Trump Strutted Like a Player, But Also Got Played

Trump Strutted Like a Player, But Also Got Played

Timothy L. O’Brien                December 14, 2020

 

(Bloomberg Opinion) — Anyone still clinging to the idea that Donald Trump is a crafty strategist who furthered his goals by corrupting everyone around him during an unspooled and vindictive presidency might want to consider, instead, that Trump himself was often gamed — at least when it comes to some of the signature policies that will define his administration. To be sure, Trump unleashed torrents of dangerous vitriol that made it safe for his party and supporters to embrace racial, economic and cultural divisions more openly and enthusiastically. And Trump’s stagecraft was certainly sui generis, tethered to outre mythmaking and serial fabulism. But apart from propagating a cult of personality, Trump’s performance art rarely revolved around policy debates or goals. It just revolved around him. On the policy frontier, where voters’ lives are shaped and institutions are remodeled, others were in charge. Those people most likely regarded Trump as a useful foil, someone easy to manipulate or outmaneuver if you had the stomach and patience for it. There are myriad examples, but for now let’s focus on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Attorney General William Barr and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. Each of those men embodies some traits needed to turn Trump into a sock puppet — or to simply keep him out of the way. They could be wily (McConnell, Barr, Powell), craven (McConnell, Barr) or courageous (Powell), but needed at least one of those attributes to achieve their goals. History will also probably judge each of them in proportion to how much their particular vices or virtues drove policy and procedure.“ At the risk of tooting my own horn, look at the majority leaders since L.B.J. and find another one who was able to do something as consequential as this,” McConnell, a history buff, told the New York Times after he rammed Justice Amy Coney Barrett onto the Supreme Court in October. McConnell regards his conservative reshaping of the federal judiciary as his signature accomplishment, and his legacy goes well beyond the Supreme Court. He has pressed the Senate to confirm at least 229 federal court appointments during Trump’s presidency, and, for the first time in 40 years, hasn’t left a left a single vacancy on district and circuit courts — even if that has meant repopulating the judiciary with young, white men bearing threadbare resumes. Trump didn’t have a sophisticated, informed view of the judiciary before becoming president. But he let McConnell transform such traditionally liberal venues as the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals because the senator sustained him in other ways. McConnell ran interference when Trump was impeached. He helped court Trump’s incendiary political base. He kept to the shadows when Trump attacked the Black Lives Matter movement. He remained silent when Trump savaged the integrity of the presidential election. McConnell, according to those close to him, held Trump in low regard but protected him anyway to feed his own political ambitions, further fuel his fundraising apparatus and go about dismantling the federal government. McConnell’s fealty and machinations came home to roost this year when Trump failed to effectively respond to the Covid-19 pandemic and the Senate was left so broken it appears unable to pass a second coronavirus relief package even though it has bipartisan support. It’s not clear yet whether McConnell, content to wield power for power’s sake alone, will pay any penalties for cuddling with Trump. But there’s no question that he has spun the president like a top the last several years whenever one of his own goals was in play. Then there’s Barr, who, when asked last year whether his ward-heeler’s advocacy for Trump has tainted his legacy and his reputation in the legal community, responded with trademark indifference: “I’m at the end of my career. … Everyone dies.” Barr has been a longstanding proponent of an unrestrained imperial presidency, and those views took root long before he encountered Trump. But he went out of his way to audition for his Justice Department job because he undoubtedly saw Trump as a useful vehicle for furthering those aims. Among other things, Barr helped Trump end-run Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, gave Trump the latitude to misuse federal force on U.S. streets, helped protect White House advisers on the wrong side of the law, knee-capped federal prosecutors investigating matters close to Trump and helped give early credence to Trump’s claims that the presidential election was rigged before later reversing himself. Trump grew weary with Barr after the attorney general refused to rush a Justice Department probe of how law enforcement went about investigating the president, but Barr initiated the investigation to begin with because he shared Trump’s belief that the deep state was out to get him. Barr reportedly worked hard to make sure that a federal investigation into President-elect Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, was kept under wraps during the election, but one wonders, given Barr’s record, how the investigation was started in the first place. Trump harbored authoritarian designs well before he intersected with Barr, but it’s Barr who tried to build a throne for the president — and taught Trump how to go about it. Powell, inhabiting the wonky and cloistered confines of the Federal Reserve, is the brighter tale here. An articulate, compassionate and relatively soft-spoken member of Trumplandia, Powell runs a financially powerful institution that Trump has repeatedly tried to strong-arm during his presidency. “Who is our bigger enemy, Jay Powell or Chairman Xi?” Trump once asked. Powell endured all of this with great calm and confidence, managing to win plaudits as one of the best Fed leaders of the modern era. He’s also been directly responsible for helping the U.S. economy weather the Covid-19 pandemic. He’s well aware that the Federal Reserve Act is meant to protect his independence from the White House, and he’s demonstrated repeated bravery charting his own course despite Trump’s interference. Asked during a congressional hearing if he’d pack up and leave if Trump tried to fire him, Powell said three times that he wouldn’t. “The law clearly gives me a four-year term, and I intend to serve it,” he responded. Trump pressured Powell to adopt rate cuts that would stoke the economy in the short run, but Powell largely made such calls on the merits. He also became one of the strongest voices in the government for using federal powers to support the financial well-being of average workers and the lives and livelihoods of those bowled over by the pandemic. To get there, he essentially ignored Trump — and expanded the Fed’s mandate and mission along the way. Powell’s tenure is a reminder that Trump can’t corrupt people willy-nilly. They have to be primed for it beforehand. And bad things didn’t happen during Trump’s time in office because he landed in Washington with a fully realized plan. Bad outcomes took root because Trump was surrounded by bad actors, some of whom knew exactly how to play him.

Michael Flynn’s firing: A lie, a leak, and then a liability

NBC News

Michael Flynn’s firing:
A lie, a leak, and then a liability

Inside the 25 days that shook the Trump presidency.

By Carol E. Lee       December 3, 2020

Donald Trump pardons ex-national security adviser Michael Flynn | Financial  Times

WASHINGTON — Michael Flynn was looking for a criminal defense attorney — on the internet.

The sun had set and much of the White House staff had cleared out for the night. Nearly alone, Flynn hovered over his assistant who was seated at her desk just outside his corner office, scanning attorney biographies on her computer screen.

He hadn’t told the president or his top advisers what prompted the Google search: Two FBI agents had interviewed him that afternoon about his contacts with Russia.

It was Flynn’s fifth day as President Donald Trump’s national security adviser. On Feb. 13, 2017, the 25th day of the Trump presidency, Flynn would be gone, fired for lying to the vice president and the FBI.

Now, after twice pleading guilty to making false statements to federal agents, Flynn is a free man — thanks to a president who says his former national security adviser was targeted by an overzealous FBI in a set up orchestrated by political foes. On a balmy Thanksgiving eve in Washington, Trump short-circuited the judicial process to grant Flynn a full pardon. He wished the retired Army general and his family a warm holiday. And Flynn returned the favor by appealing to the president’s leading grievance, writing that his former boss has been “viciously targeted” as a victim of “a coup against our nation.”

The president’s Nov. 25 pardon abruptly capped nearly four years of legal and political drama that began when Trump fired a national security adviser he’d come to privately disparage and ended with the White House declaring Flynn “an innocent man.”

“The president has pardoned General Flynn because he should never have been prosecuted,” the White House statement read. Vice President Mike Pence has so far been silent about the pardon. After portraying himself as a victim of Flynn’s deception who unwittingly repeated his falsehoods publicly, Pence earlier this year said he believes Flynn unintentionally misled him about his clandestine talks with the Russians.

But a comprehensive examination of his time as Trump’s national security adviser, including interviews with more than 20 people who were directly involved in uncovering or covering up his actions, suggests that Flynn knowingly misled investigators and the president’s inner circle repeatedly. Once considered one of the country’s top intelligence officials and skilled in deception, Flynn not only concealed key details of his conversations with Vladimir Putin’s handpicked ambassador in Washington, but also an investigation he knew was closing in on him.

By the end of the first week of Trump’s presidency, as the new administration plunged itself into foreign and domestic turmoil, a small group of senior White House officials had been repeatedly confronted with the truth about Flynn’s conversations with Russia’s ambassador, Sergey Kislyak – that they had discussed newly-imposed U.S. sanctions against Moscow. They also learned that two FBI agents had questioned Flynn about those conversations in a secure conference room just a short walk from the Oval Office, and that he’d answered with a false account similar to the one he’d given Pence.

“Everyone’s forgetting that Flynn was fired because he was lying to everyone,” one senior White House official directly involved with the Flynn matter said recently. “After weeks of asking him, he was still saying he never talked to the Russian ambassador about sanctions.”

And as officials grappled with Flynn’s own cover-up, they too engaged in similar action. The president and his closest aides worked to keep the revelations, including warnings from senior Justice Department officials that Flynn could be blackmailed by the Russians, from the public and just about every senior official in the fledgling administration all the way up to the vice president.

White House officials who worked alongside Flynn when he was national security adviser described a perfect storm of secrecy, distrust, loyalty and confusion that enabled the retired three-star general to remain on the payroll of the American taxpayers, with access to the country’s most tightly held secrets and at the helm of life-and-death decisions — despite knowledge at the highest levels of government that he could be a liability.

Those who agreed to share details from that time spoke to NBC News over many months on the condition of anonymity.

Their recollections revealed angry confrontations between a deceptive Flynn and his colleagues in the West Wing, an indecisive president more worried about his public image than the potential national security implications of Flynn’s actions, and a White House counsel searching for a crime instead of confronting a potential threat. Key evidence that Flynn had lied was only shared with Pence when its existence became public — 15 days after Trump and a handful of senior White House officials were informed of it.

This period of time, which was the subject of intense examination by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, stood at the intersection of his investigations: how Russia interfered in the 2016 election, whether Trump associates conspired with Moscow in that endeavor, and if the president attempted to obstruct the FBI’s investigation into any such coordination.

 

Flynn was one of the first Trump associates to be ensnared in the Russia investigation – and on Nov. 25 of this year he became the first to be relieved of the legal consequences of being a convicted felon.

