His misstatements and accusations made it difficult to limit the special counsel’s scope.
.. Trump is the one who hired Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.
- It is Rosenstein whose order appointing Robert Mueller fails to set limits on Mueller’s investigative jurisdiction, thereby authorizing the fishing expedition that has Trump so ballistic.
- Moreover, it was Trump’s own botching of the firing of FBI director James Comey that spooked Rosenstein, inducing him to appease furious Democrats by giving Mueller free rein.
.. Sessions’s overly broad recusal meant that there were no Trump appointees in the Justice Department to push back against then-director Comey’s desire to make sensational public disclosures about the Russia probe in his March 20 House testimony
.. The question was whether the FBI should make public comments about ongoing investigations.
.. I continue to believe that if the director had either said nothing (which would have been the right thing to do) or simply said publicly the same thing he was saying behind the scenes (which would have avoided creating a scandalous misimpression), he would still be FBI director.
.. I continue to believe that if the director had either said nothing (which would have been the right thing to do) or simply said publicly the same thing he was saying behind the scenes (which would have avoided creating a scandalous misimpression), he would still be FBI director.
.. Then, in a lapse of judgment that stands out even by Trump standards, the president decided to host Russian diplomats at the White House the day after firing Comey, and to berate the former director for the consumption of these agents of a hostile regime. In addition to describing the former director as “crazy, a real nut job,” Trump told Putin’s men that by getting rid of Comey, he had “taken off” the “great pressure” he faced “because of Russia.” Thus did the president, with both hands, feed the Democrats’ narrative that Comey had been removed in order to obstruct the FBI’s probe of Trump-campaign collusion in Putin’s election-meddling.
.. Thus the problem with the assignment Rosenstein has given Mueller: As we have repeatedly observed, a counterintelligence investigation has no discernible jurisdictional limits. Its purpose is to collect information, and from an investigator’s point of view, you can never have enough information. The reason the regulations controlling special-counsel appointments call for a criminal investigation is that crimes have knowable parameters; therefore, when the Justice Department specifies the crimes a special counsel is authorized to investigate, there are obvious jurisdictional limits.
.. I believe that Rosenstein, having been bitterly criticized by people whose opinions he cares deeply about, decided to make amends by giving Mueller free rein to take the investigation in any direction he chose to take it. Rosenstein wanted Mueller to be effectively independent of Justice Department control.
.. Sure, the regs instruct the Justice Department to set limits on a special counsel’s jurisdiction. Rosenstein, however, figured that if he followed the regs, Democrats would again inveigh against him for supposedly shielding Trump from an investigation. Under the regs, the special counsel is to be overseen by Justice Department superiors, reflecting the Constitution’s vesting of all executive power (including prosecutorial power) in the president — that’s why there is no such thing as an “independent” prosecutor. But Rosenstein determined that Mueller would be independent — as if he were a separate branch of government, outside executive control.
President Trump accomplished only one thing by railing at Attorney General Sessions: He added to the growing disinclination of quality people to work in his administration. No one with self-respect wants to work in a place where the boss not only won’t back you up when the going gets tough, but will turn on you with a vengeance — especially when there’s a need to divert attention from his own shortcomings.
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.
Trust Nothing, Defend Nothing
The Democrats are clearly in full partisan mode, framing every inconvenient, benign, or even potentially exculpatory detail as a smoking gun. The whole “hacked the election” formulation, used both by the Democrats and by allegedly objective reporters, is a misleading bit of hyperbole. Is “meddled with” or “interfered in” too big a concession to reality?
.. Meanwhile, there’s no shortage of hyperbole among those most eager to defend Trump on the Russia story.
.. More seriously, the rush to say there’s nothing to the collusion story is a mirror of the rush to insist the story is everything.
.. There were no meetings with Russians. Well there was that meeting about adoption with that Russian lawyer (attended by the campaign manager). Well, it was a meeting about opposition research that turned into a meeting about adoption, but I had no idea the Russian government was involved. Then the NYT reports last night about an email saying the meeting was pitched as part of a Russian-government operation. Then this morning the Russian lawyer says it was the Trump team that was desperate for Clinton dirt.
.. But that’s my larger point. Who the hell knows? What I just don’t understand is how conservatives can mock, scoff at, and ridicule the idea there might be some legs to this story when Donald Trump does everything he can to make it look like there might be a there there. He fired the FBI director. He told the Russian ambassador he did it to thwart the Russia investigation. He told Lester Holt the same thing. Donald Trump is clearly obsessed with the Russia story and with forging a bromance with Vladimir Putin. Both his son and his son-in-law have ties to Russia and keep having to revise their denials, making anyone who believed them in the first place look foolish.