Trump says he is under investigation, lashes out at Justice Department

President Donald Trump tweeted on Friday that he is under investigation in the probe into Russia’s involvement in the 2016 presidential election.

He also appeared to criticize Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who appointed a special counsel to oversee the investigation.

Special counsel Robert Mueller is seeking to determine whether Trump attempted to obstruct justice, following the president’s firing of former FBI Director James Comey, who had been leading the investigation of Russian interference, The Washington Post reported this week.

Rosenstein wrote the memo that suggested that Trump fire Comey over his handling of an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of State. Trump later contradicted his administration’s rationale, saying he had been thinking about the Russia investigation when he fired Comey.

In a striking testimony before Congress last week, Comey said he believed Trump had sought to persuade him to drop an investigation into then National Security Advisor Michael Flynn’s ties to Russia.
Trump’s acknowledgement of the reported obstruction of justice investigation came after a series of tweets in which he renewed his assertions that he is the subject of a “witch hunt.”

The Washington Post cited unidentified officials when it reported Mueller is investigating Trump. Rosenstein issued a statement on Thursday warning Americans to “be skeptical of anonymous allegations.”

“Americans should exercise caution before accepting as true any stories attributed to anonymous ‘officials,’ particularly when they do not identify the country — let alone the branch or agency of government — with which the alleged sources supposedly are affiliated,” Rosenstein said.

A senior Justice Department official told NBC News that no one pushed Rosenstein to issue the statement.

“This was 100 percent Rod. He’s tired of reading all these stories based on anonymous sources claiming to know what the Justice Department and the FBI are doing,” the official said.

[NBC News]

 

Trump Tweets His Frustration with Russia Investigation

President Donald Trump is beginning his day with a stream of tweets defending his record and lashing out at the investigation into Russian interference in the election.

In a two-part tweet posted before 7 a.m. Sunday, Trump wrote: “The MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN agenda is doing very well despite the distraction of the Witch Hunt.”

He continued by saying: “Many new jobs, high business enthusiasm …massive regulation cuts, 36 new legislative bills signed, great new S.C.Justice, and Infrastructure, Healthcare and Tax Cuts in works!”

“Witch hunt’ is how Trump characterizes the probe into Russia’s election interference and possible ties to his campaign associates.

Trump advisers describe the president as increasingly angry over the investigation, yelling at television sets carrying coverage and insisting he is the target of a conspiracy.

[ABC News]

Trump Picks Right-Wing Conspiracy Blogger for a Federal Judgeship

Here’s a pro tip. If you are a judicial nominee, and you have to spend much of your confirmation hearing denying that you endorsed birtherism, maybe “judge” isn’t the ideal job for you.

And yet John Bush, a lawyer and conservative blogger who spent years publishing many of his most controversial opinions under a pseudonym, is in line to be a judge on a powerful federal appeals court. Given Bush’s prolific history as a political blogger, those opinions were on full display during his confirmation hearing on Wednesday.

Birtherism came up after Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) noted a blog post where Bush relied heavily on World Net Daily, a conservative site famous for touting conspiracy theories such as the birther libel against President Obama. In the post — which bears the grammatically-dubious title “‘Brother’s Keeper’ — As In, Keep That Anti-Obama Reporter In Jail!”  — Bush touted a World Net Daily story claiming that one of the publication’s reporters was being held by immigration officials in Kenya after the reporter went there to investigate Obama’s Kenyan half-brother.

The post implied, without explicitly stating, that then-Sen. Barack Obama bore some responsibility for this reporter being detained. In any event, Bush felt that he needed to distance himself from the birther website he once cited, telling Franken that “I was certainly not intending to endorse any views of another group, as far as birtherism goes,” when he wrote this particular blog post.

Questionable citations aside, many of Bush’s other blog posts stated much more directly how the judicial nominee views the world. In one post in particular, for example, Bush claimed that “the two greatest tragedies in our country” are “slavery and abortion.”

After Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) asked Bush if he still held this view, Bush attempted to paint his views on Roe v. Wade as relatively innocuous. “I believe that [Roe] is a tragedy,” he said, “in the sense that it divided our country.”

Later in the hearing, however, Bush revealed that he either does not believe that all divisive decisions are tragic, or that he has a very poor command of American history.

“Wouldn’t you characterize Brown v. Board of Education,” Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) asked Bush, as “a case that divided our country?” In response, Bush first pled ignorance, then gave an historically-inaccurate answer.

