It’s so deeply conflicted and perverse that it almost speaks for itself. But it’s still worth listening to what the legal and ethics experts say about Trump’s public play to host the next G7 meeting (G8 if Putin and Trump get their way!) at his own resort. Josh Kovensky reports.
Jerry Falwell Jr. and his wife seem to develop very close relationships with young studs who then get money from the Falwell’s to start their own businesses.
This judgment from DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz seems entirely in character. Find some, albeit trivial way to knock Comey and thus be nice to Trump while, on the merits, confirming that Comey broke no law, released no classified info and in practice did nothing wrong.
To be clear, it goes without saying that leaking anything to the press doesn’t comply with agency guidelines.
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Tierney walks us through the key details in the Comey-Trump Memos IG Report.
This morning we saw an article from the Post that is typical of what we’ll see really no matter what Democrat gets the presidential nomination. Indeed, we’ll see it again and again. (Read the now-updated story here.) The gist, according to the Post, is that Biden tells a story of military heroism about a young soldier in Afghanistan. But that story never happened. At it’s not even one discrete story. Over the years he’s told it with different details. As the Post explains, the story is actually a pastiche of several different stories, each of which Biden was either directly a part of or heard recounted on one of his trips to Afghanistan or Iraq, or in one case at a Medal of Honor ceremony at the White House.
Today we have yet another in the endless story of Trump White House dysfunction. President Trump’s personal assistant was abruptly fired, translated into a “separated employee” after Trump learned that she’d blabbed to the press about Trump’s family. For good corporate measure, she was also barred from even entering the White House today. Again, yet more Trump nonsense.
But let me come at this from a different direction. We don’t know just what these family details were. But a personal assistant to the President has access to the President, his family and many of their collective intimacies and legitimately private life. If she really shared truly personal details with the press that is a massive breach and I suspect it would lead to termination under any White House — maybe not quite so jaggedly, with the equivalent of being escorted out of the building. But fired? I’m pretty sure yes.
But there’s another nugget that to me is the real story.
I will return to this in more depth later. But I wanted to address a key point about yesterday’s Inspector General report on James Comey and his memos about President Trump. As I noted yesterday, the report is typical of Inspector General Michael Horowitz — basically report the facts, try to avoid discussion of facts or questions that are unhelpful to President Trump and spin the facts in as friendly a way as possible to President Trump. Indeed, beyond Horowitz himself, the report is emblematic of how even seemingly apolitical appointees (Horowitz was appointed under Barack Obama) and members of the bureaucracy routinely bend their duties toward those in power.
Yesterday I was amazed to see Chuck Todd suggest to Comey’s friend and public supporter Benjamin Wittes that Bill Barr’s apolitical bona fides had been reestablished by the fact that Barr did not prosecute Comey. This is an astonishingly stupid suggestion, which again underlines the way Trump’s criminality and bad acting gets normalized to create an environment in which the major media can operate, to create a bothsidesist equilibrium.
But let me address a key point.
I had not noticed until this morning (when TPM Reader TM flagged it to my attention) that Rod Rosenstein responded (not terribly positively) to my post on the Comey Memos IG report (“Of Course Comey Was Right to Share the Memos”).
Check out this double-negative logic: "no reason to believe the others in the .. chain of command weren’t compromised by Trump’s corruption and efforts to end the investigation" — ignoring the fact that EVERY agent and prosecutor was still working on it. https://t.co/HwcC3N68ur
— Rod Rosenstein (@RodRosenstein) August 30, 2019
Allow me to respond.
I notice that a number of people are saying Joe Biden is making a big mistake not being more contrite or apologetic about jumbling facts in that story he’s told about soldiers in Afghanistan. But I’m pretty sure they’re wrong. His dismissal of the whole issue, politically at least, is the right decision.