Trump’s use of the presidential pardon power circumvented a pending decision by a federal judge, Emmet Sullivan, on whether to move forward with sentencing Flynn after the Justice Department filed a motion on May 7 to dismiss the case. Leadership at the Justice Department wasn’t consulted about the pardon and had preferred to see through the request for dismissal, which argued there was no investigation to justify the FBI interview in which the former national security adviser made false statements.

Flynn admitted to making false statements in that interview not only about his Russia contacts but also his attempt during the Trump transition to scuttle an Obama administration effort to condemn Israeli settlements with a resolution at the United Nations. As part of his plea deal, Flynn further admitted to giving false statements to the Justice Department about being paid for lobbying on behalf of the government of Turkey.

Sullivan balked at the Justice Department’s motion to dismiss a case the president had relentlessly portrayed as unfair in his efforts to undermine the Mueller investigation. Sullivan brought in a retired federal judge — who, as an assistant U.S. attorney, had prosecuted the mafia boss John Gotti — to argue that the judicial branch can reject a Justice Department request to dismiss a case if it’s believed to be politically motivated.

This past summer, Flynn tried to force Sullivan to grant the Justice Department’s motion. But the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ultimately rejected the effort.

It was one of many dramatic twists and turns in the sentencing of Flynn since he first appeared in Sullivan’s court in December of 2018. At that time the judge angrily rejected Mueller’s recommendation that Flynn merely be put on probation because he was a model cooperating witness. Over the next year, Flynn made the surprise decision to hire new lawyers, broke from the federal prosecutors he’d cooperated with and requested to withdraw his guilty plea.

“In truth, I never lied,” Flynn wrote in a court filing this past January. “I will fight to restore my good name.”

In response to specific questions about this article, Flynn’s lawyer, Sidney Powell, referred NBC News to court filings posted on her website.

Flynn’s first lawyer, Robert Kelner, declined to comment. The White House and Pence’s office had no comment.

A pardon for Flynn was a long-sought outcome for the president who hired him, fired him and, until losing re-election, said he’d consider bringing him back into the White House.

From his earliest days in office Trump has sought to shield Flynn from federal investigation, reportedly asking his then-FBI director to let any inquiry go. And after distancing himself from Flynn when he cooperated with the Mueller investigation, Trump later latched onto his case as a political cudgel. Flynn became a cause célèbre for the president and his Republican base.

Had Sullivan sentenced Flynn, Trump made clear he would pardon him, and the president’s team had been prepared since at least June for an announcement. “There was no question internally whether he would pardon Flynn,” a senior White House official said. It was just a matter of when.

In September, Powell, Flynn’s lawyer, said during a court hearing that she had spoken with the president directly and asked him not to pardon her client. But with Trump leaving the White House on Jan. 20, time was running out. “That was the motivation,” the senior White House official said of the timing.

Still, the pardon changes nothing about why Trump has said he fired Flynn: because he lied. Neither does Flynn’s reversal on his guilty plea. Or Pence’s newly adopted view that he is now “more inclined to believe” Flynn didn’t intentionally lie to him.

That Flynn remains the leading personification of Trump’s grievances – namely that forces are out to get him – and a catalyst for additional presidential pardons based on similar motivations makes his time as national security adviser and the circumstances around his firing newly germane.

Despite the lies and warnings that Flynn could be compromised, the president and his closest aides didn’t seriously discuss firing Flynn until the controversy was made public by journalists. That delay allowed Flynn to play a leading role in every sensitive national security decision in the early days of the Trump presidency:

* Trump’s hastily executed order banning travel to the U.S. by individuals from some majority-Muslim countries.

* An ill-fated counterterrorism raid in Yemen that led to the death of a Navy SEAL.

* A North Korea missile launch that caught the new administration flat-footed at the president’s Florida resort.

* Flynn publicly put Iran “on notice” over its aggression in the Middle East, a move that foreshadowed sharply escalated tensions between Washington and Tehran.

* As head of the National Security Council, Flynn arranged for a permanent council seat for the president’s chief political strategist, Steve Bannon, an unusual move and an unwelcome surprise to Trump.

Jan. 26, 2017

Trump was unmoved.

White House counsel Don McGahn was sharing what he had just learned: Flynn had been interviewed by the FBI and may have lied. McGahn had just met with Acting Attorney General Sally Yates for about 15 minutes and chief among Yates’ concerns was that Flynn wasn’t truthful with Pence and other White House officials when he told them he had not discussed U.S. sanctions with Kislyak, Russia’s ambassador in Washington, during phone calls several weeks before Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 2017.

Flynn and Kislyak spoke on Dec. 29, 2016, the same day the Obama administration announced new sanctions against Russia in response to Moscow’s interference in the U.S. presidential election held the month before. They spoke again two days later, after Russian President Vladimir Putin announced he would not retaliate against the U.S. for the sanctions. Putin’s restraint had shocked American intelligence officials, who only later learned about Flynn’s discussions with Kislyak while analyzing Russia’s response to the sanctions.

Flynn’s Dec. 29 conversation with Kislyak became public in news reports on Jan. 12. Three days later, Pence said publicly that after talking to Flynn he could confirm that call “had nothing whatsoever to do with those sanctions.” That raised concerns at the Justice Department that Pence might also be in on the deception with Flynn.

The White House didn’t know it but the FBI had previously opened an investigation into Flynn because of concerns about his relationship with the Russian government. And Flynn’s phone calls with Kislyak, as well as his false assurance to Pence that they didn’t discuss sanctions, had raised new alarms among investigators.

McGahn explained Flynn’s possible legal exposure: the perjury statute and the Logan Act, which makes it illegal for any American to negotiate with foreign governments in a dispute with the U.S. without authorization from the current U.S. government.

Trump, with his chief of staff Reince Priebus and senior adviser Stephen Bannon by his side, listened but seemed unphased. He asked McGahn to start again.

McGahn told the president he didn’t think the FBI clearly had Flynn on charges of giving false statements and, after meeting with Yates, McGahn wasn’t sure what the issue was: Is Flynn a security risk? Should the president get rid of him? Is the national security adviser under investigation?

That’s when Trump perked up: “Not again, this guy, this stuff.”

The president had already grown frustrated with Flynn, in what one senior White House official described as “a personality clash.” Trump had started complaining to aides about Flynn during the transition. He thought Flynn interrupted him too much during briefings and that his Kislyak contacts were generating a steady stream of negative press coverage. Just days into his presidency, Trump wouldn’t even look at Flynn during intelligence briefings. “He couldn’t stand Mike Flynn,” another senior White House official said. “He wanted to fire Flynn before he even got to the White House.”

Trump told McGahn, Priebus and Bannon not to discuss the issue with any other White House officials. Instead, he directed them to figure out the problem and come back with a plan.

“Then no one looked into it,” with any urgency, a senior White House official at the time said.

Bannon was the one official among them who seemed to possibly know for weeks that Flynn had been lying. He’d spoken with Flynn about the sanctions on Jan. 1 — the day after Flynn’s second discussion with Kislyak — and they agreed they had “stopped the train on Russia’s response,” according to Mueller’s report.

 

Trump has insisted he had no knowledge of Flynn’s discussions about sanctions with Kislyak before the talks took place, though federal investigators later found it implausible that senior officials including Bannon and Flynn would have kept it from him.

The circle of people with knowledge of Flynn’s lies, his FBI interview, and the Justice Department’s warning, was tight. But McGahn made a decision to widen it slightly when he ignored Trump’s instructions and tapped John Eisenberg, a deputy White House counsel and legal adviser to the National Security Council, to figure out whether Flynn had given false statements to the FBI or violated the Logan Act.

McGahn also figured there must be a recording of Flynn’s phone call with Kislyak that they could listen to. The National Security Agency had wiretapped the phone of the Russian ambassador. It’s a standard U.S. intelligence operation that Flynn, a former military intelligence officer, later said he knew about when the FBI interviewed him on Jan. 24.

Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe had called Flynn on a secure phone line around lunch time that day to tell him the FBI wanted to come by the White House to talk to him about his contacts with Russians.

McCabe told Flynn he could have a lawyer present, though stressed that the matter would be handled more quickly if he didn’t. He also said if Flynn did bring along a lawyer, officials at the Justice Department would also have to get involved.

Flynn replied that he didn’t need a lawyer.

He agreed to meet without asking McCabe for any details.

Ahead of their arrival at the White House, FBI officials discussed how to approach Flynn. “What’s our goal? Truth/Admission or to get him to lie so we can prosecute him or get him fired?” one official wrote in a memo.

By 2:15 p.m. Flynn was alone in the White House with two FBI agents, including FBI Deputy Assistant Director Peter Strzok. Flynn appeared in a good mood. He talked about everything from hotels he’d stayed at during the presidential campaign to terrorism to Trump’s knack for interior design. He even offered the agents “a little tour” of the West Wing, walking them right past Trump and a couple of movers discussing where to place artwork.

When the conversation moved to his contacts with Kislyak, Flynn “was fully aware that federal officials routinely monitor, record, and transcribe such conversations with foreign officials,” he later wrote in a court filing, and knew the FBI probably had transcripts of his calls.

And yet there in the White House, with the two FBI agents, he denied asking Kislyak to hold back on moves that would escalate tensions. “It wasn’t, ‘don’t do anything,’” he said.

Flynn also said he didn’t remember a follow-up conversation with Kislyak, after Putin announced he would not escalate. That’s when the ambassador told Flynn his request had gone to the highest levels of the Russian government.

Despite the obvious discrepancies, the agents later noted that Flynn displayed no “indicators of deception” and didn’t leave them with the impression that he was lying or thought he was lying. Within hours of their departure, Flynn would be on the hunt for a lawyer.

Jan. 27, 2017

It’s possible the president’s national security adviser broke the law.

That’s what deputy White House counsel Eisenberg told his boss on a Friday morning, exactly one week after Trump’s inauguration.

