A crisis completely of Trump’s own making
Did Trump’s dinner with Comey break the law?
The Daily Beast reports: The timing of President Donald Trump’s dinner with FBI Director James Comey raises the question of whether the president attempted to—or did in fact—interfere with an ongoing FBI investigation. And that’s a federal offense.
The episode in question occurred in the earliest days of the Trump administration. Within days of Trump’s start at the White House, the Justice Department had reason to believe that National Security Adviser Michael Flynn may have been compromised by the Russians. Flynn was interviewed by the FBI on January 24.
On January 26, Acting Attorney General Sally Yates rushed to the White House to tell Trump’s top lawyer of the Justice Department’s suspicions. She returned, at the White House counsel’s request, to continue the discussion on January 27.
That same night, the evening of January 27, the president had dinner with Comey, according to James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, who told this to NBC News.
Peter Zeidenberg, a former federal prosecutor who convicted Scooter Libby for leaking a CIA agent’s name, told The Daily Beast that the context of Trump’s dinner is “really significant.”
“So even if he’s not obstructing an investigation into himself, he may be obstructing an investigation into Flynn,” said Zeidenberg, a former assistant U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia.
“Asking him for his loyalty, I don’t know if that would qualify as obstruction of justice in and of itself,” Zeidenberg said, adding, “That suggests consciousness of guilt.” [Continue reading…]
Watchdog group alleges Sessions violated recusal rule in firing of Comey
The Washington Post reports: An ethics watchdog group filed a complaint against Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Friday alleging that his participation in the firing of FBI Director James B. Comey violated Justice Department rules and Sessions’s promise to recuse himself from matters involving Russia.
“Firing the lead investigator is the most extreme form of interfering with an investigation,” wrote Fred Wertheimer, who signed the six-page complaint on behalf of his organization, Democracy 21.
The filing asked the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility to investigate the matter and issue a public report — and to take additional action.
“Immediately, we call on OPR to take all necessary steps to ensure that the Attorney General withdraws from any participation in the selection of an interim or permanent Director of the FBI,” the complaint said.
When President Trump fired Comey on Tuesday, he announced that he had consulted with Sessions and the department’s No. 2 official, Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein.
Wertheimer, who has worked on ethics issues since the Watergate scandal, said the attorney general’s participation in the Comey firing violated Justice Department rules requiring staffers to recuse themselves from any criminal inquiry in which they have a “personal or political relationship.” [Continue reading…]
How NSA secrets helped cybercriminals mount a worldwide attack
The Washington Post reports: Computers around the world are suffering an attack from malicious software. The compromised computers have been hit by “ransomware” — software that encrypts the computer’s hard drive so that all the information on it is unavailable, and refuses to release it until a ransom is paid in Bitcoin, an online currency that is difficult to trace. Among the victims are FedEx, Britain’s National Health Service and computers belonging to Russia’s Ministry for the Interior.
Ransomware attacks have happened before. What is unusual is how quickly this attack is compromising large numbers of critical computers. It has been so successful because it has made use of a so-called “zero-day exploit” — a previously unknown flaw in Windows software that makes it easy to take control of vulnerable systems. This zero day exploit became publicly known last month, when it was released as part of a treasure trove of NSA data by the “Shadow Brokers,” a shadowy group of hackers who many believe are associated with Russian intelligence. Criminal hackers appear to have combined this exploit with ransomware tools to mount a worldwide campaign. Here’s what you need to know to understand what happened. [Continue reading…]
The Guardian reports: An “accidental hero” has halted the global spread of the WannaCry ransomware, reportedly by spending a few dollars on registering a domain name hidden in the malware.
The ransomware has wreaked havoc on organizations including FedEx and Telefonica, as well as the UK’s National Health Service (NHS), where operations were cancelled, x-rays, test results and patient records became unavailable and phones did not work.
However, a UK cybersecurity researcher tweeting as @malwaretechblog, with the help of Darien Huss from security firm Proofpoint, found and activated a “kill switch” in the malicious software.
The switch was hardcoded into the malware in case the creator wanted to stop it spreading. This involved a very long nonsensical domain name that the malware makes a request to – just as if it was looking up any website – and if the request comes back and shows that the domain is live, the kill switch takes effect and the malware stops spreading.
“I saw it wasn’t registered and thought, ‘I think I’ll have that’,” he is reported as saying. The purchase cost him $10.69. Immediately, the domain name was registering thousands of connections every second.
“They get the accidental hero award of the day,” said Proofpoint’s Ryan Kalember. “They didn’t realize how much it probably slowed down the spread of this ransomware.”
