[Special] Former FBI Director James Comey to Testify Before Congress

As the country awaits James Comey's testimony today, June 8, let's take the time to go back about a month ago to when Comey was fired by Trump. After that, feel free to read Comey's prepared opening statement, with annotated notes by Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall.

NBC News: What You Need to Know About Trump, Comey and the Russia Probe by Benjy Sarlin

The Washington Post: Inside Trump’s Anger and Impatience — and His Sudden Decision to Fire Comey by Philip Rucker, Ashley Parker, Sari Horwitz and Robert Costa

Politico: Behind Comey’s Firing [Was] An enraged Trump, Fuming About Russia (the president deliberated for more than a week before ousting the FBI chief who was investigating Trump associates) by Josh Dawsey

The Washington Post: Why Trump Expected Only Applause When He Told Comey, ‘You’re fired.’ by Marc Fisher

The Atlantic: 'There Is a Real Risk Here Things Will Spin Out of Control' by Rosie Gray and McKay Coppins

The New Yorker: Donald Trump's Firing of James Comey is an Attack on American Democracy by John Cassidy   

The Atlantic: This is Not a Drill by David Frum 

The Washington Post: Did Trump Already Blow His Own Cover Story About Comey’s Firing? by Jennifer Rubin

Politico: Russia's Oval Office Victory Dance (the cozy meeting between President Trump and Russia’s foreign minister came at Vladimir Putin’s insistence) by Susan B. Glasser

CNN: Source Close to Comey Says There Were 2 Reasons the FBI Director Was Fired by Jake Tapper [1) Comey never provided Trump with any assurance of loyalty and 2) the FBI's investigation into possible collusion with Russia in the 2016 election was accelerating]

New York Times: Days Before Firing, Comey Asked for More Resources for Russia Inquiry by Matthew Rosenberg and Matt Apuzzo

Bloomberg: Why Trump Really Fired Comey (two things have always driven the president: self-aggrandizement and self-preservation) by Timothy L. O'Brien

Talking Points Memo: Some Key Fact Points to Get Our Bearing by Josh Marshall 

New York Times: ‘Last Night in Sweden’? Trump’s Remark Baffles a Nation

By Sewell Chan:

Swedes reacted with confusion, anger and ridicule on Sunday to a vague remark by President Trump that suggested that something terrible had occurred in their country.

During a campaign-style rally on Saturday in Florida, Mr. Trump issued a sharp if discursive attack on refugee policies in Europe, ticking off a list of places that have been hit by terrorists.

“You look at what’s happening,” he told his supporters. “We’ve got to keep our country safe. You look at what’s happening in Germany, you look at what’s happening last night in Sweden. Sweden, who would believe this?”

Not the Swedes.

Nothing particularly nefarious happened in Sweden on Friday — or Saturday, for that matter — and Swedes were left baffled.

“Sweden? Terror attack? What has he been smoking? Questions abound,” Carl Bildt, a former prime minister and foreign minister, wrote on Twitter.

As the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet noted, Twitter users were quick to ridicule Mr. Trump’s remark, with joking references to the Swedish Chef, the “Muppets” character; Swedish meatballs; and Ikea, the furniture giant.

The Full Story (February 19, 2017)

See also: 'Sweden, who would believe this?': Trump Cites Non-Existent Terror Attack by The Guardian.

New York Times: A Back-Channel Plan for Ukraine and Russia, Courtesy of Trump Associates

By Megan Twohey and Scott Shane:

A week before Michael T. Flynn resigned as national security adviser, a sealed proposal was hand-delivered to his office, outlining a way for President Trump to lift sanctions against Russia.

Mr. Flynn is gone, having been caught lying about his own discussion of sanctions with the Russian ambassador. But the proposal, a peace plan for Ukraine and Russia, remains, along with those pushing it: Michael D. Cohen, the president’s personal lawyer, who delivered the document; Felix H. Sater, a business associate who helped Mr. Trump scout deals in Russia; and a Ukrainian lawmaker trying to rise in a political opposition movement shaped in part by Mr. Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort.