After an initial look at Flynn’s conduct, Eisenberg suggested that Flynn might have given false statements to the FBI or violated the Logan Act. But, he noted, no one has ever been successfully charged under the Logan Act, and he downplayed the likelihood the Justice Department would pursue such charges.

McGahn told Eisenberg to ask Yates back to the White House for another meeting.

McGahn, Priebus and Bannon were already suspicious of Yates, a holdover from the Obama administration, and questioned her motives. Obama officials made clear they had no respect for Flynn. Obama had ousted Flynn as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2014. And after the 2016 election, Obama personally advised Trump against hiring Flynn.

McGahn’s second meeting with Yates was also 15 minutes long but more contentious. McGahn questioned why it would matter to the Justice Department if one White House official lied to another. Yates replied that this situation “was a whole lot more than that,” walking McGahn again through her concerns.

He asked if taking action against Flynn would interfere with an FBI investigation into his conduct. Yates said it would not. “It wouldn’t really be fair of us to tell you this and then expect you to sit on your hands,” she said.

That’s when McGahn asked for evidence. “Is this something we could see?” Yates said she couldn’t give him the recordings of Flynn’s conversation but said she’d look into getting him transcripts.

 

A few paces away in the Oval Office, Trump called FBI Director James Comey, who was in charge of the Russia investigation, to invite him to the White House that night for dinner. The previous evening, Trump had asked several of his senior advisers during dinner what they thought of Comey.

Bannon and Priebus seemed nervous about the president dining alone with the FBI director. “Do you want someone to come with you?” Bannon asked Trump. Trump said he wanted to have dinner with Comey alone, that he was just meeting with him to decide whether to keep him in the job.

“Don’t talk about Russia, whatever you do,” Priebus told the president. Trump promised he wouldn’t.

But alone with Comey in the Green Room on the main floor of the White House, Trump did just that.

And he indicated he was souring on Flynn. To illustrate the point, he told Comey a story about Flynn waiting six days after Putin had reached out to Trump to schedule a return phone call with the Russian leader.

“The guy has serious judgment issues,” Trump said.

Jan. 28 to Feb. 2, 2017

“How’d it go?” Bannon asked the president the next after his dinner with Comey.

All the president revealed was that he had determined Comey was a good guy whom he intended to keep.

It was Saturday and Trump was about to hold his first phone call as president with Putin. Kislyak had tried multiple times for weeks to get Flynn to arrange for the two leaders to speak the day after Trump’s inauguration. The Russians had wanted it to be via secure video. But Flynn didn’t respond to those requests from Kislyak, who even left a voicemail for the incoming national security adviser the day before the inauguration asking for “an answer to the idea of our two president’s speaking.”

A week after the Russians had hoped that conversation would take place, Flynn, Pence, Priebus, Bannon and White House press secretary Sean Spicer had gathered around the Resolute Desk, while Trump was on the phone call with Putin.

Across the West Wing, a different phone call was about to be set up.

Mary McCord, the acting assistant attorney general who had accompanied Yates to her first meeting with McGahn, received an email sent from Flynn’s White House account requesting a secure phone call to follow up on the McGahn meeting. It was odd enough that Flynn was sending her an email. But what made this truly a mystery for McCord is that the email was signed by Eisenberg.

She decided not to reply and instead sent a new email directly to Eisenberg.

The following day, she and Eisenberg spoke. He told McCord that he had been in Flynn’s office the day before and an assistant had accidentally switched his and Flynn’s phones when giving them back. He then said that he and Flynn had the same password for their phones, and so he accidentally sent the email from the national security adviser’s account.

He also told McCord that from now on he would be handling the Flynn matter, not McGahn.

They spoke again the next day, Monday, about arranging for Eisenberg to review the transcripts of Flynn’s call with Kislyak. Yates also called McGahn to tell him the transcripts were ready for review.

Within hours of their discussion that morning of Jan. 30, Trump fired Yates, citing her refusal to enforce his travel ban.

McCord emailed Eisenberg Tuesday to say the transcripts were ready for him to review and she put him in touch with Peter Strzok, one of the FBI agents who interviewed Flynn and was involved with the case.

Eisenberg didn’t respond. She emailed him again the following day to ask if he’d accessed the transcripts. He didn’t respond until Feb. 2.

Within hours, two FBI agents arrived at the White House carrying a secure briefcase containing the highly classified transcripts.

McGahn told Eisenberg to look them over and report back on potential issues.

Flynn, meanwhile, held a meeting with National Security Council officials in the auditorium of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to the White House.

When one of them asked him what he thought about Yates refusing to defend Trump’s travel ban — and generally the idea of an administration official refusing to implement a president’s policies — Flynn was dismissive. “What she did was illegal,” he replied.

Eisenberg sat with the two FBI agents in McGahn’s West Wing office and read through the transcripts. It was clear Flynn had misled Pence.

But it wasn’t clear to Eisenberg what criminal charge deceiving the vice president would bring.

Eisenberg asked the FBI agents: Is this it? What am I missing? Is this a big deal?

The agents remained stone-faced and didn’t respond.

The agents packed up the documents in the briefcase and left the White House.

Eisenberg wrote a memo outlining the possible crimes Flynn could be accused of committing. But he wasn’t sure the White House had enough information to make a recommendation to the president. He discussed his findings with McGahn and they agreed that Flynn was unlikely to be charged with violating the Logan Act. However, they remained unsure if Flynn was vulnerable to a charge of giving false statements in his FBI interview.

The next day, Flynn had a private lunch with Trump in the presidential dining room.

Feb. 6 to Feb. 8, 2017

Trump had barely begun settling into the White House and was already seething over the latest chyrons scrolling across cable news about his administration.

He was in the Oval Office with Flynn, complaining about negative media coverage that had been circulating for almost a month about the calls with Kislyak. The details of Trump and Flynn’s private conversation were disclosed by Flynn to investigators and included in the final report issued by the Special Counsel.

The president wanted specifics. So Flynn dutifully listed the dates on which he said he had spoken with Kislyak.

When Trump asked what he and Kislyak talked about — the question driving the controversy — Flynn said that they might have discussed the Obama administration’s sanctions against Russia. It was a stunning departure from his insistence to the vice president, other senior White House officials, and the FBI that the topic had not come up.

Trump didn’t seem particularly shocked, according to Flynn’s own retelling of the meeting. And, he told investigators, that the president actually corrected him on one of the dates on which he said he’d spoken with Kislyak.

At 4 p.m. on Wednesday, Feb. 8, Comey arrived at the White House for a meeting with Priebus.

Trump had suggested that his chief of staff be the FBI director’s main point of contact in the White House, so Priebus had invited Comey over for what he described as a “meet and greet.” After some initial discussion of immigration issues, intelligence gathering and leaks, Priebus steered the conversation to Flynn.

“Do you have a FISA order on Mike Flynn?” Priebus asked, referring to a top-secret warrant to wiretap an American citizen suspected of being a spy for a foreign government.

It was highly unusual for a White House chief of staff to ask the FBI director such a question. But Comey agreed to answer and said there wasn’t a FISA warrant on Flynn.

A few hours later Flynn had a meeting with a Washington Post reporter. At the end of their discussion on a variety of foreign policy issues, the reporter asked Flynn if he was sure he didn’t discuss sanctions with Kislyak during their Dec. 29 call.

 

Despite denials, the Post had learned from multiple administration officials that Flynn had raised the topic on the call.

Although he had told Trump in the Oval Office that he might have, Flynn again repeated the answer he’d given multiple times: he was sure sanctions weren’t discussed. The reporter asked if that could be on the record, and Michael Anton, the NSC’s spokesperson, agreed.

Around 10 p.m., however, Flynn called Anton to ask the status of the Post’s story. Changing his story once again, Flynn told Anton he could no longer say with 100 percent confidence that he didn’t discuss sanctions with Kislyak. Anton called the Post reporter with a new statement — and unsuccessfully asked the paper not to report that Flynn had said just hours earlier that sanctions weren’t discussed.

The new statement that Flynn “couldn’t be certain that the topic never came up” was carefully worded but marked a sea change. Neither Flynn nor Anton told other senior officials about the new statement.

Feb. 9 to Feb. 10, 2017

At 9:30 p.m. on Feb. 9, the Post published its article. It immediately set off a firestorm inside and outside the White House. Nearly everyone in the West Wing was blindsided.

“We went bananas,” said a senior White House official who was there at the time.

Only then did McGahn, whom Trump had tasked with looking into Flynn’s conduct, decide to refocus on the issue.

Priebus was having dinner with the president in the White House residence when McGahn, who still had not read the transcripts of Flynn’s calls with Kislyak, urgently asked him to leave the dinner to discuss the Post article. Priebus was fuming. They summoned Flynn from the national security adviser’s suite, and a handful of senior White House officials, including White House counsel, deposed him in Priebus’ office.

“What the f— is going on?” Priebus asked Flynn.

Flynn responded that he now wasn’t completely sure if sanctions had come up in the Kislyak call.

“Well, you told me that didn’t happen, so which is it?” Priebus said to Flynn, who responded again that he was unsure.

Around 6:20 the following morning, Pence’s aide, Marc Lotter walked over to the West Wing to see Anton.

“We have a problem,” he said, adding that Flynn had “essentially made the Vice President of the United States a liar” by telling him he hadn’t discussed sanctions with Kislyak – a lie Pence then repeated in a nationally televised interview. Pence wanted to read the transcripts of Flynn’s Kislyak calls.

When David Ignatius of the Washington Post first reported that Flynn had spoken with Kislyak the day the Obama administration’s sanctions were announced, Flynn directed his deputy, KT McFarland, to call the columnist and say that he and the Russian ambassador did not discuss sanctions during the call.

“I want to kill the story,” Flynn told McFarland.

After McFarland spoke with the columnist, the Post updated his article with an anonymous Trump official saying Flynn and Kislyak did not discuss sanctions.

Pence knew he’d be asked about it during an interview the following Sunday on CBS, and he wanted to hear Flynn’s explanation directly. He called the incoming national security adviser, who told the vice president-elect that the topic of sanctions never came up. And that’s what Pence said on national television.

