This Trump tweet on Labor Day turned some heads: “Two long running, Obama era, investigations of two very popular Republican Congressmen were brought to a well publicized charge, just ahead of the Mid-Terms, by the Jeff Sessions Justice Department. Two easy wins now in doubt because there is not enough time. Good job Jeff……”
New York Times Analysis: “His tweet over the holiday weekend chastising Jeff Sessions, the attorney general, for the Justice Department’s recent indictments of two Republican congressmen because it could cost the party seats in November crossed lines that even he had not yet breached, asserting that specific continuing criminal prosecutions should be decided on the basis of partisan advantage.”
Excerpts from Bob Woodward’s book were released on Tuesday. Many former and current staff were quoted as disparaging Trump, from Cohen to Kelly to Mattis. Here are some of those excerpts.
David Graham on the revelations: “Whatever moral qualms some Trump aides have about serving him, they believe, or tell themselves, that they are better able to prevent disaster by being inside the administration than they are by leaving. Assessing such claims, as a matter of fact or of morality, is difficult, though the anecdotes sources told Woodward seem designed to bolster them.”
The New York Times editorial board published an anonymous essay from a current “senior official in the Trump administration” which claims:
- “The dilemma — which he does not fully grasp — is that many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations…. The root of the problem is the president’s amorality. Anyone who works with him knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision making.”
- The official described what has been widely reported: a two-track presidency where most policy is carried out independent of Trump’s rhetoric, and he cited the example of Russian sanctions: “On Russia, for instance, the president was reluctant to expel so many of Mr. Putin’s spies as punishment for the poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain. He complained for weeks about senior staff members letting him get boxed into further confrontation with Russia, and he expressed frustration that the United States continued to impose sanctions on the country for its malign behavior. But his national security team knew better — such actions had to be taken, to hold Moscow accountable.”
- He describes early “whispers” about the 25th Amendment.
- He closes by calling on all Americans to follow John McCain’s example, whose funeral four days earlier, may have been a motivating factor for speaking out.
Trump immediately responded, calling the writer “gutless.” Sara Sanders called for the official to resign.
There is a slurry of takes Wednesday night, with some arguing that there is little ethical distinction between giving anonymous quotes about Trump to reporters and writing out a full anonymous essay. Others say it is self-serving to do this, a way to keep his job but be able to claim later that they were really against Trump. Frum writes “those who do not quit or are not fired in the next few days will have to work even more assiduously to prove themselves loyal, obedient, and on the team. Things will be worse after this piece. They will be worse because of this piece.”
Douthat revisits a recurring theme of his Trump commentary about whether Trump is truly dangerous or too ineffectually weak to be dangerous. He still asserts that Trump is weak, and uses as evidence some of the anecdotes from Woodward’s book: the man is being thwarted by his own staff. But he warns that “this assumes that Trumpian weakness will never breed Trumpian desperation, and that this president will be content with his impotence even in the face of a Mueller indictment of someone in his inner circle or a Democratic House’s investigation that threatens disgrace and ruin for his family. It assumes that Trump will never, even in a desperate hour, put his party’s attempts to contain him gently to a firmer sort of test… we still have two years and four months left of this administration. And before it ends, I suspect the harder test will come.”
By the weekend dozens of senior Trump Administration officials released public statements they are not the anonymous author.
While this was going on Bret Kavanaugh completed his Senate confirmation heading for the Supreme Court.
The CPFB top regulator of the student loan industry resigned in protest. Last year DeVos stopped sharing data on student loans with the CPFB, and she has made it harder for students to default on their loans, and made it easier for low-performing for-profit colleges to resume getting federal subsides that Obama-era rules ended. A recent study found that the government only requires schools to report student loan default rates for three years, and that colleges are giving deferments for three years so that the default rates increase after the government stops keeping taps. Read about it here.
DeVos is also trying to stop states from acting in the students’ interest to lower their debt burden by arguing states cannot interfere in federal loan programs. The “case that could determine the future role of states in consumer protection.”
In Russia News
The New York Times reported on some leaked Justice Department documents that reveal how the FBI and DOJ were trying to enlist Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska even before the election, and that two of the people who were trying to flip him were Christopher Steele and Bruce Ohr. The documents reveal they were working together since 2014, seven months before Trump declared his run. We learn that Steele worked more closely with the FBI than previously understood, “as an intermediary between the Americans and the Russian oligarchs they were seeking to cultivate.” In September the FBI “pressed Mr. Deripaska about whether his former business partner, Mr. Manafort, had served as a link to the Kremlin during his time as Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman.” And in 2017 Ohr asked Deripaska to “give up Manafort.” The leakers of the documents were trying to support Ohr who has come under attack from Trump. They did not want Trump and his allies to get away with using “the program’s secrecy as a screen with which they could cherry-pick facts and present them, sheared of context, to undermine the special counsel’s investigation.”
Mueller’s team told Trump’s lawyers that they will accept written answers to questions about Russian collusion. There is still the possibility they may ask for an interview on other matters, such as obstruction of justice.
Trump’s lawyers sent a response, but it is not at all clear what was in it. The door for an interview may still be open.
Papadopoulos was sentenced to 14 days in prison and a year long surveillance for lying to the FBI about the Russia investigation.
Last month, Lawfare concluded “that Papadopoulos’s cooperation was always grudging and limited, and… it never amounted to all that much. ‘The defendant did not provide ‘substantial assistance,” Mueller’s team writes, ‘and much of the information provided by the defendant came only after the government confronted him with his own emails, text messages, internet search history, and other information it had obtained via search warrants and subpoenas well after the defendant’s FBI interview as the government continued its investigation.’… It appears to have been the trigger for the Russia investigation. It does not appear to hold the key to what we don’t yet know about L’Affaire Russe.”
Child-Separation Policy
- 416 separated kids are still in custody
- 304 parents were deported
- 14 still-separated kids are under 5
A woman in Arizona whose children were born in 2012 and 12014 by a midwife says they were recently denied a passport because the government doubts they are US citizens. She writes: “The denial of passports to those delivered by midwives in border states is the latest erosion of American citizens’ rights in the misguided obsession to militarize and seal the United States-Mexico border.”
The New York Times ran a story about an 8 year old boy from Guatemala who is still separated from his deported father. They speak on video conference three times a week, and the boy describes the shelter as “dangerous.” The father says he was asked to sign some papers in English that would return his son to him, but he was actually signing his deportation papers. Advocacy groups and NGOs have taken on the responsibility of finding the missing parents, 56 of whom have no contact information.
The Trump Administration is proposing a rules chance that will invalidate the Florres consent decree that prohibits holding children for longer than 20 days.
Here is reporting on one case of child separation. The mother, Anita, passed her credible-fear interview but ICE refused to release her on bond to be reunited with her 5 year old son, Jenri. Thanks to a lawyer’s intervention, an ICE supervisor reversed the decision. The quotes of the child to his mother once they were reunited are too gut-wrenching for me to copy and paste here, but I recommend reading the entire article.
Trump’s Job Approval: 40.6% (Trump did dip below 40% this week, but only for one day, September 5th.)