Category: Politics

Russia Investigation:

Barr’s letter summarizing Mueller’s findings was released around 4:30pm Sunday afternoon. It says Mueller found no crime of conspiracy between Trump or his people and Russian government, and that while Mueller remained agnostic on whether obstruction occurred, Barr has concluded that there was no obstruction.

Here is how the New York Times covered this historic development.

By midweek, as the articles and think pieces poured in (without much hard news around the story), there is both a sense that Mueller really has put to bed the notion that Trump is in serious legal jeopardy over the Russia investigation, but also that Barr’s letter is less than trustworthy on it’s face. This analysis by Slate sums up this problem: “One reason to be suspicious of Barr’s conclusions is that in the course of the letter, he tweaks Mueller’s opinion to look more like his own. Mueller’s report, as excerpted by Barr, says “the evidence does not establish that the President was involved in an underlying crime related to Russian election interference.” Barr quotes that line and then, in the same sentence, concludes that “the absence of such evidence bears upon the President’s intent with respect to obstruction.” But the excerpt from Mueller’s report doesn’t refer to an absence of evidence. It refers to a presence of evidence, and it says this evidence isn’t enough to prove a crime. Throughout the investigation, this has been a standard Republican maneuver: misrepresenting an absence of proof as an absence of evidence. Barr’s use of this maneuver in his letter is a red flag that he’s writing partisan spin.”

A former intelligence officer makes a similar point on Lawfare: “Barr’s letter quotes Special Counsel Robert Mueller as stating that the investigation “did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.” Saying that the investigation did not establish that there was collusion is not the same thing as saying that the investigation established that there was no collusion.”

On Mueller’s decision to write his report does not exonerate Trump: “Mueller isn’t prone to cheap shots; he plays by the rules, every step of the way. If his report doesn’t exonerate the president, there must be something pretty damning in it about him, even if it might not suffice to prove a crime beyond a reasonable doubt.”

All of which suggests that we cannot know what Mueller actually thought about the investigation until we read Mueller’s report.

Trump and his team responded by vowing revenge on politicians and journalists who have hyped the Russia story over the past two years.

We have learned this week that Mueller briefed Barr and Rosenstein on March 5 that he would not make a call on obstruction. Thus the decision against obstruction in the Barr letter “sparked allegations that the two Trump appointees had rushed to a judgment no one asked them to make, and it is likely to be a key battleground in the intensifying political fight over the conclusion of Mueller’s work.”

Barr and Jerry Nadler spoke by phone on Wednesday. We learned that Barr will need weeks to prepare the report, and this miss the Tuesday deadline Nadler had given. That Barr will not commit to giving an unredacted report. Barr did disclose the length of the report to Nadler, but Nadler says he is not authorized to release the number. He did suggest it is less than 1,000 pages.

There was still evidence that the legal matters that began under Mueller were ongoing. On Wednesday a prosecutor for the mystery foreign company case said in court that Mueller’s grand jury was “continuing robustly”

On Thursday we learned that the report is more than 300 pages, which “suggests that Mr. Mueller went well beyond the kind of bare-bones summary required by the Justice Department regulation governing his appointment and detailed his conclusions at length. And it raises questions about what Mr. Barr might have left out of the four dense pages he sent to Congress.” DOJ is still saying that Congress will get the redacted report before the White House.

Democrats are building a strategy to call Barr’s actions a cover up if Grand Jury information is not included in what is sent to Congress. According to one staffer: “We do not want anything in the words of the attorney general. We want to see Robert Mueller’s words.”

Republicans continued to push the narrative, which began with the Barr letter, that the entire Russia investigation was a political hit job. All nine GOP members of the House Judiciary Committee signed a letter calling on Schiff to resign, saying he has been exposed “as having abused your position to knowingly promote false information, having damaged the integrity of this committee, and undermined faith in U.S. government institutions.”

Barr sent another letter to Congress on Friday saying that the Mueller report would be released by mid-April. We finally got a ballpark figure on page length. First it was said that it was more than 300 pages, and then “nearly 400 pages” not including tables and appendices. In his new letter, Barr explains what his first letter was intended to be: “My March 24 letter was not, and did not purport to be, an exhaustive recounting of the Special Counsel’s investigation or report. As my letter made clear, my notification to Congress and the public provided, pending release of the report, a summary of its “principal conclusions” [sic] — that is, its bottom line….I do not believe it would be in the public’s interest for me to attempt to summarize the report or release it in serial fashion.”

This is how Wheeler characterizes what Barr is doing: “At least it shows he’s beginning to feel embarrassed enough about his original hackish summary that he has issued a somewhat less hackish one.”

Immigration News:

Trump is holding up money to the Northern Triangle counties meant to stem the flow of immigrants form the source. The administration is divided on sending the money: “Even as Trump has threatened to zero out aid entirely, though, the officials in his administration actually interacting with Mexican and Central American governments have continued to emphasize the importance of aid.”

In other news:

On Monday the Trump Administration ordered DOJ to support a Texas judge’s decision in invalidate the entire Affordable Care Act, apparently over the objection of cabinet officials Barr and the health secretary.

Mulveney spearheaded this decision over the advise of Barr, Pence, the Health and Human Services Secretary. Congressional republicans were upset by the move.

Mulveney pushed a budget that cut funding for the Special Olympics, and Devos took most of the blow back. Haberman reports that she may be the next cabinet official on the chopping block. This sentence from the Time’s story has implications for the kind of politics Trump will be able to apply in reelection: “Mr. Mulvaney, who helped found the hard-line Freedom Caucus in the House, has brought those sensibilities to the White House, not always with Mr. Trump’s knowledge or support.”

NBC reports that Dan Coats tried to resign with Mattis over the Syria pullout in December, but Pence convinced him to stay on until Summer.

Trump’s military wall emergency funding will go forward because the House failed to override his veto with the required two-thirds majority.

The Washington Post reported on numerous ways Trump inflated his worth to investors, potentially breaking the law.

