Trump enters the stage


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.

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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.

© 2019 Vox Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Fox News

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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DONALD TRUMP
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The Trump administration’s new goal of returning astronauts to the surface of the moon by 2024 — five years earlier than planned — is a huge gamble with the prestige of the United States.

Why it matters: If it succeeds, this week could be remembered as the turning point that restored some of the space program’s lost glory. But that’s a big if, since the rockets and spacecraft are nowhere near ready. And if it fails, it would be a huge embarrassment to the nation that did all of this once before and couldn’t do it again on deadline.

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Chinese telecom giant Huawei is poised to claim close to half of the 5G market, nudging the technological center of gravity away from western telecom vendors and sounding alarms about China’s ability to spy on Americans.

Why it matters: 5G has one global standard that makes networks interoperable regardless of the equipment vendor. The security risk posed by Huawei is debated but if it ends up dominating 5G networks, authority to set standards for future network technologies — such as 6G, which is already under development — will shift toward China.

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The Department of Housing and Urban Development filed charges against Facebook Thursday for violating the Fair Housing Act by encouraging, enabling and causing housing discrimination through the company’s advertising platform.

Why it matters: Facebook just reached a historic settlement with the ACLU and other advocacy groups around this same issue, so it’s surprising that a settlement did not occur between HUD and the tech giant.

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Puerto Rico’s Governor Officially Sick of Trump’s Shit

Samantha Grasso
Today 1:13pm

Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rosselló and President Donald Trump

Following a very strange, inaccurate presentation by President Donald Trump to Republican senators earlier this week on the amount of federal disaster relief funds given to Puerto Rico, Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rosselló has sent a message to the president essentially telling him that he’s tired of Trump’s bullshit.

“If the bully gets close, I’ll punch the bully in the mouth,” Rosselló said in an interview with CNN. “It would be a mistake to confuse courtesy with courage.”

Rosselló is currently in Washington to meet with members of Congress in an effort to grant Puerto Rico statehood, CNN reported, which Rosselló views as necessary to receive the disaster recovery funds it needs to continue the nearly-two-year-long process after Hurricane Maria.

At a weekly policy lunch on Tuesday, Trump, with the help of a misleading visual aid, questioned why Puerto Rico was getting $91 billion in aid, when Texas received $29 billion and South Carolina got $1.5 billion in aid for disaster recovery from storms. Puerto Rico, in fact, has not received even close to $91 billion—that figure is closer to the amount of damage the hurricane caused to the island, according to the Washington Post.

Following Trump’s joust at Puerto Rico, the latest in months of attacks on the island’s finances and accusations that it’s spending irresponsibly, Rosselló said Trump’s comments “are below the dignity of a sitting President of the United States. They continue to lack empathy, are irresponsible, regrettable and, above all, unjustified.”

“I invite the president to stop listening to ignorant and completely wrong advice,” Rosselló said at the time.

His thoughts shared with CNN today hit at Trump even harder. From CNN (emphasis mine):

Rosselló said the President is working off of bad information provided by White House officials.

“It’s unfortunate that we are having to hear this. These statements lack empathy, but more so they lack the true facts of the matter,” Rosselló said in response to Trump’s comments. “They’re not aligned with the truth and reality, No. 1. And No. 2, I just think we have to end this battle of words and just recognize we’re not his political adversaries, we’re his citizens,” the governor added.

[…]

“He treats us as second class citizens, that’s for sure,” he said. “And my consideration is I just want the opportunity to explain to him why the data and information he’s getting is wrong. I don’t think getting into a kicking and screaming match with the President does any good. I don’t think anyone can beat the President in a kicking and screaming match. What I am aiming to do is make sure reason prevails, that empathy prevails, that equality prevails, and that we can have a discussion.”

It’s not just Trump treating the Puerto Ricans with disrespect, but his administration too. Puerto Rican officials told CNN that on Wednesday, they were told by White House senior officials including trade adviser Peter Navarro that Puerto Rico was being too adamant in setting up a meeting between the governor and Trump. “You guys have to fucking stop with the meeting request,” one official reportedly said, while Navarro reportedly added: “Your governor is fucking things up.”

I don’t know, y’all. Maybe if the president actually gave a shit about helping Puerto Rico and the people who live there recover from the worst disaster to hit the island in modern history, Puerto Rican officials wouldn’t have to hound him for a meeting. But sure, Rosselló’s the one “fucking things up” here.

Either way, if Trump thinks dealing with Puerto Rico is going to get any easier any time soon, he’s got another thing coming—last week, San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz, an even more ferocious critic of the president and his response to Hurricane Maria, announced that she would run for governor of Puerto Rico in 2020.

Splinter Staff Writer, Texan

© 2018 Gizmodo Media Group

----------------------------’


It took Trump 90 seconds to lie about the “Mueller report” during Michigan speech
The president then took a victory lap.
By Aaron Rupar on March 28, 2019 9:40 pm

Less than two minutes into President Donald Trump’s speech in Grand Rapids, Michigan, he lied about special counsel Robert Mueller’s final report.

“The collusion delusion is over,” Trump said on Thursday night, in his first speech since Attorney General Bill Barr announced some of Mueller’s key conclusions on Sunday. “The special counsel completed its report and found no collusion and no obstruction.”

It is not true, however, that the special counsel exonerated Trump of obstruction of justice. While we still can’t say for sure what the special counsel said — all we know of Mueller’s final report came by way of a brief summary of it sent to Congress on Sunday by Barr, Trump’s hand-picked attorney general — even Barr’s letter acknowledged Mueller did not exonerate Trump of obstruction.

“While this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him,” says Mueller’s report, according to one of the few direct quotations from the special counsel’s report included in Barr’s summary.

Barr, together with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, made the subsequent decision to clear Trump of possible obstruction of justice charges. The public still hasn’t seen the final report, which the New York Times reported on Thursday is over 300 pages long. It remains unclear if the special counsel intended for Barr and Rosenstein to resolve the obstruction question, or if he primarily meant to use his report to present evidence to Congress.

It’s also not not quite the case that Mueller said “no collusion,” as Trump claimed. According to another quotation from the report included in Barr’s summary, Mueller concluded that “[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.” But not establishing a conspiracy is not the same as finding no evidence of collusion at all.

After falsely claiming total exoneration, Trump used Barr’s letter to go on the attack against some of his most prominent Democratic critics — including the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, who went viral earlier in the day when he responded to a Republican effort to compel him to resign during a hearing by reciting the major pieces of evidence suggesting the Trump campaign did in fact collude with Russia.

“Little pencil-neck Adam Schiff,” Trump said, prompting boos from the crowd. “He has the smallest, thinnest neck I have ever seen. He is not a long-ball hitter. But I saw him today — ‘well, we don’t really know, there could still have been some Russia collusion.’ Sick. Sick. These are sick people.”

While Trump and his allies have spent the week crowing over the fact that the special counsel apparently won’t be indicting Trump or any additional associates of his, it remains unclear when members of Congress or the public will be able to see more of the Mueller report beyond the less than 100 words quoted in Barr’s summary.

Following a phone call with Barr on Wednesday, House Judiciary Committee chair Rep. Jerry Nadler (NY) said the attorney general made it clear that he won’t meet an April 2 deadline Democrats set for making the report public.

“We’re not happy about that, to put it mildly,” Nadler said, according to the Times.

During his speech in Michigan, Trump did not bother trying to explain the apparent disconnect between his misleading declarations of total exoneration on one hand, and his administration’s apparent reluctance to release the Mueller report on the other. After all, if the report is as exonerating as Trump has indicated, then why not make it public and take yet another victory lap?

