What did Donald Trump do today?

He nominated still yet another of his personal criminal defense attorneys to a top DOJ post.

Today, Trump announced that he was nominating James M. McDonald as the next US Attorney for the powerful Southern District of New York. McDonald is currently a member of Trump's legal defense team trying to appeal his conviction in the New York state fraud case. He was found guilty of 34 felonies relating to his attempt to launder an illegal in-kind hush money payment to Stormy Daniels, the adult film actress he had a brief sexual encounter with shortly after the birth of his youngest son.

Trump may be the only president in history to have personal criminal defense lawyers on retainer at the time he took office. Prior to Trump, no incoming president had ever been indicted on state or federal felony charges, much less convicted. 

McDonald joins a long list of Trump defense attorneys who are being put in sensitive positions in the DOJ and the federal bench. Trump's first attorney general, Pam Bondi, was part of his impeachment defense team. His current nominee for that position, Todd Blanche, defended Trump and other people in Trump's circle after they were indicted for their roles in the conspiracy to keep Trump in office after 2020. (Blanche is also the person Trump trusted to "interview" Ghislaine Maxwell, the convicted child sex trafficker and associate of Jeffrey Epstein, after which Maxwell received an upgrade to a minimum-security federal "resort" prison.) Trump appointed yet another of his criminal lawyers, Emil Bove, to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. Matthew Schwartz, another lawyer on his criminal appeals team, was nominated by Trump as a judge on the Second Circuit. Trump named D. John Sauer, who secured for him a Supreme Court ruling making him all but invulnerable to criminal prosecution for crimes committed while in office, his first Solicitor General.

Trump hasn't really made any secret as to why he only seems to trust lawyers who have a track record of shielding him from prosecution. He was infuriated when both of his Attorneys General from his first term eventually reached a point where they refused to act as his personal lawyer: Jefferson Sessions, when evidence of Trump's collusion with Russia to influence the 2016 election became undeniable, and William Barr, when Trump was in the throes of trying to attempt a coup to toss out 2020 election.

When Sessions appointed a special prosecutor, Trump reportedly wailed, "Where's my Roy Cohn?!" That was a reference to Trump's disgraced former lawyer and notorious political dirty trickster Roy Cohn, who died in 1986. Trump publicly distanced himself from Cohn when it was revealed that Cohn, a closeted gay man, was dying of AIDS—but publicly praised him for his "loyalty" above all else. 

Trump replaced sessions with Barr, a political brawler who showed none of Sessions' respect for the traditional separation of legal and political matters. But when Barr told reporters that there was no evidence of voter fraud (or at least none against Trump), which by then had become undeniable, Trump was so enraged he threw his lunch plate at the wall.

McDonald, if confirmed, would have prosecutorial jurisdiction over the city in which the Trump Organization is based. He would also be responsible for prosecuting, or choosing not to prosecut, white-collar crimes like corporate fraud and insider trading committed there.

Why does this matter?

• The Justice Department is supposed to serve the interests of the people of the United States, not Donald Trump personally. 

• A president who wasn't afraid his crimes, past or present, would catch up to him probably wouldn't be so worried about "loyalty" from prosecutors.

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What did Donald Trump do today?

He threw another attorney general under the bus.

In an interview with the fringe-right website Newsmax today, Trump said he "wasn't happy" with William Barr, his attorney general. He refused to say that he'd retain Barr if he were re-elected.

At first glance, this may seem strange. While most legal experts, including many conservative lawyers, view Barr's tenure as attorney general with a mix of horror and outrage, Trump himself has every reason to be pleased. Barr has turned the Department of Justice into an extension of Trump's overworked personal legal defense team, and set its attorneys against Trump's enemies. He single-handedly defused the damning Mueller report through careful redaction and a misleading summary, shielded Trump's allies from prosecution, and launched counter-investigations against the people who investigated Trump's ties to the Putin regime in Russia.

But on the last of those assignments, Barr appears to have struck out, just when Trump needed him most. It was announced today that a Barr-ordered review of the Obama administration's investigation into Michael Flynn had turned up no evidence of wrongdoing, and would not even result in a report. (Flynn is the Trump crony who admitted to lying to investigators about his Russia ties, only to have Barr, in an unprecedented and legally doubtful move, try to drop the prosecution against him.)

Trump has made no secret of his desire for another "October surprise," like the one then-FBI director James Comey gave him when he announced that he was reopening an investigation into Hillary Clinton. 

Without something dramatic happening in the last 20 days of the race to upset the polls, Trump will almost certainly lose to Biden. That may explain why Trump is retweeting bizarre conspiracy theories that Biden had the Navy SEAL team that killed Osama bin Laden murdered. Since that team is still alive—its leader was a prominent Trump supporter, at least until today—it's not likely that will do the job.

