and the government partially shut down Friday at midnight. The Senate adjourned until December 27.

In Russia News:

On Monday, Flynn’s former business partner was charged with illegally lobbying on behalf of Turkey: “The indictment demonstrates the extent to which Flynn was secretly working to advance the interests of his Turkish clients while publicly serving as a key surrogate to Donald Trump and auditioning for a role in his administration.”

The next day there was a scene at the Flynn sentencing. The Judge castigated Flynn and his lawyers for suggesting he was duped by the FBI and made them walk that back and repeatedly made Flynn admit that he was guilty of lying. The judge said what Flynn did regarding lobbying for Turkey was “selling out our country” and that he was disgusted by it. Then he postponed sentencing until March so that Flynn could cooperate more and presumably made the judge feel better about giving him no prison time, which was the Special Counsel’s recommendation.

Senate-commissioned reports on Russian use of social media to interfere with the 2016 elections came out this week. It shows more widespread visibility of fake accounts than previously known, and that African Americans were targeted heavily.

According to the head researcher who reviewed all the social media data: “Russia was able to masquerade successfully as a collection of American media entities, managing fake personas and developing communities of hundreds of thousands, building influence over a period of years and using it to manipulate and exploit existing political and societal divisions…. It propagated lies about voting rules and processes, attempted to steer voters toward third-party candidates and created stories that advocated not voting.”

Wired compiled a summary of all 17 investigations of Trump and/or Russia. It spans seven different sets of prosecutors and investigators from Mueller to the SDNY to the NY State Attorney General, to the US Attorney of DC, to the Eastern District of Virginia.

There was big news in one of those investigations, by the New York Attorney General into Trump’s charity: “The Donald J. Trump Foundation, once billed as the charitable arm of the president’s financial empire, agreed to dissolve on Tuesday and give away all its remaining assets under court supervision as part of an ongoing investigation and lawsuit by the New York attorney general.”

Barr wrote a memo over the summer explaining why Mueller’s obstruction case is not grounded in DOJ policy or law. He sent the memo unsolicited to both DOJ and Trump’s legal team. Lawfare explains that Barr is making assumptions in this memo without actually knowing the fact pattern Mueller has. The question is if Barr will change his views when he gets access to what Mueller knows.

We also finally got word from DOJ about Whitaker’s status with the Special Counsel investigation: “A senior department official said on Thursday that Mr. Whitaker had not been receiving briefings on the special counsel investigation, but had decided on Wednesday that he would not recuse himself and would instead assume final say over major investigative or prosecutorial actions Mr. Mueller wants to take.” Whitaker did not submit himself to a formal ethics review process but instead “engaged in an informal conversation with the department’s career ethics lawyers that focused on statements like those he had made as a political commentator.” The ethics lawyers suggested he should recuse himself, but their advice is not binding and he has decided against it.

According to Just Security: “Whitaker consulted with an unspecified number of ‘senior’ DOJ ethics officials. Those officials advised him (apparently without dissent) that Whitaker should recuse himself from the Russia investigation because, in their view, ‘a reasonable person with knowledge of the relevant facts likely would question [Whitaker’s] impartiality.”

CNN reports that Trump has vented to Whitaker about his unhappiness about his legal woes, specifically about Cohen and the Souther District of New York: “Trump was frustrated, the sources said, that prosecutors Matt Whitaker oversees filed charges that made Trump look bad. None of the sources suggested that the President directed Whitaker to stop the investigation, but rather lashed out at what he felt was an unfair situation…. Trump pressed Whitaker on why more wasn’t being done to control prosecutors in New York who brought the charges in the first place, suggesting they were going rogue.”

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Trump’s Job Approval: 42.4%

Nick Ayers, Pence’s chief of staff whom Trump had tapped to replace Kelly as his own chief of staff, has turned down the offer and announced he is leaving the administration entirely by the end of the year.

On Friday Chris Christie turned down Trump’s offer to be his chief of staff. According to the Washington Post: “A person close to Christie said a number of current and former White House aides warned Christie that the building was unmanageable and that ‘no one can have success there.'” Mulveney was given the job on what appears to be an interim basis. 