© 2019 Vox Media, Inc.

Dee Margo, the Republican mayor of El Paso, met with Customs and Border Protection commissioner Kevin McAleenan when the federal official visited the border in the city on Wednesday and declared the system there to be “at breaking point”.

Margo told NPR shortly after that that the idea of shutting the border in response to the current migration surge would not be helpful.

He put the problem down, in the big picture, to the lack of “intestinal fortitude” exhibited on either side of the aisle in Congress on immigration laws for the past three decades.

Immediately on the ground, if the president closes the border next week, the effects will immediately be dramatic, if that’s not stating the obvious. Just in El Paso, Margo pointed out that:

“We have a hundred billion-plus in trade back and forth in imports and exports. We have six of the 28 bridges that cross from Texas to Mexico…We have 23,000 legal pedestrians that come north every day. We’ve got 13 million vehicles that come north every year.

“It affects us all the way around, from commerce - and the wait times on the bridges are approaching two hours, that’s an environmental issue, while cars are just sitting there idling. It’s a major problem.

“But the issue is not just Mexico and whatever they’re doing. The issue is the lack of action by our Congress to deal with this.”

Updated at 1.11pm EDT
Facebook Twitter
12.46pm

Politicians disagree about whether there is a crisis at the border and, if there is, to what extent it is self-inflicted by America’s own dysfunctional immigration policies.

My colleagues Amanda Holpuch, taking to experts from her well-informed purchase in New York, and Nina Lakhani, who’s based south of the US-Mexico border and reports from Mexico City, analyze the latest and jointly write today:

US authorities’ failure to keep up with a steep increase in Central American families seeking asylum at the US-Mexico border has left El Paso aid workers, churches and city government scrambling to respond.

After a sudden surge in arrivals, migrants have been crowded into hotels, churches and even held under a bridge behind a chain-link fence and razor wire while their asylum claims are processed.

The US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) commissioner, Kevin McAleenan, said the number of new arrivals in March is expected to reach 100,000, including 55,000 family members. “The immigration system is at breaking point,” he told reporters on Wednesday.

The chaotic scenes in El Paso are the result of a regional crisis in which growing numbers of Central American families flee violence, corruption and poverty – only to come up against failed migration polices in Mexico and the US.

Comedy writer and political observer Nick Jack Pappas isn’t laughing.

He tweeted: “$558 billion in goods flow across the U.S.- Mexico border in both directions, making Mexico our third-biggest trading partner for goods. Closing the border would cost billions.”

Pappas then continues, including a think tank quote: “If you are thinking about a total shutdown of the border, then it’s hundreds of millions of dollars A DAY – maybe a billion.” - Duncan Wood, director of the Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute. Our economy would stall. The U.S. would become one of Trump’s failed businesses.

The Trump administration’s hardline immigration policies demand the detention of migrants entering the US unlawfully, even if they are claiming asylum after escaping violence and crushing poverty in Central America.

Most migrants are arriving from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, a region my world affairs colleague in Washington, Julian Borger, has described, politically, as “a hell the US helped create” with its foreign policy.

The federal agencies on the front line, Customs and Border Protection, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, are overwhelmed.

Hundreds of migrant families who’ve crossed the border are packed under a highway overpass on the border in El Paso, in western Texas, next to the border processing station, behind razor wire and fencing, as CBP struggles to figure out where to put them.

-------‘------’------‘------"-----------’----‘----’----‘—’‘’‘’'–

U.S.
DONALD TRUMP DEFENDERS ARE FAILING TO ACCEPT REALITY OVER MUELLER’S REPORT, JOHN BRENNAN’S SPOKESMAN SAYS
By Shane Croucher On 3/29/19 at 7:52 AM EDT
John Brennan Donald Trump Mueller Report

Former Director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) John Brennan testifies before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on Capitol Hill, May 23, 2017 in Washington, DC. Brennan has accused President Donald Trump of treasonous behavior.

U.S. DONALD TRUMP RUSSIA INVESTIGATION

A spokesman for former CIA Director John Brennan has accused President Donald Trump and his defenders over the Mueller report of failing to accept reality amid criticism of the ex-intelligence chief.

Trump has claimed total exoneration by special counsel Robert Mueller’s report, which is confidential and has so far only been briefly summarized in public by Attorney General William Barr.

But Barr’s summary states explicitly that Mueller, who investigated Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, does not exonerate Trump on the charge of obstruction of justice.

The president attacked Brennan in a Fox News interview with Sean Hannity on Wednesday night, calling the intelligence veteran sick and saying he was not good at his former job.

“Let’s not forget that the special counsel’s investigation resulted in indictments against 34 people and three entities on nearly 200 separate criminal charges,” Brennan’s spokesman told Newsweek.

“Five associates of the president have been convicted, and another is awaiting trial. Those who think nothing happened and who are now going after critics of the president aren’t accepting reality and they are just playing politics.”

Trump and Brennan, who was director of the CIA from 2013 to 2017, have clashed over the president’s approach to Russia.

The former intelligence head, who has worked for Republican and Democratic presidents, is a fierce and frequent critic of Trump. In response to the criticism, Trump revoked Brennan’s security clearance.

At an infamous joint press conference with Trump and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin after the pair met for private talks, the U.S. president cast doubt on the conclusion of his own intelligence agencies that the Kremlin sought to interfere in the 2016 election.

On Twitter following the press conference, Brennan suggested Trump is a traitor whose comments were impeachable.

“Donald Trump’s press conference performance in Helsinki rises to & exceeds the threshold of ‘high crimes & misdemeanors,’” Brennan tweeted. “It was nothing short of treasonous. Not only were Trump’s comments imbecilic, he is wholly in the pocket of Putin.”

In the final days before Mueller finished his report and handed it to the attorney general, Brennan speculated that there could be last-minute indictments of Trump family members, though he caveated that he did not know anything about the investigation.

In the end, there were no further indictments. But Trump and his supporters seized on Brennan’s comments to MSNBC, accusing him of making a phoney prediction.

“I think Brennan’s a sick person, I really do,” Trump told Hannity in an interview giving his thoughts about the Barr summary of the Mueller report.

“I believe there’s something wrong with him…For him to come out of the CIA and act that way was so disrespectful to the country, and to the CIA, and to the position he held.

“He was not considered good at what he did. He was never a respected guy. Tough guy, but not a respected guy. But he lied to Congress. And the other night before the report came out, he predicted horrible things. The things he said were horrible.”

Barr has so far only released a four-page summary of Mueller’s findings in his book-length report, which spans more than 300 pages.

The attorney general intends to release at least some of the report into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election in April.

The U.S. intelligence community concludes that Russia attempted to sway the election in Trump’s favor. Mueller indicted many Russian intelligence officers over election interference.

According to Barr’s summary, Mueller’s report did not find that the president, his campaign, or any of its associates conspired or coordinated with Russia to influence the election.

Barr also noted that Mueller did not exonerate Trump on charges of obstruction of justice related to the special counsel’s long-running investigation.

But the special counsel also did not conclude that the president committed a crime.

Trump’s critics accuse the president of meddling with the investigation by constantly discrediting it as a politically motivated witch hunt, attacking Mueller’s witnesses, and taking action such as firing the former FBI Director James Comey when he had oversight of the probe.

Mueller deferred the decision to prosecute on the obstruction charges to Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who declined to pursue Trump.