Why should I care about this?

• Trying to frame your political opponents on fake criminal charges is what dictators do.

What did Donald Trump do today? 

He succeeded in getting the Department of Justice to act as his personal defense lawyer.

One of the literally dozens of women who have accused Donald Trump of sexual misconduct is E. Jean Carroll, who said last year that Trump raped her in the mid-1990s. Trump responded by calling Carroll a liar, an attention-seeker, a victimizer of other women, and—in a Trumpian twist—too unattractive for him to consider sexually assaulting. 

Carroll then filed a defamation lawsuit against Trump, which has been proceeding ever since. Recently, Trump lost a bid to prevent it from going forward while he was in office.

Today, with his permission, the Department of Justice intervened, asking to have private citizen Donald Trump replaced as the defendant with the United States of America. DOJ lawyers argued, in effect, that when Trump called Carroll a pathological attention-seeker who was endangering women who had been assaulted, he was doing so in his official capacity as the President of the United States.

This kind of move is routine in the many lawsuits involving the executive branch, but using it to keep a president out of civil court for personal attacks on the character of a woman he's accused of raping is totally unprecedented.

Because the United States is immune from certain kinds of lawsuits, if the request were granted, that would end the case immediately. And, critically, it would shield Trump from having to give a deposition under oath, or allow Carroll's lawyers access to evidence related to the suit—all of which would have happened in the near future. (According to Carroll herself, that would have included a DNA sample.) Legal experts say Trump is not likely to succeed, but the inevitable appeals will work as a delay tactic.

Trump has often gotten confused about whether lawyers representing the government are also his own private defense lawyers, but with the appointment of William Barr, he seems to have succeeded in getting a "defense attorney general" who is willing to adopt his view of things.

Why is this a bad thing?

• "I am the state" doesn't work in a democracy.

• The president is not above the law, including civil law.

• The presidency is a big job, but defaming the character of women in the hopes that people will think the president might not be a rapist after all is not part of the job description.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He tried to distance himself from yet another indicted campaign manager.

Steve Bannon was indicted today in federal court. He and three other defendants are accused of defrauding donors to a non-profit that promised to crowdfund the building of a border fence with Mexico. The US Attorney in the case, Geoffrey Berman, is the same person Trump unsuccessfully tried to purge from the job earlier this summer.

Asked about Bannon's arrest, Trump said this:

Well, I feel very badly. I haven’t been dealing with him for a long period of time, as most of the people in this room know. He was involved in our campaign, he worked for Goldman Sachs, he worked for a lot of companies, but he was involved likewise in our campaign, and for a small part of the administration very early on.

Bannon was "involved" in the Trump campaign as its CEO. Once Trump took office, his "small part" was as a senior advisor with a national security portfolio usually reserved for military generals and virtually unfettered access to Trump.

Trump also tried to distance himself from the donor-supported "We Build The Wall" scheme that Bannon and his co-defendants siphoned money from. 

I know nothing about the project, other than I didn’t like, when I read about it I didn’t like it. I said this is for government, this isn’t for private people, and it sounded to me like showboating and I think I let my opinion be very strongly stated at the time.

 

In reality, it's difficult to keep track of all the ways Trump is involved with Bannon's scheme. The general counsel for the project, failed Senate candidate Kris Kobach, said publicly in 2019 that the private wall had Trump's explicit blessing, which the White House did not deny when asked. Donald Trump Jr., whose main job is as a political surrogate for his father, appeared in a video with one of the people indicted today and praised it as "private enterprise at its finest."

But the most damning connection between Trump and the private fence scheme comes in the form of a $1.4 billion contract awarded to a construction company involved in it. Trump himself "personally and repeatedly" pressured the Army Corps of Engineers to award a lucrative contract for the "real" border fence. 

The beneficiary, Tommy Fisher, is a major Republican donor and conservative media star. Fisher put up at least $25 million towards the private fence scheme, but that appears to have sealed the deal in terms of getting Trump to lean on government contractors.

Bannon joins Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, and Michael Cohen as top Trump campaign officials indicted for or convicted of federal crimes.

Why does this matter?

• Presidents who care about "law and order" generally have fewer criminals than this running their campaigns.

• Donors to a cause endorsed by the Trump family whose money was stolen by Trump's campaign manager might not think Trump really "knew nothing" about this.

• Billion-dollar government contracts should go to the most qualified low bidders, not political cronies who kick money back to a president's other associates.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He solved a problem he created by declaring that he'd solved it.

This morning, Trump announced that he was ordering military troops withdrawn from Washington, D.C.

