Starting at 6 min 38 sec, Christopher Dickey describes why the most important implication of James Comey’s testimony in the Senate is that Donald Trump is a traitor to the United States.
“What [Comey] didn’t say, explicitly, was that he thinks the president is a traitor, but that was implicit in what he was saying, because he said the president didn’t care that the United States was under attack.”
Fred Kaplan writes: After James Comey’s sworn Senate testimony Thursday, even stalwart Republicans are finding it harder to deny that Donald Trump has no business being president. But it’s not stopping them from defending him anyway or from bringing the nation closer to disaster.
House Speaker Paul Ryan tried to excuse the most incriminating portions of Comey’s statement—the highly detailed claims that Trump pressured him to swear loyalty, to drop the probe of Michael Flynn, and to tell the public that Trump himself was not under criminal investigation—by saying that the president is “just new to this.” In other words, Ryan was saying, Trump isn’t a crook; he’s just ignorant.
Leaving aside the civic bromide that ignorance is no excuse when it comes to breaking the law, Ryan is off the mark, at least in this case. Trump kicked several officials out of his office before twisting the FBI director’s arm. As Comey asked at his hearing, why would he do that if he didn’t know he was about to engage in improper behavior?
New Jersey Gov. (and former Trump transition-team chairman) Chris Christie came closer to honesty, dismissing the president’s exchanges with Comey as “normal New York conversation.” This might indeed be the perception of a man who once prosecuted white-collar criminals, including Jared Kushner’s father, in the New York metropolitan area. In other words, Christie was saying, Trump is just strutting like a slippery operator—not quite the exoneration that he may have intended.
So these are the GOP’s rationales for Trump’s behavior: He was only talking like a felon, he didn’t necessarily commit a crime; and if he did, it’s only because he didn’t know what he was doing. It’s hard to believe that even the likes of Ryan and Christie aren’t a little disturbed by this state of affairs—not only because of what might be uncovered next, but because of what they are facing and abetting right now. By the powers vested in his office, Trump has immense powers (among other things, he has the nuclear codes), and his defenders are tolerating his presence in this office, even while knowing the risks.
Yes, “He’s just new to this,” but that’s the problem, or part of the problem. In fact, all presidents are “new to this.” As most of them have confessed after their terms, no experience quite prepares one for the lonely pressures of the Oval Office. But Trump takes a novice’s limits to new levels. Not only did he enter the job with no knowledge of its nature (despite bragging that he alone could fix everything), he installed an equally clueless entourage. [Continue reading…]
The Observer reports: Senior Tory and Labour MPs called on Theresa May to forge a new cross-party approach to Brexit as fears grew that the prime minister’s weakness could lead to the imminent collapse of talks on the UK’s exit from the European Union.
In a dramatic demonstration of May’s loss of authority, as a result of Thursday’s general election – which stripped her of a Commons majority – the MPs demanded that she in effect drop her own Tory “hard Brexit” plans in favour of a new “national” consenus, that would be endorsed by members from all sides of the House of Commons.
The proposal, if adopted, would throw open the debate on what kind of Brexit the country wants, with just a week to go before May is due to lead the country in formal negotiations with the EU on the terms of exit.
It comes as senior EU figures expressed their concerns that the process could collapse because of May’s lack of authority in what are bound to be many months of tough and complex talks. A leading Christian Democrat ally of the German chancellor Angela Merkel – the MEP Elmar Brok – told the Observer that the chances of a collapse in the talks had significantly increased. “The British people saw through her [May]. The negotiations have become more difficult because Britain has not got a government of real authority,” he said.
May went to the country asking for a mandate on Brexit only to lose her Commons majority. In an intervention that will alarm hardline pro-Brexit Tories, the former foreign office minister Alistair Burt, backed by ex-education secretary Nicky Morgan and other pro-EU Tories, said Brexit could only be agreed and delivered if the Conservative minority government built cross-party support behind a plan that would unite politicians and the country. [Continue reading…]
The Observer reports: Theresa May had set Britain on a course for a hard Brexit, prioritising sovereignty at the expense of close economic ties. Nevertheless, most EU governments had hoped she would win big on 8 June, so that she would be strong enough to face down the Tory right in pushing through painful compromises. They now face a prime minister whose authority is crumbling. Yet the general election makes the prospect of a softer Brexit plausible.
