Trump enters the stage

And here is the REAL political reality in the United States:

Poll: Half of Americans say Trump is victim of a ‘witch hunt’ as trust in Mueller erodes
SUSAN PAGE AND DEBORAH BARFIELD BERRY | USA TODAY | 35 minutes ago

After almost two years, Mueller’s Russia investigation status can be confusing. Here’s an overview of the central question, and what we know.
HANNAH GABER SALETAN, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON – Amid signs that special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election interference may be near its conclusion, a new USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll finds that trust in Mueller has eroded and half of Americans agree with President Donald Trump’s contention that he has been the victim of a “witch hunt.”

Support for the House of Representatives to seriously consider impeaching the president has dropped since last October by 10 percentage points, to 28 percent.

Despite that, the survey shows a nation that remains skeptical of Trump’s honesty and deeply divided by his leadership. A 52 percent majority say they have little or no trust in the president’s denials that his 2016 campaign colluded with Moscow in the election that put him in the Oval Office.

That number does reflect an improvement from previous polls. One year ago, 57 percent had little or no trust in his denials; in December, 59 percent did.

Twenty-eight percent say they have a lot of trust in former FBI director Mueller’s investigation to be fair and accurate. That’s the lowest level to date and down 5 points since December.

In comparison, 30 percent express a lot of trust in Trump’s denials, the highest to date.

President Donald Trump has been relentless in attacking Robert Mueller’s investigation.

Mueller indicted 34 people, including Russian intelligence operatives and some of Trump’s closest aides and advisers. The indictments detailed the eagerness of the Trump campaign to benefit from a sophisticated Russian effort to influence the 2016 election but have not accused the president’s aides of participating in that operation. Last week, Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, was sentenced to a total of 7.5 years in federal prison for financial crimes.

The poll’s findings set the stage for a ferocious partisan battle when Mueller submits his report to Attorney General William Barr. The president’s cascade of criticism of those pursuing him has fortified his support and raised questions about his investigators.

More: Did Trump keep promises to insulate himself from his business? Only he knows

Trump tweets about Mueller
That campaign continued this weekend.

“What the Democrats have done in trying to steal a Presidential Election, first at the ‘ballot box’ and then, after that failed, with the ‘Insurance Policy,’ is the biggest Scandal in the history of our Country!” Trump declared in a tweet Sunday night.

Friday, Trump tweeted that “there should be no” report from Mueller, who was appointed in May 2017 to investigate how Moscow tried to influence the presidential election and whether Team Trump cooperated.

“This was an illegal & conflicted investigation in search of a crime,” Trump wrote Sunday, adding in a follow-up tweet, “THIS SHOULD NEVER HAPPEN TO A PRESIDENT AGAIN!”

Fifty percent say they agree with Trump’s assertion that the special counsel’s investigation is a “witch hunt” and that he has been subjected to more investigations than previous presidents because of politics; 47 percent disagree. Just 3 percent don’t have an opinion.

There is, unsurprisingly, a stark partisan divide on that question: 86 percent of Republicans but just 14 percent of Democrats say Trump is the victim of a “witch hunt.” Among independents, 54 percent say he is; 42 percent say he isn’t.

The president’s success in persuading half of the electorate that he’s been subjected to unprecedented scrutiny is notable, says David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk Political Research Center.

"Even among people who said they had ‘some’ trust in the Mueller investigation, half agreed with President Trump’s witch hunt allegation,” he says.

More: What happens when special counsel Robert Mueller delivers his report?

“Trump, he gets badgered every single day,” says Robert Lynch, 62, of Selden, New York, a Republican who describes himself as a “100 percent” supporter of the president. Mueller’s report is “going to say no collusion, absolutely none,” he predicts.

Annette Lantos Tillemann-Dick, 66, an innkeeper from Denver and a Democrat, disagrees, saying evidence of collusion by Trump’s campaign is obvious: “You don’t need a report to see it. It’s in our face.”

Lynch and Tillemann-Dick were among those surveyed. The poll of 1,000 registered voters, taken by landline and cellphone Wednesday through Sunday, has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

“I hope that illegal collusion makes it very difficult for the Republicans to continue to defend undefendable behavior on the part of the person who is sitting in the chief executive’s office,” Tillemann-Dick says. “And I hope that it would lead to him being removed from office.” (Tillemann-Dick, who was called randomly in the survey, happens to be the daughter of the late congressman Tom Lantos, D-Calif.)

A shift on impeachment
Support for impeaching Trump has cooled, the poll shows, in the wake of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s declaration that she opposed the idea unless there was bipartisan support for it. Among Democrats, 41 percent say Pelosi’s comments had some or a lot of impact on their opinion about impeachment, about equal to the 42 percent who say they had no impact.

Pelosi’s argument that trying to remove Trump from office would divide the nation apparently flipped the public’s expectations of what Congress will do. Last fall, the poll found that a 54 percent-32 percent majority said a new Democratic majority in the House was likely to seriously consider impeachment.

Now, by 46 percent-41 percent, those surveyed predict that the House won’t.

“If he doesn’t get impeached, it’s not like it’s going to be the end of the world because 2020 is not super-far away,” says Calvin Crawford, 18, a political independent and a senior at University High School in Spokane, Washington, who was polled. “I think Trump is probably going to lose if a candidate comes out and starts to propose things that people actually want.”

Overall, Americans by 62 percent-28 percent say the House shouldn’t seriously consider impeaching Trump, compared with 54 percent-39 percent last October. While a 53 percent majority of Democrats support impeachment, just 6 percent of Republicans do.

Gloria Davy, 65, a Democrat from Tucson, says it would bring her “great joy” for Democrats to push for impeachment, but she worries about the upheaval that could follow.

“I can’t imagine what would happen to the stock market,” the Arizona retiree says. “So it’s probably best not to impeach him and to just have him run for his second term and lose. That would be the safest thing for our economy.”

She is eager to see Mueller’s report. “I’ll read it cover to cover,” she says.

Release the report?
As Mueller’s inquiry winds down, the debate over what to do about the confidential report he is required to submit to the Justice Department is heating up. Last Thursday, the House unanimously passed a resolution calling for public release of the report, but Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., blocked passage of the nonbinding measure in the Senate.

The poll found overwhelming and bipartisan support for releasing the report, whatever it finds. In all, 82 percent say it is important to them that the report be made public; 62 percent call that “very important.”

More: What happens after Mueller delivers his report? Congress braces for battles

A look at former FBI director Robert Mueller
Assessments of Mueller have become less positive and more partisan during his investigation. In June 2017, before he had brought any indictments or won any convictions, 30 percent viewed him favorably and 16 percent unfavorably, a net positive rating of 14 points. Twenty percent had never heard of him, and 33 percent weren’t sure what they thought.

In the new poll, 33 percent view him favorably and 31 percent unfavorably. That net positive rating of 2 points is his narrowest to date. As recently as last October, he had a net positive rating of 17 points, 42 percent-25 percent.

Few Americans expect the conclusion of the special counsel’s investigation is going to settle the controversies surrounding the president.

House committees controlled by Democrats launched a series of inquiries into Trump, his administration, his business practices and his family. Views of those investigations are narrowly divided: 49 percent say Democrats are doing the right thing by pursuing the investigations aggressively; 46 percent say they are going too far.

“Now we’re going after Ivanka, so there will be more and more and more,” said Davy, the Democrat from Arizona, “and he can’t veto it.”

Lynch, the avid Trump supporter from Long Island, says Mueller’s report will clear Trump and should recommend another investigation to follow into his 2016 opponent. "It should say, ‘OK, now we’re going after Hillary.’ "

© Copyright Gannett 2019

George Conway, husband of Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway, has an urgent warning about the president’s mental health
John Harwood | @johnjharwood
Published 7 Hours Ago Updated 5 Hours Ago
CNBC.com
Kellyanne Conway’s husband, George Conway, was once seemingly on his way to a top role in the Trump administration.
Now he has become one of the president’s most outspoken critics, even as his wife holds a key role in the White House.
On Monday, George Conway tweeted warnings about the president’s mental health. Kellyanne Conway responded: “No, I don’t share those concerns.”
Kellyanne Conway, senior advisor to U.S. President Donald Trump, arrives on stage with U.S. President Donald Trump during the White House State Leadership Day conference in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, Oct. 23, 2018.
Al Drago | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Kellyanne Conway, senior advisor to U.S. President Donald Trump, arrives on stage with U.S. President Donald Trump during the White House State Leadership Day conference in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, Oct. 23, 2018.
At first, it looked like a package deal: Kellyanne Conway would join President Donald Trump’s White House staff, her husband, George, the new administration’s Justice Department.

The former happened, but the latter did not. And now, in a Washington spectacle unseen since the wife of Richard Nixon’s attorney general sounded alarms about Watergate, the spouse of a top presidential advisor is issuing urgent public warnings about Trump’s mental health.

As the Trump administration got underway, media reports placed George Conway in line to head the Justice Department’s civil division. But then Trump rocked the agency by firing FBI Director James Comey in May 2017, and within weeks George Conway withdrew as a candidate to remain a private lawyer.

Conway started publicly criticizing Trump days later. “Sad,” he tweeted, invoking the familiar Trump lament, that the president had complicated the legal defense of his travel ban with impolitic comments.

Soon afterward he sought to soften the impact. “I still ‘VERY, VERY STRONGLY’” support Trump, he assured Twitter followers, “and of course, my wonderful wife.”

By the spring of 2018, Conway’s tone had changed. After Trump called the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller unconstitutional, Conway wrote a Lawfare article rebutting that “meritless legal position.”

That summer, he ripped the president more sharply. As journalists scrutinized Trump’s dubious assertions, White House disarray and diplomacy with Russia, Conway publicly mused about the fate of a business executive behaving similarly.

“What if a CEO routinely made false and misleading statements about himself, the company, and results, and public attacked business partners, company ‘divisions’ (w/scare quotes!), employees, and analysts, and kowtowed to a dangerous competitor?” Conway tweeted.

Kellyanne Conway bristles at questions about her husband’s words as unrelated to her White House work. Trump accuses George Conway of seeking attention.

Washington cynics dismiss his stance for a different reason. While she retains Trump’s favor through unyielding public advocacy, they reason, he courts the president’s foes with an eye toward life after the administration.

But recent days make it more difficult to ignore the substance of what Conway says about the most powerful man in the world. Last week, Conway questioned Trump’s mental fitness while excoriating him for false claims about federal Judge Amy Berman Jackson.

“Have we ever seen this degree of brazen, pathological mendacity in American public life?” Conway tweeted. “Whether or not impeachment is in order, a serious inquiry needs to be made about this man’s condition of mind.”

Over the weekend, the embattled president launched a scattershot volley of attacks against General Motors, “Radical Left Democrats,” “the Fake News Media” and the late GOP Sen. John McCain. Trump retweeted mugshots, circulated by a well-known conspiracy theorist, of MS-13 gang members facing murder charges.

“His condition is getting worse,” Conway tweeted.

Monday he got more specific. Conway circulated medical criteria for Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

“Don’t assume that the things he says and does are part of a rational plan or strategy, because they seldom are,” Conway tweeted. “Consider them as a product of his pathologies, and they make perfect sense.”

Others have raised such concerns. In his unsuccessful 2016 GOP presidential campaign, Sen. Ted Cruz called Trump an “utterly amoral … pathological liar.”

Some mental health professionals that year publicly called Trump psychologically unwell. After Comey’s firing, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein mentioned the Constitution’s 25th Amendment outlining procedures for removing a president on grounds of incapacity, according to former acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe.

Rosenstein later said publicly he doesn’t believe any basis exists for invoking the 25th Amendment and never advocated that. Conway on Monday raised the issue anew.

“All Americans should be thinking seriously now about Trump’s mental condition and psychological state, including and especially the media, Congress – and the Vice President and Cabinet,” Conway tweeted.

If his wife thinks seriously about it, she doesn’t show it.

“No, I don’t share those concerns,” Kellyanne Conway told reporters at the White House on Monday.

© 2019 CNBC LLC. All Rights Reserved. A Division of NBCUniversal

Paranoia ~ utilized?~ crazy as a fox?

TheHill

ADMINISTRATION
March 19, 2019 - 08:33 AM EDT
Trump blasts ‘fake news media’ as ‘absolute enemy’ in latest attack on press

President Trump on Tuesday said that “Fake News” is the “absolute Enemy” of the people and country as he renewed his attacks on the media.

Trump lashed out at the “Fake News Media” as “dishonest” and “corrupt,” lamenting that “there has never been a time like this in American History.”

“Very exciting but also, very sad!” he tweeted. “Fake News is the absolute Enemy of the People and our Country itself!”

It’s unclear what specifically triggered Tuesday morning’s barb toward the press, but Trump, who regularly derides coverage of his administration he considers unfavorable as “fake news,” has accused the news media of blaming him for last week’s deadly shootings at a pair of mosques in New Zealand.

Some U.S. media coverage has focused on the suspected gunman’s manifesto, which called Trump a “symbol of renewed white identity,” and some pundits have argued the president has stoked white nationalist fervor worldwide.

The president over the weekend lashed out at the media on multiple occasions.

He targeted “Saturday Night Live” after the sketch comedy show aired a rerun that included an opening that imagined the world if he never became president, suggesting the program should face consequences for its jokes at his expense.

In the same tweet on Sunday, he called it “hard to believe” he won the presidency with “such one sided media coverage.”

Later Sunday, Trump chastised a trio of Fox News anchors, suggesting they should work at competitor CNN instead. The message appeared to come after one of the individuals anchored a segment that highlighted economic concerns in parts of the Midwest.

The president routinely labels NBC, CNN and The Washington Post as “fake news” and has called The New York Times an “enemy of the people.” He has rarely targeted Fox News in his attacks.

Updated at 8:52 a.m.

More in Administration
Conway hits back at Trump: Just guaranteed millions will learn about ‘malignant narcissism’
Trump fires back at George Conway, calling him a loser
State Department blocks reporters from Pompeo briefing with faith-based media: report

Deutsche Bank loaned over $2 billion to Trump: report

©2019 Capitol Hill Publishing Corp., a subsidiary of News Communications, Inc.

Deceptive tactics:-Stonewalling:

House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler wrote to the White House last month demanding information about President Donald Trump’s declaration of a national emergency to fund the construction of a southern border wall.

Yet Nadler’s Feb. 22 deadline came and went with no response. Not only did the Democratic congressman not receive the documents he wanted, he didn’t even receive a customary letter back from the White House acknowledging his request.

And yet:

Poll: Half of Americans say Trump is victim of a ‘witch hunt’ as trust in Mueller erodes
SUSAN PAGE AND DEBORAH BARFIELD BERRY | USA TODAY | 13 hours ago

According to a new USA TODAY/Suffolk University poll, Americans’ trust in Robert Mueller’s investigation is decreasing.
USA TODAY
WASHINGTON – Amid signs that special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election interference may be near its conclusion, a new USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll finds that trust in Mueller has eroded and half of Americans agree with President Donald Trump’s contention that he has been the victim of a “witch hunt.”

Support for the House of Representatives to seriously consider impeaching the president has dropped since last October by 10 percentage points, to 28 percent.

Despite that, the survey shows a nation that remains skeptical of Trump’s honesty and deeply divided by his leadership. A 52 percent majority say they have little or no trust in the president’s denials that his 2016 campaign colluded with Moscow in the election that put him in the Oval Office.

That number does reflect an improvement from previous polls. One year ago, 57 percent had little or no trust in his denials; in December, 59 percent did.

Twenty-eight percent say they have a lot of trust in former FBI director Mueller’s investigation to be fair and accurate. That’s the lowest level to date and down 5 points since December.

In comparison, 30 percent express a lot of trust in Trump’s denials, the highest to date.

President Donald Trump has been relentless in attacking Robert Mueller’s investigation.

Mueller indicted 34 people, including Russian intelligence operatives and some of Trump’s closest aides and advisers. The indictments detailed the eagerness of the Trump campaign to benefit from a sophisticated Russian effort to influence the 2016 election but have not accused the president’s aides of participating in that operation. Last week, Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, was sentenced to a total of 7.5 years in federal prison for financial crimes.

The poll’s findings set the stage for a ferocious partisan battle when Mueller submits his report to Attorney General William Barr. The president’s cascade of criticism of those pursuing him has fortified his support and raised questions about his investigators.

More: Did Trump keep promises to insulate himself from his business? Only he knows

Trump tweets about Mueller
That campaign continued this weekend.

“What the Democrats have done in trying to steal a Presidential Election, first at the ‘ballot box’ and then, after that failed, with the ‘Insurance Policy,’ is the biggest Scandal in the history of our Country!” Trump declared in a tweet Sunday night.

Friday, Trump tweeted that “there should be no” report from Mueller, who was appointed in May 2017 to investigate how Moscow tried to influence the presidential election and whether Team Trump cooperated.

“This was an illegal & conflicted investigation in search of a crime,” Trump wrote Sunday, adding in a follow-up tweet, “THIS SHOULD NEVER HAPPEN TO A PRESIDENT AGAIN!”

Fifty percent say they agree with Trump’s assertion that the special counsel’s investigation is a “witch hunt” and that he has been subjected to more investigations than previous presidents because of politics; 47 percent disagree. Just 3 percent don’t have an opinion.

There is, unsurprisingly, a stark partisan divide on that question: 86 percent of Republicans but just 14 percent of Democrats say Trump is the victim of a “witch hunt.” Among independents, 54 percent say he is; 42 percent say he isn’t.

The president’s success in persuading half of the electorate that he’s been subjected to unprecedented scrutiny is notable, says David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk Political Research Center.

"Even among people who said they had ‘some’ trust in the Mueller investigation, half agreed with President Trump’s witch hunt allegation,” he says.

More: What happens when special counsel Robert Mueller delivers his report?

“Trump, he gets badgered every single day,” says Robert Lynch, 62, of Selden, New York, a Republican who describes himself as a “100 percent” supporter of the president. Mueller’s report is “going to say no collusion, absolutely none,” he predicts.

Annette Lantos Tillemann-Dick, 66, an innkeeper from Denver and a Democrat, disagrees, saying evidence of collusion by Trump’s campaign is obvious: “You don’t need a report to see it. It’s in our face.”

Lynch and Tillemann-Dick were among those surveyed. The poll of 1,000 registered voters, taken by landline and cellphone Wednesday through Sunday, has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

“I hope that illegal collusion makes it very difficult for the Republicans to continue to defend undefendable behavior on the part of the person who is sitting in the chief executive’s office,” Tillemann-Dick says. “And I hope that it would lead to him being removed from office.” (Tillemann-Dick, who was called randomly in the survey, happens to be the daughter of the late congressman Tom Lantos, D-Calif.)

A shift on impeachment
Support for impeaching Trump has cooled, the poll shows, in the wake of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s declaration that she opposed the idea unless there was bipartisan support for it. Among Democrats, 41 percent say Pelosi’s comments had some or a lot of impact on their opinion about impeachment, about equal to the 42 percent who say they had no impact.

Pelosi’s argument that trying to remove Trump from office would divide the nation apparently flipped the public’s expectations of what Congress will do. Last fall, the poll found that a 54 percent-32 percent majority said a new Democratic majority in the House was likely to seriously consider impeachment.

Now, by 46 percent-41 percent, those surveyed predict that the House won’t.

“If he doesn’t get impeached, it’s not like it’s going to be the end of the world because 2020 is not super-far away,” says Calvin Crawford, 18, a political independent and a senior at University High School in Spokane, Washington, who was polled. “I think Trump is probably going to lose if a candidate comes out and starts to propose things that people actually want.”

Overall, Americans by 62 percent-28 percent say the House shouldn’t seriously consider impeaching Trump, compared with 54 percent-39 percent last October. While a 53 percent majority of Democrats support impeachment, just 6 percent of Republicans do.

Gloria Davy, 65, a Democrat from Tucson, says it would bring her “great joy” for Democrats to push for impeachment, but she worries about the upheaval that could follow.

“I can’t imagine what would happen to the stock market,” the Arizona retiree says. “So it’s probably best not to impeach him and to just have him run for his second term and lose. That would be the safest thing for our economy.”

She is eager to see Mueller’s report. “I’ll read it cover to cover,” she says.

Release the report?
As Mueller’s inquiry winds down, the debate over what to do about the confidential report he is required to submit to the Justice Department is heating up. Last Thursday, the House unanimously passed a resolution calling for public release of the report, but Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., blocked passage of the nonbinding measure in the Senate.

The poll found overwhelming and bipartisan support for releasing the report, whatever it finds. In all, 82 percent say it is important to them that the report be made public; 62 percent call that “very important.”

More: What happens after Mueller delivers his report? Congress braces for battles

Assessments of Mueller have become less positive and more partisan during his investigation. In June 2017, before he had brought any indictments or won any convictions, 30 percent viewed him favorably and 16 percent unfavorably, a net positive rating of 14 points. Twenty percent had never heard of him, and 33 percent weren’t sure what they thought.

In the new poll, 33 percent view him favorably and 31 percent unfavorably. That net positive rating of 2 points is his narrowest to date. As recently as last October, he had a net positive rating of 17 points, 42 percent-25 percent.

Few Americans expect the conclusion of the special counsel’s investigation is going to settle the controversies surrounding the president.

House committees controlled by Democrats launched a series of inquiries into Trump, his administration, his business practices and his family. Views of those investigations are narrowly divided: 49 percent say Democrats are doing the right thing by pursuing the investigations aggressively; 46 percent say they are going too far.

“Now we’re going after Ivanka, so there will be more and more and more,” said Davy, the Democrat from Arizona, “and he can’t veto it.”

Lynch, the avid Trump supporter from Long Island, says Mueller’s report will clear Trump and should recommend another investigation to follow into his 2016 opponent. "It should say, ‘OK, now we’re going after Hillary.’ "

© Copyright Gannett 2019

Perhaps this theatre of tests, the litmus between social processing of wjat goes between socialism and capitalism, so as that this U.S. political microcosm can mirror wjat.goes on an evolving new world order

How? Because, no one wants to communicate another hidden policy assumption floating around, that surmises the assumption of a nuclear war had not Trump been elected.

This logic, corresponds to the contradictory understanding of his constituency, who take this in faithfully.

Whereas this contradiction is mirrored in the potentially vastly larger scope of national-international conflict.

For this reason , the stalemate , even with perhaps the coming of the publication of the Mueller report.

And most grass roots sources have never experienced major contradiction as politically nearing absolute so they can not entail it.

So they create a hyper real image, enters the under rated actor, who can be foreseen to cause trouble, as ma y artists have.

Better to have him join, especially a bankrupt and ego laden exemplar of vanity.

Enters Trump unto the unenviable stage.

Surprising pollimg

Donald Trump
“The economy is just so damn strong right now and by all historic precedent the incumbent should run away with it,” said Donald Luskin, chief investment officer of TrendMacrolytics, a research firm whose model correctly predicted Trump’s 2016 win when most opinion polls did not. | Evan Vucci/AP Photo

2020 ELECTIONS

How Trump is on track for a 2020 landslide
Economic models point to a Trump blowout in 2020. But a faltering economy or giant scandal could change everything.

By BEN WHITE and STEVEN SHEPARD 03/21/2019 05:02 AM EDT
President Donald Trump has a low approval rating. He is engaging in bitter Twitter wars and facing metastasizing investigations.

But if the election were held today, he’d likely ride to a second term in a huge landslide, according to multiple economic models with strong track records of picking presidential winners and losses.

Credit a strong U.S. economy featuring low unemployment, rising wages and low gas prices — along with the historic advantage held by incumbent presidents.

While Trump appears to be in a much stronger position than his approval rating and conventional Beltway wisdom might suggest, he also could wind up in trouble if the economy slows markedly between now and next fall, as many analysts predict it will.

And other legal bombshells could explode the current scenario. Trump’s party managed to lose the House in 2018 despite a strong economy. So the models could wind up wrong this time around.

Despite all these caveats, Trump looks surprisingly good if the old James Carville maxim coined in 1992 — “the economy, stupid” — holds true in 2020.

“The economy is just so damn strong right now and by all historic precedent the incumbent should run away with it,” said Donald Luskin, chief investment officer of TrendMacrolytics, a research firm whose model correctly predicted Trump’s 2016 win when most opinion polls did not. “I just don’t see how the blue wall could resist all that.”

Models maintained by economists and market strategists like Luskin tend to ignore election polls and personal characteristics of candidates. Instead, they begin with historical trends and then build in key economic data including growth rates, wages, unemployment, inflation and gas prices to predict voting behavior and election outcomes.

Yale economist Ray Fair, who pioneered this kind of modeling, also shows Trump winning by a fair margin in 2020 based on the economy and the advantage of incumbency.

“Even if you have a mediocre but not great economy — and that’s more or less consensus for between now and the election — that has a Trump victory and by a not-trivial margin,” winning 54 percent of the popular vote to 46 for the Democrat, he said. Fair’s model also predicted a Trump win in 2016 though it missed on Trump’s share of the popular vote.

Still, Luskin, Fair and other analysts who use economic data and voting history to make predictions also note that a sharp decline in growth and an increase in the unemployment rate by next fall could alter Trump’s fortunes.

O’Rourke’s sprint out of the gate leaves Democratic field gasping
By DAVID SIDERS and CHRISTOPHER CADELAGO
“It would have to slow a lot to still be not pretty good,” Luskin said, adding that what really matters is the pace of change. Even if overall numbers remain fairly strong, a sharp move in the wrong direction could alter voting behavior.

Luskin’s current model — which looks at GDP growth, gas prices, inflation, disposable income, tax burden and payrolls — has Trump winning by a blowout margin of 294 electoral votes.

The White House remains confident that the GOP tax cut will support growth of 3 percent both this year and next, keeping job and wage gains strong. That’s much higher than consensus forecasts from the Federal Reserve and major banks that generally see a global slowdown led by Europe and China, coupled with the fading impact of U.S. tax cuts pushing U.S. growth closer to 2 percent this year with job gains slowing.

But Trump may have one major ally in his quest to make sure the numbers don’t go much lower than this: the Fed, which recently stopped its campaign of interest rate hikes. And on Wednesday the central bank said it foresees no more rate hikes this year.