It was almost a month after Flynn told Pence he hadn’t discussed sanctions with Kislyak that Pence wanted to compare his conversation with Flynn to the ones Flynn had with Kislyak.

McCabe had been at the White House for an unrelated briefing that morning. When he got to his car outside the West Wing, his driver told him the White House had been frantically trying to reach him.

He connected by phone with Priebus who said the Vice President wanted to see the transcripts — now. McCabe said he’d have to get them.

“Where’s your office?” Priebus asked.

McCabe, the deputy director of the FBI, explained that he worked out of FBI headquarters.

The transcripts of Flynn’s phone calls with Kislyak were brought to the White House in a secure briefcase, just as they were eight days earlier.

Pence, his chief of staff Nick Ayers, Priebus and McGahn huddled in a conference room in the Situation Room suite reading the transcripts. McCabe remained in the room and at one point was asked whether Flynn had violated the Logan Act. He told the group that was a possibility that the FBI was investigating.

Pence asked Ayers to get him a printed copy of his CBS interview. After Ayers returned with it, Pence compared the transcript of his interview with the transcripts of Flynn and Kislyak.

He barely spoke as he read through the documents line by line.

“Number one, what I would ask you guys to do – and make sure this, make sure that you convey this, okay?” the transcript showed Flynn said to Kislyak during their Dec. 29 call – the day the Obama administration announced the Russia sanctions – “do not uh, allow this administration to box us in, right now, okay?”

“I know you have to have some sort of action,” Flynn continued. “Make it reciprocal. … Don’t go any further than you have to. Because I don’t want us to get into something that has to escalate.”

Kislyak explained that one of the problems Moscow had is in addition to expelling Russian diplomats from the U.S., the Obama administration just sanctioned key Russian intelligence entities.

“So that’s something that we have to deal with,” Kislyak said to Flynn. “But I’ve heard what you say, and I certainly will try to get the people in Moscow to understand it.”

Flynn made the case that “we need cool heads to prevail.”

Pence compared that to the transcript of his response on CBS, when asked about Flynn’s Dec. 29 phone call with Kislyak.

“I talked to General Flynn about that conversation,” Pence said in the interview. “They did not discuss anything having to do with the United States’ decision to expel diplomats or impose censure against Russia.”

“So did they ever have a conversation about sanctions ever on those days or any other day?” Pence was asked.

“They did not,” the vice-president elect replied.

Pence read the transcript of a follow-up call between Flynn and Kislyak on Dec. 31, after Russia announced it would not retaliate for the sanctions.

“I have a small message to pass to you from Moscow,” Kislyak told Flynn.

“I appreciate the steps your president has taken. I think that it was wise,” Flynn interjected.

“I just wanted to tell you that our conversation was also taken into account in Moscow,” Kislyak said.

“Good,” said Flynn.

“Your proposal that we need to act with cold heads, uh, is exactly what is uh invested in the decision,” Kislyak added.

“Good,” Flynn said again.

In Pence’s interview on CBS, the transcript showed, he had dismissed the idea of more than one conversation between Flynn and Kislyak. “I don’t believe there were more conversations,” he said.

“He was smoldering,” one person in the room described Pence as he read the transcripts.

Priebus got up in the middle of the meeting, said he’d seen enough, and left the room.

Afterward, Pence was clear: The transcripts revealed that Flynn hadn’t been truthful. But Pence wanted to think about whether he’d advise the president to fire Flynn.

More than two weeks after Yates’ first warning about Flynn, McGahn, Priebus and Bannon had the first serious conversation with Trump about whether to fire the national security adviser. They told Trump they had reviewed the transcripts of Flynn’s call with Kislyak, and that it was clear he had lied to Pence.

Priebus, who early on thought Flynn had to go, was even more certain. Flynn either knowingly lied to the vice president — which Priebus and McGahn believed he had done — or he was too incompetent to serve as national security adviser if he couldn’t remember details like the topics of his conversation with the Russian ambassador. Neither, from their perspective, was acceptable. All three advisers recommended Trump fire Flynn.

The drama unfolded behind the scenes as Trump welcomed Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to the White House for official meetings, followed by a weekend at his sprawling South Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago.

As national security adviser, Flynn had a high-profile role in Abe’s visit that day.

That afternoon Flynn joined Trump and senior White House officials on Air Force One for the flight to Florida and the weekend with Abe.

Trump wandered to the press cabin in the back of the plane while giving his wife a tour of the aircraft and told reporters he hadn’t seen the Post report on Flynn.

“I don’t know about that,” he said.

Feb. 11 to Feb. 12, 2017

“What’s he doing here?” Trump snapped to a friend when he saw Flynn that weekend at Mar-a-Lago.

The controversy over Flynn’s contacts with Kislyak showed no signs of waning. Yet Flynn felt confident he would weather the firestorm.

He played a role in the scramble that night on the outdoor terrace at Mar-a-Lago as the U.S. and Japanese delegations were dining, to craft a response to a North Korean missile test.

White House aide Stephen Miller was asked the following morning on the Sunday news shows whether Trump has confidence in Flynn, and he did not have an answer.

Meanwhile, Flynn was among those helping plan for Trump’s Monday meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at the White House.

On the president’s flight back to Washington Sunday, Flynn was in the conference room on Air Force One leaning over an aide to go over some paperwork, his image splashed on a large flat-screen TV behind him showing news coverage about whether he’d be fired.

During the flight, Trump asked Flynn if he had lied to Pence. Flynn said he might have forgotten details of his conversations with Kislyak but he didn’t believe he had lied. “OK,” Trump said. “That’s fine. I got it.”

After landing at the military base in Maryland where Air Force One is kept, Flynn was among the handful of aides who joined the president on his helicopter for the flight back to White House.

Feb. 13, 2017

Trump was still unsure about whether Flynn should go.

“He was torn,” said a White House official who was involved in the discussions.

The White House plan was for Flynn to do TV interviews that day criticizing North Korea’s test launch. And Flynn juggled national security meetings throughout the morning, ducking out of lunch with Trudeau to deal with a hiccup in the rollout of a major escalation in U.S. sanctions on a top government official in Venezuela that the administration was about to announce.

In a parallel set of Monday morning meetings, Trump’s most senior aides were vigorously debating Flynn’s future.

McGahn, Priebus and Bannon shuttled back and forth between the Oval Office and the chief of staff’s suite. All three had advised firing Flynn.

But Trump’s view was that firing his national security adviser after just a few weeks would play into the hands of his critics. And he worried about how it would reflect on him.

“It’s going to make me look bad,” he told his advisers. “We’re going to look like a bunch of clowns.”

Spicer told reporters Trump was “evaluating the situation” and speaking with Pence and others about the issue.

One of the president’s top aides thought Trump was trying to shift the burden of deciding whether to fire Flynn onto Pence when he said: “Mike, he disappointed you. He let you down.” Flynn had apologized privately to Pence who wasn’t happy with him. Still, Pence told Trump he’d support whatever decision he made.

By the afternoon, Trump had concluded that Flynn had to go. He tasked Priebus with delivering the news. A resignation letter was prepared and Priebus delivered the news.

“Flynn said he wanted to take a shot at drafting the letter,” one senior White House official who was there at the time said. “But there was a draft given to him.”

Flynn asked to say goodbye to Trump, so Priebus brought him to the Oval Office for his last meeting as Trump’s national security adviser. “He didn’t see this coming,” the official said of Flynn.

Trump hugged his national security adviser of just 24 days and shook his hand. “We’ll give you a good recommendation,” the president told him. “You’re a good guy. We’ll take care of you.”

Publicly, the White House had been sending a different message. Kellyanne Conway, the president’s counselor, said in an afternoon TV interview that Trump had full confidence in Flynn.

McGahn, meanwhile, worked with the White House press office on drafting talking points on Flynn’s resignation that said the president had been advised Flynn was unlikely to be prosecuted for any crime, but that Flynn had lost the president’s trust.

Before the White House announced Flynn’s resignation, The Washington Post published a detailed account of Yates’ Jan. 26 warning about him to McGahn.

Once again, the White House press office was caught off guard. McGahn hadn’t told officials about the meeting, even after the initial report about Flynn discussing sanctions with Kislyak.

“You didn’t need to know,” McGhan told Spicer.

Spicer told reporters that Flynn’s departure was “not based on a legal issue but based on a trust issue.”

After Flynn

Trump seemed relieved during lunch at the White House with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a friend, and Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and senior adviser.

“Now that we fired Flynn, the Russia thing is over,” Trump told Christie. A former federal prosecutor, Christie laughed. “No way,” he said. “This thing is far from over.” And he warned Trump that Flynn would never go away, “like gum on the bottom of your shoe.”

Around 4 p.m., after a homeland security briefing, Trump asked Comey to stick around and kicked all the other officials out of the Oval Office, including the attorney general.

“I want to talk about Mike Flynn,” Trump said to Comey.

“He’s a good guy and has been through a lot,” Trump said, insisting Flynn didn’t do anything wrong in talking to the Russian ambassador but had to be fired for lying to Pence. “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go.”

Trump never said publicly or privately that Flynn had lied to him. Just to Pence, and, in a tweet in December 2017, the FBI.

Comey interpreted the president’s words “letting this go” as a directive to stop investigating Flynn. At this point in the FBI’s investigation, no grand jury subpoenas had been issued.

Yet the president still seemed worried that Flynn’s legal troubles might ensnare him. Ten days after Flynn was fired, Trump ordered Priebus to have the deputy national security adviser write an internal email saying that Trump did not direct Flynn to call Kislyak to discuss sanctions.

The deputy, KT McFarland, was already uncertain about her own future. She had been asked to resign and told a possible ambassadorship to Singapore was on offer. But she wasn’t sure about the truthfulness of the claim the president wanted her to make.

She consulted the White House counsel’s office and Eisenberg advised her against writing the email. Priebus then later did the same, coming by her office to tell her not to write it and to forget he even mentioned it.

Trump then asked Priebus to call Flynn to check in and tell him the president still cared about him. Priebus did and added that Flynn is an American hero. And then the president asked McFarland to convey to Flynn he felt bad for him and he should stay strong.

