Patriot's Day

Comey: Although former FBI Director James Comey’s “memoir,” A Higher Loyalty, won’t be officially released until tomorrow the high points, or low points depending on your point of view, have already been shared with the public by the countless number of news pundits who received early copies.  Between those snippets and the interview that Comey gave George Stephanopoulos it’s fair to say that Comey wasn’t all that impressed with Trump.  He called him out as a liar and whether you like Comey or not, he came off as genuine and truthful.  Perhaps the nicest thing he said about Trump was that he doesn’t “buy this stuff about him being mentally incompetent or early stages of dementia.”  Instead he said that Trump strikes him as a “person of average intelligence” who is just “morally unfit to be president.”  As to Trump, he spent the weekend attacking Comey, calling him a “weak and untruthful slime ball” and a whole lot of other not very nice things.  The idea of the president of the United States sinking so low as to call out a former FBI Director a slime ball is pathetic at best, still Trump wasn’t the only one throwing slime, a good portion of the Republican apparatus jumped on board with the Republican  National Committee going so far as to launch a website www.LyingComey.com.  Comey is an admittedly flawed character, faced with the decision on how to handle the Hillary Clinton’s email imbroglio, he messed up big time, however, he’s not a liar and he’s not a leaker of top secret information,  but he is determined to call Trump out regardless of the consequences.  For his part Trump is doing a great job selling Comey’s book which in all likelihood will be a huge best seller.   

Mueller and Rosenstein:  As of now Special Counsel Mueller and Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein are still employed. For a while it looked like Trump planned to fire Rosenstein Friday night, at least that’s what Rosenstein thought.  Late last week it was reported that Rosenstein, who felt more vulnerable than ever after it was learned that he had been the one to approve the raid on Trump lawyer/fixer Michael Cohen’s homes and office, had told his friends that he was at peace and prepared to be fired by Trump.  To be clear, there is no legitimate reason for firing Rosenstein but legitimacy isn’t really a guiding force in Trump land so Rosenstein’s fears remain realistic and not paranoid because Trump really is out to get him.  One of the few valid concerns about Rosenstein was that he should have joined Attorney General Sessions by recusing himself from supervising Mueller and the Russia investigation because he was the scribe for the memo “justifying” the Comey firing.  However, it turns out that Rosenstein had early on covered his bases as far as that goes by consulting with the Department of Justice ethics adviser and has obtained ethics approval to continue supervising Mueller, taking that “excuse” for firing him away from Trump.  As to Mueller, though the passage of legislation protecting him remains a reach, more Republicans have come out and voiced their support for his investigation although the most outspoken seem to be the ones with one foot out of the Congressional door.  Trey Gowdy, a former prosecutor, actually told Fox News that Mueller and Rosenstein did the right thing by authorizing the warrant to raid Michael Cohen’s office and homes, saying that a “decision to conduct the raid had to be made at the "highest level" of the Justice Department and that a "neutral, detached" federal judge "who has nothing to do with politics" had to sign off on the warrant.”  Although he hasn’t fired Rosenstein or Mueller yet, Trump hasn’t been sitting on his hands. Friday, as expected, he pardoned Scooter Libby, an act widely seen as a not so subtle message to Cohen, Manafort and all of the other Trumpkins who may get indicted at some future date that he has their back and the power of the pardon.  Libby was an aide to Vice President Cheney who was found guilty of obstructing justice and lying to the FBI after leaking information that Valerie Flame was a covert spy for the CIA and not so coincidentally Comey was the person who appointed the special prosecutor who went after Libby.  The Libby leak, which was thought to be retribution for criticism made by Flame’s husband, Joe Wilson, that claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destructions were false, effectively destroyed Flame’s career since its kind of hard to be a spy when everyone knows what you do for a living.   Libby’s sentence had been commuted by George W Bush and he had already regained his ability to practice law and vote so he didn’t really need a pardon.  However, Trump, who admits that he never met Libby, thought that giving him one was the right thing to do because it was such a good message to send. Trump may not fully understand that his pardon power only goes so far and that it doesn’t cover any New York State crimes.     

Cohen:  The Cohen situation continues to spiral out of control. Trump called Cohen over the weekend, probably to remind him of his pardon power and to encourage him to stay silent, a move that was questionable at best especially since at this point it’s fair to assume that Cohen is under surveillance and that his calls are being taped. For his part Cohen was seen out and about hanging with some sketchy Russians.  The McClatchy Report says that Mueller now has evidence that Cohen attended a meeting in Prague with a Russian operative during the campaign, a meeting where, according to the infamous Steele dossier, Cohen discussed with a Russian operative named Oleg Solodukhin how “deniable cash payments were to be made to hacker who had worked in Europe under Kremlin direction against the Clinton campaign and various contingencies for covering up these operations and Moscow’s secret liaison with the Trump team more generally.”  Cohen has long denied that he ever went to Prague, holding up his passport and the absence of a Czech Republic stamp as proof that he’d never been there. The McClatchy Report article asserts that Cohen crossed into the Czech Republic through Germany which is the reason that his passport was not stamped.  To the extent that the McClatchy article is correct, Cohen’s trip could be demonstrable proof of collusion between the Trump team and Russia.  That said the Russia stuff is only the tip of the Michael Cohen problem. In an article entitled “Michael Cohen and the End Stage of the Trump Presidency,” New Yorker writer Adam Davidson argues that Michael Cohen’s legal problems provide a window into all of the Trump company’s illegal activities and that his case is the biggest problem for Trump and will lead to his fall.  He says “We don’t know when. We don’t know the precise path the next few months will take. There will be resistance and denial and counterattacks. But it seems likely that, when we look back on this week, we will see it as a turning point. We are now in the end stages of the Trump Presidency.”  Weather permitting Cohen and Trump’s lawyers are expected back in court today to try to squelch the information, including the taped conversations, that the FBI obtained during last week’s raids.  And just to make everything more interesting, Stormy Daniels, is expected to attend the hearing.  Stormy on a stormy day, it couldn’t be more perfect.      

Syria:  Together with England and France, we bombed Syrian targets late Friday in what was largely a cathartic mission intended to make the three countries feel like they were doing something useful.  Sadly for the Syrian people, though the bombing raids may have sent a message to Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad and his Russian enablers that the use of chemical weapons crosses a line, so many of them have already been killed or forced to flee their country that the mission will do little if anything to improve their lives.  It was reported that Trump wanted to do something much bigger, but that Defense Secretary Mattis pushed for restraint, making it clear that it would be better to avoid taking out any Russians or Iranians.  Afterwards, Trump tweeted “mission accomplished” perhaps missing that the last guy to say that was George W Bush when he declared the Iraq war to be reaching its end.  So much for accomplished missions.  As to these missions, its still not clear that any of them are legally permitted since the last piece of authorizing legislation, the so called authorization for the use of military force (AUMF) which was passed after 9.11 doesn’t really apply anymore.  Just another one of those things that Congress should be focusing on, and though there has been lots of talk about revisiting the subject, particularly from Senators Kaine and Flake, little has happened so far since Congress seems to like to avoid having to make tough decisions about things like war and crazy presidents.

To all of the Boston Marathoners, have a good race!