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Trump’s Job Approval: 41.9%

Barr’s letter summarizing Mueller’s findings was released around 4:30pm Sunday afternoon. It says Mueller found no crime of conspiracy between Trump or his people and Russian government, and that while Mueller remained agnostic on whether obstruction occurred, Barr has concluded that there was no obstruction.

Here is how the New York Times covered this historic development.

The commentary flowed in from Mueller watchers before the sun set. Below are links and key excerpts.

Lawfare

“it has to be significant that Mueller, after the better part of two years of investigating, has not found that anyone associated with the Trump campaign knowingly conspired with Russia’s efforts.”

“Put simply, the criminal investigation didn’t find any crimes on the U.S. side, though it found plenty on the Russian side. It doesn’t means one cannot conclude, based on the factual record, that people behaved recklessly, unpatriotically or stupidly. But it does mean that the criminal investigation is over. That’s good news, in general, and it’s good news for President Trump.”

“But Barr’s summary would also be broadly consistent with many other possible reports. It would be consistent with, for example, a report that finds lots of “evidence of collusion” that for one reason or another falls short of criminal conduct. “

Mueller “appears to have created a substantial record of the president’s troubling interactions with law enforcement for adjudication in noncriminal proceedings—which is to say in congressional hearings that are surely the next step.”

“Barr’s letter thus leaves the distinct sense that Mueller’s detailed accounting of the president’s potential acts of obstruction is significant, regardless of Barr’s own judgment as to the criminality of any of those acts.”

Neal Katyal

Katyal, who helped write the Special Counsel statute, thinks it is troubling that Barr so quickly decided there was no obstruction even though Mueller did not conclude this: “Such a conclusion would be momentous in any event. But to do so within 48 hours of receiving the report (which pointedly did not reach that conclusion) should be deeply concerning to every American… The fact that Mr. Barr rushed to judgment, within 48 hours, after a 22 month investigation, is deeply worrisome. “

“What kind of prosecutor would make a decision about someone’s intent without even trying to talk to him? Particularly in light of Mr. Mueller’s pointed statement that his report does not “exonerate” Mr. Trump. Mr. Mueller didn’t have to say anything like that. He did so for a reason. And that reason may well be that there is troubling evidence in the substantial record that he compiled.”

Katyal waits until the end of his piece to pull out the knife on Barr: “As such, Mr. Barr’s reference to the office raises the question of whether he tried to enshrine his idiosyncratic view into the law and bar Mr. Trump’s prosecution. His unsolicited memo should be understood for what it is, a badly argued attempt to put presidents above the law. If he used that legal fiction to let President Trump off the hook, Congress would have to begin an impeachment investigation to vindicate the rule of law.”

Ken White

“When prosecutors say that an investigation “did not establish” something, that doesn’t mean that they concluded it didn’t happen, or even that they don’t believe it happened. It means that the investigation didn’t produce enough information to prove that it happened.”

White echoes the Lawfare writers and others in why it is so important to see the full report: “Without seeing Mueller’s full report, we don’t know whether this is a firm conclusion about lack of coordination or a frank admission of insufficient evidence. The difference is meaningful, both as a matter of history and because it might determine how much further Democrats in Congress are willing to push committee investigations of the matter.”

“Why would Mueller spend so much time investigating obstruction of justice but not reach a conclusion? We won’t know until we read his report. But Mueller, a career G-man, is fundamentally legally conservative. That means he has a narrow view of his own role and a healthy respect for the authority of the other branches of government. He might believe that the evaluation is so inherently political that no conclusion he could offer would ever be seen as legitimate, and that the matter is better resolved through Congress’s constitutional authority to impeach (or not) the president. Even if Mueller didn’t make an explicit recommendation, we’ll probably be able to infer his conclusions by reviewing how he marshaled the evidence for and against guilt. Prosecutors, as a rule, are not good at neutral renditions of facts.”

Barr’s conclusion on obstruction after only 48 hours “reflects startling and unseemly haste for such a historic matter.”

Echoing Katyal, White wonders: “Crucially, we don’t know whether Barr concluded that the president didn’t obstruct justice or that he couldn’t obstruct justice.”

“It’s impossible to evaluate the results of Mueller’s investigation—and their legal, political, and historical significance—without the details.”

Franklin Foer

“With tonight’s summation of Robert Mueller’s investigation, there will be a temptation among those who loudly trumpeted this scandal to apologize. … They can apologize, but I won’t. Even if the actual Mueller report is anything like the attorney general’s summation of its contents, Russiagate will go down as one of the biggest scandals in American political history.”

“But Trump makes for a slippery figure to study—and here’s why Taibbi’s WMD analogy isn’t entirely wrong. Just as Saddam Hussein acted as if he possessed verboten weaponry, everything about Trump’s behavior suggested that he was guilty of instances of collusion worse than anything the public could observe. That’s undoubtedly a major reason that so many intelligence-community honchos were so worried. The other reason, which Barr cited again today, is that the Russians were actively seeking a partnership with the campaign. That such a partnership never materialized is a relief.”

David Frum

“The 2016 election was altered by Putin’s intervention, and a finding that the Trump campaign only went along for the ride does not rehabilitate the democratic or patriotic legitimacy of the Trump presidency. Trump remains a president rejected by more Americans than those who voted for him, who holds his job because a foreign power violated American laws and sovereignty. It’s up to Congress to deal with this threat to American self-rule.”

Marcy Wheeler

“Attorney General William Barr just engaged in utterly cowardly dereliction of duty.”

“Here’s the thing, though: at least given what they lay out here, they only considered whether Trump was covering up his involvement in the hack-and-leak operation. It doesn’t consider whether Trump was covering up a quid pro quo, which is what there is abundant evidence of.”

“They didn’t consider whether Trump obstructed the crime that he appears to have obstructed. They considered whether he obstructed a different crime. And having considered whether Trump obstructed the crime he didn’t commit, rather than considering whether he obstructed the crime he did commit, they decided not to charge him with a crime.”