The time that @malwaretechblog registered the domain was too late to help Europe and Asia, where many organizations were affected. But it gave people in the US more time to develop immunity to the attack by patching their systems before they were infected, said Kalember. [Continue reading…]
Issue of Russian influence on 2016 election much broader than question of Trump campaign collusion
Julian Sanchez writes: Public discussion of the FBI’s ongoing investigation into Russian influence on the 2016 election is dominated by the question of collusion: Were senior members of the Trump campaign knowing collaborators in the Russian government’s campaign to undermine Hillary Clinton’s candidacy? My own view is that we’re unlikely to get any truly conclusive evidence of this—but also that it’s a mistake to treat it as the only important question for an investigation to answer.
There are two main reasons I doubt we’re going to get any smoking gun proof of secret coordination between Russia and Trump’s campaign. The first is simply that, even if it had happened, there’s no reason to expect that unambiguous evidence of it would necessarily be available to the FBI. Collusion, after all, is ultimately a question of the conversations people had—and in this case you’d expect that at least on the Russian side there would be an acute understanding of the need to keep those conversations secret. If those conversations were conducted in person, there’s no real way to retroactively prove what was said unless one of the participants confess. If they were telephone conversations, the same applies unless one of the parties happened to be under electronic surveillance at the time (and using an actively monitored communications facility). Absent that, you might be able to show a suspicious volume of contacts, but on the critical question of what was said, you’d be out of luck. Conspiracy is just inherently a hard thing to prove unless one of the conspirators flips or is dim enough to leave a paper trail.
That’s actually secondary, however. The primary reason I doubt we’re going to see that smoking gun is that it’s hard to see why it would be in Russia’s interest to loop the Trump campaign in on their interference campaign. The risks would be significant, and the benefits hard to discern. As Lawfare observed last month, there is ample evidence of collusion and coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia—it’s just that all of it took place right out in the open. Russia’s efforts on Trump’s behalf were, for the most part, pretty open, even if Trump affected not to notice them. Trump’s praise of Vladimir Putin—grounded in an affection that long predates his political career—was public, as was his gleeful exploitation of the fruits of hacks against his opponents and encouragement of more of the same, as was his attempt to exculpate Russia long after the intelligence community had reached consensus about their responsibility, as was his use on the campaign trail of stories pushed out by Russian state media. Trump could see they were helping him, they could see he appreciated it and was reciprocating. What, exactly, would have been the marginal benefit of some further secret communication making this happy symbiosis a matter of explicit agreement? Collusion would have been redundant. [Continue reading…]
The Trump Tapes
James Comey better hope that there are no "tapes" of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 12, 2017
The Washington Post described this tweet as “an apparent attempt to threaten Comey,” while NBC News calls it “a stern warning.”
Trump’s intended insinuation would seem to be that the revelations from such “tapes” would show that Comey was lying.
But just a minute: this purported “threat” is coming from a man who has repeatedly insisted that he was a victim of wiretapping and who was publicly humiliated by Comey saying categorically that Trump’s belief was baseless.
In Trump World, if his conversations with Comey got taped, they got taped by Comey.
If he learned nothing else from Nixon, Trump surely learned that it’s never a good idea to gather evidence of ones misdeeds by keeping secret recordings of private conversations.
Moreover, Trump can hardly have forgotten that unwittingly being taped very nearly cost him the presidential election.
Trump’s early morning tweet might have been delivered in the form of a threat but what it really represents is a projection of his fears.
“James Comey better hope that there are no "tapes" of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!”
Translation:
“Donald Trump now hopes the FBI didn’t tape his conversations with Comey, because if they were leaked, they would expose how Trump just lied on NBC.”
CNN now reports that as far as Comey is concerned, “if there is a tape, there’s nothing he is worried about,” — which is to say, nothing that Comey is worried about.
And that’s probably got Trump even more worried: Comey just left open the possibility that such a tape exists!
And maybe it does — and surely this is the stuff of Trump’s nightmares.
Rod Rosenstein has debased the office of the deputy attorney general
Benjamin Wittes writes: When Trump nominated Rosenstein as deputy attorney general, I was delighted. I have known Rosenstein for a long time. I have always thought well of him. I’ve admired his ability to serve at senior levels in administrations of both parties and impress both sides with apolitical service. I considered it a positive sign that Trump had installed a career professional as deputy attorney general under Jeff Sessions, who is a polarizing figure to many. And I quietly told many people anxious about Sessions that I was not worried that anything too terrible would happen at the department with Rosenstein and Rachel Brand—who has not yet been confirmed as associate attorney general and of whom I think extremely highly—in the deputy’s and associate’s offices respectively.
