Trump enters the stage

In one of his first tweets of the new year, President Donald Trump attacked retired four-star Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal after he criticized the President on Sunday.

“‘General’ McChrystal got fired like a dog by Obama,” Trump tweeted Tuesday morning. “Last assignment a total bust. Known for big, dumb mouth. Hillary lover!”

Trump was retweeting a post from Fox News’ Laura Ingraham sharing a story headlined “Media Didn’t Like McChrystal Until He Started Bashing Trump.”

Opinions

Mitt Romney: The president shapes the public character of the nation. Trump’s character falls short.
By Mitt Romney

January 1, 2019 at 8:00 PM

President Trump speaks during an interview with Washington Post reporters Philip Rucker and Josh Dawsey in the Oval Office at the White House on Nov. 27. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Mitt Romney, a Republican from Utah and the party’s 2012 nominee for president, will be sworn into the U.S. Senate on Thursday.

The Trump presidency made a deep descent in December. The departures of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, the appointment of senior persons of lesser experience, the abandonment of allies who fight beside us, and the president’s thoughtless claim that America has long been a “sucker” in world affairs all defined his presidency down.

It is well known that Donald Trump was not my choice for the Republican presidential nomination. After he became the nominee, I hoped his campaign would refrain from resentment and name-calling. It did not. When he won the election, I hoped he would rise to the occasion. His early appointments of Rex Tillerson, Jeff Sessions, Nikki Haley, Gary Cohn, H.R. McMaster, Kelly and Mattis were encouraging. But, on balance, his conduct over the past two years, particularly his actions this month, is evidence that the president has not risen to the mantle of the office.

It is not that all of the president’s policies have been misguided. He was right to align U.S. corporate taxes with those of global competitors, to strip out excessive regulations, to crack down on China’s unfair trade practices, to reform criminal justice and to appoint conservative judges. These are policies mainstream Republicans have promoted for years. But policies and appointments are only a part of a presidency.

To a great degree, a presidency shapes the public character of the nation. A president should unite us and inspire us to follow “our better angels.” A president should demonstrate the essential qualities of honesty and integrity, and elevate the national discourse with comity and mutual respect. As a nation, we have been blessed with presidents who have called on the greatness of the American spirit. With the nation so divided, resentful and angry, presidential leadership in qualities of character is indispensable. And it is in this province where the incumbent’s shortfall has been most glaring.

Related: [The Post’s View: The last lines of defense against Trump]

The world is also watching. America has long been looked to for leadership. Our economic and military strength was part of that, of course, but our enduring commitment to principled conduct in foreign relations, and to the rights of all people to freedom and equal justice, was even more esteemed. Trump’s words and actions have caused dismay around the world. In a 2016 Pew Research Center poll, 84 percent of people in Germany, Britain, France, Canada and Sweden believed the American president would “do the right thing in world affairs.” One year later, that number had fallen to 16 percent.

This comes at a very unfortunate time. Several allies in Europe are experiencing political upheaval. Several former Soviet satellite states are rethinking their commitment to democracy. Some Asian nations, such as the Philippines, lean increasingly toward China, which advances to rival our economy and our military. The alternative to U.S. world leadership offered by China and Russia is autocratic, corrupt and brutal.

The world needs American leadership, and it is in America’s interest to provide it. A world led by authoritarian regimes is a world — and an America — with less prosperity, less freedom, less peace.

To reassume our leadership in world politics, we must repair failings in our politics at home. That project begins, of course, with the highest office once again acting to inspire and unite us. It includes political parties promoting policies that strengthen us rather than promote tribalism by exploiting fear and resentment. Our leaders must defend our vital institutions despite their inevitable failings: a free press, the rule of law, strong churches, and responsible corporations and unions.

We must repair our fiscal foundation, setting a course to a balanced budget. We must attract the best talent to America’s service and the best innovators to America’s economy.

America is strongest when our arms are linked with other nations. We want a unified and strong Europe, not a disintegrating union. We want stable relationships with the nations of Asia that strengthen our mutual security and prosperity.

Related: [Jimmy Carter: How to repair the U.S.-China relationship — and prevent a modern Cold War]

I look forward to working on these priorities with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and other senators.

Furthermore, I will act as I would with any president, in or out of my party: I will support policies that I believe are in the best interest of the country and my state, and oppose those that are not. I do not intend to comment on every tweet or fault. But I will speak out against significant statements or actions that are divisive, racist, sexist, anti-immigrant, dishonest or destructive to democratic institutions.

I remain optimistic about our future. In an innovation age, Americans excel. More importantly, noble instincts live in the hearts of Americans. The people of this great land will eschew the politics of anger and fear if they are summoned to the responsibility by leaders in homes, in churches, in schools, in businesses, in government — who raise our sights and respect the dignity of every child of God — the ideal that is the essence of America.

Read more:

Antony J. Blinken and Robert Kagan: ‘America First’ is only making the world worse. Here’s a better approach.

Jeff Flake: Republicans must move beyond the cult of Trump’s personality

Jennifer Rubin: A frightful portrait of a president out of control

George Will: This sad, embarrassing wreck of a man

Helaine Olen: 2018 is the year hope began to triumph over Trump’s nihilism

Attorneys Eric Dubelier, left, and Katherine Seikaly, right, representing Concord Management and Consulting LLC, leave federal court in Washington, Wednesday, May 9, 2018, after pleading not guilty on behalf of the company, which has been charged as part of a conspiracy to meddle in the 2016 US presidential election. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)
7’
Attorneys Eric Dubelier, left, and Katherine Seikaly, right, representing Concord Management and Consulting LLC, leave federal court in Washington, Wednesday, May 9, 2018, after pleading not guilty on behalf of the company, which has been charged as part of a … more >
‘Real Justice Department’ veteran emerges as Mueller’s top courtroom adversary
By Rowan Scarborough
A former federal prosecutor has emerged as special counsel Robert Mueller’s most persistent courtroom critic.

It’s not Rudy Giuliani, a former U.S. attorney and now President Trump’s ubiquitous defender, or any of cable TV’s prosecutors-turned-pundits.

He is Eric A. Dubelier, a litigator for the Reed Smith law firm who knows international law and the D.C. playing field. He served eight years prosecuting cases as a Justice Department assistant U.S. attorney in Washington. He refers to his former employer as “the real Justice Department,” implying that Mr. Mueller’s team is something less.

His biting remarks have come in months of court filings and oral arguments. Mr. Dubelier has depicted Mr. Mueller as a rogue prosecutor willfully ignoring Justice Department guidelines.

He has accused Mr. Mueller of creating a “make-believe crime” against his Russian client, Concord Management and Consulting, which is accused of funding a troll farm that interfered in the 2016 election.

So far, the federal judge presiding over the case has sided with Mr. Mueller.


Mr. Dubelier charges that the Mueller team violated the confidentially of Concord’s counter evidence while hiding documents Concord needs for its defense. The prosecutor wants to “whisper secrets to the judge,” Mr. Dubelier says, as Mr. Mueller is calculating the “short-term political value of a conviction” and not worrying about an appeals court defeat years later.

An example: In a Dec. 20 motion, Mr. Dubelier resurrected a botched case spearheaded by Mr. Mueller’s top prosecutor, Andrew Weissmann.

Mr. Weissmann headed the Justice Department’s Enron task force nearly two decades ago. He won a conviction against the accounting firm Arthur Andersen for shredding the defunct energy firm’s financial documents.

Years later, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously reversed the conviction. The 2005 decision effectively said that Andersen, by then out of business and its 28,000 employees gone, hadn’t committed a crime.

“Mr. Dubelier is exactly right on Mr. Mueller’s motives and tactics,” said Sidney Powell, whose book “License to Lie” exposes years of Justice Department scandals. “His lieutenant Weissmann is the poster boy for prosecutorial misconduct and has no regard for the facts or the law. He will make up whatever he wants to win, and the entire like-minded team views as an accomplishment everyone whose life they destroy in pursuit of their objective.”

‘Made up a crime to fit the facts’

Concord Management and Consulting is an unlikely client. Legal observers opined that when Mr. Mueller brought charges against various Russians who hacked computers and trolled the 2016 election, no defendant would travel the nearly 5,000 miles to show up for trial.

No defendant has personally arrived. But Concord did appear quickly after the February indictment. Of 28 Russian individuals and firms charged with election interference by Mr. Mueller, only Concord has appeared in U.S. District Court, in this instance in the person of the aggressive Mr. Dubelier.