On March 5, McGahn learned the FBI had asked the presidential transition team for documents relating to Flynn. The president told his aides he wanted Dana Boente, the acting attorney general in charge of the Russia investigation, to find out whether he or the White House was under investigation.

Concerned about what else might come out on Flynn and the Russia investigation generally, Priebus and Bannon set up a Russia “war room” inside the White House in May, in part to compile a thick file on Flynn that included detailed diagrams on whom he met with and what conflicts he might have had. The idea was to be prepared with responses before any damaging new stories emerged.

But the “war room” was disbanded soon after because, some officials believed, the White House response was increasingly handled by a very tight circle of aides as the Mueller investigation appeared to get closer to members of the president’s family.

Six months later, Flynn began cooperating with Mueller’s investigation. His lawyer informed the president’s legal team that he could no longer share information with him, a typical step for someone whose client has decided to cooperate with investigators.

Trump’s personal lawyer at the time, John Dowd, left a voicemail for Flynn’s lawyer on Nov. 22, 2017, saying if “any information that implicates the president” comes up, “we need some kind of heads up. Um, just for the sake of protecting all of our interests if we can.” He then added that Trump’s feelings about Flynn hadn’t changed.

Flynn’s lawyer returned the call to reiterate that he couldn’t share information anymore. Dowd said the decision indicated a hostility toward Trump and he’d be sure to relay that to the president. Flynn’s lawyer took Dowd’s comments as an attempt to get Flynn to reconsider cooperating.

Before Flynn’s plea agreement was publicly disclosed in December, Jared Kushner spoke with Mueller’s team about the two issues the former national security adviser pleaded guilty to lying about: the Kislyak calls and Trump transition officials’ efforts to derail an Obama administration policy on Israel.

Five days after Flynn pleaded guilty in a Virginia federal court to lying to the FBI, Trump called then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions into the Oval Office. Sessions had infuriated Trump by recusing himself because of his own contacts with Kislyak and his deep involvement in the Trump campaign. Trump suggested to Sessions that he “unrecuse” himself and take control of the Russia investigation.

“You’d be a hero,” the president said.

Mueller concluded that it would have been reasonable for Flynn to want Trump to know about his conversations with Kislyak, given that the ambassador had indicated to Flynn that his request for Moscow not to retaliate had been relayed went all the way to Putin.

The special counsel also noted that when Trump explained why he fired Flynn, he never said that Flynn had lied to him, just to Pence. Still, he wrote, “the evidence is inconclusive and could not be relied upon to establish the president’s knowledge.”

Pence was asked in Dec. 2017 if he knew Flynn had lied to the FBI at the time he was fired. “”What I can tell you is that I knew that he had lied to me,” Pence told CBS. “And I know the president made the right decision with regard to him.”

Flynn reaffirmed his guilty plea at his first sentencing hearing in December 2018, when Judge Sullivan rejected the Mueller team’s recommendation of probation.

 

Over the next 23 months, the alliance between Flynn and federal prosecutors frayed – and the Justice Department under the new leadership of Attorney General Barr intervened.

“There was a lot of pressure on the Justice Department,” one person close to the White House said.

Flynn requested to withdraw his guilty plea on Jan. 14, 2020 – almost three years to the day that Pence publicly assured the country that Flynn had not discussed sanctions with Kislyak. . In response, federal prosecutors revised their sentencing recommendation to include a short jail sentence.

Several weeks later the prosecutors reversed that position to again say probation is an “appropriate” sentence, fueling speculation that pressure from the top levels of the Justice Department was weighing in on cases in which the president had a keen interest.

Unknown publicly at the time was that Barr was seeking an internal review of Flynn’s case, specifically his FBI interview. In February, Barr tasked a U.S. attorney in Missouri with investigating the circumstances surrounding the interview. That led to the Justice Department’s determination that Flynn’s case should be thrown out because “evidence is insufficient to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt.”

The request followed a public shift by Flynn that aligned more closely with the president’s narrative.

“When FBI agents came to the White House on January 24, 2017, I did not lie to them,” Flynn wrote in a court filing. “I believed I was honest with them to the best of my recollection at the time.”

Yet for officials who worked with Flynn in the White House at the time — who asked him repeatedly for weeks if he’d talked about sanctions with Kislyak and were told no — the mystery still lingers: why wasn’t he honest with them?

“The biggest question that’s never been answered is why didn’t he tell everyone in the West Wing that he talked to him about sanctions?” one official said. “Because no one would have cared if he did.”

When he leaves office, can ex-President Trump be trusted with America’s national security secrets?

When he leaves office, can ex-President Trump be trusted with America’s national security secrets?

Ken Dilanian                     

WASHINGTON — When David Priess was a CIA officer, he traveled to Houston, he recalls, to brief former President George H.W. Bush on classified developments in the Middle East.

It was part of a long tradition of former presidents being consulted about, and granted access to, some of the nation’s secrets.

Priess and other former intelligence officials say Joe Biden would be wise not to let that tradition continue in the case of Donald Trump.

They argue soon-to-be-former President Trump already poses a danger because of the secrets he currently possesses, and they say it would be foolish to trust him with more sensitive information. With Trump’s real estate empire under financial pressure and his brand suffering, they worry he will see American secrets as a profit center.

“This is not something that one could have ever imagined with other presidents, but it’s easy to imagine with this one,” said Jack Goldsmith, who worked as a senior Justice Department official in the George W. Bush administration.

“He’s shown as president that he doesn’t take secret-keeping terribly seriously,” Goldsmith said in an interview. “He has a known tendency to disrespect rules related to national security. And he has a known tendency to like to sell things that are valuable to him.”

Goldsmith and other experts noted that Trump has a history of carelessly revealing classified information. He told the Russian foreign minister and ambassador in 2017 about extremely sensitive terrorism threat information the U.S. had received from an ally. Last year he tweeted what experts said was a secret satellite photo of an Iranian nuclear installation.

Image: President Donald Trump meets with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavro (Russian Foreign Ministry Photo / AP)
Image: President Donald Trump meets with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavro (Russian Foreign Ministry Photo / AP)

 

The president also may be vulnerable to foreign influence. His tax records, as reported by the New York Times, reveal that Trump appears to face financial challenges, having personally guaranteed more than $400 million of his companies’ debt at a time when the pandemic has put pressure on the hotel industry, in which Trump is a major player.

“Is that a risk?” said Priess, who wrote “The President’s Book of Secrets,” about presidents and intelligence. “If it were someone applying for a security clearance, damn right it would be a risk.”

The White House did not respond to requests for comment. The Biden transition declined to comment.

Trump has said his finances are sound, and that the debts are a small percentage of his assets. Generally, though, large debts to foreign banks — Trump’s biggest creditor is reported to be Deutsche Bank, a German institution with links to Russia — would exclude a person from a top secret clearance.

Presidents, however, are not investigated and polygraphed for security clearances as all other government officials are. By virtue of being elected, they assume control over all the nation’s secret intelligence, and are allowed by law to disclose any of it, at any time, to anyone.

Former presidents aren’t subject to security clearance investigations, either. They are provided access to secrets as a courtesy, with the permission of the current president.

Typically, former presidents are given briefings before they travel overseas, or in connection with an issue about which the current president wishes to consult them, Priess and other experts say.

When President Bill Clinton sent former president Jimmy Carter to diffuse a tense stand off in Haiti, for example, Carter likely received classified briefings on the situation ahead of his trip.

And when George H.W. Bush visited his son in the White House, he sat in on on the President’s Daily Brief, the highly classified compendium of secrets that is presented each morning to the occupant of the Oval Office, according to Priess, who interviewed both men for his book.

It’s unclear whether former President Barack Obama has received intelligence briefings after he left office, but President Trump said in March that he hasn’t consulted his predecessors about coronavirus or anything else.

Former presidents have long made money after leaving office by writing books and giving speeches, but no former president has ever had the kind of international business entanglements Trump does. Trump has business interests or connections in China, Russia and other U.S. adversary countries that covet even tiny portions of what he knows about the American national security state.

That said, Trump probably is not conversant with many highly classified details, experts say, He was famous for paying only intermittent attention during his intelligence briefings and declining to read his written materials. Moreover, intelligence officials tend not to share specifics about sources and methods with any president, unless he asks.

So Trump probably doesn’t know the names of the CIA’s spies in Russia, experts say. But presumably he knows a bit about the capabilities of American surveillance drones, for example, or how adept the National Security Agency has been at intercepting the communications of various foreign governments.

Trump disclosed secret weapons system to Woodward

The president revealed to Bob Woodward in the new book ‘Rage’ that he had built a secret weapons system. The panel discusses.

Like so much with Trump, his track record of sharing secrets has been unprecedented in American presidential history.

In interviews with the journalist Bob Woodward for a book released this fall, Trump boasted about a secret nuclear weapons system that neither Russia nor China knew about.

According to the Washington Post, Woodward’s sources “later confirmed that the U.S. military had a secret new weapons system, but they would not provide details, and that the people were surprised Trump had disclosed it.”

When Trump briefed the public about the commando raid that killed ISIS leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, he disclosed classified and sensitive details, according to reporting by NBC News.

In 2017, Trump gave the location of two American nuclear submarines near North Korea to the president of the Philippines.

That same year, a member of his golf club at Mar-a-Lago took a photo of a briefing Trump and the Japanese prime minister were receiving in a public area about North Korea, and posted it on Facebook.

Image: Donald Trump and Shinzo Abe at Mar-a-Lago (Nicholas Kamm / AFP - Getty Images file)
Image: Donald Trump and Shinzo Abe at Mar-a-Lago (Nicholas Kamm / AFP – Getty Images file)

 

In 2018, the New York Times reported that Trump commonly used insecure cell phones to call friends, and that Chinese and other spies listened in, gaining valuable insights.

Doug Wise, a former CIA officer and Trump critic, argued this week in a piece on the Just Security web site that Trump has long posed a national security danger, and that affording him access to secrets after he leaves the White House would compound that danger.

