Shortly after the November election, Mr. Priebus was made chief of staff, and he was involved in the major decisions the president made during the transition and in the first six months of the administration. Mr. Priebus made a point of being in most meetings and tried to be aware of what the president was doing. Mr. Trump fired him last month.
Mr. Priebus can potentially answer many questions Mr. Mueller has about what occurred during the campaign and in the White House. Mr. Priebus appears on the calendar of Mr. Manafort on the same day in June 2016 that Mr. Manafort and other campaign officials — including Mr. Trump’s eldest son and son-in-law — attended a meeting with Russians who claimed to have damaging information about Hillary Clinton, according to two people briefed on the matter. It is not clear whether Mr. Priebus and Mr. Manafort met that day.
.. Mr. Priebus may also be able to help prosecutors verify crucial details about Mr. Trump’s interactions with Mr. Comey. According to testimony Mr. Comey provided to Congress, Mr. Priebus knows that Mr. Comey had the one-on-one encounter with Mr. Trump on Feb. 14, when Mr. Comey has said Mr. Trump asked him to end the Flynn investigation. Mr. Trump has said that the meeting did not occur and that he did not ask Mr. Comey to end the inquiry.
.. Mr. Comey said in his testimony to Congress that on Feb. 14, Mr. Trump had Mr. Priebus, the attorney general, the vice president and other senior administration officials removed from the Oval Office after a counterterrorism briefing.
“The president began by saying Flynn hadn’t done anything wrong in speaking with the Russians, but he had to let him go because he had misled the vice president,” Mr. Comey said.
“The president then made a long series of comments about the problem with leaks of classified information — a concern I shared and still share. After he had spoken for a few minutes about leaks, Reince Priebus leaned in through the door by the grandfather clock and I could see a group of people waiting behind him. The president waved at him to close the door, saying he would be done shortly. The door closed.”
Right after the door closed, Mr. Comey said, Mr. Trump asked him to end the Flynn investigation.
.. Mr. Trump and his lawyers have tried to cast the search warrant served on Mr. Manafort as an unusual measure and an abuse of power. The president said he was surprised to learn about the search, saying it was something federal authorities “very seldom” do. John Dowd, a lawyer for Mr. Trump, said the search was similar to tactics used in Russia.
Trump has been making ominous threats his whole life
The crisis we now find ourselves in has been exaggerated and mishandled by the Trump administration to a degree that is deeply worrying and dangerous.
From the start, the White House has wanted to look tough on North Korea.
.. In the early months of President Trump’s administration, before there could possibly have been a serious policy review, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson warned that the era of strategic patience with North Korea was over.
.. Last week, national security adviser H.R. McMaster said that North Korea’s potential to hit the United States with nuclear weapons was an “intolerable” threat. Not North Korea’s use of weapons, mind you; just the potential.
.. So why do it? Because it’s Trump’s basic mode of action. For his entire life, Trump has made grandiose promises and ominous threats — and rarely delivered on any.
When he was in business, Reuters found,
- he frequently threatened to sue news organizations for libel, but the last time he followed through was 33 years ago, in 1984.
- Trump says that he never settles cases out of court. In fact, he has settled at least 100 times, according to USA Today.
..In his political life, he has followed the same strategy of bluster.
- In 2011, he said that he had investigators who “cannot believe what they’re finding” about President Barack Obama’s birth certificate, and that he would at some point “be revealing some interesting things.” He had nothing.
- During the campaign, he vowed that he would label China a currency manipulator,
- move the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem,
- make Mexico pay for a border wall and
- initiate an investigation into Hillary Clinton. So far, nada.
- After being elected, he signaled to China that he might recognize Taiwan. Within weeks of taking office, he folded.
- He implied that he had tapes of his conversations with then-FBI Director James B. Comey. Of course, he had none.
Does he think the North Koreans don’t know this?
.. When it saw a far more threatening leader, Mao Zedong, pursuing nuclear weapons, it was even more cautious. Mao insisted that he had no fear of a nuclear war because China would still have more than enough survivors to defeat Western imperialists. And yet, successive U.S. administrations kept their cool... The secretary of state seems to have been telling Americans — and the world — to ignore the rhetoric, not of the North Korean dictator, but of his own boss, the president of the United States. It is probably what Trump’s associates have done for him all his life. They know that the guiding mantra for him has been not the art of the deal, but the art of the bluff.
