monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

GOP Sen. Jeff Flake gave some of his harshest criticism of President Donald Trump to date in a commencement speech Wednesday to Harvard Law students, where he shared his concerns for the integrity of politics in the United States.

The Arizona senator, who has announced he will not be seeking re-election in 2018, has said he will use his remaining time in the Senate to speak out against the President when he believes it is warranted.

"Not to be unpleasant, but I do bring news from our nation's capital. First, the good news: Your national leadership is ... not good," he said at the commencement Wednesday. "At all. Our presidency has been debased. By a figure who has a seemingly bottomless appetite for destruction and division. And only a passing familiarity with how the Constitution works."

He later continued: "Now, you might reasonably ask, where is the good news in that? Well, simply put: We may have hit bottom. Oh, and that's also the bad news. In a rare convergence, the good news and bad news are the same: Our leadership is not good, but it probably can't get much worse."

In an interview with CNN's "The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer, Flake said his speech was about standing up and reclaiming "our constitutional prerogative."

"Whether it's passing immigration reform or authorization for use of force, we shouldn't continually say 'We'll pass what the president wants,' we should pass what we think we should do and ask the president to sign it. He can either sign it or veto it. But we've given far too much, and I think its time for the Congress to stand up."

During his commencement address, Flake not only slammed the White House, but also blamed Congress, saying it's "failing its constitutional obligations to counteract the power of the president, and in so doing is dishonoring itself, at a critical moment in the life of our nation."

"It will be the work of your generation to make sure that this degradation of democracy does not continue -- to see to it that our current flirtation with lawlessness and authoritarianism does not become a heritable trait to be passed down from this presidency," he said.

He ended by telling the students they have the power to change the nature of the nation's politics.

"We need each other, and it is a scoundrel who would prosper politically by turning us against each other," he said. "That is the job before us -- to get through this, and beyond it. And you're just the ones to take us there."

Jeff Flake

Guess he never heard of separation of powers and checks and balances.

Quote:

Building on the ideas of Polybius, Montesquieu, William Blackstone, John Locke and other philosophers and political scientists over the centuries, the framers of the U.S. Constitution divided the powers and responsibilities of the new federal government among three branches: the legislative branch, the executive branch and the judicial branch.

In addition to this separation of powers, the framers built a system of checks and balances designed to guard against tyranny by ensuring that no branch would grab too much power.

“If men were angels, no government would be necessary,” James Madison wrote in the Federalist Papers, of the necessity for checks and balances. “In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty is this: You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself.”

History

However, 100% of the power that is assigned to the executive branch is held by the President alone. There is no separation of powers within the executive branch.

Maybe yes, maybe no.

But firing someone because his investigation might lead to discovery of wrongdoing by you still constitutes obstruction of justice.

A senior North Korean official has dismissed remarks by US Vice-President Mike Pence as "stupid", casting further uncertainty about a planned meeting between the two countries' leaders.

Choe Son-hui said Pyongyang would not "beg" for dialogue and warned of a "nuclear showdown" if diplomacy failed.

The California city of West Hollywood has proclaimed 23 May Stormy Daniels Day.

In a ceremony at the Chi Chi La Rue sex shop, West Hollywood granted the adult film star the key to the city.

In a Facebook post, the city said Ms Daniels "has proven herself to be a profile in courage".

West Hollywood Mayor John Duran and members of the city's council gave Ms Daniels the key to the city in a ceremony on Wednesday.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, Ms Daniels thanked the city and praised its tolerance.

"This community has a history of standing up to bullies and speaking truth to power, and I'm so very, very lucky to be a part of it," she reportedly said.

Ms Daniels' lawyer, Michael Avenatti, also attended, and reportedly praised his client's courage.

Saudi Arabia has reportedly arrested three more women's rights activists in a crackdown launched just weeks before a ban on women driving will be lifted.

Human rights groups said at least 11 people, most of them women who had long campaigned for the right to drive, had now been detained since last week.

Officials have said they are suspected of "suspicious contact with foreign parties" and undermining "stability".

Other activists have said the crackdown is "unprecedented" and "shocking".

Sorry, you are incorrect. An executive who fires an investigator under his power because the investigation might uncover wrongdoing by him has committed obstruction of justice.

There has always been a relatively innocent and eminently plausible interpretation for why Donald Trump’s presidential campaign had so many suspicious ties to Russia. Let’s review:

First, the candidate himself took an indulgent view of Vladimir Putin. This was naïve, but it was no crime: Barack Obama also sought rapprochement with Moscow in 2008, despite Russia’s invasion of Georgia that year and the Kremlin’s notorious human-rights abuses.

Second, Trump had extensive business ties to Russians, both as customers and partners. This, too, isn’t criminal, even if some of those customers and partners were.

Third, Trump ran a chaos campaign. It lacked the kind of vetting procedures that might have excluded political grifters like Paul Manafort or Carter Page. Trump hired Manafort in part because he owned an apartment in Trump Tower and promised to work for free. Page came aboard on the casual recommendation of Ed Cox, chairman of the New York Republican Party.

