Month: March 2019

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.

—

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.”

—

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

—

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.)”

—

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.”

—

Trump’s Job Approval: 42%