“On the issue of obstruction of justice, Brennan believes it is too important to be dismissed by a Trump-appointed AG with a predetermined view on presidential accountability to the rule of law, and that we all need to see the report,” Brennan’s spokesman told Newsweek.

“As for the president and his own actions, Brennan will leave to others how it is possible that one can engage with a foreign power in a most unethical, unprincipled, and unpatriotic way without violating criminal statutes.

“But Mueller determined those actions weren’t illegal and Brennan fully accepts that.”

The spokesman added that Americans should expect much more of a president than the ability to escape criminal liability. “Traits such as decency, honesty, integrity, and competence in our president sure would be nice,” he said.

The president is still the subject of multiple investigations spanning his political, business and personal life.

Among those investigating Trump are various House committees, which plan to use the Mueller report to advance their own probes, including connections between Russia and his campaign, and the Southern District of New York.

Donald Trump on Wind Power Is ‘Malicious Ignorance’

© Copyright 2019 NEWSWEEK

‘This Is Lunacy’: Scalise Calls Out Schiff for Continuing to Push Trump-Russia Collusion ‘Lie’

Mar 29, 2019 // 8:23am |
House Minority Whip Steve Scalise joined the “Fox & Friends” hosts Friday morning to call out Democrats for continuing to push the Trump-Russia collusion “lie.”

On Thursday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) defended Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), an outspoken critic of President Trump who is facing calls to resign for continuing to push collusion claims despite Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s findings.

“What is the president afraid of? Is he afraid of the truth, that he would go after … a respected chairman of a committee in the Congress? I think they’re just scaredy cats,” Pelosi said at her weekly press conference Thursday.

Scalise (R-La.) said Democrats are ignoring the facts in their continued pursuit of the Russia “witch hunt.”

He lamented that Democrats have become the party of “constant harassment of the president.”

“For the last two years, Adam Schiff’s been going around saying he’s got more than circumstantial evidence of collusion. And they’ve been hanging their hat on the Mueller report. They were convinced there would be evidence of collusion and all these indictments. And there was none,” Scalise said.

Despite that, Schiff and his fellow Democrats will never admit that they were wrong, Scalise said.

“They just move on and make some other baseless accusation. … Whatever they’re gonna say next, just consider the source.”

‘This Is a Big Circle’: Sen. Paul Claims Brennan Internally Pushed ‘Fake Steele Dossier’

‘Totally, Profoundly Dishonest’: Gingrich Slams Schiff for Continued Collusion Claims

Schiff Blasts ‘Unpatriotic’ Actions of Trump Campaign, Insists ‘Collusion’ With Russia Occurred
Latest from Fox News Channel
1 Wallace: It’s Not Premature for Trump to Take ‘Victory Lap’ After Receiving ‘Clean Bill of Health’ on Collusion

©2019 FOX News Network, LLC. All rights reserved.

Lunacy or Collusion?

In the vernacular of contra-indicated state of affairs, at what point do impressions signal a state of affairs when this difference becomes of tripartite concern? At what point do the paradoxical asertions cross the line from individual psychic breaks to social-national~international urgency where appearing fissures signal particular projective breaks?
World social nationalism in itself is particularly an ominous label, where from any shrewd politician would want to steer clear of, but it seems like that line was already passed unnoticed, and a newer no holds policy has been reintegrate on assumptions yet to be determined.

This entails risk taking on a new plateau, one with which a desperation could be unearthed .

This is most probably why, Miller , as Pontious once had, washed his hands.

This is way thicker then even a crucifixion would suggest, because it is never transparent here who or what the victims are, not to mention the victims are the very ones who unwarily become the agents .

This confusion seeks clarity, a clarity that is at once desired and further obfuscated.

It’s called slipping a nice fat check to Mueller for scrapping the report.

Politicians in back rooms
Rich people with heirlooms
Handshakes at clambakes
Clear the record for namesake
You don’t believe they’re all this fake?

c’mon meno
or should I call you Janet Reno?

Caliphornia.

:confused:

youtu.be/YlUKcNNmywk

Not really, but perhaps it’s too late in the game for that.

this thread must be so therapeutic.

I wont mention to immensity of the wealth difference in favour of the anti trump charade vs what the actual base controls.
Instead, I will just cheer you on. This is going to be a hell of an interesting elections.

peteforamerica.com/meet-pete/

Forever.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2FMhBg0h_8[/youtube]
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FES7QLDVLKo[/youtube]

Compare this to Pete, though. The Dems have come a long way. Of course Biden is even more macho dan Arnold is, but you have to wonder if he ll really run.

americanpossibilities.org/? … lcEALw_wcB

I bet 3/4 75 % for he will run even before looking at the published odds if there is any, of winning.

ODDS TO WIN THE 2020 UNITED STATES PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION
Name Odds
Donald Trump +175
Bernie Sanders +650
Kamala Harris +650
Joe Biden +650
Beto O’Rourke +900
Andrew Yang +2200
Pete Buttgieg +2800
Sherrod Brown +2800
Elizabeth Warren +3000
Amy Klobuchar +3300
Cory Booker +3300
Tulsi Gabbard +4000
Mike Pence +4500
Kirsten Gillibrand +4500
Nikki Haley +5000
Michelle Obama +6600
John Hickenlooper +6600
John Kasich +6600
Julian Castro +7500
Howard Schultz +7500
Mitt Romney +8000
Oprah Winfrey +8000
Marco Rubio +10000
Mark Cuban +10000
Eric Garcetti +10000
Michael Avenatti +10000
Tom Wolf +10000
Orrin Hatch +10000
Rahm Emanuel +10000
Paul Ryan +10000
George Clooney +10000
Joe Kennedy III +10000
Ted Cruz +10000
Rand Paul +10000
Ben Shapiro +10000
Bill Gates +10000
Hillary Clinton +12500
Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson +12500
Andrew Cuomo +12500
Mitch Landrieu +12500
Chris Murphy +12500
Tom Steyer +12500
Terry McAuliffe +12500
Martin O’Malley +12500
Tammy Duckworth +15000
Bob Iger +15000
Jeb Bush +15000
Mark Zuckerberg +15000
Tim Kaine +15000
Trey Gowdy +15000
Ivanka Trump +15000
Kanye West +15000
Chelsea Clinton +20000
Leonardo DiCaprio +20000
Will Smith +20000
Joe Rogan +25000
Tom Brady +25000

Harris, Biden and Sanders are projected equally at almost 75% less likely, then the incubant, which is a wide spread, but can change dramatically, if Trump’s political and economic fronts change for the worse substantially.

If he holds on, then Biden may increase his lead considerably, opting finally to run. The barometer is very uncertain, and this will be a wild ride, affordably.


The Mueller investigation is over. QAnon, the conspiracy theory that grew around it, is not.
Why a conspiracy theory with an expiration date will endure.
By Jane Coaston on March 29, 2019 5:30 pm

Trump supporters displaying QAnon posters at a rally for President Donald Trump on July 31, 2018, in Tampa, Florida. NurPhoto via Getty Images
One would think that a conspiracy theory that’s based on the idea that special counsel Robert Mueller and President Donald Trump are working together to expose thousands of cannibalistic pedophiles hidden in plain sight (including Hillary Clinton and actor Tom Hanks) and then send them to Guantanamo Bay would be doomed. Mueller’s investigation has ended and Attorney General Bill Barr’s summary of Mueller’s report has been published — all without any mention of pedophiles, cannibals, or child murderers.

One would be wrong.

