Some in the Trump Administration appear to be walking back the Syria pullout decision. First Trump said troops would be out in 30 days, then it was six months, and then the administration said there is no end date set. Now Bolton is saying “American forces would remain in Syria until the last remnants of the Islamic State were defeated and Turkey provided guarantees that it would not strike Kurdish forces allied with the United States.”
However, by Friday the military announced that the Syria pullout had begun, though they would not declare any timeline for security reasons. Then DOD officials walked back the withdraw walk back by saying only equipment was being withdrawn.
Shutdown News
The Trump Administration made an offer to democrats on Sunday night that included $5.7 billion for the wall and $800 million in humanitarian aid for migrants being held at the border. It is unclear if this is the start of serious negotiations. According to the proposal the wall money would buy 234 miles of border barriers “steel bollards instead of any concrete wall.”
Trump made an Oval Office address Tuesday night in an apparent attempt to move public opinion to support his case for ending the government shutdown by funding his wall. According to Trump-Immigration watcher Dara Lind: “he gave the exact same speech he always gives: that immigrants are coming across the border to kill you.”
Another shutdown meeting at the White House went badly on Wednesday: “Stunned Democrats emerged from the meeting in the White House Situation Room declaring that the president had thrown a “temper tantrum” and slammed his hands on the table before leaving with an abrupt “bye-bye.” Republicans disputed the hand slam and blamed Democratic intransigence for prolonging the standoff.”
According to Wall Street Journal reporting, the White House sees an emergency declaration as a face-saving way out of the shutdown standoff: “As a possible way out of the shutdown, Mr. Trump’s advisers in recent weeks have suggested that the president could declare a national emergency to fund the border wall and agree to sign a spending bill without such a provision. While the declaration likely would get tied up in litigation, Mr. Trump would be able to tell supporters he did everything he could to build the wall, one of his top campaign pledges in the 2016 presidential campaign.”
Dara Lind uses this to point out something she has noticed reporting on Trump immigration policy: there is a sense of legal fatalism among White House staff that any policy they enact will be held up in courts. Lind points out how the emergency law works: “He has to declare which of the 100-plus emergency powers given to the president he’s invoking — not just because that’s how the law works, but because he has to identify which pools of emergency money he wants to raid to pay for the wall. (Not that it’s clear there’s even enough money in any of the applicable funds to get to $5.7 billion.)”
Trump had directed the Army Corps of Engineers to see if he can pull money from a $13 fund for disaster relief in Puerto Rico, Florida, Texas and California.
By Friday Trump appeared to be backing off of his threat to declare a national emergency “under pressure from congressional Republicans, his own lawyers and advisers, who say using it as a way out of the government shutdown does not justify the precedent it would set and the legal questions it could raise.”
Ezra Klein sums up why this stalemate is proving so heard to break: “[Trump’s] sense of negotiations is fundamentally zero-sum: One side has to lose and one side has to win. If Trump gives Democrats anything they can present as a win, he will look like a loser. As such, he can’t give them the concessions that might get him the wall because what he’d be giving up — his image as a winner — is more important to him than the policy he’d be gaining.”
In Russia News
We learned on Tuesday that Natalia Veselnitskaya, of the famous Trump Tower meeting, was indicted back in December on charges of obstructing justice in a federal money laundering investigation. Here is a good Lawfare piece on the Veselnitskya obstruction case, explaining what she did to get charged.
Also this week, When Manafort’s lawyers offered a rebuttal to Muller’s sentencing memo, they did not properly set the redactions so we learned among other things that Manafort met with Kilimnik while he was Trump’s campaign chair and shared 2016 polling data.
The Supreme Court ruled against a mystery foreign company and said it must comply with a subpoena that many believe came from the Muller team.
Rod Rosenstein will leave the Justice Department after Barr is confirmed as the new AG.
The White House has hired 17 new lawyers to help White House Counsel protect executive privilege in the face of House investigations, and the potential of Mueller’s report being sent to the Congress.
Then the big news (which warranted a Wittes “Boom!”). Friday night the New York Times reported that in the period between Comey’s firing and Meuller’s appointment the FBI opened a counterintelligence investigation against Trump: They worried Trump was: “working on behalf of Russia against American interests… president’s own actions constituted a possible threat to national security… knowingly working for Russia or had unwittingly fallen under Moscow’s influence.” The FBI was already suspicious of Trump’s behavior toward Russia but three events motivated them to open the investigation: firing Comey; admitting in a letter that he wanted the public to know he was not under investigation for ties to Russia; admitting on air that he fired Comey because of the Russia investigation.
This reporting came to light because someone (probably from Congress) leaked testimony of FBI general counsel James Baker, who did not disclose the investigation but said this: “Not only would it be an issue of obstructing an investigation, but the obstruction itself would hurt our ability to figure out what the Russians had done, and that is what would be the threat to national security.”
Ben Wittes published his thoughts on this, which included a quote from one of Baker’s Lawfare essays: “A lot of the criticism seems to be driven by the notion that the FBI’s investigation was, and is, an effort to undermine or discredit President Trump. That assumption is wrong. The FBI’s investigation must be viewed in the context of the bureau’s decades-long effort to detect, disrupt and defeat the intelligence activities of the governments of the Soviet Union and later the Russian Federation that are contrary to the fundamental and long-term interests of the United States. The FBI’s counterintelligence investigation regarding the 2016 campaign fundamentally was not about Donald Trump but was about Russia. Full stop. It was always about Russia. It was about what Russia was, and is, doing and planning. Of course, if that investigation revealed that anyone—Russian or American—committed crimes in connection with Russian intelligence activities or unlawfully interfered with the investigation, the FBI has an obligation under the law to investigate such crimes and to seek to bring those responsible to justice. The FBI’s enduring counterintelligence mission is the reason the Russia investigation will, and should, continue—no matter who is fired, pardoned or impeached (emphasis added).”
Wittes believes that this new reporting means that the obstruction investigation into Trump’s actions is tightly linked to the collusion/Russian interference investigation: “The reporting Schmidt shared with me about Baker’s testimony suggests rather strongly that the FBI did not think of the Comey firing simply as a possible obstruction of justice. Officials thought of it, rather, in the context of the underlying counterintelligence purpose of the Russia investigation. At one point, Baker was asked whether firing Director Comey added to the threat to national security the FBI was confronting. ‘Yes,’ Baker responds.”
Then the Washington Post reported on Saturday evening that Trump went to unusual lengths to keep secret the content of his meetings with Putin, including that he took possession of his interpreter’s notes after a 2017 meeting in Hamburg: “U.S. officials said there is no detailed record, even in classified files, of Trump’s face-to-face interactions with the Russian leader at five locations over the past two years.”
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Trump’s Job Approval: 41.00%