The moves followed months of Trump bashing the Fed for raising rates too much and stomping on his economy, though Chairman Jerome Powell has said repeatedly that politics plays no role in the bank’s decision.

Whatever the case, a much more gentle Fed could slide a floor beneath any decline in Trump’s economy and boost his reelection chances significantly.

Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics and a regular Trump critic, has been road-testing a dozen different economic models for the 2020 race. At this point, Trump wins in all 12 — and quite comfortably in most of them. The Moody’s models look at economic trends at the state level.

“If the election were held today, Trump would win according to the models and pretty handily,” Zandi said. “In three or four of them it would be pretty close. He’s got low gas prices, low unemployment and a lot of other political variables at his back. The only exception is his popularity, which matters a lot. If that falls off a cliff it would make a big difference.” The Moody’s models look at economic trends at the state level and incorporate some political variables including a president’s approval rating.

The Moody’s approach performed well in recent presidential elections, but missed the 2016 result in part because it did not account for a potential drop in Democratic turnout in key swing states. Zandi is trying to correct for that now before rolling out a new model sometime this summer

Klobuchar’s ‘senator next door’ strategy collides with Betomania
By ELENA SCHNEIDER
Trump has already upended many of the rules of presidential politics. His party suffered a drubbing in last year’s midterm elections despite the strong economy, and the yawning gap between how voters view the president and the nation’s economic standing is growing even larger: Presidents typically just aren’t this unpopular when the economic engine is humming along.

Trump this week seized on a new CNN poll that showed more than seven in 10 Americans, or 71 percent, view the U.S. economy as “very good” or “somewhat good.” That was higher than CNN has measured at any point since a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll in Feb. 2001 found 80 percent thought the economy was that robust.

Yet Trump’s approval rating in the poll — which is usually tied closely to the economy — is just 42 percent. And unlike during the late ’90s, when President Bill Clinton’s approval ratings surged ahead of his personal favorability amid major scandal, Trump’s favorable ratings (41 percent in the CNN poll) track closely with his job-approval rating.

Those low scores also apply to many attributes typically seen as desirable in presidents. Just 40 percent say Trump cares about people like them; 34 percent say he is honest and trustworthy; 41 percent say he can manage the government effectively; and 32 percent say he will unite the country, not divide it.

Moreover, even how Americans view the state of the country has become divorced from the economy. In the latest POLITICO/Morning Consult poll, only 36 percent of voters said the U.S. was headed in the right direction, compared with nearly two-thirds, 64 percent, who said it was off on the wrong track.

For the economic models to be correct, voters would have to shrug off much of what they dislike about Trump and decide the strength of the economy makes a change unwise.

Prominent Democrats know that while Trump might seem like a loose cannon faced with the threat of a devastating report from special counsel Robert Mueller, he will likely be a formidable opponent in 2020, especially if the economy remains close to where it is today.

“Despite the fact that Trump is a largely incompetent clown, Democrats should not be overly confident or sanguine that they can beat him,” said Dan Pfeiffer, a top aide to former President Barack Obama. “He is a slight favorite to win. But he barely won last time and it took a Black Swan series of events to make that happen. All Democrats have to do is flip 100,000 or so votes in three states to win and that’s a very doable thing.

The changing faces of Trump

youtu.be/lnrMpKqZtD0

youtu.be/_FLo14GMYos

And the early years:

youtu.be/rFGE3X6Yhj0

The New York Times

Months After John McCain’s Death, Trump Keeps Feud With Him Alive

President Trump continued his criticism of the late Senator John McCain during a speech at a tank plant in Lima, Ohio, on Wednesday.
IMAGE BY SARAH SILBIGER/THE NEW YORK TIMES
By Maggie Haberman, Annie Karni and Michael Tackett
March 20, 2019
LIMA, Ohio — It is an obsession he cannot seem to shake.

Senator John McCain of Arizona has been dead for seven months, but President Trump’s feud with him is very much alive, and in front of a military audience at a tank plant here in Lima, Ohio, on Wednesday, he took it to a new level.

He said he gave Mr. McCain “the funeral he wanted, and I didn’t get ‘thank you,’” exaggerating the role he played in honoring the senator’s death four days before his 82nd birthday.

He blamed him for “a war in the Middle East that McCain pushed so hard.” He said that “McCain didn’t get the job done for our great vets” and the Department of Veterans Affairs. And he was blunt in saying that his animosity toward Mr. McCain was not going to change.

“I have to be honest: I’ve never liked him much,” Mr. Trump said, about 10 minutes into a freewheeling speech that was ostensibly about the resurgence of manufacturing jobs. “Hasn’t been for me. I’ve really — probably never will.”

The long, antagonistic history between the president and Mr. McCain, in his youth a Navy pilot and prisoner of war celebrated for his bravery and later known as a maverick in the Republican Party, dates to the early days of the 2016 presidential campaign. Mr. Trump, who never served in the military, said Mr. McCain was not a war hero, adding, “I like people who weren’t captured.”

Mr. Trump was reacting to the senator’s accusation that he riled up “crazies” with inflammatory remarks about illegal immigration across the Mexican border. His attack on Mr. McCain, the party’s 2008 presidential candidate, horrified his own aides and led Republican leaders to denounce the outsider who was already disrupting their party. It also proved to be an early example of Mr. Trump’s ability to remain undamaged by any self-created controversy.

Now, months after Mr. McCain’s death in August, Mr. Trump suddenly cannot stop talking about his old adversary, outraging Mr. McCain’s supporters and creating another divide — if only temporary — between himself and congressional Republicans.

His attacks began over the weekend, when the president used his Twitter feed to berate Mr. McCain for his role in giving the F.B.I. a dossier of unverified information about Mr. Trump’s connections to Russia that was compiled by a former British spy — a dossier the F.B.I. already had. He brought up Mr. McCain’s vote against repealing the Affordable Care Act. He claimed that Mr. McCain, a former prisoner of war, was “last in his class” at the Naval Academy, when Mr. McCain actually graduated fifth from the bottom.

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On Tuesday, seated in the Oval Office next to President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, Mr. Trump told reporters that he was “never a fan” of Mr. McCain, and never would be. And on Wednesday, Mr. Trump reiterated all those reasons in a diatribe that was part of a week that Mr. Trump seems to have dedicated to airing personal feuds.

He has spent days criticizing George T. Conway III, the husband of Kellyanne Conway, one of his top advisers, who has been raising alarms about the president’s mental health and calling him unfit for office via his Twitter feed. On his way to Ohio, Mr. Trump called Mr. Conway a “whack job,” capping two days of back and forth with the spouse of one of his most loyal and longest-serving aides.

But his relentless fixation on Mr. McCain was more reminiscent of an election-year feud Mr. Trump escalated against a Gold Star father, Khizr Khan, who spoke at the Democratic National Convention, and, brandishing a pocket Constitution, challenged Mr. Trump for smearing the character of Muslims. Republicans once again denounced Mr. Trump when he continued to attack Mr. Khan and his wife, who Mr. Trump implied was forced against her will to stand silently by her husband’s side during the emotional speech.

The feud with Mr. McCain, however, has carried into his presidency, even after the man who was considered an elder statesman of the Senate learned he had brain cancer and eventually died.

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Planning his funeral, Mr. McCain made it clear that the president would not be welcome, leaving Mr. Trump to fume when his two immediate predecessors, Barack Obama and George W. Bush, eulogized Mr. McCain in a service at Washington National Cathedral. The president’s response was to stall on issuing any proclamation of praise, or ordering flags to be flown at half-staff to commemorate the senator’s death.

His posthumous attacks have been cheered at the president’s Make America Great rallies. But at the army tank plant in Lima, where Mr. Trump said a third of the work force is made up of veterans, the denunciations drew no cheers. And they once again resulted in rare criticism from Mr. Trump’s own party.

On Wednesday, Senator Johnny Isakson, Republican of Georgia, called out the president’s string of recent comments about Mr. McCain.

“It’s deplorable what he said,” Mr. Isakson said in an interview with Georgia Public Broadcasting’s “Political Rewind” radio show, adding, “It will be deplorable seven months from now if he says it again, and I will continue to speak out.”

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He joined Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, who had criticized the president on Tuesday. “I can’t understand why the President would, once again, disparage a man as exemplary as my friend John McCain: heroic, courageous, patriotic, honorable, self-effacing, self-sacrificing, empathetic, and driven by duty to family, country, and God,” Mr. Romney wrote on Twitter.

Other Republicans, like Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, however, were more muted in responding to Mr. Trump’s latest attacks, choosing to emphasize their support for Mr. McCain rather than confront the president.

But at least one Democratic presidential candidate used the moment to demand change in the White House.

“This Vietnam vet was brought to tears when hearing the stories of the President going after John McCain this week, as well as the lack of focus on mental health for kids in this country,” Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota, wrote on Twitter, with a picture of her embracing a veteran.

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Mr. McCain’s family, meanwhile, responded in his stead.

“This is a new bizarre low,” Mr. McCain’s daughter, Meghan McCain, said on “The View” on Wednesday. “I will say attacking someone who isn’t here is a bizarre low. My dad’s not here, but I’m sure as hell here.”

She added: “I think if I had told my dad, ‘Seven months after you’re dead, you’re going to be dominating the news and all over Twitter,’ he would think it’s hilarious that our president was so jealous of him that he was dominating the news cycle in death as well.”

Mr. McCain’s widow, Cindy McCain, for her part, shared on Twitter a hateful message she received after Mr. Trump’s most recent attacks, in which the sender wished that Ms. McCain’s daughter “chokes to death.”

Mark Salter, Mr. McCain’s closest political adviser and a harsh critic of the president, said all of Mr. Trump’s personal attacks against critics were of a piece.

“The problem isn’t Trump’s disrespect to John and his family — it’s Trump,” he said. “He’s unfit for the office, and most members of Congress know he is. I hope this latest evidence of that convinces more people that he can’t be ignored.”

Maggie Haberman reported from Lima, and Annie Karni and Michael Tackett from Washington.

Can Trump Survive Mueller?
People predict the president will collapse under the stress of the Mueller investigation. But Trump has teetered on the brink before and never succumbed.

By MICHAEL KRUSE March 22, 2019

Michael Kruse is a senior staff writer for Politico.

“Well,” the newswoman said to Donald Trump, “you’re under a tremendous amount of pressure lately.”

“Why do you say that?” he asked.

It was April 6, 1990, and Paula Zahn on CBS actually had plenty of reasons to think Trump might be feeling anxious. It hadn’t been two months since the hyper-public, tabloid-tawdry revelation that his philandering had shattered his marriage to the mother of his first three children. He and his executives were grappling with the flawed, frantic opening of the newest, gaudiest, most expensive and most debt-bloated of his three casinos in Atlantic City. And reporters who covered money instead of celebrity had started to suss out the unsteadiness of Trump’s overall financial state.

“Both in your professional life and your personal life,” Zahn offered.

She asked how he was doing.

“I feel great,” Trump replied. “I’m doing well.”

Nearly three decades have passed. Even in Trump’s perma-perilous presidency, this is a juncture that pulses with risk. Newly empowered Democrats in Congress are ramping up multiple investigations, and talk of impeachment is impossible to avoid. Looming largest over this tumultuous battlefield, though, is the report special counsel Robert Mueller appears poised to submit to Attorney General William Barr—the culmination of nearly two years of labor and the subject of immeasurable speculation. While Trump often awards himself and his administration “A-plus” grades, many others question whether he will be able to sustain his rosy self-assessment once the details of Mueller’s findings become public.

A composite of Trump images from 1990s, in front of the Trump Taj Mahal, and pictured with both Marla Maples and Ivana Trump.
Trump in the ’90s: Amidst a period of highly-public personal philandering, Donald Trump—pictured bottom left with his first wife Ivana in 1989, the year he began his affair with his to-be second wife Marla Maples, pictured bottom right with their newborn daughter Tiffany in 1993—would open and drive into incredible amounts of debt multiple casinos in New Jersey’s Atlantic City, including the Trump Taj Mahal,.

Every flurry of tweets from the president—and last weekend’s two-day grievance bender against late-night comedy and cable news shows was a particularly strong example—begets new pronouncements that Trump is coming unglued from the strain. George Conway, husband of close Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, hauled out the clinical definition of narcissistic personality disorder to make the case that Trump is not only unfit for office but becoming catastrophically worse. And psychiatrists are speaking with dire predictions about the potential for a deranged person with extraordinary powers to create global mayhem and destruction.

“He has very poor coping mechanisms when he is criticized or when he feels humiliated,” Bandy Lee, a forensic psychiatrist from Yale and the editor of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, the second edition of which is out this month, told me, “and at these points he generally goes into attack mode and he threatens others or tries to get revenge. The Mueller report is of a scale that is probably unlike what we have seen him undergo before.”

Story Continued Below

Worst-case scenario? “Obliterate observing eyes of his humiliation,” Lee said. Meaning? “Destroying the world. That, very quickly, becomes an avenue, a perceived solution … for individuals with his personality structure.”

Make what you will of such medical predictions, but the historical record tells a different story. The back-and-forth with Zahn is an instructive (and comforting?) reminder about overstating Trump’s fragility. The Trump campaign in 2015 and ’16 careened from kill shot to kill shot, of course, and just kept going, right to the White House—and that was not the first time he flashed his ability to mitigate calamity and deftly skirt what might have seemed like an inevitable comeuppance. Whether or not Trump could remain not only financially solvent but reputationally intact was an open question for the entirety of the first half of the 1990s. So many times, he could have been snuffed, stopped, rendered a relative footnote, his place in the history of this country limited to status as a gauche totem of a regrettable epoch of greed. That, needless to say, is not how the tale played out. Trump is many things. A developer. A promoter. A master media manipulator. A grown-old rich kid. The president of the United States. Above all else, though, he is a survivor.

“The ultimate survivor,” former Trump casino executive Jack O’Donnell told me recently.

Trump’s Manhattan Plaza Hotel, left, a luxury yacht, top right, and his 1989 airline Trump Shuttle, bottom left.
Trump’s Trophies: Trump had a tendency to spend on things he couldn’t afford—like his Manhattan Plaza Hotel, left, a luxury yacht, top right, and his 1989 airline Trump Shuttle, bottom left—mostly with borrowed money. | AP Images, AP Photo/Marty Lederhandler, JetPix/Wikimedia Commons

Pullquote reading: “I think he believes that the presidency is too big to fail, too powerful to be taken down. And I think that this is kind of something that he learned in the '90s.”
But it’s not just that Trump has survived that’s important to consider at this moment—it’s how he has done it. Armed with extraordinary audacity, constitutional sangfroid, a stomach for tumult, an acumen for recasting obvious losses into strange sorts of wins, and the prodigious safety net bequeathed by his wealthy, wily father, he has plowed past myriad hazards. And he did it by tying himself tightly to his bankers and lenders in New York and to gaming industry regulators in New Jersey—who let him live large until they couldn’t let him die without fatally wounding themselves. He effectively inhabited hosts, using them to get bigger and bigger in the ’80s until he was practically perversely invincible by the ’90s—not only “too big to fail,” as the late Wayne Barrett once told Susan Glasser and me, but “too big to jail.”

Perhaps his past escapes are the reason he appears oddly calm as most of the country leans forward, awaiting word of bombshells from Mueller. Over the weekend, when outsiders perceived mounting anxiety in Trump’s Twitter barrage, people who spoke to Trump by phone told reporters that “he seemed to be in good spirits.” The volume of tweets, they surmised, was just a product of too much time on his hands in the White House.

His bravado and bluster can’t mask, his critics say, the true jeopardy he faces. The stakes now are too high, the arena too large, the political currents too strong, for Trump to expect the same results. But if he does fail, pinned to account by the weight of evidence uncovered by Mueller, one thing is certain: It will be the first time.

Those who believe in the power of Trump’s survival skills to protect him from even this unprecedented threat draw an analogy between the Republican Party—its members of Congress and especially the Senate—and the institutions that have enabled him in the past.

“The banks were heavily invested in Trump, and they couldn’t have him go down,” former Trump campaign staffer Sam Nunberg told me, “and the Republican Party can’t have him go down.”

“I think he believes that the presidency is too big to fail, too powerful to be taken down,” O’Donnell added. “And I think that this is kind of something that he learned in the ‘90s, where the banks basically said to him, ‘You’re too big to fail, we have to back you.’ And they did it, time and time again, in Atlantic City.”

To be determined in the coming weeks and months: how well those lessons will hold up.

“This is a man who has lived dangerously for decades by flirting with the boundaries of propriety, legality and civility,” Trump biographer Tim O’Brien told me. “And he is now faced, after years and years of getting away with it, with consequences that are far beyond anything he’s encountered before. … The things that I think have allowed him to survive in the past will be of practical, personal use here in terms of him maintaining a stiff upper lip, if he’s able to.” But the more material applicability of the Machiavellian takeaways from his ‘90s scrapes? “I think they’re going to be absolutely of no use if the legal consequences are realized at their full magnitude.”

A composite photo of Trump pictured in 1987 above the section of the Upper West Side that would have become Trump City.
Trump the Builder: The New York real estate mogul, above in 1987, partnered with Hong Kong investors to develop buildings on the Upper West Side, below, that would have been Trump City but were later called Trump Place, until recently tenants voted to remove the president’s name. | Joe McNally/Getty Images, Oliver Morris/Getty Images

Others who know Trump well aren’t so sure.

“No matter what they do, he survives. No matter what they try, he survives,” longtime New York Democratic strategist Hank Sheinkopf told me. “Can Trump survive this? He absolutely can.”

In the middle of 1990, after all, he was more than $3 billion in the red. He had for years spent too much to buy too much, all with mostly borrowed money. The yacht, the airline, Manhattan’s Plaza Hotel. “Trophies,” he called them. And his casinos, first two, now three with the lurching launch of the Trump Taj Mahal, cannibalized each other. Even record rakes of cash weren’t enough to simply service all of Trump’s debt. On the horizon was the first of his six corporate bankruptcies.

“Trump is on his way down—and probably out,” business journalist Allan Sloan wrote that June in Newsday.

People didn’t stop at mere predictions. They also poked fun.

“I envision Donald Trump a year from now doing the ads for stomach-flatteners or ginsu knives on late-night TV. Or as a Worldwide Wrestling Federation commentator,” Gail Collins, then a columnist for the New York Daily News, told David Von Drehle, then a reporter for the Miami Herald.

Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown likened Trump to late-in-life Elvis. “He probably will wind up in that sort of Graceland, you know, wearing a diaper,” she told Steve Kroft of CBS News.

Spy, the puckish satirical magazine and inveterate needler of Trump, in its August 1990 issue took a tongue-in-cheek look at what they foresaw as a sad, middling future for a balding, paunchy Trump. Their crystal ball, though, was not all wrong. They anticipated a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing, and a rough version of reality television, too—and a public offering that would permit Trump to use money from shareholders to make money of his own (“Now YOU can own a piece of the Trump!”).

But beyond the smart set’s schadenfreude were Trump’s real-life results.

After weeks of negotiations, the cluster of 70-some-odd banks that had loaned him billions of dollars gave him an additional $65 million loan. It was the first in a yearslong sequence of bailouts and extensions and breathing-room reprieves. They had loaned him so much money, it was no longer only his problem—it was theirs. He all but dared them to take him down. “He has a good bit of leverage over the institutions,” a Harvard Business School finance professor told the Boston Globe at the time. “His adjusted net worth is minus several hundred million dollars, by my estimate, and he is alive only because his bankers are too red-faced to pull the plug on his life-support system,” the chairman of a money management firm wrote in the New York Post. “The most important thing,” an official in the office of one of his lenders said in The American Banker, “is to make Trump survive.”

A screenshot from the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape and Trump’s election acceptance speech.
Trump the Candidate: Despite a number of incidents that might have taken any other candidate down—including the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape, pictured above, in which he swaggered about sexual assault—Trump was elected president on Nov. 8, 2016 and delivered his acceptance speech, pictured below, in

A pull quote reading: “With Trump, you just think, ‘OK, this is it. This is it, you know?’ He’s bankrupt, people are laughing at him, he’s this, he’s that–but it’s never over for him.”
The banks over time clawed back a passel of Trump’s possessions (the yacht, the planes, the Plaza), but they didn’t take his casinos—because they didn’t want them. “The last thing they want to do is manage casinos,” an analyst from Moody’s Investors explained to the Associated Press. And the last thing the gaming officials and city leaders in New Jersey wanted was to have them close. The relationship was the same as with the banks back in New York. Desperate to prop up the flagging gaming industry, looking continually to the casinos to inject into the struggling seaside town at least the appearance of vitality and prosperity, they needed Trump as much as Trump needed them. A prerequisite to owning a casino in Atlantic City, understandably, was financial stability, and regulators could have stripped Trump of his—repeatedly—but of course didn’t. Trump’s casinos amounted to roughly a third of the market. “The whole economic development of the town,” said O’Donnell, “it was dependent on this. And so they just—they caved.”

Trump had managed to turn an apparent weakness into a significant advantage. The banks put him on an allowance … of $450,000 a month. The Trump Tower triplex was safe.

“The man is a Sherman tank in a Brioni suit,” New York Post gossip columnist and Trump pal Cindy Adams told USA Today.

“Hey, look, I had a cold spell from 1990 to ’91,” he said in 1994 in New York. “I was beat up in business and in my personal life. … But you learn that you’re either the toughest, meanest piece of shit in the world, or you just crawl into a corner, put your finger in your mouth, and say, ‘I want to go home.’” And Trump didn’t want to go home.

He wasn’t entirely in the clear, though, until 1995 and ’96, when his need for money finally superseded his desire for absolute control and he took his casinos public. He sat in his office and looked at O’Brien, then a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. He was “back,” he said. People bought stock in Trump and lost money in droves. Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts proved to be a good investment for just one person—Trump. “It was to get other people to get him out of that debt,” a former member of the Trump Organization told me. In addition to his selling of his stake in his foundation-laying Grand Hyatt and tens of millions of dollars of wrangled, well-timed loans from family trusts, it’s what saved Trump—along with a partnership with Hong Kong investors that turned his long-held plot of land on the Upper West Side that always cost him money into one that began to actually make him money. Construction on what would have been Trump City and now would be called Trump Place (and then wouldn’t) started in 1997. And two years later, in front of some of the buildings, Trump let the magician David Blaine get “buried alive” for a week in a plexiglass coffin. It was, said Blaine, a stunt famed illusionist Harry Houdini always wanted to do. For Trump, the publicity ploy made for an apt ode to the art of escape.

Trumpologists and culture critics frequently cite showman P.T. Barnum as Trump’s preeminent antecedent, but another, less noted inspiration was Houdini, the author of a forthcoming Houdini biography told me. “He always found—especially when it just seemed like it was over for him—he found some new chapter, and some new way to sort of get his success going again,” Joe Posnanski said. “He created this handcuff act, and the handcuff act becomes huge, and then that sort of runs its course. And then he comes up with the milk can, and the milk can sort of runs its course. And he comes up with the Chinese water torture cell, and that runs his course. And he starts hanging upside down and escaping from straitjackets.”

It makes Posnanski think of Trump.

“With Trump, you just think, ‘OK, this is it. This is totally it, you know?’” he said. “He’s bankrupt, people are laughing at him, he’s this, he’s that—but it’s never over for him.”

“Trump,” said Sheinkopf, the Democratic strategist, “is incessantly pulling Houdini acts.”

Recall all the “gaffes” that were to have torpedoed his indelicate, unorthodox 2016 presidential bid—peaking, of course, with the “Access Hollywood” tape revealed in early October in which he swaggered about sexual assault.


Those who predict Trump will ultimately fall don’t disagree that he has benefited from well-placed safety nets before. This time is different, they insist, because his high-wire act is being performed at unprecedented heights.

A composite image of Robert Mueller, Roger Stone and Michael Cohen
Under Investigation: An investigation run by Robert Mueller, left, has hung over Trump’s presidency for nearly two years and led to the arrest of multiple of the president’s associates, including his former attorney Michael Cohen, top right, and his long-time advisor Roger Stone, bottom right. | Zach Gibson/Bloomberg via Getty Images, Alex Wong/Getty Images, ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP/Getty Images

Pullquote reading: “This is a man who has lived dangerously for decades by flirting with the boundaries of propriety, legality and civility. And he is now faced … with consequences that are far beyond anything he’s encountered before."
“Significantly higher,” O’Brien said. “He’s been on a financial tightrope, and a familial tightrope, but he’s never been on a legal tightrope like this one. Not even close. This is fundamentally new because of the legal consequences, and those legal consequences don’t end with the filing of the Mueller report. He still has issues that are still very serious in the Southern District of New York; in some ways, they may be more serious than the Mueller investigation in terms of potential consequences and how far they dig into his world.”

Bandy Lee is worried. The forensic psychiatrist from Yale has studied thousands of people with the mental disorders she perceives Trump has. Their behavior, untreated, had predictable and unpleasant results. She foresees a similar unraveling for Trump, albeit with a wild card she has never encountered in any of her patients: the awesome power of the commander in chief.

“Under stress, we can see the limits of one’s ability to cope, and we can see that the president has reached his limits fairly rapidly, in terms of not being able to sit with the advancing special counsel’s investigation. You can see there is a heightening of activity and creation of crises, distractions, if you will, in order to distract both themselves as well as the public away from the bad news he is continuing to receive,” Lee said.

“He has very poor coping mechanisms when he is criticized or when he feels humiliated,” she continued, “and at these points, he generally goes into attack mode, and he threatens others or tries to get revenge.”

Our conversation took place before Trump resurrected his feud with the late John McCain, but I couldn’t help thinking of Lee’s warning as I listened to the president on Wednesday belabor his grudge before a crowd of workers who were expecting some good news on the economy, not a hit job on a war hero. Maybe this, just like the days of name-calling with George Conway, really are the signs of a mind in turmoil.

Trump is pictured leaving the White House.
Trump the Survivor: President Trump departs the White House earlier this year, while talk of his impeachment by a newly-Democratic House is impossible to avoid. He’s teetered on the brink before and never succumbed. Will he be able to do it again? | Win McNamee/Getty Images

And yet—and this is just the reality of the record—Trump shrewdly, bullheadedly, even blithely pushed past crises in the ‘90s that would have felled almost anybody else. And then, perhaps convinced of his own invincibility, he blew through a litany of accepted social and political checkpoints on his way to the Oval Office and his high-backed chair behind the Resolute desk.