It's true that the federalized National Guard troops that Trump ordered deployed against lawful protestors this past week are returning home. Trump is lying when he says that that "far fewer" protestors showed up on Saturday. In fact, it was probably the biggest day of protests so far.

But the reason Trump is giving for canceling the deployment is pure face-saving. In reality, he is bowing to enormous and bipartisan anger at a move that made him look both dictatorial and weak.

Trump ordered the deployment only in Washington, D.C. because, as a federal district, there was nothing preventing him from doing so. Although unrest and property damage that followed demonstrations was worse in other cities, no other governor requested that protests be quelled by military forces. And Trump, for all his bluster, almost certainly had no legal authority to force the issue.

Meanwhile, Trump has paid an enormous political price. His approval rating has dropped sharply over the past week, Joe Biden's lead in polls is spiking, and Republicans facing re-election are increasingly willing to speak out against him. 

Notably, almost every senior figure involved in last Tuesday's military-offensive-turned-photo-opportunity—from Attorney General William Barr to Secretary of Defense Mark Esper to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley—has backtracked on it, insisting that they didn't know or didn't approve of Trump's plans. 

Career military officials, past and present, are furious, and saying so in public. And someone inside the Trump administration also leaked his demands that 10,000 active-duty troops be deployed within Washington—meaning he wanted far more than he got. It's not clear where Trump got that number, or whether he fully understood exactly what military forces were being called up. 

Ultimately, outside of last Monday's direct offensive that culminated in the now widely-mocked photo session, and an ominous deployment to guard the Lincoln Memorial from citizens protesting violence against African-Americans, the National Guard played almost no role in policing the city.

Win McNamee/Getty

So what?

• It's wrong to pretend you've accomplished something when you haven't.

• Leaders who are actually strong don't need to make shows of strength.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He talked about what he'd learned from President Nixon.

During a phone interview this morning, the recently impeached Trump shared one of the lessons he'd learned from presidential history:

I learned a lot from Richard Nixon. Don't fire people. Of course there was one difference, one big difference. Number one, he may have been guilty. And number two, he had tapes all over the place. I wasn't guilty. I did nothing wrong, and there are no tapes. But I wish there were tapes in my case.

There's a lot to unpack here. 

Nixon's firing of his top two Justice Department officials in an attempt to protect himself from prosecution was indeed a factor in his eventual resignation, Trump has systematically fired almost everyone connected in any way to the Russia and Ukraine investigations. He started with FBI Director James Comey, who refused to back off an investigation of Trump's disgraced advisor Michael Flynn. He's also pushed out almost everyone who testified about the Ukraine scandal.

Almost the only person connected to Trump's attempts to get foreign countries to win elections for him was Jefferson Sessions, his first attorney general. Sessions was himself a subject of the Russia investigation, so had no choice but to appoint an independent prosecutor. Trump rewarded Sessions with public humiliation for almost two years in an effort to get him to quit. 

It's not clear what "tapes" Trump wanted his audience to think he'd been too clever to make. There is plenty of evidence that is known to exist for the Ukraine bribery scandal, but Trump has successfully avoided having to show the world the full contents of the call in which he attempted to force the president of Ukraine to publicly announce an "investigation" into Joe Biden. (We know this in part because he bragged about it on live TV.) Even the carefully redacted version of that call he did release, in an effort to get ahead of the scandal, was enough to get him impeached. 

Why does this matter?

• "How not to get caught" isn't the lesson a president should be learning from Nixon's example.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He promised to use the power of the state to protect his friends and punish his enemies.

Trump spoke to reporters briefly during a visit by the President of Ecuador. Most of the questions were about Trump's actions over the last few days to protect Roger Stone, his political backer. Stone was convicted of perjury and witness tampering in an attempt to shield Trump from the investigation into Russia's interference in the 2016 election.

In the course of about ten minutes, Trump attacked all of the following people:

• Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his "people," all of whom were drawn from Trump's own Justice Department
• former FBI director James Comey, who Trump fired in an attempt to prevent further investigation into his ties to Russia's election interference
• serving and former FBI agents who took part in the government's attempt to investigate Russia's interference in the 2016 election on Trump's behalf
• the four prosecutors on the Roger Stone case, who resigned in protest after they followed sentencing guidelines and were overruled by Attorney General William Barr.

In the last few days, Trump has also made implied threats against the judge handling the Stone sentencing, and mused openly about forcing the Army to discipline Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman for testifying before Congress about the Ukraine scandal.

Trump has essentially admitted in his recent tweets that Barr was acting on his direct orders by protecting Stone. His own advisors have told reporters that Trump is alternating between rage over his impeachment and exultation at having it behind him, and feels empowered to do anything necessary to prevent further scrutiny of his actions. Federal prosecutors still on the job are telling reporters that they fear more direct political interference of this type.