As of Sunday (nor in the rest of the week) “Trump has made no major address to mourn those gunned down last week as they worshiped at mosques in New Zealand. He has not condemned the professed white-supremacist motives of the accused killer.” Instead on Sunday he gave what many consider a manic performance on Twitter, in which he wrote more lies and disparagement of John McCain, attacked a rerun of Saturday Night Live, blasted Fox News for suspending Jenean Pirro for anti-Muslim comments, and retweeted conspiracy theories about the Russia investigation.

Reporters tried to figure out what inspired the uptick in tweets: “appeared to be driven more by idle hands and an empty weekend schedule.”

Trump continued to attack the memory of John McCain throughout the week.

The fact that the New Zealand shooter was a Trump fan had acting chief of staff Mulvaney on a Sunday news show saying that Trump is not a white nationalist, and by the logic that links him to Trump, the shooter’s rantings about ecoterrorism links him to Pelosi and House democrats.

Leonhardt writes: “It isn’t very complicated: The man with the world’s largest bully pulpit keeps encouraging violence and white nationalism. Lo and behold, white-nationalist violence is on the rise. You have to work pretty hard to persuade yourself that’s just a big coincidence.”

The New York Times published an investigative report on Deutsche Bank:

• “officials have quietly argued to regulators, lawmakers and journalists that Mr. Trump was not a priority for the bank or its senior leaders and that the lending was the work of a single, obscure division. But interviews with more than 20 current and former Deutsche Bank executives and board members, most of them with direct knowledge of the Trump relationship, contradict the bank’s narrative.”
• “The bankers determined he was overvaluing some of his real estate assets by as much as 70 percent, according to two former executives.”
• “Next month, Deutsche Bank is likely to start handing over extensive internal documents and communications about Mr. Trump to the congressional committees”

Elijah Cummings says that he has evidence Jared and Ivanka may be violating the Presidential Records Act by using encrypted communications Whats App to communicate official White House business.

Despite the end of the Mueller investigation, Trump’s legal problems–about a dozen separate investigations that we know about–will carry on in other jurisdictions, most of them in the Southern District of New York.

Russia Investigation:

On Tuesday, a curious clue from Mueller’s office. The Washington Post has been given a March 21 deadline for the unsealing of documents in the Manafort case. Mueller’s team requested an eleven day extension until April 1 due to “a press of other work.” Unclear what that means, but there is speculation that by April 1 some work, either about Manafort or some other case, will be concluded.

By Thursday there was more intense speculation the Mueller was about to make a move this week. A reporter even snapped a picture of him driving to his office. Wheeler says any guessing is a lot of hot air. She posits these five possibilities, from a conspiracy indictment to a report that says no crime was committed.

On Friday, just after 5:30 news broke that Mueller had submitted his report to Barr. Barr then sent a letter to the House and Senate. Main takeaways:
All of Mueller’s investigative actions were approved by the Assistant Attorney General or the Attorney General, meaning everything he wanted to do he was allowed to do.
There will be no more indictments by Mueller’s office.
Barr will notify the Congress about “principle conclusions” this weekend.

Barr and his team worked on preparing the report through Saturday. The Democratic leadership have made their first moves in the unfolding chess match over the Muller report. Pelosi is insisting they receive the “full report and underlying findings will be sufficient so that Democrat-led House committees can conduct their own scrutiny of Mr. Trump.” Top House and Senate Democrats are “demanding that all documents, communication and evidence amassed by Mr. Mueller and his team be preserved because Congress might request access to it.” And Pelosi is sugesting that the Democrat members of the Gang of Eight will refuse to particiapte in a classified briefing on the report, saying that “any briefing be unclassified to allow lawmakers to discuss the full investigative findings publicly.”

Ben Wittes, and others, make a point that backs up the call for releasing the report to the public: “It becomes the central vehicle for the redeployment of the criminal probe for all of the other democratic purposes we have invested in that probe. At least as regards the president himself, one cannot then read much into the end of the investigation without reference to the text of the report. The report is the investigation and the investigation is the report.”

Personal Log: I saw the news just a minute after the Washington Post tweeted their article. I was in our neighborhood park with Viola, just checking in with the news while she played on the slide. The first several hours, before we knew any details, were a reckoning. The fantasy of Mueller hauling Trump and his family away in chains was popped immediately as the news that there would be no new Mueller indictments.

By end of day Saturday, with DOJ saying there would be no communication today, the speculation continued, with a sense of muted excitement from people on Team Trump, and a sense of muted acceptance and general glumness from people who expected Mueller to offer some sort of knock out blow. Trump himself has not Tweeted or made any announcement from Mar-a-Lago, which has inspired speculation of its own.

Writers who take the Mueller investigation seriously on the merits–not as political theater–weighed in throughout the day. Wheeler explains that part of the reason we got here, with the stakes so high for the Mueller report, is this: “Partly as a result, partly because he’s a narcissist who wanted to deny that he had illicit help to win, and partly because he’s a compulsive liar, Trump and his aides all lied about what they’ve now sworn to be true. Over and over again. And that raised the stakes of the Russian investigation, which in turn further polarized the country.”

“Both sides, however, would do well to take this report — whatever it says — as the final word on this part of the Russian attack in 2016, and set about protecting the country from the next attack it will launch.”

Wittes emphasizes how important it is to know why the Mueller investigation ended: was it because he found no wrong doing, or because the wrongdoing he found could not be prosecuted for any host of prosecutorial reasons he outlines in the post. He describes how Mueller’s mandate was limited, that “it was so wrong to make the Mueller investigation the end all and be all of accountability for L’Affaire Russe in the first place. … Because a criminal investigation is not designed to answer [all] these questions comprehensively, its end cannot put them to rest.” He then pivots to why the Mueller report is so important: “What a criminal investigation can do, and what it may have done here, is to provide a text that offers a factual record which might be redeployed for purposes of answering non-criminal questions in addition to the criminal ones for which that record was created.”