“I wasn’t alive at the time of Brown,” Bush said. “But I don’t think it did.”

In reality, Brown is probably second only to Dred Scott v. Sandford, which played a major role in sparking the Civil War, among the Supreme Court’s most divisive decisions. Multiple books have been written on the Southern white backlash triggered by Brown — including two chapters of my own book, Injustices: The Supreme Court’s History of Comforting the Comfortable and Afflicting the Afflicted.

Even before the decision was handed down, Justice Hugo Black, a former Alabama senator, told his colleagues that violence would inevitably follow a decision ending public school segregation, and he relayed former justice and then-South Carolina Gov. Jimmy Byrnes’ warning that the state might “abolish [its] public school system” before it abided by such a decision.

Southern lawmakers demanded “massive resistance” to Brown. Many signed a “Southern Manifesto” accusing the Court of stirring up “chaos and confusion in the states principally affected.” Massive resistance proved so successful that, ten years after Brown, only one in 85 Southern black students attended an integrated school.

In fairness, Bush’s ignorance of American civil rights history, while certainly not an optimal trait in a judge, might not prevent him from performing the core responsibilities of an appellate jurist. Typically, judges spend far more time parsing statutory language and consulting legal precedents than they do digging into political history.

But Bush is not like most people named to the federal bench. In a 2009 panel hosted by the conservative Federalist Society — an organization which has played a major role in selecting Trump’s judicial nominees — Bush aligned himself with originalism, the belief that the only valid way to interpret the Constitution is to apply its text in the way those words were originally understood at the time they were drafted.

Whatever the virtues or demerits of originalism as an interpretive method, it only works if the judges applying it have a deep command of history and the skills necessary to sort good historical arguments from bad ones. After all, how can someone figure out the original meaning of a text if they don’t understand the historical and political context that brought that text into being?

The fact that Bush knows so little about one of the most famous judicial decisions in American history does not suggest that he is up to this task.

Franken, Feinstein, and Durbin are, of course, Democrats. And Bush will be confirmed unless some of Trump’s fellow Republicans break with him on this nominee. At least one Republican senator did appear uncomfortable with Bush’s nomination, however, during the hearing.

“I’ve read your blogs,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) told Bush. “I’m not impressed.”

[ThinkProgress]

Trump has made the Department of Health and Human Services a center of false science on contraception

Contraception policy may not be the biggest target of the anti-science right wing — climate change and evolution probably rank higher — but it’s the field in which scientific disinformation has the most immediate consequences for public health.

So it’s especially disturbing that President Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price have stocked the corridors of health policy with purveyors of conclusively debunked claptrap about contraception, abortion, pregnancy and women’s reproductive health generally.

That’s the conclusion of a new article in the New England Journal of Medicine identifying four Trump appointees as carriers of the disinformation virus. What makes them especially dangerous, says the author, bioethicist R. Alta Charo of the University of Wisconsin law school, is that the “alternative facts” they’re purveying could influence an entire generation’s attitude toward contraception, for the worse.

Among their themes is that condoms don’t protect against HIV or other sexually transmitted diseases and that abortions and contraceptives cause breast cancer, miscarriages and infertility. None of these assertions is true.

“The move toward misinformation at the level of sex education is dangerous,” Charo told me, “because you form instincts about what is safe very early in life.”

These appointments are all of a piece with Trump’s habit of staffing federal agencies with people actively in opposition to those agencies’ goals and statutory responsibilities — climate change deniers at the Environmental Protection Agency, corporate executives at the Department of Labor, and so on.

They’re also consonant with policies from the White House and Price’s office aimed at narrowing access to contraceptives by reducing government assistance to obtain them.

As Charo observes, the rate of unintended pregnancies has come down sharply, especially since the advent of the Affordable Care Act, which mandated that health plans make birth control available without co-pays or deductibles.

Price has defended reducing government assistance for contraception on the ground that “there’s not one” woman who can’t afford it on her own, but that’s plainly untrue; some long-lasting contraceptives such as Nexplanon or IUDs, can cost hundreds of dollars, a discouraging obstacle for many low-income patients.

Let’s take a look at the four horsewomen of disinformation on Charo’s list. What characterizes their approach to human reproduction, she says, is “rejection of the scientific method as the standard for generating and evaluating evidence.”

(We’ve asked both Charmaine Yoest, now the assistant secretary for public affairs at Health and Human Services, and the department for comment but have received no reply.)

