The emissary leaves behind a book in the Kanamit language. A team of analysts translates the title as “To Serve Man,”
‘To Serve Man,’ it’s… it’s a cookbook!”
.. For those who serve the president: The price of your diligence is his flippancy. The price of your efforts to protect him is his willingness to expose you. The price of your sacrifice — of time, profit, career and, in the long run, reputation — is his indifference. The price of your loyalty is his contempt.
.. For those who think the president’s character flaws can be softened, or overcome, by the caliber of his advisers: You can’t use water to put out a grease fire.
.. The president’s digital compulsions may be less obscene than Anthony Weiner’s, but they’re more consequential.
.. Twitter is the electric current that connects populist to populus, demagogue to mob
.. What’s a loss at the high court when he knows he can use it to capitalize politically from the next terrorist attack in the U.S.?
.. we may learn from James Comey’s Senate testimony whether Trump will have to pay a political price of his own for demanding personal loyalty oaths from nonpolitical appointees. If so, it would be fitting punishment for a man who so far has only known profit and advantage from his lack of loyalty toward those who serve him.
Donald Trump undermines his lawyers’ case for the travel ban
A quartet of intemperate tweets could sink the president’s efforts to ban travel from six Muslim-majority nations
Mr Trump’s advocates—highly skilled, hard-working lawyers at the Department of Justice—have been striving to explain to federal judges across the land why the president’s unprecedented effort to ban travel from six Muslim-majority nations is not the so-called Muslim ban he called for in December 2015, or even a “ban” at all. They’ve resorted to redundancy for emphasis: it’s not just a “pause”, but a “temporary pause” on travel from these countries. And it is rooted not in bias or animosity against Muslims but in the sober calculation of multiple executive agencies that vetting procedures of travellers from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen need to be re-evaluated for the sake of national security.
In the course of a few minutes, the president subverted this case point by point. First, using upper case letters and an exclamation point for emphasis, Mr Trump clarified how the order should be understood: “People, the lawyers and the courts can call it whatever they want, but I am calling it what we need and what it is, a TRAVEL BAN!” This suggests Mr Trump would not be satisfied with merely reviewing vetting procedures; he wants to keep people from certain places out of the country, full stop. And by preferring “ban” to “pause”, he is indicating the 90-day prohibition may be a prelude to a more enduring change in policy.
Second, Mr Trump harked back to his original order from January 27th, a haphazardly crafted document that applied to America’s lawful permanent residents and caused chaos at American airports by effectively rescinding visas from incoming travellers at 35,000 feet. “The Justice Dept. should have stayed with the original Travel Ban”, Mr Trump tweeted, “not the watered down, politically correct version they submitted” to the Supreme Court.
This is a truly odd series of sentiments. Lawyers in the Justice Department serve at the president’s pleasure and carry out his policies. If Mr Trump wanted to stick with his first order banning travel, he could have directed the attorney-general to make that happen; his tweet makes it sound as if his own department went rogue... As Corey Brettschneider, a political scientist at Brown University, observes, admitting that the first ban was not politically correct implies that both it and the second order unconstitutionally target Muslims, even if animus in the latter is slightly better cloaked: “No one thinks that targeting countries that posed an actual threat would be politically incorrect”... But there is no sense in which the administration lawyers could seek a “much tougher version” of the travel ban from the Supreme Court; the judiciary does not make policy... “In any event we are EXTREME VETTING people coming into the U.S. in order to help keep our country safe. The courts are slow and political!” But this tweet pulls the rug out from the administration’s stated purpose behind the executive order. Extreme vetting, the president reports, is already happening, without the travel ban in place. If the travel ban—or pause, or “temporary pause”—is only necessary to permit the administration to undertake a review of vetting standards, it suddenly has no justification at all.
President Trump, Meet the Department of Justice; DOJ, President Trump
This morning, President Trump tweeted several times: “People, the lawyers and the courts can call it whatever they want, but I am calling it what we need and what it is, a TRAVEL BAN!” “The Justice Dept. should have stayed with the original Travel Ban, not the watered down, politically correct version they submitted to S.C.” “The Justice Dept. should ask for an expedited hearing of the watered down Travel Ban before the Supreme Court — & seek much tougher version!” “In any event we are EXTREME VETTING people coming into the U.S. in order to help keep our country safe. The courts are slow and political!”
