Category Archives: Lands

FBI Russia investigation may continue while starved of necessary resources

Julia Ioffe writes: The abrupt and strange way Comey was fired, as well as the lack of a nominee to replace him, “is a very political decision, and the message it sends seems to be to back off the investigation,” said Amy Zegart, the co-director for Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation and senior fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution.

If that’s the case, there are many ways the bureau could “back off” without actually looking like it has backed off or even stopped investigating Russian interference. According to the former FBI agent Clinton Watts, the limbs of the beheaded bureau will keep doing their work. “The investigative part is independent,” said Watts. But even if the work goes on, what will that work look like? “The investigation will go forward in the short run,” said Jack Goldsmith, a professor at Harvard Law School and an assistant attorney general under George W. Bush. “The question is how vigorous it will be.”

One factor that may determine the answer is money. According to multiple reports, which a spokeswoman from the Department of Justice denied, Comey had asked the department for more resources to pursue the Russia investigation right before he was fired. What happens to the FBI’s resources now? A new FBI director “can’t shut the investigation down,” said Watts, “but can decide how resources are allocated and how time is spent.” Eric Columbus served from 2009 to 2014 in the office of the deputy attorney general—a position now occupied by Rod Rosenstein, whose letter describing Comey’s handling of the Clinton email investigation was cited by Trump as the reason for Comey’s dismissal. Columbus said that though a new director would have the legal authority to shut the Russia investigation down, “the smarter ploy would be to slow walk it and starve it of resources and not have it be the focus of leadership. … You can investigate things forever and have it never go anywhere. If you want to kill something, the most effective way to kill it is to just have it on a slow simmer rather than a rolling boil.”

In other words, the investigation could keep going but be so starved of money and manpower that it is not much of an investigation at all. [Continue reading…]

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Uncertain future for FBI Russia investigation

McClatchy reports: The FBI-led probe into whether Russian influence operations helped put Donald Trump in the White House is on a knife’s edge and could easily veer into either of two distinct directions.

One possibility is that investigators will feel galvanized by President Donald Trump’s abrupt firing of FBI director James Comey and burrow ever deeper into a probe in which they see the reputation of the bureau at stake.

Or, with the FBI temporarily rudderless, Trump loyalists in the Justice Department could put the brakes on the investigation in multiple ways.

“They could just say, ‘We’ve got 60 days to tie this up. I’m not spending more person power inside the bureau. . . . Let’s just say wrap it up unless we’ve got a smoking gun,’ ” said Christopher H. Schroeder, a former assistant attorney general who headed the Office of Legal Policy.

Agents could be reassigned, Schroeder said, “and you could slow walk it by starving it.”

New indications arose Wednesday that Comey, whom Trump axed Tuesday, ostensibly for the way he handled the probe into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while serving as secretary of state, was seeking to expand the investigation into Trump’s inner circle and its ties to Russia. [Continue reading…]

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Trump official: We ‘let the biggest perpetrator of fake news into the Oval Office’ (apart from Trump himself)

The Daily Beast reports: Senior members of the Trump administration are livid that the White House allowed the Russian government to steer the narrative of the president’s Wednesday meeting with top Russian diplomats by giving Kremlin-backed media exclusive access to the event.

The White House did not allow American press into the meeting between President Donald Trump, Russian foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, and Russia’s ambassador to Washington, Sergey Kislyak. But it did admit a photographer from TASS, a state-owned Russian news service. Its photos were subsequently posted on TASS’s website, giving that outlet a monopoly on publishable visuals of the meeting.

Russian government Twitter accounts shared photos of the event shortly after its conclusion. They revealed Kislyak’s presence—a fact that was not even mentioned in the official White House readout of the meeting. Some U.S. officials suspect Kislyak, whose conversations with Trump’s former National Security Adviser have fed an FBI investigation of his campaign, is a Kremlin spy—or at least spy-adjacent.