Charmaine Yoest

Charmaine Yoest is now the assistant secretary for public affairs at HHS. Yoest is the former head of Americans United for Life, a prominent anti-abortion group. She and the organization promoted the claim that abortion increases a woman’s chance of breast cancer, a claim that was conclusively debunked by medical authorities years ago. The National Cancer Institute (a government body), declared in 2003 that thorough scientific studies “consistently showed no association between induced and spontaneous abortions and breast cancer risk.”

The same goes for the claim by Yoest’s group that abortion increases the risk of “serious mental health problems.” This notion is the basis for state laws requiring counseling before a patient is allowed to undergo an abortion. A study by UC San Francisco published last year found that the “greater risk” of “adverse psychological outcomes is faced by women denied an abortion. These findings do not support policies that restrict women’s access to abortion on the basis that abortion harms women’s mental health,” the study concluded.

Yoest was an architect of the strategy that led Texas to enact an anti-abortion law so extreme that it was slapped down by the Supreme Court last year on a 5-3 vote. The law placed heavy restrictions on abortion clinics, ostensibly to protect women’s health, that effectively shut many down. In his majority opinion, Justice Stephen Breyer essentially called that a subterfuge: “There was no significant health-related problem that the new law helped to cure,” he wrote.

Teresa Manning

Teresa Manning was appointed as HHS’ deputy assistant secretary for population affairs. Manning is a former lobbyist for the National Right to Life Committee and a legislative analyst for the Family Research Council. During a 2003 NPR interview, she said: “Of course, contraception doesn’t work. … Its efficacy is very low.” In fact, as Charo observes, hormonal methods are 91% effective, and IUDs are 99% effective.

In 2001, then as Teresa Wagner, Manning was quoted in a Family Research Council news release attacking prescriptions for the morning-after pill, which she characterized as an abortion method. She said doctors prescribing the pill were “accepting — and, in effect, — promoting promiscuity — the cause of the STD explosion, as well as the well known social problems of out of wedlock pregnancy and illegitimacy. We expect more from our doctors than collaboration with abortion advocates!”

Valerie Huber

Valerie Huber was appointed earlier this month as chief of staff to the assistant secretary for health at HHS. Huber is an abstinence advocate and the president of Ascend, a Washington group that advocates for abstinence-only sex education.

The problem there is that birth control experts have consistently found that abstinence education is ineffective at preventing teen pregnancies. In fact, just the opposite — a 2011 study at the University of Georgia reported that the “data show clearly that abstinence-only education as a state policy … may actually be contributing to the high teenage pregnancy rates in the U.S.”

Huber’s approach is moralistic. “As public health experts and policymakers, we must normalize sexual delay more than we normalize teen sex, even with contraception,” she told PBS last year. But studies consistently show that what reduces teen pregnancies is increased use of contraceptives.

Katy Talento

Katy Talento was named to Trump’s Domestic Policy Council. Talento has been the author of frequent anti-birth control screeds, including several that appeared on the Federalist, a right-wing website. Among them was an article whose headline called birth control “the mother of all medical malpractice,” and another asserting that women who took chemical forms of birth control risked “breaking your uterus for good,” ruining it “for baby-hosting altogether.”

Talento’s basis for this claim was what she called a “ground-breaking 2012 study” ostensibly showing that women who used birth control pills for several years had higher rates of infertility and miscarriage than those who did not. But as Jon Cohen of Science Magazine showed earlier this year, the study reported nothing of the kind — as its lead author confirmed. In fact, the researchers cited a study indicating that long-term use of the pill — five years — actually increased a woman’s subsequent fertility.

The lead author, Robert Casper, a Toronto fertility doctor, told Cohen that while his study found that using the pill sometimes led to thinner uterus linings, that wasn’t associated with more infertility or miscarriages — his study group was small and predisposed to fertility problems, he explained.

“The benefits of the birth control pill in preventing unwanted pregnancy or in treating painful menstrual periods far outweighs the rare possible case of thin endometrium,” Cohen wrote. “There is no evidence that the birth control pill is ‘seriously risky’ in terms of future reproductive health.”

As Charo observes, the “alternative science” underlying these appointees’ approach has infected public discussions of birth control and the courts. “Legislatures and even the Supreme court have tolerated individuals making up their own definitions for abortifacient [that is, abortion-producing] and pregnancy,” she writes, and then using them to justify refusing to fill prescriptions or offer insurance coverage for contraceptives.”