At a time when Mr. Trump’s ties to Russia, and the people connected to him, are under heightened scrutiny — with investigations by American intelligence agencies, the F.B.I. and Congress — some of his associates remain willing and eager to wade into Russia-related efforts behind the scenes.

* * *

Mr. Cohen and Mr. Sater said they had not spoken to Mr. Trump about the proposal, and have no experience in foreign policy. Mr. Cohen is one of several Trump associates under scrutiny in an F.B.I. counterintelligence examination of links with Russia, according to law enforcement officials; he has denied any illicit connections.

The two others involved in the effort have somewhat questionable pasts: Mr. Sater, 50, a Russian-American, pleaded guilty to a role in a stock manipulation scheme decades ago that involved the Mafia. Mr. Artemenko spent two and a half years in jail in Kiev in the early 2000s on embezzlement charges, later dropped, which he said had been politically motivated.

The Full Story (February 19, 2017)

See also: A Big Shoe Just Dropped from Talking Points Memo

New York Times: Trump’s ‘Winter White House’ - A Peek at the Exclusive Members’ List at Mar-a-Lago

By Nicholas Confessore, Maggie Haberman and Eric Lipton:

On any given weekend, you might catch President Trump’s son-in-law and top Mideast dealmaker, Jared Kushner, by the beachside soft-serve ice cream machine, or his reclusive chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, on the dining patio. If you are lucky, the president himself could stop by your table for a quick chat. But you will have to pay $200,000 for the privilege — and the few available spots are going fast.

Virtually overnight, Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s members-only Palm Beach, Fla., club, has been transformed into the part-time capital of American government, a so-called winter White House where Mr. Trump has entertained a foreign head of state, health care industry executives and other presidential guests.

But Mr. Trump’s gatherings at Mar-a-Lago — he arrived there on Friday afternoon, his third weekend visit in a row — have also created an arena for potential political influence rarely seen in American history: a kind of Washington steakhouse on steroids, situated in a sunny playground of the rich and powerful, where members and their guests enjoy a level of access that could elude even the best-connected of lobbyists.

Membership lists reviewed by The New York Times show that the club’s nearly 500 paying members include dozens of real estate developers, Wall Street financiers, energy executives and others whose businesses could be affected by Mr. Trump’s policies. At least three club members are under consideration for an ambassadorship. Most of the 500 have had memberships predating Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign, and there are a limited number of memberships still available.

William I. Koch, who oversees a major mining and fuels company, belongs to Mar-a-Lago, as does the billionaire trader Thomas Peterffy, who spent more than $8 million on political ads in 2012 warning of creeping socialism in America.

Another member is George Norcross, an insurance executive and the South Jersey Democratic Party boss, whose friendship with Mr. Trump dates to the president’s Atlantic City years, when Mr. Norcross held insurance contracts with Mr. Trump’s casinos, and Mr. Trump wrangled with the state’s Democratic leaders over tax treatment of the properties. Yet another member is Janet Weiner, part owner and chief financial officer of the Rockstar energy drink company, which has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars lobbying federal officials to avoid tighter regulations on its products.

Bruce Toll, a real estate executive who co-founded Toll Brothers, one of the nation’s largest home builders, and who is still active in the industry, owns a home nearby and frequently sees Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago, he said. While they did not discuss any of Mr. Toll’s specific projects, he said, the two would occasionally discuss national issues, such as Mr. Trump’s plans to increase spending on highways and other infrastructure projects.

“Maybe you ought to do this or that,” Mr. Toll said of the kind of advice that Mr. Trump got from club members.

The Full Story (February 18, 2017)

[Special] New York Times: Comey Memo Says Trump Asked Him to End Flynn Investigation

By Michael S. Schmidt:

President Trump asked the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, to shut down the federal investigation into Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, in an Oval Office meeting in February, according to a memo Mr. Comey wrote shortly after the meeting.