Pelosi, Schumer, Trump and Pence met in the Oval Office to discuss the upcoming budget showdown and Trump’s demand for wall spending. Trump invited cameras into the room, and the ensuing argument was broadcast live. Trump said he would be happy to shut the government down over border security.

Michael Isikoff reports that Barr was tapped to be Trump’s defense laywer at least twice before Trump nominated him to Attorney General. The article also details negative comments about Mueller Barr has made in the last year.

Federal prosecutors have opened an investigation to see if the Trump inaugural committee misspent donor funds by pumping money into the Trump Organization or other kids of graft, and also whether foreign countries mostly in the Middle East made illegal donations to the committee. According to ProPublica, Ivanka is implicated: “A top inaugural planner emailed Ivanka and others at the company to ‘express my concern’ that the hotel was overcharging for its event spaces, worrying of what would happen ‘when this is audited.'” $40 million is unaccounted for.

The Texas judge finally released his Obamacare decision. He struck down the entire law. This does not go into effect until it is upheld by higher courts. 

Ryan Zinke resigned from as Interior Secretary.  

In Hush Money News: 

On Wednesday, Cohen was sentenced to three years in jail for “tax evasion, false bank statements, campaign-finance violations, and lying to Congress.”

David Pecker and AMI admitted to making the $150,000 payment to McDougal to cover up her affair with Trump. They have made a deal with federal investigators to provide information about the case, and will not be charged with any crimes.

In Russia News:

In preparation for Flynn’s sentencing next week, his lawyers released a letter suggesting he was tricked into lying to the FBI. This caused Mueller’s team to send a partially redacted rebuttal to the judge. According to the New York Times: “prosecutors explained his confidence … as a result of the numerous dishonest accounts he had already given about his conversations with Mr. Kislyak. ‘By the time of the F.B.I. interview,’ they wrote, ‘the defendant was committed to his false story.’”  

In Immigration News: 

Ice arrested 170 undocumented immigrants who came forward to sponsor or claim migrant children being held in custody. 109 had no criminal record. Nearly 80% of the people who came forward to sponsor children were not in the country legally.

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Trump’s Job Approval: 42.5% 

In Russia News:

Some Trump tweets Monday morning praised Stone for not cooperating, and that Cohen was a liar who should be sentenced to maximum time. George Conway tweeted a suggestion that this might be witness tampering. Experts say it’s close but may not be provable in court.

Here is an Lawfare explainer of the witness tampering law and how it may or may not apply in this case.

In an addendum to Flynn’s sentencing memo, Mueller’s team writes that Flynn sat for 19 interviews, assisting three separate criminal investigations, only one of which is the Russian collusion investigation, and that some of the benefit Flynn has provided “may not be fully realized at this time because the investigations in which he has provided assistance are ongoing.” Muller is recommending no jail time.

There are still questions about whether or not Whitaker has recused himself from the Mueller investigation, and whether or not he has seen the redacted information (among other documents) in the Flynn sentencing memo. So far DOJ is not commenting when asked.

Court documents about Cohen and Manafort were released late Friday afternoon from SDNY and Muller. The Manafort sentencing memo came from Muller and accused Manafort of lying about being in contact with Kilimnick, about being in contact with senior administration officials as late as February 2018, and other matters. He also lied about a $125,000 payment to a firm, and this section was heavily redacted. Here is the Manafort document.

The SDNY issued a 40 page non-redacted sentencing memo that recommended the judge “impose a substantial term of imprisonment.” Cohen admitted to discussing with Trump “contacting the Kremlin in the fall of 2015, months after the beginning of his presidential bid, to organize a meeting between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin at the U.N. General Assembly in September 2015.” Also, the government accused Cohen of crimes in paying hush money to Daniels and McDougal: “Cohen’s commission of two campaign finance crimes on the eve of the 2016 election for President of the United States struck a blow to one of the core goals of the federal campaign finance laws: transparency. While many Americans who desired a particular outcome to the election knocked on doors, toiled at phone banks, or found any number of other legal ways to make their voices heard, Cohen sought to influence the election from the shadows. He did so by orchestrating secret and illegal payments to silence two women who otherwise would have made public their alleged extramarital affairs… Cohen deceived the voting public by hiding alleged facts that he believed would have had a substantial effect on the Election.”

