Trump is accelerating his trade war with allies Canada, Mexico and the EU. The tariffs he said earlier in the spring that he was going to waive for them are back on.
And Trump also declared the North Korea summit is back on.
Trump pardoned Dinish D’Souza on Thursday, another pardon people suspect is a veiled message to DOJ and Mueller in particular. Here is a good history of D’Souza career from conservative up-and-coming intellectual to troll and crank.
By coincidence (or perhaps not) this is the same week that Roseanne Barr was fired from ABC and her hit show canceled because she tweeted Valerie Jarret was the love child of a Planet of the Apes character and a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, McKay Coppins wrote this profile of Steven Miller for The Atlantic: “the journey from winking provocateur to racist ideologue might be shorter than many imagine. You start out with the goal of provoking the left—and, well, what’s more provocative than posting a racist meme on the internet? But with each new like and upvote, an incentive structure forms, a community coalesces, an identity hardens. Before long, the line between performance and principle is blurred beyond recognition, your “true” beliefs buried under so many layers of irony that they’ve been rendered irrelevant.”
In Russian News:
News came that McCabe wrote a memo about a conversation he had with Rosenstein shortly after Trump fired Comey that suggests Trump fired Comey because of Russia. He turned this over to Mueller, and also a draft of Trump’s reasoning for firing Comey that Trump gave to Rosenstein.
On Saturday a letter to Mueller from Trump’s legal team was released that claimed Trump cannot be indicted, cannot be charged with obstruction of justice, or forced to answer questions.
Here is Wittes trying to glean insight into Mueller’s thinking based on issues the Trump lawyers raised: “he may be investigating a series of overt acts in what he believes could be a conspiracy to obstruct justice. Under such a theory, each of the overt acts at issue might (or might not) be legal in and of itself, but may feed an unlawful objective: some kind of agreement to violate one or more obstruction statutes.”
Trump’s Approval Rating: 41.6%