Trump is also very likely afraid: Stone is the fifth person from Trump's innermost circle either in or facing prison time with direct knowledge of his dealings with Russia during the 2016 election. (Michael Flynn is awaiting sentencing, and Michael Cohen, Rick Gates, and Paul Manafort are all in prison.) 

Why does this matter?

• Doing corrupt acts out in the open is just as bad as doing them in secret.

• Americans losing faith in the fairness of their courts and the integrity of their elections is what America's enemies want.

• Using the power of the government to punish people who oppose you is pretty much the definition of authoritarianism.

• When the president's own closest allies are telling people that he's having mood swings and lashing out at anyone he thinks is an enemy, it's a bad situation.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He tried to undo releasing the memo that summarizes his attempt to force the Ukrainian government to interfere in the 2020 election.

Impeachment is now looking increasingly likely after a whirlwind week of revelations about alleged corruption and cover-up over Trump's attempts to get another foreign country to intervene in an election on his behalf. All of this was, of course, put into motion by a formal whistleblower complaint that Trump initially tried to suppress.

Today, Trump insisted that "The Whistleblower’s complaint is completely different and at odds from my actual conversation with the new President of Ukraine." 

As it happens, since both the Trump administration's own summary of the call and the whistleblower's complaint are now (mostly) public, this is a testable claim.

COMPLAINT: In the course of my official duties, I have received information from multiple U.S. Government officials that the President of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election. ...According to the White House officials who had direct knowledge of the call, the President pressured Mr. Zelenskyy to, inter alia[,] initiate or continue an investigation into the activities of former Vice President Joseph Biden and his son, Hunter Biden.

TRUMP [on call with Zelensky]: There's a lot of talk about Biden's son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General [William Barr] would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it... It sounds horrible to me.

COMPLAINT: The President’s personal lawyer, Mr. Rudolph Giuliani, is a central figure in this effort. Attorney General Barr appears to be involved as well.

TRUMP [on call with Zelensky]: I will have Mr. Giuliani give you a call and I am also going to have Attorney General Barr call and we will get to the bottom of it. I'm sure you will figure it out.

COMPLAINT: [Trump pressured Zelensky to] assist in purportedly uncovering that allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election originated in Ukraine , with a specific request that the Ukrainian leader locate and turn over servers used by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and examined by the U.S. cyber security firm Crowdstrike, which initially reported that Russian hackers had penetrated the DNC’s networks in 2016

TRUMP [on call with Zelensky]: I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike... I guess you have one of your wealthy people... The server, they say Ukraine has it. There are a lot of things that went on, the whole situation. I think you're surrounding yourself with some of the same people.

COMPLAINT: [Trump pressured Zelensky to] meet or speak with two people the President named explicitly as his personal envoys on these matters, Mr. Giuliani and Attorney General Barr, to whom the President referred multiple times in tandem.

TRUMP [on call with Zelensky]: Mr. Giuliani is a highly respected man. He was the mayor of New York City, a great mayor, and I would like him to call you. I will ask him to call you along with the Attorney General. Rudy very much knows what's happening and he is a very capable guy. If you could speak to him that would be great. ...The other thing, There's a lot of talk about Biden's son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it...

COMPLAINT: The President also praised Ukraine's Prosecutor General, Mr. Yuriy Lutseno, and suggested that Mr. Zelenskyy might want to keep him in his position.

TRUMP [on call with Zelensky]: Good because I heard you had a prosecutor who was very good and he was shut down and that's really unfair. A lot of people are talking about that, the way they shut your very good prosecutor down and you had some very bad people involved.

COMPLAINT: Aside from the above-mentioned “cases” purportedly dealing with the Biden family and the 2016 U.S. election, I was told by White House officials that no other “cases” were discussed.

The summary of the call mentions no other "corruption" besides Trump's conspiracy theory about Russia's innocence in interfering in the election, and what he is trying to get Ukraine to accuse the Bidens of.

Trump also said that the whistleblower "knew practically NOTHING" about the call. That's actually true: the whistleblower was reporting things he or she was told by other Trump administration officials without having heard the call him or herself. This is a huge problem for Trump, because it means that the whistleblower's other sources—which talk about the larger attempt to strong-arm Ukraine beyond the single phone call—are accurate and direct witnesses to Trump's actions.

So what?

• Things that are true don't become false just because a president needs them to be for political purposes.

• It's illegal and anti-American to try to get foreign governments to sabotage American elections.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He tried really, really hard to keep a whistleblower from telling Congress about something he did that his own appointee called a "credible and urgent" matter.