As evidenced by Trump’s Thursday night rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, QAnon — a conspiracy theory that took root in online forums before bursting into the public eye in early 2018 — is alive and well.

It’s not just left-leaning or mainstream outlets that have argued the conspiracy theory’s inherent, and pervasive, ridiculousness. Major supporters of the president have denounced QAnon as a “grift” and a “scam.” Many of the conspiracy theory’s allegations — like that Hillary Clinton was executed by lethal injection in February — are patently false (and wild).

But the people who follow QAnon don’t care. In their view, QAnon — a conspiracy theory that alleges hundreds of thousands of child-eating pedophiles are due to be arrested any day now by Trump and Mueller (oh, and John F. Kennedy Jr. is alive) — is bringing America together.

A quick refresher on #QAnon
QAnon is a conspiracy theory based around an anonymous online poster known as “Q” — a pseudonym that comes from the Q-level security clearance, the Department of Energy equivalent of “Top Secret.” Beginning on October 28, 2017, Q began posting on the 4chan message board /pol/ about Hillary Clinton’s imminent arrest. Followers of Q became known as QAnon, and they began awaiting “The Storm,” during which all of Trump’s enemies, including Rep. Adam Schiff and others, would be arrested and executed for being murderous child-eating pedophiles.

From a QAnon Twitter user, March 29, 2019.
I wrote about QAnon last year, when the conspiracy theory first gained attention in mainstream circles. And as I wrote then, most, if not all, of Q’s posts and predictions were unadulterated nonsense.

In a posting on November 1, 2017, Q said that on November 3 and 4, John Podesta, chair of Clinton’s 2016 campaign, would be arrested, military control would take hold, and “public riots would be organized in serious numbers to prevent the arrest and capture of more senior public officials.” Q posted, “We will be initiating the Emergency Broadcast System (EMS) during this time in an effort to provide a direct message (avoiding the fake news) to all citizens. Organizations and/or people that wish to do us harm during this time will be met with swift fury – certain laws have been pre-lifted to provide our great military the necessary authority to handle and conduct these operations (at home and abroad).”

Obviously, none of this happened. There were no public riots or mass arrests or the use of emergency broadcasts. (In fact, the Emergency Broadcast System went out of service in 1997, replaced by the Emergency Alert System.)

But none of QAnon’s most fervent followers seemed to care. And even with the release of Barr’s summary of the Mueller report — which, though very short, would probably have mentioned the indictments of Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton had they been included in the document — QAnon believers aren’t deterred.

We will never see the end of QAnon
And that’s why, despite everything that’s taken place over the last week, QAnon will persist — because QAnon wasn’t built on facts, but on almost religious fervor. In fact, that’s how most conspiracy theories work. As I wrote last year:

Conspiracy theories like QAnon are “self-sealing” — meaning that evidence against them can become evidence of their validity in the minds of believers, according to Stephan Lewandowsky, a professor at the University of Bristol who studies conspiracy theories and conspiracists. Trying to disprove a conspiracy theory thus usually only serves to reinforce it.
Take conspiracy theorists who believed, falsely and without evidence, that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg had secretly died earlier this year and her death was being withheld from the American public by the government. As SCOTUSblog found in a case study it conducted, RBG conspiracy believers whom the blog confronted with evidence that the justice had not, in fact, passed away, reacted by leaning into the conspiracy theory even further.

Two users insisted that Ginsburg was dead. According to one, with over 15,000 followers: “Nope, that’s a body double if ever there was one.” And as another user, with over 435,000 followers, suggested, “That’s total hoax and a planned delay – bet she’s dead.”
And that’s just one conspiracy theory. QAnon — which began relatively simply as a conspiracy theory about the Mueller investigation — now includes references and allusions to the Pizzagate conspiracy theory and “false flag” mass shootings. That means that the end of the Mueller investigation won’t end QAnon. Nothing will.

As Travis View, a conspiracy theory researcher and QAnon expert, wrote on QAnon in the Washington Post on March 26:

… failed predictions and misplaced expectations haven’t damaged the size or enthusiasm of the QAnon community. They persist in their faith that high-level Democrats will be arrested at any moment, weathering several more disconfirmations of Q’s legitimacy and trustworthiness. Some QAnon followers even claim that failed predictions are irrelevant, because dates that pass without incident serve the purpose of tricking the evil “cabal” they imagine they’re fighting.
Like 9/11 trutherism and moon-landing truthers, QAnon, it appears, is with us for good.

© 2019 Vox Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Iii
The day North Korea talks collapsed, Trump passed Kim a note demanding he turn over his nukes
Published 4 Hours Ago Updated 2 Hours Ago
Reuters
During talks in Hanoi last month, U.S. President Donald Trump passed a piece of paper to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un calling on the leader to hand over the country’s nuclear weapons
After Kim received the document during a meeting of the two leaders at Hanoi’s Metropole hotel on Feb. 28, the summit collapsed
The document took a hard line on North Korea’s denuclearization, calling for Kim to turn over Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons and bomb fuel
U.S. President Donald Trump walks with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during a break in talks at the U.S.-North Korea summit in Hanoi on February 28, 2019.
Saul Loeb | AFP | Getty Images
U.S. President Donald Trump walks with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during a break in talks at the U.S.-North Korea summit in Hanoi on February 28, 2019.
On the day that their talks in Hanoi collapsed last month, U.S. President Donald Trump handed North Korean leader Kim Jong Un a piece of paper that included a blunt call for the transfer of Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons and bomb fuel to the United States, according to the document seen by Reuters.

Trump gave Kim both Korean and English-language versions of the U.S. position at Hanoi’s Metropole hotel on Feb. 28, according to a source familiar with the discussions, speaking on condition of anonymity. It was the first time that Trump himself had explicitly defined what he meant by denuclearization directly to Kim, the source said.

A lunch between the two leaders was canceled the same day. While neither side has presented a complete account of why the summit collapsed, the document may help explain it.

The document’s existence was first mentioned by White House national security advisor John Bolton in television interviews he gave after the two-day summit. Bolton did not disclose in those interviews the pivotal U.S. expectation contained in the document that North Korea should transfer its nuclear weapons and fissile material to the United States.

The document appeared to represent Bolton’s long-held and hardline “Libya model” of denuclearization that North Korea has rejected repeatedly. It probably would have been seen by Kim as insulting and provocative, analysts said.

Trump had previously distanced himself in public comments from Bolton’s approach and said a “Libya model” would be employed only if a deal could not be reached.

The idea of North Korea handing over its weapons was first proposed by Bolton in 2004. He revived the proposal last year when Trump named him as national security advisor.

The document was meant to provide the North Koreans with a clear and concise definition of what the United States meant by “final, fully verifiable, denuclearization,” the source familiar with discussions said.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The State Department declined to comment on what would be a classified document.

After the summit, a North Korean official accused Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo of “gangster-like” demands, saying Pyongyang was considering suspending talks with the United States and may rethink its self-imposed ban on missile and nuclear tests.

The English version of the document, seen by Reuters, called for “fully dismantling North Korea’s nuclear infrastructure, chemical and biological warfare program and related dual-use capabilities; and ballistic missiles, launchers, and associated facilities.”

Aside from the call for the transfer of Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons and bomb fuel, the document had four other key points.

It called on North Korea to provide a comprehensive declaration of its nuclear program and full access to U.S. and international inspectors; to halt all related activities and construction of any new facilities; to eliminate all nuclear infrastructure; and to transition all nuclear program scientists and technicians to commercial activities.