That was glaringly true in the Supreme Court’s egregious 2014 Hobby Lobby decision, which allowed owners of private companies to refuse to cover contraceptives under the Affordable Care Act. The Hobby Lobby plaintiffs specifically objected to four birth control methods — including IUDs and the morning-after pill because they produced abortions, which the plaintiffs found objectionable supposedly on religious grounds. But neither medical authorities nor the federal government classified those methods as abortifacients; the plaintiffs’ definition was accepted as gospel by Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the opinion, which became the basis for allowing businesses to exclude all birth control methods from their health plans.

With adherents of similar viewpoints now ensconced in positions of responsibility in the Trump administration, their approach threatens to spread throughout government policy. But it’s no more based on legitimate science than it ever was.

[The Los Angeles Times]

Trump team halts rules meant to protect students from predatory for-profit colleges

The Trump administration is suspending two key rules from the Obama administration that were intended to protect students from predatory for-profit colleges, saying it will soon start the process to write its own regulations.

The move made Wednesday by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos was a victory for Republican lawmakers and for-profit colleges that had lobbied against the rules. Critics denounced it, accusing the administration of essentially selling out students to help for-profit colleges stay in business.

The Education Department released a statement saying that it was going to create new committees to rewrite rules covering borrower defense to repaying, or BDR, and gainful employment. BDR relieves students of all federal loans if a school used illegal or deceptive tactics to persuade students to borrow money to attend. Gainful employment requires that action be taken — including possible expulsion from the federal student aid program — against vocational programs whose graduates leave with heavy student loan debt. Ninety-eight percent of the programs that officials found to have failed to meet those standards are offered by for-profit colleges.

Parts of the gainful employment rule are already in effect. BDR was set to become effective July 1 but will now be postponed. The Education Department said that while new rules are drawn up, it will process applications under the current borrower defense rules.

A program is considered to lead to “gainful employment” if the annual loan payment of a typical graduate does not exceed 20% of their discretionary income or 8% of their total earnings. Exceeding those debt-to-earnings rates means possible expulsion from the federal student aid program.

DeVos criticized the regulations that were approved by the Obama administration, saying that they are unfair to students and schools and that they leave taxpayers with a big bill.

“Fraud, especially fraud committed by a school, is simply unacceptable,” she said in her department’s statement. “Unfortunately, last year’s rule-making effort missed an opportunity to get it right. The result is a muddled process that’s unfair to students and schools, and puts taxpayers on the hook for significant costs. It’s time to take a step back and make sure these rules achieve their purpose: helping harmed students. It’s time for a regulatory reset. It is the department’s aim, and this administration’s commitment, to protect students from predatory practices while also providing clear, fair and balanced rules for colleges and universities to follow.”

The American Federation of Teachers pushed back against the decision.

“The Trump administration’s actions today show that the White House stands with predatory for-profit schools, not the students they rip off,” it said in a statement. “About the only thing worse than ripping off students with worthless degrees from for-profit colleges is denying them help to relieve their substantial debt, and allowing the schools to continue to prey on students. Given that for-profit colleges were big donors to Trump and other Republican candidates, one wonders whether this is simply a new pay-to-play scheme at the expense of our students, including our veterans, who are much helped by the rules Education Secretary Betsy DeVos wants to eliminate.”

Not everyone in higher education opposed the administration’s move, however. The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that the United Negro College Fund and the National Assn. for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education — which represent historically black colleges and universities, or HBCUs — sent a letter to DeVos this week urging her to put a hold on the implementation of the regulations and reconsider them.

“We remain concerned about the sweeping scope of the regulation and vague standards for determining ‘misrepresentation’ that could unfairly leave HBCUs and PBIs liable for frivolous claims, unwarranted fines, and unfounded penalties,” they said in the letter. “Such provisions could result in significant costs that would divert precious resources better spent on serving the needs of students.”

The nonprofit consumer advocacy group Public Citizen and the Project on Predatory Student Lending smacked DeVos’ move, saying in a statement that she had “put the profit margins of for-profit colleges ahead of the interests of students and their families” in “a craven attempt to avoid the agency’s legal obligation” to enforce the rules. The statement cited a part of the Obama-era rules that included a ban on the use of forced arbitration clauses in many student enrollment contracts:

“These clauses require students to submit any dispute that might later arise between the students and the institution to binding arbitration, a private process with little right to appeal, instead of a court of law. The rules also provide new and long-needed protections for students asserting defenses against repayment of their federal loans based on fraud or other misconduct by the students’ schools.”

