Democrats in Congress will demand to know more about those conversations now, and especially what Mr. Trump knew of them. But that may not even be the administration’s biggest headache. The issue that has always been looming just behind the Flynn controversy is the more explosive question of whether there were covert contacts between the Trump team and Russian representatives in an attempt to influence the presidential campaign.
The inquiry can intensify in several ways in the weeks ahead. Democrats are pressing for a joint House-Senate intelligence committee inquiry, or the formation of a select committee specifically charged with investigating the question of Russian interference in the election.
.. If Republicans balk at going those routes—and signals so far suggest they would—then Democrats will try to increase pressure publicly. In that effort, they may find friends in the intelligence community. It’s clear that the president has made enemies within the intelligence world, who appear willing to leak what they are finding on the Russia connection if there isn’t an official route by which it can surface.
.. There are multiple power centers within the White House, but it may be that Mr. Pence will emerge from the Flynn episode as a particularly important one. Mr. Pence seemed irritated enough at being misled by Mr. Flynn to have acted on the irritation, rather than letting it pass.
.. Mr. Pence has always had the potential to emerge as a dominant player
.. That hasn’t been the case so far with Mr. Priebus, in part because Mr. Trump reportedly has only recently indicated that he wants him to exert that kind of control.
Priebus faces daunting task bringing order to White House that will feed off chaos
Reince Priebus says that one of his most important tasks as Donald Trump’s chief of staff will be to establish “some level of order within the White House.”
That, of course, has been the central mission of everyone who has held this post in the past, but it is certain to be a particularly daunting challenge with a president who regards chaos as a management tool.
.. the 44-year-old Priebus will be at the center of an experiment to determine whether Trump’s singular style of leadership — honed in his family business, displayed on reality television, and used with devastating effect in a presidential campaign that defied every expectation — will transform Washington as Trump promised or prove ineffective when applied to the more complex work of presiding over the massive federal government.
.. “The president has to make it clear that Reince is first among equals,” said Ken Duberstein, who served as chief of staff under Ronald Reagan. “You’ve got to empower somebody on the staff.”
.. “The chief of staff, I think, has the responsibility to be all-knowing — to decide what the president should know, what he needs to know, what he doesn’t need to know,”
.. But Trump is also known for being swayed by the last person he has talked to, especially if the advice is accompanied by flattery.
.. “Reince has this kind of ‘aw, shucks’ demeanor, but he’s pretty tough,” said former RNC chairman Ed Gillespie.
.. in the wake of The Washington Post’s Oct. 8 revelation of a 2005 tape in which Trump was heard making lewd comments about women and boasting of groping them. The distraught party chairman reportedly urged the GOP nominee to drop out of the race, or face losing it in a landslide.
.. Early on, Priebus used some of those sessions to urge Trump to tamp down his incendiary and divisive rhetoric. That turned out to be futile.
.. it also turned out to be what Priebus called “a perfect marriage.”
.. “It just turns out that the president-elect’s message was ringing extremely true to the electorate and we had the data and the infrastructure to back it up.”
.. One of this most important projects was bringing aboard key party leaders in Priebus’s home state of Wisconsin, which had gone for Sen. Ted Cruz
.. Priebus “was the ultimate diplomat,” said Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, whose own 2016 presidential hopes had fallen early victim to Trump. “Paul’s support was critical to sending a message, not just to House members, but just overall Republican voters. Reince was just tenacious.”
.. Priebus has more often than not gotten his way on key administration hires.
.. RNC communications director and Priebus confidant Sean Spicer as press secretary. Katie Walsh, currently Priebus’s chief of staff at the RNC, is considered likely to become a deputy White House chief of staff.
.. His first name is short for Reinhold.
.. took his future wife, Sally, to a party fundraiser on their first date.
.. He became RNC chairman in 2011 at a desperate time for the party, which was $24 million in debt. It had a little more than $350,000 cash on hand and a $400,000 payroll due six days later — a situation so dire that, early on, he had to help float it by maxing out two personal credit cards to pay his travel expenses.