Frum makes this point Friday as well, which he has been saying since 2017: “Mueller’s full report will surely inform and enlighten Americans about many details of what exactly happened in 2016. But the lack of further indictments by Mueller underscores that the job of protecting the country against the Russia-compromised Trump presidency belongs to Congress. It always did.”

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Trump’s Job Approval: 41.9%

Pelosi went on record on Monday with the Washington Post saying she will not bring impeachment charges against Trump, saying “he’s not worth it” and that it would be inappropriate to do a partisan impeachment if the Republican Senate won’t go along.

In what appears to be a new investigation stemming from Cohen’s recent hearings and cooperation, “The New York attorney general has subpoenaed records from Deutsche Bank related to three large loans the bank extended to President Trump’s company in recent years — and a fourth loan that Trump sought to buy the NFL’s Buffalo Bills.”

On Wednesday Manafort was sentenced in his second and final trial. Judge Jackson added over three years to last week’s verdict, to bring his prison term to seven and a half years.

Wheeler on Manafort’s bad day, and on the pardon dynamic: “Immediately after the sentencing ended, Cy Vance announced a 16-count indictment in New York State, on charges that Trump cannot pardon. Whatever you think of Vance’s grandstanding, the NY indictment immediately shifts Manafort’s incentives for a pardon, because prison in NY State would be significantly less comfortable than FCI Cumberland, where Manafort will serve his federal charges. So any pardon might just hasten a move to less comfortable surroundings.”

The House voted 420-0 in support of a bill that calls on the DOJ to release the Mueller report to Congress. Graham said the Senate will not take up the bill.

On Thursday 12 GOP Senators joined with Democrats to overturn Trump’s emergency declaration. Trump vetoed it on Friday, and there are not enough votes to overturn the veto. It marks the third bipartisan rebuke of Trump this week, the other being a vote that ended our war effort in Yemen.

Personal Log: There is a palatable sense of waiting for Mueller’s next move, and subtle frustration that everyone keeps saying it will be soon but no one really knows what will happen. We are now three weeks out from reports that Mueller would release his report within days. This week felt like something might happens because Rosenstein was reported to have set his last day at DOJ as March 15. Well, it’s March 17 and reporting on Rosenstein’s exit has not been updated since February.

Here is what some important Mueller watchers were writing this week:

• DEAR EDITORS: STOP TRYING TO PREDICT THE MUELLER REPORT

• MUELLER IS CLOSE TO DONE, BUT THE ANDREW WEISSMANN DEPARTURE IS OVERBLOWN

• “Multiple other details suggest that Mueller expects to be able to share things in a month that he’s unable to share today. ”

• Mueller Might Not Be Done With Manafort Yet

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Trump’s Job Approval: 41.5%

Congressional Investigations

House Judiciary Committee sent requests to 81 individuals and entities close to Trump requesting documents that may shed light on obstruction of justice, the Russia election interference, and corruption.

Wheeler breaks down and categorizes all the targets for requests based on who was involved in various Russia investigation matters, hush payments, corruption, obstruction, pardons.

Cohen produced two hush money checks with Trump’s signature in his hearing last week, and this week his lawyer provided six more to the New York Times. He wrote them on a near monthly basis from the White House in 2017. The quote from the article drew attention: “Indeed, some people close to Mr. Trump have privately predicted that he will ultimately choose to seek a second term in part because of his legal exposure if he is not president.”

Michelle Goldberg thinks the hearings could lead to a chance in public opinion: “so far, neither Democrats nor prosecutors have woven the various threads of presidential wrongdoing into a coherent picture, showing how Trump’s shady business practices, opaque finances, vulnerability to blackmail, abuses of power and subservience to foreign autocrats all intersect….Given the polarization in our politics, there’s no reason to expect the coming hearings to change many minds. What they can do, potentially, is put the question of Trump’s criminality at the center of political life, just as the Watergate hearings did with Nixon.”

For the record, Douthat laid down a marker for what it will take to trigger Trump’s removal from office, which he believes is unlikely to be what we learn actually happened, reinforced for him by the Cohen hearing: “If the D.N.C. hack took place with Trump’s cooperation as part of a longstanding exchange of favors, then he would be guiltier than Nixon, having participated in a Watergate with a foreign power as the burglar.”

Spurred in part by the Cohen testimony, there is a sense that journalists and media people trying to get their head and their explanatory power around the scope of Trump’s corruption, which is beginning to feel like it is everywhere and so all pervasive that it is hard to define. We are like the fish that doesn’t know it is swimming through water. Marcy Wheeler wrote a blog post about this: “It’s partly because of the boiling frog effect: we’ve had piecemeal disclosures over two years, and few journalists have taken stock along the way to see what the actual court evidentiary record amounts to. And even there, we often forget to add in the truly breathtaking corruption of Administration aides like Scott Pruitt or Ryan Zinke, or of current Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross”

She recommends this approach: “It seems that we need to start trying to quantify this not in terms of names or actions but instead in terms of harm to the nation…. Whatever crimes (or not) Trump committed, because he and his flunkies refuse to put the interest of the country first, it has consequences for Americans, including the constituents of members of Congress who want to ignore all this corruption.We’ve been boiling frogs for several years here. But it’s time to take stock on the bottom line effect that Trump’s corruption has had on the country, and holding Republican enablers accountable for that damage.”

The White House is refusing to turn over any documents about security clearances to House investigators.

Russia Investigation

Manafort was sentenced in his first of two trials on Thursday. He was given a four year sentence, much lower than the 19 years in the sentencing guidelines.

Here is Ken White on the complicated mix of reasons Manafort was sentenced below the guidelines: “Ellis announced that he was sentencing Manafort below the recommended guideline range because that range was far above what defendants received in similar cases. That is, in fact, a factor that he’s required by law to consider. Manafort’s case was arguably much more serious than others, but there’s no question that his sentencing range was atypically high for a white-collar defendant. This is how the system’s discrepancies become self-justifying and self-perpetuating: Judges give white-collar criminals lower sentences because white-collar criminals typically get lower sentences.”