I was profoundly wrong about Rosenstein.
Rosenstein’s memo in support of Comey’s firing is a shocking document. The more I think about it, the worse it gets. I have tried six ways from Sunday to put an honorable construction on it. But in the end, I just cannot find one. The memo is a press release to justify an unsavory use of presidential power. It is also a profoundly unfair document. And it’s gutless too. Because at the end of the day, the memo greases the wheels for Comey’s removal without ever explicitly urging it—thus allowing its author to claim that he did something less than recommend the firing, while in fact providing the fig leaf for it.
In other words, Rosenstein’s actual role was even less honorable than the one he reportedly objected to the White House’s tagging him with. If the original story that Rosenstein’s recommendation drove the train had been true, after all, that at least would involve his giving his independent judgment. But the truth that Trump told is far worse than the lie Rosenstein insisted the White House correct. Rosenstein was tasked to provide a pretext, and he did just that.
Let’s give Rosenstein the benefit of the doubt and assume he believes every word of the memo he wrote—and I do assume as much. A lot of people, including a lot of people with institutionalist Justice Department views, share the belief that Comey screwed up, as the President would say, big league. Even I, who have defended the good faith of Comey’s actions and believe he was in an impossible situation, do not agree with every one of his decisions during the 2016 election period. So I’m perfectly willing to believe that Rosenstein felt able to take on the assignment to write this memo because he, in fact, believes the things he said in it.
Let’s go a step further and assume that everything Rosenstein says in the memo about Comey’s conduct is actually true—in other words, not merely that Rosenstein believes it all, but that he’s right. (This I do not believe, but I don’t want to relitigate the question of Comey’s handling of the Clinton emails matters.)
For that matter, let’s set aside the fact that the memo criticizes Comey for actions taken many months ago that the current president never criticized and that the previous administration did not think amounted to a firing offense.
Even with these assumptions, the memo is indefensible. Paul Rosenzweig has ably detailed its deficiencies; Bob Bauer has described how the document, which was produced in the less-than-two-weeks that Rosenstein has been in office, does not indicate whom Rosenstein consulted with and on what factual record his conclusions depended. Daphna Renan and David Pozen make a similar point, arguing that “the process by which Comey was fired appears to raise a version of the same professional concerns that the firing supposedly responds to”: a breach of Justice Department norms developed to protect integrity and independence.
I won’t rehash their many points in detail here but I wish to add a few, all around one general theme: Rosenstein’s memo wasn’t honorable, and it debases the office of the deputy attorney general for the occupant of that office to issue such a memo. [Continue reading…]
Trump: James Clapper said I have no Russia connections. Clapper: No I didn’t
Vox reports: President Donald Trump has tried to tamp down the growing controversy over his campaign’s ties to Russia by deliberately misrepresenting comments from James Clapper, formerly the nation’s top spy.
On Friday, Clapper began pushing back — and added his voice to the chorus of officials and lawmakers from both parties who worry that there’s more still to come out about possible collusion between the Trump team and the Kremlin during the campaign. [Continue reading…]
Don’t forget those smiling images of Trump and the Russians
Anne Applebaum writes: I know that investigations should continue, but let’s be clear: Russia would have needed no inducements or collusion to support Trump’s election campaign. His personality is the kind they understand, his cynicism and his dishonesty are familiar, his greed is the same as their greed. Above all, his lack of respect for the law is their lack of respect for the law. Trump fired the FBI director to get him off his television screen; Russian police lock up dissidents to get them out of public view. No, it’s not the same thing. But it’s not that different either. [Continue reading…]
4 things Western democracies need to understand to stop hostile Kremlin meddling
Jakub Janda writes: In 2015, I started the Kremlin Watch Program at a think-tank in Prague. My team analyzes Russian influence and disinformation operations, and we have helped the Czech government tailor a national strategy. We publish papers, propose strategies, and have been invited to consult in 16 countries—mostly European—so far. These are four lessons I have learned from my experience.
#1. Putin’s regime wants to call itself a superpower and to be respected as such. Apart from having nuclear weapons and large territory, Russia has nothing that makes it anything more than a regional dictatorship with living standards of a developing country. Freedom of speech in Russia is worse than in Zimbabwe, political opponents are shot or poisoned, journalists are assassinated, history is systematically falsified, and most major media outlets are controlled by the regime. Putin suppresses domestic opposition—from both political groups and independent media—because he has failed to deliver solid living standards for ordinary Russians over the course of the 17 years he has ruled. Russia has a lower GDP than Italy, and its average wages are lower than Romania’s.