.. When you don’t have the White House and you don’t have the Congress, dialing for money is just hard as hell, and he just kept doing it, and he didn’t have anybody helping him,” said lobbyist Richard Hohlt. “He loved the job.”
.. By the end of 2012, the RNC has $3.3 million in the bank and no debt.
.. Priebus shares one thing with the president-elect: little apparent need for sleep. Walker marveled at how he has texted Priebus at 11 p.m. on a Saturday, gotten an immediate response, and then awakened to a follow-up sent at dawn.
That means that when the future president is firing off tweets in the wee hours, as is his wont, his chief of staff will probably be up and seeing them.
.. Among his queries: How do you involve Cabinet officials, and make sure they are pursuing the president’s agenda, rather than their own?
.. How do you control who gets the president’s ear?
What is paramount, said former chief of staff Card, is that no one be allowed to make end runs around Priebus.
.. “Almost no debate in the Oval Office should come without a prior debate in the chief of staff’s office,” Card said. “It is going to be a challenge for Reince.”Priebus disagreed.“No, I don’t think it’s a particular challenge,” he said, promising “an orderly system in place in which the president is informed, and not exhausted with multiple sources of information in an unorganized fashion.”
New WH Chief of Staff Wants America To ‘Make Everything Here.’ This Is Economically Idiotic.
“We can make everything here, or our goal should be to try to make everything we can in the United States so that the money gets put in the pockets of Americans,” argued Priebus.
In Trump Era, Uncompromising TV News Should Be the Norm, Not the Exception
.. And, CNN was reporting, the transition team had even sought to get Mr. Flynn’s son a security clearance, for access to sensitive information.
.. And so it went eight times, as Mr. Tapper repeated the question and Mr. Pence accused him of pursuing “a distraction” and tried to change the subject. “I want to move on to other issues,” Mr. Tapper told him, “but I’m afraid I just didn’t get an answer.”
.. On television, in real time, even the best-prepared interviewers may have neither the time nor the facts to catch a lie and call it out. Even when they do, their attempts to call foul can turn into stalemates if the interviewee insists on continuing to forward something that’s false or unsubstantiated, which seems to be the latest craze (see Reince Priebus, millions of illegal votes, “Face the Nation”).
.. Hillary Clinton did not grant Mr. Tapper another interview after a sit-down in early June, when he asked her if questions about her family foundation undermined her criticism of Mr. Trump’s. (In an email, divulged by WikiLeaks, the Clinton adviser John Podesta once called Mr. Tapper a word for the male anatomy not suitable for print.)
.. Mr. Tapper said some of his competitors, whom he did not name, had gone easy on interview subjects to ensure future access. “We’re not supposed to be providing people in power with safe spaces,” he said.
.. You can only imagine how Mr. Russert would have handled Katrina Pierson, the Trump campaign’s national spokeswoman, when she incorrectly asserted on CNN that it was President Obama who invaded Afghanistan, or what short work Mr. Koppel would have made of Mr. Lewandowski in August when he repeated the tired fake claim that Mr. Obama wasn’t born here.
.. CNN was host to such nonsense enough that Karen Tumulty of The Washington Post felt compelled to ask Jeffrey A. Zucker, CNN’s president, at a panel discussion two weeks ago, “At what point do you say, ‘You can’t come on our air anymore’?”
In an interview with me on Friday, Mr. Zucker defended those appearances by saying that they represented Mr. Trump’s worldview, and that his anchors were there to keep them honest and did.
.. Mr. Tapper did not invent the tough interview. George Stephanopoulos and Martha Raddatz of ABC, Chuck Todd of NBC, Chris Wallace and Megyn Kelly of Fox News, and John Dickerson of CBS have all had their moments.
And none has yet claimed the mantles of Tim Russert and Ted Koppel, feared interviewers who combined tough styles with incomparable levels of preparation.