Soggy East Egg Roll

The Cabinet Shuffle:  Though he achieved fame for firing people, Trump still hasn’t mastered his technique.  He messed up the firing of Secretary of State Tillerson by failing to notify him before tweet announcing the appointment of his successor, an act made even more embarrassing for Tillerson when Chief of Staff Kelly asserted that Tillerson kind of knew the dismissal was coming because after all he, Kelly, had notified him while he, Tillerson, was on the toilet suffering from the African cousin of Montezuma’s revenge.  Then last week, after what now former VA Secretary Shulkin describes as a pleasant call with Trump, one in which they discussed strategy and upcoming plans, Trump again went into tweet mode, appointing Shulkin’s replacement, albeit an unqualified one, even though he’d forgotten to inform Shulkin that he was a history burger on that call.  It turns out that Trump’s failure to act respectfully by manning up and directly informing of his dismissal is just part of the problem.  By firing Shulkin instead of forcing a resignation Trump may well have lost flexibility with regard to who gets to serve as acting VA secretary in the run up to the Senate confirmation for his replacement, his physician, the affable but underqualified Rear Admiral Ronny Jackson.   Instead of having Shulkin’s likeminded deputy, a guy who probably would try to continue Shulkin’s resistance to full VA privatization, succeed to acting secretary, Trump appointed  Robert Wilkie, a Defense Department official.  The problem is that the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, the prevailing law that dictates who presidents can appoint as acting secretaries pending confirmation of new appointees, may not allow him to circumvent the normal succession chain in the case of a forced dismissal.  Trump and his Koch Brothers sponsors want Wilkie in place in order to advance their privatization objective but they could get stuck with Shulkin’s deputy while Jackson makes his way through what might be a long and winding confirmation process.  In any case, Shulkin, who repeatedly stated this weekend that he was unceremoniously fired, isn’t Trump’s only cabinet problem.  Though Trump loves EPA Secretary Scott Pruitt, because what’s not to love about a guy who disavows climate science and is doing his best to roll back automobile emissions standards, Pruitt’s ethics violations continue to jeopardize Pruitt’s longevity.  He’s run up huge travel bills, he’s traveled to Morocco to advocate for the benefits of liquefied natural gas sales even though promoting US energy resources is the responsibility of the Department of Energy not the EPA and he’s been the beneficiary of a suspiciously low cost living arrangement that has the rest of Washington turning green  and by green think envy not ecology.  Pruitt’s landlady is the wife of a Washington lobbyist, a lobbyist who not so coincidentally represents the liquefied natural gas industry.  Former NJ Governor Chris Christie, who is still smarting from Trump’s failure to listen to him, hire him or heed his transition advice, believes that Pruitt’s days are numbered.  Christie’s view may be wishful thinking.  Trump really likes Pruitt and has even considered moving him to the Attorney General slot, a spot that the very ambitious Pruitt covets, if and when he ever gets around to firing his former BFF Jefferson Sessions.  As to Sessions, he keeps walking the tightrope.  Last week, he disappointed Trump and a number of Republicans by deciding not to appoint a special prosecutor to look into allegations that the FBI committed various and sundry “violations” when it obtained the FISA warrant to surveil the odd but very complicit Carter Page and his Russian related activities.  However, to placate them Sessions did announce that he’s directed the Federal Attorney for Utah John Huber, one of the few US Attorneys that wasn’t fired last year, to supervise an investigation into those “questionable” warrant related procedures and actions.  Sessions is having too much fun, resisting son-in-law Kushner’s prison and sentencing reform objectives and dismantling civil rights protections to make it all that easy for Trump to fire him.

Weekend Rants:  Although he attended church in celebration of the Easter holiday, Trump missed the rebirth and renewal message, instead remaining focused on his usual obsessions.  He started the weekend by continuing his anti-Amazon tweets, a message intended to strike a chord with those who blame Amazon for the move away from brick and mortar shopping, but one that is really a not so veiled attack of the Washington Post and its owner Jeff Bezos.  On Sunday, proving his populist roots, Senator Bernie Sanders chimed in, agreeing that Amazon may be too big for its britches, he didn’t mention and may not even have gotten the Bezos, Anti-Washpo part of Trump’s rant.  By Sunday, Trump had moved on to his favorite subject, illegal immigration and Mexico.  He’d spent part of his weekend dining with soulmate and strategist Sean Hannity and the rest with fellow xenophobe Stephen Miller so his pivot wasn’t all that surprising.  He’d also seen a Fox TV report about a caravan of Latin Americans making their way through Mexico to a hoped for illegal border crossing into the US, enough of a trigger for him to attack DACA, Mexico and the NAFTA trade agreement. By tweeting that “these big flows of people are all trying to take advantage of DACA. They want in on the Act!,” he showed that he doesn’t even understand that if any of the “flows” were to make it into the US, none would qualify for DACA, a program limited to young people who had arrived in the US before 2007 and, in any case a program that he ended and that even with court intervention is currently limited to individuals who are already qualified beneficiaries.  Anyway, he again threatened to kill DACA permanently, especially if he can’t get his wall funded, and why would he want to sound upbeat and charitable on a holy holiday anyway?  Jared Kushner, the son in law who occasionally plays clean up in aisle Mexico must have been just a bit stressed, he’s been trying to undo some of Trump’s damage to Mexico-US relations and every time he takes a step forward, his father in law takes two steps back and by attacking NAFTA and Mexico, this time Trump may have taken four steps back and gone over a precipice. As to Kushner, his woes go beyond Mexico, he can’t be all that happy about today’s NY Times article, the one that points out how his days at the “pinnacle” of Washington power are causing a “wellspring” of regulatory trouble and criminal investigations for his family.  His sister can’t be all that happy either, apparently she now has a criminal lawyer on retainer to help her out with those inquiring eyes wanting to know more about the visas she promoted during her condo sales tour in China.                     

Russia, Russia, Russia:  Last week Mueller detained Ted Malloch, a London professor and another one of those people most of us had never heard of, as he disembarked from a flight from London at Boston’s Logan Airport.  Malloch is a Trump ally and a friend of Roger Stone.  He was detained, questioned and had his electronic equipment confiscated.  Malloch, who asserts he knows nothing about anything says that he was questioned about his links to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and about his visits, which he asserts never took place, to Assange’s current location the London Ecuadorian Embassy.  He’s now scheduled to spend some more time with Mueller’s team next week.   If Malloch is anything like his friend Roger Stone, he’s probably a master of deception, at least with regard to what he’s willing to tell the press so it’s hard to know what he knows and what he was really asked.  However, to the extent that he was questioned about WikiLeaks and Assange, it’s probably fair to assume that Mueller, who never tells us what he is doing, is looking into the connections, to the extent that there were any, between the Trumpkins, WikiLeaks and the DNC emails, a connection that Trump trumpeted when he called out  “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” before asking then BFF, now not so much, Putin to release them.