The Washington defense attorney seemed to catch the Mueller team off guard by immediately demanding disclosure of evidence. Disclosure, Mr. Dubelier argues, is a sacred legal right in America, even for the oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin, Concord’s chief with close ties to Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

Concord is accused of an elaborate conspiracy with another Russian operation, the Internet Research Agency. The indictment accuses Concord of providing the troll farm $1.2 million monthly to defraud the U.S. The two firms set up fake personas and false Twitter accounts, Facebook ads and other social media posts mostly to disparage Hillary Clinton and support Donald Trump.

In a separate case, Mr. Mueller brought charges in July against 12 Russian intelligence officers for hacking Democratic computers, stealing emails and funneling them to three websites for distribution.

Mr. Dubelier argues that people are free to create fake accounts. It’s done all the time, he says.

“When it comes to political speech, one is free to pretend to be whomever he or she wants to be and to say whatever he or she wants to say,” he said at an Oct. 15 hearing.

“That’s why in this case this special counsel made up a crime to fit the facts that they have,” Mr. Dubelier said. “And that’s the fundamental danger with the entire special counsel concept: that they operate outside the parameters of the Department of Justice in a way that is absolutely inconsistent with the consistent behavior of the Department of Justice in these cases for the past 30 years.”

Mr. Dubelier lost that argument with U.S. District Judge Dabney L. Friedrich, who rejected his bid to dismiss the case.

But he wasn’t done. There is an ongoing battle over Concord’s access to “sensitive” evidence that Mr. Mueller won’t let its officers see because they are Russians with ties to Mr. Putin.

Mr. Dubelier has expressed exasperation.

“This equates to the burden of preparing for trial without any ability to discuss the evidence with the client who is to be put on trial,” he said. “This has never happened before in reported case law because the notion is too ludicrous to contemplate.”

“What Mueller has turned over is often irrelevant to mounting a defense, such as promotion emails for airlines and personal naked selfie photographs,” Mr. Dubelier said in a December filing.

The special counsel is keeping most relevant information between himself and Judge Friedrich, excluding Mr. Dubelier.

Why no probe of dossier writer?

Mr. Mueller won the argument over “sensitive” material. He now wants to hold closed sessions with the judge over classified information — again, without Mr. Dubelier.

Mr. Dubelier responded in a Dec. 27 filing: “The Special Counsel has made up a crime that has never been prosecuted before in the history of the United States, and now seeks to make up secret procedures for communicating ex parte [meaning no defense counsel present] to the court which have never been employed in any reported criminal case not involving classified discovery.”

The defense attorney admitted his motion is “likely fruitless” because Judge Friedrich previously has ruled against Concord.

Many documents are in Russian, a culturally different language than English.

One Russian word, Mr. Dubelier says, “can be translated into the English words ‘chief,’ ‘boss’ or ‘chef’ — a distinction that is critically important since international media often refers to Mr. Prigozhin as ‘Putin’s chef.’”

On another matter, Mr. Dubelier is accusing the Mueller team of skullduggery.

Judge Friedrich last summer approved the prosecutor’s request for a “firewall counsel” to review evidence for its national security implications.

Mr. Dubelier said he submitted evidence to the firewall lawyer only to see it fall into the hands of Mr. Mueller’s team, who began using it to further investigate Concord. “Surely a remarkable coincidence,” Mr. Dubelier said.

In another pre-trial argument, Mr. Dubelier is the first defense attorney to ask this question: Why isn’t British ex-spy Christopher Steele, who was paid by Democrats to obtain anti-Trump information from the Kremlin to influence 2016 voting, being investigated by the Justice Department for election interference just like the Russians?

Mr. Steele didn’t register under the Justice Department’s Foreign Agent Registration Act, under which Mr. Mueller has brought charges against a number of defendants, including the Concord team. Judge Friedrich rejected Mr. Dubelier’s argument of “selective prosecution.”

Mr. Mueller’s counter-motion boils down to this: Mr. Prigozhin is a criminal fugitive who blatantly interfered in the U.S. election and is not entitled to sensitive national security information he would share with the Kremlin intelligence.

In a new battleground, the Mueller team wants to show the judge top secret material to persuade her to keep it from the defense.

“Disclosure of such information could cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security,” the Mueller filing stated.

Judge Friedrich ruled in June that Mr. Prigozhin is prohibited from viewing non-classified sensitive information that details how the government obtained evidence.

The Mueller team argued: “Discovery in this case contains sensitive information about investigative techniques and cooperating witnesses that goes well beyond the information that will be disclosed at trial … Information within this case’s discovery identifies sources, methods, and techniques used to identify the foreign actors behind these interference operations … the government has particularized concerns about discovery in this case being disclosed to Russian intelligence services.”

Mr. Mueller says that as long as Mr. Prigozhin, whom the U.S. sanctioned and then indicted for election interference, remains in Russia, he isn’t entitled to see sensitive evidence.

Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC.

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Tomorrow is the day Donald Trump’s presidency totally changes
Analysis by Chris Cillizza, CNN Editor-at-large
Updated 8:16 PM EST, Wed January 02, 2019

Washington (CNN) Donald Trump may not realize it totally yet, but today was the last easy-ish day of his presidency.

By noon (or so) Thursday, Nancy Pelosi will become the new speaker of the House of Representatives – formalizing the Democratic majority her side won in last November’s election. And that will change everything.

Trump has sought to look on the bright side of divided control of government to date – insisting that maybe he will be able to make deals with the new Democratic majority in the House. “It really could be a beautiful bipartisan situation,” he said at a press conference the day after the 2018 election.

But the early returns are not promising. The federal government has been shut down for the past 12 days – and there’s little reason to believe that will change at any point soon. Trump has dug in on his demand for $5 billion to fund construction of his border wall. Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, of New York, are equally dead-set on providing zero dollars for Trump’s wall.

View this interactive content on CNN.com
And this is only the beginning. Starting tomorrow, Democrats in the House will make Trump’s life a living hell. Efforts are already underway to bring a number of his Cabinet officials before Congress, to extricate his tax returns from his grip and to more deeply probe his business dealings both before and during his presidency.

Trump, a political neophyte prior to the 2016 race, has never had to deal with this sort of opposition before. Sure, Democrats have never been willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. But he never really needed Democrats to do much of anything, either. The Republican majorities in the House and Senate ensured Trump got his tax cuts and two Supreme Court picks. There was no real political penalty for his total unwillingness and inability to work with Democrats.

Those days are now over. Democrats can now do Trump real political damage using the official means of their House majority. While they may not be able to, say, force his tax returns into public view (the jury remains out on that), they can make sure the issue is front and center and create major distractions for a White House that has already shown it can distract itself very well, thank you very much.

Trump claims to understand this, likely with his self-professed titanic intellect. To me, that’s like when people who are about to have a baby say they are totally ready for it. As evidence, they point to their nursery being all set up, the Diaper Genie being up and running, and so on and so forth. Then the baby comes – and they realize, like every parent that has gone before them, that no amount of planning or bracing could fully prepare them for their new reality.

That’s Trump and the new Democratic House majority.

The Point: Look out: It’s going to be a mess.

View on CNN
© 2019 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. All Rights

Showdown

The president is demanding more than $5 billion to build a new wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. House Democrats plan to advance legislation that would reopen key parts of the government but deny Trump any additional money for a wall, as one of their first acts after they take control of the chamber on Thursday.

But Trump told congressional leaders he will not sign the measure, said incoming House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), who attended the meeting.

Anderson Cooper on ‘General Trump’ :

CNN’s Anderson Cooper had some home truths for Donald Trump after the president bragged he’d have made “a good general” during Wednesday’s bizarre Cabinet meeting.

“The world will never know General Trump, in part because the president never set foot in a combat theater until last week with his trip to Iraq,” said the host of “Anderson Cooper 360°.”

“The closest he came to serving in uniform was his teen years as a student in the New York Military Academy, which was a prep school. His parents sent him there to straighten out his behavior, apparently,” Cooper added.

Moments ago: President Trump spoke to reporters in the White House briefing room. He refused to take questions.

Sanders introduced President Trump, who talked about his border wall demand, and then both Sanders and Trump left the room, taking no questions from reporters.

CNN’s Brianna Keilar called the question-less appearance a “non-briefing.”