The SDNY also said Trump directed Cohen to commit these crimes: “With respect to both payments, Cohen acted with the intent to influence the 2016 presidential election. Cohen coordinated his actions with one or more members of the campaign, including through meetings and phone calls, about the fact, nature, and timing of the payments. In particular, and as Cohen himself has now admitted, with respect to both payments, he acted in coordination with and at the direction of Individual-1.”

From Lawfare: “this is the first time that the government has alleged in its own voice that President Trump is personally involved in what it considers to be federal offenses.”

Mueller for the first time is publicly connecting the Trump Tower Moscow deal with the election collusion investigation: According to Buzfeed news: “The activity surrounding the Trump Tower Moscow project is ‘particularly’ relevant, Mueller said, because it happened in the time when ‘sustained efforts by the Russian government to interfere’ in the election were taking place.” A Russian athlete named Dmitry Klokov reached out to Cohen in the November 2015 about the Moscow Project, offering to connect Trump and Putin and promising “political synergy.” He told Cohen that “such a meeting could have a ‘phenomenal’ impact ‘not only in political but in a business dimension as well.'”

Reactions: 

At 6:00pm Trump tweeted: “Totally clears the President. Thank you!”

David French’s first impression Friday night was to make comparisons to Nixon and Clinton articles of impeachment about encouraging and helping others to lie: “it is highly likely that senior Trump officials reviewed Cohen’s prepared, false testimony before he lied to Congress. This raises two important questions. Was Trump aware of the substance of Cohen’s testimony? If so, was Trump aware that Cohen’s testimony was false?… Nothing is yet set in stone, but tonight was a very bad night for his presidency. Donald Trump’s legal problems continue to mount.”

Ken White (PopeHat on Twitter) writes: “If the Southern District’s fury at Cohen is notable, its explicit accusation that President Trump directed and coordinated campaign-finance violations is simply stunning. The prosecutors’ openness suggests that they are sure of their evidence and have mostly finished collecting it. It’s a sign of a fully developed, late-game investigation of the president’s role, one that may soon make its way to Congress.” Also: “That statement suggests that the special counsel believes that someone in the Trump administration knew of, and approved in advance, Cohen’s lies to Congress. That’s explosive, and potentially impeachable if Trump himself is implicated.”

Andrew McCarthy goes into detail about the campaign finance violations Cohen is charged with, and predicts that SDNY will indict Trump: “According to prosecutors, Pecker arranged with Cohen that the Enquirer would buy McDougal’s story for $150,000 and bury it. Although it was contemplated that Cohen would reimburse Pecker (and then be reimbursed by Trump), the reimbursement did not happen. Cohen, therefore, pleaded guilty not to making his own excessive contribution but to causing a third party to make an illegal contribution. Cohen says he was operating at Trump’s direction. Logically, then, if this is true and Cohen caused the third-party illegal contribution, so did the president. Notably: prosecutors have given Pecker and another American Media executive, Dylan Howard, immunity from prosecution. Do you think prosecutors did that to tighten up the case against Cohen? I don’t.”

In other news:

The funeral of George H.W. Bush was held in the national cathedral on Wednesday. Trump and Melania attended, and sat with all the previous presidents and first ladies in one pew. It was the first time Trump was with all the living presidents.

A US district judge has said an emoluments case against Trump can proceed so long as discovery is limited to the Trump hotel is DC. Maryland and DC now have 13 subpoenas for records that may show Trump has received emoluments from foreign countries through the hotel.

