Spy Games

Oh Rudy:  The Rudy Show continued over the weekend with the former mayor and one time advocate of law and order offering a few more versions of the events surrounding the Stormy Daniels hush payment scenario.  He revised his comments about when and what Trump knew about the payment, but then suggested that there were probably a few more  “Stormy situations” out there waiting to see the light of day.  He continued to attack the Russia investigation, calling for Attorney General Sessions to “step up and dismiss the probe,” and went on to say that Trump couldn’t be forced to testify because as president he wouldn’t have to respond to a subpoena, a questionable legal analysis that might ultimately get tested by the Supreme Court if in fact Trump refuses to testify when and if called.  Nothing he said made much sense, he even admitted that he really wasn’t up on the facts and that he was only addressing the law.  As to the law, it appears that he was trying to make the argument that Trump hadn’t violated any campaign finance laws, but his knowledge of that subject fell short leaving other experts with the distinct impression that if anything he had further implicated Trump and fixer/lawyer Michael Cohen, who according to Giuliani is no longer Trump’s lawyer for anything. To complicate matters Trump pretty much disagreed with much of what Giuliani said but defended him anyway by saying that he was a great guy but new to the team so his lack of knowledge about the real chain of events was understandable. As to any meeting with Mueller, Trump still asserts that he really wants to meet with him but will only do it if Mueller promises to be fair, and by fair he probably means softball questions and a ten minute time limit. Trump and Giuliani have either cooked up a really shrewd strategy to further inoculate Trump’s base against worse news to come or have fed the various investigators looking into Trump’s Cohen and Stormy related activities more fodder, or both.  As to Giuliani though his tenure has exceeded that of Anthony Scaramucci, many outside the White House expect that he won’t last long and many inside are hoping that he’ll leave sooner rather than later.   Sarah Huckabee Sanders may be one of those hoping for his exit, she’s been left trying to explain why almost everything she’s had to say about the Stormy problem has proven to be false, her defense so far is that she thought she was telling the truth when she clearly knew she wasn’t.  For her part Kellyanne Conway, the inventor of the alternative facts defense, told CNN’s Jake Tapper that the White House doesn’t have a credibility problem, the problem is the press and their coverage.  A skeptical Tapper wasn’t buying it.         

Intelligence:  The White House has a Gina Haspel problem.  On Friday, Haspel, Trump’s nominee to succeed Mike Pompeo as the next director of the CIA tried to withdraw her name from consideration to “avoid the spectacle of a brutal confirmation hearing” but was persuaded to stick it out by a frantic White House team that included Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Marc Short, director of White House legislative affairs.  Haspel, a respected agency veteran with numerous undercover postings, faces bipartisan concerns over her involvement with interrogation tactics, including actions such as waterboarding that have since been banned, against detained suspected terrorists during the Bush administration.  Moreover, she supervised one of the CIA’s black sites where enhanced interrogation took place and had a role in the destruction of some related tapes.  Though her critics recognize that she is qualified they can’t forgive her complicity in the torture and are concerned about the message that her confirmation will send to allies and tyrants around the world.  Trump kind of likes torture so he has no problem with her past.  Over the weekend Sarah Huckabee Sanders tweet-called Democratic women who support women’s empowerment but don’t support Haspel’s nomination hypocrites, a tweet that was mostly directed at Senator Diane Feinstein whose vote will be important.  Feinstein is facing a primary challenge in California from the progressive wing of the Democratic party and is under pressure to vote against Haspel.  To the extent that Haspel sticks it out to a confirmation vote, the outcome is not certain and every vote will count.  Also on the intelligence front, two more of former FBI Director James Comey’s people left the FBI this weekend.  Lisa Page, who gained unwanted fame as one half of the couple who engaged in romantic but politician slamming tweets resigned as did James Baker, the former FBI General Counsel who had been shifted into a crappy job after Comey departed.  The two may be gone, but they will not be forgotten since both were part of Comey’s inner circle and were privy to his contemporaneous memos.  

Campaign Season:  It’s not clear that he ever left, but to the extent that he did, campaign Trump is back.  He spoke to the adoring crowds at the NRA meeting in Dallas  ensuring them that he had their back because guns are good and gun owners who vote for him and other Republicans are even better. He managed to infuriate France and Britain by saying that they would have fewer terrorist events if they had more liberal gun laws.  He also went to Ohio where he went after immigrants again, threatening to shut down all immigration if he doesn’t get his wall, the costly white elephant that won’t accomplish more than drones and electric fences but that riles up his base.  Despite his outrage, even without a wall Illegal crossings at the Mexico border are at historically low levels, continuing a trend set during the Obama years.  West Virginia’s Republican are set to select their candidate to run against Democratic Senator Joe Manchin in November.  Ex-con Don Blankenship is giving the other two candidates a run for their money, or his money since he’s been spending a lot of the fortune he built up running criminally unsafe mines.  He appears to be having a late surge.  Blankenship who has attacked Senate Majority Leader McConnell, calling him cocaine Mitch and lambasting him for associating with Chinese people especially his wife, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao’s father, is so bad that Donald Trump Jr has questioned his suitability for office.  His victory would be a gift to Joe Manchin.

Other News:  Senator John McCain has let it be known that he doesn’t want Trump to attend his funeral.  He’s okay with Obama and Bush coming and speaking and wouldn’t mind if Pence provided a eulogy, but as far as he’s concerned Trump should stay home.  McCain also says that he regrets choosing Sarah Palin as his running mate, saying that she wasn’t prepared, how’s that for an understatement, and that he wishes he had stuck with is first choice, then Connecticut Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman.  Trump is likely to kill the Iran agreement on May 12 unless he has a change of heart or decides to leave it be while he negotiates with Kim Jong Un.  Over the weekend it was revealed that someone on the Trump team hired the same group of former Israeli Mossad agents who helped Harvey Weinstein dig up dirt on his accusers.  They were tasked to find out “bad” stuff about two Obama aides, including Ben Rhodes the former deputy national security advisor who headed up the Iran nuclear agreement negotiations.  It doesn’t look like they came up with anything useful but the fact that they were hired is definitely a bad thing, a really bad thing.  Last week Trump promised to come up with bad stuff about Montana Senator Jon Tester after Tester released the accusations against Trump’s inappropriate VA nominee Ronny Jackson. Makes one wonder if the former Mossad guys have a new assignment.