[The Los Angeles Times]

Trump: Why is Clinton Not Investigated But I Am?

President Trump on Thursday questioned why Hillary Clinton isn’t the subject of Russia-related investigations but he is.

“Why is that Hillary Clintons family and Dems dealings with Russia are not looked at, but my non-dealings are?” Trump tweeted.

“Crooked H destroyed phones w/ hammer, ‘bleached’ emails, & had husband meet w/AG days before she was cleared- & they talk about obstruction?” he added, in reference to the investigation into Clinton’s private email server.

Trump has previously called into question the Clinton campaign, referencing potential contacts between her campaign staff and the Kremlin.

“What about all of the contact with the Clinton campaign and the Russians? Also, is it true that the DNC would not let the FBI in to look?”  Trump asked on March 20.

Later that month, Trump asked why the “fake news” did not cover “ties” between the Kremlin and Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta.

“Why doesn’t Fake News talk about Podesta ties to Russia as covered by @FoxNews or money from Russia to Clinton – sale of Uranium?” Trump tweeted at the time.

The president has also accused former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who presided over the Justice Department while it conducted the investigation into Clinton’s private server use, of making “law enforcement decisions for political purposes.”

The U.S. intelligence community concluded last year that Russia interfered in the presidential election specifically to help Trump defeat Clinton, the Democratic nominee.

The Justice Department, FBI and Senate and House Intelligence committees are investigating Russian election meddling, including possible ties between Trump’s team and Russia.

In addition, a special counsel is reportedly probing whether Trump obstructed justice by firing former FBI Director James Comey last month. Comey testified that Trump leaned on him to “let go” of the bureau’s probe into former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

[The Hill]

Reality

Okay let’s step through these one at a time.

Clinton did not sell a uranium mine to Russia, she was Secretary of the State Department when they and, this is important, 9 total agencies signed-off on a sale of an energy company to a Canadian-based Russian subsidiary. Again, very important, she didn’t have the power to approve or reject the deal.

Hillary Clinton destroyed her old phones “with a hammer” because destroying old devices is standard operating procedure, and state.gov emails would have been on government servers, not on her phone.

You can’t “bleach” emails, that’s not a thing.

Yes Bill Clinton met with Lorretta Lynch on a tarmac, they probably didn’t just talk about their grandkids, but Lynch recused herself from the Hillary Clinton private email server investigation immediately afterwards. That’s why the investigation then fell to James Comey, who found so little wrongdoing he could not imagine a reasonable prosecutor could bring a case.

Trump Administration Quietly Rolls Back Civil Rights Efforts Across Federal Government

For decades, the Department of Justice has used court-enforced agreements to protect civil rights, successfully desegregating school systems, reforming police departments, ensuring access for the disabled and defending the religious.

Now, under Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the DOJ appears to be turning away from this storied tool, called consent decrees. Top officials in the DOJ civil rights division have issued verbal instructions through the ranks to seek settlements without consent decrees — which would result in no continuing court oversight.

The move is just one part of a move by the Trump administration to limit federal civil rights enforcement. Other departments have scaled back the power of their internal divisions that monitor such abuses. In a previously unreported development, the Education Department last week reversed an Obama-era reform that broadened the agency’s approach to protecting rights of students. The Labor Department and the Environmental Protection Agency have also announced sweeping cuts to their enforcement.

“At best, this administration believes that civil rights enforcement is superfluous and can be easily cut. At worst, it really is part of a systematic agenda to roll back civil rights,” said Vanita Gupta, the former acting head of the DOJ’s civil rights division under President Barack Obama.

Consent decrees have not been abandoned entirely by the DOJ, a person with knowledge of the instructions said. Instead, there is a presumption against their use — attorneys should default to using settlements without court oversight unless there is an unavoidable reason for a consent decree. The instructions came from the civil rights division’s office of acting Assistant Attorney General Tom Wheeler and Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Gore. There is no written policy guidance.

Devin O’Malley, a spokesperson for the DOJ, declined to comment for this story.

Consent decrees can be a powerful tool, and spell out specific steps that must be taken to remedy the harm. These are agreed to by both parties and signed off on by a judge, whom the parties can appear before again if the terms are not being met. Though critics say the DOJ sometimes does not enforce consent decrees well enough, they are more powerful than settlements that aren’t overseen by a judge and have no built-in enforcement mechanism.

Such settlements have “far fewer teeth to ensure adequate enforcement,” Gupta said.