Trump’s large debts, he wrote, present “obvious and alarming counterintelligence risks” to the United States.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, for one, would have a great incentive to pay Trump to act on Russia’s behalf, Wise wrote.

“Assuming President Joe Biden follows custom, Trump would continue to have access to sensitive information that the Russians would consider valuable,” he wrote. “As horrifying as it would seem, could a financially leveraged former president be pressured or blackmailed into providing Moscow sensitive information in exchange for financial relief and future Russian business considerations?”

It was not impossible to envision Trump paid millions on retainer by Gulf Arab states or other foreign governments, Harvard professor Goldsmith said, “in the course of which he starts blabbing and disclosing lots of secrets. It wouldn’t be an express quid pro quo, but people would pay for access to and time with him, knowing that he will not be discreet.”

Former CIA Director John Brennan, a frequent Trump critic who was denied access to his own classified file by the president, said the Biden administration should carefully weigh the question of Trump’s access to future secrets.

“The new administration would be well-advised to conduct an immediate review to determine whether Donald Trump should have continued access to classified information in light of his past actions and deep concern about what he might do in the future,” he said.

Then again, it may never become an issue, said former CIA officer Marc Polymeropoulos, who pointed out that Trump has long displayed “disdain” for American intelligence agencies.

“I would frankly be surprised if he even wanted these briefings,” Polymeropoulos said.

Treasury Secretary Mnuchin is moving $455 billion of unspent stimulus money into a fund the incoming Biden administration can’t deploy without Congress

Treasury Secretary Mnuchin is moving $455 billion of unspent stimulus money into a fund the incoming Biden administration can’t deploy without Congress

Joseph Zeballos-Roig                    
Mnuchin says he will talk to lawmakers about PPP disclosure
  • Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is moving $455 billion in unspent stimulus money into a fund that the incoming Biden administration cannot deploy without Congress, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday.
  • It will leave Mnuchin’s likely successor, Janet Yellen, with only $80 billion in relief funds at her discretion.
  • Experts say Mnuchin’s move greatly limits the tools available to the Biden administration to manage the economic fallout of the pandemic.

Video: Billionaires’ net worth increased by half a trillion dollars during the pandemic

How billionaires saw their net worth increase by half a trillion dollars during the pandemic

40 million Americans filed for unemployment during the pandemic, but billionaires saw their net worth increase by half a trillion dollars. This isn’t the first time billionaires have seen gains while others dealt with loss, and it tends to tie back to two things. First, the government disproportionately gives more aid to banks and corporations. Then, when the stock market bounces back, the unequal bailouts mean that the wealthy still have money on hand to invest and thus profit, while the middle and lower classes do not. Wealth-friendly tax laws and loopholes then keep those billionaires at the top. Knowing all of this, some are advocating for policies to help level the playing field and create change.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is moving $455 billion in unspent stimulus money into a fund that the incoming Biden administration cannot deploy without Congress, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday.

That amount includes money that Mnuchin is yanking from the Federal Reserve and unused loans for companies. The funds will be deposited into the Treasury’s General Fund, which requires legislative approval to use the money elsewhere. The Treasury Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The move, experts say, will likely undercut the ability of Mnuchin’s likely successor, Janet Yellen, from restarting the Fed’s lending programs at a similar scale early next year. Instead, she will have only $80 billion at her discretion.

Ernie Tedeschi, a policy economist at Evercore ISI, called Mnuchin’s decision “a dangerous move” as the US economy faces a perilous moment in the pandemic.

“It’s one more enormous risk we are piling onto the winter in the US atop of other risks already there,” Tedeschi told Business Insider. “We may need that backstop again as cases have now blown through their prior peaks, state and local governments are making cuts, and we’re about to kick off millions of people from unemployment insurance.”

Bharat Ramamurti, a Democratic member of a congressional panel overseeing the funds, criticized the move.

“This is Treasury’s latest ham-handed effort to undermine the Biden Administration,” he wrote on Twitter. “The good news is that it’s illegal and can be reversed next year.”

The development came after Mnuchin recently announced he was not extending most of the Fed’s emergency lending programs past December 31, including those supporting markets for corporate bonds and another providing loans to medium-size businesses and state governments.

The Treasury and central bank jointly operate the lending programs under the CARES Act, which Congress approved in March. The pandemic relief law doesn’t mandate Mnuchin move the money into the Treasury’s General Fund — it could keep it within easy reach for President-elect Joe Biden in another pot of money until 2026.

Mnuchin also requested last week that Fed Chair Jerome Powell return unspent stimulus money. He objected and said the lending programs should continue, sparking a rare public clash between two figures that had collaborated closely to contain the economic devastation from the pandemic. The Fed later said in a letter it would return the funds.

Mnuchin then called on Congress to repurpose the unspent money, and he drew support from Republicans like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

“We don’t need this money to buy corporate bonds. We need this money to go help small businesses that are still closed or hurt, no fault of their own, or people who are going to be on unemployment that’s running out,” he told CNBC last week.

Congress has been fiercely divided on passing another coronavirus relief bill that most economists say is urgently needed. Nearly 12 million workers are at risk of losing all of their federal unemployment aid next month, according to an analysis from the progressive Century Foundation.

A destructive legacy: Trump bids for final hack at environmental protections

A destructive legacy: Trump bids for final hack at environmental protections

Oliver Milman                       
<span>Photograph: Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images</span>
Photograph: Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images

 

Donald Trump is using the dying embers of his US presidency to hastily push through a procession of environmental protection rollbacks that critics claim will cement his legacy as an unusually destructive force against the natural world.

Related: Trump officials rush plans to drill in Arctic refuge before Biden inauguration

Trump has yet to acknowledge his election loss to president-elect Joe Biden but his administration has been busily finishing off a cavalcade of regulatory moves to lock in more oil and gas drilling, loosened protections for wildlife and lax air pollution standards before the Democrat enters the White House on 20 January.

Trump’s interior department is hastily auctioning off drilling rights to America’s last large untouched wilderness, the sprawling Arctic National Wildlife Refuge found in the tundra of northern Alaska. The refuge, home to polar bears, caribou and 200 species of birds, has been off limits to fossil fuel companies for decades but the Trump administration is keen to give out leases to extract the billions of barrels of oil believed to be in the area’s coastal region.

The leases could result in the release of vast quantities of carbon emissions as well as upend the long-held lifestyle of the local Gwich’in tribe, which depends upon the migratory caribou for sustenance. Several major banks, fiercely lobbied by the Gwich’in and conservationists, have refused to finance drilling in the refuge but industry groups have expressed optimism that the area will be carved open.

An airplane flies over caribou on the coastal plain of the Arctic national wildlife refuge in north-east Alaska.
An airplane flies over caribou on the coastal plain of the Arctic national wildlife refuge in north-east Alaska. Photograph: US Fish and Wildlife Service/AP

 

The administration is also opening the way for drilling around the Chaco Canyon National Historical Park, considered a sacred area by the native Navajo and Pueblo people who live near the New Mexico site and has targeted a linchpin environmental law, known as the National Environmental Policy Act, to allow more logging and road-building in national forests.

Trump has previously shrunk federally-protected areas as part of an “energy dominance” mantra that the president claims will bolster the US economy.

Meanwhile, safety rules for offshore drilling, put in place after the disastrous 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, are being watered down. The risks of a catastrophic, unrestrained spill are highest in the Arctic, where retreating sea ice is encouraging some fossil fuel firms to move into a region largely devoid of clean-up and rescue infrastructure.

The Trump administration is is also maintaining air quality standards widely condemned by experts as being insufficient to protect communities from sooty pollution that comes from cars, trucks and heavy industry. Many cities in the US are riven with environmental injustices, where poorer communities of color are routinely placed in proximity of industrial plants, highways and other sources of pollution.

Vehicles drive on the 101 freeway in Los Angeles, California.
Vehicles drive on the 101 freeway in Los Angeles, California. Photograph: Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images

 

The regulatory rampage extends to creatures from the skies to the prairies to the oceans – fines for people who kill migratory birds are being reviewed while the US Navy has been given latitude to inadvertently harass endangered whales with noise from explosions and speeding vessels during war game exercises along the west coast.

A plan to slash protections for sage grouse across the US west has been finalized, placing the habitat of the once-common bird, about the size of a chicken and known for its flamboyant mating dances, at risk. “These guys are hellbent on turning over the last refuges of the vanishing greater sage grouse to drilling, mining and grazing,” said Michael Saul, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. “It’s disgusting, transparent and illegal.”

The Trump administration spent four years assaulting every protection for our air, water, lands, wildlife and climate

Jill Tauber

The actions of the exiting administration will have “extremely damaging environmental consequences”, said Richard Revesz, a professor of environmental law at New York University. “Trump’s counterproductive actions have allowed the climate crisis to intensify and put the health of many Americans, especially in the most vulnerable communities, at risk by ignoring threats from pollution,” he added.

The scorched earth approach of Trump’s final months will further exacerbate a four-year legacy where climate policies have been dismantled, clean air and water rules scaled back and legions of demoralized federal government scientists sidelined or decided to quit.

“The Trump administration spent four years assaulting every protection for our air, water, lands, wildlife and climate,” said Jill Tauber, vice-president of litigation at Earthjustice, a non-profit law organization.

People visit Griffith Observatory on a day rated &#x002018;moderate&#x002019; air quality in Los Angeles, California, in June 2019.
People visit Griffith Observatory on a day rated ‘moderate’ air quality in Los Angeles, California, in June 2019. Photograph: Mario Tama/Getty Images

Leah Donahey, legislative director at the Alaska Wilderness League, added: “No administration has been worse for our environment or our nation’s public health than this one.”

Biden will be able to reverse some of Trump’s actions and has vowed to limit drilling on federal land as well as to rejoin the Paris climate agreement, which the incumbent has removed the US from. Biden has called the climate change an “existential threat” in the wake of a year of fierce wildfires in California and a record number of hurricanes in the Atlantic, but his ambition to pass sweeping climate legislation hinge upon a US senate that, with looming special elections in the state of Georgia, appears likely to remain in Republican control.