May’s instincts are probably to keep pushing for the hard Brexit that her right wing desires. But there is no parliamentary majority for a hard Brexit. Just a few pro-EU Tories could join opposition MPs to defeat May. If she wants to pass the Brexit deal – and the many Brexit-related laws that are required – she will have to collaborate with Labour and other opposition MPs.
Such a volte-face would be uncharacteristic of May. But if she doesn’t reinvent herself as a soft Brexiter, it is hard to see how she can stay in office. And if she falls, her successor will find that survival means working with the opposition to achieve a softer version of Brexit. [Continue reading…]
John Harris writes: The centre of Birmingham at midnight offered plenty of proof of what had just happened. On Broad Street, the neon-lit strip that sits at the heart of the city’s nightlife, an endless parade of young people were shouting their joy. “Corbyn! Corbyn!” yelped three twentysomething men; a woman told me she planned to drink a shot of tequila every time Labour gained a seat. They talked in emotional terms about student debt, the health service, and their belief in a diverse Britain. But perhaps the most moving part was played by a man in a wheelchair, who told us he was penniless and bemoaned the cruelties of the benefits system before he mentioned Jeremy Corbyn, and uttered seven words that made me well up: “Something has to change in this world.”
With my Guardian colleague John Domokos, I had spent the previous eight hours shooting a film for the Guardian’s Anywhere But Westminster series in nearby Walsall, where Labour held one seat and lost another, it frequently felt very different. There, in neighbourhoods such as Bloxwich and Bentley, an array of older voters echoed all the Tory attack lines on Corbyn, and talked about switching from Labour to Conservative, often via Ukip. Their sentiments sounded like the spirit of Brexit, full of a mixture of fear and obstinacy, and hardened anew by the attacks on London and Manchester: “I don’t think it’s fair that we should be worried in our own country,” said one woman.
But younger people appeared too, and told us they were voting Labour for very different reasons. No sooner had we met a man carrying a copy of the Sun and spitting bile about Corbyn and the IRA than a young nurse and her friend came round the corner, both first-time voters, deeply concerned about the fate of public services, impressed by the Labour leader and passionate about getting rid of the Tories. “Labour are more for young people,” said one. And we got a sense of politics at its most simple and urgent. [Continue reading…]
Climatewire reports: The national security establishment needs to prepare for a series of global crises sparked by climate change, a group of experts wrote in a report released today.
The analysis by the Center for Climate and Security identifies 12 “epicenters” where climate change could stress global security, possibly igniting conflicts around the world.
American diplomats and military planners have already started grappling with some of these problems—but the links between them do not get enough attention, the experts said. And it is an open question whether the Trump administration confronts those challenges or tries to ignore them.
Many of the risk epicenters stem from resource shortages and dislocated populations, but the experts also consider an increased likelihood of nuclear war, more pandemics and tensions in the Arctic.
Any one of those factors is enough to cause serious problems, but together they threaten to undermine the international order, said Francesco Femia, one of the authors of the report, titled “Epicenters of Climate and Security: The New Geostrategic Landscape of the Anthropocene.”
“The humanitarian effects of [climate change] are massive,” he said. “But what we’re saying is that those humanitarian consequences are likely to spill over into broader security problems that speaks to the heart of how the world organizes itself.” [Continue reading…]
At today’s White House news conference, Trump was challenged on the question of whether there are tapes of his conversations with James Comey.
Reporter: “You seem to be hinting there are recordings of those conversations…”
Trump: “I’m not hinting anything. I’ll tell you about it over a very short period of time.”
Reporter: “When will you tell us?”
Trump: “Over a fairly short period of time.”
Reporter: “Are there tapes sir?”
Trump: “Oh, you’re going to be very disappointed when you hear the answer.”
Reporter: “Mr President. Are you now hinting that you’ve actually been bullshitting about these tapes all along?”
