Mommy and Me

More Legal Beagles:  Trump has finally found a few lawyers willing to take him on as a client.  Rudy Giuliani and two Florida attorneys, Jane and Marty Raskin, are now part of Team Trump.  All three are former US attorneys. The bombastic Giuliani who was one of Trump’s biggest cheerleaders during the 2016 campaign, is known to be a legal pit-bull and a publicity seeker.  As former FBI Director Comey put it in his book, the “most dangerous place to be in New York is between Rudy and a microphone.”   Guiliani asserts that his role will be limited in time and scope, that he’s coming on board to improve relations with Special Counsel Mueller who he has worked with before in order to help bring the investigation into Trump to a rapid conclusion, because it “needs a little push.”  For some reason, Giuiliani thinks that his presence will help end the investigation in two weeks. Should we mark that in our calendars or was that just part of his pitch to Trump?  Apparently Guiliani is being tasked with working out a strategy for the on again, off again Trump interview with Mueller and his team, the interview that most of Trump’s other lawyers and TV advocates think should never happen given Trump’s difficulties telling the truth and the one that Trump decided against after his fixer/lawyer Michael Cohen’s facilities were raided.   For now at least, Giuliani has taken a leave from the Greenberg, Traurig law firm; it’s reported that a number of his partners are less than happy that he’s joined the Trump team so it’s not clear how happy they will be to get him back after his “brief” assignment.  Mired in divorce proceedings Giuliani may just be looking for a new challenge to keep himself out of trouble or he might be angling to become the new Attorney General, when and if Trump ever gets around to firing Jeff Sessions.  Giuliani has wanted that job for a while but had been overlooked in part over concerns that given some of his sketchy clients, including a Turkish gold trader on the Iran sanctions list, he would find it difficult making it through a Senate confirmation. It’s also worth noting that it’s quite possible that Giuliani has been the subject of an FBI investigation.  A few weeks before Comey upturned the election by revealing that the FBI was analyzing the thousands of emails that Clinton aide Huma Abadin had left on her husband Anthony Weiner’s laptop, Giuliani  bragged about being told by his NYC FBI contacts that an October surprise was imminent. Yesterday, Comey revealed that those remarks prompted an investigation into those FBI leaks.  Comey doesn’t know how that investigation turned out because he was long gone before it was completed but it’s possible that Giuliani is knowingly or unknowingly embroiled in another FBI investigation, making him another questionable Trump hire and possibly another person who, to the extent he needs to go through one, will have a hard time passing his security review.  As to Trump’s lawyer/fixer Cohen, yesterday he dropped his libel case against Buzzfeed and Fusion GPS, the firm that hired ex-British spy Christopher Steele.  Cohen asserted that though he still feels that he was libeled he dropped the case because he’s otherwise occupied.  The Kushner family is also facing some additional legal pressure, yesterday it was revealed that they have been subpoenaed by federal prosecutors for information related to an AP report that the company filed dozens of false documents about its buildings in NYC.       

The Comey Memos:  Under pressure from the Nunes wing of House wackadoos, the beleaguered Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein finally relented and released former FBI Director Comey’s infamous contemporaneous memos, the ones that Comey wrote after each and every one of his meetings with Trump.  It’s against policy to release information that is the subject of an ongoing investigation but the House wackadoos were threatening Rosenstein’s very existence so he finally gave up, providing redacted versions of the memos for their review late yesterday and, of course, within minutes the memos were released to the press.  Unredacted versions will be made available for review in the house SCIF (cone of silence), and given this crowd’s propensity to share secrets, we’ll probably hear more about the memos’ contents as soon as they are reviewed by one or more of the talkative members of the House Intelligence Committee from either side of the aisle.  Between Comey’s Congressional testimony, his book and his book tour there isn’t all that much in the memos that most of us haven’t read or heard about. However, there are a few interesting new tidbits.  Though we already knew that Trump wasn’t all that concerned about former security advisor Flynn’s inappropriate business dealings or talks with Russia’s ambassador about sanctions relief, Trump was quite annoyed about Flynn’s poor judgment because he had taken a call from Putin, one in which Putin congratulated the new administration on the Trump victory, and then had taken days to tell Trump about it.  Trump felt that as a result of Flynn’s omission he had been put in the position of dissing his BFF Putin by taking a full six days to return his call. Trump also showed a lot of interest in Andrew McCabe, querying Comey about whether McCabe had hard feelings about the way he and his wife had been slammed by Trump during the campaign.  Given yesterday’s news that McCabe’s failure to be fully transparent about some of his conversations with the press, the reason given for his sudden dismissal, has now been referred to prosecutors for possible charges, those questions about McCabe feed the argument that he is being unfairly targeted and treated unduly harshly for his infractions.  For the record, yesterday Comey said that though McCabe should have been more open about his conversations with the press, he was fully authorized to have those conversations.  Others report that though it is normal for issues like McCabe’s to be referred to prosecutors it would be highly unusual for any charges to be pressed, but then again Trump is itching to throw someone into jail and McCabe may be his man.   Finally, the memos also reveal how upset Trump was about the Steele Dossier’s “pee tape” assertions.  Oddly enough, while claiming a guy like him didn’t have to seek the services of prostitutes, Trump also told Comey that Putin had told him that the prostitutes in Russia were among the most beautiful in the world, certainly an odd conversation to reveal at the same time that you are asserting that you have no interest in prostitutes.  In any case, Trump’s dalliance with playmate Karen McDougal make his assertion about never hanging with prostitutes less credible. Though their relationship went on for around ten months and  McDougal is not a prostitute, she reports that Trump tried to pay her after their first “date.” As to the memos, they don’t directly claim that Trump colluded but neither does he come off all that concerned about Russian interference, they also don’t show that Comey did anything illegal by writing or sharing them,  so of course Trump tweeted   “James Comey Memos just out show clearly that there was NO COLLUSION and NO OBSTRUCTION. Also, he leaked classified information. WOW! Will the Witch Hunt continue?”

Rules Update:  It’s kind of crazy that it took so long for the Senate to have to reconsider its rules to make an accommodation for a legislator and her newborn but thanks to Illinois Senator Tammy Duckworth and her newborn baby girl Maile Pearl Bowsbey, it finally has.  Senator Duckworth, an Iraq war veteran and a double amputee is taking some time off for maternity leave but plans to remain available for any close votes and had requested permission to bring her baby onto the Senate chambers as necessary, something that had been prohibited. At one point some of her less than helpful Senate colleagues were so resistant to the presence of a “screaming baby” that they had suggested she instead use a room right off the Senate floor, one no bigger than a closet and were only dissuaded when Duckworth pointed out that her wheelchair wouldn’t fit through that room’s doors.  With the help of another Senate mother, Senator Amy Klobuchar, Duckworth was finally able to convince Senate leadership to change the rules.  Still a number of the older, stodgier mostly Republican Senators weren’t all that happy about the change.  Yesterday Duckworth and little Maile made history, rolling on to the floor so that the Senator could cast a vote against the confirmation of the new head of NASA, he was confirmed anyway.  Still Duckworth and little Maile made history  It’s about time.