Why is the president fuming about the Department of Justice like it’s some faraway entity? Someone reminded him he gets to make appointments to the DOJ, right?
It’s June 5, and right now there are only three Trump appointees working at DOJ:
Attorney general Jeff Sessions, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, and Associate Attorney General Rachel Brand have been confirmed. Trump has named Noel J. Francisco as his nominee to be Solicitor general, Steven Engel to be his assistant attorney general for the Office of the Legal Counsel, Stephen Elliott Boyd to be assistant attorney general for the Office of Legislative Affair, and Makan Delrahim to be assistant attorney general for the antitrust division. The Senate can be blamed for the slow action on those nominees.
But President Trump still hasn’t even named a nominee for the positions of assistant attorney general for the national-security division, assistant attorney general for the civil division, assistant attorney general for the civil-rights division, assistant attorney general for the criminal division, assistant attorney general for the environment and natural-resources division, assistant attorney general for the justice-programs division, assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Policy, or assistant attorney general for the tax division.
While these positions may not relate directly to litigating the travel ban, Trump still hasn’t named a director for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco Firearms and Explosives, administrator or deputy administrator for the Drug Enforcement Agency, or a director of the U.S. Marshals Service.
And, of course, he fired FBI Director Comey. He said we would have a replacement quickly… three weeks ago.
Whenever I make this point, some ill-informed Trump defender insists this is a wise cost-cutting measure. No, those positions don’t go unfilled; they’re just filled by “acting” replacements… who, at this rate, are likely to be acting for quite a while. Those acting replacements may or may not agree with the Trump administration’s perspective; while they’re no doubt professionals, why wouldn’t Trump want his own people in these positions, who understand his priorities?
Trump’s complaining about the courts? There are 131 judicial vacancies in the federal courts. Trump has nominated ten judges so far. Nominating qualified figures to the executive and judicial branch is a key part of governing. Reacting to what’s said about you on Morning Joe isn’t.
By the way, that second travel ban that Trump is complaining about? He signed it! If he thought it was such a terrible idea, Trump should have said so back in March when discussing it with his legal and national-security team, instead of chewing their work out in public two months later.
This is the problem with a president whose decisions can be swayed by whether he talked with Steve Bannon or Ivanka Trump most recently. Trump makes a decision, and then if he decides he doesn’t like the outcome, he blames the person who offered that advice, instead of himself for following that advice.
For the readers who will grumble this is “bashing” President Trump… what am I supposed to say? Pretend this is the way a president and his administration are supposed to work? The president is publicly fuming about the decisions of his own Department of Justice, decisions he signed off on! He’s got a phone. He can call Jeff Sessions anytime he likes. I’m sure they’ll wake him up if the president calls.
Yes, there are a lot of judges with starkly different philosophies who will block an executive order on sketchy grounds. This is the opposite of unprecedented. If you think Trump is the first president who have his desired policy about who to let into the country nullified by decisions by judges, ask President Obama how his executive order about illegal-immigrant children and their parents turned out.
Trump’s tweets ‘a gold mine’ for Mueller probe
The president’s running public commentary gives investigators real-time insight into the intent behind his actions – and could create problems for him or his aides.
.. the @realdonaldtrump account gives investigators a detailed timeline of Trump’s thoughts and opinions – including where they might differ from official accounts – and can also be used to establish intent, which can be critical in a criminal investigation.
.. The president’s warning last month to the fired FBI director James Comey, that he’d “better hope that there are no tapes” of their conversations, “could well be interpreted as an effort to intimidate a witness,” Forde added.
.. Legal experts say the president’s recent statements, including his admission to NBC News’ Lester Holt that he had the Russia investigation in mind before firing Comey, as well as his comment reported by the New York Times that Comey was a publicity-seeking “nut job” helps them paint a poignant picture of the president’s intentions.
“You could use those tweets to show the president was angry and frustrated by this Russia investigation, that he was furious that it was ongoing, that he didn’t think it was legitimate, that he therefore fired the FBI director to thwart it,” Zeidenberg said. “You could support that whole theory almost entirely on tweets and statements of Trump.”
.. The degree of attention Trump has given to the Russia probe on Twitter, Zeidenberg said, would make it challenging for the president’s attorneys to argue he wasn’t being serious on his social media account.