Over the last few days, the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community has been attempting to inform the House Intelligence Committee about a whistleblower report that he deemed "credible and urgent." Reporting on the matter has suggested that the "urgent" concern has to do with a conversation Trump had with a foreign leader—possibly the president of Ukraine—and a "disturbing" promise that Trump extended.

As his lawyer Rudy Giuliani spectacularly demonstrated on CNN tonight, Trump has been pressuring the Ukrainian government to launch two "investigations." One was to be aimed at rehabilitating the image of his now-incarcerated campaign manager Paul Manafort, and one was intended to discredit Hunter Biden, son of Democratic candidate and former vice-president Joe Biden. Recently, and without explanation, Trump ended months of foot-dragging over a $250 million military aid package for Ukraine.

Although it is required by law, Trump's Director of National Intelligence has refused to allow the Inspector General to report to Congress about the matter.

Today, Trump weighed in on the matter via Twitter.

In other words, Trump is saying he knows better than to say inappropriate things when he's aware other people are listening in. That would, at least, explain why Trump has frequently sought out one-on-one meetings, particularly with hostile, authoritarian leaders like Putin and North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un where he might want to say "inappropriate" things.

For example, he met privately with Putin at the 2018 G20 summit, where only Putin's translator—and no American staff whatsoever—were present. At a different meeting with Putin, he confiscated his translator's notes and refused to tell his own advisors what the conversation had been about. When he met with Kim at their first summit, he demanded a block of time alone with Kim, with no American advisors accompanying him, something that horrified national security experts. (The immediate effect of that was that China found out before the United States military about Trump's agreement to unilaterally cancel joint military exercises with South Korea.)

In fact, even during the post-election transition phase, Trump was trying to establish secret backchannels to hostile foreign governments that American intelligence agencies couldn't intercept. His son-in-law and advisor, Jared Kushner, asked Russian officials to let him use Russian communications lines—which are hardened against eavesdropping by American intelligence—so that Trump's team and Putin's could talk directly. Trump also enlisted Erik Prince, the CEO of the mercenary firm known as Blackwater, to set up a secret backchannel with the Putin regime during the transition.

That said, Trump frequently gets confused about what he is and isn't supposed to say out loud. Just yesterday, at his border fence photo op, he began speaking about sensitive details of the surveillance network built into the fence, and had to be gently pushed off the topic by a military official. Whether accidentally or on purpose, he's revealed classified information a number of times. Earlier this month, he tweeted a cell phone picture of a classified briefing on Iran that revealed technical details about U.S. surveillance capacities. He burned an Israeli intelligence asset by speaking carelessly about information shared by Israel to visiting Russian officials, and then made things worse by publicly confirming that Israel was indeed the source. He's revealed the location of American submarines—the whole purpose of which is to have their locations unknown. He let top-secret information about a terrorist attack in Britain leak while the hunt for the attacker was still underway, infuriating British officials.

Arguably, though, Trump has done more espionage damage to the United States by the things he's done intentionally. In an attempt to interfere with the Russia investigation, he ordered the partial declassification of a FISA warrant that revealed U.S. intelligence sources and methods. He tried to circumvent the usual vetting procedures to get his daughter and son-in-law security clearances they couldn't otherwise get because of lies they'd told while applying. And he kept Michael Flynn, now a convicted felon, as his intelligence chief in spite of knowing about Flynn's undisclosed ties to foreign governments including Russia.

The Inspector General who found the whistleblower's complaint "credible and urgent" is a Trump appointee. This may be significant, given the importance Trump has placed on surrounding himself with law enforcement officials who are willing to give him their personal loyalty—like Attorney General William Barr, whose Justice Department is reportedly leading efforts to protect Trump from Congress learning what the whistleblower has to say.

Trump's comments came on the same day that he filed a lawsuit against New York prosecutors, arguing that it is illegal to even investigate a sitting president, even for matters that have nothing to do with his conduct in office.

So?

• It's wrong for a president to use the power of his office to pressure other countries into doing his political dirty work.

• Administrations that haven't done anything wrong don't try to silence whistleblowers.

• The president is not above the law.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He made sure that people thinking about Jeffrey Epstein were thinking about him, too.

Trump spent the first day of his (official) 2019 vacation on Twitter the way he spends many other days: at the golf course, tweeting. In what appears to be his first and so far only public comment on the death in federal custody of his former friend, the notorious pedophile and accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, Trump... blamed it on the Clintons.

In reality, Trump is the president and head of the executive branch that controls federal prisons and how inmates are handled—not Bill or Hillary Clinton.

Trump has not come within earshot of a reporter since Epstein was found dead.

Trump and Epstein were longtime friends who once threw themselves a party in which they and 28 "calendar girls" were the only attendees. (The two later had a falling out over a real estate deal in 2004.) In a 2002 profile for New York Magazine, Trump joked about Epstein's attraction to young women. According to court documents unsealed yesterday, Epstein used Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort as a hunting ground for victims.