The Washington Post reports that the Saudi’s used veteran groups to send veterans to DC to lobby Congress and put them up in Trump Hotel. They booked blocks of rooms for 500 nights. One veteran initially “believed the trips were organized by other veterans, but that puzzled him, because this group spent money like no veterans group he had ever worked with. There were private hotel rooms, open bars, free dinners. Then, Garcia said, one of the organizers who had been drinking minibar champagne mentioned a Saudi prince. ‘I said, Oh, we were just used to give Trump money,’ Garcia said.”

Haspel gave a classified briefing to senators Tuesday that convinced them the crown prince was directly responsible for the Khasoggi murder: “The intelligence agency is also believed to have evidence that the crown prince communicated repeatedly with an aide who commanded the team that assassinated Mr. Khashoggi, around the time of the journalist’s death on Oct. 2.” Senators suggest Matis and Pompeo are being misleading by sugesting that there is not “smoking gun” evidence of the prince’s guilt.

Friday morning, Trump announced he was downgrading the UN ambassador to a sub-cabinet position, and appointed former Fox News anchor Heather Nauert to the role. He appointed William Barr to be his next Attorney General; he previously held the job for H.W. Bush. And Trump announced Kelly will leave the White House by the end of the year. 

Trump’s Job Approval Rating: 42.2% 

As the week began, there was reporting about a “remain in Mexico” policy for asylum seekers being negotiated with Mexico. But the Trump Administration has not yet secured a formal agreement, and Mexico released a non-denial denial that the policy was in the works.

In Tijuana, Mexico is holding about 5,000 migrants, some from the caravan, in a tent city. On Sunday they rushed the border–some migrants said they were marching to the boarder to negotiate with US border agents. Mexican riot police pushed them back, and US agents fired tear gas canisters.

On Sunday Russian fighter jets fired on Ukrainian naval vessels.

Reporting this week tells us that the Trump Administration was too afraid of the political and legal blowback of suppressing or altering last week’s federal climate change report. Instead they released it on Black Friday to minimize public awareness. And they were not overly concerned with public awareness to begin with: “We don’t care. In our view, this is made-up hysteria anyway,” Said Steven J Milloy, a member of Trump’s EPA transition team.

Bolton said he has not listened to the audio of the Khashoggi murder.

Trump attended the G-20 Summit. He canceled his meeting with Putin. People speculate that he did so because of the Cohen plea deal and not for the stated reasons of Putin’s recent Ukraine aggression. At the G-20 Trump tried to declare a pause in the tariff war with China, and signed the new NAFTA deal, although Congress is suggesting they will not vote it into law.

Finally, George H.W. Bush died on Saturday.

In Russia News:

On Monday the Mueller team said that Manafort has lied repeatedly during his plea agreement, thus violating any obligations of leniency, and that he should be sentenced immediately.

The New York Times reports that Manfort’s lawyers shared information with Trump’s lawyers after Manafort agreed to cooperate with Mueller: “Some legal experts speculated that it was a bid by Mr. Manafort for a presidential pardon even as he worked with the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, in hopes of a lighter sentence.” And this: “Though it was unclear how frequently [Kevin Downing ] spoke to Mr. Trump’s lawyers or how much he revealed, his updates helped reassure Mr. Trump’s legal team that Mr. Manafort had not implicated the president in any possible wrongdoing.” If this is true, it is very irregular, and likely means Manafort’s lawyers will have a hard time finding clients in the future because no one will trust their ability to negotiate a plea agreement. 

Here is a good explainer of the implications of this: “It’s a blow to Mr. Mueller’s team, because their questions to Mr. Manafort — repeated to Mr. Trump’s lawyers — may be a road map to at least part of the special counsel investigation. … It’s a blow to Mr. Manafort, who will receive no sentencing credit for his brief cooperation. It’s a blow to Mr. Manafort’s lawyers; no federal prosecutor will ever trust them again. And it’s a blow to Mr. Trump, who has overplayed his hand, because Mr. Mueller may now be able to delve into the Trump lawyers’ conversations with Mr. Manafort’s lawyers.
They are consistent with only one conclusion: Mr. Manafort and his lawyers seek a presidential pardon, not a reduced sentence through sincere cooperation.”