“Pressure,” Trump said in an extended interview in Playboy in 1990, “doesn’t upset my sleep. … I like throwing balls into the air—and I dream like a baby.”

That same year, on June 14, he turned 44. The next day, he missed about $45 million in debt payments for his casino called Trump Castle. “He is absolutely on knife’s edge,” James Grant, the editor of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, told Newsday. The day after that, Trump had a party. More than a thousand employees in Atlantic City showed up at the bash on the boardwalk, according to news reports. “We love you, Donald!” they cried. He was presented with a chocolate cupcake, a 12-page birthday card and an 8-foot-by-10-foot portrait of himself.

“Nobody wants to write the positives,” Trump told the cheering crowd. “Over the years, I’ve surprised a lot of people. The largest surprise is yet to come.”

© 2019 POLITICO

Space

NASA rocket becomes Boeing’s latest headache as Trump demands moon mission
By Christian Davenport, Joel Achenbach

March 22, 2019 at 8:39 AM

Boeing senior executives arrived at NASA headquarters two weeks ago for what they knew would be a tense meeting. The rocket they’ve been building for NASA was behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget. Worse yet, there was no way it was going to be ready for a scheduled maiden launch in June 2020.

One estimate had the rocket launch as late as November 2021, and NASA’s leaders were furious, according to people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid about sensitive negotiations. President Trump and Vice President Pence wanted NASA to pull off something big and bold with human spaceflight before the 2020 election: sending a crewless capsule around the moon in a precursor to an eventual return of American astronauts to the lunar surface.

But the latest delays would push the flight well past the election.

“We’re not doing this,” a dismayed NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine told the Boeing team. “We’re going to create an alternative solution. All options are on the table.”

This meeting, reported here for the first time, is the backstory to Bridenstine’s March 13 bombshell dropped during testimony before the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee. He said that although NASA still steadfastly supports the massive rocket, known as the Space Launch System (SLS), the agency would consider sidelining it and instead using commercially available rockets for the mission known as Exploration Mission-1 (EM-1).

Bridenstine’s comments at the Senate hearing touched off a political maelstrom — angering Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), the chairman of the appropriations committee and SLS’s chief benefactor. Critics say the latest machinations are yet another example of how political pressures have sustained the lucrative rocket program for years, as it has maintained Congressional support no matter how high the costs or lengthy the delays.

In the space world, Bridenstine’s announcement set off shock waves. It not only signaled a potentially radical change in NASA’s plans to return to the moon, but was a major blow to NASA’s flagship rocket program and its main contractor, Boeing. The announcement came as the company has been under scrutiny for the way it has handled the crashes of two of its commercial airplanes that killed 346 people.

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said that although NASA still steadfastly supports the massive rocket, known as the Space Launch System (SLS), the agency would consider sidelining it and instead using commercially available rockets for the mission. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Bridenstine’s announcement prompted critics of the program to question whether NASA truly needs a government-owned heavy-lift rocket. The private sector is already producing such rockets. And although they are not as powerful as the SLS, they’re cheaper to fly, with reusable boosters.

Trump’s latest budget request states that a commercial rocket, not the SLS as previously planned, would be used to send a robotic probe to Jupiter’s moon Europa.

The request also says commercial rockets would be used to put up a new outpost in lunar orbit, called the Gateway. Bridenstine testified last week that commercial rockets also could send astronauts to the Gateway — another presumed SLS function. And NASA has abandoned a much-derided mission to haul an asteroid to lunar orbit to be inspected by astronauts launched via the SLS.

“This is a rocket that has been looking for a mission,” said Lori Garver, who served as NASA’s deputy administrator under President Barack Obama.

For years, Boeing has long faced criticism for its handling of the program. Last year, a report from the NASA inspector general was withering in its criticism of the company, saying it already has spent $5.3 billion and is expected to burn through the remaining money by early this year, three years too soon, without delivering a single rocket stage. The report said problems at Boeing have led to a 2½-year delay and $4 billion in cost overruns.

“Boeing officials have consistently underestimated the scope of the work to be performed and thus the size and skills of the workforce required,” the report stated.

John Shannon, Boeing’s SLS program manager, said the company acknowledges widespread problems but recently has shown progress.

“We’re late and I completely own that, but we are dialed in now and the team is producing extremely well,” Shannon said. “I have high confidence that we’re going to come out with an amazing capability by the end of the year, and I can’t wait to get to that point.”

Related: Companies in the cosmos: The new space race

In 2017, the agency’s watchdog reported in an audit that NASA had spent more than $15 billion on SLS, Orion, and the ground systems needed between 2012 and 2016. And it estimated that the total would reach up to $23 billion.

Construction of the rocket and the Orion spacecraft is spread out so that every state has jobs connected to the program. In all, SLS supports about 25,000 jobs nationwide, with a total economic impact of $4.7 billion, according to NASA.

That has helped the rocket win support among members of Congress, but also has fueled critics who have dubbed it the “Senate Launch System.” In addition to primary contractor Boeing, key contractors are Aerojet Rocketdyne, Northrop Grumman and the United Launch Alliance.

No state has benefited more than Shelby’s state, Alabama, home to NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville. The program has created about 13,000 jobs and has pumped $2.4 billion into the state’s economy.

So when the NASA administrator floated the idea of sidelining the rocket, Shelby released a statement saying: “While I agree that the delay in the SLS launch schedule is unacceptable, I firmly believe that SLS should launch the Orion.”

Privately, his aides angrily chastised NASA officials.

The next day, Bridenstine reiterated his support for the SLS program in a blog post, saying the agency is “committed to building and flying SLS.” The day after that, he tweeted: “Good news: The @NASA and Boeing teams are working overtime to accelerate the launch schedule of @NASA_SLS.”

‘Over budget … and unexecutable’

The SLS was born in the ashes of an earlier rocket program. Called Constellation, the program emerged under President George W. Bush and would send Americans back to the moon, and eventually to Mars. One element of the plan was the creation of a new, heavy-lift rocket, the Ares V, a modern successor to the Saturn V. It would hurl a new capsule, Orion, to the moon.

When Obama entered office, the Constellation program was struggling, and administration officials called it “over budget, behind schedule, off course and ‘unexecutable.’ ”

Obama killed Constellation in 2010, and directed NASA to aim for an asteroid and Mars instead of the moon. But the move once again angered Shelby, whose state is home to the Marshall Spaceflight Center, where much of the work on Constellation would have been based.

"The president’s proposed NASA budget begins the death march for the future of U.S. human spaceflight,” he said at the time. “If this budget is enacted, NASA will no longer be an agency of innovation and hard science. It will be an agency of pipe dreams and fairy talks.”

Although the administration terminated the moon plan, it found it politically impossible to kill all of the projects already pouring billions of dollars into coffers of major aerospace contractors.

“The president’s proposed NASA budget begins the death march for the future of U.S. human spaceflight,” Shelby said at the time.

A quartet of powerful senators who have NASA space bases in their states — Shelby, Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.) and Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Tex.) — protected the heavy-lift rocket as well as the Orion capsule. They pushed through legislation mandating construction of a heavy-lift rocket and even dictating how it would be designed, including the use of legacy space shuttle hardware.

Related: The White House is in such a hurry to get to the moon that NASA is considering sidelining its major rocket to make it happen

With Constellation’s moon mission canceled, the precise purpose — the actual destinations — of the SLS and Orion became murky. The SLS clearly existed to launch Orion. But to where?

Throughout this process, the big rocket and Orion have crawled toward completion. NASA has been spending more than $3 billion a year on SLS and Orion. Both programs have faced delays.

Solid rocket boosters for the Space Launch System will be stacked at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral. (Mike Brown/Reuters)
The SLS has taken so long to build that it arguably is technologically obsolete, industry officials say. Much of the hardware is derived from the space shuttle, developed in the 1970s.

Meanwhile, a vibrant commercial launch industry, with Boeing, Lockheed and Northrop Grumman, is facing competition from relatively new entrants such as SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk, and Blue Origin, founded by Jeffrey P. Bezos (who owns The Washington Post). SpaceX has disrupted the launch industry by building largely reusable rockets and selling them at a discount: $62 million for its Falcon 9 and as low as $90 million for its Falcon Heavy.

By contrast, NASA officials have said that each launch of the SLS, a far more powerful rocket, would cost about $1 billion.

Garver, the former NASA deputy administrator, said that, if nothing else, these programs have delivered jobs to aerospace companies and NASA centers.

“Given that the purpose was to employ people and keep existing contracts going — they have delivered,” she said in an email.

Deep space aspirations

Since he was narrowly confirmed as NASA administrator a year ago, Bridenstine has been a steadfast supporter of SLS, a commitment he reiterated at the Senate hearing last week. He praised SLS and said it remains “a critical capability” for the U.S. space program.

The SLS is supposed to be the backbone of NASA’s deep space aspirations. But it still hasn’t flown, and the Trump administration is in a hurry to get to the moon.

At the Senate hearing last week, Bridenstine said NASA wanted to stick to its plan to launch no later than June 2020.

“Sir, if we tell you and others that we’re going to launch in June of 2020 around the moon … I think it can be done. We as an agency need to consider all options to accomplish that objective," he said.

To meet the 2020 timeline, Bridenstine said the agency was looking at changing the mission profile, bypassing SLS for a pair of commercial rockets. Instead of launching Orion on a trajectory straight to the moon, it would look at the possibility of flying it to orbit the Earth. Then, on a second commercial rocket, NASA would launch a propulsion module. The Orion spacecraft would dock with it, and the propulsion module would shoot Orion to the moon.

Bridenstine’s blog post calls that option “not optimum or sustainable” and says having two rockets involved “adds complexity and risk that is undesirable.”

Boeing has said it is examining how to speed up work on SLS, including bypassing a months-long test program for the rocket’s first stage that was to occur at the Stennis Space Center and shipping it directly to the Kennedy Space Center.

Earlier this month, Jody Singer, the director of the Marshall Space Flight Center, acknowledged that the program was having challenges and that its maiden launch would need to be delayed, according to SpaceNews.

That didn’t faze Shelby, who introduced Singer at the luncheon.

“As chairman of the appropriations committee, I have more than a passing interest in what NASA does," he said, according to the news site. "And I have a little parochial interest, too, in what they do in Huntsville, Alabama. Jody, you keep doing what you’re doing. We’ll keep funding you.”

Christian Davenport covers the defense and space industries for The Washington Post’s Financial desk. He joined The Post in 2000 and has served as an editor on the Metro desk and as a reporter covering military affairs. He is the author of “The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos” (PublicAffairs, 2018).

Joel Achenbach covers science and politics for the National desk. He has been a staff writer for The Post since 1990.

© 1996-2019 The Washington Post

AP NEWS

The Latest: Trump lawyers want early look at Mueller report
33 minutes ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Latest on special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation (all times local):

6:40 p.m.

President Donald Trump’s lawyers want an early look at special counsel Robert Mueller’s findings before they are made public.

That’s according to Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s attorney. He says Trump’s legal team hasn’t received any assurances that they’ll get the early look they want, though.

Mueller notified Attorney General William Barr on Friday that he had concluded his probe of Russian election interference and any possible coordination with Donald Trump’s campaign.

Now, Barr will review the findings and determine how much to make public.


6:38 p.m.

Special counsel Robert Mueller will be concluding his government service in the “coming days.”

That’s according to special counsel spokesman Peter Carr.

Carr says in a statement that a “small number” of the office’s staff will remain “to assist in closing the operations of the office.” He did not provide a specific timeline for when that might occur. As of Friday, 11 prosecutors were still employed by the special counsel’s office.

The statement comes just hours after Mueller turned in his confidential report closing his probe of Russian election interference and possible coordination with Donald Trump’s campaign.


6:35 p.m.

House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff says his panel will issue subpoenas if special counsel Robert Mueller’s report — and its underlying evidence — are not released to Congress for further review.

The California Democrat said on CNN that Congress needs to know “and so does the country.”

He said he’s willing to subpoena Mueller as well as Attorney General William Barr, if needed, to push for disclosure.

House Democrats now see the Mueller investigation as a starting point for their own probes of President Donald Trump and Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Mueller delivered his final report to Barr on Friday.


6:15 p.m.

One top Republican, Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, says the findings of the special counsel’s Russia investigation must be made public to end the “speculation and innuendo” that hangs over President Donald Trump’s administration.

The former Judiciary Committee chairman says while it’s clear the Russians “tried to meddle in our democratic processes,” he still hasn’t seen any evidence of collusion.

Grassley says Attorney General William Barr Attorney General must provide the findings from special counsel Robert Mueller’s report to Congress and the American people “to finally put an end to the speculation and innuendo that has loomed over this administration since its earliest days.”


5:58 p.m.

Special counsel Robert Mueller is not recommending any further indictments in the Russia investigation.

That’s according to a Justice Department official who spoke on condition of anonymity because the person wasn’t authorized to speak publicly about the confidential recommendation.

Mueller notified Attorney General William Barr on Friday that he had concluded his probe of Russian election interference and any possible coordination with Donald Trump’s campaign.

—By Eric Tucker


5:57 p.m.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham expects that he and the panel’s top Democrat, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, will be briefed “in the coming days” about special counsel Robert Mueller’s report.

The South Carolina Republican says he was notified by the Justice Department that Mueller’s report has been turned over and that Attorney General William Barr “will pursue as much transparency as possible.”

Graham says he expects to be “more thoroughly” briefed. He says he believed it was important for Mueller to do his job “without interference, and that has been accomplished.”


5:55 p.m.

Attorney General William Barr says the Justice Department did not block special counsel Robert Mueller from taking any action during his Russia investigation.

Barr is required to disclose to Congress any instance in which he or Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein decided an action Mueller proposed should not be pursued.

Barr said in his letter to members of Congress on Friday that “there were no such instances during the Special Counsel’s investigation.”

The attorney general notified four key lawmakers that he may update them over the weekend.


5:50 p.m.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says he welcomes news that special counsel Robert Mueller has completed his investigation into Russia’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 elections.

McConnell says he and other Republicans have long believed that Russia poses a significant threat to American interests, adding that he hopes Mueller’s report will “help inform and improve our efforts to protect our democracy.”

The Kentucky Republican says he hopes that Attorney General William Barr, who received Mueller’s report on Friday, will “provide as much information as possible” on the findings, “with as much openness and transparency as possible.”

Georgia Rep. Doug Collins, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, said he expects the Justice Department to release the report to the committee without delay “and to the maximum extent permitted by law.”


5:40 p.m.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Chuck Schumer say it’s “imperative” to make the full report from Special Counsel Robert Mueller public.

The top congressional Democrats say, “The American people have a right to the truth.”

In a joint statement, they say Attorney Gneral William Barr must not give President Donald Trump his lawyers or staff any “sneak preview” of the findings or evidence.

“The White House must not be allowed to interfere in decisions about what parts of those findings or evidence are made public,” they say.

__

5:39 p.m.

The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee says Congress should receive the full report from special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.

New York Democrat Jerrold Nadler says in a statement that “We look forward to getting the full Mueller report and related materials.” He adds that “transparency and the public interest demand nothing less” because the public needs to have faith in the rule of law.

Attorney General William Barr wrote in a letter to Nadler and other committee chairmen that Mueller had finished his investigation and delivered his report to Barr. The attorney general said he would update Congress as soon as this weekend, but it wasn’t clear now much of the report would be shared with lawmakers or with the public.

__

5:38 p.m.

Democratic presidential candidates are demanding that Attorney General William Barr make Robert Mueller’s report on Russia public.

Minutes after Barr notified members of Congress Friday that Mueller had delivered his report, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts tweeted that the attorney general should “release the Mueller report to the American public. Now.”

Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey tweeted that the report “should be made public immediately.”

The Trump administration’s handling of Mueller’s report foretells big fights to come, from the presidential campaign trail to, in all likelihood, the federal courts.

__

5:25 p.m.

President Donald Trump’s lawyers say they are “pleased” that special counsel Robert Mueller has delivered his report on the Russia investigation.

Rudy Giuliani and Jay Sekulow issued their joint statement within minutes of Attorney General William Barr’s letter to key members of Congress confirming the delivery and suggesting he could update lawmakers as soon as this weekend.

They say: “We’re pleased that the Office of Special Counsel has delivered its report to the Attorney General pursuant to the regulations. Attorney General Barr will determine the appropriate next steps.”

Mueller’s report, still confidential, sets the stage for big public fights to come, including in all likelihood, in federal court. It’s not clear how much of the report will become public or provided to Congress.

__

5:20 p.m.

Responding to the release of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report, the White House says the next steps are “up to Attorney General (William) Barr.”

White House press secretary Sarah Sanders says “we look forward to the process taking its course.”

She adds, “The White House has not received or been briefed on the Special Counsel’s report.”

For 22 months, Mueller has probed allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 election and other potential misdeeds by those in President Donald Trump’s orbit.

Barr has said he will provide updates on Mueller’s still-confidential findings to Congress as soon as this weekend.

__

5:15 p.m.

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s report concluding the Russia investigation was delivered by a security officer early Friday afternoon to the office of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

That’s according to Justice Department spokeswoman Kerri Kupec. It was then delivered within minutes to Attorney General William Barr.

The White House was notified around 4:35-4:40 p.m. that the Justice Department had received the report.

The letter was scheduled to be delivered at 5 p.m. to staff members on Capitol Hill.

Rosenstein was expected to call Mueller on Friday to thank him for his work in the last two years.

__

5:07 p.m.

Attorney General William Barr says he could update Congress as early as this weekend about special counsel Robert Mueller’s findings in the Russia investigation.

The Justice Department confirmed late Friday that Barr received Mueller’s final report. The report concludes Mueller’s nearly two-year-long investigation of Russian election interference and possible coordination with President Donald Trump’s campaign.

__

5:03 p.m.

Special counsel Robert Mueller has concluded his investigation into Russian election interference and possible coordination with associates of President Donald Trump.

The Justice Department says Mueller delivered his final report Friday to Attorney General William Barr, who is reviewing it.

Mueller’s report, still confidential, sets the stage for big public fights to come. The next steps are up to Trump’s attorney general, to Congress and, in all likelihood, federal courts.

It’s not clear how much of the report will become public or provided to Congress. Barr has said he will write his own report summarizing Mueller’s findings.

The nearly two-year probe has shadowed Trump’s presidency and resulted in felony charges against 34 people including six people who served on Trump’s campaign.

Smart systems are poised to dominate the retail space by 2021 – meaning certain precautions have become necessary.

Hopes shifting as Republicans, Democrats wait for Mueller
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump has been calling the Russia probe a witch hunt for two years. But now, Trump and his allies are starting to see it as something potentially very different:…

Now here is an abrupt, about face policy turnaround!!!

Trump will remove new North Korea-related sanctions because he ‘likes’ Kim Jong Un
Jacob Pramuk | @jacobpramuk
Published 5 Hours Ago Updated 3 Hours Ago
CNBC.com
President Donald Trump says he will remove new North Korea-related sanctions announced only on Thursday.
The White House says he made the sudden move because he “likes” North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.
The U.S. is pushing North Korea to abandon its nuclear and missile programs.
US President Donald Trump (R) gestures as he meets with North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un (L) at the start of their historic US-North Korea summit, at the Capella Hotel on Sentosa island in Singapore on June 12, 2018.
Saul Loeb | AFP | Getty Images
US President Donald Trump (R) gestures as he meets with North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un (L) at the start of their historic US-North Korea summit, at the Capella Hotel on Sentosa island in Singapore on June 12, 2018.
President Donald Trump said Friday that he would scrap action his administration took only a day earlier to crack down on companies accused of helping North Korea evade sanctions.

“It was announced today by the U.S. Treasury that additional large scale Sanctions would be added to those already existing Sanctions on North Korea,” the president tweeted on Friday, though the Treasury announcement he appeared to reference took place Thursday and did not involve “large scale” sanctions. “I have today ordered the withdrawal of those additional Sanctions!”

In explaining the president’s sudden announcement, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said, “President Trump likes Chairman Kim and he doesn’t think these sanctions will be necessary.” Trump’s tweet and the press secretary’s clarification of it sent waves of confusion throughout Washington, from the Pentagon to the White House itself.

On Thursday, Treasury designated two China-based shipping companies that it said has aided Pyongyang in circumventing U.S. and international sanctions. The U.S. and its allies have used those economic measures to push North Korea to dismantle its nuclear and missile programs.

Trump and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un have met face to face twice, but left a summit in Vietnam last month without reaching a deal on denuclearization. Since the summit, reports have emerged of new activity at a North Korean missile research center and rocket site.

Trump’s surprise reversal Friday marks a departure from his administration’s messaging a day earlier. In a tweet Thursday after the Treasury’s announcement, White House National Security Advisor John Bolton said “everyone should take notice and review their own activities to ensure that they are not involved in North Korea’s sanctions evasion.”

Since exchanging explosive rhetoric with Kim during his first year in office, Trump has aimed to assuage his North Korean counterpart as he pushes for an agreement to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula.

The president has also tried to tread carefully around China as he tries to reach a trade deal with Beijing and end a potentially devastating trade conflict. The U.S. has viewed getting Beijing to pull back its support for North Korea as crucial to getting the isolated regime to abandon its nuclear ambitions.

A Treasury Department spokesman did not immediately respond to a request to comment on the president’s tweet. The Pentagon referred all queries about it to the White House.

© 2019 CNBC LLC. All Rights Reserved. A Division of NBCUniversal

The New York Times

Mueller Delivers Report on Trump-Russia Investigation to Attorney General

The special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, has conducted an extensive investigation into Russian efforts to sway the outcome of the 2016 presidential race. Here is the story of how it all started.

By Sharon LaFraniere and Katie Benner
March 22, 2019
WASHINGTON — The special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, on Friday delivered a report on his inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 election to Attorney General William P. Barr, the Justice Department said, bringing to a close an investigation that has consumed the nation and cast a shadow over President Trump for nearly two years.

Mr. Barr told congressional leaders in a letter that he may brief them on the special counsel’s “principal conclusions” as early as this weekend, a surprisingly fast turnaround for a report anticipated for months. The attorney general said he “remained committed to as much transparency as possible.”

In an apparent endorsement of an investigation that Mr. Trump has relentlessly attacked as a “witch hunt,” Mr. Barr said Justice Department officials never had to intervene to keep him from taking an inappropriate or unwarranted step. The department’s regulations would have required Mr. Barr to inform the leaders of the House and Senate Judiciary committees about any such interventions in his letter.

A senior Justice Department official said that Mr. Mueller would not recommend new indictments, a statement aimed at ending speculation that Mr. Trump or other key figures might be charged down the line. With department officials stressing that Mr. Mueller’s inquiry was over and his office closing, the question for both Mr. Trump’s critics and defenders was whether the prosecutors condemned the president’s behavior in their report, exonerated him — or neither. The president’s lawyers were already girding for a possible fight over whether they could assert executive privilege to keep parts of the report secret.

[What’s next? We break it down as well as the major moments in the case. And here’s the latest reaction to the news.]

Since Mr. Mueller’s appointment in May 2017, his team has focused on how Russian operatives sought to sway the outcome of the 2016 presidential race and whether anyone tied to the Trump campaign, wittingly or unwittingly, cooperated with them. While the inquiry, started months earlier by the F.B.I., unearthed a far-ranging Russian influence operation, no public evidence emerged that the president or his aides illegally assisted it.

Nonetheless, the damage to Mr. Trump and those in his circle has been extensive. A half-dozen former Trump aides were indicted or convicted of crimes, mostly for lying to federal investigators or Congress. Others remain under investigation in cases that Mr. Mueller’s office handed off to federal prosecutors in New York and elsewhere. Dozens of Russian intelligence officers or citizens, along with three Russian companies, were charged in cases that are likely to languish in court because the defendants cannot be extradited to the United States.

Republicans immediately seized upon the news that no more indictments are expected as a vindication of Mr. Trump and his campaign. Those reports “confirm what we’ve known all along: There was never any collusion with Russia,” Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the second-highest-ranking House Republican, said in a statement.

Image
The letter that William P. Barr, the attorney general, sent to Congress.
Democrats, including some of those hoping to supplant Mr. Trump in the White House in the 2020 election, insisted that Mr. Mueller’s full report be made public, including the underlying evidence. In a joint statement, Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the top Senate Democrat, warned Mr. Barr not to allow the White House a “sneak preview” of the document.

“The White House must not be allowed to interfere in decisions about what parts of those findings or evidence are made public,” they said.

Not since Watergate has a special prosecutor’s inquiry so mesmerized the American public. Polls have shown that most Americans want to know its findings, and the House unanimously passed a nonbinding resolution to publicize the report.

Mr. Barr’s letter said he would decide what to release after consulting with Mr. Mueller and Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general who has overseen his investigation. Justice Department officials emphasized that the White House had been kept at a distance.

Only a handful of law enforcement officials have seen the report, said Kerri Kupec, a department spokeswoman.

Although a White House lawyer was notified that Mr. Mueller had delivered it to Mr. Barr, no White House official has seen the report or been briefed on it, according to Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary. “The next steps are up to Attorney General Barr, and we look forward to the process taking its course,” she said.

Rudolph W. Giuliani, one of the president’s personal lawyers, said he planned to remain in Washington over the weekend in part because Mr. Barr might update Congress on Mr. Mueller’s findings.

He sidestepped a question about whether the president’s lawyers were seeking to review the report before any of it becomes public. White House lawyers have been preparing for the possibility they may need to argue some material is protected by executive privilege, especially if the report discusses whether the president’s interactions with his top aides or legal advisers are evidence of obstruction of justice.

Mueller Has Delivered His Report. Here’s What We Already Know. More than two years of criminal indictments and steady revelations about Trump campaign contacts with Russians reveal the scope of the special counsel investigation.
Even though Mr. Mueller’s report is complete, some aspects of his inquiry remain active and may be overseen by the same prosecutors once they are reassigned to their old jobs in the Justice Department. For instance, recently filed court documents suggest that investigators are still examining why the former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort turned over campaign polling data in 2016 to a Russian associate who prosecutors said was tied to Russian intelligence.