Epstein's sweetheart plea deal for earlier charges related to sex with minors was brokered by then-US Attorney Alex Acosta, who later became Trump's secretary of labor. (A federal court this year found that Acosta had broken the law by trying to hide the details of that deal from Epstein's many victims.) Trump's attorney general, William Barr, promised Congress that he would recuse himself from any Epstein-related matters, since he worked for the law firm that defended Epstein, and had an odd family connection to Epstein. But when Epstein was once again indicted by a federal grand jury, Barr reneged on that promise and has stayed involved in the case.

Of course, there's no evidence that Trump was personally, directly involved in Epstein's horrific crimes—although at least one of Epstein's victims has alleged that he was in a lawsuit. Nor is there yet any direct evidence that Trump somehow engineered Epstein's death—although there are angry and bipartisan calls in Congress for an independent investigation as to how Epstein died on Trump's watch. 

That said, Trump routinely accuses other people of doing things he himself has done.

So what?

• Not every problem Trump has can be blamed on the Clintons.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He tried to cut himself free from the unfolding Jeffrey Epstein child sex trafficking scandal.

Trump was forced to address his and his administration's connections to Jeffrey Epstein, the hedge fund manager who was given a notoriously lenient sentence for sex crimes against children, and who now faces new charges for child sex trafficking. He expressed sympathy for his labor secretary, Alex Acosta, whose as a prosecutor signed off on an extremely light sentence, and then illegally tried to hide the details of that deal from Epstein's victims. Trump also claimed he'd had a "falling out" with Epstein and that he "wasn't a fan."

Trump made no mention at all of Epstein's dozens of known victims.

Asked about his confidence in Acosta, Trump said, "I feel very badly, actually, for Secretary Acosta because I’ve known him as being somebody that works so hard and has done such a good job." He also floated the idea that Acosta wasn't really responsible: "I do hear that there were a lot of people involved in that decision, not just him."

As for his relationship with Epstein, Trump explained it this way:

Well, I knew him like everybody in Palm Beach knew him. I mean, people in Palm Beach knew him. He was a fixture in Palm Beach. I had a falling out with him a long time ago. I don’t think I’ve spoken to him for 15 years. I wasn’t a fan. I was not — yeah, a long time ago. I’d say maybe 15 years. I was not a fan of his, that I can tell you. I was not a fan of his.

This is either a lie or a convenient mis-remembering. Trump was a fan of Epstein's, at least for a while. In New York magazine's 2002 profile on Epstein, Trump told a reporter, "I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it – Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”

Trump is not directly implicated in Epstein's alleged child sex trafficking, although he has openly admitted to behavior with girls and young women that ranges from creepy to criminal.

However, Trump is acting very worried by the unfolding Epstein drama. Probably the most important sign of how seriously Trump is taking the potential for scandal is the behavior of his famously Trump-protective attorney general, William Barr. Yesterday, Barr recused himself from the Epstein case, as he had promised senators he would at his confirmation hearing. Barr has several connections to Epstein that would normally prevent him from being involved: he was a partner at the law firm that defended Epstein, and Barr's father gave Epstein (then a college dropout) a job at a private school in New York.

Today, Barr "unrecused" himself.

Why should I care about this?

• The attorney general is not the president's personal "fixer."

• Presidents are responsible for appointing people who the public can trust with power.

• Reality doesn't change just because the president wants to remember it differently.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He attacked an imaginary version of Robert Mueller.

Trump used the 75th anniversary commemoration of D-Day to give an interview in Normandy, France with Fox News host Laura Ingraham. With the graves of American soldiers in the background, Trump said this about special counsel Robert Mueller, a former Marine and Bronze Star recipient:

INGRAHAM: Do you mind if he testifies still? Before, you said you didn't care if Mueller testified. 

TRUMP: Let me tell you, he made such a fool out of himself the last time he — because what people don't report is the letter he had to do to straighten out his testimony because his testimony was wrong.

It's not unusual for Trump to insult Mueller, but there's a bigger problem with this statement: Mueller hasn't testified about the Russia probe yet. Congress and 73% of Americans want him to, but there are no concrete plans for it at the moment.

The only letter Mueller has sent on the subject of the Russia probe was to Trump's hand-picked attorney general, William Barr, and that letter isn't something Trump would want to draw attention to.

In short, Trump seems to have imagined Mueller's testimony, and also fantasized that Mueller had to retract it.

Trump was imagining the "corrective letter" in a tweet this past Sunday, but at that point he still seemed to understand that Mueller hadn't testified. 

Why should I care about this?

