Month: February 2019

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.

Episode 13

Rank: 3

Decline: -1:10%

Lowest Approval: 41.4%

Date Range: December 15-29 2018

Key Events:

Policy: In Oval Office ambush meeting with Pelosi and Schumer, Trump declares on camera that he will be happy to shut the government down and will take full responsibility for doing so; federal judge trikes down the entire Affordable Care Act; Trump announces Syria withdrawal, prompting congressional backlash; Government shuts down December 21; immigrant boy dies in US custody on the border.

White House Chaos: Ayres and Christie turn down offers to be chief of staff; continued news reports of how no one wants to be be Trump’s chief of staff; Zinke resigns under a cloud of multiple investigations; Syria withdrawal announcement via tweet and without consultation with usual stakeholders.

Russia Investigation: Cohen sentenced to jail in part for lying to Congress about Trump Tower Moscow; Flynn’s lawyers suggest he was framed by the FBI, then Flynn recants, admits to lying in open court and his sentencing is postponed so he can continue cooperating with the FBI; Whitaker choses not to recuse himself from the Mueller Investigation.

Non-Russia Related Legal Troubles: Cohen sentenced to three years in jail in part for hush money payments; Pecker admits to paying McDougal $150,000 to cover up affair with Trump, and AMI’s non-prosecution deal is made public; New York orders the Trump charity to close due to fraud.

Defections: Mattis resigns and submits critical resignation letter

This approval dip ranks at a 3 on the 10-point severity scale, so 9 of the 13 dips have been more sever. The main drivers of this dip appear to be the fact that Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen was sentenced to 3 years in prison, and Defense Secretary Mattis’s resignation. These events made me realize that I need to add 2 more categories to the trends that tend to coincide with approval dips. Before this episode there were only four: Policy; White House Chaos; Taboos; Russia Investigation. It’s been clear for a while that Trump is under a serious legal threat that has nothing to do with his dealings with Russia, and part of what Cohen is going to jail over has to do with campaign finance violations around the hush money payments for Trump’s affairs (He also admitted to lying to Congress about Trump Tower Moscow; Here is the full list of his crimes: “tax evasion, false bank statements, campaign-finance violations, and lying to Congress.”) The second new category covers defections from Trump World: when someone publicly cuts ties with Trump while also leveling clear, specific criticisms. Jim Mattis is the first major Trump Administration defector. His leaving left a lot of people expressing fear and anxiety, which probably accounts for the approval dip during these last weeks of December.

The government funding/wall problem has been kicked to a bipartisan conference committee of congressional appropriation members. They have until February 15 to come up with a solution.

Pelosi invited Trump to give State of the Union on February 5. He accepted.

A poll showed that 56% of all Americans would “definitely not vote for” Trump in 2020, and although “75 percent of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents approve of Trump’s performance” one-third of them prefer he lose in a primary.

The top intelligence chiefs testified in Congress with some conclusions that go against Trump’s rhetoric, namely that North Korea will continue its nuclear program, that Iran is complying with the nuclear deal, and that ISIS is not defeated.

Trump responded on twitter, basically saying they are wrong. But on Thursday in the Oval Office he told the press that the media had misquoted them and that they told him it was fake news.

The Senate voted to rebuke Trump’s Syria and Afghanistan withdrawal policy:
“The vote was the second time in two months that a Republican-led Senate had rebuked Mr. Trump on foreign policy.”

The Trump Administration withdrew from a late Cold War era nuclear weapons treaty. Russia followed suit by withdrawing itself a day later.

Russia Investigation

Whitaker made impromptu statements at a Monday press conference that the Mueller investigation was close to closing up, and that he had been “fully briefed on the investigation.”

Roger Stone plead not guilty to the Special Counsel’s charges.

Trump’s Job Approval: 39.6%

Immigration/Shut Down News

This is an article about a border town where the residents do not want the wall. They chafed at the feeling of enclosure they felt from the barbed wire the military placed on the fencing last month. This is the same place Neilson came just before the November election to unveil a plaque, trying to suggest this was the first part of Trump’s new wall. One resident: “Before we started this project here to do the replacement, Border Patrol came to visit us about three times to ask us to please participate in avoiding the drama. They came to say, three times, ‘You guys, just so you know, we’re starting this project, and it’s not the wall,” recounted Ms. Hurtado, a Democrat who did not vote for the president. “And then here comes Trump and says, ‘It’s the wall!’”

Jamelle Bouie’s debut op-ed for the New York Times argues that Pelosi was right to call the wall immoral: “It would stand as a lasting reminder of the white racial hostility surging through this moment in American history, a monument to this particular drive to preserve the United States as a white man’s country. In fact, you can almost think of the wall as a modern-day Confederate monument.”

On Wednesday Trump sent a letter to Pelosi stating that he would still address Congress for the State of the Union; she sent a return letter stating that he would not. Then Trump announced he will postpone the speech until after the shut down.

On Friday the Trump administration is starting a new asylum policy that will make asylum seekers wait in Mexico for their case to be processed: “The policy change means that people who are trying to exercise their legal right to seek asylum will be barred from the US for as much as a year while they wait for their claim to come before a judge. It is the most sweeping development in Trump’s ongoing crackdown on asylum seekers, who are largely from Central America, and disproportionately children and families.”

By Friday, Trump signed a bill reopening the government for three weeks. It was the same deal he turned down before the shutdown.

Russia Investigation

On Friday Roger Stone was indicted by the Special Counsel’s Grand Jury. He was accused on seven counts, including obstruction of justice, witness tampering and false statements to FBI and Congress FBI arrested him at his home just before 6AM. Some important quotes: “After the July 22, 2016 release of stolen DNC emails by Organization 1, a senior Trump Campaign official was directed to contact STONE about any additional releases and what other damaging information Organization 1 had regarding the Clinton Campaign. STONE thereafter told the Trump Campaign about potential future releases of damaging material by Organization 1.”
“Shortly after Organization 1’s release, an associate of the high ranking Trump Campaign official sent a text message to STONE that read “well done.””

After continued threat’s by Trump to investigate Cohen’s father-in-law, Cohen notified Congress that he would not testify before them in February. Some speculate there are other reasons he backed out: the Special Counsel advising him not to; fear of hostile questions from Republicans; and to build the case for obstruction of justice by saying he feels afraid to testify due to Trump’s threats.

NBC news reports that career security specialists who decide security clearances have been overruled by the White House in over 30 cases, including for Kushner. The White House then asked the CIA to give Kushner the highest level of security clearance. They apparently refused and were shocked he was even granted Top Secret clearance based on his file: “questions about his family’s business, his foreign contacts, his foreign travel and meetings he had during the campaign, the sources said, declining to be more specific.”

Trump’s Job Approval: 39.3%