Fourth, Trump talks (or tweets) a lot of trash. When, at a rally in October 2016, he said “I love WikiLeaks!” because of its publication of Clinton campaign manager John Podesta’s hacked emails, did the candidate even understand that the U.S. government saw WikiLeaks as a vehicle for Russian political interference? Perhaps not.

Finally, Trump was ill-served by his inept son, Don Jr., whose bungled efforts to solicit damaging information on Hillary Clinton from a Russian lawyer would have constituted collusion, if anything had come of it. But Trump himself claims to have been unaware of the infamous Trump Tower meeting at the time.

All of this might make for a compelling case that there’s not much to L’Affaire Russe, as the president never tires of averring. Or it might not. That’s what we have Robert Mueller for: To lay the question to rest, if only the president and his congressional muppets will let him.

But that’s not what we’re debating today. Instead, the president’s apologists insist the real story is the genesis of the investigation, supposedly a Deep State smear job by the F.B.I. against an anti-establishment candidate they feared and loathed. Or, as Trump tweeted Wednesday morning, “SPYGATE could be one of the biggest political scandals in history!”

So let’s review again:

Beginning in 2014, the Obama administration began receiving urgent warnings that Russia planned to interfere in U.S. politics. “You have no idea how extensive these networks are in Europe … and in the U.S.,” a Russian source told a U.S. official that year, according to an investigation by Politico’s Ali Watkins. “Russia has penetrated media organizations, lobbying firms, political parties, governments and militaries in all of these places.”

As early as 2013, the F.B.I. had concerns about Paul Manafort and his deputy, Rick Gates, regarding their “offshore consulting activities,” and interviewed the pair repeatedly. At the time, Manafort was working for Ukrainian President (and Putin puppet) Viktor Yanukovych, from whom he allegedly received more than $12 million in secret payments.

The bureau also had long been interested in Carter Page, an obscure energy consultant whom it had first interviewed in 2013 in connection to his contacts with Victor Podobnyy, a Russian spy based in New York. Page’s chief distinction was his willingness to recite Kremlin talking points on foreign policy.

Manafort joined the Trump campaign in March 2016. Page was named to Trump’s foreign policy team that same month. So was George Papadopoulos, another nonentity with pro-Russian views. Within two months, Papadopoulos was getting word of Russia’s hacking ops via a Kremlin-connected source, which he passed along to former Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer that May. The Australians later related this to the F.B.I.

Retired Gen. Mike Flynn, the future national security adviser, had his own financial ties to Russian companies and organizations that would stand to benefit from the lifting of U.S. sanctions on Russia. Flynn’s sudden advocacy for lifting sanctions was especially odd given that he was previously on record as an anti-Russia hawk.

All of this is independent of Christopher Steele’s notorious Russia dossier. Some pundits on the right are now breathlessly trying to claim that the bureau was spying on Page, and thus the campaign, via an informant before the formal investigation began, as if this is an outrage of the first order.

But the significant question is whether any competent counterintelligence officer would not have seen, in this constellation of facts, serious reason to believe that the Trump campaign was profoundly vulnerable to Russian manipulation, even (or especially) if the candidate himself didn’t know about it. Just imagine if Manafort or Flynn hadn’t had their Russia ties exposed and now occupied positions of trust in the White House. The Kremlin would surely know how to leverage their secrets.

Trump is now taking his usual unbridled umbrage at comments by former National Intelligence Director James Clapper, which the president then misquoted, that he should be glad the F.B.I. was looking into potential Russian infiltration of his campaign. Of course he should be glad: The Bureau has now twice rescued him, first by reopening the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails on the eve of the election, and then by clearing out the Russian stooges in his employ.

That Trump won’t acknowledge this means he’s either profoundly foolish or, in ways we don’t yet understand, dangerously complicit. I still lean toward the former interpretation — just.

In a morning tweetstorm on the Russia investigation, President Donald Trump misquoted James Clapper. Trump claimed the former intelligence director said, “Trump should be happy that the FBI was SPYING on his campaign,” when, in fact, Clapper said the FBI did not spy on his campaign.

Clapper said that Trump should have been happy to know that the FBI was investigating “what the Russians were doing” to infiltrate his campaign and influence a U.S. presidential election.

The president in recent days has repeatedly accused the FBI of spying on his campaign in the summer of 2016. He’s referring to media reports that an undercover FBI intelligence source met with Trump campaign aides in the summer and fall of 2016 as part of the agency’s counterintelligence investigation into Russia’s meddling in the presidential campaign.

In a tweet on May 20, Trump called for the Justice Department to “look into whether or not the FBI/DOJ infiltrated or surveilled the Trump Campaign for Political Purposes – and if any such demands or requests were made by people within the Obama Administration!” A day later, the Justice Department announced it asked the department’s inspector general to conduct a review.

Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general overseeing the Russia investigation, said that “if anyone did infiltrate or surveil participants in a presidential campaign for inappropriate purposes, we need to know about it and take appropriate action.”