Except for the last question, that’s exactly how this brief exchange played out. The last question, of course, never got asked — the White House press corps is too polite to challenge Trump that bluntly.
Trump thinks it’s his prerogative to jerk around the press, abuse reporters personally, pour scorn on what he brands as “fake news,” and he also expects that journalists will meekly take this in their stride. He expects that he can constantly dish out bullshit while never being told to his face that he’s a bullshitter.
Matthew Yglesias writes: Donald Trump says a lot of things that aren’t true, often shamelessly so, and it’s tempting to call him a liar.
But that’s not quite right. As the Princeton University philosophy professor Harry Frankfurt put it in a famous essay, to lie presumes a kind of awareness of and interest in the truth — and the goal is to convince the audience that the false thing you are saying is in fact true. Trump, more often than not, isn’t interested in convincing anyone of anything. He’s a bullshitter who simply doesn’t care.
In Trump’s own book, Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again, our now-president describes himself in a way that Frankfurt could hold up as the quintessential example of a bullshitter. Trump writes that he’s an “I say what’s on my mind” kind of guy. Pages later, he explains that doesn’t mean he’s necessarily an honest guy.
“If you do things a little differently,” he writes of the media, “if you say outrageous things and fight back, they love you.” The free publicity that results from deliberately provoking controversy is invaluable. And if a bit of exaggeration is what it takes, Trump doesn’t have a problem with that. “When,” he asks “was the last time you saw a sign hanging outside a pizzeria claiming ‘The fourth best pizza in the world’?!”
When Trump says something like he’s just learned that Barack Obama ordered his phones wiretapped, he’s not really trying to persuade people that this is true. It’s a test to see who around him will debase themselves to repeat it blindly. There’s no greater demonstration of devotion.
In his first and best-known book, The Art of the Deal, Trump writes a passage that is one of the most remarkable ever set to paper by a future American president. It’s deeply telling about Trump’s views on the distinction between integrity and loyalty. Trump sings the praises of Roy Cohn — Joe McCarthy’s infamous legal attack dog later turned Trump mentor:
Just compare that with all the hundreds of “respectable” guys who make careers out of boasting about their uncompromising integrity but have absolutely no loyalty. They only care about what’s best for them and don’t think twice about stabbing a friend in the back if the friend becomes a problem. What I liked most about Roy Cohn was that he would do just the opposite. Roy was the kind of guy who’d be there at your hospital bed long after everyone else had bailed out, literally standing by you to the death.
Trump, ironically, would not stand by Cohn’s deathbed as he perished of AIDS; instead, he disavowed his friend. For Trump, loyalty is a way to size up those around him, suss out friend from foe. It is not a quality he cares to embrace in his personal life. Now president, it’s the same in his political life.
The two passages taken together illuminate an important facet of Trump’s personality, and of his presidency. He’s a man who doesn’t care much about the truth. He’s a man who cares deeply about loyalty. The two qualities merge in the way he wields bullshit. His flagrant lies serve as a loyalty test.
Trump’s tactics, in a different context, would be understood as typical authoritarian propaganda — regimes often propound nonsense more to enforce expectations on their citizens than because they are expecting anyone to actually believe it. The United States isn’t the kind of place where that can work. There’s a free and vibrant press and political debate operating wholly outside the world of Trump’s bullshit. But by filling the heads of his fans — and the media outlets they consume — with a steady diet of bullshit, Trump is nonetheless succeeding in endlessly reinscribing polarization in American politics, corroding America’s governing institutions, and poisoning civic life. [Continue reading…]
Philip Bump writes: President Trump’s declaration that the Thursday testimony of former FBI director James B. Comey was a “total and complete vindication” despite “so many false statements and lies” was the sort of brashly triumphant and loosely-grounded-in-reality statement we’ve come to expect from the commander in chief. It was news that came out a bit later, news about plans to file a complaint against Comey for a revelation he made during that Senate Intelligence Committee hearing meeting, that may end up being more damaging to the president.
CNN first reported that Trump’s outside counsel, Marc Kasowitz, plans to file complaints with the inspector general of the Justice Department and the Senate Judiciary Committee about Comey’s testimony. At issue was Comey’s revelation that he provided a memo documenting a conversation with Trump to a friend to be shared with the New York Times.