Any successful remediation of the rollbacks will also have to survive as flurry of lawsuits, with the US supreme court now titled decisively in a conservative direction. All of this will soak up time during a period where scientists say planet-heating emissions must be cut rapidly to avoid the worst ravages of the climate crisis. “Trump’s legacy on environmental issues will be less about lasting policy changes,” said Revesz, “and more about lost time and missed opportunities.”

Trump May Need to Be Impeached and Removed Before Inauguration Day

Trump May Need to Be Impeached and Removed Before Inauguration Day

Jack Holmes                                    November 19, 2020
Photo credit: Tasos Katopodis - Getty Images
Photo credit: Tasos Katopodis – Getty Images

 

Now that Donald Trump, the President of the United States, is personally “reaching out” to members of a Michigan election board as part of a larger plot to simply throw out the results of an election he lost by a comfortable margin, maybe we can stop pretending this is just a public tantrum we can allow to burn out until he falls into a fevered nap. That his allies believe the president must be approached like a spoiled toddler is itself an indication of our national decline, and of all the lackeys who’ve worked so hard to make this state of affairs possible. But his campaign is also in court asking a judge to simply nix the election in Pennsylvania and give him the Electoral Votes. This is not just another meltdown to be managed, as we all try to dodge the toys he’s throwing out of the crib. He should be removed from office for crimes against the American republic.

I have said in private for some time that I believe Trump, if he is to actually leave office, may have to be impeached in the lame duck period. It’s often been met with eye-rolls, but there are a number of reasons to believe he simply will not leave willingly, even if it’s useful and necessary to call on him to resign. The first is that he may well face criminal jeopardy in multiple jurisdictions once he loses the immunity protections of the presidency. This guy has been crooked for a long time, and while a staggering number of the people around him have faced prison time, he has yet to see any real consequences. He does not intend to. He also owes a lot of people a lot of money, and it’s not clear he could make good even if he wanted to. (He does not.) Beyond the practical, there is the specter of his towering ego and his crippling fear of humiliation. His impulsive and shameless behavior, often bordering on nihilism, is driven in no small part by a primal urge to avoid paying the piper. It’s worked for him his whole life. This guy never pays his bills—to contractors or to the bank—and nothing ever comes of it. Why should that stop now?

Photo credit: Tasos Katopodis - Getty Images
Photo credit: Tasos Katopodis – Getty Images

 

Some allies have brushed his antics off as a presidential coping mechanism, which again places the American republic in the position of existing to serve one man’s fragile psyche. America First! His aides will occasionally leak some horseshit to the media about how this is about Fighting For His People, as if Donald Trump genuinely engages in altruistic behavior, and as if even that would justify undermining American democracy itself and delegitimizing the coming presidency of Joe Biden.

Which is part of the point: even Trump’s more reluctant allies in the Republican Party are interested in using the lame duck to turn Biden’s entire presidency into the same. Trump’s destructive impulse has been highly useful in that regard: on the foreign-policy front, he is reportedly in the process of setting “so many fires that it will be hard for the Biden administration to put them all out.” He is also hard at work ransacking the federal bureaucracy to prevent Biden doing much of anything at all. Meanwhile, he’s not doing the actual job in any sense. His regime is doing nothing about the pandemic even as it explodes in severity. There will be no relief bill for businesses or local governments.

All of these consequences are pretty much baked in now. Trump’s base will refuse to recognize Biden’s legitimacy as president, having been served a steady stream of disinformation on Facebook and the teevee. He’ll be Birtherized. Along with that damage to the republic, the actual government itself will be thoroughly crippled, and many people will die unnecessarily from COVID-19. But the longer this is allowed to go on, the more Trump himself may believe that he has the backing and support to actually steal the election. After all, his allies have not stood up to him on anything except the prospect of pulling troops out of the Middle East. In his time in the big chair, the president has steamrolled the separation of powers that undergirds our Constitution and faced zero consequences. He has rejected the notion Congress has subpoena power. He has flouted federal court orders. But we’re supposed to believe The Law or The Norms will stop him now? He will do whatever he can get away with, just like he’s always done.

Photo credit: BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI - Getty Images
Photo credit: BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI – Getty Images

 

There is some chance that, if the Electoral College actually meets and votes as the American public has instructed on December 13—that is, if the 306 votes Biden looks to have won are awarded to him—that Trump will slink away to Mar-a-Lago and stay there through the Inauguration. (The prospect that he will show up on January 20 to graciously engage in a time-honored tradition that reinforces the health of American democracy, and signals allegiance to something greater than himself, seems genuinely absurd.) But how much damage will he do while he still holds the powers of the presidency—which he can wield from anywhere—as he tells himself he has nothing to lose?

In a sane country, he would be nowhere near this position. But in a moderately less sane one, he would be removed from office—via the impeachment power of Congress or the 25th Amendment—before he can do more damage. If the Senate Republicans who would need to convict him were not such craven fools, they might realize they don’t need him anymore, and that if he is swiftly removed—if they repudiate him—he may not turn out to be the zombie kingmaker all have assumed he will be in his political afterlife. He has only risen so far because they have allowed it at every moment.

Trump asked for options for attacking Iran last week, but held off – source

Reuters – Middle East & Africa

Trump asked for options for attacking Iran last week, but held off – source

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Donald Trump, with two months left in office, last week asked for options on attacking Iran’s main nuclear site, but ultimately decided against taking the dramatic step, a U.S. official said on Monday.

Trump made the request during an Oval Office meeting on Thursday with his top national security aides, including Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, new acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller and General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the official said.

Trump, who has refused to concede and is challenging the results of the Nov. 3 presidential election, is to hand over power to Democratic President-elect Joe Biden on Jan. 20.

The official confirmed the account of the meeting in The New York Times, which reported the advisers persuaded Trump not to go ahead with a strike because of the risk of a broader conflict.

“He asked for options. They gave him the scenarios and he ultimately decided not to go forward,” the official said.

Trump has spent all four years of his presidency engaging in an aggressive policy against Iran, withdrawing in 2018 from the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by his Democratic predecessor, Barack Obama, and imposing economic sanctions against a wide variety of Iranian targets.

Trump’s request for options came a day after a U.N. watchdog report showed Iran had finished moving a first cascade of advanced centrifuges from an above-ground plant at its main uranium enrichment site to an underground one, in a fresh breach of its 2015 nuclear deal with major powers.

Alireza Miryousefi, spokesman for Iran’s mission to the United Nations in New York, said Iran’s nuclear program is purely for peaceful purposes and civilian use and Trump’s policies have not changed that. “However, Iran has proven to be capable of using its legitimate military might to prevent or respond to any melancholy adventure from any aggressor,” he added.

Iran’s 2.4 tonne stock of low-enriched uranium is now far above the deal’s 202.8 kg limit. It produced 337.5 kg in the quarter, less than the more than 500 kg recorded in the previous two quarters by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

In January, Trump ordered a U.S. drone strike that killed Iranian General Qassem Soleimani at Baghdad’s airport. But he has shied away from broader military conflicts and sought to withdraw U.S. troops from global hotspots in keeping with a promise to stop what he calls “endless wars.”

A strike on Iran’s main nuclear site at Natanz could flare into a regional conflict and pose a serious foreign policy challenge for Biden.

Biden’s transition team, which has not had access to national security intelligence due to the Trump administration’s refusal to begin the transition, declined comment.

Reporting by Steve Holland; Additional reporting by Michael Martina and Michelle Nichols; Editing by Mary Milliken, Cynthia Osterman, Leslie Adler and Lincoln Feast.

Column: Just when you thought the president could sink no lower….

Column: Just when you thought the president could sink no lower….

Jonah Goldberg                 November 17, 2020
U.S. President Donald Trump leaves the stage after addressing a plenary session on the last day of the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, WEF, in Davos, Switzerland, Friday, Jan. 26, 2018. (Laurent Gillieron/Keystone via AP)
President Trump leaves the stage after speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in 2018. (Laurent Gillieron / Associated Press)

 

“Despite the Left’s attempts to undermine this Election, I will NEVER stop fighting for YOU,” President Trump assured me in a fundraising email.

I don’t take campaign fundraising emails seriously (never mind literally). They’re all pretty stupid.

But this one was obviously different, for the simple reason that the election is over. Indeed, this note — one of a great many sent by the Trump campaign recently — was a plea for money to pay for the legal effort to reverse an election Trump lost by the same margin of electoral votes he once claimed amounted to a “massive landslide.” And if you read the letter’s fine print, you’ll discover that “fighting for you” actually means “fighting for me.” Most of the money from small donors will go not to the legal effort, but rather to pay down campaign debt.

In a sense I’m grateful that Trump is doubling down on everything wrong about his presidency in its final chapter. Yes, this is embarrassing for the country. Yes, Trump’s radioactive conspiracy theory of a stolen election will have a long, poisonous half-life. But Trump is removing all doubt that his narcissistic presidency was always entirely about him.

The country is in the midst of a health and economic crisis, but Trump’s primary focus is licking his own wounds, not tackling the country’s. He has largely abandoned formal intelligence briefings and hasn’t met with the coronavirus task force in months. Instead, with the exception of a Veterans Day visit to Arlington National Cemetery and a Friday night statement on the pandemic, he’s conducted his post-election presidency doing precisely what he’s always done — subordinating the office to his own wants, desires and petty grievances.

He punctuates his brooding and sulking with pathetic tweets brimming with conspiratorial or otherwise deranged hogwash, including the repeated claim “I won the election.” He continues to insist, as he has throughout his presidency, that proof for his lies is just around the corner. On Sunday, he promised a new lawsuit showing the “unconstitutionality” of the 2020 election.

“Nixon’s real tragedy is that he never had the stature to be a tragic hero,” Gary Wills wrote in “Nixon Agonistes.” “He is the stuff of sad (almost heartbreaking) comedy.” I think that’s a little unfair to Nixon, but it’s dead on with Trump.

It would take a heart of stone not to laugh, as he finally turns on the real Judas in his eyes, Fox News (where I am a contributor). The network, he tweets, “forgot what made them successful, what got them there. They forgot the Golden Goose. The biggest difference between the 2016 Election, and 2020, was @FoxNews!”