Two senior administration officials, one an Obama holdover and the other a Trump appointee, told The Daily Beast that the resulting reliance of U.S. media on a propaganda arm of a foreign government let Russia set the public tone of the meeting and embarrassed the administration amid already contentious discussions with Russian diplomats.

Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity in order to candidly express their views. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“This isn’t an ‘America First’ policy,” one of the officials fumed of the White House’s decision “to let the biggest perpetrator of fake news into the Oval Office.” Trump, the official added, is “either in bed with the Russians or too stupid to understand the severity of this mistake. Either way, the implications are truly terrifying.” [Continue reading…]

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Europeans are less likely to share fake news. Here’s why

PRI reports: If you picked up a newspaper in the UK on Monday, you might have encountered an unusual advertisement offering tips on how to spot “false news.”

Facebook published the full-page ads in major newspapers — including the Guardian and the Times of Londn — ahead of the country’s general elections next month. Last month, it published the same ads in Germany and France, ahead of elections in those countries.

“People want to see accurate information on Facebook and so do we. That is why we are doing everything we can to tackle the problem of false news,” Simon Milner, Facebook’s Director of Policy for the UK, wrote in a statement.

Research indicates that Internet users in some European countries are less likely than Americans to share fake news online. Still, Facebook and other social media companies have been facing mounting pressure from European leaders to address fake news, as well as other hateful, racist and violent posts.

“I think Europe has within living memory much more understanding of the consequences of letting hateful propaganda spread,” said Zeynep Tufekci, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina who studies the effect of technology on politics and society. “They lived through World War I and World War II, and they have a deeper visceral reaction to the consequences of letting hate speech, incitement to violence, misinformation, propaganda — the whole range of things that we see online today — going unchecked.” [Continue reading…]

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Inside Trump’s anger and impatience — and his decision to fire Comey

The Washington Post reports: Every time FBI Director James B. Comey appeared in public, an ever-watchful President Trump grew increasingly agitated that the topic was the one that he was most desperate to avoid: Russia.

Trump had long questioned Comey’s loyalty and judgment, and was infuriated by what he viewed as the director’s lack of action in recent weeks on leaks from within the federal government. By last weekend, he had made up his mind: Comey had to go.

At his golf course in Bedminster, N.J., Trump groused over Comey’s latest congressional testimony, which he thought was “strange,” and grew impatient with what he viewed as his sanctimony, according to White House officials. Comey, Trump figured, was using the Russia probe to become a martyr.

Back at work Monday morning in Washington, Trump told Vice President Pence and several senior aides — Reince Priebus, Stephen K. Bannon and Donald McGahn, among others — that he was ready to move on Comey. First, though, he wanted to talk with Attorney General Jeff Sessions, his trusted confidant, and Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, to whom Comey reported directly. Trump summoned the two of them to the White House for a meeting, according to a person close to the White House.

The president already had decided to fire Comey, according to this person. But in the meeting, several White House officials said Trump gave Sessions and Rosenstein a directive: to explain in writing the case against Comey.

The pair quickly fulfilled the boss’s orders, and the next day Trump fired Comey — a breathtaking move that thrust a White House already accustomed to chaos into a new level of tumult, one that has legal as well as political consequences.

Rosenstein threatened to resign after the narrative emerging from the White House on Tuesday evening cast him as a prime mover of the decision to fire Comey and that the president acted only on his recommendation, said the person close to the White House, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter. [Continue reading…]

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Trump’s feeble effort to hide behind Rosenstein

A New York Times columnist, writes: the White House needed the cover of an honorable man making an honest case against Comey to disguise its own case against him, which is neither honorable nor honest. How do we know? By following @realDonaldTrump on Twitter.

“F.B.I. Director Comey was the best thing that ever happened to Hillary Clinton in that he gave her a free pass for many bad deeds!” the president wrote on May 2. “The phony Trump/Russia story was an excuse used by the Democrats as justification for losing the election. Perhaps Trump just ran a great campaign?”

Tell: After the president publicly impugned his own F.B.I. director, it meant Rosenstein’s memo was a pro forma, pretextual exercise.

