Schiller is widely regarded inside and outside the White House as the “most underestimated person on Trump’s team,” as one former aide put it — someone with constant access to Trump who has not only developed a deep level of trust with the President, but also has turned into a sort-of Trump translator... During the campaign, “it mattered more to me what Keith Schiller thought of me than what the campaign manager thought,” a former top campaign aide told CNN about Schiller. “Now I think it means more what Keith thinks of you than Reince (Trump’s chief of staff) thinks of you.”.. Friends from high school say Schiller never shied away from a fight during his younger years, a trait that has stayed with him. When protesters gathered around Trump tower during the campaign, Schiller ripped a sign out of one man’s hands a punched him when he tried to grab it back... Schiller, former aides and advisers said, understands the President better than most in the White House... “Any time I wanted to understand something, I would ask Keith,” former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski said. “I valued him for all the roles he played.”.. Schiller is regularly the aide checking the quality of the shot to make sure his boss looks good... Schiller enjoys something that not many of Trump’s White House aides has: Trust.
The Threat in President Trump’s Interview with Lester Holt
President Trump is a selfish liar, and a vain one. Those traits, together, can cause chaos, as they did on Thursday, when, in an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt, Trump undermined his own alibi for firing the F.B.I. director, James Comey
- Vice-President Mike Pence and other dependents repeated this story all day Wednesday, with Pence portraying the President as solemnly resolved to follow the best advice he had, and
- Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the deputy press secretary, throwing in some smears of Comey, who she said had committed “atrocities” while at the F.B.I. and was disliked by its rank and file.
.. But, when Holt asked him about heeding Sessions and Rosenstein, Trump seemed to bristle. Could Holt think that he, Trump, needed to hear what anyone had to say—that he had his mind changed by subordinates?
.. “when I decided to just do it”—that is, to fire Comey: “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.” His aides, needless to say, had spent the day saying that Comey’s firing had nothing to do with Russia.
.. Instead, it leaves open the possibility that some sort of public confession in which Comey would “admit his errors” might be an alternative, in terms of restoring “trust.”
.. Instead, in both the letter that Trump sent to Comey and in his interview with Holt, Trump claimed that he got something else from Comey: an assurance that he was not under investigation. Trump doesn’t bother to conceal that he regarded such an assurance as something of a condition of employment.
.. Trump would rather raise the possibility that he’d had an improper, if not actually illegal, conversation with Comey than leave anyone with the impression that he couldn’t instruct the people who worked for him to do anything he desired.
.. Trump seems to treat the idea of being investigated the same way that he regards the idea of losing money. He is not personally being investigated; he never personally declared bankruptcy—only some of his various businesses did.
.. McCabe added that he personally regarded serving with Comey as the honor of his life. Sanders countered that many F.B.I. officers of her acquaintance had told her the opposite, which she treated as definitive despite adding, with a note of pleased and oblivious self-contradiction, “And I don’t even know that many people in the F.B.I.!”
.. She answered questions about the propriety of the Trump-Comey dinner by seeming to cite lawyers she’d seen comment on television.
.. In a way, she is the perfect Trump spokesperson. Her incoherent answers revolved around the greatness of Trump and the perfidy of his enemies.
Will Republicans ever rein in Trump? Only when this happens.
Republicans — hoping to refocus on getting tax cuts and Obamacare repeal through — will use the existence of the special counsel as cover for evading pressure on them to exercise meaningful oversight.
Trump’s conduct further devolves into truly unhinged autocratic madness
.. It is plausible Trump might start attacking Mueller on Twitter
It is even plausible Trump could try to get Mueller fired, by appealing to Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein
.. If somehow Republicans lose the upcoming House special elections in Georgia and Montana — which seems unlikely but not impossible — that might really focus their minds.
.. Republicans are doing nothing to try to compel Trump to release his tax returns or otherwise be transparent about his business holdings, even as he advances a tax plan that could deliver him and his family an enormous windfall
.. reports that Trump called Comey a few weeks after the inauguration and asked him
I am confident that these incidents … sketch a trajectory in which Trump kept Comey on board only as long as it took him to figure out that there was no way to make Comey part of the team. Once he realized that he couldn’t do that — and that the Russia matter was thus not going away — he pulled the trigger.
Trump must be impeached. Here’s why.
Further reporting suggests that the encounter was even more sinister, with Trump insisting that Comey pledge “loyalty” to him in order to retain his job. Publicly saying he saw nothing wrong with demanding such loyalty, the president turned to Twitter with a none-too-subtle threat that Comey would regret any decision to disseminate his version of his conversations with Trump — something that Comey has every right, and indeed a civic duty, to do.