Consent decrees often require agencies or municipalities to take expensive steps toward reform. Local leaders and agency heads then can point to the binding court authority when requesting budget increases to ensure reforms. Without consent decrees, many localities or government departments would simply never make such comprehensive changes, said William Yeomans, who spent 26 years at the DOJ, mostly in the civil rights division.

“They are key to civil rights enforcement,” he said. “That’s why Sessions and his ilk don’t like them.”

Some, however, believe the Obama administration relied on consent decrees too often and sometimes took advantage of vulnerable cities unable to effectively defend themselves against a well-resourced DOJ.

“I think a recalibration would be welcome,” said Richard Epstein, a professor at New York University School of Law and a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, adding that consent decrees should be used in cases where clear, systemic issues of discrimination exist.

Though it’s too early to see how widespread the effect of the changes will be, the Justice Department appears to be adhering to the directive already.

On May 30, the DOJ announced Bernards Township in New Jersey had agreed to pay $3.25 million to settle an accusation it denied zoning approval for a local Islamic group to build a mosque. Staff attorneys at the U.S. attorney’s office in New Jersey initially sought to resolve the case with a consent decree, according to a spokesperson for Bernards Township. But because of the DOJ’s new stance, the terms were changed after the township protested, according to a person familiar with the matter. A spokesperson for the New Jersey U.S. attorney’s office declined comment.

Sessions has long been a public critic of consent decrees. As a senator, he wrote they “constitute an end run around the democratic process.” He lambasted local agencies that seek them out as a way to inflate their budgets, a “particularly offensive” use of consent decrees that took decision-making power from legislatures.

On March 31, Sessions ordered a sweeping review of all consent decrees with troubled police departments nationwide to ensure they were in line with the Trump administration’s law-and-order goals. Days before, the DOJ had asked a judge to postpone a hearing on a consent decree with the Baltimore Police Department that had been arranged during the last days of the Obama administration. The judge denied that request, and the consent decree has moved forward.

The DOJ has already come under fire from critics for altering its approach to voting rights cases. After nearly six years of litigation over Texas’ voter ID law — which Obama DOJ attorneys said was written to intentionally discriminate against minority voters and had such a discriminatory effect — the Trump DOJ abruptly withdrew its intent claims in late February.

[ProPublica]

Trump Conflates ‘Phony Collusion’ And Possible Obstruction Of Justice Investigation

President Trump dismissed a potential obstruction of justice investigation into his conduct, calling allegations of collusion between him, his campaign or people associated with him and Russia a “phony story.”

Of course, it’s possible to obstruct justice without colluding.

Trump was responding to a Washington Post report that special counsel Robert Mueller, who is overseeing the Department of Justice Russia investigation, is looking into whether Trump attempted to obstruct justice. An hour later, Trump was back at it, calling the investigation the “single greatest WITCH HUNT in American political history.” (People who followed McCarthyism closely might disagree.)

The president also appeared to undermine Mueller’s leadership, saying the “witch hunt” was being “led by some very bad and conflicted people!”

There has been an effort on the right to try to undermine Mueller to de-legitimize his potential findings…:

… even though some of the same people just a month earlier had been praising the former FBI director for his esteem:

News of Mueller looking into potential obstruction comes after former FBI Director James Comey testified last week. He said he didn’t know if Trump obstructed justice, but said it was for Mueller to decide.

Comey testified that he told the president he was not personally under investigation three times and confirmed that Trump was not under investigation at the time of his firing on May 9.

But, “Officials say that changed shortly after Comey’s firing,” the Post reports.

It stands to reason that the circumstances surrounding Comey’s firing would now be at the center of Mueller’s query. That’s particularly the case since other high-ranking administration officials have declined under oath in open testimony to provide more details about whether Trump asked them in any way to influence Comey or the investigation.

Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, National Security Agency Director Adm. Mike Rogers and Rogers’ former deputy, Richard Ledgett, agreed to be interviewed as part of Mueller’s investigation, according to five people “briefed on the requests” who were “not authorized to discuss the matter publicly,” the paper reports.

Officially, Mueller spokesman Peter Carr told NPR’s Carrie Johnson, “We’ll decline to comment.”

NSA spokeswoman Vanee Vines told NPR’s Phil Ewing, “NSA will fully cooperate with the special counsel. We are not in a position to comment further.”

A spokesman for Trump’s personal lawyer in the Russia matter, Marc Kasowitz, said, “The FBI leak of information regarding the president is outrageous, inexcusable and illegal.”

