CNN just reported that a team of outside advisers to the President have been meeting today to bring in more lawyers to help the President in light of the appointment of a special counsel. That is not abnormal. Presidents who have been in some sense the focus of investigations like this have often, probably usually, hired outside lawyers beyond the White House Counsel. But apparently shepherding this process is Michael Cohen, the President’s longtime “personal lawyer” and Trump Organization fixture who has his own tangled relationship with various Russian and Ukrainian interests, Felix Sater and more.
Remember, he was actually the one who met with Sater and that Ukrainian member of parliament who had a ‘peace plan’ to deliver to Mike Flynn.
This is very interesting.
Let me share a few thoughts on the press conference President Trump just held with the President of Colombia. In the nature of the moment, I’ll just focus on the questions President Trump fielded on the investigations. Read More
We’re seeing multiple stories this morning, building on hints and suggestions over the course of the week, that Vice President Mike Pence was kept “out of the loop” on seemingly all the problems with Mike Flynn. I see no reason to believe this.
Pence wouldn’t be the first Vice President to go this route. Some of the modern ubiquity of this phrase stems from then Vice President Bush claiming he’d been “out of the loop” on key decisions and knowledge about the Iran-Contra Scandal. There’s even less reason to believe this with Pence. Read More
I was in meetings when this afternoon’s burst of stories hit. For now, I’ll mention one thing. The kinds of discussions, signals, hints that would likely count as collusion would not look much different from what we now know happened in the Oval Office with President Trump and the Russian Foreign Minister. Read More
Before more time goes by I wanted to share a few thoughts about the latest we’ve heard on the role Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein played in the firing of FBI Director James Comey as well as the larger Russia investigation. Rosenstein has now written an explanation and justification for the firing memo and appeared in a close door session before members of Congress.
The memo Rosenstein penned to explain the firing memo and why he wrote it is a minor bureaucratic masterpiece. It does what lawyers are trained to do in an advocacy context: state clearly and emphatically what can be discussed and argued, ignore or seek to make irrelevant what cannot be discussed and put a firm interpretation on what is inherently subjective. Read More
Richard Rubin is the author of three books, his most recent being Back Over There: One American Time-Traveler, 100 Years Since the Great War, 500 Miles of Battle-Scarred French Countryside, and Too Many Trenches, Shells, Legends and Ghosts to Count. Richard will be in The Hive Wednesday May 24th at 2 PM EST for a chat about World War I, which reaches its 100th anniversary this year. Submit your questions at any time or feel free to join us on Wednesday! If you’d like to participate but don’t have TPM Prime, sign up here.
The main takeaway from Friday’s Washington Post story on Trump/Russia was that the investigation has now expanded to include a current White House official who is close to the President as a “significant person of interest.” That’s a big deal not least because the description (1. current White House official, 2. present during the campaign and 3. “close to the president”) matches up so closely with the President’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. But to me that wasn’t the most noteworthy revelation.
What jumped out to me was that the authors twice invoked investigators’ focus on “financial crimes.” Read More
In news from the weekend, the specter of getting tripped up by financial crimes looms over President Trump and his cronies, Rod Rosenstein still isn’t coming clean on his role in the Comey firing and, like Mike Pence, H.R. McMaster seems to have a poor memory.
A short time ago on CNBC, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross appeared on CNBC to discuss the President’s trip to Saudi Arabia. After raving about a “very bright, very attractive young woman” at a venture capital panel he attended on the trip, Ross noted the absence of any protestors during the visit, in contrast to the situation in the US.
Ross: I think the other thing that was fascinating to me … there was not a single hint of a protestor anywhere there during the whole time we were there, not one guy with a bad placard, instead …
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