President Trump on Saturday asserted the “complete power to pardon” relatives, aides and possibly even himself ..
.. “While all agree the U.S. President has the complete power to pardon, why think of that when only crime so far is LEAKS against us,” he wrote on Twitter. “FAKE NEWS.”
.. an article by The Post reporting that Mr. Sessions may have discussed campaign activities and policy with the Russian ambassador, Sergey I. Kislyak, last year, despite his public statements to the contrary. In the article, The Post cited intercepted communications between Mr. Kislyak and his home office in Moscow. Mr. Trump excoriated the newspaper and expressed no concern about his attorney general’s conduct.
“A new INTELLIGENCE LEAK from the Amazon Washington Post, this time against A.G. Jeff Sessions,” Mr. Trump wrote. “These illegal leaks, like Comey’s, must stop!”
.. In the interview, Mr. Trump faulted Mr. Sessions for his misleading testimony. “Jeff Sessions gave some bad answers,” the president said. “He gave some answers that were simple questions and should have been simple answers, but they weren’t.”
.. “My son Donald openly gave his e-mails to the media & authorities whereas Crooked Hillary Clinton deleted (& acid washed) her 33,000 emails!” he wrote.
The Men Who Never Have to Grow Up
The family’s crisis team drafted a statement for the young man to give and, crucially, a strategy to shape the public’s perception. If America saw this married man in his late 30s as a boy — handsome and high-spirited, mischievous, not a criminal — he’d be able to squirm out of his misdeeds with minimal punishment.
.. If this sounds familiar, it should. It’s how, in the summer of 1969, the Kennedy camp managed the fallout after 37-year-old Teddy drove his car off a bridge off Chappaquiddick Island, and his young female passenger died.
.. We’ve all been having a good chuckle watching our president and his surrogates characterize Mr. Trump’s 39-year-old son, the married father of five, as an “honest kid,” a wide-eyed innocent
.. Those misdeeds were waved away by Rio Olympic officials, who defendebd the 32-year-old athlete and his partners in crime by saying, “Let’s give these kids a break.”
.. Readers who studied John Updike are conditioned to find those kinds of admissions adorably annoying, charmingly childish. Rich and his fictional brethren, from Alexander Portnoy all the way back to Peter Pan, are the man-boys we love to hate.
.. Women and nonwhite men don’t have it quite as easy.
.. If boys will be boys, then girls must be grown-ups, whose job it is to protect men from their worst impulses. Witness every administrative body, from middle school to Congress, that has decided that it’s easier and more culturally acceptable to police girls’ and women’s clothingthan it is boys’ behavior.
.. Brock Turner, once a promising Stanford swimmer, was convicted of sexual assault, his parents thought that even a six-month sentence was too much. “He will never be his happy-go-lucky self,” Mr. Turner’s father lamented
.. People of color, of course, never receive the leeway that “good kids” like the 39-year-old Trump son seem to get.
Guest List at Donald Trump Jr.’s Meeting With Russian Expands Again
Seventeen years ago, congressional investigators looking into money laundering stumbled upon an obscure Soviet-born financier who offered special services to his Russian clients. He had opened 2,000 companies in Delaware and more than 100 bank accounts for Russian clients who moved hundreds of millions of dollars through those accounts to overseas destinations, they found.
On Tuesday, that man, Irakly Kaveladze, resurfaced as the latest foreign guest on the ever-expanding list of participants at the June 2016 meeting where Donald Trump Jr. and other Trump campaign officials were hoping to get damaging information about Hillary Clinton.
.. Rinat Akhmetshin, a Russian-born lobbyist who has spoken openly of his past as a Soviet intelligence officer and was accused of hacking one company’s computer system in American lawsuits that were later withdrawn.
.. And at Citibank alone, he opened 136 American accounts for Russian clients who moved more than $560 million through those accounts to overseas destinations, investigators said.
.. said Mr. Kaveladze was “the poster child” of the money-laundering schemes.
Bungled Collusion Is Still Collusion
Donald Trump Jr.’s e-mails discredit the ‘nothingburger’ argument the president’s supporters have been advancing for months.
.. You don’t have to go back to the ’40s and ’50s when the CIA intervened in France and Italy to keep the Communists from coming to power. What about the Obama administration’s blatant interference to try to defeat Benjamin Netanyahu in the latest Israeli election?
.. One might even add the work of groups supported by the U.S. during Russian parliamentary elections — the very origin of Vladimir Putin’s deep animus toward Hillary Clinton, then secretary of state, whom he accuses of having orchestrated the opposition.
.. This defense is pathetic for two reasons. First, have the Trumpites not been telling us for six months that no collusion ever happened? And now they say: Sure it happened. So what? Everyone does it.
.. Second, no, not everyone does it. It’s one thing to be open to opposition research dug up in Indiana. But not dirt from Russia, a hostile foreign power that has repeatedly invaded its neighbors (Georgia, Crimea, Eastern Ukraine), that buzzes our planes and ships in international waters, that opposes our every move and objective around the globe. Just last week the Kremlin killed additional U.N. sanctions we were looking to impose on North Korea for its ICBM test.