On the international stage, there isn’t much to respect Russia for—apart from its status of a doping superpower; its occupation of Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova; and its covering up for bloody dictators like Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Western leftists need to wake up from their naïve dream of Russia being a champion of socialist ideals, and Western rightists should recognize that Russia is not a champion of conservative values; it suppresses individual freedoms and has the highest abortion rate in the world. Putin’s regime kills and bullies to get respected. Democracies need to denounce this paradigm. It worked at the end of 1980s, and it will work again if we stop buying into the Soviet dictatorship’s fear game. [Continue reading…]
Will Trump’s spiraling constitutional crisis end up saving the Paris climate deal?
Joe Romm writes: Will President Donald Trump’s surprise move to fire FBI director James Comey this week change the dynamics that had appeared to be leading toward a decision by the Trump administration to exit the landmark Paris climate accord?
Some say yes. “Every president in the modern era who gets into trouble at home, looks to opportunities to engage other leaders on the world stage publicly and cooperatively to demonstrate their legitimacy,” Andrew Light, senior fellow at World Resources Institute and former U.S. State Department climate official, told me.
Exiting the Paris agreement would make it all but impossible for Trump to work with other world leaders on a global stage.
Backing up a couple of weeks, before the stunning Comey decision and constantly-shifting rationale behind it, things were looking very bad for global climate action. [Continue reading…]
Music: ‘Egg – Symphony No. 2 – First Movement’
Trump said he was thinking of Russia controversy when he decided to fire Comey
The Washington Post reports: President Trump on Thursday said he was thinking of “this Russia thing with Trump” when he decided to fire FBI Director James B. Comey, who had been leading the counterintelligence investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.
Recounting his decision to dismiss Comey, Trump told NBC News, “In fact, when I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said, ‘You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made up story, it’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won.’”
Trump’s account flatly contradicts the White House’s initial account of how the president arrived at his decision, undercutting public denials by his aides that the move was influenced in any way by his growing fury with the ongoing Russia probe. [Continue reading…]
Current and former FBI officials dispute Trump account of meeting with Comey
NBC News reports: Despite what President Donald Trump said earlier in the day, James Comey did not seek a dinner with the president to retain his job, one current and one former FBI official close to Comey told NBC News Thursday evening.
The January dinner meeting between the two men, the sources said, was requested by the White House. And the former senior FBI official said Comey would never have told the president he was not under investigation — also contradicting what Trump said.
“He tried to stay away from it [the Russian-ties investigation],” said the former official, who worked closely with Comey and keeps in touch with him. “He would say, ‘look sir, I really can’t get into it, and you don’t want me to.'”
A current FBI official confirmed that Comey did not request the one-on-one dinner, which happened at the White House a few days after Trump was sworn in. [Continue reading…]
Given that Comey’s position as FBI director was set to continue until the end of its term in 2023 — by which time it’s reasonable to assume that Trump would at least be out of office if not in jail or exile — why would Comey go as supplicant, asking to be able to stay in his job? Least of all, why would he be ingratiating himself in front of the man who was the direct beneficiary of Comey’s ill-conceived intervention in the 2016 election?
Either Emperor Trump is, as is his habit, simply lying. Or, incapable of differentiating between fantasy and memory, he has reconstructed a version of events that corresponds with the power dynamics he desired rather than the actuality he encountered.
In a private dinner, Trump demanded loyalty. Comey demurred
The New York Times reports: Only seven days after Donald J. Trump was sworn in as president, James B. Comey has told associates, the F.B.I. director was summoned to the White House for a one-on-one dinner with the new commander in chief.
The conversation that night in January, Mr. Comey now believes, was a harbinger of his downfall this week as head of the F.B.I., according to two people who have heard his account of the dinner.
As they ate, the president and Mr. Comey made small talk about the election and the crowd sizes at Mr. Trump’s rallies. The president then turned the conversation to whether Mr. Comey would pledge his loyalty to him.
Mr. Comey declined to make that pledge. Instead, Mr. Comey has recounted to others, he told Mr. Trump that he would always be honest with him, but that he was not “reliable” in the conventional political sense.
The White House says this account is not correct. And Mr. Trump, in an interview on Thursday with NBC, described a far different dinner conversation with Mr. Comey in which the director asked to have the meeting and the question of loyalty never came up. It was not clear whether he was talking about the same meal, but they are believed to have had only one dinner together.
By Mr. Comey’s account, his answer to Mr. Trump’s initial question apparently did not satisfy the president, the associates said. Later in the dinner, Mr. Trump again said to Mr. Comey that he needed his loyalty.
Mr. Comey again replied that he would give him “honesty” and did not pledge his loyalty, according to the account of the conversation.