Mr. Mueller looked extensively at whether Mr. Trump obstructed justice to protect himself or his associates. But despite months of negotiations, prosecutors were unable to personally interview the president.

Mr. Trump’s lawyers insisted that he respond only to written questions from the special counsel. Even though under current Justice Department policy, a sitting president cannot be indicted, Mr. Trump’s lawyers worried that his responses in an oral interview could bring political repercussions, including impeachment, or put him in legal jeopardy once he is out of office.

Mr. Trump has helped make Mr. Mueller a household name, attacking his investigation an average of about twice a day as an unfair, politically motivated attempt to invalidate his election. He never forgave former Attorney General Jeff Sessions for recusing himself from the Russia inquiry, an action that cleared the way for his deputy, Mr. Rosenstein, to appoint Mr. Mueller.

Mr. Trump reiterated his attacks on the special counsel this week, saying Mr. Mueller decided “out of the blue” to write a report, ignoring that regulations require him to do so. But the president also said the report should be made public because of “tens of millions” of Americans would want to know what it contains.

“Let people see it,” Mr. Trump said. “There was no collusion. There was no obstruction. There was no nothing.”

In court, the evidence amassed by the Mueller team has held up. Every defendant who is not still awaiting trial either pleaded guilty or was convicted by a jury. Although no American has been charged with illegally plotting with the Russians to tilt the election, Mr. Mueller uncovered a web of lies by former Trump aides.

Five of them were found to have deceived federal investigators or Congress about their interactions with Russians during the campaign or the transition. They includes Mr. Manafort; Michael T. Flynn, the president’s first national security adviser; and Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former lawyer and longtime fixer. A sixth former adviser, Roger J. Stone Jr. is to stand trial in November on charges of lying to Congress.

Glimpses of the Mystery That Is the Mueller Investigation Here are some pieces of the jigsaw puzzle. The full picture is missing.
Those who know Mr. Mueller, a former F.B.I. director, had predicted a concise, legalistic report devoid of opinions — nothing like the 445-page treatise that Ken Starr, who investigated President Bill Clinton, produced in 1998. Operating under a now-defunct statute that governed independent counsels, Mr. Starr had far more leeway than Mr. Mueller to set his own investigative boundaries and to render judgments.

[Make sense of the people, issues and ideas shaping American politics with our newsletter.]

The regulations that governed Mr. Mueller, who is under the supervision of the Justice Department, only required him to explain his decisions to either seek or decline to seek criminal charges in a confidential report to the attorney general. The attorney general was then required to notify the leadership of the House and Senate judiciary committees.

Despite pledging transparency, Mr. Barr may be reluctant to release the part of Mr. Mueller’s report that may be of most interest: who the special counsel declined to prosecute and why, especially if Mr. Trump is on that list.

The department’s longstanding practice, with rare exceptions, is not to identify people who were merely investigative targets to avoid unfairly tainting their reputations, especially because they would have no chance to defend themselves in a court of law. Mr. Rosenstein, who has overseen Mr. Mueller’s work and may have a say in what is released, is a firm believer in that principle.

In a May 2017 letter that the president seized upon as justification for his decision to fire James B. Comey as F.B.I. director, Mr. Rosenstein severely criticized Mr. Comey for announcing during the previous year that Hillary Clinton, then a presidential candidate, would not be charged with a crime for mishandling classified information as secretary of state. Releasing “derogatory information about the subject of a declined criminal investigation,” Mr. Rosenstein wrote, is “a textbook example of what federal prosecutors and agents are taught not to do.”

Weighing that principle against the public’s right to know is even more fraught in the president’s case. If Mr. Mueller declined to pursue criminal charges against Mr. Trump, he might have been guided not by lack of evidence, but by the Justice Department’s legal opinions that a sitting president cannot be indicted. The department’s Office of Legal Counsel has repeatedly advised that the stigma and burden of being under prosecution would damage the president’s ability to lead.

Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York and the head of the House Judiciary Committee, has argued that the department’s view that presidents are protected from prosecution makes it all the more important for the public to see Mr. Mueller’s report.

“To maintain that a sitting president cannot be indicted, and then to withhold evidence of wrongdoing from Congress because the president cannot be charged, is to convert D.O.J. policy into the means for a cover-up,” he said before the House approved its nonbinding resolution to disclose the special counsel’s findings.

Some predict that any disclosures from Mr. Mueller’s report will satisfy neither Mr. Trump’s critics nor his defenders, especially given the public’s high expectations for answers. A Washington Post-Schar School poll in February illustrated the sharp divide in public opinion: It found that of those surveyed, most Republicans did not believe evidence of crimes that Mr. Mueller’s team had already proved in court, while most Democrats believed he had proved crimes that he had not even claimed.

Nicholas Fandos contributed reporting.

And now, what goes with the whole nine yards of cleaning out Washington’s political quagmire? And how will America get Great again? And will all these walled in scenarios meet the test of time for another two years?

lets see how this plays out now!!!

POLITICO

President Donald Trump gives the thumbs-up as he arrives on Air Force One on March 22 at Palm Beach International Airport, en route to Mar-a-Lago.

WHITE HOUSE

Trump faces Mueller report in Mar-a-Lago bubble
The president kicked off a weekend at Mar-a-Lago with a speech at a fundraising dinner but few words about special counsel Robert Mueller.

PALM BEACH, Florida – When the news finally broke that Robert Mueller had completed his investigation, President Donald Trump was cloistered in the safe space of his private club here, surrounded by senior aides and the diehard supporters who pay big bucks to catch a glimpse of him.

As Washington melted down over the long-awaited news 1,000 miles away, the fierce Trump defenders here girded for an epic battle.

“He seems to be able to deal with most of the stuff that most people can’t. I am convinced that he can weather anything he’s put through,” said Joyce Lewis Bass, a board member of the Boca Raton Regional Republican Club.

On Friday night, just feet from where Trump and his family were having dinner, local Republicans were holding a fundraising dinner. The logo for the event: a five-dollar bill featuring a MAGA-hat clad Abraham Lincoln.

Organizers had held out hope that Trump would make an appearance at the event, and White House officials initially signaled he wouldn’t attend, saying he planned to spend his night on Mar-a-Lago’s patio with First Lady Melania Trump, their son Barron, and Melania Trump’s parents.

Schumer: Attorney General Barr must make the full Mueller report public
CONGRESS

Congress demands full Mueller report ahead of huge partisan fight
By KYLE CHENEY

The president spoke to the cheering crowd for about two minutes, with the first lady standing beside him on stage, according to a video of his remarks obtained by POLITICO. He said nothing about the Mueller news. Instead, he thanked “the legendary Pam Bondi,” Florida’s former attorney general who was honored at the dinner, and marveled at the first lady’s poll numbers. The president also cracked a joke about the keynote speaker, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.

“If Lindsey’s speaking, I want to come down here,” Trump said, “for two reasons. No. 1: he’s a great speaker. And No. 2, I know if I’m here, he’s not going to say anything bad about me.”

The dinner capped another whirlwind day for Trump. As they braced for the report throughout the day Friday, Trump and his team tried to convey an image of a president putting his head down and focusing on the job. Aides arranged a meeting with the leaders of five Caribbean countries, the president announced his pick to join the Federal Reserve and he bragged about the defeat of the Islamic State.

But Trump quickly overshadowed those efforts, issuing a confusing tweet that implied he was undoing North Korea sanctions that his administration had just put in place. The tweet caught many in the White House by surprise and the administration later tried to clarify, insisting he was referring instead to not-yet-imposed sanctions.

Trump’s Islamic State victory lap was also quickly undercut. At the end of the flight to Florida, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders entered Air Force One’s press cabin wielding a map. ISIS no longer holds any territory in Syria, she declared, without offering any other details. Trump later held up the same map, at one point displaying it upside down, boasting about his success in diminishing the terrorist group.

“So here is ISIS on Election Day. Here’s ISIS right now,” he said. The only problem: the graphic didn’t compare ISIS’s current territory to Election Day in 2016. According to photographs captured by reporters, it compared the territory to 2014, undercutting the president’s about turning things around immediately after taking office.

“You guys can have the map. Congratulations. You’ll spread it around,” Trump told reporters, handing them the document. Sanders quickly snatched up the paper.

Trump tried to project calm throughout the day, distancing himself from the image of a man about to suffer a political blow. On his arrival at the airport here, he delighted in the adoration of his supporters, signing a red “Make America Great Again” hat.

But there were more subtle signs that the White House — like all of Washington — had assumed crash position ahead of the transmittal of Mueller’s report to Attorney General Bill Barr, which happened at 5pm, shortly after a sudden blinding hailstorm tore through an already-anxious capital: White House counsel Pat Cipollone joined the president at Mar-a-Lago, according to a person familiar with the matter, as did Sanders, who doesn’t always travel with the president on weekend trips.

“We’ll see what happens,” Trump had said early in the day as he departed for his weekend in Florida. “There was no collusion. There was no obstruction,” he repeated once again. “Everybody knows it. It’s all a big hoax. It’s all a witch hunt.”

But he didn’t mention Mueller for the rest of the day. Though the president is often eager to field reporters’ questions, he ignored journalists as he sat alongside the Caribbean leaders, under two gold and crystal chandeliers. For once, it seemed, Trump felt he had nothing more to say. He was content to wait. By late evening, he had resisted tweeting once about Mueller or Russia.

Friday’s fundraising dinner was hosted by the Palm Beach County Republicans. Tickets for the fundraiser started at $375, with sponsorship packages going as high as $25,000.

By JOSH GERSTEIN
On Friday afternoon, a person helping to organize the dinner predicted Trump would attend, especially given that the event was held just feet from the room where Trump huddled with the Caribbean leaders. “We very much expect the president to come,” the person said. “It’s in his house.”

The mood at Mar-a-Lago Friday afternoon was low-key, despite the furor over the Mueller developments swirling in Washington. A nearby parking lot was packed with luxury cars, including a bright yellow Porsche and a chrome Rolls Royce. A woman in the parking lot sported a black fur coat in the nearly 75-degree weather.

Mueller’s actual conclusions remain under lock and key at the Justice Department. But supporters here seemed unfazed by the report’s imminent disclosure.

Asked if she’s certain the president can overcome the Mueller probe’s findings, Toni Holt Kramer, a Mar-a-Lago member and founder of the Trumpettes USA, a Trump fan club, said via email, “Positive!!!”

Marc Caputo and Anita Kumar contributed to this story.

© 2019 POLITICO LLC

Opinion, Analysis, Essays

Mueller report’s release to AG Barr is the end of the beginning for Trump, not the beginning of the end
Democrats are gearing up to fulfill their oversight responsibilities in a manner wholly consistent with what Republicans called for during the Obama years.

The fight continues.
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s 22-month-long investigation into the relationship between President Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia is finally over, bringing an end to this dramatic investigative chapter into the activities of the American president and those closest to him.

But the thing is, this was just chapter one. Anyone thinking or hoping that the completion of the Mueller report would be the finale of the story will be sorely disappointed.

Because the next chapter belongs to Attorney General William Barr and the new Democratic majority in the House as they fight for full access to the report and the underlying evidence used to compile it. And remember, while Mueller’s long-awaited report was submitted to the Justice Department on Friday, Barr has yet to determine what will be publicly revealed to Congress, if anything at all.

Because while the report itself is important, the next few chapters of this investigation belongs to Congress and the new Democratic majority in the House.

First, Congressional oversight committees will fight for possession of the Mueller report. Then, they will use the Mueller report as a blueprint to guide their investigations into every part of Donald Trump’s presidency including his foreign policy decisions, financial interests, political activities, and personal relationships.

Just three months ago, Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC), the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said that “some of it should be sanitized…I’ll trust Mr. Barr too work with us to get as much out as we can.” Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, advocated for the president’s legal team to have the right to “correct it” before the report is made public or released to Congress.

Anything short of releasing the full, un-redacted report to Congress will presumably result in a high-stakes standoff between Congress and the executive branch. Should the attorney general fail to voluntarily produce the report, Congressional committees will subpoena the Justice Department for it. If the DOJ refuses to comply with the subpoena, a lawsuit will be filed and this could end up in the Supreme Court’s hands. Meanwhile, newly minted private citizen Robert Mueller will almost certainly be invited to testify at a congressional hearing to discuss his report’s findings.

Related
Mueller report and Trump-Russia investigation must push Congress to protect future special counsels
Withholding or sanitizing the Mueller report is a political loser for the president. Recent polls reveal that nearly 9 in ten Americans believe the full report should be made public. This is also a tough fight for Congressional Republicans given their past rhetoric about transparency and oversight during President Barack Obama’s time in office.

Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, the ranking Republican on the Committee on Oversight and Reform, said this during a 2012 proceeding about getting documents from the Justice Department: “How can you ignore the facts when you don’t’ get the facts? That’s what this is all about…I just want to get the information…I think we’re right on target with this. We just want the information so we have the facts.”

At that same proceeding, former Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., then a member of the House Oversight Committee and now a Fox News contributor, opined that “the notion that you can withhold information and documents from Congress no matter whether you are the party in power or not in power is wrong. Respect for the rule of law must mean something, irrespective of the vicissitudes of political cycles.

VIEW THIS GRAPHIC ON NBCNEWS.COM
In fact, oversight Republicans’ fight with then Eric Holder’s Justice Department over the release of documents related to “Operation Fast and Furious” is instructive now. Following President Obama’s use of executive privilege to ignore a Congressional subpoena, Republicans filed a lawsuit in district court declaring, “The Attorney General’s conception of the reach of ‘Executive privilege,’ were it to be accepted, would cripple congressional oversight of Executive branch agencies, to the very detriment of the Nation and our constitutional structure.” U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson agreed, who is also the judge presiding over Roger Stone’s case, ruled against the Justice Department.

If Barr and the Trump White House resist efforts by Congress to get the full report, history could repeat itself.

Related
AOC and Cohen remind Trump that Mueller isn’t the only investigator he needs to worry about
Once they’ve acquired the report, the real force of congressional oversight will be felt. Investigators will comb through every thread of evidence to create multiple lanes of oversight inquiries. Statements made to Mueller and his team will be cross-referenced with statements made to Congress during public hearings or depositions. Officials who have any inconsistencies in their testimonies will be called upon by Congress to address them under the threat of perjury. The Mueller report will effectively serve as the foundation of a forensic autopsy Congress will conduct examining every controversial decision the Trump administration has made.

In short, Democrats in Congress are gearing up to fulfill their oversight responsibilities in a manner entirely consistent with what Republicans called for during the Obama years. As House Republicans declared in 2010, “Congress is constitutionally obligated to provide thorough oversight of the Executive Branch. This obligation is recognized by scholars and the Courts and by the American public that expects its federal government to root out waste, fraud, abuse, mismanagement, and misconduct.”

Their words. Their standard. Now Trump will have to live with it.

Kurt Bardella

© 2019 NBC UNIVERSAL


Now what?

No new indictments, is this a positive sign to foreshadow a sign of political survival, with a clean ending of a stopped buck for Trump, hence forward?

The Guardian chimes in:

'How did the Mueller investigation manage to keep its secrets under wraps for two years?

My colleagues Oliver Laughland and Jon Swaine have a new article looking at the “leak-proof inquiry”:

Behind the walls of a nondescript concrete office building in south-west Washington DC, special counsel Robert Mueller has meticulously compiled one of the most important investigations in American history.

There have been 37 indictments or guilty pleas and 199 criminal charges. Five people, including some of Donald Trump’s closest former advisers, have been sent to prison.

And yet for all the political fallout, intrigue over Mueller’s prosecutorial strategy and obsession with the contents of his final report, the office of the special counsel has remained an almost sealed vessel.’


How in the world can things go back to some kind of ill defined normality, even after a public release of the Mueller Report, even as the supercharged political athmosphere grinds on and within its own ranks, produces newer and newer fashioned myth laden archetypes of anti constitutional severance, where perhaps the Supreme Court may turn out to be the final arbiter?

Can even they, produce some resemblance to clarity, in a starkly new world, where the very timbers which constitute the foundation , which served reverently and with absolute reference, tolling the faith and absolute allegiance of increasingly divided people?

Does an overly far reach from that into thus: the quagmire characterized as a swamp, become a politically brutal ball, seething in the language of animosity and division and contradiction hold up an outline with which the banner of oncoming generations may march forward in confidence?

Can a new internationalism arise out if a perplexing U.S. paradigm, which has served well as the blueprint for a clear manifest for the guarantee of human rights and transparently benevolent government with which it may cross over borders of faithful performance?

Can the 21st century live by a new motto, 'Beyond Truth and Fiction?

The ramifications are yet hidden, but what ideology could ever sustain a governance , before being uncovered for what it truly is?

None, the answer is always relentlessly compelling !


Boston.com

The Latest: House Democrats set group call on Mueller report
Associated Press AP, 9:43 AM

Attorney General William Barr leaves his home in McLean, Va., on Saturday morning, March 23, 2019. Special counsel Robert Mueller closed his long and contentious Russia investigation with no new charges, ending the probe that has cast a dark shadow over Donald Trump’s presidency. (AP Photo/Sait Serkan Gurbuz) —The Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Latest on special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation (all times local):

10:05 a.m.

House Democrats will gather by phone on Saturday as they wait for the Justice Department to send them details of what special counsel Robert Mueller has found in his investigation of Russian interference.

That’s according to a person familiar with the meeting. The person requested anonymity to discuss the private call.

Democrats planned the 3 p.m. conference call to discuss strategy and their next steps after they were notified Friday afternoon that Mueller had sent his completed report to Attorney General William Barr.

Barr said in a Friday letter to the House and Senate Judiciary committees that he would share Mueller’s “principal conclusions” with Congress as soon as Saturday.

— By Mary Clare Jalonick


10 a.m.

Attorney General William Barr has arrived at the Justice Department a day after receiving special counsel Robert Mueller’s final report on the Russia investigation.

Barr says he could notify Congress of Mueller’s “principal findings” as soon as Saturday. Mueller on Friday concluded his probe of Russian election interference and possible coordination with Donald Trump’s campaign.

The special counsel’s full report is confidential, but Barr says he will be deciding soon how much of it he will release to Congress and the public.


9:40 a.m.

President Donald Trump is on the golf course in Florida a day after special counsel Robert Mueller closed his 22-month-long Russia investigation with no new charges.

Mueller delivered his long-awaited report Friday to the Justice Department, which was expected to release the main findings as soon as Saturday.

White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said Friday that the next steps are up to the attorney general and the White House will let the process take its course. As of Friday evening, the White House had not received or been briefed on the report.

Even with the details still under wraps, the end of the probe without additional indictments by Mueller was welcome news to some in Trump’s orbit who had feared a final round of charges could ensnare more Trump associates, including members of the president’s family.


1:45 a.m.

Special counsel Robert Mueller closed his long and contentious Russia investigation with no new charges, ending the probe that has cast a dark shadow over Donald Trump’s presidency. The Justice Department was expected to release the main findings as soon as Saturday.

Even with the details still under wraps, the end Friday of the 22-month probe without additional indictments by Mueller was welcome news to some in Trump’s orbit who had feared a final round of charges could ensnare more Trump associates, including members of the president’s family.

For now, the report is accessible to only a handful of Justice Department officials while Attorney General William Barr prepared to release the “principal findings” soon.

TOPICS: Politics
©2019 Boston Globe Media Partners, LLC

U.S.
DEFENSE ATTORNEY SAYS DONALD TRUMP STILL FACING LEGAL WOES, WARNS SDNY INVESTIGATION ‘AIN’T A FISHING EXPEDITION’
By Donica Phifer On 3/23/19 at 9:12 PM EDT
Randy Zelin
Defense attorney Randy Zelin appears on MSNBC on March 23 to discuss the end of Robert Mueller’s investigation and the legal challenges remaining for President Donald Trump.
PHOTO: MSNBC

U.S. DONALD TRUMP MSNBC
As the reactions continue to pour in following the delivery of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on accusations that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia during the 2016 special election, one defense attorney was quick to caution those celebrating President Donald Trump’s alleged victory.

Appearing on MSNBC Saturday, criminal defense attorney Randy Zelin and MSNBC anchor Kendis Gibson discussed the report from Mueller and how Trump’s legal troubles may not be over, despite Mueller’s recommendation that no one else is indicted as a result of his investigation.

Zelin began by outlining the mandate from the special counsel’s office, saying the report is “limited to investigation into Russian influence into 2016 and related matters.”

“Which means that everything related to everything else is for someone else to do,” Zerlin added. “In the Southern District [of New York] are they interested in Russian interference or are they interested in things like campaign finance violations unrelated to Russia.”

Gibson responded to reference the president’s frequent calls of Mueller’s investigation being a fishing expedition, to which Zelin asked what Gibson would say about the SDNY investigation “which ain’t a fishing expedition.”

“You have Michael Cohen, who has already pleaded guilty, you have evidence of campaign finance violations, you have investigations into, now, Trump Organization business dealings, insurance fraud, tax fraud, all kinds of fraud which are unrelated to the Russia investigation,” Zelin said. “So how does the Mueller report extricate the president from his problems?”

Zelin later asked why Americans aren’t concerned about learning if Russa interfered in the 2016 presidential election saying, “we’ve lost sight of that.”

Zelin’s comments echo what other legal experts told Newsweek on Friday.

“I think that [the Mueller report] certainly is not the end-all, be-all for legal problems and ethics problems for the president,” Noah Bookbinder, executive director at the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington said. “There’s just a lot of really problematic conduct that is being investigated, and that’s not to say that what special counsel Mueller found is not going to be incredibly important…but there’s some danger to looking at whatever he produces as the definitive statement on whether or not this president did anything wrong.”

Speaking to MSNBC Saturday, New York Times justice reporter Katie Bennan said that while Trump and his family — including his children Eric Trump, Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr. — haven’t shown themselves to be worried in public, the remaining investigations from Congress and the Southern District of New York cannot be discounted for their potential legal ramifications.

The Southern District of New York is currently investigating potential campaign violations and misuse of funds, an investigation that includes a recent subpoena for financial documents and donor records for Trump’s inauguration committee.

“I think we do have to look back at the investigation at SDNY, especially the ones that concern the Trump Organization, where the president’s children might be directly implicated,” Bennan said, adding that Michael Cohen’s testimony included statements that some of his actions were to protect Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr.

Gibson then asked Zelin if those with the last name of Trump should be worried.

“Hell yes,” Zelin replied.

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In an interview with Fox News which aired on Friday morning, hours before Mueller delivered his report, Trump expressed confusion that he was being investigated in other areas saying that his lawyers, “don’t even know what people are talking about.

© Copyright 2019 NEWSWEEK

MSNBC’s Chris Matthews said it is “startling” that there were no indictments following the conclusion of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. Matthews questioned why there was no “interrogation” of President Trump following the announcement that Mueller submitted his report to the U.S. Attorney General on Friday.

“Why was there never an interrogation of this president?” Matthews asked. “We were told for weeks by experts, you cannot deal with an obstruction of justice charge or investigation without getting to motive. You cannot get to motive unless you hear it from the person himself who’s being targeted, a subject of the investigation.”

“How can they let Trump off the hook?” Matthews demanded.

“So far tonight we have no reason to believe Trump is going to be charged by rhetoric in the document itself, in the Mueller report, no he will not be charged with obstruction or collusion without ever having to sit down with the special counsel Mueller and answer his damn questions. How can that happen?” Matthews asked Friday night.

Matthews calls it “startling” that there will be no further indictments:

I haven’t seen MSNBC this upset since Election Night

Democracy Dies in Darkness
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© 1996-2017 The Washington Post

Politics

The battle over the Mueller report begins as Trump allies claim victory
By Philip Rucker, Robert Costa, Josh Dawsey, Ashley Parker

March 23, 2019 at 6:53 PM

Congressional Democrats on March 22 demanded the release of all underlying evidence in the Russia investigation while Republicans pointed to findings to vindicate President Trump. (JM Rieger/The Washington Post)
The political showdown over the Russia investigation that could reshape the remainder of President Trump’s term began in earnest Saturday even before the special counsel’s conclusions were known to the public, as Trump allies claimed vindication while Democrats demanded transparency and vowed to intensify their own probes.

Trump and his attorneys and aides were clouded by uncertainty because they did not yet know the contents of the Robert S. Mueller III’s report, which Attorney General William P. Barr and a small coterie of Justice Department officials spent Saturday privately reviewing.

Ensconced for the weekend in Palm Beach, Fla., Trump exuded optimism while playing golf, lunching at the clubhouse and chatting with friends. At the urging of his advisers, he also exhibited uncharacteristic caution, refraining from publicly crowing that the “witch hunt” was over or declaring victory prematurely. Asked mid-Saturday to evaluate the president’s mood, White House spokesman Hogan Gidley said simply, “He’s good.”

The Trump team clung to hopeful signs — such as word from the Justice Department that there would be no more indictments from Mueller’s team — that the president could end up exonerated after a nearly two-year investigation of Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Related: [Attorney general is preparing a set of conclusions from Mueller report]

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III completed his report on whether Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia in 2016. Now the spotlight is on the attorney general. (Monica Akhtar/The Washington Post)
But there was also widespread recognition within the Trump orbit that the Mueller report could still contain damaging information for the president — and that his legal troubles are far from over, with separate investigations into Trump’s business, inaugural committee and conduct continuing apace in New York and on Capitol Hill.

Rudolph W. Giuliani, one of Trump’s personal attorneys, said he was in a “watch and wait” mode and had been urging the president to “keep your powder dry.”

“The information that has been revealed publicly, particularly no further indictments, has been helpful,” Giuliani said. But, he added, “until you read the report, you don’t know exactly what it entails. . . . My message is: We’ve all waited this long. Let’s just await the reading of what’s disclosed, and then we can have proper final reactions. There’s too much assuming going on, on the other side, and we shouldn’t fall into that trap.”

Still, the contours of the political battles ahead took form. The mood among Democrats was tense and urgent, with expectations running high that Mueller’s complete report could be explosive and spark a reckoning for Trump. Party leaders called for the report to be released in full, along with the underlying documents.

Americans “deserve the truth, to know the truth,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Saturday afternoon on a conference call with caucus members. “Transparency is the order of the day.”