The US government is warning Americans that if they visit China they may not be able to return home
Benjamin Zhang Jan 3, 2019, 3:05 PM

Air China plane flags
The Chinese presidential Boeing 747-400. The State Department has released a travel advisory for China.Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images
The US State Department has issued a travel advisory urging Americans to “exercise increased caution” when traveling to the People’s Republic of China.
The elevated travel advisory is out of concern that China may arbitrarily enforce local laws and detain US citizens without cause using exit bans.
Under these exit bans, US citizens may be detained or forced to stay in China for an indefinite period of time and may be subject to harassment and interrogation.
The China travel advisory is a level-two advisory, which urges increased caution.
Other countries or regions with a level-two advisory include Algeria, Antarctica, Belgium, France, Germany, Denmark, Myanmar, and the United Kingdom.
The US State Department has issued a travel advisory urging Americans to “exercise increased caution” when traveling to the People’s Republic of China.

The State Department’s elevated travel advisory is out of concern that China may arbitrarily enforce local laws and detain US citizens without cause.

The advisory also indicates that US-Chinese citizens or Americans of Chinese heritage are especially vulnerable to “additional scrutiny and harassment.”

“Chinese authorities have asserted broad authority to prohibit US citizens from leaving China by using ‘exit bans,’ sometimes keeping US citizens in China for years,” the State Department said in its advisory.

Read more: The US is warning Americans about the dangers of traveling to China. Here’s what to know before you visit the country.

According to the advisory, China tends to use these exit bans in a coercive manner to “compel US citizens to participate in Chinese government investigations, to lure individuals back to China from abroad, and to aid Chinese authorities in resolving civil disputes in favor of Chinese parties.”

In addition, the State Department said Americans find out about these exit bans only when they try to leave China, and they aren’t notified how long the bans will last.

Read more: The government shutdown could spur more flight delays making travel a nightmare, air traffic controllers claim.

The advisory also said that Americans affected by exit bans have been “harassed and threatened” by authorities.

“US citizens may be detained without access to US consular services or information about their alleged crime,” the State Department said. "US citizens may be subjected to prolonged interrogations and extended detention for reasons related to “state security.”

“Security personnel may detain and/or deport US citizens for sending private electronic messages critical of the Chinese government,” the agency added.

Read more: Here are all the countries not allowed to fly into the US

The new China travel advisory is a level-two advisory, which urges increased caution. A level-one advisory suggests travelers “exercise normal precautions,” while a level-three advisory urges Americans to “reconsider travel.” A level-four advisory recommends that Americans avoid traveling to a particular country.

Leaving for Asia tonight- Hanoi and Cebu. This may be my last correspondence. Try to write after arrival.

Safe travels.

Certain common aphorisms were never meant to be taken literally. “What doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger” is a particularly risky principle by which to live. A watched pot will indeed boil. Time does not heal all wounds. “Slow and steady” does not always win the race. President Trump added a new - and, for him, potentially dangerous - aphorism on Friday, when asked about impeachment. He said he was not at all concerned because “you can’t impeach somebody that’s doing a great job.”

The president was hopefully making an aspirational, not a literal, point - because a president can be entirely successful in office yet rightfully be impeached for committing “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” Indeed, no matter how successful a president may be in various policies, the commission of any impeachable offense means, by definition, that he or she is not doing a “great job.”

Trump’s statement was unnerving not only because he has said it before but because he is entering the most dangerous period of his term so far. With Democrats now controlling the House of Representatives - and some already stating their intentions, intemperately or even profanely like Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) - the White House is about to be hit with a torrent of document demands and subpoenas from a half-dozen committees.

Committee chairmen have promised to demand answers on Trump’s taxes, foreign business dealings, family charity and other areas beyond the still-ongoing Russia investigation. These moves reflect a strategy that not only targets Trump but is counting on Trump to be successful. They are relying on Trump’s self-description as a “counterpuncher” to supply the grounds of his removal. Yes, a president can counterpunch himself into impeachment.

Despite the filing of articles of impeachment on the first day of House Democratic control, there is not a strong basis for a single article at this time. Thus far, the strongest basis is the money paid to two women to silence them about alleged affairs with Trump before the election. Yet, while highly damaging, these allegations can be difficult to prosecute and occurred before Trump took office. An in-kind campaign contribution simply is not a strong stand-alone issue for impeachment.

Likewise, there still is no compelling basis to allege a crime based on obstruction or theories of collusion. That leaves Democrats with a House majority secured, at least in part, on promises of impeachment but without a clear, impeachable act.

Special counsel Robert Mueller could well supply the missing “high crime and misdemeanor,” of course, but the only other possible source is Trump himself. And, as he demonstrated during the James Comey debacle, Trump has the ability to do himself great harm by acting impulsively or angrily.

Thank You , Mowk

President Xi Jinping told a meeting of top brass China’s armed forces must strengthen their sense of urgency and do everything they can to prepare for battle. The news comes amidst escalating tensions between China and the US as well as American-backed Taiwan, with disputes between the two superpowers ranging from trade to the status of the island. Mr Jinping told a meeting of the top military authority that China faced increasing risks and challenges, and the armed forces must work to secure its security and development needs, reports the official Xinhua news agency.

Huh?

POLITICO

Supreme Court turns down mysterious Mueller subpoena fight
By JOSH GERSTEIN 01/08/2019 03:31 PM EST Updated 01/08/2019 06:08 PM EST
The U.S. Supreme Court
An unknown firm had asked the high court to block a federal judge’s contempt order and financial penalties for refusing to comply with a subpoena. | Eric Baradat/AFP/Getty Images

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The Supreme Court has declined to intervene in a mysterious subpoena fight that apparently involved an unidentified foreign-government-owned company and special counsel Robert Mueller.

Last month, the unknown firm asked the high court to block a federal judge’s contempt order and $50,000-a-day penalty for refusing to comply with the subpoena, arguing that the company is immune from U.S. grand jury subpoenas. The company also insisted that complying with the subpoena would violate the law in the firm’s home country.

Story Continued Below

But on Tuesday, the Supreme Court turned down the company’s request to step into the dispute, at least for now. The order in the case came a little more than two weeks after Chief Justice John Roberts put a temporary freeze on the contempt order and the sanctions.

The court’s order Tuesday offered no explanation for its decision and no justice publicly signaled any dissent. The high court did indicate that Roberts referred the issue to the full court and that the short-term stay he ordered last month was now dissolved.

Many details about the case have been shrouded in secrecy.

POLITICO first reported in October that the dispute appears to have links to Mueller after a POLITICO reporter at an appeals court observed a visitor request a copy of a sealed filing from the special counsel just hours after a deadline for such a submission in the ongoing legal fight.

In addition, an appeals court judge who indicated he was likely to recuse himself from any cases involving Mueller’s office stepped back from the dispute.

Although the case has traveled through three different levels of the federal court system, the publicly available court dockets do not specifically identify which prosecutors are handling the dispute or disclose whether they are attached to Mueller’s office.

An unusual degree of confidentiality continued to prevail when other appeals court judges held closed-door arguments in the grand jury fight last month. Reporters who gathered to try to spot lawyers entering or departing from the courtroom were banished from the floor where arguments were taking place.

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals later released an order turning down the company’s appeal and revealing some more information about the legal dispute. The judges said the witness rebuffing the subpoena was actually a corporation owned by a foreign government, although they did not name the company, specify the country involved or say what information was being sought. It’s also unclear what records Mueller’s team might be seeking.

Story Continued Below

The three-judge panel then dismissed the company’s legal arguments for avoiding compliance with the subpoena.

The D.C. Circuit panel released an expanded but partially sealed ruling Tuesday explaining the court’s legal rationale. Most of the decision involves arcane issues related to the extent of immunity enjoyed by foreign governments and their offshoots.

However, the new opinion reveals the sanction that Chief Judge Beryl Howell imposed against the firm fighting the subpoena: $50,000 per day.

The high court’s action on Tuesday means the monetary sanctions against the firm are likely to kick in unless it complies with the demand for records. While the appeals court insisted the firm was liable for the penalty, the judges acknowledged some uncertainty about whether it could be collected.

“Whether and how that order can be enforced by execution is a question for a later day,” the D.C. Circuit opinion says.

On Monday, an unknown party that appears to be the firm filed another motion with the Supreme Court asking the justices to allow the filing of a sealed petition to grant review in the case, the high court’s docket shows.