The summit in Vietnam’s capital was cut short after Trump and Kim failed to reach a deal on the extent of economic sanctions relief for North Korea in exchange for its steps to give up its nuclear program.

The first summit between Trump and Kim, which took place in Singapore in June 2018, was almost called off after the North Koreans rejected Bolton’s repeated demands for it to follow a denuclearization model under which components of Libya’s nuclear program were shipped to the United States in 2004.

Seven years after a denuclearization agreement was reached between the United States and Libya’s leader, Muammar Gaddafi, the United States took part in a NATO-led military operation against his government and he was overthrown by rebels and killed.

‘Miserable fate’
Last year, North Korea officials called Bolton’s plan “absurd” and noted the “miserable fate” that befell Gaddafi.

After North Korea threatened to cancel the Singapore summit, Trump said in May 2018 he was not pursuing a “Libya model” and that he was looking for an agreement that would protect Kim.

“He would be there, he would be running his country, his country would be very rich,” Trump said at the time.

“The Libya model was a much different model. We decimated that country,” Trump added.

The Hanoi document was presented in what U.S. officials have said was an attempt by Trump to secure a “big deal” under which all sanctions would be lifted if North Korea gave up all of its weapons.

U.S.-North Korean engagement has appeared to be in limbo since the Hanoi meeting. Pompeo said on March 4 he was hopeful he could send a team to North Korea “in the next couple of weeks,” but there has been no sign of that.

Jenny Town, a North Korea expert at the Washington-based Stimson Center think tank, said the content of the U.S. document was not surprising.

“This is what Bolton wanted from the beginning and it clearly wasn’t going to work,” Town said. “If the U.S. was really serious about negotiations they would have learned already that this wasn’t an approach they could take.”

Town added, “It’s already been rejected more than once, and to keep bringing it up … would be rather insulting. It’s a non-starter and reflects absolutely no learning curve in the process.”

North Korea has repeatedly rejected unilateral disarmament and argues that its weapons program is needed for defense, a belief reinforced by the fate Gaddafi and others.

In an interview with ABC’s “This Week” program after the Hanoi summit, Bolton said the North Koreans had committed to denuclearization in a variety of forms several times “that they have happily violated.”

“We define denuclearization as meaning the elimination of their nuclear weapons program, their uranium enrichment capability, their plutonium reprocessing capability,” Bolton said.

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

Jonathan Swan
7 hours ago
Trump goes it alone
President Trump walking away juxtaposed over a presidential document.

President Trump and his chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, have realized they’re passing no major legislation through this divided Congress.

Why it matters: No sooner had Trump put out his budget than the conversation among many Capitol Hill Republicans turned to what they expect will eventually happen: No grand spending deal between Democrats and Republicans, and instead perhaps a continuation of 2019 spending levels through 2020.

Reality check: Forget infrastructure. Forget any serious action to rein in the national debt. Forget entitlement reform. Forget fixing the nation’s broken immigration system.

And yes, forget health care. Trump may want to revisit the Affordable Care Act, but he doesn’t have a lot of company in the GOP.
Instead, the Trump team is busy figuring out ways to go over the heads of Congress. (The one exception is drug pricing.)
What to expect: More executive orders, more foreign deals sealed by a presidential signature rather than congressional approval, and more creative applications of the law — for example, declaring a national emergency to build the wall — to get Trump what he wants.

David McCabe, Gigi Sukin

------‘---------’-‘’‘’-‘’-----------'-----

© Copyright Axios 2019


TheHill

NATIONAL SECURITY
March 30, 2019 - 12:38 PM EDT
Questions mount over Mueller, Barr and obstruction

Questions are mounting over special counsel Robert Mueller’s inquiry into whether President Trump obstructed justice as lawmakers on Capitol Hill await the release of his report.

While Barr’s four-page letter to Congress on Sunday silenced suspicions Mueller would charge Trump or members of his campaign with conspiring with the Russian government, its contents only amplified the mystery surrounding the obstruction inquiry.

It remains unclear why Mueller declined to make a decision one way or another on whether Trump impeded his investigation, and Democrats have grown increasingly skeptical of Attorney General William Barr’s judgment that the evidence was insufficient to accuse Trump of obstruction. They also argue he is not a neutral arbiter.

Lawmakers are unlikely to get answers for weeks, as the Justice Department combs through Mueller’s 300-plus-page report to determine what can be publicly released.

Barr told Congress on Friday that he expects to have the report prepared for public release by mid-April, after officials scrub it of grand jury material, sensitive national security information and details that could impact ongoing investigations.

In the meantime, Democrats are focused on a lengthy memo Barr penned last year criticizing the obstruction inquiry and labeling the theory Trump impeded the probe by firing FBI Director James Comey “fatally misconceived.”

Some legal experts have described Mueller’s decision to not make his own call on obstruction charges as unusual. Regulations governing Mueller’s appointment required him to submit a report to Barr laying out why he prosecuted or declined to prosecute certain crimes.

“It is a little unusual because there is a charging decision, and either someone is charged or the prosecution is declined - a declination. It’s more unusual for a prosecutor to say, I don’t know or I don’t know enough to reach a firm conclusion,” said Jack Sharman, a defense attorney at Lightfoot, Franklin & White and a former special counsel to Congress during the Whitewater investigation.

Some say it’s possible that Mueller meant to lay out the facts and let Congress decide on whether Trump obstructed the investigation or that he meant for Barr, a political appointee, to ultimately make the call.

Mueller was also keenly aware of the Justice Department policy not to indict a sitting president, which may have affected his reasoning.

Some argue Barr overstepped his bounds by making his own judgment on obstruction without releasing Mueller’s report or the evidence backing it up.

Others say it was Barr’s call to make given Mueller’s decision to not make a decision.

“It doesn’t say what happens if Mueller says, I’m unable to make a determination,” Steven Cash, a lawyer at Day Pitney and former counsel to Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), said of Mueller’s original mandate.

Broadly, legal experts agree that proving obstruction of justice is difficult; it requires establishing that the offender acted to impede an official proceeding and that he or she acted with “corrupt intent.”

Doing so would almost certainly require Mueller to interview Trump in order to get to the bottom of his reasons for firing Comey or taking other actions that the special counsel likely examined, such as his tweets attacking then-attorney general Jeff Sessions and calling on him to end Mueller’s probe.

Mueller never reached an agreement with Trump’s personal lawyers on an interview and ultimately did not pursue a subpoena to compel his testimony. Why he did not subpoena Trump is another mystery.

“The fact that we ended up right on a tightrope on whether or not it was obstruction underscores how important it was for Mueller to interview or subpoena Trump,” said Elie Honig, a defense attorney at Lowenstein Sandler and a former federal prosecutor.

Barr’s letter, quoting from Mueller’s report, notes that Mueller recognized “the evidence does not establish that the President was involved in an underlying crime related to Russian election interference” and suggests that makes it more difficult to prove the president was deliberately improper in his actions.

There is also debate as to whether a president can be accused of obstructing justice; some argue that Trump has the constitutional authority to remove Comey and order the Justice Department who and who not to investigate.

House Democrats are pushing for the full and immediate release of Mueller’s report as well as the underlying evidence, saying they cannot assess the findings until they see all the details the special counsel collected in the course of his 22-month investigation. Republicans, including Trump, are also in favor of the release of Mueller’s report.

Democrats have pointed to the June memo that Barr, a former attorney general under George H.W. Bush, penned to the Justice Department and White House, suggesting that he was biased in his handling of Mueller’s report, particularly on the question of obstruction.