Related: [Trump’s legal troubles are far from over even as Mueller probe ends]

Rank-and-file Democrats worried to House leaders that the Justice Department’s independence could be threatened, according to several aides involved in those talks, while Pelosi tried to fend off — for now, at least — calls within her party to seek Trump’s impeachment.

Attorney General William P. Barr departs his home Saturday morning in McLean, Va. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
“I think that day will come,” Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) told MSNBC’s Joy Reid on Saturday. “I don’t think he’s legitimate. I said it back at the end of the election. I still believe that today.”

On the campaign trail, Democratic presidential candidates called for full transparency from the Justice Department.

“We really need a full accounting of what happened,” Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Ind., told a breakfast crowd in Greenville, S.C. He added, “It may well be the case that the only appropriate response is impeachment, but to me the most decisive way to put an end to Trumpism is for it to be defeated massively at the ballot box.”

Among Republicans, meanwhile, the calls for caution from Trump’s attorneys did not seem to reach the ears of his allies, who took a victory lap on the president’s behalf.

“This is a vindication for the president and his family that after one year, 10 months and six days the Mueller report is concluding something which we already knew, which is there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians,” said Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s former campaign manager.

Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist, wrote in an email that the president would “weaponize Mueller report to bludgeon Democrats. Expect him to come ‘off the chain.’ ”

There was a defiant streak throughout conservative media. On Breitbart, headlines read “Leftists cope with Mueller report bust” and “MSNBC-onspiracy!” And on the Sirius radio program “Breitbart News Saturday,” upbeat tracks from the “Ghostbusters” and “Rocky” soundtracks played as a parade of Trump allies called in with commentary.

A feeling of relief set in among the many Trump associates who had spent hours being questioned by Mueller’s investigators, including former campaign official Michael Caputo.

“My family has lost everything and now we’re starting over, but I awoke today optimistic for us and for our nation,” Caputo said.

On Friday evening, after Mueller gave his report to Barr, Trump was at his Mar-a-Lago Club and in unusually good spirits, according to people who interacted with him. Cable news shows were abuzz with reports about the Mueller probe, but Trump was not seen watching much television. Rather, he sat at his usual table on the patio for dinner and to celebrate his son Barron’s 13th birthday with his wife, Melania, and Donald Trump Jr. and his girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle.

Trump Jr., who had been vacationing at Mar-a-Lago all week with his children, was on a boat fishing when the Mueller news broke Friday. The president’s son, who had come under scrutiny for the 2016 meeting he arranged at Trump Tower with a Russian lawyer promising dirt on Hillary Clinton, responded by tweeting a picture of himself and his boys holding up the fish they caught and then retweeting pro-Trump reactions.

President Trump left the patio for about an hour Friday night to attend a Republican Party fundraising dinner in Mar-a-Lago’s ballroom, where the crowd chanted “Lock her up!” after one of the featured speakers, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), called for an investigation of “both sides” — reflecting the desire of Trump supporters to go after Clinton, the defeated 2016 Democratic nominee.

Late in the evening, the president returned to the patio and appeared loose and upbeat, nodding and smiling as club members and other friends approached him at the table. Although nobody quite knew what the Mueller report said or what might happen next, people still cheered Trump. He in turn told several guests that he was proud of his accomplishments in office but did not speculate or engage in detailed discussion about the Mueller probe, according to people who were present.

At one point, White House lawyer Emmet Flood joined for a few minutes to talk with the president, as did Graham, who said he urged Trump to “listen to your lawyers.”

“He keeps saying he didn’t do anything with the Russians, and I said, ‘Well, there’s only one person that can really clear the air here, and that’s Mueller, and he’s been able to do his job and we’ll see here in a day or two what he found,’ ” Graham said in an interview Saturday.

Typically, Trump is accompanied by only a small staff entourage, sometimes with mid-level aides, on his weekend jaunts to Florida. But on Friday, several senior White House officials, including acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and press secretary Sarah Sanders, flew with him to Florida — in part so Trump would be surrounded by people he knows and trusts and therefore be less likely to do something rash, according to two people close to the president who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reveal internal details.

Trump agreed with his aides to be restrained in his public comments about the Mueller report until he gets a full briefing on its findings, which could occur as early as Sunday. Reminded that the president’s inclination has been to break the shackles his aides place on him by tweeting his feelings, one senior administration official replied, “The stakes are higher.”

On Saturday, Trump spent much of the day at the Trump International Golf Club in nearby West Palm Beach. Trump golfed and spent time with the musician Kid Rock, according to an administration official and the musician’s Instagram page, where he posted a picture posing with the president.

And there was a celebratory mood among the Trump fans — “my bridge people,” as the president calls them — who gathered near a bridge to cheer the presidential motorcade as it traveled to and from Mar-a-Lago, despite not knowing what the report says.

“I’m relieved that it’s finally out and it vindicates our president,” Paula Magnuson said. “Hopefully the Democrats will let it go now.”

Trump has told confidants he has not known Barr for long and that he cannot predict how the attorney general, who was sworn in only last month, will handle the situation. But the president also has said he is glad Barr is in charge and not former attorney general Jeff Sessions, and he has reiterated that his attorneys have told him Barr is fair, according to advisers who have spoken with him.

With little new information emerging Saturday, officials said Trump’s attorneys impressed upon the president to take a hands-off approach and to be patient with Barr — waiting for him to share Mueller’s conclusions on his own timetable and not to contact the attorney general or press for an update.

“He’s not going to engage a lot until he gets more information,” said David Bossie, Trump’s former deputy campaign manager.

That is the plan, but as those who work for him readily acknowledge, Trump rarely sticks to plans.

Meagan Flynn and Lori Rozsa in Palm Beach, David Weigel in Greenville and Colby Itkowitz in Washington contributed to this report.

3.0k Comments
Philip Rucker is the White House Bureau Chief for The Washington Post. He previously has covered Congress, the Obama White House, and the 2012 and 2016 presidential campaigns. Rucker also is a Political Analyst for NBC News and MSNBC. He joined The Post in 2005 as a local news reporter.

Robert Costa is a national political reporter for The Washington Post. He covers the White House, Congress, and campaigns. He joined The Post in January 2014. He is also the moderator of PBS’s “Washington Week” and a political analyst for NBC News and MSNBC.

Josh Dawsey is a White House reporter for The Washington Post. He joined the paper in 2017. He previously covered the White House for Politico, and New York City Hall and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie for the Wall Street Journal.

Ashley Parker is a White House reporter for The Washington Post. She joined The Post in 2017, after 11 years at the New York Times, where she covered the 2012 and 2016 presidential campaigns and Congress, among other things.

Attorney General William Barr
AMueller delivered his report to Barr on Friday, and Barr is expected to brief members of Congress on the report this weekend. | Win McNamee/Getty Images

CONGRESS

Congress waits another day for Mueller findings
The Justice Dept. said it would not transmit a summary of the special counsel’s findings Saturday, fueling Democrats’ urgent pleas to release the entire document.

By KYLE CHENEY, HEATHER CAYGLE, ANDREW DESIDERIO and JOSH GERSTEIN 03/23/2019 09:28 AM EDT
The public and members of Congress will be in the dark for at least one more day on special counsel Robert Mueller’s central conclusions about contacts between associates of President Donald Trump and Russia during the 2016 campaign.

The Justice Department informed Congress on Saturday afternoon that Attorney General William Barr would not provide findings to lawmakers until at least Sunday, officials at Justice and on Capitol Hill confirmed, prolonging rampant speculation about what might be in Mueller’s report and fueling Democrats’ increasingly urgent pleas to release the entire document.

However, Barr, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and their top aides were at Justice Department headquarters Saturday poring over Mueller’s submission and considering how to boil down the core conclusions into a summary that can be made public before officials embark on a review of the whole document, an official said.

Access to Mueller’s report has been limited to “very few” individuals, a Justice official said, in part out of concern about leaks of one of the most politically sensitive documents in modern American history.

Democrats huddled on Saturday to strategize about how to talk about the as-yet-unseen report and how to force the Justice Department to make it public — a possible drag-out legal fight that could consume Washington for months.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi hosted a conference call with House Democrats on Saturday afternoon to discuss the report’s impending arrival. According to multiple sources who participated in the call, Pelosi said she would reject an offer for a classified briefing on Mueller’s underlying findings, arguing that the evidence should be unclassified despite DOJ guidelines that state the department should not disclose damaging information about individuals who are not indicted.

House Democratic committee chairs repeatedly referred to Republicans’ efforts to disclose documents related to other former top officials who were not indicted, including Hillary Clinton and former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, when they controlled the House during the first two years of the Trump presidency.

Separately, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), a member of the Judiciary Committee, said Republicans’ efforts during that time period to force the public release of elements of the Russia probe — as well as the investigation of Clinton’s email server — had armed Democrats with an argument to require significant disclosure of the Mueller findings.

“Republicans have really shot themselves in the foot with what they approved,” Jayapal said. “They really undermined any argument Barr might want to make that there’s longstanding precedent.”

In a letter to lawmakers Saturday afternoon, Pelosi dismissed Barr’s plan to summarize the findings for the relevant committees as “insufficient” and said any briefings on the report should be unclassified so members are free to share the details publicly.

“We are insisting that any briefings to any committees be unclassified so that members can speak freely about every aspect of the report and not be confined to what DOJ chooses to release publicly,” Pelosi wrote.

We’re hosting a live chat on Reddit with former federal investigators who worked on some of the biggest cases since Watergate and our senior reporter, Darren Samuelsohn. Join us on Monday, March 25 at noon ET.

Pelosi also reiterated that DOJ should release the report in its entirety and related documents, “even if DOJ chooses not to prosecute additional individuals.”

“Congress requires the full report and the underlying documents so that the Committees can proceed with their independent work, including oversight and legislating to address any issues the Mueller report may raise,” she wrote.

Democrats have also expressed concern that the Justice Department’s sifting of the report for public consumption could be influenced by the White House. Justice officials confirmed that they alerted the White House to the receipt of the report just before congressional leaders were notified Friday afternoon.

However, a Justice spokesperson insisted that the only information conveyed was the brief letter also sent to lawmakers. Officials have declined to say whether they plan to vet future disclosures from Mueller’s report with the White House, although such consultations over executive privilege issues are typical.

Asked Saturday whether Justice Department leaders were “plotting” with the White House to stage manage release of more information about Mueller’s probe, a Justice official who asked not to be named said: “No, that’s ridiculous.”

While they await answers, the leaders of House committees who oversee the Justice Department and intelligence community have signaled they’re prepared to unleash aggressive tactics to compel Barr to make the details of the report public.

“If the AG plays any games, we will subpoena the report, ask Mr. Mueller to testify, and take it all to court if necessary," said Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-N.Y.), a member of the House Intelligence Committee, a comment echoed by committee Chairman Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.).

That could include issuing a subpoena that could plunge the two branches of government into a protracted court fight — and potentially demanding that Mueller himself testify publicly after nearly two years of operating in virtual secrecy.

“We’re potentially looking at a classic collision of Congress’s constitutional authority to investigate with the preferences of the executive branch to, in this case, to potentially withhold information from Congress. That is an issue that will have to be decided by a court if that’s how it evolves,” said David Laufman, who ran the Justice Department’s counter-intelligence unit from 2014 to 2018 and had a key role overseeing both the Clinton and Russia investigations.

Schumer: Attorney General Barr must make the full Mueller report public
CONGRESS

Congress demands full Mueller report ahead of huge partisan fight

Republicans were circling the wagons around Trump, noting that Mueller did not drop new indictments as he wrapped up his nearly two-year-long probe. But Democrats cautioned that Mueller was not the end-all-be-all, noting that Congress is still investigating allegations of obstruction of justice and abuse of power on the president’s part, and that other federal and state entities are conducting probes into several aspects of the Trumpworld.

“It’s the end of the beginning, it’s not the beginning of the end,” said Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. “It’s important to remember that whatever is concluded by Robert Mueller doesn’t mean that the president and his core team are free of legal jeopardy from these other proceedings. And it’s important to remember that the Congress has a different scope of charge and responsibility than Special Counsel Mueller.”

But most lawmakers tempered their comments as they awaited word from Barr about what level of detail he intends to share with Congress and the public this weekend.

Barr’s decision carries enormous consequences for the Trump administration and the new Democratic House majority, which is wrestling with outspoken members eager to impeach Trump and is in the early stages of a crush of sensitive investigations of Trump and his administration. Democrats are also acutely aware of the dicey politics of probing a combative president.

Coloring the debate is the news that Mueller is not recommending any new indictments, a determination that has emboldened Trump, who has long claimed the investigation was a “witch hunt.” It’s unclear whether word that Mueller isn’t urging additional charges precludes the possibility that he obtained some indictments that remain sealed.

Mueller is also known to have referred or handed off responsibility for some matters to federal prosecutors in New York, Virginia and Washington, D.C., but the full extent and status of such spinoff probes has never been made public.

Announcement of the end of the Mueller probe, annotated
Announcement of the end of the Mueller probe, annotated

Republicans have emphasized that even though they, too, want much of the report to be public, Democrats seem to be demanding that the Justice Department reveal derogatory information about Mueller’s witnesses even if they’re not charged with a crime. Rosenstein has previously suggested the Justice Department would not take such a step, especially given the backlash after former FBI Director James Comey publicly disparaged Clinton in 2016 even while declining to recommend charges against her for her use of a private email server.

Democrats, though, say Mueller’s report may contain crucial counterintelligence information that shows links and alliances between Trump associates and Russian operatives, information that could be crucial to future efforts to protect American elections from foreign interference.

And they also have raised concerns that even if Mueller’s report found criminal wrongdoing by the president, a longstanding Justice Department policy against indicting sitting presidents could preclude the details from becoming public.

“To be clear, if the Special Counsel has reason to believe that the President has engaged in criminal or other serious misconduct, then the Justice Department has an obligation not to conceal such information,” Schiff, Nadler and other committee chairmen said in a late Friday statement. “The President must be subject to accountability and if the Justice Department is unable to do so, then the need to provide Congress with the relevant information is paramount.”

Trump spent much of the day golfing at Trump International Golf Club, just a few miles from Mar-a-Lago. He golfed with three other people, though the White House refused to identify his partners.

White House officials said the president was in a good mood. So far, Trump has not reacted publicly to the news that Mueller has completed his investigation. And aides said the White House has not yet been briefed on the contents of Mueller’s report.

White House officials remained largely in wait-and-see mode, even though they believe the final report will be a flop.

It was an unusually low-key response for a president known for indignant Twitter outbursts. But people close to the president predicted it wouldn’t last long.

Trump’s friends and advisers have also been privately assuring him that the report is going to be a flop and that he can spin the whole endeavor as a politically motivated waste of time. But it remains to be seen what the report might actually say — and if it’s worse than the president’s allies think, Trump could react with fury.

By Saturday afternoon, Trump had retreated back to Mar-a-Lago, his private club. He’s not expected to make any public appearances for the rest of the day.

As his client and the country awaited the Mueller report’s findings, Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani was seen on Saturday shopping at a downtown D.C. Brooks Brothers, according to an eyewitness.

© 2019 POLITICO LLC

Mueller report: Why so many of President Donald Trump’s aides lied to protect him in Russia investigations

BRAD HEATH AND KEVIN JOHNSON | USA TODAY | 17 hours ago

The conclusion of the Mueller investigation into whether Trump colluded with Russia in the election has been submitted. And, Mueller’s report will be governed by rules written in the wake of the Starr Report. We explain.

WASHINGTON – The first lie – the first one that was a crime, at least – came on the fourth day of Donald Trump’s presidency, in a White House office down the hall from Trump’s own.

That day, a pair of FBI agents came to question Trump’s top national security aide, Mike Flynn, about his dealings with the Russian government. Flynn gave the agents a tour of his new spot in the new administration, interrupted at one point as Trump and some movers walked past discussing where to hang art on the walls. Then Flynn took them back to his corner office and calmly lied to them about conversations with Russia’s ambassador.

Flynn, agents later wrote, “did not parse his words or hesitate.” He simply lied.

The exchange was the start of a remarkable succession of lies over nearly two years by some of Trump’s closest political associates, told to federal agents, Congress and the public that distanced the president and his campaign from an investigation into whether his campaign participated in Russian efforts to disrupt the election that put him in office.

Whatever else special counsel Robert Mueller’s now-concluded investigation may reveal, it has devoted considerable attention to the Trump associates whose lies to lawmakers and investigators deflected attention from connections between Russia and the president’s campaign, and to a central question hanging over many of the charges Mueller has filed: Why did they lie?

Mueller delivered his final report Friday to Attorney General William Barr, marking the end of an investigation that has loomed over the first two years of Trump’s presidency. The Justice Department has so far revealed none of the report’s conclusions, but over the past year and a half, prosecutors have sketched some of them in hundreds of pages of court filings.

Prosecutors have revealed that Trump’s campaign worked eagerly to benefit from a Russian intelligence operation that hacked his opponents’ emails and echoed them in phony social media campaigns, an effort the U.S. government later concluded was aimed in part at helping to deliver Trump the presidency. And investigators charged that a succession of top aides then lied to pretend they hadn’t.

Barr’s Letter: Read Attorney General Barr’s letter to Congress announcing end of Mueller’s Russia probe

Investigation Ends: Special counsel Robert Mueller delivers report marking end of investigation into Trump’s campaign, Russia

Mueller’s office accused seven people, all but one of them former aides or advisers to Trump, with making dozens of false statements during the Russia investigation.

The investigation has produced a deluge of falsehoods on subjects from the president’s business dealings in Moscow to a meeting his son and campaign chief attended in Trump Tower in 2016 with a Russian promising “dirt” on his political opponent. But lying to the public is usually not a crime, and Mueller’s investigators zeroed in on those directed to lawmakers and federal investigators.

Trump’s lawyers maintain that the lies reflect little more than a misguided impulse to protect themselves from things that weren’t crimes to begin with. “The thing about all these lies is that if they all just told the damn truth they probably wouldn’t have been in any trouble,” said Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s lead attorney.

Prosecutors haven’t hinted at their answer, other than to reveal that it is one of the subjects they investigated.

But some of the people they have accused of lying have supplied answers of their own: One suggested he lied out of loyalty. Others appear to have been protecting the president. One, Michael Cohen, a former executive in Trump’s private business and his personal lawyer, said he lied because the president wanted him to.

“Everybody’s job at the Trump Organization is to protect Mr. Trump. Every day most of us knew we were coming in and we were going to lie for him on something and that became the norm,” Cohen said in sworn testimony to a House committee Feb. 27. “And that’s exactly what’s happening right now in this country and it’s exactly what’s happening here in government.”

Special counsel Robert Muller arrives at his office building, Thursday, March
23 months of Russia lies
Flynn has pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI on Jan. 24, 2017, about conversations with Russia’s ambassador, including one in which he discussed rolling back sanctions the Obama administration had imposed in response to Moscow’s election-meddling.

Three days after that meeting, two FBI agents went looking for a young campaign aide, George Papadopoulos. They took him from his mother’s house in Chicago to the bureau’s office there, switched on a video camera, and warned him to tell the truth.

“The only way you’re getting in trouble today is if you lie to us,” one said, according to court records.

For two hours, the agents quizzed Papadopoulos on his interactions with a professor in London named Joseph Mifsud and other people Papadopoulos believed had ties to the Russian government. Eventually, Papadopoulos revealed that Mifsud told him in early 2016 that Moscow had gathered “dirt” on Hillary Clinton, in the form of “thousands of emails,” months before the government revealed that Russia’s military intelligence service had hacked Democratic political organizations. But Papadopoulos passed his encounter with Mifsud off as a “strange coincidence,” unrelated to his work for Trump.

He later admitted that wasn’t true; Mifsud approached him because of his role on the campaign.

Foreign policy advisor to President Donald Trump’s election campaign, George Papadopoulos and his wife Simona Mangiante Papadopoulos leave a federal court in Washington after his sentencing on September 7, 2018.
Foreign policy advisor to President Donald Trump’s election campaign, George Papadopoulos and his wife Simona Mangiante Papadopoulos leave a federal court in Washington after his sentencing on September 7, 2018.

More lies by Trump associates followed.

That August, Michael Cohen lied in a written statement to two congressional committees about Trump’s efforts to construct a potentially lucrative high-rise in Moscow, telling them that they ended early in the campaign, when in fact those efforts continued until the point – almost six months later – when Trump had effectively secured the Republican presidential nomination. Cohen also tried to mislead members of Congress into thinking that Trump himself was uninvolved in the project.

A month after that, in September 2017, prosecutors allege that another Trump confidante, Roger Stone, lied to lawmakers about his efforts to gather information for the campaign about hacked emails that were being released by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks. Prosecutors said someone in Trump’s campaign directed a senior campaign official to get in touch with Stone about any other “damaging information” the group might have on Clinton.

When lawmakers summoned one of Stone’s associates to testify, Stone suggested he, too, stick to the story, saying in a text message obtained by prosecutors: “Stonewall it. Plead the fifth. Anything to save the plan’ … Richard Nixon.”

Cohen, Flynn and Papadopoulos have pleaded guilty to making false statements. So has Manafort’s former deputy Rick Gates, and an attorney who worked with the pair, Alexander Van Der Zwaan. Stone, who has maintained his innocence, is scheduled to go on trial in November on charges of lying to Congress and obstruction of justice.

Late last year, Paul Manafort, the former chairman of Trump’s campaign, met with investigators and appeared twice before a grand jury. There, prosecutors alleged in court filings, he lied about his interactions with a business associate in Ukraine who U.S. authorities say is tied to Russian intelligence. Prosecutors say Manafort passed polling data to the foreign associate while running Trump’s campaign.

Prosecutors didn’t charge Manafort with lying, though a judge concluded that he had. Instead they sought to use his lies against him when he was sentenced for other crimes, including conspiracy and tax and bank fraud related to years of lobbying work he conducted in Ukraine.

The full consequence of all the lies remains to be seen.

The personal legal jeopardy for Trump’s associates is playing out in courtrooms from New York to Washington. It’s less clear the implications those lies have had on Mueller’s effort to understand the scope of the Russian government’s intelligence operation around the 2016 election, and how directly it was able to tap into Trump’s campaign, if at all.

David Laufman, who ran the Justice Department’s counter-intelligence unit from 2014 until early 2018, declined to comment on the cases Mueller filed, but said the urgency of finding and countering foreign intelligence operations should be obvious.

“It’s essential when a counterintelligence threat is discovered for the FBI and the Justice Department to be able to take appropriate investigative steps to get to the heart of the matter as quickly as possible,” he said. “If someone the FBI goes to interview is withholding information from the government, that’s a serious mater

‘Loyalty’ and ‘orders’
Trump has tried repeatedly to discredit Mueller’s investigation, savaging it as a political “witch hunt.” The FBI has confirmed that it investigated whether the president also tried to obstruct it, and Mueller’s office closely scrutinized the false statements of Trump aides.

Both Cohen and Flynn have agreed to cooperate with prosecutors and have provided information about the circumstances in which they lied.

“The obvious question on the obstruction theory is who, if anyone, is suggesting that they’d want to cover it up,” said Shanlon Wu, a former federal prosecutor who represented Gates until last year.

“Isn’t it a remarkable coincidence — why are they all lying?” said Robert Ray, a former independent counsel who investigated President Bill Clinton. “Politics is one of those spaces where loyalty is prized above most everything,” Ray said. “When you look at these cases, it’s like everyone understood that — down to the lowest staffer.”

Flynn has never revealed why he lied, and it’s puzzled those who know him.

Giuliani said it was “stupid perjury,” because Flynn, the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency and a retired general, should have known the government was monitoring his contacts with Russia’s ambassador. Giuliani also said it was “outrageous” that agents questioned Flynn without a lawyer and didn’t give him a chance to correct his false statements.

National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and President Donald Trump arrive at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida to visit the U.S. Central Command and Specials Operations Command on Feb. 6, 2017.
MANDEL NGAN, AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Robert “Rocky” Kempenaar, one of Flynn’s longtime friends from Rhode Island, said he believes he lied to protect the president and his administration and that he did not decide to do it on his own.

“He’s a general,” Kempenaar said. “He was following orders from above him. Whether it was the president, I don’t know, but I kind of figured it out knowing Michael the way we do.”

Cohen, too, placed Trump squarely at the center of the obstruction investigation. In scathing testimony to the House Oversight Committee in early February, he said Trump had implicitly encouraged him to lie to lawmakers about plans to build a Trump Tower in Russia. And he testified that some of Trump’s lawyers reviewed and edited a false written statement before he delivered it to Congress in 2017.

“Mr. Trump did not directly tell me to lie to Congress, that’s not how he operates,” Cohen said. “In conversations we had during the campaign, at the same time I was actively negotiating in Russia for him, he would look me in the eye and tell me, there’s no Russian business, and then go on to lie to the American people by saying the same thing.

“In his way, he was telling me to lie.”

Cohen has not said when or where he had those conversations with Trump, but investigators revealed in warrant applications that they had extensively monitored both his communications and his location. He submitted documents to the House Intelligence Committee about his interactions with Trump’s lawyers.

Prosecutors have so far offered nothing to substantiate that account, though they confirmed to a judge last year that Cohen had given them information about the “circumstances of preparing and circulating,” his written statement to Congress, which they found both “relevant and truthful.”

Beyond that, Mueller’s office has offered only brief explanations for why they think Trump’s aides lied.

One of its top prosecutors, Andrew Weissmann, told a judge last year that the special counsel’s office thought Manafort had lied to investigators – after promising to cooperate – to “augment his chances for a pardon.”

And they said Papadopoulos was seeking a job with Trump’s National Security Council or elsewhere in the administration when he lied to the FBI, telling agents he was “trying to help the country and you guys, but I don’t want to jeopardize my career.”

Papadopoulos’ lawyer offered a clearer explanation last year before the former foreign policy aide was sentenced to 14 days in prison. He lied, Thomas Breen said, out of “misguided loyalty to his master.”

Contributing: Bart Jansen

© Copyright Gannett 2019

TheHill

ADMINISTRATION
March 24, 2019 - 06:00 AM EDT
Mueller’s end shifts focus to New York prosecutors

The end of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation is shifting the spotlight to federal prosecutors in President Trump’s hometown.

