Here’s the moment, caught by an AP photographer. Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov cracking a joke (see video here) about Comey’s firing before heading into his meeting with the Secretary of State. He’s currently meeting with the President.
Click the headline of this story to see a full size version of the photo.
A lot of people have been (maybe just had been) pretending or hoping that Rod Rosenstein somehow wasn’t quite understanding the decision he was party to. I’ve heard he was in a professional bubble, naive in political terms. This must be somehow like career Army intelligence officer Michael Flynn didn’t understand the US’s historic rivalry with Russia.
Now we’re hearing that days before his firing, Comey asked Rosenstein for more money and personnel for the Trump/Russia probe. Yes, boom! Read More
White House press was barred from the meeting between President Trump and Foreign Minister Lavrov. But a Russian news agency was allowed in (they were apparently released by the Russian Foreign Ministry.) Here’s the photos they took. The third man is Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak, the whose calls with Mike Flynn led to Flynn’s firing. Photos after the jump. Read More
This is just a gut feel. But I have the sense that the White House is losing control of this story. Read More
[ed.note: this post originally ran at 7:44 am this morning …]
This may seem like an odd post. But I’ll keep it very real and specific. We have aggressive membership sign up goals for this month to stay on track for what we need to do by the end of the year. I spent a good bit of yesterday working with colleagues planning how we get there and more importantly the sign up goals we have to meet for the year. They’re a big deal for the reasons I’ve already discussed with you here. I wake up this morning with a pressing focus, an impulse to spend as little time as possible working on that and thinking about that in the coming days. I want to be as focused on writing, reporting and hiring as possible. If you’ve been considering signing up for Prime, if you think it might be worthwhile, anything like that, please take a moment and sign up this morning.
There’s only so much time in the day. I don’t want to be distracted. If you haven’t seen my initial take on last night’s events yet, it’s in the post immediately preceding this one.
I mentioned in the earlier post that it feels to me like the White House is losing control of this story. I want to follow up by looking at what White House Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in today’s presser. She said a lot that was all over the place. But I want to focus on her essentially giving three overlapping and at least partly contradictory explanations for why the President fired James Comey. Read More
I wanted to add some context to one of the more surreal moments of this surreal day. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov met first with Secretary of State Tillerson and then a short time later with President Trump in the Oval Office.
This is not standard procedure. Read More
Deputy AG Rosenstein reportedly threatened to resign after he found out the White House was making him the instigator of James Comey’s firing.
Last night came word that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein reportedly threatened to resign Tuesday night when he realized that the White House was making him the key decision-maker in the firing of James Comey. This tells us a lot, but not necessarily what it might appear on first notice. The main significance is that no more than 30 hours in, the White House’s absurd cover story about firing Comey over his misdeeds toward Hillary Clinton – a lie that virtually everyone at the White House has now publicly repeated and vouched for – is coming apart at the seams. We can also see the staggering fact that after no more than two weeks on the job, Rosenstein’s public reputation, which was formidable, has been destroyed. He now joins a legion of Trump Dignity Wraiths, men and women (though mainly men) of once vaunted reputations or at least public prestige who have been reduced to mere husks of their former selves after crossing the Trump Dignity Loss Event Horizon. Read More