James Comey wrote an op-ed in which he laid out DOJ precedent for transparency in cases even when no one is charged with a crime. He writes, “Republicans are wrong now, when they claim Justice Department rules forbid transparency about the completed work of the special counsel. It is difficult to imagine a case of greater public interest than one focused on the efforts of a foreign adversary to damage our democracy, and in which the president of the United States is a subject. I don’t know all the considerations that will go into deciding precisely what to say about the completion of the special counsel’s work and when to say it. It’s always important to consider guidelines and routines. But don’t listen to those who tell you transparency is impossible. Every American should want a Justice Department guided first and always by the public interest. Sometimes transparency is not a hard call.”

On Barr and the Mueller investigation, this came from the DOJ this week: “Following Attorney General Barr’s confirmation, senior career ethics officials advised that Attorney General Barr should not recuse himself from the Special Counsel’s investigation. Consistent with that advice, Attorney General Barr has decided not to recuse”

In Other New

Mother Jones reports that a Chinese massage parlor madame in Florida–one parlor was recently busted in a sex traffic ring–“runs an investment business that has offered to sell Chinese clients access to Trump and his family.”
“On a page displaying a photo of Mar-a-Lago, Yang’s company says its “activities for clients” have included providing them “the opportunity to interact with the president, the [American] Minister of Commerce and other political figures.” The company boasts it has “arranged taking photos with the President” and suggests it can set up a “White House and Capitol Hill Dinner.” (The same day the Herald story about Yang broke, the website stopped functioning.)”

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Trump’s Job Approval: 41.8%

On Tuesday Cohen testified privately before the Senate for nine hours. On Wednesday he testified in an open session of the House Oversight and Reform Committee. Here are some experts from his opening statement:

• “He is a racist. He is a conman. He is a cheat. He was a presidential candidate who knew that Roger Stone was talking with Julian Assange about a WikiLeaks drop of Democratic National Committee emails.”
• “Mr. Trump did not directly tell me to lie to Congress. That’s not how he operates. In conversations we had during the campaign, at the same time I was actively negotiating in Russia for him, he would look me in the eye and tell me there’s no business in Russia and then go out and lie to the American people by saying the same thing. In his way, he was telling me to lie.”
• “You need to know that Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers reviewed and edited
  my statement to Congress about the timing of the Moscow Tower
  negotiations before I gave it.”
• “Mr. Trump is an enigma. He is complicated, as am I. He has both good and bad, as do we all. But the bad far outweighs the good, and since taking office, he has become the worst version of himself. He is capable of behaving kindly, but he is not kind. He is capable of committing acts of generosity, but he is not generous. He is capable of being loyal, but he is fundamentally disloyal.”
• “He never expected to win the primary. He never expected to win the general election. The campaign – for him – was always a marketing opportunity.”
• “In July 2016, days before the Democratic convention, I was in Mr. Trump’s office when his secretary announced that Roger Stone was on the phone. Mr. Trump put Mr. Stone on the speakerphone. Mr. Stone told Mr. Trump that he had just gotten off the phone with Julian Assange and that Mr. Assange told Mr. Stone that, within a couple of days, there would be a massive dump of emails that would damage Hillary Clinton’s campaign.”
• “The President of the United States thus wrote a personal check for the payment of hush money as part of a criminal scheme to violate campaign finance laws.”

Here are five key takeaways.

Republican members of the committee behaved in a way that drew attention to the fact that Republicans tend to support Trump by attacking his opponents rather than mount any kind of defense of Trump himself. Here is how Peter Wehner puts it: “Republicans on the committee tried to destroy the credibility of his testimony, not because they believe that his testimony is false, but because they fear it is true.” And a prediction: “When this story is finally told — when the sordid details are revealed, the dots finally connected — the Republican Party will be the political and institutional version of Mr. Cohen, who squandered his integrity in the service of a man of borderless corruption.” And he cites Cohen as supporting evidence for this prediciton: “The more people that follow Mr. Trump — as I did blindly — are going to suffer the same consequences that I’m suffering…. Everybody’s job at the Trump Organization is to protect Mr. Trump. Every day most of us knew we were coming and we were going to lie for him about something. That became the norm.”

Frum also noticed that none of the Republicans tried to defend Trump: “None of them would dare say that Trump is truthful in speech or honest in business. None would say it is impossible he said the things about black Americans that Cohen alleges he said. Even the allegations Cohen could not corroborate are all so hideously plausible that the most pro-Trump Republicans on the Oversight Committee shied from gainsaying them. Cohen’s testimony may not all prove correct. But all of it is plausible—and not a word of it has been contradicted, let alone refuted.”

Democratic House Leadership is signaling that they prefer to open multiple lines of investigations of Trump through 2020 rather than open an impeachment inquiry.

Happening at the same time as the time as the Cohen hearing was Trump second summit with North Korea: “President Trump and Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s leader, abruptly ended their second summit meeting on Thursday when negotiations collapsed after the two sides failed to agree on even the first steps on nuclear disarmament, a peace declaration or reducing sanctions on the North.”

The New York Times reports that Trump ordered Kelly to issue Kushner a top secret security clearance even though intelligence officials said he should not receive one. Kelly wrote a contemporaneous memo after the order to record the fact that Trump ordered him to do it.

Elijah Cummings has given the White House until Monday to deliver all relevant security clearance documents to his committee.

Immigration News

The House voted to overturn Trump’s national emergency declaration. Only 13 Republicans voted for the bill. It will now go to the Senate.

Documents reveal that there have been thousands of reports of sexual abuse of minors in immigration custody going back to 2015, “increase in complaints while the Trump administration’s policy of separating migrant families at the border was in place.”