While all eyes this weekend are on the Department of Justice and Mueller’s conclusions, the completion of the special counsel’s report won’t finish all the investigations into Trump.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) is reportedly already carrying out a series of probes related to the president, including efforts focused on Trump’s inaugural committee.

It is also overseeing an investigation into potential campaign finance violations tied to the president.

Trump and his allies are well aware of the investigations and the dangers of the New York prosecutors.

The office is legendary for its ruthless and broad investigations and has shown a willingness to take on big names, from mafia bosses to celebrities and economic powerhouses.

Legal experts told The Hill that even as the Mueller probe ends, SDNY could pose an even greater threat to the president, his family and his businesses.

“That office has been very aggressive about going after high-profile targets,” said former federal prosecutor Kendall Coffey, who called the Manhattan attorney’s office “utterly fearless.”

“Anybody that might be in their bullseye ought to be mighty worried,” Coffey added.

Jonathan Turley, a professor at George Washington University Law School, said charges pursued by SDNY could have a statute of limitations extending beyond Trump’s term, meaning Trump could be indicted once he leaves office.

“If the president was found to be part of a criminal conspiracy or violation, it’s possible that they could proceed with charges after the election,” said Turley, an opinion contributor to The Hill.

The White House and Trump attorney Jay Sekulow did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

Documents from the federal raids on former Trump attorney Michael Cohen released Tuesday indicated that federal prosecutors in New York are probing a potential campaign finance violation. Cohen has publicly implicated the president in the scheme to make payments to women alleging affairs with Trump, as have court filings from SDNY. Trump has denied any wrongdoing in the case.

The New York Times also reported Saturday that the Manhattan attorney’s office is conducting several investigations tied to the president, including one into his inaugural committee and two others linked to former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.

A spokesperson for SDNY declined The Hill’s request for comment.

A source close to Donald Trump Jr. dismissed any concerns over SDNY. Trump Jr. is overseeing the president’s personal businesses alongside his brother Eric and has faced scrutiny over a 2016 Trump Tower meeting between Trump campaign officials and a Russian lawyer.

Legal sources told The Hill that as Mueller’s probe wound down, it’s possible he handed evidence not relevant to the Russia probe to other U.S. attorney’s offices.

Mueller referred the Cohen investigation to SDNY after investigators on his team found evidence of crimes unrelated to Russian election interference, such as bank and wire fraud.

Coffey said that while Mueller had talented prosecutors on his team, his office lacked the longstanding structure and resources SDNY has in place. That could bolster any DOJ probes coming out of New York.

Several figures who were scrutinized as part of the Mueller probe have celebrated its conclusion, taking the lack of indictments issued as the investigation ended as a sign that they won’t be prosecuted as part of the Russia probe.

However, Mimi Rocah, a former assistant U.S. attorney for SDNY, said those figures could still face charges from other parts of the Justice Department.

She said that because some figures such as Trump Jr. never interviewed with Mueller before the investigation concluded, those individuals could be targets of an investigation rather than just witnesses.

The experts also noted that many of the witnesses in the Mueller probe are now facing congressional inquiries. Democrats, who took over the House in January, have launched several investigations into Trump and his businesses.

The House Judiciary Committee alone has requested documents from 81 figures, including Trump Jr. and White House senior adviser Jared Kushner, who is also Trump’s son-in-law.

“The congressional investigations remain a live torpedo in the water for any unindicted person,” Turley said.

Rocah said Mueller could hand over evidence that he uncovered in his probe to congressional investigations as long as it wasn’t part of a grand jury investigation and wasn’t classified.

Jill Wine-Banks, who worked as an attorney on the Watergate investigation, said investigations launched by the state of New York could prove to be a bigger threat than those coming out of the U.S. attorney’s office.

She said SDNY would have to follow the same Justice Department guidance Mueller did, which states a sitting president cannot be indicted. However, state prosecutors wouldn’t be held to the same standards.

The New York attorney general has personally targeted Trump before. The office last year sued the president over his foundation, demanding that it be dissolved and that he and his adult children be prevented from holding leadership roles at other charities, at least temporarily, over alleged “persistent illegality.”

And the Manhattan district attorney filed fraud charges against Manafort shortly after he was sentenced on federal charges. The maneuver was viewed by some as an attempt to stop Trump from potentially pardoning Manafort, as the president cannot pardon an individual for state charges.

“New York is his homebase and it’s where his corporation and foundation are,” Wine-Banks said of Trump, noting that the state and SDNY could also attempt to claim jurisdiction over the Trump inaugural committee and transition teams over their New York ties.

The contents of this site are ©2019 Capitol Hill Publishing Corp., a subsidiary of News Communications, Inc.

Initial Trump reaction from Trump

youtu.be/DaP54DQeUzg

Here is an op-ed from today’s (Sunday, March 24, 2019) Los Angeles Times, in part.

'with all this, wjat do concerned citizens need with the report? A team of league eagles to cut our meat , for us , evidently.

And that’s forgivable : The heart craves the whole truth, or should , whatever it’s partisan implications.
As Garrett Graff wrote recently in Wired, all patriots must hope the Mueller report finds Trump blameless in any “conspiracy to defraud the United States.”

That’s because it’s unthinkable that an American president would sell out his country to the Kremlin.Bit , depending on Mueller’s conclusions . it might have to become thinkable . Remember Rocah’s words, “That’s when all real work begins.”

President Trump Is Vindicated. The Witch Hunt Is Over
By Mike Huckabee
Attorney General William Barr’s letter to Congress shows that the Russia collusion investigation is exactly what President Trump always said it was – a witch hunt.

“In addition to this notification, the Special Counsel regulations require that I provide you with ‘a description and explanation of instances (if any) in which the Attorney General’ or acting Attorney General ‘concluded that a proposed action by a Special Counsel was so inappropriate or unwarranted under established Departmental practices that it should not be pursued.’ 28 C.F.R. 600.9(a)(3). There were no such instances during the Special Counsel’s investigation.” Barr wrote in his one page letter to the House and Senate Judiciary Committees.

In other words, for a man Democrats said was hellbent on obstructing justice and preventing the Special Counsel from completing his investigation, President Trump did a lousy job.

CNN political analyst Gloria Borger admitted that the president is “vindicated” by the conclusion of Mueller’s probe.

Even one top Democrat in the Senate is now urging restraint. Sen. Chris Coons on Saturday said that House Democrats must use their oversight power in a “focused and responsible way” as they go forward with investigations involving President Trump, cautioning his colleagues to make sure they don’t “overdo it.”

“We have to be careful to use the resources and the abilities of the House majority in a focused and a responsible way,” Coons said on CNN. “We need to focus on things that are relevant and matter to the average American.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer are obsessing over the contents of the Mueller Report, but they’re overlooking the significance of what’s not in it.

Not one of the Democrats’ high-value targets — Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, or any other Trump family members — were indicted by Mueller, and the Department of Justice has already said there will be no more indictments forthcoming.

Of course, Mueller didn’t subpoena the president, either, crushing the hopes of the mainstream media journalists and pundits who had been confidently expecting that very outcome from the start of Mueller’s probe. If President Trump really was an agent of Russia, as they fervently believe he is, then surely Mueller would have taken the added step of at least interviewing him before ending the investigation.

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Among those who were indicted in the Mueller investigation, moreover, not one was charged with conspiring with Russia to fix the 2016 election – the entire purpose of assigning a special counsel.

Here we are, two years and $30-plus million in taxpayer funds later, and nothing to show for it, except some completely discredited media commentators and partisan members of Congress who breathlessly all but guaranteed there would be evidence of the president and members of his family and staff colluding with the Russians. I won’t hold my breath for their admissions and apologies.

Lives have been ruined and America’s image on the world stage has been tarnished because rogue government agents and hyper-partisan Democrats thought they could overturn the results of an election they lost fair and square.

With the Mueller witch hunt behind him, perhaps now the President Trump can finally focus his full attention on the job that the American people elected him to do: making America great again.

©2018 RealClearPolitics

Trump’s Bully Pit
By Debra Saunders
WASHINGTON – During a week when President Donald Trump should have been beating his chest nonstop to celebrate the strong U.S. economy, he instead chose to flog his enemies, dead and alive, on Twitter and on camera.

It apoears, that as formerly held in this forum, there may eventually evolve two types of interpretations resulting with Mueller’s report

As any other major politically infused national trauma, the report can be compared with that of Kenneth Starr’s analysis if the Clinton fiasco, or the report on Nixon, or even the even more ominous report on the Kennedy assassination.
Follow up examinations of any high profile political traumas generate the pragmatic believers, who would like the healing by applying the balls which usually heal the underlying pain caused by them. The residual skeptics will always perpetuate the possible interference with the facts, as presented, saturating any credibility within a pocket of gross conspiratorial underbelly, and that usually emerges through the extreme positions of both the right and left.

Since extremists on the right will not ever, it seems now, succumb to disbelieve a validation of Mueller’s report, if it’s interpretation will tend to support Trump’s appearent confirmation of his non involvement, it will only be the work of the extreme left, to keep facts and falsehoods alive.

The validity of Mueller’s work, even now, is beginning to be questioned, as the new democratic congress has voiced intentions to subpoena Miller to a series of question before Congress, if it seems as if he developed an ulterior attitude to pursue interviewing him , rather then relying on less obtrusive methods.
The written answer to the prosecutor’s questions to elaborate any involvement, may be overly dismissive to that effort. In addition, ongoing legal processes, even if reaching the Supreme Court, may imply a political bias into its workings.

But we’re far from that stage, and it just may follow, that a prosecurial immunity can not follow a criminal charge , after Trump leaves office.

This is w h y, for the president, the 2020 reelection becomes so very important:

He may avoid criminal prosecution for another term.

The follow ups, may vindicate him, even if district courts clearly show guilt, by virtue of how interpretations can mitigate, be the fading of public awareness.

This implies some overwhelming national/international determinancy, perhaps in the form of national security , to over-ride this whole astounding few historical years.


The Barr letter is a massive political victory for Trump (or, is it?)
Barr’s letter will define the narrative on the Mueller investigation — even if it’s wrong.
By Zack Beauchamp on March 24, 2019 5:54 pm

US Attorney General William Barr listens while President Trump speaks on February 15, 2019, in Washington, DC. Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images
Attorney General William Barr’s summary of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russia and 2016 was delivered to Congress on Sunday afternoon. We still don’t know what the report itself says, but there’s no doubt that Barr’s summary is a huge win for President Donald Trump.

According to Barr’s letter, Mueller “did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia” during the 2016 campaign. Mueller apparently did not come to any firm conclusion on whether Trump’s interference with the investigation constituted obstruction of justice, instead asking Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to draw a conclusion based on their read of Mueller’s work. Barr and Rosenstein decided that “the evidence developed during the Special Counsel’s investigation is not sufficient to establish that the president committed an obstruction-of-justice offense.”

Bill Barr’s letter summarizing Mueller’s findings, explained
Substantively, this leaves a lot of big questions about the investigation unanswered. Barr doesn’t quote nearly enough of Mueller’s work on the 2016 election to support his brief summary. Nor does he explain in detail why he decided the evidence on obstruction wasn’t enough — something that is especially important since, prior to his Senate confirmation, Barr wrote a memo harshly criticizing the Mueller investigation and, in particular, its approach to the obstruction question.

But politically, Barr’s letter is a massive PR victory for the president. It allows Trump to claim victory on both substance of the investigation and the obstruction charges and to say that his oft-repeated mantra of “no collusion” is entirely accurate. This is the interpretation that will dominate cable news for the next few days, maybe even weeks, demoralizing Democrats and rejuvenating Republicans.

Barr says at the end of the letter that he wants to release Mueller’s full report, but that there are tricky legal issues surrounding what evidence detailed in the report can and can’t be made public. These issues are currently under review; Barr says that he will release the Mueller report “as soon as that process is complete,” but who knows how long the review will take.

It’s possible Barr’s summary is accurate and the report is as good as it seems for Trump. It’s also possible that it’s misleading, and that Barr’s decision on obstruction was influenced by the beliefs he held before becoming attorney general. We just don’t know at this point.

But what is clear is this: The president absolutely has to be thrilled today.

Barr’s letter is everything Trump could have asked for
The best way to understand the politics here is to look at this tweeted statement from Sarah Sanders, Trump’s press secretary:

The first two sentences in Sanders’ statement are essentially accurate summaries of what Barr wrote in his letter. The last one is more than a bit of a leap.

Barr does not say that Mueller proved Trump innocent on either collusion or obstruction, but merely that there was not sufficient evidence of his legal guilt on either count. The Mueller report, in Barr’s summary, doesn’t clear Trump or his campaign staff of any wrongdoing or shady ties to Russia — it just concludes what they found is not enough evidence to establish that what they did in 2016 was criminal.

And when it comes to obstruction, Mueller explicitly did not “exonerate” Trump. Barr himself is explicit on this point: “The Special Counsel states that ‘while the report does not conclude that the President has committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.” Does the president’s handpicked attorney general making the final call on obstruction constitute “exoneration” when Mueller didn’t go that far?

But these are fine-grained and detailed distinctions that will likely be lost on a lot of people. On the face of it, Sanders’s spin that this vindicates the “no collusion, no obstruction” line seems right. The cable news summary of this report is “no charges for Trump, no evidence of crimes” — and that’s basically the message Sanders is hammering away at. As is her boss, in characteristically blunter fashion:

This version of events will be repeated over and over again for the next few days, on cable news and talk radio and congressional Republicans’ social media platforms. Twitter is full of them right now. All Democrats can say in response is “we need to see the full report” — which is true, as far as it goes, but not exactly a resounding response.

The report’s phrasing hands the president and his allies a victory in the spin wars before they even have begun. That’s true regardless of how accurate his summary is or how open the underlying report is to different interpretations. Since it’s still not clear when we’ll get to see the full report, or just how complete any version released to the public would be, Barr’s version of Mueller’s report will likely be the version that’s treated as authoritative for at least some time.

Democrats are already trying to push back on this. Rep. Jerry Nadler, the chair of the House Judiciary Committee, is already threatening to haul Barr in for questioning.

Whether Nadler and other Democrats could get Barr to admit something damning under questioning — if there is indeed something damning to admit — is an open question. Without the full text of the report, demonstrating any discrepancies between it and Barr’s account will be hard. And it’s not clear, again, when the full report will be released.

So given how favorable Barr’s text is for the president, how easily it can be spun as complete and total vindication for Trump, that’s about as big a win as he could have hoped for.

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Does AG Barr’s summary of the Mueller report “exonerate” Trump? I asked 15 legal experts.:

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Does AG Barr’s summary of the Mueller report “exonerate” Trump? I asked 15 legal experts.
Not quite — but it’s mostly good news for the president.
By Sean Illing@seanillingsean.illing@vox.com Mar 24, 2019, 6:20pm EDT
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Special counsel Robert Mueller in Washington, DC, on March 24, 2019. Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
dSpecial counsel Robert Mueller has finally completed his Trump-Russia report.

Attorney General Bill Barr made the announcement in a letter to congressional committee leaders on Friday. We’ve yet to see the full report, but on Sunday Barr released a summary of the report’s principal conclusions to Congress.

At first glance, it appears to be mostly good news for President Donald Trump. Barr’s summary explicitly states that “the Special Counsel’s investigation did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election.”

On the question of obstruction of justice, the initial report is more ambiguous. The special counsel’s office, according to Barr, “did not draw a conclusion — one way or the other — as to whether the examined conduct constituted obstruction.” But Barr wrote that he and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein concluded that there wasn’t sufficient evidence for obstruction charges.

That doesn’t necessarily exonerate Trump or anyone in his campaign, but it leaves a lot of room for speculation.

So, given what we now know, where does all this leave us? What is the legal significance of this report for Trump? Does it actually exonerate the president?

To get some answers, I reached out to 15 legal experts and asked them to react to Barr’s initial summary of Mueller’s findings. Their full responses, edited for clarity and length, are below.

Victoria Nourse, law professor, Georgetown University
This report indicates that the president did not conspire with the Russians and did not obstruct justice — or at least that obstruction would be difficult legally and factually to prove. The criminal law is a poor measure — a very low bar — for a president.

The Constitution, which is our highest law, provides that the president must faithfully execute the law and the Constitution. One did not need a criminal investigation to determine that Russians hacked our election. Legally, that is the most important part of the report, since it goes to the heart of our democracy.

This report is likely to make efforts by those who seek to impeach the president more difficult. Some people wrongly believe that impeachment requires an actual crime. The Constitution does not so provide. Political offenses are sufficient. The founders, in my opinion, created impeachment as a means to oust an incompetent or disloyal president, but hoped that it would be used rarely.

This report does nothing to other investigations, in the Southern District of New York and elsewhere, that may provide more light on election hacking and may implicate the president in other potential crimes (money laundering, fraud, tax crimes etc.).

Jessica Levinson, law professor, Loyola Law School
Bottom line — this is a huge victory for Trump and his supporters. The report takes the wind out of the sails of the congressional Democrats who wish to continue investigating Trump, his businesses, his charity, and his inauguration. I think the American public could soon have “investigation fatigue.”

Mueller’s conclusion on collusion charges is an enormous vindication for Trump, who has been chanting “no collusion” for years. It’s slightly less helpful for Trump that his attorney general, Bill Barr, instead of the special counsel, concluded that Trump should not be charged with obstruction of justice, but the headline for Trump is the same — vindication on both major questions Mueller was investigating.

It’s important to remember that it’s a high bar to charge obstruction of justice, and in particular it’s difficult to prove corrupt intent, but this likely isn’t what the public will remember. The public will remember that Trump will not be charged with either collusion or obstruction of justice.

Diane Marie Amann, law professor, University of Georgia
With his four-page letter on Mueller’s report, Attorney General William Barr drives the obstruction-of-justice ball firmly into Congress’s court.

Although the “‘report does not conclude that the President committed a crime,’” as Barr writes, quoting Mueller, “‘it also does not exonerate him.’” Barr continues that he and Rosenstein weighed the evidence presented in the report, and found it “insufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense.”

This may not end the matter, however. That’s because the conclusion turns on whether Barr and Rosenstein believed prosecutors could prove beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump’s actions, in their words, “had a nexus to a pending or contemplated proceeding, and were done with corrupt intent.”

“Beyond a reasonable doubt” is indeed the standard of proof for conviction in a federal criminal court. But the same is not true for other forums. Most notably, conviction in an impeachment proceeding depends on the judgment of senators following a trial in the Senate — a trial that cannot take place unless the House of Representatives votes to send to the Senate articles of impeachment. Thus the ball now lies in Congress’s court.

But given another Barr quotation of the Mueller report — that the special counsel’s “‘investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities’”— the obstruction-of-justice ball well may languish there.

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, law professor, Stetson University
Russians were eager to offer help to the Trump 2016 campaign (from the Russian lawyer who showed up at Trump Tower in 2016 to meet Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort, to Alexander Torshin, who met Don Jr. at dinner at an NRA convention in Kentucky).

Barr’s characterization of the Mueller report is that no one in the Trump campaign came to an agreement with the Russian government to conspire with the Russian interference in the 2016 election.

This is reassuring to a point.

The fact that the Trump campaign did not report the Russian offers of help in real time in 2016 remains troubling at best. And this could be fertile ground for investigations by the Democratically controlled House. Moreover, to the extent that individuals lied to Congress during the course of House and Senate investigations into the 2016 election, this could still expose more people to liability on that perjury front.

The Barr letter also refers to ongoing matters including those that have been referred from the special counsel to other offices. This would clearly include the prosecution of Rick Gates, Roger Stone, and Michael Cohen. Another open question is whether the special counsel referred any other matter that is not yet public to another office for federal prosecution.

The Southern District of New York has already referred to President Trump as “Individual 1” and implicated him in Michael Cohen’s campaign finance crimes. One of the few times that Barr quotes the Mueller report is to state “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.” Presumably that “no exoneration” would apply to the Southern District of New York’s own investigations of criminality.

In other words, while Barr has exonerated the president on the question of obstruction of justice, the question of whether the president violated campaign finance laws could remain a live issue for SDNY.

Christopher Slobogin, law professor, Vanderbilt University
If the summary is correct that the special counsel found no evidence that the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian attempt to influence our electoral process, then the claim that Trump obstructed the investigation into that attempt is significantly undercut. It is difficult to show a corrupt motive to obstruct an investigation into a crime that did not occur.

At the same time, if there is weak to no evidence of collusion or obstruction, then concerns about tainting the grand jury are minimal and the full report should be released.

Miriam Baer, law professor, Brooklyn Law School
To show obstruction, a prosecutor must demonstrate a nexus between the particular conduct and the “proceeding” it is corruptly intended to obstruct. On page three of his letter to Congress, Barr advises that Mueller declined to say, one way or the other, whether President Trump obstructed justice.

The attorney general then goes on to advise that he and Rosenstein have reached their own joint conclusion that the facts laid out in the report fail to establish a “nexus” between Trump’s behavior and any specific “proceeding.”

Moreover, Barr states as well that report fails to establish evidence of “corrupt intent.” The determination that corrupt intent is lacking rests, at least in part, on Mueller’s other conclusion — that the evidence fails to establish that Trump himself conspired with the Russians to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.

Many observers will question Barr and Rosenstein’s conclusions that none of Trump’s actions (not all of which occurred in public) were “obstructive,” or lacked “corrupt intent.” The nexus element may be more complicated, however, since it is contingent on the specific factual conclusions contained in the special counsel’s report.

For all these reasons, it will be crucial for the attorney general to provide Congress as full a recitation of the facts contained in the special counsel’s report as possible. Moreover, because the underlying facts potentially indicate behavior warranting impeachment, many members of Congress are sure to demand a recitation of the Mueller report’s facts and its underlying documents.

Trump may say he feels vindicated by this report, but the summary itself falls far short of exonerating him.

Keith Whittington, politics professor, Princeton University
The letter is notable in several aspects. It is significant in stating clearly that all indictments from the special counsel’s office have already been publicly disclosed and that no new indictments are recommended.

That does not preclude the possibility of further indictments arising from related investigations by either federal or state prosecutors, but those will presumably not focus on either Russian activities relating to the 2016 election or possible obstruction of justice.

The letter is clear that the special counsel found no coordination between the Trump campaign and Russian actors to interfere with the 2016 election. It appears that we already know the extent of the relationship between the two, and moreover we already know the extent of the Russian meddling in the election. There are no new revelations here on actions that Russia took to affect the election or of actions that campaign officials took to shape Russian interference.

The letter is particularly interesting on the obstruction of justice question. The special counsel did not rely specifically on the view that a sitting president cannot be indicted and did not factor in the issue of whether the president’s use of his Article II powers could provide the basis for an obstruction of justice charge.

Instead, the special counsel refrained from reaching any legal conclusions about whether or not the president engaged in obstruction of justice and the attorney general is now determining that no obstruction charge would be appropriate.

It would seem that both the attorney general and the special counsel are leaning heavily on the notion that the president could not have been acting with corrupt intent if there was no underlying crime for the president to attempt to cover up.

Given ongoing state and federal investigations, the president and his associates are not entirely out of the legal woods, but the Russian collusion angle is at least done. If the special counsel’s report is consistent with the attorney general’s letter, this will presumably take the steam out of the sails of an impeachment effort based on Russian collusion or obstruction of justice.

Robert Weisberg, law professor, Stanford University
A comment on obstruction: Barr’s reference to what Mueller says, and his own conclusion that he would not (if he constitutionally could) charge Trump with obstruction — these are careful and a bit slippery. He leverages the no-conspiracy finding to say that this bears on the question of whether Trump obstructed — i.e., if Trump didn’t conspire, he’d lack the motive to obstruct.

I suppose that is a legitimate evidentiary factor, but Barr may be imputing more thoughtfulness or awareness to Trump than is warranted. Further, Barr’s ultimate conclusion treats obstructive conduct and corrupt intent as if they are separate elements. Anyone who tries to make sense of the clotted and obtuse language of the obstruction statutes and the utterly unhelpful court interpretations — especially the Aguilar case—would realize that it is a little disingenuous to label these as separate elements.

In any event, it would (will) help if Barr explained what he thinks the notoriously vague term “corruptly” means. Obviously we look to appellate opinions, not prosecutorial decimations, to help us understand criminal statutes — but Barr owes us some explanation of how he understands these laws.

Jimmy Gurulé, law professor, Notre Dame
The order appointing Mueller to investigate whether Trump or members of his presidential campaign colluded with the Russians to interfere with the 2016 presidential election also authorized Mueller to investigate any crimes arising from the Russia investigation, which includes whether Trump engaged in obstruction of justice.

By failing to reach a conclusion on that matter, Mueller failed to fulfill his mandate. Furthermore, referring the obstruction of justice issue to Barr, who had decided that Trump had not obstructed justice prior to being appointed to serve as attorney general was a serious mistake and undermines the public’s confidence in the outcome.

Stephen Legomsky, law professor, Washington University
However informative the Mueller report may be, my sense is that the vast bulk of the salient revelations will end up coming from other sources.

Much information is or soon will be available from earlier news reports, the unredacted allegations in the various Mueller indictments, even the redacted allegations that hopefully will be provided to Congress, the indictments and evidence in the actions brought by both the Southern District of New York and the New York state attorney general, the previous closed-door and public testimony of the witnesses before the various congressional committees, future information from cooperating witnesses, and future leaks from administration sources.

Hopefully, too, the evidence on which the Mueller report was based will be shared with the congressional committees and will prove even more valuable than the text of the report. And all of this will generate leads from which the congressional committees can ferret out still more facts. So the Mueller report, while critical, will prove to be just one piece in the larger investigation.

Frances Hill, law professor, University of Miami
Barr’s brief letter is likely to become the centerpiece of the Trump political message for the 2020 campaign. While the Democrats will, as they should, continue to press for the prompt release of the Mueller report and all of the underlying documents, this is likely to be overshadowed by the action taken today by Barr.

The controversy will center on the obstruction charge and why the special counsel did not conclude that he found obstruction but followed the guidelines of the DOJ and thus did not indict a sitting president. Why did the special counsel leave the operative legal conclusion based on his work to the attorney general? We may never know.