Tell: When the president boasts about his great campaign, you know he’s less than sure about just how great it really was.

Tell: When the president calls news “fake” or a story “phony,” you know the truth quotient is likely to be high. And, again, you know he knows you know it.

All the more so thanks to reporting from The Times’s Matthew Rosenberg and Matt Apuzzo, who revealed Wednesday that Comey had only recently asked Rosenstein “for a significant increase in resources for the bureau’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the presidential election.” For the record, the Justice Department denies the claim.

For the administration’s apologists, the fallback line is that the Russia investigation will continue no matter who succeeds Comey. That might be credible if, say, the former New York Police Department commissioner Ray Kelly gets the job. And if Chris Christie or Rudy Giuliani gets it?

In all this, the riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma is Russia.

Golf courses: Russia. Mike Flynn’s lies to the vice president: Russia. Jeff Sessions’s lies to the Senate: Russia. Paul Manafort, Carter Page and Roger Stone: Russia. WikiLeaks: Russia. Donald Trump Jr.: Russia. The Bayrock Group: Russia. Erik Prince’s diplomatic back channel: Russia.

No one piece in this (partial) list is incriminating. And with Trump, the line between incompetence and nefariousness, misjudgment and misdirection, is usually a blurry one.

Still, Jim Comey’s firing now brings two points into high relief. First, the administration is not being truthful when it claims the director was dismissed for what he did last summer. Second, Donald Trump is afraid. A president who seeks to hide a scandal may be willing to risk an uproar. [Continue reading…]

The columnist? Bret Stephens.

I’ll confess, it’s the only column of his I’ve read from beginning to end, but it illustrates (at least for me) why any argument or piece of writing is best judged on its own merits rather than the predisposition the reader feels towards the author.

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Trump meets Russia’s foreign minister at Vladimir Putin’s insistence

Susan Glasser writes: When President Donald Trump hosted Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in the Oval Office Wednesday just hours after firing the FBI director who was overseeing an investigation into whether Trump’s team colluded the Russians, he was breaking with recent precedent at the specific request of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The chummy White House visit—photos of the president yukking it up with Lavrov and Russian Ambassador to the United States Sergey Kislyak were released by the Russian Foreign Ministry since no U.S. press was allowed to cover the visit—had been one of Putin’s asks in his recent phone call with Trump, And indeed the White House acknowledged this to me later Wednesday. “He chose to receive him because Putin asked him to,” a White House spokesman said of Trump’s Lavrov meeting. “Putin did specifically ask on the call when they last talked.”

The meeting was Lavrov’s first in the White House since 2013—and came after several years of the Obama administration’s flat-out refusal to grant him an Oval Office audience, two former senior White House officials told me. “The Russians were begging us for years to do that,” one of the former officials said. “They were constantly pushing for it and we were constantly saying no.”

The images of Trump putting his arm genially on Lavrov’s back—and a later White House official readout of the meeting that said Trump “emphasized his desire to build a better relationship between the United States and Russia”—couldn’t have come at a more fraught political moment for Trump, amid a barrage of bipartisan criticism of his firing of FBI director James Comey. On Wednesday morning before meeting with Trump, Lavrov even cracked a joke about his hosts’ political predicament, laughingly claiming not to have heard of the Comey firing while standing alongside Trump’s Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.

In other words, Lavrov was right where he has always wanted to be Wednesday: mocking the United States while being welcomed in the Oval Office by the president himself. [Continue reading…]

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Senate Intelligence Committee subpoenas Flynn

Politico reports: The Senate Intelligence Committee has subpoenaed any Russia-related documents from former national security adviser Michael Flynn for its continuing probe into the Kremlin’s efforts to manipulate the 2016 election.

The legal order, announced by the panel’s bipartisan leaders Sens. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) and Mark Warner (R-Va.), went out Wednesday after Flynn’s attorneys informed the panel they would not cooperate with the probe unless the embattled former general was granted immunity, a congressional source told POLITICO.