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Trump’s Job Approval: 42%

Russia Investigation

The 60 Minutes interview with McCabe aired Sunday night. He describes that Rosenstein discussed the possibility of the cabinet evoking the 25th Amendment, and Rosenstein wearing a wire to collect evidence from Trump. Rosenstein released a statement that did not deny these things were discussed. As Lawfare puts it: “If Rosenstein and the Justice Department do not want people to believe McCabe’s account, they will need to start by denying it clearly. Evidently doing so presents a problem for them…. as the picture comes into tighter focus, the image that emerges is of a chaotic period, one in which everyone was under intense stress and Rosenstein in particular was handling the stress badly and making erratic judgments.”

Here is the full transcript of the interview, which includes this key quote: “It’s many of those same concerns that cause us to be concerned about a national security threat. And the idea is, if the president committed obstruction of justice, fired the director of the of the FBI to negatively impact or to shut down our investigation of Russia’s malign activity and possibly in support of his campaign, as a counterintelligence investigator you have to ask yourself, “Why would a president of the United States do that?” So all those same sorts of facts cause us to wonder is there an inappropriate relationship, a connection between this president and our most fearsome enemy, the government of Russia?”

In an interview for The Atlantic McCabe hits the same point he has made in all his interviews this week when asked if Trump is compromised by the Russians: “it certainly could be. I don’t know that for a fact. That was the reason we initiated the [counterintelligence] investigation. We were concerned, and we felt like we had credible, articulable facts to indicate that a threat to national security may exist. And, in fact, that a crime may have been committed: obstruction of justice. My own view of it is that those two things, the obstruction and the national-security threat, are inextricable. They are two sides of the same coin.” As Wittes pointed out a few weeks ago on Lawfare, some in the FBI believe(d) that Trump obstructed justice precisely becasue he is or has worked at the behest of the Russians.

Here’s what McCabe predicts about Mueller: “He’ll explain his findings in the report, and then if he’s called upon to testify about it, he’ll certainly do that. But he is always the guy who will say less than more. He’ll seek less attention than more attention. He is perfectly happy to do his job and to do it fully and completely. And then, when it’s all said and done, he’ll lock the door behind him and go home.”

Rosenstein announced he will depart the DOJ in mid-March. And Jack Goldsmith writes in a retrospective on Whitaker’s tenure that “power and resilience of Justice Department norms of independence” held since Whitaker did nothing to interfere with any investigations on Trump’s behalf, so far as we know.

The New York Times published an investigative report on the history of Trump’s attacks against DOJ investigations of him going back to January 2017, a “sustained, more secretive assault by Mr. Trump on the machinery of federal law enforcement.” The goal of the investigation is that “fusing together the strands reveals an extraordinary story of a president who has attacked the law enforcement apparatus of his own government like no other president in history, and who has turned the effort into an obsession. Some tidbits:

• Trump asked Whitaker about whether or not a rump ally in SDNY could be put in charge of the Cohen/hush money investigation.
• Trump appears to have believed that firing Flynn would have ended the Russia investigation: “This Russia thing is all over now because I fired Flynn.”
• But it also appears that he did not fire Flynn, that Flynn resigned, and Trump adopted Paul Ryan’s statement that Trump asked him to resign, even though this appears not to be the case.

• “One of Mr. Trump’s lawyers also reached out that summer to the lawyers for two of his former aides — Paul Manafort and Mr. Flynn — to discuss possible pardons. The discussions raised questions about whether the president was willing to offer pardons to influence their decisions about whether to plead guilty and cooperate in the Mueller investigation.”
• After the Cohen raid: “Since then, Mr. Trump has asked his advisers if Mr. Rosenstein was deliberately misleading him to keep him calm.”

News began to break mid week that Mueller was preparing to release his report by next week. According to the Washington Post, Mueller closing his shop does not necessarily mean DOJ prosecutors will stop pursuing their cases that began during the Russia investigation: “According to people familiar with the special counsel’s work, Mueller has envisioned it as an investigative assignment, not necessarily a prosecutorial one, and for that reason does not plan to keep the office running to see to the end all of the indictments it has filed.”

CNN, which also reports that Mueller may be closing shop, reports a similar idea: “Even with these signs of a wrap up, the DC US Attorney’s office has stepped in to work on cases that may continue longer than Mueller is the special counsel. That office has joined onto some of the Mueller’s team’s casework, including the cases against Stone, a Russian social media propaganda conspiracy, and in an ongoing foreign government-owned company’s fight against a grand jury subpoena…. visiting them more often than ever before are the prosecutors from the DC US Attorney’s Office and others in the Justice Department who’ve worked on the Mueller cases.”

Wheeler speculates that Mueller may have chosen this moment to wrap up his investigation because Whitaker is now gone, Rosenstein is back in charge because Barr has not completed the ethics review process: “Mueller is choosing this timing (and choosing not to wait for the appeals to be done). Whatever reason dictates this timing, by doing it in this window, Mueller can ensure the legitimacy of what happens, both legally (because Barr will be in place) and politically (because it will be clear Rosenstein presided over it). So whatever comes next week, people on both sides should accept that it is the outcome of the investigation that Mueller deemed appropriate.”

Neal Katyal, who helped write the Special Counsel regulations, makes a similar point: “A concise Mueller report might act as a “road map” to investigation for the Democratic House of Representatives — and it might also lead to further criminal investigation by other prosecutors. A short Mueller report would mark the end of the beginning, not the beginning of the end. …now the investigation resembles the architecture of the internet, with many different nodes, and some of those nodes possess potentially unlimited jurisdiction. Their powers and scope go well beyond Mr. Mueller’s circumscribed mandate; they go to Mr. Trump’s judgment and whether he lied to the American people. They also include law enforcement investigations having nothing to do with Russia, such as whether the president directed the commission of serious campaign finance crimes, as federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York have already stated in filings.”