In that memo, which was reported on soon after Trump nominated him for attorney general, Barr argued that Mueller’s investigation into Trump’s firing of Comey was “premised on a novel and legally insupportable reading of the law” and “would do lasting damage to the Presidency and to the administration of law within the Executive branch.”

Democrats say they want to hear from Mueller, not Barr.

“We want to be clear, and I think that this letter that Barr wrote last Sunday underscores Congress’s view that we do not want anything in the words of the attorney general. We want to see Robert Mueller’s words. That’s very critical,” a House Democratic aide told reporters at a meeting in the Capitol on Thursday.

Democrats are demanding that Barr meet an April 2 deadline to produce Mueller’s full report to Congress. Barr on Friday said Justice would have the report ready for public release by mid-April or sooner.

Barr also told Congress on Friday that he would not provide the White House an advanced copy of the report to review for issues of executive privilege.

“Everyone will soon be able to read it on their own,” Barr wrote. “I do not believe it would be in the public’s interest for me to attempt to summarize the full report or to release it in serial or piecemeal fashion.”

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

Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan on 28 March.

From victory to vengeance: Trump scents blood in 2020 fight
The president celebrated the Mueller report – but then his latest effort to invalidate Obamacare left some feeling he ‘stepped all over that message’

@SabrinaSiddiqui
Sun 31 Mar 2019 09.17 EDT First published on Sun 31 Mar 2019 01.00 EDT
It felt like a victory lap. At a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan on Thursday night, surrounded by a sea of red Make America Great Again hats, a defiant Donald Trump held the podium before a raucous crowd.

Trump Fed pick was held in contempt for failing to pay ex-wife over $300,000

“After three years of lies and smears and slander, the Russia hoax is finally dead,” the president declared in a 90-minute speech.

Basking after the conclusion of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, which clouded the first two years of his presidency, Trump falsely claimed “total exoneration”.

He vowed retaliation against some of his sharpest critics and suggested consequences for the media were in order. He spoke of doing away with Barack Obama’s healthcare law. And he threatened to shut down the US-Mexico border as early as next week.

It was a stark reminder of how Trump views his executive authority and a glimpse of his looming fight for re-election.

He is much more likely to be re-elected today than he seemed at the end of last week

Michael Steele
“He is much more likely to be re-elected today than he seemed at the end of last week,” said Michael Steel, a Republican operative who was an aide to former House speaker John Boehner. “I think that Democratic oversight activities will continue, but this definitely took the wind out of their sails.”

However, Trump’s legal perils are far from over. According to a short letter to Congress by attorney general William Barr, the special counsel’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election did not clear Trump of wrongdoing. Mueller did not reach a conclusion on whether Trump obstructed justice, specifically stating that his report “does not exonerate” the president.

Mueller did not find a criminal conspiracy between Trump aides and Moscow, which the president said supported his longstanding claim of “no collusion”. Left unclear was what the special counsel had to say of repeated contacts between Trump associates and Russian nationals, and lies to prosecutors about such communications.

On Friday, Barr said that by mid-April he would make public a redacted version of the Mueller report, which is nearly 400 pages long. The attorney general faced criticism after drawing his own conclusion, in his letter to Congress, that Mueller did not have sufficient evidence to charge Trump with obstruction of justice.

In a second letter released on Friday, Barr said his initial assessment was not intended to be a summary of the Mueller report and that the American public “would soon be able to read it on their own”.

‘Russia hoax is finally dead’: Donald Trump wrongly claims ‘total exoneration’ at rally – video
Trump nonetheless seized on Barr’s rendering of the Mueller report.

“There are a lot of people out there that have done some very, very evil things, some bad things, I would say some treasonous things against our country,” Trump told reporters last Sunday. “And hopefully people that have done such harm to our country – we’ve gone through a period of really bad things happening – those people will certainly be looked at. I’ve been looking at them for a long time.”

On Fox News, Trump’s most prominent boosters chimed in.

“This must be a day of reckoning for the media, for the deep state, for people who abuse power, and they did it so blatantly in this country,” said Sean Hannity, who ranks among Trump’s closest allies.

It could be a reset but it’s not going to be, because the president is congenially incapable of resetting

Rick Tyler
“If we do not get this right, if we do not hold these people accountable, I promise you, with all the love I can muster for this country and our future for our kids and grandkids, we will lose the greatest country God has ever given man. We will lose it.”

Initial polls showed little change in public perception of the Mueller investigation or potential wrongdoing by Trump.

A CNN survey found nearly 60% of Americans believed Congress should continue to investigate, while 56% said they did not believe Trump had been exonerated of collusion, even though Barr’s letter said the special counsel could not establish a criminal conspiracy. Perhaps most tellingly, 86% said the findings would not affect their vote in 2020.

“The political divide is virtually the same,” said Rick Tyler, a former aide to Ted Cruz’s 2016 presidential campaign. “If you didn’t like Trump before, you don’t like him anymore now. If you like Trump, you still like him.”

“It could be a reset but it’s not going to be, because the president is congenially incapable of resetting.”

‘The party of healthcare’
Indeed, in the immediate wake of what some called the best week of his presidency, Trump returned to the impulsive style of governing that has prompted disorder and left his own party flatfooted.

In a major shift, the administration announced on Wednesday it would back a legal effort to fully invalidate the Affordable Care Act (ACA), commonly known as Obamacare, a move that would threaten healthcare coverage for millions of Americans, an issue which proved central to November’s midterm elections, in which Democrats regained the House.

At his Michigan rally Trump renewed his call to toss out the ACA, insisting Republicans would come to be known as the ‘party of healthcare’. Photograph: Paul Sancya/AP
Trump’s move came over the objections of Barr and Alex Azar, his health secretary. The House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, reportedly told Trump the move made no sense, given Republicans do not have a plan to replace the ACA and would be unable to move legislation.

“Members feel like [the Mueller report announcement] was great and Trump stepped all over that message with the Obamacare lawsuit announcement,” a House GOP aide told Axios.

Trump intervenes in case of Navy Seal charged in stabbing of Isis prisoner

Tyler said: “While I can argue lots of different structures that would be better than Obamacare, that would be like overthrowing a foreign government with no replacement government. The result would be chaos.”

Undaunted, at his Michigan rally Trump renewed his call to toss out the ACA, insisting Republicans would come to be known as the “party of healthcare”. And he didn’t stop there.

Trump also vowed to shut down the Mexico border “next week”, a move that would do significant damage to the US economy. Mexico is a vital trading partner but Trump complained it was not doing enough to stop illegal immigration.

Trump received familiar support from Fox. But other Republicans warned Trump not to jeopardize an otherwise positive moment.

“I think it’s a good thing for America that a detailed and thorough investigation concluded that the president of the United States is not a witting or unwitting agent of a foreign power,” said Steel.

“I do think there’s some danger that in the hubris of his response, the president makes mistakes.