“I hope you can let this go,” the president told Mr. Comey, according to the memo.

The documentation of Mr. Trump’s request is the clearest evidence that the president has tried to directly influence the Justice Department and F.B.I. investigation into links between Mr. Trump’s associates and Russia. Late Tuesday, Representative Jason Chaffetz, the Republican chairman of the House Oversight Committee, demanded that the F.B.I. turn over all “memoranda, notes, summaries and recordings” of discussions between Mr. Trump and Mr. Comey.

Such documents, Mr. Chaffetz wrote, would “raise questions as to whether the president attempted to influence or impede” the F.B.I.

Mr. Comey wrote the memo detailing his conversation with the president immediately after the meeting, which took place the day after Mr. Flynn resigned, according to two people who read the memo. It was part of a paper trail Mr. Comey created documenting what he perceived as the president’s improper efforts to influence a continuing investigation. An F.B.I. agent’s contemporaneous notes are widely held up in court as credible evidence of conversations.

Mr. Comey shared the existence of the memo with senior F.B.I. officials and close associates. The New York Times has not viewed a copy of the memo, which is unclassified, but one of Mr. Comey’s associates read parts of it to a Times reporter.

“I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go,” Mr. Trump told Mr. Comey, according to the memo. “He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.”

Mr. Trump told Mr. Comey that Mr. Flynn had done nothing wrong, according to the memo.

Mr. Comey did not say anything to Mr. Trump about curtailing the investigation, replying only: “I agree he is a good guy.”

The Full Story (May 16, 2017)

New York Times: Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence

By Michael S. Schmidt, Mark Mazzetti and Matt Apuzzo: 

Phone records and intercepted calls show that members of Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election, according to four current and former American officials.

American law enforcement and intelligence agencies intercepted the communications around the same time they were discovering evidence that Russia was trying to disrupt the presidential election by hacking into the Democratic National Committee, three of the officials said. The intelligence agencies then sought to learn whether the Trump campaign was colluding with the Russians on the hacking or other efforts to influence the election.

The officials interviewed in recent weeks said that, so far, they had seen no evidence of such cooperation.

But the intercepts alarmed American intelligence and law enforcement agencies, in part because of the amount of contact that was occurring while Mr. Trump was speaking glowingly about the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin. At one point last summer, Mr. Trump said at a campaign event that he hoped Russian intelligence services had stolen Hillary Clinton’s emails and would make them public.

The Full Story (February 14, 2017)

See Also from the New York Times, Flynn’s Downfall Sprang From ‘Eroding Level of Trust’ which describes the FBI interrogation of Flynn. 

[Special] FBI Director James Comey Fired by White House

• New York Times: F.B.I. Director James Comey Is Fired by Trump by Michael D. Shear and Matt Apuzzo

President Trump on Tuesday fired the director of the F.B.I., James B. Comey, abruptly terminating the law enforcement official leading a wide-ranging criminal investigation into whether Mr. Trump’s advisers colluded with the Russian government to steer the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.

The stunning development in Mr. Trump’s presidency raised the specter of political interference by a sitting president into an existing investigation by the nation’s leading law enforcement agency. It immediately ignited Democratic calls for an independent prosecutor to lead the Russia inquiry.

Mr. Trump explained the firing by citing Mr. Comey’s handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, even though the president was widely seen to have benefited politically from that inquiry and had once praised Mr. Comey for having “guts” in his pursuit of Mrs. Clinton during the campaign.

But in his letter to Mr. Comey, released to reporters by the White House, the president betrayed his focus on the continuing inquiry into Russia and his aides.

“While I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation, I nevertheless concur with the judgment of the Department of Justice that you are not able to effectively lead the bureau,” Mr. Trump said in a letter to Mr. Comey dated Tuesday.

New York Times: Flynn Is Said to Have Talked to Russians About Sanctions Before Trump Took Office

By Matthew Rosenberg and Matt Apuzzo:

Weeks before President Trump’s inauguration, his national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, discussed American sanctions against Russia, as well as areas of possible cooperation, with that country’s ambassador to the United States, according to current and former American officials.