Then Friday the AP reported they have a source–“a senior department official”–telling them the report will not be released next week. and here is the New York Time’s take in the question: “The new attorney general, William P. Barr, is preparing for the special counsel to deliver a report in coming weeks on the results of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, two officials briefed on the Justice Department’s preparations said.”

Mueller submitted the final sentencing memo before Manafort is to be sentenced next week. It is about 850 pages. There is a lot in it about how much of a crook Manafort is, but no big details about his dealings with Russia during the election. Wheeler believes that means: “he’s certain he will be able to provide a report in some public form, presumably in the same kind of detail he has presented in all his other statements. He doesn’t need to avail himself of this opportunity to do so…. I believe it suggests that Mueller plans to and believes he can present the details about that August 2 meeting somewhere else.”

In Other News

By Monday, 16 states joined a lawsuit against Trump’s emergency declaration.

From the New York Times: “Top Trump administration officials have pushed to build nuclear power plants throughout Saudi Arabia over the vigorous objections of White House lawyers who question the legality of the plan and the ethics of a venture that could enrich Trump allies, according to a new report by House Democrats released on Tuesday.

The Magnitsky act requires the president to inform Congress of it’s view on whether Kashoghi was murdered. The Trump Administration has refused to do this, and Politico reports that the new chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is covering for them, “even giving potentially misleading information” to other Republicans on the committee in order to quell dissent.

Trump’s Syria policy shifted a few more times this week, with the administration finally announcing that 200 then 400 troops will remain. This after NATO allies said they would not remain in Syria if US troops pulled out entirely: “The Pentagon was not expecting the decision so quickly and had anticipated delivering a final pitch to the president in a few weeks. Officials described a surreal atmosphere at the Pentagon among military leaders who work on Syria policy and no longer know what to expect from one day to the next.”

Immigration News

Newly released data shows that children and parents are still being separated at the border: “nearly 250 parents have been separated from their children since June 26. Meanwhile, a report released Thursday from the advocacy group Texas Civil Rights Project suggests that those separations might be dwarfed by the number of other relatives — siblings, aunts and uncles, grandparents, cousins — who bring a child to the US without her parents and are then separated from her by immigration agents.”

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Trump’s Job Approval: 42.7%

(Trump has regained all the approval points he lost since December 9th, before the shutdown.)

Talks over government funding and the border wall broke down over the weekend. But by Tuesday there appeared to be a deal. On Thursday Trump agreed to sign the deal and promised to declare a national emergency at the same time. The Democrats used hardball tactics to negotiate the bill down to $1.375 billion and 55 miles of barrier.

Here is a list of quotes from the Washington Post article about how people tried to manage Trump’s emotions around signing the funding bill:
–“some Republican senators spent recent days on the phone, soothing him and trying to persuade him to hold his fire.”
–“He doesn’t seem to work on a totally rational basis,” Schumer said in the Post interview. “Little comments throw him off.”
–“When Shelby called Trump to brief him on the deal, he tried to sell the president on the idea that the $1.375 billion figure was merely a “down payment” on his wall”
–“Political dealmaking is a little different. I’m sure the president, he’s been there two years now, he’s probably learned that it’s different. We’ll see how the next year or two goes.”
–“Shelby approached Trump carefully, always framing the talks in cheery terms.”
–“Democrats, privately, were amused but made a conscious decision not to gloat — concerned that if they celebrated what they considered a victory Thursday they might anger Trump enough to veto the deal.”

Other details in the bill:

–“Only “existing technologies” are allowed, effectively prohibiting a concrete structure or any new prototypes that administration officials might try to put into place.”
–“Communities and towns along the border will also be able to weigh in on the location and design of the fencing.”
–“$750 million that can be shifted to detention centers”
–“oversight of ICE, and places numerous limits on the agency, outlining protections for pregnant detainees, requirements for publicizing data about who is in custody and prohibitions on destroying records.”
–“$560 million will go toward drug inspection at ports of entry”
–“$415 million for humanitarian relief — medical care, transportation and food for migrants”

Trump gave a rambling Rose Garden press event where he announced his national emergency to devote about $8 billion to his wall. While the national emergency law has been invoked many times since it was enacted in 1976, most of those cases were devoted to sanctions and trade regulations with foreign powers. Said one expert: “But there is no example where a president asked for funding for something from Congress, Congress said, ‘No,’ and the president said, ‘I’ll use emergency powers to do it anyway.’”

Here are excerpts of the Proclamation: “The Secretary of Defense … shall order as many units or members of the Ready Reserve to active duty … to assist and support the activities of the Secretary of Homeland Security at the southern border…. to use or support the use of the authorities herein invoked, including, if necessary, the transfer and acceptance of jurisdiction over border lands.”

Russia Investigation

The Washington Post also wrote about the Manafort hearing transcripts released last week. The reporting reiterates the importance of the August 2 meeting with Kilimnik, and that it involved a Ukraine peace plan and a hand off of polling data, also that Manafort has consistently lied about this meeting.

Wednesday evening, the Manafort judge decided that he did in fact lie in three of the five instances the Mueller team accused him of, thus breaching his plea agreement.

McCabe began his book tour this week. He released a section of his book in The Atlantic in which he claimed credit for convincing Rosenstein into appointing a special counsel; described how Trump talked and operated like a mob boss. In a 60 Minutes clip released on Thursday he confirmed prior reporting on Rosenstein suggesting he wear a wire when with Trump, and that FBI leadership discussed the possibility of the 25th Amendment.

The Senate voted 54-45 to confirm Barr as Attorney General on Thursday.

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Trump’s Job Approval: 41.8%

Trump gave his second State of the Union Tuesday night. He called for his border wall to be built, continuing his rhetoric about the danger of immigrants crossing the southern border, and he warned Democrats not to investigate him.

Russia Investigation

Buzzfeed News, which has been tracking reports of questionable wire transfers in 2016, now reports that the recipient of much of those transfers is a Russian lobbyist who was present at the Trump Tower meeting.

