America's Mayor

Rudy Talks and Talks:  For a while there it appeared that the biggest news of the day was that Trump had finally found a real lawyer to represent him but then last night, Rudy Giuliani dropped a Stormy bombshell during an interview with Fox’s Sean Hannity.  First, on the legal front, Ty Cobb, Trump’s in-house Russia lawyer, announced that he was “retiring” although it wasn’t clear that the decision to retire was all his.  Cobb had done his best to push Trump to cooperate with Special Counsel Mueller, a strategy that most in the White House and Fox News circle disagreed with.  Cobb is being replaced by Emmet Flood from the Williams and Connolly law firm.  Flood who represented Bill Clinton when the Whitewater investigation led to impeachment proceedings over his lying about his dalliance with Monica Lewinsky, has also represented George W Bush and Dick Cheney and is highly respected.  Apparently, White House Don McGahn has been trying to get Flood on board the Trump team for months.  McGahn who is planning to leave the White House soon is hoping that Flood will ultimately become his successor.  Now to America’s Mayor and his interview with Hannity, last night after first slamming the Russia investigation, calling it a witch hunt and labeling former FBI Director Comey a perverted man and a pathological lawyer, Rudy told a someone surprised Hannity that Trump reimbursed his lawyer/fixer Michael Cohen for the $130,000 hush payment that he made to Stormy Daniels by “funneling it through a law firm.”  That Trump reimbursed Cohen isn’t all that surprising, that it was finally admitted to in what was either an off the cuff comment by Giuliani or part of some kind of shrewd strategy is unclear. Giuliani went on to say that because Trump had reimbursed Cohen the pre-election hush payment did not violate campaign finance laws because candidates can contribute their own funds to their campaigns if they want to.  Despite Giuliani’s assertion, Trump’s payment is still problematic.  Few are surprised that Trump who very publicly denied making the payment while on Air Force One and doubled down several times by saying that he had no knowledge first of Stormy and then about Cohen’s payoff, is a liar, but the optics of being caught in such a bigly lie aren’t good, even for Trump.  Later in the evening, Giuliani  attempted to clarify his statement by saying that Trump made the payment in installments, the implication is that Cohen fronted him the money in a form of a loan which could still make it a campaign finance problem and/or a violation of banking regulations. Giuliani didn’t just blindside everyone with his Stormy payment comment, he also said that Trump couldn’t be forced to sit down with Mueller because it was wrong to force an acting president to spend any time defending himself in an ongoing investigation when he could be solving the Korea nuclear crisis and/or playing hundreds of rounds of golf, okay, admittedly he didn’t say the golf part.  As to Cohen, to the extent that what Giuliani said doesn’t match what Cohen has already told FBI investigators, his problems have just multiplied.  Stormy’s lawyer Michael Avenotti was pretty stunned by Giuliani’s admission but not so stunned that he didn’t find time to tweet “We predicted months ago that it would be proven that the American people had been lied to as to the $130k payment and what Mr. Trump knew, when he knew it and what he did in connection with it. Every American, regardless of their politics, should be outraged...”  As to Emmet Flood, in addition to being a skilled lawyer, he is known for being particularly combative.  It’s expected that he will push back against Mueller, arguing that he can’t force Trump to sit down for an interview or subpoena him to appear before a grand jury, an argument that could find Mueller and Flood arguing opposite sides before the Supreme court. For his part, Trump is continuing to wage his battle against the Justice Department, yesterday he tweet threatened to "get involved" if they don’t produce the documents that his cronies in Congress have requested, not so coincidentally those documents include information about the Mueller investigation. To the extent that they were ever on, the gloves are now off, the messy battle wages on.

Russia, Russia, Russia: Last night the New York Times reported that Ukraine is no longer cooperating in the investigation into former campaign manager Manafort’s illegal activities, many of which involved money laundering to hide payments he received for his work with Ukraine’s former Russian friendly government. Apparently the current US friendly Ukraine government instructed their prosecutor to stop coordinating with Mueller due to concerns that working with him would kill their chances of obtaining the Javelin anti-tank missiles that they coveted. After Ukraine stopped cooperating, the missile sale was approved by Trump’s administration.  It’s worth noting that Obama had refused to allow the sale of those missiles to Ukraine. Cambridge Analytica, the data harvest firm that has been blamed for misusing Facebook data and weaponizing the DNC emails that were obtained by WikiLeaks in order to advance the Trump campaign and for disrupting campaigns around the world is shutting down effective immediately. It turns out that at least for some, there are consequences for bad actions.    

Other News:  VP Pence proved once again that he is a stand-up guy, or at least a stand up guy for people like the disgraced but Trump pardoned Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Speaking at an event for the pro-Trump outside group America First Policies, Pence singled out former Arpaio for praise calling him "A great friend of this president, a tireless champion of strong borders and the rule of law," going on to say "Sheriff Joe Arpaio, I'm honored to have you here."  Unquestionably Arpaio is no champion of the rule of law and trumpeting support for him is the kind of thing that upsets main stream Republicans like Senate Leader Mitch McConnell who is trying to rein in Trump’s worst instincts to prevent him from endorsing unwinnable, fringe candidates in an attempt to salvage the 2018 elections.  Arpaio is one of three Republicans seeking his party’s nomination to run for Senator in Arizona to fill the seat being vacated by retiring Senator Jeff Flake.  A boost from Pence and Trump could help his candidacy, something that would make the Democrats very happy, they’d love nothing more than to run against the very flawed Arpaio.  Back from his trip overseas, newly confirmed Secretary of State Pompeo promised to reinvigorate the State Department and denuclearize North Korea.  He also denounced the Iran agreement.  In the meantime, sixteen Republican members of Congress nominated Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize.  Just another day.