Flynn had been asked, along with a spate of other former and current Trump associates, at the end of last month to provide the Intelligence Committee with any documents potentially related to the panel’s Russia probe. The investigation is examining, among other questions, whether Flynn or other Trump associates had improper contact with the Russian government throughout the course of the campaign or the transition period. [Continue reading…]

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Days before firing, Comey asked for more resources for Russia inquiry

The New York Times reports: Days before he was fired, James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, asked the Justice Department for a significant increase in resources for the bureau’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the presidential election, according to four congressional officials, including Senator Richard J. Durbin.

Mr. Comey made his appeal to Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, who also wrote the Justice Department’s memo that was used to justify the firing of Mr. Comey this week, the officials said.

“I’m told that as soon as Rosenstein arrived, there was a request for additional resources for the investigation and that a few days afterwards, he was sacked,” said Mr. Durbin, a Democrat of Illinois. “I think the Comey operation was breathing down the neck of the Trump campaign and their operatives, and this was an effort to slow down the investigation.” [Continue reading…]

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Hackers came, but the French were prepared

The New York Times reports: Everyone saw the hackers coming.

The National Security Agency in Washington picked up the signs. So did Emmanuel Macron’s bare-bones technology team. And mindful of what happened in the American presidential campaign, the team created dozens of false email accounts, complete with phony documents, to confuse the attackers.

The Russians, for their part, were rushed and a bit sloppy, leaving a trail of evidence that was not enough to prove for certain they were working for the government of President Vladimir V. Putin but which strongly suggested they were part of his broader “information warfare” campaign.

The story told by American officials, cyberexperts and Mr. Macron’s own campaign aides of how a hacking attack intended to disrupt the most consequential election in France in decades ended up a dud was a useful reminder that as effective as cyberattacks can be in disabling Iranian nuclear plants, or Ukrainian power grids, they are no silver bullet. The kind of information warfare favored by Russia can be defeated by early warning and rapid exposure.

But that outcome was hardly assured on Friday night, when what was described as a “massive” hacking attack suddenly put Mr. Macron’s electoral chances in jeopardy. To French and American officials, however, it was hardly a surprise.

Testifying in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee in Washington on Tuesday, Adm. Michael S. Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency, said American intelligence agencies had seen the attack unfolding, telling their French counterparts, “Look, we’re watching the Russians. We’re seeing them penetrate some of your infrastructure. Here’s what we’ve seen. What can we do to try to assist?”

But the staff at Mr. Macron’s makeshift headquarters in the 15th Arrondissement at the edge of Paris didn’t need the N.S.A. to tell them they were being targeted: In December, after the former investment banker and finance minister had emerged as easily the most anti-Russian, pro-NATO and pro-European Union candidate in the presidential race, they began receiving phishing emails.

The phishing mails were “high quality,” said Mr. Macron’s digital director, Mounir Mahjoubi: They included the actual names of members of the campaign staff, and at first glance appeared to come from them. Typical was the very last one the campaign received, several days before the election on Sunday, which purported to have come from Mr. Mahjoubi himself.

“It was almost like a joke, like giving us all the finger,” Mr. Mahjoubi said in interview on Tuesday. The final email enjoined recipients to download several files “to protect yourself.”

Even before then, the Macron campaign had begun looking for ways to make life a little harder for the Russians, showing a level of skill and ingenuity that was missing in Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and at the Democratic National Committee, which had minimal security protections and for months ignored F.B.I. warnings that its computer system had been penetrated. [Continue reading…]

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South Korea’s new president says his election completes the ‘candlelight revolution’

Tim Shorrock reports:  Moon Jae-in, a human rights and labor lawyer who came of age protesting authoritarian military governments backed by the United States, assumed South Korea’s presidency Wednesday after a snap election that repudiated 10 years of right-wing conservative rule.

Moon, 64, took office after securing about 41 percent of a total popular vote of 32.8 million, far ahead of his closest rival, the conservative Hong Joon-pyo, who ended up with 24 percent. It was the largest margin in Korean election history, the wire service Yonhap reported.