Buzzfeed News also released a load of documents they had obtained about Trump Tower Moscow. They place key docs side by side to illustrate that Trump’s praise of Putin in 2015-16 were designed to encourage the Putin’s approval of the Trump Tower deal.

Marcy Wheeler scoured the docs and came to this conclusion: “At that point, Sater told Cohen there was a “very strong chance” he would meet Russia’s President, which Cohen and Don Jr would have both believed meant that the Trump Organization could make $300 million by lending Trump’s name to the tallest tower in Europe. Quid pro quo, all executed on social media.”

There was a close door hearing in the Manafort case on Monday that surfaced some nuggets (the transcript was released late Thursday). Prosecutors claimed that Manafort lied about a sensitive undisclosed issue because telling the truth might have “negative consequences in terms of the other motive that Mr. Manafort could have, which is to at least augment his chances for a pardon.” The sensitive issue has to do with an August 2, 2016 meeting between Manafort, Gates and Kilimnik.

Marcy Wheeler’s interpretation of the significance of this meeting: “Manafort knows well what he did in August 2016. But he — and his lawyers, and whoever lied anonymously to the NYT — continue to lie about it in hopes that, by refusing to confirm that he conspired with Russia to get Trump elected, Trump will pay him off with a pardon. The truth appears to be that Manafort walked Konstantin Kilimnik through recent, highly detailed polling data at a clandestine meeting in NYC on August 2, 2016, in part because even if it didn’t help Trump, it might help his own fortunes down the way. And he’s willing to bet that lying about that fact is his best chance for a pardon.”

Also at issue was the potential that Trump could end the conflict over Russian invasion of Crimea and end the sanctions: “This goes to the larger view of what we think is going on, and what we think is the motive here,” Mr. Weissmann said. “This goes, I think, very much to the heart of what the special counsel’s office is investigating.” These “cryptic comments suggest that the special counsel’s investigation … is still pursuing the central question of whether there was some kind of deal between Russia and the Trump campaign.”

Whitaker testified before the House Judiciary Committee on Friday. He said he had not interfered with the Mueller investigation, and that Mueller was honest, but declined to say if he thought it was a witch hunt. He often tried to obfuscate the questions–especially about if he talked with Trump about Mueller, the SDNY or pardons–and some suspect he was trying to curry favor with Trump for another post in the administration after Barr takes over as AG next week.

Non-Russia Related Legal Troubles

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan have subpoenaed the Trump inaugural committee for all records about payments and donors.

Jeff Bezos accused Pecker and AMI of extortion in a blogpost published on Medium. He reprinted emails sent to him that described sexted images of himself that they would publish in the National Enquirer if he did not call off his investigation of their investigation of how they acquired knowledge of his affair and of the hacked texts.

In the post Bezos confirmed that he had a career investigator on the case named Gavin de Becker. He “confirmed to The Daily Beast on Jan. 31 that he was leading the investigation into the matter of how the Enquirer had obtained the text messages. Not long afterward, The [Washington] Post prepared an article exploring competing theories about the motivation behind the publication of the tawdry tale” of the affair. This is what prompted AMI to threaten Bezos with detailed descriptions of the images they had obtained. The entire situation is connected to Trump’s legal problems because AMI signed a non-prosecution agreement with the SDNY: the “agreement, signed in September, stipulated that A.M.I. ‘shall commit no crimes whatsoever’ for three years, and that if it did, ‘A.M.I. shall thereafter be subject to prosecution for any federal criminal violation of which this office has knowledge.’

On Friday the board of AMI announced it was starting an investigation into Bezos’s claims.

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Trump’s Job Approval: 40.2%

Episode 14

Rank: 7

Decline: 2.10%

Lowest Approval: 39.3%

Date Range: January 5-26

Key Events:

Policy: Pelosi sworn in as Speaker of the House; Democrats pass same funding bill Senate already approved; Trump Administration floats idea of declaring a national emergency to fund the border wall; Oval Office address over Shut Down; Trump walks out of meeting with democrats; Shut down becomes longest in history; Pelosi canceled the State of the Union; Trump rebuked by Pelosi on State of the Union; continued negative coverage about the shutdown, including airport strikes; Trump reopens government without getting a deal; Inspector General for DHHS reports that we will never be able to determine how many children were separated at the border; Barr confirmation hearings.

Taboos: In a performative cabinet meeting Trump spouts pro-Soviet propaganda about their invasion of Afghanistan.

Russia Investigation: We learn that Manafort gave Russians campaign data when he was campaign chair; NYTimes story about the FBI opening an counter intelligence investigation against Trump, and WaPo story about Trump concealing all notes from his meetings with Putin; Buzzfeed story about Trump directing Cohen to lie to congress, and the Special Counsel’s rebuttal; Stone indicted

Non-Russia Related Legal Troubles: Cohen says due to threats by Trump against his family he will not testify before Congress

Defections: Romney publishes critical op-ed before becoming a senator

This approval dip ranks at a 7 on the 10-point severity scale, so only 5 other dips have been as or more sever. The main drivers of this dip are clearly the shut down fight, which Trump kept loosing with every new development. Not only did the main stream news coverage focus more and more on the increasing negative effects, Trump took more and more of the blame in polling, which then got reported on and the conversation was mostly about the “Trump shut down.” His poll numbers may also have been dragged down among his base because they saw him getting routed by Pelosi in ways that could not be spun. There was also a lot of important news about the Russia investigation in these weeks.

The ground was also softened in the final weeks of December by the Mattis resignation and Cohen sentencing, which I categorize as the 13th approval dip. That dip stalled out for two weeks ,with no increase of approval, before dropping much faster and steeper (by the 4th week of the shut down there was a drop of one percentage point in one week, which has only happened 7 times in two years, and most of them at the very beginning of his presidency). For this reason I don’t count this as one dip, even though they are contiguous. The Mattis/Cohen dip would have petered out and started to increase if not for the shut down.