However, it seems unlikely that the Supreme Court will accept the case for argument since no justices publicly indicated they would have granted the stay that the company requested to block the contempt order and penalties imposed by the lower court rulings.

The order the Supreme Court issued Tuesday did not indicate how or whether the court had resolved the motions the company and prosecutors filed to put their various filings in the dispute under seal.

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U.S. Supreme Court Robert Mueller Supreme Court Justices Mueller Investigation

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Trump Appeals for Wall, Citing Misleading Statistics of Crisis and Crime Along Border
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As the government shutdown grinds on, President Trump laid out his case for the border wall. Top Democrats Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer were not convinced.
IMAGE BY DOUG MILLS/THE NEW YORK TIMES
By Peter Baker
Jan. 8, 2019
WASHINGTON — President Trump doubled down on one of the biggest gambles of his presidency on Tuesday night with a televised appeal to pressure Congress into paying for his long-promised border wall, even at the cost of leaving the government partly closed until lawmakers give in.

Embarking on a strategy that he himself privately disparaged as unlikely to work, Mr. Trump devoted the first prime-time Oval Office address of his presidency to his proposed barrier in hopes of enlisting public support in an ideological and political conflict that has shut the doors of many federal agencies for 18 days.

In a nine-minute speech that made no new arguments but included multiple misleading assertions, the president sought to recast the situation at the Mexican border as a “humanitarian crisis” and opted against declaring a national emergency to bypass Congress, which he had threatened to do, at least for now. But he excoriated Democrats for blocking the wall, accusing them of hypocrisy and exposing the country to criminal immigrants.

“How much more American blood must we shed before Congress does its job?” Mr. Trump asked, citing a litany of grisly crimes said to be committed by illegal immigrants. Asking Americans to call their lawmakers, he added: “This is a choice between right and wrong, justice and injustice. This is about whether we fulfill our sacred duty to the American citizens we serve.”

Democrats dismissed his talk of crisis as overstated cynicism and, with polls showing Mr. Trump bearing more of the blame since the partial shutdown began last month, betrayed no signs of giving in. The White House earlier in the day dispatched Vice President Mike Pence and others to Capitol Hill to try to shore up Senate Republicans, who are growing increasingly anxious as the standoff drags on.

In their own televised response on Tuesday night, Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, accused the president of stoking fear and mocked him for asking taxpayers to foot the bill for a wall he had long said Mexico would pay for.

“President Trump must stop holding the American people hostage, must stop manufacturing a crisis and must reopen the government,” Ms. Pelosi said.

In taking his argument to a national television audience and on a trip to the Texas border he plans to take on Thursday, Mr. Trump hoped to reframe the debate. After spending much of the first two weeks of the shutdown cloistered in the White House, he has now opted to use the powers of the presidency to focus public attention on his ominous warnings about the border.

Yet privately, Mr. Trump dismissed his own new strategy as pointless. In an off-the-record lunch with television anchors hours before the address, he made clear in blunt terms that he was not inclined to give the speech or go to Texas, but was talked into it by advisers, according to two people briefed on the discussion who asked not to be identified sharing details.

“It’s not going to change a damn thing, but I’m still doing it,” Mr. Trump said of the border visit, according to one of the people, who was in the room. The trip was merely a photo opportunity, he said. “But,” he added, gesturing at his communications aides Bill Shine, Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Kellyanne Conway, “these people behind you say it’s worth it.”

Mr. Trump plans to head to the Capitol on Wednesday to attend a Senate Republican lunch and later will host congressional leaders from both parties to resume negotiations that so far have made little progress. Mr. Trump has insisted on $5.7 billion for the wall, while Ms. Pelosi said she would not give him a dollar for a wall she has called “immoral.”

In a nod to Democrats, Mr. Trump spent the first half of his talk on the humanitarian situation at the border before even mentioning the wall, expressing sympathy for those victimized by human smugglers. “This is a humanitarian crisis — a crisis of the heart and a crisis of the soul,” he said.

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Even so, he directly took on Ms. Pelosi and Mr. Schumer. “The only thing that is immoral is the politicians to do nothing and continue to allow more innocent people to be so horribly victimized,” he said.

Mr. Trump has made the wall the singular focus of his presidency as he enters his third year in office. His promise to erect a “big, beautiful wall” along the border became perhaps the most memorable promise on the campaign trail this fall, eliciting chants from supporters of “build the wall,” and he has been frustrated by his inability to deliver on it.

But his alarming description of a “crisis” at the border has raised credibility questions. While experts agree there are serious problems to address, migrant border crossings have actually been declining for nearly two decades. The majority of heroin enters the United States through legal ports of entry, not through open areas of the border. And the State Department said in a recent report that there was “no credible evidence” that terrorist groups had sent operatives to enter the United States through Mexico.

At one point in his speech, he even suggested that Democrats had signaled that they would accept his wall if redesigned. “At the request of Democrats, it will be a steel barrier rather than a concrete wall,” he said, even though Democratic leaders have made clear they oppose the barrier regardless of the material.

Even so, Democrats, many of whom like Mr. Schumer voted in 2006 for 700 miles of fencing along the border, did not want to conduct the debate on Mr. Trump’s terms. Instead, they focused attention on the damaging effects of the shutdown, already the second longest in American history. About 800,000 government employees are either furloughed or working without pay, in addition to hundreds of thousands of contractors.

House Democrats planned to approve individual spending bills this week that were intended to reopen closed departments one at a time in hopes of putting Republicans on the defensive, but Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, has said he would not put any bill on the floor without Mr. Trump’s explicit support.

Senate Democrats took to the floor on Tuesday to pressure Mr. McConnell and vowed to block consideration of other legislation until the government is reopened.

Mr. McConnell fired back, noting the 2006 legislation. “Maybe the Democratic Party was for secure borders before they were against them,” he said. “Or maybe they’re just making it up as they go along. Or maybe they are that dead-set on opposing this particular president on any issue, for any reason, just for the sake of opposing him.”

But two more Republicans, Senators Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, spoke out on Tuesday in favor of reopening the government while negotiations over border security continue. “I think we can walk and chew gum,” Ms. Murkowski told reporters.

Ms. Capito expressed frustration with the shutdown and “how useless it is,” indicating that she might support reopening the government while wall talks continue. “I mean, I think I could live with that, but let’s see what he says tonight,” she said before the speech.

That makes five Republican senators who have expressed such a position, which if combined with a unanimous Democratic caucus would make a majority to reopen the government if Mr. McConnell were to allow a vote.

Allies of the president warned fellow Republicans to stand with Mr. Trump. “If we undercut the president, that’s the end of his presidency and the end of our party,” Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said on Fox News after the speech.

The political nature of the fight was hard to miss. Just hours before he went on air, Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign sent out a fund-raising email asking supporters to raise $500,000 by the time his speech began. On the other side, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a possible candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination next year, offered his own response after Ms. Pelosi and Mr. Schumer.

For all of the pyrotechnics of competing national speeches, it seemed like a political Kabuki dance that by the end of the evening had changed no minds in Washington.

Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the No. 5 House Democrat, who perhaps most succinctly summed up his party’s response: “We are not paying a $5 billion ransom note for your medieval border wall,” he wrote on Twitter, with a castle emoji. “And nothing you just said will change that cold, hard reality.”

If Democrats do not approve money for the wall, Mr. Trump has threatened to declare a national emergency and proceed with construction without Congress, a move that could provoke a constitutional clash with the legislative branch over the power of the federal purse. While some legal experts said the president has a plausible case given current law, it would almost surely generate a court challenge.

Even some Republicans warned against it. Senator Susan Collins of Maine said that although the law provides the president with emergency powers, “the administration should not act on a claim of dubious constitutional authority.” She added, “It should get authorization from Congress before repurposing such a significant sum of money for a border wall.”

The wall is popular with Mr. Trump’s base, but the public at large holds the president responsible for the shutdown, according to polls. In a Reuters-Ipsos poll, 51 percent of respondents said that Mr. Trump “deserves most of the blame,” up four percentage points from earlier in the crisis, while 32 percent pointed the finger at congressional Democrats.

Moreover, the public seems to have grown weary of the impasse. Seventy percent of registered voters in the latest The Hill-HarrisX poll favored a compromise, while just 30 percent said sticking to principles was more important than reopening the government.

