Mueller Has Early Draft of Trump Letter Giving Reasons for Firing Comey

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The special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, has obtained a letter drafted by President Trump and a top political aide that offered an unvarnished view of Mr. Trump’s thinking in the days before the president fired the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey.

..  Donald F. McGahn II, the White House counsel, who believed that its angry, meandering tone was problematic

.. Among Mr. McGahn’s concerns were references to private conversations the president had with Mr. Comey, including times when the F.B.I. director told Mr. Trump he was not under investigation in the F.B.I.’s continuing Russia inquiry.

.. Mr. McGahn successfully blocked the president from sending the letter — which Mr. Trump had composed with Stephen Miller

.. But a copy was given to the deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, who then drafted his own letter.

.. It rained during part of the weekend, forcing Mr. Trump to cancel golf with Greg Norman, the Australian golfer. Instead, Mr. Trump stewed indoors, worrying about Mr. Comey and the Russia investigation.

.. Mr. Miller and Mr. Kushner both told the president that weekend that they were in favor of firing Mr. Comey.

.. Mr. Trump ordered Mr. Miller to draft a letter, and dictated his unfettered thoughts. Several people who saw Mr. Miller’s multi-page draft described it as a “screed.”

.. Some present at the meeting, including Mr. McGahn, were alarmed that the president had decided to fire the F.B.I. director after consulting only Ms. Trump, Mr. Kushner and Mr. Miller. Mr. McGahn began an effort to stop the letter or at least pare it back.

Trump Attorneys Lay Out Arguments Against Obstruction-of-Justice Probe to Mueller

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In meetings and memos, lawyers argue president didn’t obstruct justice by firing former FBI Chief Comey

Another memo submitted the same month outlined why Mr. Comey would make an unsuitable witness, calling him prone to exaggeration, unreliable in congressional testimony and the source of leaks to the news media, these people said.

.. Mr. Trump has given conflicting reasons as to why he dismissed Mr. Comey. At first, he said it was in response to advice from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who had concluded in a memo for the president that Mr. Comey was an ineffective leader.

Two days after the firing, Mr. Trump told NBC News that the decision to fire Mr. Comey was his alone and that when he did 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.”

.. Legal experts agree the president can fire the FBI director at will. That doesn’t mean Mr. Trump could act with impunity if his intention was to interfere with the FBI’s Russia investigation, some said. “Many people do lawful acts for corrupt motives and are charged with the crime of acting corruptly,” said Paul Rosenzweig, who was a deputy to special counsel Kenneth Starr during his investigation of Mr. Clinton. Bribery is a classic example, Mr. Rosenzweig said: A Pentagon official, for instance, may have the authority to award a contract to a particular company but he can’t do so legally in exchange for a bribe.

.. The Mueller probe is also examining whether Mr. Flynn, a former adviser to the Trump campaign, played any role in obtaining Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s emails from Russian hackers.

Bannon Firing Proves Trump is Winging It

He risks having no base from which to build, no prospect for governance.

In the wake of Stephen Bannon’s firing, it has become almost inconceivable that President Trump can avoid a one-term fate. This isn’t because he sacked Bannon but because of what that action tells us about his leadership. In celebrating Bannon’s dismissal, The Wall Street Journal wrote in an editorial: “Trump can’t govern with a Breitbart coalition. Does he see that?” True enough. But he also can’t govern without the Breitbart constituency—his core constituency—in his coalition. The bigger question is: Does he see that?

It’s beginning to appear that Trump doesn’t see much of anything with precision or clarity when it comes to the fundamental question of how to govern based on how he campaigned. He is merely a battery of impulses, devoid of any philosophical coherence or intellectual consistency.

Indeed, it’s difficult to recall any president of recent memory who was so clearly winging it in the Oval Office. Think of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, both of whom made huge mistakes that cost them the White House. But both knew precisely what they wanted to accomplish and how to go about accomplishing it.

.. Further, that agenda had to give a majority of Americans a sense that

  • the economy was sound and growing,
  • that unnecessary foreign wars would be avoided,
  • that domestic tranquility would prevail,
  • that the mass immigration of recent years would be curtailed,
  • that the health care mess would be fixed, and that
  • infrastructure needs would be addressed.

Consider some of the elements of conventional wisdom that he smashed during the campaign.

  • Immigration
  • Foreign Policy
  • Trade

The important point about these issues is that they all cut across partisan lines. That’s what allowed Trump to forge a nontraditional coalition that provided him a slim margin of victory—but only in the Electoral College. His challenge was to turn this electoral coalition into a governing one.

.. What we see in these defeats and stalled initiatives is an incapacity on the part of the president to nudge and herd legislators, to mold voter sentiment into waves of political energy, to fashion a dialectic of political action, or to offer a coherent vision of the state of the country and where he wishes to take it. Everything is ad hoc. No major action seems related to any other action. In a job that calls for a political chess master, Trump displays hardly sufficient skills and attentiveness for a game of political checkers. 

.. It’s telling, but not surprising, that Trump couldn’t manage his White House staff in such a way as to maintain a secure place on the team for the man most responsible for charting his path to the White House. This isn’t to say that Bannon should have been given outsized influence within West Wing councils, merely that his voice needed to be heard and his connection to Trump’s core constituency respected.

But that’s not the way Trump operates—another sign of a man who, over his head at the top of the global power structure, is winging it.

Report: Ivanka Trump Helped Push Steve Bannon out of the White House

A Daily Mail report cites sources giving Ivanka Trump credit for forcing Steve Bannon out of the White House.

The article references “Washington sources” that Trump’s daughter Ivanka pushed out Bannon because of his “far-right views” clashing with her Jewish faith.

Bannon’s departure, the Daily Mail reports, was “done to save the Presidency,” according to a source close to Ivanka Trump, claiming that Bannon leaving “changes everything” with the Trump presidency.

But according to a report from Axios reporter Jonathan Swan, Bannon had not “meaningfully advised the president about his response to Charlottesville,” although the pair spoke on the phone over the weekend.

.. Bannon also decried the white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and KKK members as “losers … a fringe element” that needed to be “crushed” during an interview with The American Prospect.

“These guys are a collection of clowns,” Bannon added, blaming the media for raising their profile.