“I will restore a government based on principle and justice,” Moon declared Tuesday night in a nationally broadcast speech from Seoul’s Gwanghwamun district, which is famous for its political protests. “I will be the proud president of a proud nation.”

After being sworn in Wednesday, he startled the nation with a ringing declaration calling for a new foreign policy based on negotiations and dialogue. “I will do whatever it takes to help settle peace on the Korean Peninsula,” including visiting North Korea, Moon told the National Assembly. In a nod to Washington, he also declared he would “further strengthen the alliance between South Korea and the United States.”

Moon’s election was the direct result of the impeachment of his predecessor, Park Geun-hye, who had embraced Washington’s hard-line policies toward Pyongyang. She was brought down after millions of citizens angry about corruption, economic mismanagement, abuse of power, and the uncertain future of Korean youth flooded the streets of Seoul and other major cities in a peaceful movement now known as the “candlelight revolution.” [Continue reading…]

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Grand jury subpoenas issued in FBI’s Russia investigation

CNN reports: Federal prosecutors have issued grand jury subpoenas to associates of former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn seeking business records, as part of the ongoing probe of Russian meddling in last year’s election, according to people familiar with the matter. CNN learned of the subpoenas hours before President Donald Trump fired FBI director James Comey.

The subpoenas represent the first sign of a significant escalation of activity in the FBI’s broader investigation begun last July into possible ties between Trump campaign associates and Russia.

The subpoenas issued in recent weeks by the US Attorney’s Office in Alexandria, Virginia, were received by associates who worked with Flynn on contracts after he was forced out as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2014, according to the people familiar with the investigation.

Robert Kelner, an attorney for Flynn, declined to comment. The US Attorney’s Office in Alexandria, the Justice Department and the FBI also declined to comment.

Investigators have been looking into possible wrongdoing in how Flynn handled disclosures about payments from clients tied to foreign governments including Russia and Turkey, US officials briefed on the matter have told CNN. [Continue reading…]

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Whoever replaces Comey needs to satisfy Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein

This is just my opinion, but the widely expressed view that Trump fired Comey in order to shut down the Russia investigation seems to overstate Comey’s role in an investigation that in his absence still proceeds.

The reports of Trump screaming at television coverage of the investigation, do not suggest that he is in the midst of a carefully crafted cover-up.

Most importantly, having publicly deferred to the judgement of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein — as did Attorney General Jeff Sessions — Trump has effectively handed a veto to Rosenstein when it comes to the choice of Comey’s replacement.

By all appearances, Rosenstein’s allegiances are strictly constitutional and institutional. If Trump’s choice for a new FBI director appears tainted in any way and if this is not an individual of unquestionable independence and integrity, it seems reasonable to expect that Rosenstein will be shooting off another memo.

Who knows? If he objects to Trump’s choice, maybe Rosenstein would even have the guts to do something virtually unheard of in this era: resign on a matter of principle.

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Trump screamed at television when watching clips on Russia investigation

Politico reports: President Donald Trump weighed firing his FBI director for more than a week. When he finally pulled the trigger Tuesday afternoon, he didn’t call James Comey. He sent his longtime private security guard to deliver the termination letter in a manila folder to FBI headquarters.

He had grown enraged by the Russia investigation, two advisers said, frustrated by his inability to control the mushrooming narrative around Russia. He repeatedly asked aides why the Russia investigation wouldn’t disappear and demanded they speak out for him. He would sometimes scream at television clips about the probe, one adviser said.

Trump’s firing of the high-profile FBI director on the 110th day since taking office marked another sudden turn for an administration that has fired its acting attorney general, national security adviser and now its FBI director, who Trump had praised until recent weeks and even blew a kiss to during a January appearance. [Continue reading…]

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In near darkness, among the bushes, Spicer struggles to explain why Trump fired Comey

The Washington Post reports: “Another Tuesday at the White House,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders quipped as she finished speaking on Fox News from its outdoor set, as the voice of Kellyanne Conway continued to banter with CNN’s Anderson Cooper from the next booth over.