The president’s use of the Oval Office for the speech stirred some debate, with critics asserting that a setting more typically used for occasions of war or other national security crises was being turned into a partisan platform. The subsequent joint statement by Ms. Pelosi and Mr. Schumer was the first time opposition leaders were given national airtime to respond to a president in the Oval Office.

Not counting speeches to Congress, Mr. Trump had made only five formal addresses to the nation before Tuesday night, three of them in prime time and none from the Oval Office, according to Mark Knoller, a longtime CBS News journalist who tracks recent presidential history. Mr. Trump’s previous prime-time speeches were to introduce his two Supreme Court nominations and to announce his decision to send more troops to Afghanistan.

By contrast, President Bill Clinton gave 16 addresses to the nation over eight years, 14 of them from the Oval Office. President George W. Bush gave 23 such addresses, six from the Oval Office, and President Barack Obama gave 12, with three from his office.

Reporting was contributed by Maggie Haberman, Julie Hirschfeld Davis, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Michael Tackett, Emily Cochrane and Catie Edmondson from Washington, and Michael M. Grynbaum from New York.

RELATED COVERAGE
Trump Suggests Government Shutdown Could Last for ‘Months or Even Years’JAN. 4, 2019

© 2018 The New York Times Company

Donald Trump may have claimed that “I have never had so much support, as I have in the last week, over my stance for border security, for border control and for, frankly, the wall or the barrier,” but let’s put it this way: There’s a reason Trump himself keeps coming out to make the argument for his wall. That reason is that other people aren’t rushing out to defend him on the air.

A “former senior administration official” told Politico that “He’s sitting there going, ‘Why the f*#k isn’t there anybody saying good stuff about me? Why is there nobody on TV that’s defending me?” Simple answers to stupid questions: Because you and your shutdown are super unpopular, and even most anti-immigrant fanatics aren’t all that excited about a wall.

The White House pushback on the idea that Trump is frustrated by the lack of support was singularly unconvincing. “We’re doing our very best to communicate with our surrogates and get the message out. The White House and the president always enjoy looking at the screen and seeing our surrogates and our friends on camera,” an unnamed official told Politico. “We’re doing our very best” does not mean “We’re doing well,” and “The president always enjoy[s] looking at the screen and seeing our surrogates” does not mean “The president is currently looking at the screen and seeing a lot of surrogates.”

So, lacking enough surrogates to argue and bluster and bully for his wall, Trump is making the case himself. Which means he now has two things to be unhappy about: the lack of surrogates tongue-bathing him on television, and the fact that he’s having to do some work.

Trump’s team had over 100 contacts with Russian-linked officials, report shows
CHRISTAL HAYES | USA TODAY | 6 hours ago

A majority of Americans say they believe President Donald Trump has tried to obstruct the investigation into his campaign’s ties to Russia, according to a new poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. (Dec. 21)
AP
WASHINGTON – Members of President Donald Trump’s campaign and transition team had more than 100 contacts with Russian-linked officials, according to a new report.

The milestone illustrates the deep ties between members of Trump’s circle and the Kremlin. The findings, tracked by the Center for American Progress and its Moscow Project, come amid reports that special counsel Robert Mueller is nearing the conclusion of the two-year investigation into Russian collusion in the 2016 election and possible obstruction of justice by the president.

“This wasn’t just one email or call, or one this or that,” said Talia Dessel, a research analyst for the left-leaning organization. “Over 100 contacts is really significant because you don’t just have 100 contacts with a foreign power if there’s nothing going on there.”

The number of contacts was raised to 101 this week after it was reported that Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, a former campaign aide, shared polling data with Manafort’s former Russian business partner Konstantin Kilimnik.

Dessel noted the group’s list of contacts is on the “conservative” end and the “very minimum amount of contacts” between Russian-linked officials and those within the Trump campaign and transition.

Those within Trump’s team who had contacts with Russian-linked officials include Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen, former Trump adviser Roger Stone, the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, Trump’s former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci, and Trump’s daughter, Ivanka Trump.

Trump has consistently denied all allegations of colluding with Russia and has repeatedly called the Mueller investigation a “witch hunt”.

A look at former FBI director Robert Mueller
Dessel said the group omitted many contacts that were seen as “intermediaries” between the members of Trump’s team and Russian-linked officials, which would include the messages between Roger Stone and WikiLeaks, which is noted as being described by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo as a “hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia.”

Russia’s role in the 2016 election and ties between the president and the Kremlin are all but certain to remain constant themes of 2019 with a new Democratic-led House that now has subpoena and investigative powers.

Morgan Finkelstein, a spokeswoman for the Center for American Progress and the Moscow Project, said the organization has hosted discussions with lawmakers about the Russia investigation and what areas they can focus on in the next two years.

“The fact is there is so much low-hanging fruit that Republicans simply ignored or didn’t flesh out when they had power,” Finkelstein said, noting a major area that could provide new insights is the money and financial aspect between Russia and Trump’s team. “There’s so much to explore but we’ve identified a pretty clear roadmap.”

Special counsel Robert Mueller made court filings in cases against President Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen and former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort on Friday. (Dec. 7)
AP

© Copyright Gannett 2019

POLITICS
FBI Agents Say the Shutdown Is a Threat to National Security
Nearly 5,000 FBI special agents, intelligence analysts, attorneys, and professional staff have been furloughed.

NATASHA BERTRAND
4:05 PM ET

FBI agents near YouTube headquarters following an active-shooter situation in San Bruno, California, in April 2018ELIJAH NOUVELAGE / REUTERS
They’ve weathered blistering attacks from the president, the exposure of sensitive sources, and the politicization of classified information. And now they’re not getting paid. “I’m not going to try to candy-coat it,” Tom O’Connor, a special agent and president of the FBI Agents Association, told me this week. “We really feel that the financial insecurities we are facing right now equate to a national-security issue.”

On Saturday, the current government shutdown will be the longest in U.S. history—and it could remain shuttered for “months or even years,” President Donald Trump warned Democrats last week. While much of the drama has centered around Trump’s demand for a wall on the southern border, thousands of FBI agents and other federal employees whose unfettered work is crucial to national security have either been furloughed or forced to work with no pay and steep budget cuts.

Morale at the FBI had already been steadily declining for months before the government shut down on December 22, according to current and recently departed agents who spoke to me on the condition of anonymity to discuss their feelings candidly. President Trump’s open warfare on the bureau has made agents’ jobs more difficult, they say, as trust in the FBI wanes among people who identify as Republicans and right-leaning independents. “Part of it is Trump’s constant attacks,” said one agent who left late last year. “Bigger than that, though, is that it seems like a portion of the population believes him. Which makes their jobs harder to do.”

Read: The Republican Party turns against the FBI

Another agent who left the bureau last year told me that certain leads that might be politically controversial were sometimes tabled indefinitely because they were not seen as worth incurring the wrath of the Trump White House. In the two and a half years since the FBI launched its counterintelligence investigation into potential coordination between members of Trump’s campaign and Russia, the president has chided the FBI, former FBI Director James Comey, Special Counsel Robert Mueller, the Russia “witch hunt,” and the “deep state” in dozens of tweets, rallies, and interviews. Last April, he called the FBI and Justice Department’s desire to withhold sensitive information related to the ongoing investigation “an embarrassment to our country.” The withering morale and possibility of having to work without pay has made it increasingly difficult to recruit new agents, the agents said.

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The government shutdown, now heading into its 20th day, is the cherry on top of a galling two years. “You know the old adage that crime doesn’t pay? Well right now, agents are starting to feel like neither does the federal government,” O’Connor said. In a conference call with reporters on Thursday, O’Connor said that nearly 5,000 special agents, intelligence analysts, attorneys, and professional staff are currently furloughed, resulting in reduced staffing for “critical functions that support field operations.” None of them are being paid, he said. He wouldn’t elaborate on which investigations were being impacted, but emphasized that a lack of funding has hurt agents’ ability to do their job “completely and to the fullest ability we have.”