As the news broke, I was on the phone with Stephen Kohn, partner at a law firm focused on whistleblower protection. We’d been talking about where the boundaries lay for Comey in what he could and couldn’t do with the information about his conversations with the president. Kohn’s response to the story about Kasowitz, though, was visceral.
“Here is my position on that: Frivolous grandstanding,” he said. “First of all, I don’t believe the inspector general would have jurisdiction over Comey any more, because he’s no longer a federal employee.” The inspector general’s job is to investigate wrongdoing by employees of the Justice Department, of which Comey is no longer, thanks to Trump.
“But, second,” he continued, “initiating an investigation because you don’t like somebody’s testimony could be considered obstruction. And in the whistleblower context, it’s both evidence of retaliation and, under some laws, could be an adverse retaliatory act itself.” [Continue reading…]
Anne Applebaum writes: Theresa May had a plan: Steal the policies of Britain’s “far right” — the U.K. Independence Party — and then steal their voters, too. Since she took office about a year ago, the formerly moderate British prime minister attacked foreigners, jeered at the European Union and held Donald Trump’s hand. In April, she called an early general election, confident that UKIP voters would now endorse her “hard Brexit” and her watered-down English Tory populism.
Never mind that the moderate centrism of her predecessor, David Cameron, won a Conservative Party majority only two years ago. Never mind that she herself has offered few details about Brexit and what it will mean: May called this a “Brexit election,” declared herself the “strong and stable” candidate, promised tough negotiations with Europe and clearly expected to win a larger majority.
Yes, May had a plan — but it was a plan designed for her base. She ignored the 48 percent of the country that did not vote for Brexit, calling them “citizens of nowhere.” She ignored the anxiety that Brexit has created and the economic consequences that are now just beginning to bite. She ignored younger people, who preferred to stay in the E.U. last year and now prefer the Labour Party to the Tories by a huge margin, 63 percent to 27 percent.
May also assumed that the centrists and moderates who had voted Conservative in 2015 and to “Remain” in Europe in 2016 would have to vote for her because they would have nowhere else to go. They couldn’t possibly vote for Jeremy Corbyn, the quasi-Marxist, left-wing Labour Party leader who campaigned on high taxes for the rich, heavy spending and deep skepticism toward Britain’s traditional defense and foreign policies. They couldn’t possibly prefer a Labour Party that is itself divided over Brexit. But as the campaign went on, as May grew stiffer and more prone to error, as her “strong and stable” tagline wore thin, a lot of people in the floating center looked at Corbyn and thought, “Is he really that much worse?”
And the result? Remainers’ revenge. [Continue reading…]
The Washington Post reports: The number of advertisers on the alt-right site Breitbart.com has dropped 90 percent in recent months, from 242 in March to 26 in May, according to data from MediaRadar, a New York firm that tracks online advertising. Among those that continue to advertise on the site include a gentleman’s club in Northern Virginia, a golf resort near the coast of Spain and the conservative foundation Judicial Watch.
“Liberal activists want to destroy Breitbart, but we won’t be cowed,” the foundation’s president Tom Fitton said in an interview. “We advertise widely on the internet, and we’re proud of the relationship and the partnerships we have.”
Fitton said Judicial Watch had been advertising on Breitbart for years, but would not elaborate on the company’s strategy or where else it places ads. “I’m not talking about the details of our internal decision-making with the anti-Trump Washington Post,” he said. [Continue reading…]
Simon Jenkins writes: The clock is ticking on the two-year Brexit countdown, with just 10 days to go to fiendishly urgent talks on its modality. May’s tactic appeared to be to enter those talks armour-plated against domestic trouble from both her right and left, or at least from advocates of hard and soft Brexit. That tactic, however plausible, lies in ruins.
How the EU’s negotiators will react is hard to predict. They must be dismayed at the prospect of weakened British negotiators vulnerable to constant carping and second-guessing by a hung British parliament. Some are already suggesting a postponement of the talks. It is hard to see that helping.
