The president is attempting to dismantle the rule of law, destroy the time-honored independence of the Justice Department, and undermine the career men and women who are devoted to seeking justice day in and day out, regardless of which political party is in power.
.. President Trump claims that it is very “unfair” that Mr. Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation, a recusal indisputably necessary given Mr. Sessions’ role in the campaign that is now under investigation. At its core, the president’s complaint is that he doesn’t have a political ally at the Justice Department to protect him from the Russia investigation. And he is apparently trying to bully Mr. Sessions into resigning so that he can put someone in place who will.
The president hasn’t stopped there. He has also tried to goad Mr. Sessions into re-initiating a closed investigation of the president’s former political rival. And all of this takes place in the wake of the president’s attempts to persuade the former F.B.I. director James Comey to back off the Michael Flynn investigation, and then firing Mr. Comey when he didn’t.
President Trump’s actions appear aimed at destroying the fundamental independence of the Justice Department. All the while, he’s ripping the blindfold off Lady Justice and attempting to turn the department into a sword to seek vengeance against his perceived enemies and a shield to protect himself and his allies.
.. In short, no one at the White House should have anything to do with any decisions about whom or what to investigate or prosecute. Period.
We must do more than rubberneck as we drive past this car crash. We all have a responsibility to protect our Justice Department’s ability to do its job free from interference. The very foundation of our justice system — the rule of law — depends on it.
James Comey Is Maxwell Smart
How Comey’s botched mission to safeguard a Hillary presidency elected Trump.
It’s far more likely that Mr. Comey conceived of his intervention as a counterintelligence operation. Hillary would win. Russia’s fake email about Ms. Lynch conspiring to prevent a Hillary indictment would become public and be used by Trump partisans and America’s adversaries to discredit her victory. Therefore he would neutralize this Russian threat by clearing Mrs. Clinton himself. In doing so, it now appears he accidentally secured Mr. Trump’s win.
Free yourself from any hindsight bias. All actors at the time were convinced Hillary would win; for U.S. officials, the urgency was to protect Mrs. Clinton’s inevitable presidency from Russian dirty tricks.
.. Mr. McAuliffe, in last month’s podcast, opined flatly that Russia also expected Mrs. Clinton to win and wanted to destabilize her presidency.
Mr. Comey himself, in public testimony, gave mumbly assent to the “intelligence community’s” now-claim that Russia wasn’t just trying to weaken Mrs. Clinton but elect Donald Trump, arguing that in a two-person race, hurting one necessarily helps the other.
Such sophistries aside, this is implausible. Against all polling, Russia would not have thought trying to elect Mr. Trump a good investment. In effect, this claim about Russian motives is another counterintelligence operation by our own intelligence community to distract from its botched counterintelligence operation that elected Mr. Trump.
To be clear, we’re not talking about a conspiracy exactly, but about intelligence leaders adjusting their statements and emphases on the fly to pretty up an embarrassing picture.
.. Hillary and her surrogates tirelessly flogged an apparent Trump-Putin affinity to her advantage. Mrs. Clinton’s mistake was devoting too many of her resources to the wrong states.
.. It’s useful to recall that what the FBI handed over to Special Counsel Robert Mueller was a “counterintelligence investigation”—an inquiry into the facts of Russia’s meddling, not a criminal investigation seeking something, anything to pin on Donald Trump.
If Mr. Mueller does not see the importance of coming clean on the Comey intervention (whether or not he wants to acknowledge that the Comey intervention may have elected Mr. Trump), then Mr. Mueller is part of the stonewall.
The poor members of Trump World
Poor Attorney General Jeff Sessions. He is latest to the firing line that has included such formerlys as FBI director James B. Comey, national security adviser Michael Flynn and acting attorney general Sally Yates, as well as the “voluntarily resigned” — press secretary Sean Spicer and communications director Michael Dubke.
.. Kislyak looks like a jovial sort who enjoys a hearty chuckle. His sides must be splitting these days as Trump repeals and replaces officials who are investigating Russia or who deny knowing any Russians.
Citing Recusal, Trump Says He Wouldn’t Have Hired Sessions
President Trump said on Wednesday that he never would have appointed Attorney General Jeff Sessions had he known Mr. Sessions would recuse himself from overseeing the Russia investigation that has dogged his presidency, calling the decision “very unfair to the president.”
In a remarkable public break with one of his earliest political supporters, Mr. Trump complained that Mr. Sessions’s decision ultimately led to the appointment of a special counsel that should not have happened. “Sessions should have never recused himself, and if he was going to recuse himself, he should have told me before he took the job and I would have picked somebody else,” Mr. Trump said.
.. In a wide-ranging interview with The New York Times, the president also accused James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director he fired in May, of trying to leverage a dossier of compromising material to keep his job. Mr. Trump criticized both the acting F.B.I. director who has been filling in since Mr. Comey’s dismissal and the deputy attorney general who recommended it. And he took on Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel now leading the investigation into Russian meddling in last year’s election.
Mr. Trump said Mr. Mueller was running an office rife with conflicts of interest and warned investigators against delving into matters too far afield from Russia.
.. Asked if Mr. Mueller’s investigation would cross a red line if it expanded to look at his family’s finances beyond any relationship to Russia, Mr. Trump said, “I would say yes.” He would not say what he would do about it. “I think that’s a violation. Look, this is about Russia.”
.. In the interview, Mr. Trump said he believed Mr. Comey told him about the dossier to implicitly make clear he had something to hold over the president. “In my opinion, he shared it so that I would think he had it out there,” Mr. Trump said. As leverage? “Yeah, I think so,’’ Mr. Trump said. “In retrospect.”
.. Mr. Comey testified before Congress that he disclosed the details of the dossier to Mr. Trump because he thought that the media would soon be publishing details from it and that Mr. Trump had a right to know what information was out there about him.
.. Mr. Comey testified before Congress that Mr. Trump kicked the vice president, attorney general and several other senior administration officials out of the room before having the discussion with Mr. Comey.
.. “I don’t remember even talking to him about any of this stuff,” Mr. Trump said. “He said I asked people to go. Look, you look at his testimony. His testimony is loaded up with lies, O.K.?”
.. He noted that he actually interviewed Mr. Mueller to replace Mr. Comey just before his appointment as special counsel.
.. Talk about conflicts. But he was interviewing for the job. There were many other conflicts that I haven’t said, but I will at some point.”
.. The president also expressed discontent with Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, a former federal prosecutor from Baltimore.
.. “There are very few Republicans in Baltimore, if any,” he said of the predominantly Democratic city.
He complained that Mr. Rosenstein had in effect been on both sides when it came to Mr. Comey. The deputy attorney general recommended Mr. Comey be fired but then appointed Mr. Mueller, who may be investigating whether the dismissal was an obstruction of justice. “Well, that’s a conflict of interest,” Mr. Trump said. “Do you know how many conflicts of interests there are?”
.. As for Andrew G. McCabe, the acting F.B.I. director, the president suggested that he, too, had a conflict. Mr. McCabe’s wife, Jill McCabe, received nearly $500,000 in 2015 during a losing campaign for the Virginia Senate from a political action committee affiliated with Gov. Terry McAuliffe, who is close friends with Hillary and Bill Clinton.
.. But the president repeated that he did not know about his son’s meeting at the time and added that he did not need the Russians to provide damaging information about Mrs. Clinton.
“There wasn’t much I could say about Hillary Clinton that was worse than what I was already saying,” he said. “Unless somebody said that she shot somebody in the back, there wasn’t much I could add to my repertoire.”