• Trump is not mentally healthy enough to be President of the United States.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He lashed out at an insufficiently loyal Republican.

Yesterday, Rep. Justin Amash became the first Republican currently serving in Congress to endorse Trump's impeachment. Amash is a member of the very conservative House Freedom Caucus, which overlaps with the "Tea Party" movement in the Republican Party. In a long Twitter thread, Amash laid out his reasons:

Here are my principal conclusions:

1. Attorney General Barr has deliberately misrepresented Mueller’s report. 
2. President Trump has engaged in impeachable conduct. 
3. Partisanship has eroded our system of checks and balances. 
4. Few members of Congress have read the report.

I offer these conclusions only after having read Mueller’s redacted report carefully and completely, having read or watched pertinent statements and testimony, and having discussed this matter with my staff, who thoroughly reviewed materials and provided me with further analysis.  

In comparing Barr’s principal conclusions, congressional testimony, and other statements to Mueller’s report, it is clear that Barr intended to mislead the public about Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s analysis and findings. Barr’s misrepresentations are significant but often subtle, frequently taking the form of sleight-of-hand qualifications or logical fallacies, which he hopes people will not notice.  

Under our Constitution, the president “shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” While “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” is not defined, the context implies conduct that violates the public trust. Contrary to Barr’s portrayal, Mueller’s report reveals that President Trump engaged in specific actions and a pattern of behavior that meet the threshold for impeachment. In fact, Mueller’s report identifies multiple examples of conduct satisfying all the elements of obstruction of justice, and undoubtedly any person who is not the president of the United States would be indicted based on such evidence.
Impeachment, which is a special form of indictment, does not even require probable cause that a crime (e.g., obstruction of justice) has been committed; it simply requires a finding that an official has engaged in careless, abusive, corrupt, or otherwise dishonorable conduct. While impeachment should be undertaken only in extraordinary circumstances, the risk we face in an environment of extreme partisanship is not that Congress will employ it as a remedy too often but rather that Congress will employ it so rarely that it cannot deter misconduct.  

Our system of checks and balances relies on each branch’s jealously guarding its powers and upholding its duties under our Constitution. When loyalty to a political party or to an individual trumps loyalty to the Constitution, the Rule of Law—the foundation of liberty—crumbles. We’ve witnessed members of Congress from both parties shift their views 180 degrees—on the importance of character, on the principles of obstruction of justice—depending on whether they’re discussing Bill Clinton or Donald Trump. Few members of Congress even read Mueller’s report; their minds were made up based on partisan affiliation—and it showed, with representatives and senators from both parties issuing definitive statements on the 448-page report’s conclusions within just hours of its release.  

America’s institutions depend on officials to uphold both the rules and spirit of our constitutional system even when to do so is personally inconvenient or yields a politically unfavorable outcome. Our Constitution is brilliant and awesome; it deserves a government to match it.

Predictably, Trump lashed out at Amash today, although he was briefer: he called Amash a "loser" and insisted once again that the Mueller report proved he had committed "NO COLLUSION" and "NO OBSTRUCTION." (The Mueller report says no such thing.)

Trump also asked a question, probably meant to be rhetorical, that may have revealed more than he intended to: "Anyway, how do you Obstruct when there is no crime[?]" In reality, obstruction of justice is a crime in and of itself—because normally suspected criminals aren't in charge of whether or not their crimes are investigated. (Even in cases where the president isn't involved, obstruction is a crime all by itself because otherwise there would be no reason for criminals not to try to destroy evidence, intimidate witnesses, or lie to law enforcement.)

According to a recent poll, a slim majority of Americans support impeaching Trump.

Who cares?

• Members of Congress swear oaths of allegiance to the Constitution, not the person who is president at the time.

• No one president's political fortunes are more important than the rule of law.

• It's wrong to lie.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He said he hadn't told his attorney general to do the thing he told his attorney general to do.

En route to a fundraiser today, Trump was asked about Attorney General William Barr's decision to appoint a federal prosecutor to look into the origins of the Russia probe:

Q Mr. President, did you ask the Attorney General to launch a probe into the Russia investigation? 

TRUMP: No, I didn’t ask him to do that. 

Q Did you know he was going to do it? 

TRUMP: I didn’t know it. I didn’t know it. But I think it’s a great thing that he did it. I saw it last night. And they want to look at how that whole hoax got started. It was a hoax. And even Mueller... had 18 people that didn’t like Donald Trump. They were Hillary Clinton fans. They contributed, many of them, to Hillary Clinton. They came out. It was the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the people of this country. 

And you know what? I am so proud of our Attorney General, that he is looking into it. I think it’s great. I did not know about it. No.

The idea that Trump didn't tell Barr to do this is, to put it mildly, a lie.