© 2019 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

cnn.com/2019/03/31/media/sn … index.html


Rolling Stone

POLITICS

What Would Happen If Trump Actually Closed the U.S.-Mexico Border
Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney said that it would take “something dramatic” to prevent the action

RYAN BORT
APRIL 1, 2019 11:25AM EDT

President Donald Trump speaks to reporters during a visit to Lake Okeechobee and Herbert Hoover Dike at Canal Point, Fla., . President Trump increased attention on the Jussie Smollett case when, two days after Smollett reported the attack, he told reporters at the White House that he saw a story about Smollett. “It doesn’t get worse, as far as I’m concerned,” Trump said. Smollett said his attackers yelled, “This is MAGA country,” a reference to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign slogan. Two days after prosecutors drop charges against Smollett the president tweeted that the FBI and Department of Justice will “review the outrageous Jussie Smollett case” and calls the case an embarrassment to our NationEmpire Cast Member Attack, Canal Point, USA - 29 Mar 2019
Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP/REX/Shutterstock
After capping the last season of Border Crisis with a dramatic national emergency declaration, the Trump administration is searching for bold ways to keep ratings high as asylum-seeking migrants continue to head toward the United States. Last week saw the president cut off hundreds of millions in aid to three Central American nations. This week could see him close the U.S.-Mexico border entirely, a move that would do little more than devastate the economy.

Trump first threatened to do so on Friday before continuing to escalate tension on Twitter over the weekend. On Sunday night, he attacked Democrats for “allowing a ridiculous asylum system and major loopholes to remain as a mainstay of our immigration system,” while bashing Mexico for “doing NOTHING.” He also warned that the United States could take a harder line toward those seeking asylum. “Homeland Security is being sooo very nice, but not for long!”

He was back at it again Monday morning.

After threatening to close the border on Friday, Trump announced that the United States will be cutting $500 million in aid to Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador as a way to punish these countries for not preventing their citizens from fleeing to the U.S. border. “We were paying them tremendous amounts of money,” the president told reporters in Florida. “We’re not paying them anymore, because they haven’t done a thing for us.”

The move makes little sense. Northern Triangle nations are not actively sending their citizens to the U.S. border, as Trump seems to believe, and stripping them of aid would bring an end to several programs designed to keep Guatemalas, Hondurans and El Savladorians at home. Trump Trump has threatened to do this in the past, but this time it’s for real. Later on Friday, the State Department issued a statement confirming the action. “We are carrying out the president’s direction and ending FY 2017 and FY 2018 foreign assistance programs for the Northern Triangle,” it read. “We will be engaging Congress as part of this process.”

Trump also threatened to close the border entirely, as he did in December while seeking nearly $6 billion in funding for a border wall. “If Mexico doesn’t immediately stop ALL illegal immigration coming into the United States throug our Southern Border, I will be CLOSING the Border, or large sections of the Border, next week,” he tweeted on Friday. “This would be so easy for Mexico to do, but they just take our money and ‘talk.’ Besides, we lose so much money with them, especially when you add in drug trafficking etc.), that the Border closing would be a good thing!”

Again, this does not appear to be an empty threat, as it has been in the past. On Sunday, Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney told ABC it would take “something dramatic” for the president not to close the border this week. “Why are we talking about closing the border?” he said. “Not for spite and not to try to undo what is happening, but simply because we need the people from the ports of entry to go out in the desert and patrol where we don’t have any wall.”

© 2019 PMC. All rights reserved.

Trump border closing? Republicans, Chamber of Commerce question president’s latest threat
JOHN FRITZE AND ELIZA COLLINS | USA TODAY | 2 hours ago

President Donald Trump on Friday threatened to close the nation’s Mexican border or large sections of it next week, a potentially drastic step affecting both nations’ economies, if Mexico does not halt illegal immigration at once. (March 29)
AP
WASHINGTON – Border-state Republicans and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce balked Monday at President Donald Trump’s latest threat to close the U.S.-Mexico border, arguing the move would damage the nation’s economy.

Frustrated by an influx of migrant families arriving from Central America, Trump has ratcheted up his rhetoric on sealing the border, threatening that his administration could close ports as early as this week if Mexico doesn’t do more to stem the flow of arrivals.

But a number of Republicans representing border states urged caution, noting Mexico was the nation’s third-largest trading partner last year. Others, including Republican leaders, stayed quiet as they sought to assess the seriousness of Trump’s threat, which he has made previously without following through.

“The president made that statement out of frustration. I don’t think he’s going to actually shut off the border,” Texas Rep. Michael McCaul, the ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told a forum in Washington on Monday.

“It would have a significant impact on our economy,” he added.

“I understand the president’s frustration, but the unintended consequences of that, I think, would be bad for everybody,” said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas.

Several Republicans on Capitol Hill didn’t seem to see the president’s threat as something immediate and instead focused on the need to deal with immigration.

“What do you mean, shut it down?” Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., responded when asked about Trump’s threat.

White House officials did not respond to a request for comment Monday.

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President Trump holds campaign rally in Michigan
Illegal immigration remains lower than it was during the 1990s and 2000s, when Border Patrol agents regularly apprehended more than 1 million undocumented immigrants a year at the southern border. But the administration has pointed to a spike in Central American families making the journey north.

In February, Border Patrol agents apprehended 66,450 people illegally crossing the southern border. A record high 36,174 of those (54%) were members of families and 6,825 (10%) were unaccompanied minors, according to Border Patrol data.

Speaking to reporters Friday, Trump said there is a “very good likelihood that I’ll be closing the border next week” to address the issue. White House acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney told ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday that the administration would need to see “something dramatic” to hold short of sealing the U.S. Mexico-border.

The idea has drawn tepid a response from some within Trump’s party.

“It’s my view that we’ve got to keep the legitimate trade and travel and cross-border commerce happening at the ports entry while we also need to secure our border and address this crisis,” Sen. Martha McSally, R-Arizona, told reporters Monday.

Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., wouldn’t directly say whether he would support closing the border.

“What the president seems to be doing right now is trying to work with Mexico and with Central America, and say, ‘If we don’t find a way to work together to stop this, then I’m going to have to find a way that’s a blunt object to do it,’” Lankford said.

At least one Democrat said the threat of border closure was real.

“I think you’ve gotta take him seriously,” said Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce also weighed in Monday, urging the administration to consider the costs to domestic exporters. The leading business organization said it shared the administration’s concern about a “massive influx of migrants” but said the best response is for Congress to attempt a broader overhaul of immigration law.

Mexico must use its very strong immigration laws to stop the many thousands of people trying to get into the USA. Our detention areas are maxed out & we will take no more illegals. Next step is to close the Border! This will also help us with stopping the Drug flow from Mexico!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 30, 2019
"Even threatening to close the border to legitimate commerce and travel creates a degree of economic uncertainty that risks compromising the very gains in growth and productivity that policies of the Trump administration have helped achieve,” said Neil Bradley, the group’s executive vice president and chief policy officer.

The Commerce Department estimates $502 billion in goods crossed the border in trucks and trains last year, roughly $1.4 billion a day. That doesn’t include products shipped by air and sea.

Administration officials have said the border has reached its “breaking point,” forcing Customs and Border Protection to use extreme measures to keep up. One of those changes has been to start releasing migrants into the streets of border communities, breaking with the administration’s practice of detaining them as long as possible.

Trump’s proposal has met with support from some Republicans, while many others have not commented. Some Republicans, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, initially advised Trump against declaring an emergency at the border to free up federal funding for the wall, but then backed the move once Trump acted.

“Well, I mean, what are we supposed to do?” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., a Trump ally told “Fox News Sunday.” “So if the president feels like that the only way to control this problem is to move the people from the port of entry to the ungoverned spaces where we need a wall, I will support him. I hope we don’t have to do that.”

Trump threatened to close the border several times last year, but the administration did not follow through on the threat.

“Mexico should move the flag waving Migrants, many of whom are stone cold criminals, back to their countries,” Trump tweeted in late November. “We will close the Border permanently if need be.”

