Even before the media obsession with Hillary Clinton’s email server put The Worst President Ever™ in the White House, historians were comparing Donald Trump to Caligula, the cruel, depraved Roman emperor who delighted in humiliating others, especially members of the empire’s elite.
.. For one thing, Caligula did not, as far as we know, foment ethnic violence within the empire.
.. Finally, when his behavior became truly intolerable, Rome’s elite did what the party now controlling Congress seems unable even to contemplate: It found a way to get rid of him.
.. Journalists have stopped seizing on brief moments of not-craziness to declare Trump “presidential”; business leaders have stopped trying to curry favor by lending Trump an air of respectability; even military leaders have gone as far as they can to dissociate themselves from administration pronouncements.
.. “Not my president” used to sound like an extreme slogan. Now it has more or less become the operating principle for key parts of the U.S. system.
But remember, this administration has yet to confront a crisis not of its own making. Furthermore, a series of scary deadlines are looming. Never mind tax reform.
Congress has to act within the next few weeks to enact a budget, or the government will shut down;
- to raise the debt ceiling, or the U.S. will go into default;
- to renew the Children’s Health Insurance Program, or millions of children will lose coverage.
So who’s going to ensure that these critical deadlines are met? Not Trump
.. remember when people took Paul Ryan’s pretense of policy expertise seriously? And their association with President Caligula has destroyed their moral credibility, too. They could keep the government functioning by dealing with Democrats, but they’re afraid to do that, for the same reason they’re afraid to confront the madman in the White House... Everyone in Washington now knows that we have a president who never meant it when he swore to defend the Constitution. He violates that oath just about every day and is never going to get any better... But a third of the country still approves of that rogue president — and that third amounts to a huge majority of the G.O.P. base... Trump is already supporting challengers to Republicans he considers insufficiently loyal... The fact is that white supremacists have long been a key if unacknowledged part of the G.O.P. coalition, and Republicans need those votes to win general elections. Given the profiles in cowardice they’ve presented so far,it’s hard to imagine anything — up to and including evidence of collusion with a foreign power — that would make them risk losing those voters’ support... So the odds are that we’re stuck with a malevolent, incompetent president whom nobody knowledgeable respects, and many consider illegitimate. If so, we have to hope that our country somehow stumbles through the next year and a half without catastrophe, and that the midterm elections transform the political calculus and make the Constitution great again.
Chaos? What chaos? No chaos here!
Meanwhile, Kushner is leaking to the White House interns that the Trump campaign was TOO INCOMPETENT TO COLLUDE WITH ANYONE (Kushner continues to be both a particle and a wave; his collusion cat is always dead, though), and then the interns told a reporter. This is a fine defense and not a sign of chaos or panic on anyone’s part.
.. And a lawsuit is alleging that the Trump White House was behind the bogus story on Fox News (retracted, with ZERO resignations) that Democratic National Committee employee Seth Rich was murdered for being the real source behind WikiLeaks.
Jared Kushner’s Got Too Many Secrets to Keep Ours
he’s under investigation, and a series of revelations have bolstered suspicions — and credible doubts mean that he must be viewed as a security risk.
.. Kushner attended a meeting in June 2016 whose stated purpose was to advance a Kremlin initiative to interfere in the U.S. election; he failed to disclose the meeting on government forms (a felony if intentional); he was apparently complicit in a cover-up in which the Trump team denied at least 20 times that there had been any contacts with Russians to influence the election; and he also sought to set up a secret communications channel with the Kremlin during the presidential transition.
.. Kushner is set to be interviewed Monday in a closed session with the Senate Intelligence Committee, his first meeting with congressional investigators. I hope they grill him in particular about the attempt to set up a secret communications channel and whether it involved mobile Russian scrambling devices.
.. Similar issues arise with Ivanka Trump. The SF-86 form to get a national security clearance requires inclusion of a spouse’s foreign contacts
.. McClatchy has reported that investigators are looking into whether the Trump campaign’s digital operation, which Kushner oversaw, colluded with Russians on Moscow’s efforts to spread fake news about Hillary Clinton.
.. the national security world fears that there is something substantive to the suspicions about the president and Russia. Otherwise, nothing makes sense.
- Why has Trump persistently stood with Vladimir Putin rather than with allies like Germany or Britain?
- Why did Trump make a beeline for Putin at the G-20 dinner, without an aide, as opposed to chat with Angela Merkel or Theresa May?
- Why do so many Trump team members have ties to Russia?
- Why did Trump choose a campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, who had been as much as $17 million in debt to pro-Russian interests and was vulnerable to Moscow pressure?
- Why did he take the political risk of firing Jim Comey?
- Why is he so furious at Jeff Sessions for recusing himself?
- Why does he apparently contemplate the extreme step of firing Bob Mueller during his investigation into the Russia ties?
If the Trump team is innocent and expects exoneration, why would it work so hard on a secret effort aimed at discrediting Mueller, as The Times reported?
Why would Trump be exploring pardons for aides, family members and himself, as The Washington Post reported?
.. One thing you learn as a journalist is that when an official makes increasingly vehement protestations of innocence, you’re probably getting warm.
.. I sympathize with our counterintelligence officials, who chase low-level leakers and spies even as they undoubtedly worry that their commander in chief may be subject to Kremlin leverage or blackmail.
Mueller’s Investigation Must Be Limited and Accountable
To speak in terms of collusion rather than conspiracy—as the Russia investigation coverage often does—only confuses matters. Contrary to what you may have heard from sundry “strategists” and “analysts,” collusion is neither a crime nor a term that has a legally consequential meaning. The word has a pejorative feel, especially in the last seven months. But literally, all it means is “concerted activity.” That could be criminal or noncriminal, sinister or benign.
Thus, if we insist on asking about “collusion” in the context of a criminal investigation, we’re really asking two questions: was there any concerted activity between two or more people, and, if yes, what was the precise nature of the activity—i.e., collusion in what?
That is where we are at with respect to the Trump Tower meeting. In light of the Donald Trump, Jr. emails and the meeting that followed them, it makes little sense to me to claim there was no “concerted activity.” Yet, the “in what?” question remains vital.
.. Since there is now indisputable proof of some kind of concerted activity between Trump campaign staff and potential Russian operatives, it is worth focusing investigative attention on the exact purpose of that activity and the nature of the relationship.
.. Nevertheless, a counterintelligence investigation is the wrong vehicle for such an inquiry. It is not designed to investigate wrongdoing. Its purpose is to collect intelligence in order to understand a foreign power’s designs and to predict its behavior. It is forward-looking, whereas criminal investigations are retrospective. It seeks to assess, not to prove. As such, there are no natural limitations on the investigator’s warrant; it is completely open-ended.
.. It is fair to observe that there was more interaction between Donald Trump’s campaign and the Russian regime (including Putin’s oligarch cronies) than the president and his subordinates acknowledged. Even if that interaction is unrelated to Russia’s cyber-espionage, the nature and extent of the relationship merits investigation.
But an investigation of a president necessarily compromises an administration’s capacity to govern. That can harm the country. Therefore, the investigation must have parameters.
.. The applicable regulations make it incumbent on the Justice Department to specify what exactly a special counsel is authorized to investigate. The Justice Department has failed to do this, a dereliction that must be rectified. Complying with this requirement would not prevent special counsel Mueller from seeking an expansion of his jurisdiction were he to discover behavior that warrants additional investigation. But limits must be imposed.
If they are not, there is no telling where the probe will wander, how long it will take, and how paralyzing it will be. And that does not serve the country well.