Never mind that Fox was No. 1 in every time slot more than a decade before Trump descended that escalator in 2015. Never mind, that for four years, he began his day with his Presidential Daily Brief — “Fox and Friends” — and ended it with the primetime gang. And never mind that Trump and the opinion side of the network remain in a deeply codependent relationship.

He still didn’t get the full-throated, unwavering praise he needed, so now he finds joy in thinking about creating a new competing network, one without all the obvious anti-Trump bias!

Most presidents, if they’re remembered at all, get summarized with a single sentence. Whatever Trump’s sentence might have been before the election, he managed to rewrite it after the election: “A one-term president who was the first in American history to refuse to concede or recognize the election results.” Talk about scoring after the buzzer.

George H.W. Bush, the last incumbent president to lose a reelection bid, left office (after graciously conceding) in fairly bad odor on the right. After eight years of Bill Clinton, however, nostalgia for Bush was so strong, his son parlayed his patronymic name ID into a winning presidential bid.

If Trump had followed a similar course, he (or perhaps his sybaritic scion) might have cashed in on similar nostalgia after four years of a Biden presidency almost certain to be seen as disastrous by those on the right. Instead, he has chosen to prove that those of us who said “character is destiny” were right all along.

Let Trump continue insisting he didn’t really lose — it’s impossible to stop him after all. Let those who believe him — or pretend to — continue to march and tweet and rant, including the many highly compensated media personalities who’ve gotten rich off the Trump train.

But for the rest of us, the one thing we won’t ever feel about the Trump presidency is nostalgia — not least because he won’t really be gone. Even after he leaves the White House, he’ll be fighting for himself — and making sure we hear him — for the rest of his days.

Secret intelligence exists that ‘would cast Trump in very negative light’, warns ex-FBI chief

Secret intelligence exists that ‘would cast Trump in very negative light’, warns ex-FBI chief

Kate Ng                          November 14, 2020
&lt;p&gt;Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe appears remotely during the &#x00201c;Oversight of the Crossfire Hurricane Investigation&#x00201d;&lt;/p&gt; (Getty Images)

Former acting FBI director Andrew McCabe has warned that classified intelligence from bureau’s investigation into President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign ties to Russia could contain information that would “risk casting the president in a very negative light”.

Mr McCabe has been at the centre of a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, in which a Republican-controlled panel is reviewing the FBI’s recision to initiate the investigation.

He testified before the panel on Tuesday and told lawmakers that officials had a “duty” to carry out the investigation due to the information they had collected. Mr McCabe personally approved the decision to investigate Mr Trump for possible obstruction of justice.

In an interview with CNN on Friday night, Mr McCabe was asked what the risks were if more information from the Russia investigation was to be declassified.

CNN anchor Andrew Cuomo said Mr Trump was told by Devin Nunes, a close ally of the president’s and former chair of the House Intelligence Committee, that if more previously unreleased information comes out, the more it will appear that the president was “framed”.

“From your knowledge, is there anything that could come out that people would look at and say, ‘wow, I can’t believe they ever included the president in this analysis, he and his people clearly did nothing’?” asked Mr Cuomo.

Mr McCabe replied: “There is some very, very serious, very specific, undeniable intelligence that has not come out, that if it were released, would risk compromising our access to that sort of information in the future.

“I think it would also risk casting the president in a very negative light – so, would he have a motivation to release those things? It’s almost incomprehensible to me that he would want that information out, I don’t see how he spins it into his advantage, because quite frankly, I don’t believe it’s flattering.

Asked if Mr McCabe thought there was more “bad stuff” about Mr Trump that wasn’t already publicly known, he replied: “There is always more intelligence, there is a lot more in the intelligence community assessment than what is ever released for public consumption.

“The original version of that report was classified at the absolute highest level I have ever seen. We’re talking about top secret, compartmentalised code word stuff, and it would be tragic to American intelligence collection for those sources to be put at risk.”

The FBI has been accused by the Senate Judiciary Committee of going “rogue” with the Russia investigation, with one senator describing it as the “biggest scandal in the history of the FBI” on Tuesday.

Mr Trump has repeatedly railed against the FBI for the investigation and maintained there was “no collusion” between his 2016 presidential campaign and Russia.

In 2019, after a report by former FBI director Robert Mueller concluded that Mr Trump’s campaign did not conspire with Russia during the 2016 election – but did not clear him of obstruction of justice – Mr Trump tweeted: “No Collusion, No Obstruction, Complete and Total EXONERATION. KEEP AMERICA GREAT!”

During the hearing on Tuesday, Mr McCabe pointed out that Mr Trump fired then-director James B Comey in 2017 after Mr Comey refused to close an investigation into the president’s national security at the time, or say publicly that Mr Trump himself was not under investigation.

Mr McCabe said: “It became pretty clear to us that he did not want us to continue investigating what the Russians had done.

“We had many reasons at that point to believe that the president might himself pose a danger to national security and that he might have engaged in obstruction of justice, if the firing of the director and those other things were geared towards elimination or stopping our investigation of Russian activity.”

How the Koch brothers used their massive fortune to power a conservative crusade that reshaped American politics

Business Insider

How the Koch brothers used their massive fortune to power a conservative crusade that reshaped American politics

Joseph Zeballos-Roig                 November 13, 2020
GettyImages 110872550
In this February 26, 2007 file photograph, Charles Koch, head of Koch Industries, talks passion Bo Rader/Wichita Eagle/Tribune News Service via Getty Images. 

  • The Koch Brothers fueled a conservative crusade that profoundly reshaped American politics.
  • They built an influential network of donors aligned with their libertarian ideals of free-markets and lower taxes.
  • Charles Koch recently wrote he had misgivings about the partisanship he fostered in a new book. “Boy, did we screw up! What a mess!” he wrote.
  • Here’s a look at how the Koch brothers realigned the nation’s politics with their libertarian brand of conservatism.

Charles Koch is in the news after he shared lines from his newest book in a Wall Street Journal interview published Friday. He expressed regret for his role powering a conservative crusade that forever changed American politics.

“Boy, did we screw up! What a mess!” he wrote.

David and Charles Koch became a colossal political force in recent decades. Since the 1970s, they personally donated at least $100 million to aid the rise of the Tea Party movement and bolster the Republican Party, according to The New York Times.

They built an influential network of donors aligned with their libertarian ideals of free-markets, lower taxes, and shrinking the size of the federal government. As their network poured money into recent election cycles, critics assailed it as the “Kochtopus.”

The Koch brothers also funded initiatives that undercut climate science, and both “vehemently opposed the government taking any action on climate change that would hurt their fossil fuel profits,” author Jane Mayer wrote in her book “Dark Money.”

Here’s a look at how the Koch brothers realigned the nation’s politics with their libertarian brand of conservatism.

David Koch ran as the vice-presidential candidate for the Libertarian party in 1980, attacking campaign donation limits and calling for the repeal of laws criminalizing drug use and homosexuality. The loss compelled him to reevaluate his political approach, planting the seeds for the extensive donor network he would help create.

ed clark david koch

 

The Koch brothers founded Americans for Prosperity in 2004, now one of the most influential conservative political organizations. It counts more than 700 wealthy donors in its ranks and has chapters in 36 states. Its influence is only rivaled by the Republican Party.

Americans for Prosperity
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) speaks during an Americans For Prosperity rally on Capitol Hill April 6, 2011 in Washington, DC. Alex Wong/Getty Images. Source:  The Wall Street Journal

 

The Koch Brothers were credited with financially aiding the rise of the Tea Party movement, which wrested control of the House for Republicans in the 2010 midterms at the tail end of President Barack Obama’s first term.

Tea Party
AP       Source: TIME

The Kochs backed the American Legislative Exchange Council, an organization of conservative state lawmakers and business lobbyists. They’ve drafted “model legislation” that lawmakers have introduced to cut taxes, weaken environmental protections, and promote other conservative ideas. More than 600 of them have become law across the US.

david koch 9
Phelan M. Ebenhack / AP Images.  Source: USA Today.

 

The Kochs have used their network to support academic programs and centers at colleges across the nation that teach conservative economic principles and theories. Its generated controversy from critics who argue it gives conservative organizations too much power in hiring and firing professors and researchers.

college campus students walk
College campus. Drew Angerer / Getty Images.

Source: Center for Public Integrity

As key players in the fossil fuel industry, the Koch brothers staunchly opposed efforts to fight climate change and have downplayed its risks. After the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United in 2011, the Kochs unleashed a wave of political advertising to elect Republicans who wouldn’t pass new environmental regulations.

Charles Koch
Charles Koch. YouTube/CBS This Morning. 

Sources: Washington Post, The New York Times 

During the 2016 presidential election, the Koch network spent around $750 million, putting it almost on par with the amount spent by the Republican Party. But the Kochs didn’t back Trump, and they’ve been critical of his policies on trade and immigration.

donald trump election
Republican president-elect Donald Trump in November 2016. Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images       Source: The Washington Post

 

The Kochs ramped up their political efforts during the 2018 midterms, vowing to spend up to $400 million to support conservative candidates . But they lost many of their races and Democrats recaptured the House, exposing limits to their influence.

Trump rally midterms Florida
The crowd cheered as Donald Trump looked at them at a campaign rally for GOP midterm candidates in Florida. Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Source: Center for Responsive Politics.

 The Kochs were key supporters of the First Step Act, a bipartisan criminal justice legislation that became law earlier this year. It was aimed at reducing recidism rates among federal prisoners, expanding early-release programs and modifying sentencing laws.

Chuck Grassley, Cory Booker, Mike Lee and Lindsay Graham after criminal justice reform bill passed
GettyImages 110872550
Charles Koch. Bo Rader/Wichita Eagle/Tribune News Service via Getty Images

 

Charles Koch said in a Wall Street Journal interview published Friday he regretted the conservative partisanship he fostered. He shared several lines from his new book.

Boy, did we screw up!” he writes in his new book, “Believe in People: Bottom-Up Solutions for a Top-Down World.” “What a mess!