Meanwhile it is likely that in coming months a “remainist” or perhaps “softest” fifth column will open up across parliament and among the lobbyists. The collapse of Ukip and the probable increase in emboldened remain MPs clearly undermines whatever May’s “hard Brexit” stance was meant to achieve. In the Commons there should now be a majority behind Corbyn’s view, that no deal is worse than a soft deal.
The British team’s absurdist machismo in advance of talks has never rung true – and would appear to have cut little ice even with a post-referendum electorate. Coupled with the result itself, this should tilt the balance towards a more accommodating approach on both sides. The EU and Britain must clearly compromise, to honour last year’s referendum yet without the manifest shambles of a negotiating failure.
Common sense indicates that, at the day’s end, Britain must somehow stay within the regulatory regime of a European customs union. Since that would leave migration as the chief bone of contention, and since some deal on the movement of workers is vital for British industry, it is now possible to see negotiations slithering towards a “Norwegian” version of a single market. If so, this election could prove a blessing, albeit in heavy disguise. [Continue reading…]
NPR reports: Former FBI director James Comey may have done more potential damage to Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Thursday than even President Trump, who Comey publicly accused of waving him off part of the Russia investigation.
Comey said he expected Sessions to recuse himself from the Russia investigation weeks before he did because of reasons that are classified. That does not comport with Sessions rationale when he announced his recusal in early March.
Sessions has been the subject of scrutiny over his failure to disclose meetings with Russian ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak during the 2016 campaign, which Sessions has defended as routine — part of his duties as a U.S. senator.
In his opening statement to the Senate Intelligence Committee, released on Wednesday, Comey detailed a private conversation with President Trump in the Oval Office shortly after National Security Advisor Michael Flynn was forced to resign, in which Comey recalls the president saying, “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.”
This has raised questions as to why Comey didn’t tell others, including the attorney general. Comey said in his opening statement that his leadership team at the FBI agreed not to share this with Sessions for the following reason: “We concluded it made little sense to report it to Attorney General Sessions, who we expected would likely recuse himself from involvement in Russia-related investigations.”
Comey also pointed out that they were right – Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation less than two weeks later.
The question is why Sessions recused himself. [Continue reading…]
.@NBCNews reports that in the closed session, Comey told Senators that AG Sessions met with Russians a *third* time that he never disclosed
— Doug Sovern (@SovernNation) June 8, 2017
David Frum writes: Thursday was a bad, bad day for Team Trump. Things looked even worse at the end of the day than they did when the Senate Intelligence Committee adjourned midday.
The first line of defense—revealed by the president’s own team yesterday—is that Comey somehow vindicated Trump by confirming that he told Trump in January that Trump was not personally a target of an investigation. But if that assurance had been enough for the president, Trump would not have added the demand that Comey end the investigation of Michael Flynn. Trump evidently felt strongly motivated to protect Flynn—more strongly motivated than he had been to protect any of his other associates.
Line two of defense is that the president’s expression of a “hope” that Mike Flynn could be “let go” merely expressed a wish, not an order. But Adam Liptak, Supreme Court reporter for The New York Times, almost instantly produced an example of an obstruction of justice conviction that rested precisely on “I hope” language—and the all-seeing eye of Twitter quickly found more. Anyone who has ever seen a gangster movie has heard the joke, “Nice little dry cleaning store, I hope nothing happens to it.” The blunt fact is that after Comey declined to drop the investigation or publicly clear the president, Trump fired Comey. A hope enforced by dismissal is more than a wish. [Continue reading…]
The Washington Post reports: Former FBI director James B. Comey on Thursday essentially laid out an obstruction of justice case against President Trump and suggested senior leaders in the bureau might have actually contemplated the matter before Trump removed him as director.
Comey did not explicitly draw any legal conclusions. Whether justice was obstructed, he said, was a question for recently appointed special counsel Robert Mueller. But he said Trump’s request to terminate the FBI’s investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn left him “stunned,” and senior FBI officials considered it to be of “investigative interest.”
Of particular concern, Comey said, was that Trump asked other officials to leave him alone with his FBI director in the Oval Office before saying of Flynn: “He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.”