After [White House press secretary Sean] Spicer spent several minutes hidden in the bushes behind these sets, Janet Montesi, an executive assistant in the press office, emerged and told reporters that Spicer would answer some questions, as long as he was not filmed doing so. Spicer then emerged.

“Just turn the lights off. Turn the lights off,” he ordered. “We’ll take care of this… Can you just turn that light off?”

Spicer got his wish and was soon standing in near darkness between two tall hedges, with more than a dozen reporters closely gathered around him. For 10 minutes, he responded to a flurry of questions, vacillating between light-hearted asides and clear frustration with getting the same questions over and over again.

The first question: Did the president direct Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein to conduct a probe of FBI Director James B. Comey?

As Spicer tells it, Rosenstein was confirmed about two weeks ago and independently took on this issue so the president was not aware of the probe until he received a memo from Rosenstein on Tuesday, along with a letter from Attorney General Jeff Sessions recommending that Comey be fired. The president then swiftly decided to follow the recommendation, notifying the FBI via e-mail around 5 p.m. and in a letter delivered to the FBI by the president’s longtime bodyguard. At the same time, the president personally called congressional leaders to let them know his decision. Comey learned the news from media reports.

“It was all him,” Spicer said of Rosenstein, as a reporter repeated his answer back to him. “That’s correct — I mean, I can’t, I guess I shouldn’t say that, thank you for the help on that one. No one from the White House. That was a DOJ decision.”

The news Tuesday was surprising for a number of reasons, especially since the president once delighted in Comey’s investigation of Democrat Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server — an investigation that is now at the heart of Trump’s explanation for firing Comey. Some have then wondered aloud if the president is instead trying to punish Comey for investigating ties between his campaign and Russia.

When pressed on this, Spicer would put forth Rosenstein’s resume: A prosecutor with more than 30 years of experience who served as a U.S. Attorney during the Obama administration and was overwhelmingly confirmed for his new position as deputy attorney general by Congress.

Spicer said he’s not aware of any of Rosenstein’s superiors who might have directed him to do this — although he then said that such questions should be directed to Justice officials, not him. Spicer did a lot of referring.

Was Sessions involved? “That’s something you should ask the Department of Justice,” Spicer said.

Was Rosenstein’s probe part of a larger review of the FBI? “That’s, again, a question that you should ask the Department of Justice,” he said.

Did the president discuss Rosenstein’s findings with Rosenstein? “No, I don’t believe, I don’t know how that sequence went — I don’t know,” he said.

What was the president’s role? “Again, I have to get back to you on the tick-tock,” he said.

When’s the last time Trump and Comey spoke? “Uh, I don’t know. I don’t know. There’s some — I don’t know. I don’t know,” he said.

What were the three occasions on which the president says Comey assured him that he was not under investigation? “I don’t — we can follow — I can try, yeah,” he said.

How long did the president deliberate? “I don’t, I don’t… I can look at the tick-tock. I know that he was presented with that today. I’m not sure what time,” he said.

Why wasn’t Comey given the news in a personal phone call? “I think we delivered it by hand and by email and that was — and I get it, but you asked me a question and that’s the answer,” he said.

Did Comey’s testimony last week — which contained inaccuracies — influence the decision? “You’d have to ask the Department of Justice. They’re the ones that made the recommendation,” he said.

Why didn’t the president do this months ago? “Again, I would refer you to the Department of Justice,” he said.

Does he know about grand-jury subpoenas that have reportedly been issued in an investigation involving Michael Flynn, Trump’s previous national security adviser? “I’m not — I’m not aware of any,” he said.

Is it true that the president will meet on Wednesday with Russian diplomat Sergey Viktorovich Lavrov? “We’ll see what the schedule says. I don’t — I just — I’ve been a little tied up.” [Continue reading…]

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Justice Department was ordered to find reasons for firing Comey; Trump now plans to meet Russian FM

The New York Times reports: Senior White House and Justice Department officials had been working on building a case against Mr. Comey since at least last week, according to administration officials. Attorney General Jeff Sessions had been charged with coming up with reasons to fire him, the officials said. [Continue reading…]

The Hill reports: The White House circulated negative press clippings on FBI Director James Comey minutes after announcing his firing Tuesday evening.