Originally Published 3 hours ago
Updated 1 hour

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POLITICO

Trump bewilders GOP allies on immigration ahead of border visit
As the administration weighs immigration actions, even Trump officials and Hill Republicans aren’t sure what to make of his talk of closing the Mexican border.

By ANITA KUMAR, TED HESSON and BURGESS EVERETT

04/01/2019 07:55 PM EDT

Donald Trump
Some Hill Republicans warned that any dramatic disruption to regular traffic across the U.S.-Mexico border could bring President Donald Trump into a new confrontation with his own party. | Evan Vucci/AP Photo

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President Donald Trump is thrusting his hardline posture on immigration back to the fore this week, with plans for a Friday trip to the southern border and possible new executive actions to restrict border crossings.

But days after Trump renewed his longstanding threat to shut down the southern border entirely, even administration officials and congressional Republicans were bewildered and guessing at his next move on a defining issue of his presidency.

And some Hill Republicans warned that any dramatic disruption to regular traffic across the U.S.-Mexico border could bring Trump into a new confrontation with his own party, whose leaders warn that closing parts or all of the border would wreak economic havoc.

On Monday, the Department of Homeland Security announced plans to require that greater numbers of non-Mexican asylum seekers stay in Mexico while they wait for their cases to be resolved and to speed up the reassignment of 750 customs officers to process arriving migrants.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is considering closing some of the lanes at ports of entry or preventing certain types of vehicles or people from crossing the border as he tries to force Mexico to increase its enforcement, three outside advisers told POLITICO.

“He’s trying to get Mexico’s attention,” said Roy Beck, president of NumbersUSA, a group that advocates for tighter restrictions on immigration.

The administration already has taken some of those actions, though they have gotten little attention. Customs and Border Protection said in a March 29 memo to shipping companies, importers and other businesses that it would halt a Sunday screening program for commercial trucks at a Nogales port of entry and blamed an “unprecedented humanitarian and border security crisis” for the cutback.

The administration is considering ways to reduce the number of people crossing into the U.S. That could mean closing some lanes at ports of entry or limiting who is allowed to cross to day workers only. Another proposal under discussion would bar passenger vehicles — but not commercial trucks — from crossing the border.

But closing the border or even limiting the flow of people through the ports of entry would not prevent migrants from attempting to cross the border illegally.

Even some people close to the White House called Trump’s remarks “bluster” and predicted he would not close off the border from one of its largest trading partners. Mexico is the United States’s third-largest trading partner with more than $600 billion in cross-border trade last year.

“I understand the president’s frustration but the unintended consequences of that would be bad for everybody: economic, diplomatic,” said Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, who questioned how such a move could disrupt negotiations with Mexico to handle migrations from the Northern Triangle. “I take him very seriously. But I think we should have a longer conversation about unintended consequences.”

“It’s part of the way he negotiates but I’m not sure that’s a particularly good idea and I’m not sure it gets the desired result,” said Senate Majority Whip John Thune of South Dakota of the potential closed border. “Tactically it doesn’t get a result and probably has a lot of unintended consequences … there’s a lot of bilateral trade at the border.”

Trump will travel to Calexico, Calif., to tour the border on Friday on west coast swing that also includes 2020 campaign fundraising. The White House has not disclosed details of the trip.

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Asked whether he thinks Trump is serious about closing the border, Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) replied: “Oh, I have no idea. You’d need to ask him that.”

Trump has made cracking down on immigration a central theme of his presidency but has struggled to get his proposals past Congressional Republicans. In February, he declared a national emergency to unlock Pentagon funds he can unilaterally steer to a border wall as well as use money from other projects. That action was immediately challenged in court.

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) said he takes the president “seriously” and wants more details about how it would affect trade and the economy. Romney was one of a dozen Republicans who rebuffed Trump’s emergency request last month, revealing a sharp intraparty divide over border politics.

Most Republicans agree there is a crisis on the border but disagree with tactics like closing ports of entry and the emergency request.

According to a current and a former DHS official familiar with the situation, Trump is once again considering creating a so-called immigration czar, a single person in charge of an issue that impacts a dozen departments and agencies, including Homeland Security, State, Justice, Labor, Housing and Health and Human Services. The position would not need Senate confirmation.

Some of the people being considered are Francis Cissna, director of Citizenship and Immigration Services; Thomas Douglas Homan, former acting director of Immigration and Customs, former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach and former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, according to the former DHS official. Michael Neifach, who worked for former President George W. Bush, was approached about the job last year, the former official said.

The White House did not respond to questions Monday. But On Sunday, White House counselor Kellyanne Conway insisted that Trump’s talk of bold action should not be dismissed. “It certainly isn’t a bluff. You can take the president seriously," she told Fox News.

Trump on Friday renewed past threats to close the border after his administration announced it was at a “breaking point” processing the paperwork at the border, where agents are seeing an influx of migrants. Border Patrol arrested more than 66,000 migrants in February, the highest monthly total since March 2009 – and officials have said the numbers rose higher still last month. “Mexico is going to have to do something, otherwise I’m closing the border,” declared Trump, who is said to fixate on border crossing statistics.

Trump has long criticized Mexico for failing to halt Central American migrants from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras from coming to the U.S. border. But he had not previously put a timeline on his threat to close the border.

On Monday, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen ordered an expansion of the administration’s “remain in Mexico” strategy, which forces certain non-Mexican asylum seekers to wait in Mexico pending resolution of their asylum cases in the U.S.

FOREIGN POLICY

Trump seeks to cut aid to 3 Central American nations
By ASSOCIATED PRESS
The secretary said her department would expand the policy — formally known as the “Migrant Protection Protocols” — “to return hundreds of additional migrants per day.” The program already has been launched at and between several ports of entry in California and Texas.

In a memo to Customs and Border Protection, Nielsen also called for the agency to accelerate a plan to reassign 750 customs officers to assist with Border Patrol efforts to process and house incoming migrants.

She added in a related announcement that CBP should explore reassigning more personnel, but should notify her if it details more than 2,000 employees to emergency border work.

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“The crisis at our border is worsening, and DHS will do everything in its power to end it,” she said in a written statement. “We will not stand idly by while Congress fails to act yet again, so all options are on the table.”

The number of family members intercepted at the southwest border soared in March, according to preliminary CBP statistics. While overall arrests remain below the higher levels of 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s, the Trump administration argues families and children present unique humanitarian and security issues.

Nielsen last week urged Congress to provide additional resources to deal with the growing number of migrants. In addition, she pressed lawmakers to change immigration laws to permit children to be detained for more than 20 days — the current limit set by a federal court order — and to allow for the swift deportation of unaccompanied minors from Central America.

The Trump administration has implemented a number of hardline policies to deter illegal immigration and asylum seekers, only to see a record number of family members caught crossing the border in recent months. Border Patrol estimated that it arrested more than 55,000 family members in March, a 520 percent increase over the same month a year earlier.

Trump last week ordered the State Department to slash aid to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras because those nations haven’t taken enough action to deter migrants from traveling northward. The State Department informed congressional offices in recent days that it would redirect $450 million in fiscal year 2018 funding to the countries and examine already-committed funds to see if they could be rerouted.

“Cracking down and being harsher has not deterred anybody from coming,” said Theresa Cardinal Brown, director of immigration and cross-border policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center. “Ultimately what would stop people from coming is if those countries improve the conditions on the ground.”

Marianne LeVine contributed to this report.

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