Tweets are first time president has weighed in on reports over Kushner, Russia
“It is my opinion that many of the leaks coming out of the White House are fabricated lies made up by the #FakeNews media,” Mr. Trump said on Twitter. “Whenever you see the words ‘sources say’ in the fake news media, and they don’t mention names….it is very possible that those sources don’t exist but are made up by fake news writers. #FakeNews is the enemy!”.. the president is discussing major changes in the White House, including having lawyers vet his tweets and shaking up his top staff,
s As president, Trump’s legacy of lawsuits and minimal briefings isn’t helping
As President Trump manages his latest crises, he is turning to strategies from his tumultuous business career: rely on family and a few trusted advisers, demand absolute loyalty from those beyond the inner circle, threaten opponents with legal action, and insist on bare-bones briefings.
.. His threats — such as tweeting that fired FBI Director James B. Comey “better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!” — have often backfired.
.. “The day I realized it can be smart to be shallow was, for me, a deep experience”
.. Trump’s view of Washington is rooted in deep distrust of government authority, stemming from the day in 1973 when the Justice Department sued him and his father for racial bias
.. When judges suspended his entry ban that mostly affected Muslim travelers and immigrants, he attacked judges and vowed to “see you in court,” just as he had during his business career.
.. Trump often deployed a tactic of telling others that he was taping their conversations and monitoring their work, and threatening to file lawsuits or to reduce payments owed to contractors. By suggesting that he had secretly recorded his dinner conversation with Comey, Trump apparently hoped to prevent the fired FBI director from speaking negatively about him.
.. Flynn’s firing took 18 days from the time that acting attorney general Sally Yates warned White House Counsel Donald McGahn that Flynn had compromised himself
.. McGahn is the nephew of Patrick “Paddy” McGahn, who once was Trump’s lawyer.
.. Paddy McGahn “was one of the few people that just didn’t care and would say anything to Trump,” O’Donnell said in a telephone interview. “He was a fixer, getting out in front of things, issues that might come, before they turned into problems.”
.. A former White House lawyer who has spoken to McGahn said the counsel ill served the president if he did not make it sound like an emergency.
.. there are concerns that McGahn, unlike his uncle, was reluctant to stand up to Trump.
.. He often paired the lawsuits with verbal vitriol, seeking to intimidate those he sued. While Trump keeps up the vitriol in the White House with his use of Twitter
A Travel Ban’s Foe: A Young Firebrand and Her Pro Bono Brigade
Tipped off by her Washington sources that an executive order blocking refugees was coming, Becca Heller fired off messages to her vast network of law students and pro bono lawyers:
Tell any clients who already have visas to board a plane for the United States. Get ready for the possibility that they will be detained upon landing.
.. After Mr. Trump’s election, she said, “I started thinking increasingly in military terms, so I was like: ‘What does it mean that we have an army of 2,000 lawyers who want to do stuff for refugees? What can we do with that?’”
.. In their eyes, she comes off as a naïve liberal who puts the plight of foreigners over the nation’s security.
.. “there can be no such thing as an immigration policy that puts the national interest first.” He said they treated the immigration system “like a giant global welfare program.”
.. To those critics, Ms. Heller says her role is to uphold the nation’s tradition of responding to humanitarian crises.
.. The night after the order was signed, an IRAP client, Hameed Darweesh, an Iraqi detained at Kennedy, won the very first court ruling against the travel ban, from a federal judge in Brooklyn.
Lawyers at airports showed the order to officials on their smartphones. Travelers began to be set free.
.. Though Ms. Heller and other challengers to the ban have been victorious in court, and popular among liberals, how broadly the public supports these efforts is an open question.