Attorney general is ‘tired’ of his boss’s treatment, an associate says
Last Thursday, Mr. Trump began a meeting attended by Mr. Sessions by saying, “I also want to thank a really tremendous attorney general.” He turned to the person seated next to him and added: “That’s Pam Bondi, from Florida.” Ms. Bondi is Florida’s state attorney general.
Mr. Sessions, a former Alabama senator and one of Mr. Trump’s earliest supporters, largely shrugged off the earlier criticisms as typical of Mr. Trump’s personality. He also didn’t believe that getting into a public spat with Mr. Trump would quell the president’s outrage, the associates said. Mr. Sessions felt a better course was to try to please his boss by touting Mr. Trump’s achievements, they said.
People close to Mr. Sessions said Mr. Trump’s Wednesday morning tweet crossed a line for the attorney general, who believed that Mr. Trump was trying to assert direct control over the Justice Department’s established protocols and procedures.
.. “He is tired of it,” the second person said. “He just said, ‘Stop it. Fire me if you want. I’m not resigning.’ He also strongly believes the institution of the Justice Department needs to be protected.”
.. “He is tired of it,” the second person said. “He just said, ‘Stop it. Fire me if you want. I’m not resigning.’ He also strongly believes the institution of the Justice Department needs to be protected.”
Select the Worst Trump Minion
Just this week we had a top aide with multiple domestic abuse allegations, plus a chief of staff who never seemed to bother to pursue the matter. And a communications director — third one in a little over a year — who helped write the statement defending said aide, whom she happened to also be dating.
.. Tenure is irrelevant. Kirstjen Nielsen has only been secretary of homeland security for a couple of months, but we already know her as the woman who tried to support her boss by claiming she wasn’t sure whether Norway was a predominately white country.
.. Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar .. Azar’s mission is supposed to be bringing down prescription prices, and his main qualification is having run the American division of a drug company during the five years when the price of its insulin rose from $122 to $274 a vial.
.. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos .. “The bureaucracy is much more formidable and difficult than I had anticipated,” she complained.
.. Scott Pruitt, head of the Environmental Protection Agency
.. “Do we really know what the ideal surface temperature should be in the year 2100? … That’s fairly arrogant for us to think that we know exactly what it should be in 2100.”
.. Attorney General Jeff Sessions is busy pushing the federal death penalty and trying to prosecute the marijuana industry in states where grass is legal.
.. U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer is trying to dismember the World Trade Organization. Smaller minds are fascinated by reports that Lighthizer has a life-size portrait of himself hanging on the wall at home.
.. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross is in charge of the upcoming census, which is underfunded, and rumors are that the chief candidate for deputy director is a highly partisan Texas professor whose book on reapportionment is subtitled “Why Competitive Elections Are Bad for America.”
..Secretary of the Treasury Steve Mnuchin .. The new Trump nominee to lead the I.R.S. is a tax lawyer who specializes in defending wealthy clients against — yes! — the I.R.S. To cheer things up, we can go back to recalling the time Mnuchin posed with his wife, dressed in black opera gloves and a come-hither hairdo, admiring his signature on bills at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing.
Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke is well known for his enthusiasm for fossil fuel drilling. But even some of his fans were a little perplexed when he announced a policy for expanding offshore oil and gas drilling, and then abruptly added that there would be an exception for … Florida. Think it was all about Mar-a-Lago?
.. taxpayers paid $6,000 to helicopter Zinke to a critical appointment going horseback riding with Mike Pence.
Who’s Who Among Trump’s Law-Enforcement Targets
The president has attacked key FBI, Justice figures involved in investigating him
President Donald Trump’s attacks on top Justice Department and FBI officials on Friday mark his latest escalation of rhetoric on officials who one way or another have a hand in investigating ties between the president’s associates and Russia.
- Jeff Sessions, attorney general
- Rod Rosenstein, deputy attorney general
- Robert Mueller, special counsel
- Christopher Wray, FBI director
- Andrew McCabe, former FBI deputy director
- Peter Strzok, FBI investigator
Questions That Mueller Might Ask Trump
The most consequential could involve the President’s understanding of the rule of law.
.. His most consequential questions for Trump might not be about Russian influence over American voters but about the power that the President of the United States believes he has to control, or to abrogate, the rule of law.
To that end, Mueller might ask Trump why he has, or has not, fired various people. He might start with James Comey,
.. Mueller also will likely ask Trump why he fired Michael Flynn, his first national-security adviser, and what assurances he might have given him at the time.
.. Flynn was already in legal jeopardy, because he had hidden his contacts with Russians and because his lobbying firm had taken money from Turkish interests without reporting it. Comey testified that Trump nonetheless asked him to go easy on Flynn
.. Does the President imagine that the job of the Attorney General is to protect the law, or to protect him?
.. They also reportedly spoke to Mike Pompeo, the head of the C.I.A., and Dan Coats, the director of National Intelligence. All were apparently asked whether Trump pressured them in regard to the investigation. If Mueller has these men’s statements in hand, he can see if Trump’s answers match theirs.
.. The President might not care. He has said that he has an “absolute right” to control the Justice Department and “complete” pardon power. Speaking to reporters last week, he mocked his critics: “Did he fight back? . . . Ohhhh, it’s obstruction.” Often, for Trump, fighting back has meant just saying that everything is Hillary Clinton’s fault. Indeed, if Mueller gets Trump talking about Clinton, it will be hard to get him to stop
.. The memo was shared only with House members, and reportedly alleges that the Russia investigation is tainted at its core, because, in an application to surveil Carter Page, a Trump-campaign associate, the F.B.I. made use of a dossier that had been partly paid for by the Clinton campaign.
.. Sessions had tried to get Christopher Wray, the new F.B.I. director, to fire McCabe; Wray refused.
.. Trump’s strategy seems obvious: to create confusion, suspicion, deflection, doubt, and, above all, noise.
.. if he does sit down with Mueller’s team, once the first question is asked there will be an interval of silence that only the President can choose how to fill. Will he try to turn the interview against Mueller? If Trump thinks that Mueller can be scared off by the prospect of being fired