We are also left to wonder whether the constraints on the investigation relating to the conspiracy issue, especially the constraints in the investigation of Trump’s business dealings with confidants of Russian President Vladimir Putin, did or did not provide evidence that Trump was sufficiently compromised that it might (or might not) have been possible to conclude that he was engaged in a conspiracy to prevent disclosure of his prior business dealings.

While these questions will linger and while they should continue to be investigated by both Congress and federal prosecutors, such efforts are now likely to be seen as either not constructive or excessive, even if they are ultimately proved to be true.

It is possible to conclude that Mueller in fact wrote a report that left the issues in this matter in the hands of the American people in the 2020 election. Whether that was the special counsel’s intent, that is where the issues now will be decided.

It becomes now particularly important to do all that is possible to counter ongoing efforts of the Russians and others to wage cyberwar against the voters. It is also important to counteract efforts by domestic political actors to selectively suppress the right of all Americans to vote.

Ilya Somin, law professor, George Mason University
Barr’s summary states that the special counsel did not find that Trump or members of his campaign colluded with Russian government efforts to influence the 2016 presidential campaign. This crucial finding appears to exonerate Trump on the crucial issue of “collusion” with Russia.

On the question of obstruction of justice, Barr’s summary quotes the special counsel’s report as stating that “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.” Barr goes on to state that he and Rosenstein have concluded that the evidence “is not sufficient” to conclude that Trump committed obstruction of justice.

The equivocal nature of the obstruction finding emphasizes the importance of publicly revealing as much of the report as possible, so that Congress and the public can make an informed judgment. While Justice Department policy forbids prosecution of a sitting president, Congress can still pursue impeachment proceedings against him.

Unlike a criminal trial, impeachment does not necessarily require proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. In the view of most legal scholars across the political spectrum, impeachment is also possible in cases of illegal conduct or abuse of power that are not crimes.

Today’s revelations were beneficial to Trump’s cause. But he is not out of the woods yet. Multiple state and federal investigations into possible lawbreaking on his part are still ongoing. Congress would also do well to further investigate such technically non-criminal abuses of power as the president’s cruel “family separation” policy, which has been ruled unconstitutional by a federal court, in a June 2018 decision.

The administration continues to drag its feet on reuniting many of the separated migrant children with their families, and new separations still occur, even long after the court’s ruling.

The Barr letter is an important development. But it is far from the end of this particular road.

Jens David Ohlin, law professor, Cornell University
What strikes me as most important is the fact that Barr (not Mueller) made the determination not to indict the president for obstruction of justice. Based on just the evidence from the public record, even if the Mueller report added no new information, there was enough evidence to warrant a prosecution of the president for obstruction.

Incredibly, Barr states in his letter to Congress that his decision not to pursue an obstruction charge was based, in part, on the absence of evidence that Trump committed a crime related to Russian election interference.

It seems to me that this represents a major legal error on Barr’s part. Trump could still have a “corrupt intent” even if he didn’t personally conspire with the Russians, but nonetheless wanted to shut down an investigation that was threatening his close aides and associates — like former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.

We’ll have to see if Congress is willing to rectify Barr’s legal error.

Ric Simmons, law professor, Ohio State University
The only possible conclusion to draw based on this summary is that the Mueller report is a complete exoneration of President Trump from any criminal activity regarding collusion with Russia or obstruction of justice. Robert Mueller has an unassailable reputation as a non-partisan professional law enforcement officer of the highest caliber, and he conducted an exhaustive, comprehensive investigation, leading a team of nearly sixty lawyers and investigators for almost two years, ultimately concluding that there was no coordination or collaboration between the Trump campaign and Russia.

It is true that Mueller did not explicitly exonerate the president on the obstruction of justice charges, but as the summary notes, the fact that there is no evidence of collusion on the part of the president makes it very unlikely that the president did in fact obstruct justice in this matter. More to the point, it would be nearly impossible to legally prove that Trump obstructed justice, since proving such a charge would require the prosecutor to establish intent, and it would be paradoxical to argue that the president intentionally obstructed justice when he was factually innocent of the underlying charge.

Peter Margulies, law professor, Roger Williams University School of Law
In declining to find that President Trump obstructed justice, Attorney General Barr ranked his view of the presidency as an institution over the unprecedented conduct of the White House’s current occupant. The matters that Special Counsel Robert Mueller described as “difficult” included whether Trump’s firing of FBI Director Jim Comey constituted obstruction. In deciding against obstruction charges, Barr had to weigh the disruption to the Russia probe caused by Comey’s dismissal against the president’s power to fire political appointees.

Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein apparently were concerned that criminalizing the Comey firing and other Trump actions that “took place in public view” would displace presidential accountability from the electoral and political realm to the courtroom. In the memo Barr wrote about the Mueller probe before becoming Attorney General, Barr worried that this shift in accountability might chill future presidents’ ability to make difficult decisions about policy and personnel.

But whether or not criminal prosecution proceeds now, Mueller’s statement that his report does not “exonerate” the President should give pause to Congress and to all citizens. Surely, the United States deserves a chief executive who is definitively free of the taint of obstruction. Mueller’s refusal to give the President that clean bill of health should spur further inquiry by Congress about the contents of Mueller’s report and the conduct of this particular president.

Russia is a threat to American democracy, with or without collusion
Robert Mueller was never going to end Donald Trump’s presidency.
© 2019 Vox Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved

© 2019 Vox Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The report did not exonerate Trump except to the extent that it found no collusion with Russia on which to prosecute. However. Mueller investigated much else in addition to collusion with Russia, most notably obstruction of justice, which the DOJ may pursue and the House committees clearly will pursue.

“There also are all of the Trump organization and Trump’s business dealings that could expose Trump to criminal and/or civil liability… In other words, Trump may be vulnerable on many fronts to legal challenges.”

Again, the beat goes on, and conspiracy theories may have some work cut out for them particularly if those conlirracirs were deliberately set up by real actions, and Miller was advised from the get go how to play That reality show, from an expert who am.ist got an Emmy.

(Right?)

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Trump’s ‘delight’ and the discomfort of Democrats: How global media is reacting to the Mueller report
Holly Ellyatt | @HollyEllyatt
Published 5 Hours Ago Updated 52 Mins Ago
CNBC.com
Global media are reacting to the results of one of the most gripping investigations into a U.S. president in modern times and the somewhat unexpected result of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Donald Trump.
The investigation found that Trump did not collude with Russia to influence the 2016 election.
Global media are reacting to the results of one of the most explosive investigations in modern U.S. history.

Global media are reacting to the results of one of the most gripping investigations into a U.S. president in modern times — and the somewhat unexpected result of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into whether President Donald Trump colluded with Russia to influence the 2016 election.

Attorney General William Barr summarized the results of Mueller’s investigation on Sunday by sayingit had not found that the Trump campaign had"conspired or coordinated with the Russian government" to influence the 2016 vote.

In addition, Barr said Mueller had not concluded one way or another as to whether Trump obstructed justice by trying to influence the investigation. Barr said Mueller’s evidence was not sufficient to establish that Trump committed a crime.

Trump tweeted that the report’s conclusions were a “total exoneration” of him. But in a letter to key members of Congress on Sunday, Barr noted that while Mueller’s report “does not conclude that the president committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”

Disappointed by Barr’s summary of the investigation, Democrats have called Mueller’s report to be published in full. Meanwhile, much of the global media have focused on the shock result and whether or not Trump is really “exonerated.”

Here’s a selection of global media reaction and commentary to the results of the Mueller probe:

No conspiracy
The Washington Post is headlined Monday “Mueller finds no conspiracy,” attorney general says and notes in a separate article that “No collusion!” goes from defiant mantra to rallying cry for Trump’s re-election" but senior editor Marc Fisher also noted that Mueller’s report “contains enough fuel for both sides to cling to their version of the truth.”

The New York Times also headlined with Barr’s conclusions but noted that the report “stops short of exonerating Trump on obstruction of justice.” The paper said that “with no impeachment in view, Democrats push forward with an investigation.” Nonetheless, the paper’s White House correspondent Peter Baker notes that “a cloud over Trump’s presidency is lifted” and that the results will have “fortified the president for the battles to come, including his campaign for re-election.”

The Wall Street Journal said “Trump’s team sees political gold” in the results and that his team was already “crafting plans to use Robert Mueller’s findings as a line of attack against Democrats” in the 2020 election.

Democrats’ discomfort
Media outside the U.S. have also followed every twist and turn of Mueller’s 22-month long investigation and have eagerly anticipated the results of the probe that Trump often called a “witch hunt.”

U.K. newspapers largely focused on Trump’s jubilant and delighted reaction to Barr’s summary of the report and the Democrats’ disappointment at the result — and what it could mean for the 2020 election race.

The U.K.‘s Daily Mail noted that "Trump revels in “complete exoneration” and blasts "illegal’ probe" and reported the president’s happiness at the result, quoting an unnamed senior administration official as telling the paper that he hadn’t “seen Trump this happy in months. It’s like election night again.” The U.K.'s center-right Daily Telegraph newspaper said “The findings left the president and his allies delighted” and “amounted to a major victory for Mr. Trump after 22 months of Mr Mueller’s investigation.”

The paper also focused on Democrats Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer demanding the full confidential report be published and their joint statement in which they noted that “Attorney General Barr’s letter raises as many questions as it answers.”

The Telegraph’s U.S. editor, Ben Riley-Smith, and Washington editor, Nick Allen, noted in their reaction that “Democrats found themselves in a politically uncomfortable position, being asked during TV interviews whether they agreed there was no collusion and whether they trusted Mr Mueller — a man whose integrity they had repeatedly trumpeted in public.”

‘No respite’ for Trump
The Mueller report has also caught the attention of continental Europe, a region with its own conflicted relationship with Trump following threats from the president to impose import tariffs on European cars.

France’s Le Figaro said that while the Mueller report “clears” Trump and that the White House “triumphs” at the findings, the Democrats “wince.” Le Monde said the findings “reinforce Trump in upcoming battles.”

Italy’s Corriere della Sera newspaper said even though the report found “no proof (of collusion), the president is not absolved,” while Germany’s public broadcaster Deutsche Welle said on its website that the report actually gives “no respite” for Trump as other investigations into his administration and his business dealings will “continue unabated.”

Daniel Friedrich Sturm, Die Welt’s U.S. correspondent, wrote that “Sunday was a great day for the American president,” and that the Mueller findings were “perhaps Trump’s greatest triumph in the battle for power since his electoral victory two-and-a-half years ago.” However, he noted that although the White House had downplayed the question of whether Trump had obstructed the investigation, “that will not be the last word” on the subject.

View interactive content
German business newspaper Handelsblatt said that “What remains after 3,000 subpoenas and more than 500 witnesses from the Mueller report (are) no conspiracy, no charges,” but it added that while the result of the Russia investigation is “mostly good news” for Trump “the report contains worrying findings” and that “many questions remain unanswered, as long as the report is only a summary.”

Trump’s “victory” has barely made a dint in Chinese newspapers that largely report on the world through the lens of the ruling Communist Party. The China Daily newspaper is focused on President Xi Jinping’s visit to France on Monday while the Mueller report’s findings are also absent from the South China Morning Post and Communist Party-run People’s Daily.

The view from Russia
Beyond Europe, Trump’s reactions to the report will be just as closely scrutinized as Russia’s. Russian President Vladimir Putin has not yet publicly commented on the Mueller findings.

Grigory Dukor | Reuters
President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin shake hands as they hold a joint news conference after their meeting in Helsinki, Finland July 16, 2018.
Despite an apparent mutual respect between Putin and Trump, U.S.-Russian relations have been frosty of late, particularly against a backdrop of continuing U.S. sanctions on Russian organizations and individuals it says meddled in the U.S. 2016 election, as well as sanctions for any entity deemed to have been involved in its 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine.

Russian newspapers Vedomosti, Kommersant and Komsomolskaya Pravda carried very little analysis of the Mueller findings but Rossiyskaya Gazeta, which is published by the Russian government, carried an opinion piece by Konstantin Kosachev, a senior Russian lawmaker and chairman of the Federation Council Committee on Foreign Affairs.

Kosachev was damning of the investigation, noting that “two years were not just lost for Russian-American relations (but were) simply crushing for them.” “Will someone answer for this damage or apologize?” he asked.

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Mueller report: Trump accuses enemies of ‘treasonous, evil things’ – live
President attacks unnamed adversaries in press conference day after summary of special counsel’s report is published

Trump threatens retaliation against ‘evil, treasonous’ opponents over Russia investigation – video
Ben Jacobs in Washington (now) and Erin Durkin in New York (earlier)

Mon 25 Mar 2019 15.01 EDT First published on Mon 25 Mar 2019 08.16 EDT
Key events
3.01pm

The American Enterprise Institute, a major conservative thinktank, just released the list of attendees at its retreat last month in Georgia.

It includes a number of Republican elected officials as well as New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger, former Vice President Dick Cheney and John Delaney, a former Democratic congressman running for President.

Facebook Twitter
2.50pm

The Wall Street Journal reports that celebrity lawyer Mark Geragos is the unnamed conspirator with Avenatti.

The Washington Post reports that Donald Trump is adamantly against further aid to Puerto Rico, which is still suffering 18 months after the island was devastated by hurricanes.

But at an Oval Office meeting on Feb. 22, Trump asked top advisers for ways to limit federal support from going to Puerto Rico, believing it is taking money that should be going to the mainland, according to senior administration officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share details of the presidents’ private remarks.

The meeting — an afternoon session focused on Housing and Urban Development grants — ended abruptly, and Trump has continued to ask aides how much money the island will get. Then, Trump said he wanted the money to only fortify the electric grid there.

Trump has also privately signaled he will not approve any additional help for Puerto Rico beyond the food stamp money, setting up a congressional showdown with Democrats who have pushed for more expansive help for the island.

A senior administration official with direct knowledge of the meeting described Trump’s stance: “He doesn’t want another single dollar going to the island.”

The U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York has tweeted a chart that they are using to lay out the case against Avenatti.

Stormy Daniels has tweeted a statement about her former lawyer, Michael Avenatti.

Fred Malek, a longtime Republican activist and fundraiser died today at the age of 85.

The death was announced by the American Action Network, the Republican 501 (c)(4) he founded. Malek worked in both the Nixon and George H.W. Bush administrations. He gained notoriety after it was revealed that he counted the number of Jews working in the Bureau of Labor Statistics at the request of Nixon.

Senator Susan Collins of Maine will face a primary challenge to her right in 2020.

The moderate Republican will face Derek Levasseur, a conservative blogger upset with her vote to overturn Trump’s declaration of a national emergency. However, Levasseur has some baggage, being arrested in 2012 for assaulting four people, including his daughter at his own wedding reception.

Hillary Clinton has endorsed a candidate in the open race to be the next mayor of Dallas, Texas.

The former secretary of state endorsed Regina Montoya ahead of the city’s nonpartisan primary on May

Montoya, a lawyer, was a staffer in the Clinton White House and a major donor to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign

Updated at 2.50pm EDT
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2.01pm

Nancy Pelosi defended House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff after Donald Trump aides called for his resignation.

“Chairman Schiff has done an outstanding job and that’s the reason why he’s subject to these ridiculous attacks,” Pelosi spokeswoman Ashley Etienne told the Hill.

“Democrats aren’t going to be intimidated by the White House or Congressional Republicans, we’re not going to be distracted from securing the release of the full Mueller report and the underlying evidence, and we will continue to pursue legitimate oversight because that’s what the Constitution requires,” she said. “The days of Congress ignoring the mountain of legal and ethical misconduct by this President and Administration are over.”

Updated at 2.07pm EDT
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1.52pm

Attorney General William Barr is likely to testify before the House Appropriations Committee next month, the Washington Post reports.

The committee has tentatively scheduled a budget hearing for April 9 on the Justice Department’s budget. The attorney general typically testifies at such hearings.

Here’s the criminal complaint against Michael Avenatti in Los Angeles.

Prosecutors allege he “embezzled a client’s money in order to pay his own expenses and debts — as well as those of his coffee business and law firm — and also defrauded a bank by using phony tax returns to obtain millions of dollars in loans.”

From DOJ:

According to an affidavit filed with the criminal complaint in this case, Avenatti negotiated a settlement which called for $1.6 million in settlement money to be paid on January 10, 2018, but then gave the client a bogus settlement agreement with a false payment date of March 10, 2018. The affidavit states that Avenatti misappropriated his client’s settlement money and used it to pay expenses for his coffee business, Global Baristas US LLC, which operated Tully’s Coffee stores in California and Washington state, as well as for his own expenses. When the fake March 2018 deadline passed and the client asked where the money was, Avenatti continued to conceal that the payment had already been received, court documents said.

Avenatti also allegedly defrauded a bank in Mississippi by submitting to the lender false tax returns in order to obtain three loans totaling $4.1 million for his law firm and coffee business in 2014. According to the affidavit, Avenatti obtained the loans by submitting fabricated individual income tax returns (Forms 1040) for 2011, 2012, and 2013, reporting substantial income even though he had never filed any such returns with the Internal Revenue Service.

Updated at 2.07pm EDT
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1.39pm

Donald Trump Jr. is already taunting Michael Avenatti.

Michael Avenatti faces a separate set of charges in Los Angeles, where prosecutors allege “he embezzled a client’s money in order to pay his own expenses and debts — as well as those of his coffee business & law firm — and also defrauded a bank by using phony tax returns to obtain millions of dollars,” per NPR.

That’s in addition to the case in New York, where he’s charged with attempting to extort millions out of Nike.

Updated at 2.06pm EDT

Trump set to weaponize Mueller report in war on Democrats and media
What we learned from Barr’s summary of the Mueller report

William Barr: attorney general plays ‘It has proved what we already knew’
Russia on Mueller report: ‘It has proved what we already knew’
The key findings of the Mueller report

No collusion, plenty of corruption: Trump is not in the clear
Richard Wolffe

© 2019 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.



Robert Mueller and the collapse of American trust
The reaction to AG William Barr’s Mueller letter reveals a disturbing truth about America.
By Zack Beauchamp on March 25, 2019 3:50 pm

The US Capitol pictured on November 7, 2018, in Washington, DC. Zach Gibson/Getty Images
Attorney General William Barr’s summary of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report has not resolved all of the disputes surrounding Donald Trump’s ties to Russia during the 2016 election. But the reaction to it has revealed one of the ways in which American politics is deeply and profoundly broken.

Democrats have responded to Barr’s summary by calling the attorney general’s impartiality into question (not entirely without reason). Leading members of Congress have raised the alarm about “very concerning discrepancies and final decision making at the Justice Department” and are pushing for the full release of Mueller’s report and for Barr to testify under oath.

Congressional Republicans, meanwhile, have responded by blasting “the biased media” for spreading “a collective scam and fraud.” The chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), even called for investigations into the FBI’s investigation itself, to see if the bureau’s pursuit of Trump and his allies was in any way improper.

A quick gander at social media shows this polarized reaction from partisan politicians is reflected in their parties’ respective media surrogates and rank-and-file voters. There’s not even a pretense of neutrality: Everyone is reading what they want into Barr’s letter, establishing a reality in which their side is right and the other side is making things up.

Barr’s document is particularly vague on some points, an ambiguity heightened by the fact that no one weighing in — from either side — has read the full report. But even the most unequivocal report would be subject to the deeper forces: the death of the neutral arbiter.

All in all, this reflects a collapse in trust in two core American institutions: politically independent federal law enforcement and the free press. This lack of faith, combined with a concomitant rise in partisanship, means that virtually every major political event is interpreted through a partisan lens. There’s no political institution widely accepted as being neutral anymore; instead, Americans judge the quality of the country’s leading institutions based on how favorable each one’s outputs are to their political interests.

The big problems haunting the Mueller debate
The fact of the decline in trust in core American institutions is well established and undeniable.

Two charts from a 2018 RAND Corporation report called “Truth Decay” tell the story elegantly. The first looks at long-term Pew data on Americans’ trust in government, finding a significant decline beginning in the mid-’60s. The data seems to track real-world government failures, such as the Vietnam War, Watergate, and the war in Iraq:

RAND Corporation -------- -------- ---------
The second chart looks at public confidence in Congress, specifically, as well as the media. Once again, it shows a pretty clear decline from peaks several decades ago.

Rand Corporation
The causes of these declines in faith in public institutions are complex. Some of it reflects actual policy and reporting failures, like the Iraq WMD debacle. Some of it reflects attempts by political actors to delegitimize these institutions, like the conservative campaign against the “liberal media” and Trump’s cries of “fake news.” It’s difficult — maybe even impossible — to separate out the relative causal power of these different events.

But this decline of faith intersects with a separate and equally important trend: rising partisanship. While people were losing faith in core institutions, the major political parties were becoming much more ideologically unified — with liberals sorting into the Democratic Party and conservatives becoming Republicans.

Like the decline in trust, the rise in polarization has complex and intertwined causes. The political aftermath of the civil rights movement, the politicization of evangelical Christianity, and the rise of the modern conservative movement all play major parts in this story. The result is that Americans have come to closely identify their social groups, like race or religion, with their political party. Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at New America, put it well in a Vox essay in September 2017:

Over the past half-century or so, partisan identities have become much more closely aligned with other social identities. Partisan divides now overlay religious divides, cultural divides, geographical divides, and racial divides. In the past, these identities used to cross-cut each other more often. Thirty years ago, you could be a culturally conservative Democrat, or culturally liberal Republican. These overlaps made the parties less distinct. They also made it easier to find common ground with opposing partisans based on other shared identities.

But as social sorting took place, we lost those potentially bridging ties. Moreover, our collective sense of cultural, regional, and ethnic status become more and more linked to the status of our two political parties, which came to represent these different identities. This made politics more emotional because it felt like even more was at stake with each election. It was not just the parties fighting each other, but also competing ways of life they represented.

As political scientist Lilliana Mason convincingly argues, “The more sorted we become, the more emotionally we react to normal political events.” And when emotions are heightened, everything becomes a threat to status. Politics becomes more about anger. And, here’s the warning from Mason that should give you goose bumps: “The angrier the electorate, the less capable we are of finding common ground on policies, or even of treating our opponents like human beings.”

When your partisan identity becomes so closely tied to your personal identity, information that challenges your political beliefs becomes a more existential threat — changing your mind or even admitting you might be wrong feels like a major betrayal. So partisans come to believe that their side has to be right — it just has to be — because the alternative is unthinkable.

Like polarization itself, the problem isn’t symmetrical on right and left. “Tribal epistemology,” as my colleague Dave Roberts terms it, is far more prevalent on the right, with media organizations like Fox News dedicated to selling comforting, often false, information to viewers.

But Democrats are hardly immune to confirmation bias. A number of laboratory experiments and surveys have shown that partisans on both sides of the political aisle work to fit facts into their existing narrative and beliefs. Polarization makes people interpret facts to fit their feelings.

This intersects with the decline of faith in political institutions in a particularly nasty way.

The less confidence people have in media and government institutions, the harder it is for information coming from one of these sources to override their partisan judgments. There are very few sources that are seen as politically neutral, and the quality of information is determined by the perceived political alignment of the source. A majority of Americans told Gallup pollsters in 2017 that they could not name a single news organization they would describe as “objective”; among those who could, Republicans named Fox News while Democrats typically cited one of several mainstream media outlets.

Every piece of information is evaluated less on the merits and more on its provenance. Court rulings are evaluated by whether the deciding judge was appointed by a Republican or a Democrat. Congressional reports are judged by which party controlled the committee that produced them. Media watchdogs on the left and right scrutinize every piece of work in the mainstream media for “bias.”

The reaction to the Barr letter was no exception. Democrats see the attorney general as a hackish Trump loyalist and evaluate the letter through that lens. Republicans see the media as in the tank for the Democrats and thus see the letter as confirmation that they were right to mistrust reporters on the Trump-Russia beat.

The result is that partisans, from politicians on down to rank-and-file voters, are living in two distinct worlds. One of those is more connected to reality than the other, to be sure, but hardly perfect. On complex political issues like Trump’s connection to Russia, where the truth of the matter is by its nature difficult to determine, people will interpret reality in a way that flatters their biases.

This leads me to be profoundly pessimistic about the future of the Mueller investigation. Even if Mueller’s full report is released in a timely fashion — and that’s still an “if” at this point, not a “when” — people will read it differently, in each case trying to vindicate their narrative of events. There will never be a shared sense of reality about what really happened in 2016 or whether Trump obstructed justice during the investigation. No authoritative document could overcome the deep systemic forces that produced this dispute.

All of this raises a series of disturbing questions: How much further can this political relativism be pushed? What happens when the subject of partisan dispute isn’t election interference, but the legitimacy of the vote counting itself?

And most broadly, how can American democracy work when there are essentially two polities living in two separate realities?

The progressive base is not as far left as you might think
Michael Avenatti has been arrested for allegedly trying to extort $20 million from Nike
Attorney General Bill Barr could wind up testifying in front of both the House and Senate

© 2019 Vox Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved

-----------'-------------

Mueller report public
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has blocked a non-binding resolution put forth by Senator Chuck Schumer calling for the Mueller report to be made public

All charges dropped against actor Jussie Smollett. Watch CNN

Mueller told Justice Dept. three weeks ago he wouldn’t reach a conclusion on obstruction
By Laura Jarrett, CNN

Updated at 7:48 PM ET, Mon March 25, 2019

03:03
Barr delivers his summary of Mueller report to Congress

01:03
CNN reporter prediction: Look for pardons

00:51
Wolf Blitzer: Sounds like Russians got what they wanted

02:02
WH says Mueller report is ‘complete exoneration’ of Trump

02:42
Toobin: Total vindication of Trump on collusion

03:11
Giuliani responds to Mueller report summary

01:34
CNN reporter: This line is key

02:16
Barr: Mueller finds no Trump-Russia conspiracy

00:58
Ex-Trump aide: Trump will use report as political bludgeon

02:58
How the Mueller report stacks up with Watergate

01:54
Trump responds to AG summary of Mueller report

03:03
Nadler: Conclusions raise more questions than they answer

03:03
Barr delivers his summary of Mueller report to Congress

01:03
CNN reporter prediction: Look for pardons

00:51
Wolf Blitzer: Sounds like Russians got what they wanted

02:02
WH says Mueller report is ‘complete exoneration’ of Trump

02:42
Toobin: Total vindication of Trump on collusion

03:11
Giuliani responds to Mueller report summary

01:34
CNN reporter: This line is key

02:16
Barr: Mueller finds no Trump-Russia conspiracy

00:58
Ex-Trump aide: Trump will use report as political bludgeon

02:58
How the Mueller report stacks up with Watergate

01:54
Trump responds to AG summary of Mueller report

03:03
Nadler: Conclusions raise more questions than they answer

Washington (CNN) — Roughly three weeks ago the special counsel’s team told Attorney General Bill Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein that Robert Mueller would not be reaching a conclusion on whether President Donald Trump obstructed justice, according to a source familiar with the meeting.
The source said that conclusion was “unexpected” and not what Barr had anticipated.
Barr released a four-page summary on Sunday of Mueller’s principal conclusions, writing that the special counsel “did not draw a conclusion – one way or another – as to whether the examined conduct constituted obstruction.”
“Instead,” Barr explained, “for each of the relevant actions investigated, the report sets out evidence on both sides of the question and leaves unresolved what the Special Counsel views as difficult issues of law and fact concerning whether the President’s actions and intent could be viewed as obstruction.”