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ELAINE GODFREY
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ELAINE GODFREY OLIVIA PASCHAL MADELEINE CARLISLE
O’Connor also described a mounting backlog at Quantico labs, which provide forensic-analysis support services to the FBI, and said that funds supporting drug trafficking and undercover operations have been dangerously limited. Some, particularly those who work at Quantico labs, are not even allowed to come to work because of the shutdown. “FBI headquarters is trying to make sure that the most important topics are covered,” O’Connor said. “But that will get more and more difficult as the pot of money gets smaller and is not refilled.” According to an FBIAA spokesman, FBI field offices are responsible for allocating their resources and determining which activities are most central to specific missions or operations. Which areas are prioritized—whether it’s drug trafficking, counterterrorism, etc.—is also at the discretion of field-office leadership. “However, as the pool of resources dwindles, the scope of what can be adequately funded will also shrink,” the spokesman, Paul Nathanson, said.

Read: The peril of taking on the FBI

If the issue does not get resolved within the next few weeks, however, agents in various field offices may stage a callout—a coordinated sick day to protest the shutdown. (Transportation Security Administration agents have already begun doing so, according to CNN.) O’Connor said he had not heard of any plans to strike or begin calling in sick en masse, but he emphasized that he would not support it if they did. “Whether we’re paid or not, we’re going to show up and do our jobs to protect the United States,” he said. A coordinated “sick-out” would be one way of protesting the current conditions, since the Taft-Hartley Act, enacted in 1947, prohibits public employees from overtly striking. Federal-employee unions may also find recourse in the courts—some have already filed lawsuits arguing that requiring employees to work without pay violates the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.

For now, the FBI Agents Association is simply pressuring elected officials. In a petition sent to the White House, the vice president’s office, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, and other House and Senate leaders on Thursday, the agents association warned of the effects of the ongoing shutdown on the bureau’s work. “The operations of the FBI require funding,” the petition reads. “As the shutdown continues, Special Agents remain at work for the American people without being paid, and FBI leadership is doing all it can to fund FBI operations with increasingly limited resources—this situation is not sustainable.” Asked what the agents’ next steps will be if the funding is not restored, O’Connor said that they’ll continue to do “the best with what we have.”

“But I think it’s the public that will have an outcry when they see things not being done because we don’t have the funding for it,” he added.

Read: The evolution of the TSA

The FBI is not the only agency whose limited budget and resources could compromise national security. More than half of the staff of the newly established Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, a division of Homeland Security tasked with protecting the country’s critical infrastructure, have been furloughed, according to DHS. Nearly every employee of the Secret Service—which protects current and former government officials as well as the president—is going without pay, too, according to The New York Times, as are TSA agents and air-traffic controllers. “The growing financial insecurity may lead some agents to consider career options that provide more stability,” O’Connor said on Thursday. “The field is trying to be fully funded and staffed. But as we go forward, that’s going to change.”

NATASHA BERTRAND is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where she covers national security and the intelligence community.

Copyright © 2019 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.

President Donald Trump has rejected a plan proposed by a bloc of GOP senators.

Thanks Mowk. Right now I’m a hotel room planning seeing sights of Hanoi and flying back to Manila tonight then party for 10 days . hope you are well .
Trying to break dependence on alcohol and flip back to days when I started at no sooner then 12 pm afternoon.

Well, An invitation. I am feeling rather punk. In this state, I shouldn’t comment
Stupid things I weep over. Was distracted by an episode of a tv show while cooking; a cute little girl uttered “it’s a metaphor doofus.” to why a whale was in a dream. It just took me over emotionally. Makes one pause and go HMMM?

I think I’m loosing my socks cause it felt good, like watching “it’s a wonderful life”. Emotional strings. Who can you trust, when even yourself is the cause of question?

Don’t wear a watch while on vacation. (ribbing)

An other thought was to drink all night and sleep past noon. That works too, but don’t take me too seriously.

I try to squeeze in a nap between the two.

I’m sort of oddly autistic, and this medium is rather cold, did the idea of “all in good time” come off at all? It was what I was aiming for.

I’ve never been comfortable as a traveler. It is an industry that applies a great deal of leverage on time.

The New York Times

F.B.I. Opened Inquiry Into Whether Trump Was Secretly Working on Behalf of Russia
Image
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Following President Trump’s firing of James B. Comey as F.B.I. director, the bureau grew increasingly concerned about whether the president’s actions constituted anti-American activity.CreditSarah Silbiger/The New York Times
By Adam Goldman, Michael S. Schmidt and Nicholas Fandos
Jan. 11, 2019
WASHINGTON — In the days after President Trump fired James B. Comey as F.B.I. director, law enforcement officials became so concerned by the president’s behavior that they began investigating whether he had been working on behalf of Russia against American interests, according to former law enforcement officials and others familiar with the investigation.

The inquiry carried explosive implications. Counterintelligence investigators had to consider whether the president’s own actions constituted a possible threat to national security. Agents also sought to determine whether Mr. Trump was knowingly working for Russia or had unwittingly fallen under Moscow’s influence.

The investigation the F.B.I. opened into Mr. Trump also had a criminal aspect, which has long been publicly known: whether his firing of Mr. Comey constituted obstruction of justice.

Agents and senior F.B.I. officials had grown suspicious of Mr. Trump’s ties to Russia during the 2016 campaign but held off on opening an investigation into him, the people said, in part because they were uncertain how to proceed with an inquiry of such sensitivity and magnitude. But the president’s activities before and after Mr. Comey’s firing in May 2017, particularly two instances in which Mr. Trump tied the Comey dismissal to the Russia investigation, helped prompt the counterintelligence aspect of the inquiry, the people said.

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The special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, took over the inquiry into Mr. Trump when he was appointed, days after F.B.I. officials opened it. That inquiry is part of Mr. Mueller’s broader examination of how Russian operatives interfered in the 2016 election and whether any Trump associates conspired with them. It is unclear whether Mr. Mueller is still pursuing the counterintelligence matter, and some former law enforcement officials outside the investigation have questioned whether agents overstepped in opening it.

The criminal and counterintelligence elements were coupled together into one investigation, former law enforcement officials said in interviews in recent weeks, because if Mr. Trump had ousted the head of the F.B.I. to impede or even end the Russia investigation, that was both a possible crime and a national security concern. The F.B.I.’s counterintelligence division handles national security matters.

If the president had fired Mr. Comey to stop the Russia investigation, the action would have been a national security issue because it naturally would have hurt the bureau’s effort to learn how Moscow interfered in the 2016 election and whether any Americans were involved, according to James A. Baker, who served as F.B.I. general counsel until late 2017. He privately testified in October before House investigators who were examining the F.B.I.’s handling of the full Russia inquiry.

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The F.B.I. investigated whether the firing of Mr. Comey was a national security threat.CreditErik S Lesser/EPA, via Shutterstock
“Not only would it be an issue of obstructing an investigation, but the obstruction itself would hurt our ability to figure out what the Russians had done, and that is what would be the threat to national security,” Mr. Baker said in his testimony, portions of which were read to The New York Times. Mr. Baker did not explicitly acknowledge the existence of the investigation of Mr. Trump to congressional investigators.

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No evidence has emerged publicly that Mr. Trump was secretly in contact with or took direction from Russian government officials. An F.B.I. spokeswoman and a spokesman for the special counsel’s office both declined to comment.

Rudolph W. Giuliani, a lawyer for the president, sought to play down the significance of the investigation. “The fact that it goes back a year and a half and nothing came of it that showed a breach of national security means they found nothing,” Mr. Giuliani said on Friday, though he acknowledged that he had no insight into the inquiry.

The cloud of the Russia investigation has hung over Mr. Trump since even before he took office, though he has long vigorously denied any illicit connection to Moscow. The obstruction inquiry, revealed by The Washington Post a few weeks after Mr. Mueller was appointed, represented a direct threat that he was unable to simply brush off as an overzealous examination of a handful of advisers. But few details have been made public about the counterintelligence aspect of the investigation.

The decision to investigate Mr. Trump himself was an aggressive move by F.B.I. officials who were confronting the chaotic aftermath of the firing of Mr. Comey and enduring the president’s verbal assaults on the Russia investigation as a “witch hunt.”

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A vigorous debate has taken shape among some former law enforcement officials outside the case over whether F.B.I. investigators overreacted in opening the counterintelligence inquiry during a tumultuous period at the Justice Department. Other former officials noted that those critics were not privy to all of the evidence and argued that sitting on it would have been an abdication of duty.

The F.B.I. conducts two types of inquiries, criminal and counterintelligence investigations. Unlike criminal investigations, which are typically aimed at solving a crime and can result in arrests and convictions, counterintelligence inquiries are generally fact-finding missions to understand what a foreign power is doing and to stop any anti-American activity, like thefts of United States government secrets or covert efforts to influence policy. In most cases, the investigations are carried out quietly, sometimes for years. Often, they result in no arrests.