“Why did he kick everybody out of the Oval Office?” Comey said. “That, to me as an investigator, is a very significant fact.” [Continue reading…]
Comey says he didn't warn the White House that Trump's behavior was inappropriate because president's words of investigative interest.
— Paul Sonne (@PaulSonne) June 8, 2017
The Daily Beast reports: Four current and former law enforcement officials believe prosecutors have been treating Trump and his associates like a criminal network, and subjecting them to an array of time-tested law enforcement tricks.
One of those tricks involves floating names of potential targets of the investigation, to try and get potential co-conspirators to turn on one another. Another, called “tickling the wire,” entails strategically leaking information to try and provoke targets under surveillance into saying something dumb, or even incriminating.
“You want people to freak out, to say, ‘are they talking about me? Is this me? What do they know?’—and you want them to do this in a way that is captured,” one former FBI official said about the Russia investigation.
“Now we wait for the cover up.” [Continue reading…]
Hooman Majd writes: The terrorist attacks in Tehran on Wednesday — in bright daylight and at two very different yet entirely related locations — up the ante in what has become a battle royale for influence in the Middle East, and in the fight against the terrorists wreaking havoc in the region and in the West. While Iran may seem to Americans a million miles away, what happens in Tehran most definitely does not stay there.
On his recent trip to Saudi Arabia, President Trump joined many of his Arab counterparts in denouncing Iran as the foremost sponsor of terrorism, perhaps unaware of the irony of doing so while being feted in the country of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State’s ideological forefathers. Qatar, whose emir met with Mr. Trump in Riyadh and who was perhaps alarmed by the carte blanche being given to Saudi Arabia, subsequently reached out to Iran in an attempt to calm tensions in a combustible region. He was rewarded with the cutting off both political and economic relations by a Saudi-led coalition: Arab unity be damned.
Two days later, terrorists struck in Tehran. The timing is significant, but so are the locations: The sites of the Islamic State’s attacks demonstrate what Iran’s enemies hope to destroy and how these goals are tied to the wider instability facing the Middle East. [Continue reading…]
The New York Times reports: If the Islamic State did carry out the twin terrorist attacks on Wednesday in Iran, as the militant group claims, it struck at an opportune time to further the cause of chaos.
Iran rushed to blame Saudi Arabia, its chief rival in a contest for power playing out in proxy wars in at least two other countries in the region, Syria and Yemen.
Saudi Arabia, however, seemed too preoccupied to respond. Its state-run news media was dominated by criticism of its neighbor and ostensible ally, Qatar, after the Saudis and other Arab allies cut off ties to Qatar as part of a different struggle for power within the Persian Gulf.
The attacks in Tehran threatened to escalate the broader regional conflict between the two heavyweight powers, Iran and Saudi Arabia, at a time when the Western-allied gulf bloc is divided against itself. And Saudi Arabia, under the two-year-old reign of King Salman and his powerful son, Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, is demonstrating an unexpected willingness to plunge into risky multifront battles.
Turkey has long been a partner to the gulf monarchs in their proxy war against Iran in Syria. But in Ankara, the Turkish capital, on Wednesday, Parliament voted to authorize sending troops to Turkey’s base in Qatar — presumably to help defend against the Saudis.
What’s more, the Saudis may actually risk driving Qatar — the world’s largest producer of natural gas, and home to the largest American air base in the region — even closer to Iran.
Tehran has eagerly offered to provide Qatar with food and other supplies to make up for a closing of the vital overland shipping routes from Saudi Arabia.
Qatar has so far rebuffed the Iranian offer, saying it prefers to rely on supplies delivered by air from Turkey. But Qatari diplomats have also quietly stepped up dialogue with their Iranian counterparts, officials close to the Qatari foreign minister say. [Continue reading…]
Roger Cohen writes: For a long time I could not bring myself to write about the British election. Trump-coddling, self-important, flip-flopping Theresa May, ensconced at 10 Downing Street without ever being elected prime minister, was going to sweep to her hard-Brexit victory and take the country down her little England rabbit hole.