Trump’s Lawyers Sound Like They’re Getting Nervous
As Mueller’s probe expands, the president’s legal team is treading carefully... Back in June, Donald Trump was still treating the Russia investigation like some sort of defamation suit, one of a countless number of lawsuits that Trump has been involved in over the years. The first attorney he retained to lead his legal team, Marc Kasowitz, was his longtime personal lawyer from his New York real-estate days, and he responded as if former F.B.I. director James Comey’s sworn Senate testimony was just another meritless claim he could dismiss with a cease-and-desist letter. “Comey’s excuse for this unauthorized disclosure of privileged information . . . appears to be entirely retaliatory,” Kasowitz said in a statement at the time, reflexively going on the offensive. “We will leave it [to] the appropriate authorities to determine whether this leaks [sic] should be investigated along with all those others being investigated.”.. Special Counsel Robert Mueller has impaneled a grand jury, and Jay Sekulow, who occupies the role of Trump’s “TV lawyer,” defending the president on news shows, has apparently tempered his rhetoric... Despite their best efforts, they’re dealing with a client who is almost pathologically incapable of telling the same story twice. When he fired Comey, Trump made his situation worse by offering a constantly evolving set of justifications for his dismissal... A similar problem arose when Sekulow went from claiming that Trump played no role in crafting Donald Trump Jr.’s misleading statement about his infamous meeting with a Russian lawyer at Trump Tower last year, to the White House claiming that Trump helped “as any father would.”
Reince Priebus Is Ousted Amid Stormy Days for White House
Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff who failed to impose order on a chaos-racked West Wing, was pushed out on Friday after a stormy six-month tenure, and President Trump replaced him with John F. Kelly
.. The president became convinced that Mr. Priebus was not strong enough to run the White House operation and told him two weeks ago that he wanted to make a change
.. Intrigued at the idea of putting a general in charge, Mr. Trump offered the job to Mr. Kelly a few days ago.
.. Mr. Priebus said he had tendered his resignation to the president on Thursday, the same day the newly appointed White House communications director, Anthony Scaramucci, was quoted vowing to force the chief of staff out. Even so, as late as Friday morning, Mr. Priebus told colleagues that he thought he would have a week before the announcement to make a graceful exit, but he evidently learned otherwise later in the day. Mr. Kelly will take over the corner office in the West Wing on Monday.
.. Some advisers to Mr. Trump opposed the choice, arguing that Mr. Kelly did not have the political background for the job.
.. “The president needs someone who understands the Trump constituency as his chief of staff, someone who has both administrative skills and political savvy,” Roger Stone
.. In six months in office, he has fired
- a national security adviser (Michael Flynn),
- an F.B.I. director and (James Comey)
- a holdover acting attorney general, (Sally Yates)
while his
- White House press secretary, (Sean Spicer)
- communications director, (Mike Dubke)
- deputy chief of staff, (Katie Walsh)
- deputy national security adviser and (K-T-McFarland)
- legal team spokesman (Mark Corall0)his resignation was due to growing frustration with operation and warring factions, as well as concerns over whether he was being told the truth. (The Hill)
- have all left.
.. Privately, even Mr. Priebus’s critics wondered how Mr. Kelly would surmount the same challenges — controlling a freewheeling president who often circumvents paid staff members by seeking counsel from a roster of outside advisers.
.. Several conservative supporters of Mr. Bannon — including Representative Mark Meadows, the House Freedom Caucus chairman — told Mr. Trump on Friday that the president would risk losing base supporters if he let the strategist go.
.. Mr. Priebus had hoped to last a full year, but in the end no other White House chief of staff has been forced out after such a short tenure.
.. Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, soured on Mr. Priebus, partly because of what he viewed as the shortcomings of Sean Spicer, an ally of Mr. Priebus’s
.. Mr. Priebus and Mr. Spicer had told the president that they believed Mr. Scaramucci, a gregarious but edgy hedge fund manager and fund-raiser, lacked the required political experience and organizational skills.
.. Mr. Scaramucci quickly engaged in open war against Mr. Priebus — with the president’s encouragement. By Wednesday, the new communications chief publicly suggested that the chief of staff was a leaker and threatened to seek an F.B.I. inquiry.
.. help guide him through a capital that had never seen a president who had not served in politics or the military.
.. “I’ll tell you, Reince is really a star,” Mr. Trump said, using language that he would repeat less than a year later about the man he picked to replace Mr. Priebus.