Comey’s firing is a “central moment that’s being looked at” in the investigation, Post reporter Devlin Barrett told NPR’s Ari Shapiro on All Things Considered, “but it’s not the only thing.” Investigators are also considering the conversations Comey and the president had leading up to that point.

In his testimony on June 8, Comey told the Senate Intelligence Committee that he believed Trump had fired him over his role as lead of the FBI investigation into Russian interference in the U.S. election and Trump campaign associates’ possible ties to Russia.

The White House has been inconsistent with its public messaging about the dismissal — initially saying Trump took the recommendations of Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein about Comey’s management of the FBI and his handling of the Clinton email investigation. But then the president himself said he had made up his mind prior to receiving the recommendations from the two top lawyers at the Department of Justice.

Comey testified that initial explanations that he was fired because of poor leadership were “lies, plain and simple.” He also said Trump had privately urged him to pull back on the investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn — a claim that the president has denied. Comey said he declined to tell agents working on the case about his conversation with Trump to shield them.

The Washington Post previously reported that Trump also asked Rogers and Coats to push back against the FBI’s investigation. The intelligence chiefs declined to discuss their private conversations with Trump during a Senate panel hearing on June 7.

Asked whether Trump’s actions rose to the level of obstruction of justice, Comey testified last week: “I don’t know. That’s Bob Mueller’s job to sort that out.” But Comey did lay out facts that a prosecutor could use to try to prove obstruction.

Trump and his supporters cast Comey’s testimony that he had told the president he was not personally under investigation as vindication. Trump disputed, though, Comey’s assertion he had asked for a pledge of loyalty. After Comey’s much-watched Senate testimony, the president said in a press conference that he would testify under oath regarding his interactions and conversations with the former FBI director.

“I think, frankly, our story shows that the president is by no means out of the woods as far as the investigation goes,” the Post’s Barrett told NPR.

Chatter surfaced earlier this week that the president was considering firing Mueller. After a day of speculation, White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said, “While the president has the right to, he has no intention to do so.” The New York Times reported that Trump had been waved off the idea by advisers.

Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein, who appointed Mueller on May 17, testified on Tuesday that he would not fire the special counsel without “good cause.”

Trump is not the only one under scrutiny, Barrett said: Investigators are also looking into the finances of Trump associates.

“Oftentimes what happens, frankly, in counterintelligence investigations is you start looking at sort of a core intelligence question — What did the Russians do and did they do it with any Americans? — and it grows into: What did any of those Americans do in their financial matters that may also raise alarms with the FBI?” Barrett said.

Mueller’s investigative team has expanded in recent weeks. The National Law Journal reported on June 9 that Mueller has brought Deputy Solicitor General Michael Dreeben onto the team on a part-time basis. Reporter Tony Mauro noted the addition of Dreeben may signal that “Mueller may be seeking advice on complex areas of criminal law, including what constitutes obstruction of justice.” At the end of May, the chief of the Justice Department’s Fraud Section, Andrew Weissman, also joined the team, NPR’s Carrie Johnson reported at the time.

Justice Department policy is that a sitting president cannot be indicted by a grand jury, the Post also reported Wednesday. Any findings by the department’s investigation would be referred to Congress, where lawmakers would determine whether to impeach the president.

[NPR]

 

 

 

Trump Gives Pentagon Authority to Determine Troop Levels in Afghanistan

Defense Secretary James Mattis confirmed Wednesday that President Trump has granted him the authority to set troop levels in Afghanistan. The move means Mattis will decide whether to send 2,000 to 4,000 more American troops to Afghanistan as has been recommended by U.S. military commanders.

“At noon yesterday, President Trump delegated to me the authority to manage troop numbers in Afghanistan,” Mattis told the Senate Appropriations Defense Subcommittee in his opening statement.

Mattis said the decision does not mean a change in troop numbers will happen right now, though he indicated he might have an idea of how many in a few weeks time.

He indicated that additional U.S. troops could be directed towards specific tasks to help the Afghan military like more air power and more intelligence support.

“The delegation of this authority, consistent with the authority President Trump granted me two months ago for Iraq and Syria does not, at this time, change the troop numbers for Afghanistan,” Mattis told the committee.

“Together in the interagency, we will define the way ahead and I will set the U.S. military commitment, consistent with the commander in chief strategic direction and the foreign policy as dictated by secretary of state Tillerson,” said Mattis. “This ensures the department can facilitate our missions and nimbly align our commitment to the situation on the ground.”