Mr. Trump had caught the attention of F.B.I. counterintelligence agents when he called on Russia during a campaign news conference in July 2016 to hack into the emails of his opponent, Hillary Clinton. Mr. Trump had refused to criticize Russia on the campaign trail, praising President Vladimir V. Putin. And investigators had watched with alarm as the Republican Party softened its convention platform on the Ukraine crisis in a way that seemed to benefit Russia.

How the Mueller Investigation Could Play Out for Trump If Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, finds evidence that Mr. Trump broke the law, he will have decisions to make about how to proceed. We explain them.
Other factors fueled the F.B.I.’s concerns, according to the people familiar with the inquiry. Christopher Steele, a former British spy who worked as an F.B.I. informant, had compiled memos in mid-2016 containing unsubstantiated claims that Russian officials tried to obtain influence over Mr. Trump by preparing to blackmail and bribe him.

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In the months before the 2016 election, the F.B.I. was also already investigating four of Mr. Trump’s associates over their ties to Russia. The constellation of events disquieted F.B.I. officials who were simultaneously watching as Russia’s campaign unfolded to undermine the presidential election by exploiting existing divisions among Americans.

“In the Russian Federation and in President Putin himself, you have an individual whose aim is to disrupt the Western alliance and whose aim is to make Western democracy more fractious in order to weaken our ability, America’s ability and the West’s ability to spread our democratic ideals,” Lisa Page, a former bureau lawyer, told House investigators in private testimony reviewed by The Times.

“That’s the goal, to make us less of a moral authority to spread democratic values,” she added. Parts of her testimony were first reported by The Epoch Times.

And when a newly inaugurated Mr. Trump sought a loyalty pledge from Mr. Comey and later asked that he end an investigation into the president’s national security adviser, the requests set off discussions among F.B.I. officials about opening an inquiry into whether Mr. Trump had tried to obstruct that case.

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But law enforcement officials put off the decision to open the investigation until they had learned more, according to people familiar with their thinking. As for a counterintelligence inquiry, they concluded that they would need strong evidence to take the sensitive step of investigating the president, and they were also concerned that the existence of such an inquiry could be leaked to the news media, undermining the entire investigation into Russia’s meddling in the election.

After Mr. Comey was fired on May 9, 2017, two more of Mr. Trump’s actions prompted them to quickly abandon those reservations.

The first was a letter Mr. Trump wanted to send to Mr. Comey about his firing, but never did, in which he mentioned the Russia investigation. In the letter, Mr. Trump thanked Mr. Comey for previously telling him he was not a subject of the F.B.I.’s Russia investigation.

Everyone Who’s Been Charged in Investigations Related to the 2016 Election Thirty-seven people have been charged in investigations related to Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
Even after the deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, wrote a more restrained draft of the letter and told Mr. Trump that he did not have to mention the Russia investigation — Mr. Comey’s poor handling of the Clinton email investigation would suffice as a fireable offense, he explained — Mr. Trump directed Mr. Rosenstein to mention the Russia investigation anyway.

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He disregarded the president’s order, irritating Mr. Trump. The president ultimately added a reference to the Russia investigation to the note he had delivered, thanking Mr. Comey for telling him three times that he was not under investigation.

The second event that troubled investigators was an NBC News interview two days after Mr. Comey’s firing in which Mr. Trump appeared to say he had dismissed Mr. Comey because of the Russia inquiry.

“I was going to fire Comey knowing there was no good time to do it,” he said. “And in fact, when I decided to just do it, I said to myself — I said, you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story. It’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should’ve won.”

Mr. Trump’s aides have said that a fuller examination of his comments demonstrates that he did not fire Mr. Comey to end the Russia inquiry. “I might even lengthen out the investigation, but I have to do the right thing for the American people,” Mr. Trump added. “He’s the wrong man for that position.”

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As F.B.I. officials debated whether to open the investigation, some of them pushed to move quickly before Mr. Trump appointed a director who might slow down or even end their investigation into Russia’s interference. Many involved in the case viewed Russia as the chief threat to American democratic values.

“With respect to Western ideals and who it is and what it is we stand for as Americans, Russia poses the most dangerous threat to that way of life,” Ms. Page told investigators for a joint House Judiciary and Oversight Committee investigation into Moscow’s election interference.

F.B.I. officials viewed their decision to move quickly as validated when a comment the president made to visiting Russian officials in the Oval Office shortly after he fired Mr. Comey was revealed days later.

“I just fired the head of the F.B.I. He was crazy, a real nut job,” Mr. Trump said, according to a document summarizing the meeting. “I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.”

© 2018 The New York Times Company

20,679 views|Jan 7, 2018,5:00 pm
Donald Trump, Democrat?
Ralph BenkoContributor

FILE – In this Dec. 7, 2017, file photo, President Donald Trump accompanied by Vice President Mike Pence, listens as House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of Calif., speaks before a meeting with congressional leaders including House Speaker Paul Ryan of Wis., Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Ky., and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of N.Y., in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)

My headline employs “democrat” in its generic, rather than proper noun (partisan), definition. President Trump shifted his party registration back and forth (five times, according to the Washington Times’s report of a report by The Smoking Gun). Trump, Politico reports, also was a substantial donor to Senator Clinton, the Clinton Foundation, and many other Democrats.

This history does not make Donald Trump a Democrat. But I submit that Donald Trump is democracy’s smoking gun.

Trump won the presidency as the nominee of the Republican Party. Despite his occasional public flirtations with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi he works with the Congressional majority, Republicans, largely eschewing the Democrats’ progressive policy agenda.

That said, I submit that the election of Donald Trump as president is largely an outcome of “creeping democracy.” Democracy is routinely extolled by the left. It, along with “equality,” is frequently used by leftists as a vague synonym for anything good.

The left, however, is wrong about this. Democracy is a bad thing. Bad for the left too.

This remains unclear to the left. This is understandable. The word “democracy” sounds vaguely good. It has proved useful in advancing the progressive agenda. Thus, celebrations of democracy persist but the outcomes, even from their point of view, just are not looking so hot.

O Democracy!

The Washington Post earlier this year adopted the slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” According to the Post’s own credible backstory, this was not aimed at President Trump but was derived from a line in a speech by its owner Jeff Bezos, adopted from Bob Woodward (who had used it for many years), itself appropriated from a coinage by appellate Judge Damon J. Keith.

Currently, the poster child book on this topic is How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (whose names are curiously omitted from the front cover of the book jacket). The New York Times’s David Leonhardt extols it in his recent column The Meaning of Bannon vs. Trump:

Democracy. Later this month, an alarmingly titled book, “How Democracies Die,” written by two political scientists, will be published. It is, as the book’s promotional material states, “a bracing, revelatory look at the demise of liberal democracies around the world — and a road map for rescuing our own.”

Let’s help the left out. America was unequivocally designed as a republic, not a democracy. There are reasons for this.

My friend Jonathan Rauch, Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at Brookings Institution, has wryly painted how wrongheaded have been the progressives in undermining the republican order. His assessment may be found, among other places, in a cover story at The Atlantic archly headlined The Case For Corruption. Progressives have, over more than a century, conscientiously eroded America’s republican structure, including the very political norms — the guardrails — they take Trump to task for violating.

Let them consider whether Trump’s presidency is the effect, not the cause, of their own century-long project of undermining republican safeguards.

Progressives? Meet the Law of Unintended Consequences.

A more democratic America has delivered unto you President Trump.

Happy?

Let’s take a deeper dive into democracy vs. republicanism to help understand where the left went so Wrong.

I have many dear progressive friends. I heart them for their commitment to justice among other things. I myself am neither a progressive nor a democrat. As Alcuin famously wrote to Charlemagne in 798 AD, “Nec audiendi qui solent dicere, Vox populi, vox Dei, quum tumultuositas vulgi semper insaniae proxima sit.”

And do not listen to those who keep saying, ‘The voice of the people is the voice of God.’ because the tumult of the crowd is always close to madness.

Trump certainly plays to the tumult of the crowd. As I have pointed out here the remnants of the republican system – the electoral college (which progressives are now targeting for demolition) — worked as designed. The electorate — which is subtly but materially different from the “crowd” — chose the presidential aspirant who best, relative to the other 19 significant contenders in 2016, articulated its yearning for peace and prosperity.