Even before the inspector general’s office begins its work, however, the president has determined that the FBI was illegally spying on his campaign. In a series of tweets on the morning of May 23, Trump claimed the FBI informant “was only there to spy for political reasons,” calling it “a major spy scandal” — which he dubbed “spygate.”

He also misquoted Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, who appeared on “The View” on May 22 to talk about his new book, “Facts and Fears: Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence.” The show’s co-hosts, Joy Behar and Whoopi Goldberg, later asked Clapper about the FBI’s use of an undercover informant.

Behar specifically asked Clapper if the FBI was “spying on the Trump campaign.” He said it did not. Still, Trump distorted Clapper’s answer, putting these words in the mouth of the former intelligence head: “Trump should be happy that the FBI was SPYING on his campaign.”

Quote:

Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump
“Trump should be happy that the FBI was SPYING on his campaign” No, James Clapper, I am not happy. Spying on a campaign would be illegal, and a scandal to boot!

Trump’s choice of words is verbatim from a headline on Real Clear Politics — except that the website only put the words “happy” and “spying” in quotation marks.

In remarks to reporters later in the day, Trump said Clapper “sort of admitted that they had spies in the campaign, yesterday, inadvertently.”

The exchange between Clapper and Behar shows that Clapper, in fact, never said that “the FBI was SPYING on his campaign.” Quite the opposite.

Clapper, May 22: With the informant business, well, the point here is —

Behar: Well, let me get to my questions.

Clapper: — are the Russians, not spying on the campaign. But what are the Russians doing and in a sense, unfortunately, what they were trying to do is protect our political system and protect the campaign.

Behar: … So, I ask you, was the FBI spying on Trump’s campaign?

Clapper: No, they were not. They were spying on, a term I don’t particularly like, but on what the Russians were doing. Trying to understand were the Russians infiltrating, trying to gain access, trying to gain leverage and influence which is what they do.

Behar: Well, why doesn’t he like that? He should be happy.

Clapper: Well, he should be.

So, contrary to what Trump claimed, Clapper said the informant’s target was the Russians, not the Trump campaign.

US-North Korea summit will not take place, Donald Trump says

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Sorry, you are incorrect. An executive who fires an investigator under his power because the investigation might uncover wrongdoing by him has committed obstruction of justice.

No. If that were true, then the entire obstruction statute would be unconstitutional.

However, it isn't true. It is a rather extreme interpretation of the obstruction statute. More mainstream interpretations do not agree with it at all.

The courts have a rule that if they can interpret a law in a way that is constitutional and interpret it in a way that is unconstitutional, they must interpret it in the way that complies with the constitution.

The courts have recognized repeatedly that a government official’s clear legal authority to take some action does not immunize that official from prosecution for crimes relating to the exercise of that authority. To take just a few examples, in U.S. v. Smith, several members of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s department were convicted on obstruction charges for relocating and restricting access to a prisoner—conduct that would have been legal but for its purposeful interference with an FBI investigation into civil rights violations at Los Angeles County jails. In U.S. v. Baca, the court explained that “[a] local [police] officer may not use [his] authority to engage in what ordinarily might be normal law enforcement practices, such as interviewing witnesses, attempting to interview witnesses or moving inmates, for the purpose of obstructing justice.” And in U.S. v. Mitchell, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit upheld the conviction of two brothers who accepted a payment of $50,000 to convince their uncle—a congressman—to stop a congressional investigation into a company’s eligibility for a government program.

The principle animating these cases is perhaps easiest to understand in the context of bribery, which by its nature requires that an official agree to take some action he or she is empowered to do in exchange for personal gain. The crime of obstruction of justice can also involve official acts; that’s why the official’s intent matters. It’s in the president’s power to fire his FBI director, for instance. But he or she could be prosecuted for bribery if he/she accepted a large bribe from a mobster to fire an FBI director investigating the man.

Dowd’s, [Trump's lawyer at the time], statement is apparently premised in part on a spurious “unitary executive” theory, which understands the president’s Article II powers to give him completely unchecked authority to direct, control and supervise inferior officers and agencies that exercise discretionary executive power. This view has been widely rejected, including by the Supreme Court. In Morrison v. Olson, the court upheld the constitutionality of a statute authorizing the appointment of an independent counsel who were appointed by a three-judge panel and removable by the attorney general, not the president, and only for good cause. That is a far cry from the absolute right to direct and control all executive branch personnel that Dowd’s argument posits.


It is also critical to distinguish the argument Dowd is making from another—that the president cannot be indicted for any crime, much less obstruction of justice. Whether a sitting president may face a criminal indictment is an open question; however, there are good reasons to be skeptical of broad invocations of presidential immunity. Previous investigations of presidents—including Watergate, Iran Contra and Whitewater—have proceeded under the assumption that the president could be indicted. And in past cases that have involved subjecting the president to judicial process, the Supreme Court has consistently ruled that due deference to the constitutional responsibilities of the president requires only special accommodation, not absolute immunity.