News of Mueller’s decision to punt on the crucial question of whether the President’s actions amounted to obstruction of justice was particularly notable given that he never received a sit down interview with Trump to assess his state of mind.

On the contrary: the base of Trump’s linkage to his constituents understand only the language of appearances, contrary to a submerged corresponding reality.
The news therefore is,: that contrary to ALL appearances , International Capital won the game. Perfectly scripted and well delivered by the guy who is well known for saying “You’re fired.”

And weren’t all his underlings suffer that sad fate in “reality”?

The message has proven not to be in the media. A perfect coup, and all the other legal skirmishes will follow suit.
Consequential proof has shown politocal philosophies’ cherished tenet of representative democracy win over objectives (objectionable issues) to be non sequitur, - the Constitutional Rights of Men(( men)) to be no longer a matter of accountability , but preference.

Now preference has become vested iron clad without the possibility of actually guilloteening sub stance from form, cause it has been perfectly re-fused figuratively.

The stage is not really cleared: props and a few minor characters drift, but the system has been saved, universally.
Putin and other mega billionaires with the aid of Trumpian deception , saved the day, for those who would have mired the landscape with an equally indisposed socialistic decline.

The decline would have paralleled a historical precedent of almost unveliavable nuclear showdown.

So I guess we should all revel at the monumental deception for the sake of following a totally self deceptive objective interpretation of the value of
demonizing excesses necessarily based on primal narcissism.

It’s a fait accompli.

House fails to override Trump’s veto on bill that would have blocked his national emergency
Jacob Pramuk | @jacobpramuk
Published 9 Hours Ago Updated 5 Hours Ago
CNBC.com
The House fails to override President Donald Trump’s veto of a measure that would have ended the president’s national emergency declaration at the southern U.S. border.
Fourteen House Republicans support the measure, but it was not enough to reach a two-thirds majority.

House Democrats’ attempt to override President Donald Trump’s first veto failed Tuesday, leaving the president’s national emergency declaration in place for now.

The chamber fell short of the two-thirds majority needed to overcome the president’s opposition to a resolution that would end his executive action. Only 14 Republicans joined with Democrats in voting to override the veto in a 248-181 vote — one more GOP representative than when the House passed the measure last month.

In a joint statement, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Joaquin Castro, a Texas Democrat who authored the resolution, said the congressional votes would “provide significant evidence for the courts as they review lawsuits” challenging the move to secure money for the president’s proposed border wall. They signaled the House would vote again on ending the national emergency in six months, which lawmakers can do as long as it is in effect.

“The President’s lawless emergency declaration clearly violates the Congress’s exclusive power of the purse, and Congress will work through the appropriations and defense authorization processes to terminate this dangerous action and restore our constitutional system of balance of powers,” they said following the vote. “In six months, the Congress will have another opportunity to put a stop to this President’s wrongdoing. We will continue to review all options to protect our Constitution and our Democracy from the President’s assault.”

Al Drago | Bloomberg | Getty Images
U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat from California, speaks to members of the media while departing a House Democratic Caucus meeting on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Tuesday, March 26, 2019.
Last month, Trump declared a national emergency to divert money already approved by Congress to the construction of barriers on the U.S.-Mexico border. Democrats and some Republicans worried about Trump circumventing the legislature’s appropriations power after lawmakers passed only about $1.4 billion of the $5.7 billion the president sought for structures.

In a tweet later Tuesday, Trump celebrated what he called a “BIG WIN on the border.”

Both the House and Senate previously passed the legislation to block the emergency declaration with bipartisan support.

Trump hopes to use the declaration to secure $3.6 billion of the $8 billion total he wants to put toward barriers on the border. It would come from the Defense Department’s military construction budget. The president has argued he has the full authority to divert the funds.

Though Congress cannot terminate the emergency declaration for now, Trump’s action still will face its share of scrutiny. Numerous states and outside groups have filed lawsuits challenging the declaration.

Lawsuits have in part cited Trump’s own words last month, when he said “I didn’t need to do this” to get border wall funding, “but I’d rather do it much faster.”

After acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan said Monday that the Pentagon would move $1 billion away from military construction projects to build the border wall, House Armed Services Committee Chairman Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wa., denied the move. He said his committee had not approved it.

It still may go through, as the Pentagon will argue it has the authority to use the funds.

Trump also requested $8.6 billion for border wall construction in his fiscal 2020 budget, which could spark yet another standoff with Democrats over his signature campaign promise.

© 2019 CNBC LLC. All Rights Reserved. A Division of NBCUniversal


Donald Trump
During a private lunch with Senate Republicans, Donald Trump laid out an ambitious legislative agenda and reveled in the findings of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report. | Andrew Harnik/

‘He’s doing a victory lap’: Rejuvenated Trump pushes aggressive agenda post-Mueller
The president appeared to move past intraparty squabbles at a private lunch with Republican senators.

President Donald Trump is acting like he just hit the lottery.

In a private lunch with Senate Republicans on Tuesday, a rejuvenated Trump laid out an ambitious legislative agenda and put past intraparty conflicts behind him as he reveled in apparent vindication after special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into allegations that the president colluded with Russia during the 2016 campaign.

Trump looked like a president eager to run for reelection in 2020, and Senate Republicans — who face a tough map next year — were happy about it.

“I look at this as sort of a new election. A fresh start,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, a close Trump ally. He said Trump put it this way: “I’ve got this behind me now. It’s a fresh start. So let’s see what we can do — starting with health care.”

The president urged his party to swiftly pass a new North American trade deal, said he would pursue an “excellent” pact with China and even called on the GOP to formulate a new health care plan as he seeks to invalidate the Affordable Care Act. He endorsed a probe by Graham into whether there was an anti-Trump effort in the Justice Department in 2016 and at one point handed Majority Leader Mitch McConnell pages listing unconfirmed nominees and directed the caucus: “Please get these done.”

McConnell is expected to bring a rules change to the Senate floor pushing some confirmations as soon as next week.

Trump specifically called out Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) for slowing ambassador nominees and remarked that Menendez, who survived a corruption trial, is “lucky” to be in the Senate, according to a person briefed on the meeting. Trump also complained that Federal Reserve Chairman Jay Powell’s policies are hindering gross domestic product growth from reaching 4 percent, the person said.

The meeting with Republicans, described by a dozen GOP senators, showcased Trump’s new outlook as he enters his reelection campaign in earnest. With much of the cloud of the special counsel probe removed, Trump dictated an aggressive blueprint for Senate Republicans that seems impossible to execute with Democrats in the House majority.

But for Trump anything seemed possible on Tuesday as he declared both inside and outside the lunch that Republicans are going to become the “party of health care.” Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) said Trump is “reinvigorated” and Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) said the president feels “vindicated” after nearly two years of scrutiny by the special counsel.

“His perception: … That there was a concerted attempt to smear him and to cripple his presidency with something that was probably false,” Cassidy said.

“He’s doing a victory lap, no doubt about it,” said Sen. Johnny Isakson of Georgia. “But he earned it. He spent two years going through all this stuff with Mueller."

Trump’s decision to jump headlong into another divisive health care effort — with Democrats in control of the House no less — shows that he isn’t shying away from conflicts, even those that could hurt vulnerable GOP lawmakers. In fact, Republicans had no real plans to pass or even necessarily plan for sweeping health care legislation as of 24 hours ago. And most in the party have been eager to put the disastrous effort to repeal Obamacare behind them.

But at Trump’s direction, that all seemed to change on Tuesday.

“His real mission statement of the day was: take up a Republican health care package,” said Sen. Kevin Cramer of North Dakota

Graham to speak with attorney general about releasing Mueller report
By KYLE CHENEY and JOHN BRESNAHAN
Not everybody was that eager: “I want nothing to do with this,” said one Republican senator scarred from the failed attempt to repeal the health law in 2017.

Trump also picked on favorite targets. He complained about spending in Puerto Rico as Congress tries to forge a disaster aid deal for the island states affected by recent storms. He even showed Republicans a chart that laid out what he views as profligate spending as the island recovers from a recession and a hurricane.

“And he’s right on that. A lot of it has been misused and abused,” said Shelby, the Senate Appropriations Committee chairman. “It doesn’t have the best record of spending wisely.”

Trump also griped about a lack of investigations into the Justice Department and urged Graham to move forward. He said he wants Congress to act quickly on a new deal to replace NAFTA despite the steep hurdles posed by Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s ambivalence.

And Trump brought up the cost of stationing U.S. forces in Europe as part of NATO, but didn’t complain as much as he normally does, GOP senators said.

“Compared to the way [Trump] used to be about anything multi-national, I thought it was pretty good,” said Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma. “It wasn’t bad at all.”

The president told Republicans he wants to protect intellectual property produced by “nerds” in Silicon Valley from China, angling for a new pact with the country by driving a hard bargain, according to one attendee.

“Very good deal. Not a good deal. Not an OK deal it has to be a great deal,” Trump said, according to Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida.

Nancy Pelosi
CONGRESS

‘Let’s just get the goods’: Pelosi rallies dejected Dems post-Mueller
By ANDREW DESIDERIO and HEATHER CAYGLE
But what was most striking is that even after Republicans voted against his national emergency on the border and his administration’s presence in Syria, he viewed the caucus as a cohesive and loyal unit instrumental to his success.

There was no apparent pushback over Trump’s posthumous attack on Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) nor did Republicans express disdain for the Trump administration’s support on Monday for obliterating Obamacare. And the president didn’t single out GOP senators that have voted against him, either.

For once, Trump was somewhat magnanimous, at least by Trumpian standards. And rather than pick fights with Republicans who have slighted him, Trump thanked the GOP for the support.

Story Continued Below

“He was grateful. He expressed gratitude for the last two years of support he’s gotten from the institution and the members in there. It was a real sincere expression of gratitude,” Cramer said.

‘Let’s just get the goods’: Pelosi rallies dejected Dems post-Mueller
Trump hands Democrats a gift with new effort to kill Obamacare
House fails to override Trump veto on border emergency
Supreme Court weighs crackdown on gerrymandering
‘He’s doing a victory lap’: Rejuvenated Trump pushes aggressive agenda post-Mueller

Special counsel Robert Mueller walking in front of the White House
If You Thought Mueller Had Settled Matters, Think Again
By JOHN F. HARRIS

© 2019 POLITICO LLC


Mueller’s many loose ends
What comes next now that the probe is finished.
By Andrew Prokop on March 27, 2019 8:00 am

Special counsel Robert Mueller arrives at his office on March 21, 2019, in Washington, DC. Mark Wilson/Getty Images
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s sprawling, 22-month investigation has ended with a terse four-page letter from the attorney general — and a whole lot of loose ends.

Foremost among these is the question of when we will get to see more of Mueller’s report itself, rather than just William Barr’s summary. But commentators are already confused and divided on what we can infer from Mueller’s failure to “establish” conspiracy to interfere with the election means, and why Mueller decided not to decide on whether Trump obstructed justice.

More broadly, it’s also unclear how a great many threads Mueller investigated that weren’t mentioned in Barr’s letter were resolved — or unresolved. Congress will try to get answers in the coming days, and here are some of the biggest questions they will have.

The biggest loose end: When will we see (some of) the report?
Of course, the biggest loose end is that we still haven’t seen Mueller’s report itself. We’ve only seen Barr’s summary of it, which does not reveal Mueller’s reasoning or any details, and only quotes the special counsel a handful of times.

Barr wrote Sunday that his “goal and intent is to release as much of the Special Counsel’s report as I can consistent with applicable law, regulations, and Departmental policies.”

The first step in that process, he said, will be identifying what obtained Mueller from his grand jury — because he says grand jury material cannot by law be made public. Barr said materials impacting “other ongoing matters,” such as investigations Mueller referred elsewhere, must also be identified.

It’s unclear how long these steps will take, but once they are completed, we could get a (heavily redacted) Mueller report released. A Justice Department official told reporters Tuesday this will likely take “weeks not months,” but there’s some ambiguity about whether that refers to a redacted version of Mueller’s actual report, or simply another Barr summary with more information. If some version of the report is released, though, there will likely be more political and legal battles about revealing what’s under those redactions.

Did Mueller find nothing on collusion — or just not enough to prosecute?
The special counsel’s decision not to charge Americans with criminally conspiring with the Russian government to interfere with the election has spurred skeptics of the Russia probe to claim vindication. Trump supporters claim this confirms his “no collusion” mantra, and critics of the investigation from both the left and right have acted as if Mueller definitively declared there was nothing here at all.

Other commentators, though, have cautioned against jumping to that conclusion before seeing Mueller’s fuller findings. “Without seeing Mueller’s full report, we don’t know whether this is a firm conclusion about lack of coordination or a frank admission of insufficient evidence,” defense attorney Ken White writes at the Atlantic.

Barr quotes the Mueller report’s exact language twice on this topic. The first quote is, “the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.” The second is, “the evidence does not establish that the President was involved in an underlying crime related to Russian election interference.”

So it’s not yet entirely clear whether Mueller’s report describes a murky situation in which there’s some evidence that collusion occurred — or whether this part of the investigation truly did lead nowhere.

What did Mueller find on obstruction — and why didn’t he make a recommendation one way or the other?
On the topic of obstruction of justice, Mueller’s report specifically says it “does not conclude that the President committed a crime,” but that it “also does not exonerate him,” according to Barr. (Barr then proceeded to exonerate Trump himself.)

That, of course, raises the questions of what exactly Mueller found on obstruction. Here, the special counsel is known to have investigated:

The circumstances around Trump’s firing of National Security Adviser Michael Flynn
Trump’s conversations with FBI Director James Comey and his eventual firing of Comey
Trump’s pressures on Attorney General Jeff Sessions over the Russia investigation
Trump’s treatment of and contacts with various other Justice Department and intelligence officials, with regards to investigations implicating him or his associates
Whether Trump or his associates may have hinted at or offered pardons to witnesses in exchange for not incriminating him
False testimony from Trump associates to congressional committees investigating Russian interference
Trump’s involvement in crafting a false public story about Donald Jr.’s meeting with the Russian lawyer
Barr’s letter also says that “most” of the presidential actions Mueller analyzed in the obstruction report have “been the subject of public reporting.” But most is not all, so there appear to be some potentially obstructive Trump actions we don’t yet know about. So what are they?

Then there’s the question about why Mueller couldn’t make up his mind about whether Trump committed a crime here. Barr suggests that Mueller was stymied by “‘difficult issues’ of law and fact concerning whether the President’s actions and intent could be viewed as obstruction.” But he is vague on why, specifically, Mueller “determined not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment.” Some have suggested that Mueller may have intended to leave the topic to Congress and not Barr — but again, we need to see his fuller report for more information.

What happens to Mueller’s existing cases?
As the special counsel’s office closes down, any pending cases and matters Mueller’s team has dealt with will be handled off to other Justice Department offices to resolve.

For instance, the US Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia will handle the prosecution of Roger Stone — that office has been involved in Stone’s charges from the get-go, and Stone’s trial is currently scheduled for November 5, 2019.

DC federal prosecutors are also taking over unresolved matters relating to Paul Manafort, Rick Gates (who has not yet been sentenced), and a mysterious company owned by a foreign government that’s been fighting a subpoena. Michael Flynn’s sentencing, and an appeal from an associate of Stone’s who is fighting testimony, will also likely be handed off to other prosecutors.

What happened to … everything else Mueller investigated?
One surprising aspect of Mueller’s findings on Russian interference with the election, as summarized by Barr, is that they were quite narrowly tailored.

Barr writes that Mueller did not find that any Trump associates conspired or coordinated with the Russian government on the Kremlin’s two main efforts to interfere with the election: the Internet Research Agency’s social media propaganda operation, and the hacking and leaking of Democrats’ emails.

Yet Barr’s summary mentions nothing about … well, many, many other topics related to the Trump team and Russia that we know Mueller has investigated. These include:

The Trump Organization’s business dealings related to Russia
The Trump Tower Moscow talks
Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with a Russian lawyer at Trump Tower
Russian efforts to influence US policy on sanctions and Ukraine, both during the election and afterward
Paul Manafort’s handing over Trump polling data to Konstantin Kilimnik
Manafort’s efforts to reach out to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska
Connections between the NRA, a Russian central bank official, and spending on behalf of Trump’s campaign
Potential efforts to coordinate with WikiLeaks over the stolen emails
An offer from Gulf princes to the Trump team for election help on social media
Russia and other foreign-tied donations to Trump’s inauguration
Efforts by Jared Kushner to set up back-channel communications with Russia after the election
Barr’s summary tells us nothing of what became of Mueller’s inquiries into all these matters. But there are a few possibilities.

  1. Dead ends: It’s simply possible that some of the above turned out to be investigative dead ends not worth mentioning in a top-line summary.

  2. Included in separate counterintelligence findings: A second possibility ties into how the Russia investigation originated as a counterintelligence probe into whether Trump campaign advisers were working on Russia’s behalf, either wittingly or unwittingly. That probe was eventually expanded to include President Trump himself.

Some of these are not about criminal conspiracy with the Russian government to interfere with the election, which was the focus of Barr’s report. Instead, these are about potential compromise or links to Russia — something that would be part of a counterintelligence probe rather than a criminal one.

So these counterintelligence findings may well have been separated out from Mueller’s main report (which focused on prosecution or nonprosecution decisions), to be handled elsewhere. And indeed, NBC News now reports that congressional leaders may be briefed on Mueller’s counterintelligence findings in the next 30 to 60 days. So stay tuned for more on that.

  1. Referred elsewhere to DOJ to investigate: According to Barr’s letter, Mueller “referred several matters to other offices for further action” during his investigation. That is — matters on which the special counsel chose not to bring charges, but on which he think other Justice Department offices might.

We know of some of these. By February 2018, Mueller had referred an investigation into Michael Cohen’s finances to SDNY. And by August 2018, Mueller had referred cases about several people who had worked with Manafort on his Ukraine lobbying work — Tony Podesta, Vin Weber, and Greg Craig — to other offices. However, we don’t know how many matters Mueller referred elsewhere or what those offices might do with them moving forward.

What is Congress going to find out?
Probably before that is done, Barr will end up testifying before Congress. He has a scheduled appearance before an appropriations subcommittee to talk about the Justice Department’s budget on April 9. But Democrats want him to testify before the House Judiciary Committee before that to answer questions about the Mueller investigation, and are currently trying to nail down the timing.

Additionally, as mentioned above, the FBI is expected to brief key congressional leaders and committee chairs on the findings of the counterintelligence investigation into whether Trump or his campaign advisers were working on Russia’s behalf, per NBC News. That briefing would happen behind closed doors, but information from it could leak.

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OPINIONPublished March 27, 2019 Last Update 8 hrs ago
Andy Puzder: How Mueller’s report cleared Trump, and exposed the deep state

To paraphrase the French poet Charles Baudelaire, the greatest trick the deep state ever pulled off was convincing Americans that it didn’t exist. While Baudelaire was, of course, speaking of the devil, it seems an appropriate phrase. It expresses perhaps the most significant aspect of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report. There is a deep state, and it just got caught using a lie to try to reverse a presidential election.

In this respect, Mueller’s report did more than simply exonerate President Trump and his campaign from patently fake claims of Russian collusion. It did more than validate his election victory. It proved beyond any doubt, for anyone from either side of the aisle willing to listen, that the deep state exists, respects no bounds on its power, has no allegiance to the truth, and, left unchecked, threatens the very foundations of our constitutional democracy.

This is not to say there is a coordinated group of conspirators that gathers in smoke-filled rooms; just that there is undeniably a power that comes with many government positions. While the majority of those in government are honorable people who respect the limits placed on their power by our Constitution and traditions, there are always those who believe they have a higher purpose, and are willing to use government power to manipulate events and further their political beliefs. A distrust of common Americans – the deplorables – can ignite a temptation to use that power to achieve a goal the deep state deems significant, even if it may subvert our democracy.

HOW LONG HAS MUELLER KNOWN THERE WAS NO TRUMP-RUSSIA COLLUSION?

The American people have intuited the deep state’s existence. They elected Donald Trump in part because he promised to “drain the swamp” and take on the systemic corruption of the D.C. establishment. In this instance, the Democrats, along with a cabal of unelected bureaucrats and certain supportive elements of the media, responded by trying to take down the duly elected president. Some of those involved sincerely believed the unsubstantiated allegations of “Russian collusion.” Others always knew – or clearly should have known – that the claims against President Trump were politically motivated fabrications.

Our nation and our institutions are strong, however, and this deep state effort failed to bring down our president. According to Attorney General William Barr’s summary, Mueller concluded that his investigation “did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities . . . despite multiple offers from Russian-affiliated individuals to assist the Trump campaign.” That’s definitive.

True believers remain incredulous, but Mueller deserves credit for sticking to the truth despite the deep state pressure to do otherwise. He also deserves credit for taking an approach that enhanced his Report’s credibility. While it took what seemed like an unduly long time to conclude the investigation, it was undeniably thorough.

Mueller also assembled a team that included a number of Hillary Clinton supporters to investigate the claims of Russian collusion. The fact that even these potentially biased investigators were unable to find evidence of collusion following an extensive and unrestricted investigation is a compelling reason to believe the Mueller report’s conclusion. In retrospect, it was a smart move by Mueller, enhancing his report’s credibility. Had he hired a staff of Trump supporters, the Democrats could credibly have attacked the report as biased. Now, they cannot. Kudos to Special Counsel Mueller for that.

Mueller declined to reach any conclusions on the charge of obstruction of justice, properly leaving it “to the Attorney General to determine whether the conduct described in the report constitutes a crime.” After reviewing the report’s findings, Barr stated that “Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and I have concluded that the evidence developed during the Special Counsel’s investigation is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense,” stressing that this decision was made without regard to Department of Justice rules forbidding criminal prosecution of a sitting president.

Rosenstein’s involvement in that determination is significant. It was Rosenstein who appointed Mueller in the first place, and Rosenstein who authorized Mueller to investigate “any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation” – language that opened the door to investigating possible obstruction of justice. His concurrence in the Attorney General’s no obstruction conclusion enhances its credibility.

Let’s be honest about it. The collusion probe was a politically motivated, deep state effort to lay the groundwork for impeaching President Trump – a mission Democratic Party operatives spearheaded with cooperation from partisan elements in the FBI and supported by a barrage of fake news coverage that all but assumed an unsubstantiated claim that a duly elected president colluded with Russia to win an election were true. As we now know, it was simply untrue.

President Trump also had powerful allies – the American people and the truth. Mueller’s report proves that Trump’s campaign message was accurate from the start – there really is a deep state, and it only tolerates those who play by its rules. Mueller’s report doesn’t just vindicate the president; it validates what he’s been saying about the corrupt D.C. establishment ever since he embarked on the road to the White House.

Those who would continue this circus of investigations and unsubstantiated accusations should be on notice: Mueller’s report was a wake-up call for the American people, and there is another election on the horizon.

Andy Puzder was chief executive officer of CKE Restaurants for more than 16 years, following a career as an attorney. He was nominated by President Trump to serve as U.S. labor
Fox News

©2019 FOX News Network, LLC. All rights reserved.

Rebecca Falconer
3 hours ago
Trump: FBI officials committed treason in Russia probe
President Trump told Fox News’ “Hannity” Russia would’ve preferred Hillary Clinton as commander-in-chief.
Photo: Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
President Trump told Fox News’ “Hannity” Wednesday FBI officials investigating possible Russia links to his campaign had “committed treason.”

What he’s saying: “They wanted an insurance policy against me,” he told Fox News host Sean Hannity, referring to former FBI officials Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, who upset him previously over anti-Trump campaign texts. “And what we were playing out until just recently was the insurance policy. They wanted to do a subversion. It was treason … We can never allow these treasonous acts happen to another president.”

The big picture: Strzok was fired from the FBI in 2018 because of his anti-Trump texts with his then-colleague Page in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election. He had worked on the Hillary Clinton email server investigation and joined Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation but was kicked off the team and demoted when the texts surfaced.

Why it matters: This is Trump’s first interview since Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation concluded, and he didn’t hold back in the wide-ranging phone interview.

On the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act: Trump said he would release the FISA warrants and related documents used by the FBI to investigate his campaign in full and unredacted. He told Hannity he wanted to “get to the bottom” of how the long-running Russia collusion narrative began.

On the Mueller investigation: Trump called it “an attempted takeover of our government, of our country, an illegal takeover.”

On William Barr: Trump said it would never have happened Attorney General William Barr in the position from the start of his presidency. Barr said in a summary of the Mueller report Sunday finding no evidence of a Trump campaign conspiracy with Russia. On obstruction of justice, Barr said the report “does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”

On Russia: Trump said Russia would’ve “much rather” had Hillary Clinton as president than himself. “I will tell you this about Russia; if they had anything on me, it would have come out a long time ago,” he said. “You look at all of the different things.”

On the Green New Deal, spearheaded by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: “I really do want to campaign against it,” Trump said. “It’s ridiculous. The new green deal is going nowhere.”

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