But Mr. Trump pressed him on whether it would be “honest loyalty.”
“You will have that,” Mr. Comey told his associates he responded. [Continue reading…]
In defense of Comey and the FBI, McCabe defied Trump
The New York Times reports: Andrew G. McCabe has risen so fast at the F.B.I. that he has become a source of both admiration and resentment. So a favorite way to criticize him is to offer one of the most backhanded compliments in the bureau’s lexicon: He’s a great briefer.
Mr. McCabe’s talent for briefing his superiors is regarded by many workaday agents as nothing more than an ability to discuss somebody else’s work. But it is highly valued at F.B.I. headquarters, and in a city where briefings become policy.
“With McCabe, it was always his capacity to understand an issue at great depth that made him stand out,” said James W. McJunkin, who supervised Mr. McCabe years ago in the F.B.I.’s counterterrorism division. Mr. McCabe provided unvarnished information, he said, with cut-to-the-chase precision.
That ability was on display on Thursday in Mr. McCabe’s first public appearance as acting director, less than 48 hours after President Trump fired James B. Comey, Mr. McCabe’s boss.
In testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mr. McCabe, 49, crisply refuted a pair of Trump administration assertions about Mr. Comey’s firing.
The White House said Mr. Comey had lost the support of his agents. Not so, Mr. McCabe said.
The White House said the F.B.I. regarded the investigation into Russian election interference as a low priority. Mr. McCabe called it “highly significant.”
Mr. McCabe’s standing up to a temperamental president who has repeatedly smacked the bureau like a political piñata won over at least some F.B.I. agents who had viewed Mr. McCabe as overly cautious. Mr. Trump has described the agency as corrupt, repeatedly belittled Mr. Comey and called the F.B.I. investigation into Russian influence in the 2016 election and potential collusion with the president’s associates a “hoax.”
Senator Martin Heinrich, Democrat of New Mexico, said he was surprised by Mr. McCabe’s bluntness. “I wasn’t expecting it,’’ he said in an interview. “It was pleasantly candid. He bucked the system.” [Continue reading…]
When Andrew McCabe flatly contradicted the White House’s claims about James Comey’s standing in the FBI, it might have seemed like he was lining himself up as the next man to get fired, but on the contrary, I suspect he improved his job security.
Trump has already turned the agency into his enemy. If McCabe now gets elbowed out, Trump will become even more vulnerable. The more pressure team Trump applies, the more resistance they will meet.
Trump just decimated the White House’s entire Comey narrative
Aaron Blake writes: I wrote Wednesday that the White House’s explanations for firing James B. Comey were crumbling. Well, President Trump just exploded them.
In one fell swoop, Trump totally contradicted his three top spokespeople and offered a polar-opposite version of events than they had provided.
After they had spent the past 45 hours emphasizing that this was a decision Trump arrived at after receiving a memo and recommendation from Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, Trump just blurted out that he was going to fire Comey all along. Basically, he admitted the memo was a ruse and a political ploy. [Continue reading…]
Attorney General Sessions agreed to develop a cover story for Trump. Where is his integrity and commitment to justice? pic.twitter.com/LX03EU2l9a
— Senator Jeff Merkley (@SenJeffMerkley) May 11, 2017
Trump cancels visit to FBI headquarters after being told he’s unwelcome
.@SarahHuckabee on firing of James Comey: "I've heard from countless members of the @FBI that are grateful & thankful for @POTUS' decision." pic.twitter.com/pVpw34EtvM
— Fox News (@FoxNews) May 11, 2017
NBC News reports: The White House has abandoned the idea of President Trump visiting FBI headquarters after being told he would not be greeted warmly, administration officials told NBC News.
Amid the continuing fallout over his decision to fire FBI Director James Comey, Trump was considering an appearance at the FBI’s J Edgar Hoover Building in downtown Washington, DC. The White House publicly floated the idea as recently as Thursday morning.
Spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders, asked by a reporter whether such a visit was imminent, replied, I believe that it’s very likely that takes place sometime in the next few days.”
But that idea was dropped later Thursday, administration officials said, after the FBI told the White House the optics would not be good. FBI officials made clear that the president would not draw many smiles and cheers, having just unceremoniously sacked a very popular director.
And FBI agents said that, while many of them voted for Trump, after the president unceremoniously fired a very popular director, few were ready to meet him at the bureau with open arms.
“My sense is most FBI employees feel a loyalty to Comey,” one person who works at headquarters told NBC News. “And whether they agree or disagree with the way he handled the email case, like and respect him … Trump would not be well-received at headquarters.” [Continue reading…]