The one-page sheet circulated by the White House contained four stories, most of them about Democrats criticizing Comey’s decision to disclose developments in the investigation into Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server.

One of the clips was a Wall Street Journal editorial calling for Comey’s resignation because “he has lost the trust of nearly everyone in Washington, along with every American who believes the FBI must maintain its reputation as a politically impartial federal agency.” [Continue reading…]

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Trump fires Comey, the one man who would stand up to him

Benjamin Wittes and Susan Hennessey write: Make no mistake: The firing of James Comey as FBI director is a stunning event. It is a profoundly dangerous thing—a move that puts the Trump-Russia investigation in immediate jeopardy and removes from the investigative hierarchy the one senior official whom President Trump did not appoint and one who is known to stand up to power. One of the biggest dangers of Comey’s firing is that Trump might actually get away with it, ironically, because of Comey’s unpopularity among Democrats and on the political left.

We warned about this danger immediately after the election.

On November 10, we wrote that that Trump’s firing of Comey would be a “a clear bellwether to both the national security and civil libertarian communities that things are going terribly wrong.” At the time we wrote those words, Comey was deeply unpopular with both the Left, which blamed Hillary Clinton’s defeat on his eleventh hour letter to Congress, and the Right, which criticized his decision to recommend that Clinton not be charged over her handling of government emails. Whatever the merit of Comey’s actions during the campaign, the fact that he managed to anger both sides of the political spectrum demonstrated his storied political independence. And that political independence, we argued, would serve as a critical check against any efforts on the part of President Trump to trample the rule of law.

The FBI Director serves a ten-year term precisely in order to insulate against the whims of a President who does not like what—or whom—the FBI is investigating. While the President has legal authority to fire an FBI director, the fact that Trump has done so under circumstances of an active FBI investigation of the President’s own campaign violates profoundly important norms of an independent, non-political FBI. The situation has no parallel with the only previous FBI director to be removed by a president: President Clinton’s firing of William Sessions, whose ethical misconduct was so extensive that it resulted in a six-month Justice Department investigation an a blistering 161-page report detailing his illicit activities, including flagrant misuse of public funds. Trump’s firing Comey at a time when Comey is investigating Russian intervention in the election on Trump’s behalf and the specific conduct of a number of people close to Trump undermines the credibility of his own presidency. And it deeply threatens the integrity of and public confidence in ongoing law enforcement and intelligence operations. [Continue reading…]

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In Trump’s firing of James Comey, echoes of Watergate

The New York Times reports: In dramatically casting aside James B. Comey, President Trump fired the man who may have helped make him president — and the man who potentially most threatened the future of his presidency.

Not since Watergate has a president dismissed the person leading an investigation bearing on him, and Mr. Trump’s decision late Tuesday afternoon drew instant comparisons to the Saturday Night Massacre when President Richard M. Nixon ordered the firing of Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor looking into the so-called third-rate burglary that would eventually bring Nixon down.

In his letter informing Mr. Comey that he was terminated as F.B.I. director, Mr. Trump made a point of noting that Mr. Comey had three times told the president that he was not under investigation. But Mr. Comey has said publicly that the bureau is investigating Russia’s meddling in last year’s presidential election and whether any associates of Mr. Trump’s campaign were coordinating with Moscow.

While Mr. Trump said he acted on the recommendation of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, he had left little doubt about his personal feelings toward Mr. Comey or that Russia investigation in recent days. “Comey was the best thing that has ever happened to Hillary Clinton in that he gave her a free pass for her many bad deeds!” he wrote on Twitter a week ago.

“The Russia-Trump collusion story is a total hoax, when will this taxpayer funded charade end?” he added on Monday. [Continue reading…]

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