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Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse
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President Trump’s legal team reversed course Sunday, announcing that a lawyer slated to join the attorneys handling the response to special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s Russia investigation will not come on board after all, the latest sign of disarray for Trump’s legal strategy.
The development came three days after John Dowd, who had been Trump’s top attorney handling the Russia inquiry, resigned amid strategy disputes with the president.
Trump is now left, at least temporarily, without a traditional criminal defense attorney as Mueller’s team appears to be entering a critical phase in its investigation into Moscow’s interference in the 2016 election and whether the president’s campaign cooperated with Russia in this effort.
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The unraveling of the president’s legal team has left his advisers concerned. People familiar with the situation said the president has been counseled by friends that he needs to find a new lawyer to quarterback his team, and efforts are underway by people close to Trump to hire a new lawyer.
Before his resignation Thursday, Dowd had been Trump’s main point of contact with Mueller’s office and had been helping to negotiate the terms for an interview between the president and the special counsel’s team as it examines whether Trump obstructed justice by allegedly seeking to shut down the investigation, which was being conducted by the FBI until Trump fired FBI Director James B. Comey in May. Mueller was then appointed special counsel by Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein.
Trump’s legal effort is now led by Sekulow, a conservative attorney and radio host who has concentrated on constitutional issues, and assisted by Ty Cobb, a White House lawyer paid by taxpayers to represent the institution of the presidency rather than Trump personally. Cobb, too, has occasionally drawn the president’s ire, people familiar with the team have said.
A number of white-collar attorneys in Washington said the president has been unable to attract top-flight talent as he looks to overhaul his legal team, with major firms fearful that an affiliation with Trump and the Russia case could impact their ability to attract other clients and hire new lawyers.
Mister Sandman
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I hope the WH has some VERY good pediatric therapists.... poor kid [emoji53]
It's no small irony that the same week in which ultra-hawk John Bolton finally rose to a position of power at the White House also marked the 15th anniversary of the disastrous war he helped birth.
Bolton, a veteran “swamp” creature who held several national security posts in both Bush administrations, is poised to replace H.R. McMaster as national security adviser in early April. McMaster’s departure and Bolton’s appointment were both expected after weeks of White House whispers, but their tweeted confirmation on Thursday still set alarm bells ringing across the capital.
There are few more notorious hard-liners in Washington than Bolton, a 69-year-old former diplomat known for being profoundly undiplomatic. He shares President Trump’s scorn for multilateralism, and his loathing for the United Nations (where Bolton served a brief stint as U.S. ambassador) is matched by his contempt for the European Union. He sees both institutions as forums for ponderous deliberations that undermine American sovereignty and impede Washington's ability to act decisively.
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“The Trump White House is something of a clown show, but Bolton is no clown,” wrote Matthew Waxman, who served in the Bush White House. “Rather than just adding a Fox-newsy ideologue who shifts the balance of the administration team’s view further toward the president’s most hawkish outlook, Trump has added someone who can actually help him make that outlook into reality.”
Ann Fucking Coulter ... LMAO
When Rick Gates struck a plea deal last month with special counsel Robert Mueller, the 45-year-old former Trump campaign official likely avoided decades behind bars and salvaged a chance to watch his children grow up.
The question is what Gates offered Mueller in return. Though it is a virtual given that Gates will sell out his business partner and Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, less understood is the direct threat Gates could pose to President Donald Trump.
That’s the conclusion of several lawyers involved in the Russia case and more than 15 current and former Trump aides and associates interviewed by POLITICO to determine how much danger Gates’s guilty plea could pose to the president and his inner circle, and how alarmed they might be by his testimony.
While Gates now wears a GPS monitor around his ankle, in 2016 he wore a Secret Service lapel pin that gave him easy access to Trump on the campaign trail and at Trump Tower.
“He saw everything,” said a Republican consultant who worked with Gates during the campaign. The consultant called Gates one of the “top five” insiders whom Mueller could have tapped as a cooperative government witness. One defense attorney in the case said that Gates’s plea has triggered palpable alarm in Trump world.
The announcement is in retaliation for the poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain.
Twelve Russian diplomats at the United Nations in New York and 48 at the Russian embassy in Washington face expulsion by the U.S. government for what senior administration officials described as covert intelligence operations that undermine U.S. national security.
Can It Happen Here?, a new collection of essays that ask whether America is susceptible to creeping authoritarianism, includes a startling assertion by psychologists Karen Stenner and Jonathan Haidt.
"Western liberal democracies," they write, "have now exceeded many people's capacity to tolerate them."
Their analysis of a survey conducted at the end of 2016 found "about a third of white responders across 29 liberal democracies proved to be authoritarian to some degree." That large chunk of the population is predisposed to support authoritarian leaders in times of real or perceived threat.
In their research-driven essay "Authoritarianism Is Not a Momentary Madness," they offer a compelling clarification as to how Donald Trump holds onto the support of 30 to 40 percent of Americans, even as he displays authoritarian tendencies. Furthermore, their findings help explain our increasing political polarization.
"The things that multiculturalists believe will help people appreciate and thrive in democracy—appreciating difference, talking about difference, displaying and applauding difference—are the very conditions that encourage authoritarians not to heights of tolerance, but to their intolerant extremes," they write.
Stenner is an Australian political psychologist and behavioral economist. A former faculty member at Princeton and Duke universities, she is director of Insight-Analytics, and one of the world's foremost researchers on the psychology of authoritarianism. She explained the reasons for its recent rise in an email exchange.
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