Someone asked me this morning how it is that Don McGahn still refuses to testify to Congress even after Donald Trump is literally accusing him of committing a felony by lying under oath in his testimony to the Special Counsel’s Office. One point to note here: no one thinks that the White House can bind McGahn. The White House can arguably give him a rationale, legal reason to refuse to testify. But he’s definitely free to do what he wants. So why is he still doing Trump’s bidding?
The answer is as clear as it is depressing.
Just so we’re clear on this. The President directly accused his former White House Counsel, Don McGahn, of lying under oath in his testimony to the Mueller investigators. His alleged lie was telling them about Trump’s demands to fire Robert Mueller. Why did he lie? “Because he wanted to make himself look like a good lawyer.”
Got any questions? Tomorrow at 12:30 PM Eastern I’m doing a Reddit AMA. If you’re not a Redditer that means Ask Me Anything. Open questions for me about anything and everything. I’ll be posting a link tomorrow morning.
Also, if you’re on Reddit, I wanted to let you know we have our own official TPM Reddit page right here. So it’s an easy way for you to find our stuff at Reddit.
I’ve been thinking about President Trump’s comments to George Stephanopoulos. Why did he say that? That he would do that doesn’t surprise me. But why would he say it?
One part of it is probably the most innocent explanation (everything is relative). For Trump to say he would not work with a foreign government against his domestic political enemies would suggest that he or his family members or staffers did something wrong in 2016. Maybe they didn’t commit a crime. Maybe they didn’t “collude”, whatever that means. But to say he wouldn’t do this in 2020 would be to concede what he has never conceded and cannot concede but which likely strikes most of us as obvious: he and his campaign did something deeply wrong by welcoming and making use of damaging information from a foreign adversary state.
Trump tells Poland’s rightist/authoritarian President: “Much of the media unfortunately in this country is corrupt. I have to tell you that, Mr. President.”
Trump tells Poland's Rightwing President: "Much of the media unfortunately in this country is corrupt. I have to tell you that, Mr. President." pic.twitter.com/3RUJwiDbCg
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) June 12, 2019
Earlier Trump commented on protests in Hong Kong: “I hope that it all works out for China and for Hong Kong … I hope that they can work it out with China.”
Looks like Mike Flynn may be going full Papadopoulos after all. Or maybe at least half Papadopoulos.
Quinnipiac has new poll data about impeachment out today. It shows among other things the public has pretty different takes on the presidency than what is treated largely as a given within elite opinion.
One big takeaway is that the public does not support impeaching the President: 61% to 33% say Congress should not begin the process of impeaching the President. That obviously includes lots of Republicans who are firmly against it. Democrats support it, unsurprisingly, but there’s significant opposition even there. 62% of Democrats favor but 31% oppose. African-Americans are the only demographic group that supports impeachment, 63% to 31%.
But that’s not the whole story. American voters overwhelmingly believe a sitting President should be able to face criminal charges while he or she serves as President, just like every other American.
Looks like Mike Flynn may be doubling down on a presidential pardon. He has hired a new lawyer not from the small circle of high-powered white-collar criminal defense attorneys in DC, but with pro-Trump/anti-Mueller bona fides.
President Trump is still angry about the prospect of impeachment. But he’s apparently intrigued with the idea that the battle might actually help boost his approval numbers as it did President Clinton more than 20 years ago. As you know, I think impeaching the President now is unwise, but not because I think or fear that it will boost him politically. We can’t know the future. But the notion that getting impeached will somehow help Trump is mainly based on poor memories or in some cases no memories of just what happened back in 1998. More than poor memories, it’s tied to many people’s inability to grapple with how badly they got the Starr investigation wrong.
Let’s review some history.
Here’s a fascinating and disturbing part of Trump’s impromptu presser early this afternoon. It got less play than the Biden trash talk or the Mexico “secret agreement.” You had to know the backstory, which I didn’t, to even understand what was being said. Yesterday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Kim Jong Un’s half-brother, Kim Jong Nam was a CIA source. This Kim was assassinated by poison in 2017 in Malaysia, by all accounts by the North Korean government. He had lived in exile for a number of years. Trump got asked about this and he responded by pledging to Kim Jong Un that he would not allow the CIA to spy in this way “under my auspices.”
In essence he was pledging not to spy on North Korea and arguably apologizing for whatever relationship the CIA had with Kim Jon Nam.
Video after the jump …