Trump has publicly called for someone—though admittedly without naming Barr personally—to "INVESTIGATE THE INVESTIGATORS" repeatedly over the last few months. He's also called the investigation "illegal," "treason," a "hoax," and accused unspecified "Democrats" of having committed the real (but still unspecified) "crime" of colluding with Russia.

Trump, who once plaintively asked White House advisors, "Where's my Roy Cohn?" appears to have found him in Barr. (Cohn, who for a time was Trump's lawyer until Trump fired him amid revelations that Cohn had AIDS, was the pitbull lawyer made famous by his work on Sen. Joseph McCarthy's red-scare campaign. He was later disbarred for "dishonesty, fraud, deceit and misrepresentation.") But in getting Barr to launch this counter-investigation this way, Trump is repeating a trick he perfected during the campaign: avoiding immediate responsibility for illegal or unethical actions by doing them in plain sight.

Trump has yet to take any action about the central finding of the Mueller report, which was that "[t]he Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion," or the FBI's urgent warning that the Putin regime intends to do so again in 2020.

Why does this matter?

• No matter how genuinely Trump believes it, the Department of Justice is not his private police force.

• Only dictators try to criminalize accountability.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He started backpedalling even faster on the Mueller report.

Two weeks ago, Trump was declaring that Robert Mueller had "acted honorably" by producing a report that was a "Complete and Total EXONERATION" of him. That was based on a four-page memo written by an attorney general, William Barr, who had declared before being nominated that Trump could not possibly be guilty of obstructing the Russia investigation—and who then promptly declared that he would not try to prosecute Trump for obstruction.

Trump—who may actually have believed that he had been exonerated, in spite of the memo quoting a passage from the report saying he had not been—even went so far as to suggest that he welcomed the public release of the report.

But evidence is mounting that the actual report is much more damning than Barr's memo makes it sound. According to articles sourced to the investigators themselves,Trump and his associates may have escaped prosecution because they were manipulated by Russian intelligence operatives rather than actively conspiring. (Generally speaking, criminal conspiracies require participants to know that they are helping to commit crimes.)

In other words, Trump and his senior aides, many of whom had no experience in politics or government, may not be guilty of conspiracy because they were more like what Vladimir Lenin called "useful idiots."

Accordingly, Trump is rapidly changing his tune. He has begun reviving his attacks on Mueller, and walking back his support for letting anyone—in Congress or in the public—see the report that supposedly "exonerates" him. 

In today's "executive time" Twitter session, Trump insisted that "[a]ccording to polling, few people seem to care about the Russian Collusion Hoax." In reality, seeing the report has broad bipartisan support. The House of Representatives voted 420-0 to recommend its release, and according to actual polls, an overwhelming 75% of Americans want to see the report released (including a majority of Republicans). 

Why does this matter?

• Innocent people who have been falsely accused generally don't try to keep anyone from ever seeing the evidence that "totally exonerates" them.

• It's a matter of opinion whether a president being corrupted by a hostile foreign power or merely bamboozled by one is worse, but both are very bad.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He accidentally told the truth about William Barr.

In an interview tonight, Trump told Fox News that if Attorney General William Barr had been in office from the start, "this all would not have happened." In other words, Trump is saying he believes that Barr would not have appointed a special counsel to investigate his and his campaign's ties to the Russian government's attempts to throw the election to him.

This is almost certainly true. 

Trump spent much of his first two years as president attempting to hound his first attorney general, Jefferson Sessions, from office. Sessions, who was part of the Trump campaign and himself had secret meetings with Russian agents that he lied about to Congress, had recused himself from the FBI's investigation into that attack. Replacing Sessions would have allowed Trump to put a loyalist in charge of the Mueller investigation directly.

Barr wrote an unsolicited memo to the Department of Justice arguing that Trump could never be guilty of obstruction of justice while in office. This memo was brought to the attention of Trump, who then appointed him to replace Sessions, who he had fired after the midterm elections in November. 

Barr then used that authority to pre-emptively declare Trump innocent of obstruction, which Mueller had pointedly refused to do. 

In his summary of the still unseen Mueller report, which apparently runs into the hundreds if not thousands of pages, Barr argued that Trump should not be prosecuted for obstruction if he could not be prosecuted for an underlying crime. This is legally backward—obstruction of justice is a crime in and of itself, because if it were not, there would be no reason for criminals not to try to obstruct investigations into their crimes.

In short, Barr as attorney general absolved Trump after less than two days of the crime he had promised to absolve Trump of when he was a private citizen waiting to be nominated.

Why does this matter?

• The attorney general is not the president's personal defense attorney.

• It's bad if the president needs the attorney general to act as his own defense attorney.

• The president is not above the law.