Mueller Seeks Interview With Ex-Spokesman for Trump’s Legal Team

Mark Corallo resigned from position after revelation that president’s son arranged meeting with Russian lawyer

Special counsel Robert Mueller is seeking an interview with Mark Corallo, the former spokesman for President Donald Trump’s legal team

.. When news of the New York meeting first broke, Mr. Trump Jr. said the participants “primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children.” Emails he subsequently released showed he took the meeting after he was told that the Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, had damaging information about Democrat Hillary Clinton that was being offered by the Russian government in support of Mr. Trump’s candidacy.

.. Mr. Mueller is examining an Air Force One flight that followed initial reports about the Trump Tower meeting during which top White House advisers, including the president, crafted a statement about that meeting

.. in Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” a book the president has repeatedly attacked. Mr. Wolff wrote that Mr. Corallo quit after “privately confiding that he believed the meeting on Air Force One represented a likely obstruction of justice.”

The president’s legal team is also debating whether to allow Mr. Trump to interview with Mr. Mueller, which the president last week told reporters he was “looking forward” to doing.

Yet Mr. Trump’s lawyers have been studying a 1990s federal court ruling that could serve as a basis for delaying, limiting or avoiding an interview with Mr. Mueller

Now on Stage, Stormy Daniels: A Strip Club and a Presidency Meet After Dark

GREENVILLE, S.C

.. Better known as 38-year-old Stephanie Clifford to some offstage, the headliner was setting off on what is being called the “Making America Horny Again Tour,” capitalizing on her spin through a Trump news cycle.

.. . Suzanne Coe, 52, a local pub owner, hoped Ms. Clifford might sign her copy of “Fire and Fury,” by Michael Wolff

.. “HE SAW HER LIVE,” an ad for the event read, using the same image. “YOU CAN TOO!”

..  Ms. Clifford, who said she had not danced since the summer

.. “Imagine coming back when you’re the most insecure,” she said of her return. “It’s the only time I’ve ever gone onstage and was actually scared.”

The President and the Porn Star

. There’s a sentence in Michael Wolff’s book “Fire and Fury” that hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves. It comes toward the end, when Steve Bannon is praising Trump’s lawyer Marc Kasowitz: “Kasowitz on the campaign — what did we have, a hundred women? Kasowitz took care of all of them.”

.. If it turns out there were payoffs to hide non-consensual behavior, there may be an uproar. But sleeping with a porn star while your wife has a new baby, then paying the porn star to be quiet? That’s what everyone expects of this president.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the right’s tacit embrace of a laissez faire approach to sexuality — at least male, heterosexual sexuality — coincides with attempts on the left to erect new ethical guardrails around sex.

.. In the 1990s, many feminists defended untrammeled eros because they feared a conservative sexual inquisition. Elements of that inquisition remain; attacks on reproductive rights have grown only more intense. Still, Trump has reconciled reactionary politics with male sexual license. In doing so, he’s made such license easier for feminists to criticize.

.. Among feminists, reaction to the piece broke down roughly generationally. Grace interpreted her experience as sexual assault, but several older writers saw it as a story about caddishness and bad sex, neither of which justified the invasion of Ansari’s privacy. In The Atlantic, Caitlin Flanagan described it as “3,000 words of revenge porn” inspired by romantic disappointment.

.. I agree with Flanagan that the bad behavior Grace described doesn’t rise to the level of assault or harassment, and I don’t think Babe should have published the story. Still, I can sympathize with the younger feminists who are pushing the limits of the #MeToo movement. They are, it seems to me, trying to impose new norms of consideration on a brutal sexual culture, without appealing to religious sanction or patriarchal chivalry.

“A lot of men will read that post about Aziz Ansari and see an everyday, reasonable sexual interaction,” tweeted the feminist writer Jessica Valenti. “But part of what women are saying right now is that what the culture considers ‘normal’ sexual encounters are not working for us, and oftentimes harmful.”

Maybe feminists feel free to express their fury about the path sexual liberation has taken because they no longer need to defend sexual liberation itself from conservatives. In the 1990s, porn culture seemed subversive and chic. Now it’s become repulsively presidential.