In late April, Trump gave Mattis the authority to manage the U.S. troop levels in Iraq and Syria.

Defense Secretary James Mattis confirmed Wednesday that President Trump has granted him the authority to set troop levels in Afghanistan. The move means Mattis will decide whether to send 2,000 to 4,000 more American troops to Afghanistan as has been recommended by U.S. military commanders.

While a similar delegation of authority to the Pentagon for Afghanistan troop levels had been expected, it had been anticipated that it would occur after the Trump administration concluded its Afghanistan strategy review.

On Tuesday, Mattis told a congressional panel that the review will be completed in mid-July.

“We are not winning in Afghanistan right now, and we will correct this as soon as possible,” Mattis told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

There are about 8,400 American troops in Afghanistan advising and assisting the Afghan military in its fight against the Taliban and the ISIS affiliate in Afghanistan.

In February, General John Nicholson, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, described the military situation there as “a stalemate” and acknowledged the need for additional troops to assist the Afghan military.

U.S. officials have said that as part of the strategy review the U.S. military had proposed sending 2,000 to 4,000 more American troops to Afghanistan.

The delegation of troop level authority to Mattis means that the defense secretary will decide how many additional American troops could be headed to Afghanistan.

The move restores the process that had been in place prior to the Bush and Obama administrations.

Defense Department officials portrayed the return to the Pentagon of control over Iraq and Syria troop levels as giving military commanders more flexibility and better management of their operations.

[ABC News]

Trump Blocks National Veteran Group on Twitter

On Tuesday morning, President Donald Trump started out the day as he has in the past: by tweeting criticisms of the news media and courts that have blocked his travel ban.

But he also took time to block the Twitter account of VoteVets.org, an organization that represents around 500,000 U.S. military veterans and their families.

Trump first tweeted that the “Fake News Media has never been so wrong or so dirty” and accused journalists of using “phony sources to meet their agenda of hate.”

VoteVets.org responded to Trump in a tweet that said, “You’re describing your road to the White House to a T” and accusing the president of “colluding with an adversary of the United States,” in reference to concerns about Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential campaign.

Will Fischer, director of government affairs for VoteVets, told NBC News that he had written the tweets criticizing Trump when the account was suddenly blocked.

“He has no interest in hearing any type of dissent,” said Fischer.

VoteVets.org has been critical of Trump before, most recently in a television ad featuring a veteran of the war in Afghanistan speaking directly to the president about stripping healthcare from vets.

“There’s not an issue being debated that doesn’t affect military families and vets,” said Fischer. “There are nearly 2 million veterans and their spouses on Medicaid. 500,000 veterans are served by Meals on Wheels each year.”

“This is part of a long narrative of Trump’s disregard for veterans and military families,” Fischer said of the blocking.

“Trump only wants to surround himself with Yes-men,” said Fischer, citing a video of Monday’s cabinet meeting in which the attendees praised Trump in an effusive way that was mocked by some.

It’s not the first time the president has blocked his critics on social media. Also on Tuesday, he blocked noted science fiction and horror novelist Stephen King, Center for American Progress fellow Rebecca Buckwalter-Poza, and March for Truth organizer Jordan Uhl.

The president appeared to go on a blocking spree throughout the day, also blocking former Guantanamo Bay guard Brandon Neely. In a tweet about being blocked by Trump Tuesday, Neely suggested the president could be “blocking all veterans.”

So many people have been blocked from reading or responding to the president’s tweets that the hashtag #BlockedByTrump began to take off on Tuesday. Because Trump has blocked so many users, there are several other accounts — like @subtrump and @unfollowtrump — that retweet all of his posts on the platform.

Trump’s blocking has caused concern in legal circles, where some have raised questions about whether it could be illegal for a sitting U.S. President to intentionally hide his statements from members of the public.

On June 6, attorneys from the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University sent a letter to Trump asking him to unblock users. The letter says that an elected president’s Twitter account is a “designated public forum” — similar to a school board or city council meeting — and blocking Americans from seeing and responding to it based on their viewpoints is a violation of the First Amendment.

That same day, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer told reporters that Trump’s tweets are “considered official statements by the president of the United States.”

The Knight First Amendment Institute is currently soliciting submissions from other people who have been blocked by the president.

Fischer said that he wasn’t very surprised about VoteVets.org getting the president’s block treatment.

“If the campaign taught us anything,” said Fischer, “It’s that the days of disbelief and shock are over.”

[NBC News]

 

 

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