The left would do better to seek to extract the log in its own eye than to condemn the mote in the eye of the right. “’You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,— mon frère!‘”

Notwithstanding their ongoing confrontation with the Law of Unintended Consequences the left continues to extol democracy. That’s a system of government America’s founders deplored. The Founders’ deploring it, one supposes, would have made them a basket of deplorables to the Hillary Clintons of their day. Such figures, then, were blessedly few.

Let’s go to the record.

The founders of America detested democracy, putting many guardrails against it into the Constitution. They made no bones about it.

Here are some representative quotes by some of the premier architects of our charter document:

At the close of the Constitutional Convention of 1787: A lady [one Mrs. Powel of Philadelphia] asked Dr. [Benjamin] Franklin Well Doctor what have we got a republic or a monarchy[?] — A republic replied the Doctor if you can keep it[.]

James Madison, Federalist Paper No. 10:

From this view of the subject it may be concluded that a pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert result from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this species of government, have erroneously supposed that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would, at the same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions.

A republic, by which I mean a government in which the scheme of representation takes place, opens a different prospect, and promises the cure for which we are seeking. Let us examine the points in which it varies from pure democracy, and we shall comprehend both the nature of the cure and the efficacy which it must derive from the Union.

Edmund Randolph, in the Constitutional Convention, said in speaking on the constitution of a Senate:

If he was to give an opinion as to the number of the [U.S. Senate], he should say that it ought to be much smaller than that of the first; so small as to be exempt from the passionate proceedings to which numerous assemblies are liable. He observed that the general object was to provide a cure for the evils under which the United States labored; that in tracing these evils to their origin every man had found it in the turbulence and follies of democracy; that some check, therefore, was to be sought for against this tendency of our governments, and that a good Senate seemed most likely to answer the purpose.

As John Adams wrote to John Taylor in 1814:

You Say “Mr. Adams calls our Attention to hundreds of wise and virtuous Patricians, mangled and bleeding Victims of popular Fury.” and gravely counts up several Victims of democratic Rage as proofs that Democracy is more pernicious than Monarchy or Aristocracy.” Is this fair, sir? Do you deny any one of my Facts? I do not say that Democracy has been more pernicious, on the whole, and in the long run, than Monarchy or Aristocracy. Democracy has never been and never can be so durable as Aristocracy or Monarchy. But while it lasts it is more bloody than either.

Remember Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes exhausts and murders itself. There never was a Democracy Yet, that did not commit suicide. It is in vain to Say that Democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious or less avaricious than Aristocracy or Monarchy. It is not true in Fact and no where appears in history. Those Passions are the same in all Men under all forms of Simple Government, and when unchecked, produce the same Effects of Fraud Violence and Cruelty.

America was very much designed to avoid democracy, The Constitution itself, at Article 4, Section 4 states:

The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government….

“A Republican Form of Government.” Nowhere in the Constitution does the word democracy occur. This is not an oversight.

Fraud, Violence and Cruelty? John Adams, a member of the Committee that wrote the Declaration of Independence and our second president, thereby demonstrated prophetic qualities. The left, hoist with its own petard, would do well to take heed.

Comes now How Democracies Die. Its lead jacket blurb is from E.J. Dionne, Jr., who I respect greatly as one of the leading classical liberal public intellectuals working today notwithstanding that he bats (cleanup) for the Other Team.

How Democracies Die turns out to be an interesting work by two scholars who have deep knowledge of how authoritarians have taken power. They give special attention to the role of the establishment parties in facilitating that process, by connivance or negligence, thus paving the way for monsters such as Hitler, Mussolini, or Hugo Chavez to take power. They offer many interesting cautionary vignettes from world, and American, history.

They offer a soft, almost exculpatory, critique of some of FDR’s violations of political norms – prominently, threatening to pack the Supreme Court and violating the precedent of limiting himself to two terms. They gently chide, while exonerating, some of Barack Obama’s violations.

At base however, the authors blame the Republicans. They attribute the key erosion in what they call the political “guardrails” to the hardball tactics of Speaker Newt Gingrich and Majority Leader Tom Delay. There is some merit to this claim. However, they weirdly present a case that good Republicans are domesticated to the progressive agenda and protest, if at all, impotently. They seem oddly insensitive to the manifold examples of the violations by prominent Democrats such as Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi among many others. The sins of progressives are venial while comparable sins by conservatives are presented as mortal.

The left has a propensity to extol hardball tactics when used by Democrats and excoriate them when used by Republicans. Chris Matthews’s finest and most delightful book, Hardball: How Politics Is played, Told by One Who Knows the Game, for which his MSNBC show is named, provides a very nice Bill of Particulars.

In the eyes of progressives “democracy” is a great thing … so long as Democrats get elected and move the policies of America leftward. When the political system works to elect Republicans who move policy rightward it is ipso facto deemed demagoguery.

How Democracies Die displays many of the internal contradictions inherent within the left’s narrative. For example, the authors critique state defiance of President Obama’s (questionable) regulatory order limiting greenhouse gas emissions. They term it “a stunning undermining of federal authority.” Then the authors attack Trump for signing an executive order authorizing federal agencies to withhold funding from “sanctuary cities” that refused to cooperate with the administration’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants.

State resistance to federal authority is inherently either legitimate or illegitimate. They can’t have it both ways. The plenitude of these kinds of opportunistic arguments is one of the book’s greatest flaws. While I — on conservative philosophical grounds — oppose the withholding of federal aid to self-designated sanctuary cities one cannot logically reconcile how state resistance to the federal government is “a stunning undermining” while municipal resistance is legitimate.

The authors, blind to their own contradictions, paint themselves into many such logical corners. There are arguments to be made for their preferred policies here. This argument, however, is self-contradictory and thus contributes to the polarization which the authors, purportedly, deplore.

Senator Warren is right. The game is rigged.

Just, not necessarily in the way she propounds.

The Founders were not alone in their condemnation of democracy. H.L. Mencken, the Sage of Baltimore, a somewhat libertarian curmudgeon beloved by progressives for his ridicule of William Jennings Bryan for his attack on the teaching of evolution, was an intense and consistent critic of democracy.

Mencken devoted his Last Words to a rather definitive deconstruction of the pretense of democracy (and, let it be noted, of the Democrats of his day):

Democracy always seems bent upon killing the thing it theoretically loves. I have rehearsed some of its operations against liberty, the very cornerstone of its political metaphysic. It not only wars upon the thing itself; it even wars upon mere academic advocacy of it. I offer the spectacle of Americans jailed for reading the Bill of Rights as perhaps the most gaudily humorous ever witnessed in the modern world. Try to imagine monarchy jailing subjects for maintaining the divine right of Kings! Or Christianity damning a believer for arguing that Jesus Christ was the Son of God! This last, perhaps, has been done: anything is possible in that direction. But under democracy the remotest and most fantastic possibility is a common-place of every day. All the axioms resolve themselves into thundering paradoxes, many amounting to downright contradictions in terms. The mob is competent to rule the rest of us—but it must be rigorously policed itself. There is a government, not of men, but of laws – but men are set upon benches to decide finally what the law is and may be. The highest function of the citizen is to serve the state – but the first assumption that meets him, when he essays to discharge it, is an assumption of his disingenuousness and dishonour. Is that assumption commonly sound? Then the farce only grows the more glorious.

I confess, for my part, that it greatly delights me. I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing. Does it exalt dunderheads, cowards, trimmers, frauds, cads? Then the pain of seeing them go up is balanced and obliterated by the joy of seeing them come down. Is it inordinately wasteful, extravagant, dishonest? Then so is every other form of government: all alike are enemies to laborious and virtuous men. Is rascality at the very heart of it? Well, we have borne that rascality since 1776, and continue to survive. In the long run, it may turn out that rascality is necessary to human government, and even to civilization itself – that civilization, at bottom, is nothing but a colossal swindle. I do not know: I report only that when the suckers are running well the spectacle is infinitely exhilarating.

The many political and policy maladies and madnesses of which the left complains derive from democracy itself, not its death. For the sake of making tactical gains the left has (and continues) to kill the goose that lays the golden egg: republicanism. To fall doubly afoul of the metaphor: the chickens are coming home to roost. Down with democracy!

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