There were more important things to think about, like the end of the American century in 2017, one hundred years after the Bolshevik Revolution. A boorish clown named Donald Trump brought down the curtain.
In Britain, anyway, there was no story: The June 8 vote was a formality. The Labour Party was in meltdown, having exited the Blairite middle ground for leftist orthodoxy under Jeremy Corbyn. The British, their ludicrous vote to leave the European Union gradually sinking in, had morphed into sheep. May would get her mandate to do her worst, with Boris Johnson, a foreign secretary who long since forsook any claim to be taken seriously, cheering her on.
Then came two unspeakable terrorist attacks, one in Manchester and one in London. As I’ve argued before, the Islamic State should be driven out of Raqqa, whatever it takes (and if you have any doubt, watch Matthew Heineman’s new movie “City of Ghosts” about the citizen-journalist group “Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently.”) Iniquity has its capital. From there it will emanate until crushed.
Of course Trump tried to make cheap political capital from the blood on London’s streets. He quoted London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, out of context in a flurry of tweets aimed at buttressing the case for his bigotry. The president of the United States just felt like insulting a prominent Muslim.
Trump bears about the same relationship to dignity as carbon dioxide to clean air. And this is the man May and Johnson have coddled, in the name of offsetting the Brexit debacle with increased U.S. trade.
Johnson, by the way, assured the world a couple of months back that British seduction of Trump had been so effective that efforts to convince the president not to quit the Paris climate accord “will succeed.” After all, Trump had been offered a state visit, horse-drawn carriage, the queen; all that British pomp for His Neediness. We know what the word of Johnson, who was for the European Union before he was against it, is worth. It’s worth zilch. No wonder Trump’s finger-to-the-planet Paris decision prompted scarcely a British whimper. [Continue reading…]
Polls close at 10pm local time.
The Atlantic reports: First European Council President Donald Tusk described Donald Trump as a threat to European unity. Next German Chancellor Angela Merkel declared that Germany could no longer “completely depend” on America, noting that “We Europeans truly have to take our fate into our own hands.” Then, in vowing to “make our planet great again,” French President Emmanuel Macron seized the leadership role on climate change vacated by the United States.
Now signs of tectonic shifts in the Western alliance are cropping up across the Atlantic. On Tuesday—against the backdrop of Trump’s condemnation of NAFTA, withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, and chilly summit with NATO leaders, all three of which have put the U.S. at odds with its northern neighbor—Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland delivered a remarkable address in the House of Commons. At times, it almost sounded like she was bidding farewell to a retiring superpower, even as she held out hope that the superpower would agree to stay on a while longer. She never mentioned Trump by name. But the speech was a forceful rebuttal to Trump’s view of how the world should work.
Many American voters in last year’s presidential election were “animated in part by a desire to shrug off the burden of world leadership,” Freeland told Canadian lawmakers. “To say this is not controversial: it is simply a fact.” [Continue reading…]
Philip Allen Lacovara, a former U.S. deputy solicitor general in the Justice Department who served as counsel to the Watergate special prosecutors, writes: In prepared testimony released on the eve of his appearance Thursday before the Senate Intelligence Committee, former FBI director James B. Comey placed President Trump in the gunsights of a federal criminal investigation, laying out evidence sufficient for a case of obstruction of justice.
Comey proved what Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats and National Security Agency Director Michael S. Rogers carefully avoided admitting in their testimony on Wednesday — that the president had specifically attempted to shut off at least a major piece of what Trump calls the “Russia thing,” the investigation into the misleading statements by fired national security adviser Michael Flynn concerning his role in dealings with the Russians. This kind of presidential intervention in a pending criminal investigation has not been seen, to my knowledge, since the days of Richard Nixon and Watergate.
Comey’s statement meticulously detailed a series of interventions by Trump soliciting his assistance in getting the criminal probe dropped. These details are red meat for a prosecutor. Presumably, the team of experienced criminal prosecutors that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III has assembled will be following up on this crucial testimony, which rests on contemporaneous memorandums that Comey was sufficiently alarmed to prepare immediately after receiving the president’s requests. [Continue reading…]