NBC and CNN obtained documents from court filings about Jerome Corsi. There are emails between Corsi and Stone about the Wikileaks dumps of Clinton emails two months before those dumps began: “Word is friend in embassy plans 2 more dumps,” Corsi wrote on Aug. 2, 2016, referring to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, according to the draft court papers. “One shortly after I’m back. 2nd in Oct. Impact planned to be very damaging.” There was some talk even in conservative press about the fact that the Corsi/Assange/Stone nexus started the idea of talking about Clinton’s poor health, backed up by Wikileaks documents, and then Trump then started pushing that message on the stump.  

In a surprise legal move, Cohen plead guilty to lies that Mueller accused him of on Thursday morning. He admitted to lying to Congress about pursuing the Trump Tower Moscow deal during the 2016 election with Kremlin agents (first reported in Buzzfeed in May 2018). He also admitted to lying about the fact that the Russians actually responded to him (when this aspect was earlier reported, there was media snark about how Cohen used a generic Russian government email he found on the internet, and that no one replied–the fact that Putin’s press secretary called Cohen back was not in the Buzzfeed article). He also admitted to lying about how much conversation there was in the Trump organization and campaign about Cohen and Trump traveling to Russia to discuss the deal.

Lawfare wants us to pause on the Cohen revelations and consider that “this is all utterly unacceptable. That a large swath of the public, and the legislative branch, has chosen to accept it does not make it more reasonable that a man seeking to be president of the United States would at the same time publicly cozy up to a foreign dictator and negotiate with his regime over a potential business opportunity—and then cover it all up.” But they also point out that “contemplating a significant real estate deal in the capital of a hostile foreign power, that in and of itself does not constitute criminal behavior.” 

Also from Lawfare: “notwithstanding the omission of those few key details, the court documents released Thursday continue Mueller’s trend of using ‘speaking indictments.’ Although the document here is a criminal information, rather than an indictment, the filing is factually rich and tells a story in a fashion that seems designed to inform the public.”

This quote is the strongest condemnation Andrew McCarthy has bout the Cohen revelation: “Now, such a showing of collusion could be politically damaging. It might even be something on which the Democratic-controlled House could try to build an impeachment effort. But it is not a criminal conspiracy because it does not establish an agreement to commit a federal crime.” He is still arguing that Mueller will not find any actual crime on Trump’s part, and seems to be of a mind with Allan Dershowitz who says this week that Meuller is now “looking for political sin.”

On Friday morning Trump tweeted “Oh, I get it! I am a very good developer, happily living my life, when I see our Country going in the wrong direction (to put it mildly). Against all odds, I decide to run for President & continue to run my business-very legal & very cool, talked about it on the campaign trail….Lightly looked at doing a building somewhere in Russia. Put up zero money, zero guarantees and didn’t do the project. Witch Hunt!”

Later Friday morning a judge set a sentencing date for Manafort as March 5. Also the judge will “first be tasked with deciding whether Manafort did, in fact, breach his plea agreement with Mueller’s office. The government is due to submit papers about that allegation by Dec. 7, and Manafort’s lawyers will then propose a schedule for responding.” (Cohen’s sentencing is December 12, and Flynns is December 18.)

In Cohen’s sentencing memo his lawyers make the case to the judge for leniency. It makes the following point: “In the context of this raw, full-bore attack by the most powerful person in the United States, Michael, formerly a confidante and adviser to Mr. Trump, resolved to cooperate, and voluntarily
took the first steps toward doing so even before he was charged in this District.” It also makes a point of saying Cohen is fully cooperating “despite regular public reports referring to the President’s consideration of pardons and pre-pardons in the SCO’s investigation.”

While all of this is going on, there is no word about Whitaker’s role or whether he has recused himself yet. But on Friday The Washington Post reported that Whitaker was notified about the Cohen guilty plea beforehand.

The same Buzzfeed reporters who broke the Moscow Project story back in May report this week that Trump offered to gift Putin a $50 million penthouse in the top of the tower.

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Trump’s Job Approval: 42.4%