Note the wording that Kasowitz uses: “selective and illegal leaks of classified information and privileged communications.” He’s conflating “selective” with “illegal” and “classified” with “privileged.” Comey’s was a selective leak of privileged conversation — not anything illegal. He’s lumping in Comey with those who leaked classified information, for rhetorical effect.
.. Kasowitz here makes it seem as though Comey leaked information about his conversations back in March, before he was fired — but appears to be referring to Comey describing those conversations with friends. That, too, is not illegal.
.. The net effect of this focus on leaks is, of course, to undermine Comey’s testimony.
.. The use of “was not” is important here. Comey did testify that, as of the day he was fired one month ago Friday, Trump was not personally under investigation
.. Comey also indicated that he didn’t say that publicly because that status might change.
.. Finally, it did “leak” that Trump wasn’t under investigation — Trump said it himself, publicly, in the letter firing Comey.
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.
Trump’s Threat Undermines Obamacare Marketplace
Continuing uncertainty will force more cautious strategies, insurers say, such as bigger rate increases, or pullbacks or withdrawals, because they can no longer stomach the risk. Insurers say they were whipsawed by the Trump administration’s moves last week, when President Trump threatened to stop funding the ACA’s cost-sharing reduction subsidies in an effort to prod Democrats to negotiate over a health bill.
The Most Abused Press Secretary in History
Sean Spicer, meet Ron Ziegler.
.. Nixon didn’t value that perspective, though—“The press is the enemy … write that on a blackboard a hundred times,” he once told Kissinger.
.. In the week after the Watergate arrests in June 1972, as the news broke that the burglars had ties to the Nixon reelection campaign, Nixon ordered Ziegler to minimize the crime. He did so memorably, dismissing it as a “third-rate alleged burglary attempt.” When Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein doggedly pursued the story, Ziegler accused them of “shabby journalism” and “character assassination.”
.. he continued to duck and weave in Spicer-like fashion, and even introduced his own “alternative facts” into the lexicon of politics, begrudgingly declaring the president’s long-standing insistence of White House guiltlessness “inoperative.” “If my answers sound confusing,” the Los Angeles Times quoted him saying during a 1974 White House briefing just a few months before Nixon resigned, “I think they are confusing because the questions are confusing and the situation is confusing—and I’m not in a position to clarify it.”
.. Praise and censure in the Nixon years were parceled out according to an aide’s willingness to defy the hated press—a pattern that has also been attributed to Trump.
.. Ziegler was just 29 years old when he became the White House press secretary. It was a job that most thought would go to Herb Klein, a former Southern California newsman and longtime campaign spokesman for Nixon, but the new president wanted someone more compliant. Ziegler’s inexperience was itself seen as an insult by the White House press corps
.. Most of the press corps began by treating Ziegler like a puppy-dog frontman, recognizing his advertising background and low rating in the inner circle to be the insult it really was,” Safire recalled.