Throughout the discussions, the message Mr. Flynn conveyed to the ambassador, Sergey I. Kislyak — that the Obama administration was Moscow’s adversary and that relations with Russia would change under Mr. Trump — was unambiguous and highly inappropriate, the officials said.

The accounts of the conversations raise the prospect that Mr. Flynn violated a law against private citizens’ engaging in diplomacy, and directly contradict statements made by Trump advisers. They have said that Mr. Flynn spoke to Mr. Kislyak a few days after Christmas merely to arrange a phone call between President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and Mr. Trump after the inauguration.

But current and former American officials said that conversation — which took place the day before the Obama administration imposed sanctions on Russia over accusations that it used cyberattacks to help sway the election in Mr. Trump’s favor — ranged far beyond the logistics of a post-inauguration phone call. And they said it was only one in a series of contacts between the two men that began before the election and also included talk of cooperating in the fight against the Islamic State, along with other issues.

The Full Story (February 9, 2017)

New York Times: Ivanka Trump Reported to Have Stepped Down as Murdoch Trustee

By Richard Perez-Pena: 

Ivanka Trump served for several years as a trustee for a fortune set aside for the daughters of Rupert Murdoch, people familiar with the arrangement said. Her role highlights the close ties between President Trump’s family and the family that controls Fox News Channel, The Wall Street Journal and other news outlets.

Ms. Trump, the president’s daughter, stepped down in December as a Murdoch trustee, a relationship reported on Wednesday by The Financial Times. The trust for the Murdoch daughters holds some $300 million in stock in News Corporation and 21st Century Fox, companies that Mr. Murdoch, 85, leads, and in which he and his family hold controlling interests.

Mr. Trump has been a favorite topic of Mr. Murdoch’s New York Post for decades, and in the years before last year’s presidential campaign, Mr. Trump had a regular morning call-in segment on Fox News. During the campaign and since the election, Fox News has covered him far more favorably than its competitors.

The Full Story (February 8, 2017)

[Special] New York Times: South Koreans Feel Cheated After U.S. Carrier Miscue

By Choe Sang-Hun:

When news broke less than two weeks ago that the Trump administration was sending the aircraft carrier Carl Vinson to the Korean Peninsula, many South Koreans feared a war with North Korea. Others cheered for Washington, calling the deployment a powerful symbol of its commitment to deterring the North.

On Wednesday, after it was revealed that the carrier strike group was actually thousands of miles away and had been heading in the opposite direction, toward the Indian Ocean, South Koreans felt bewildered, cheated and manipulated by the United States, their country’s most important ally.

“Trump’s lie over the Carl Vinson,” read a headline on the website of the newspaper JoongAng Ilbo on Wednesday. “Xi Jinping and Putin must have had a good jeer over this one.”

“Like North Korea, which is often accused of displaying fake missiles during military parades, is the United States, too, now employing ‘bluffing’ as its North Korea policy?” the article asked.

The episode raised questions about whether major allies of the United States, like South Korea and Japan, had been informed of the carrier’s whereabouts, and whether the misinformation undercut America’s strategy to contain North Korea’s nuclear ambitions by using empty threats.

Compounding their anger over the Carl Vinson episode, many South Koreans were also riled at Mr. Trump for his assertion in a Wall Street Journal interview last week that the Korean Peninsula “used to be a part of China.” Although Korea was often invaded by China and forced to pay tributes to its giant neighbor, many Koreans say the notion that they were once Chinese subjects is egregiously insulting.

“The 50 million South Koreans, as well as many common-sensical people around the world, cannot help but feel embarrassed and shocked,” said Youn Kwan-suk, spokesman of the main opposition Democratic Party, which is leading in voter surveys before the May 9 presidential election.

The Full Story (April 19, 2017)

New York Times: Tech Opposition to Trump Propelled by Employees, Not Executives

By David Streitfeld:

After President Trump’s Jan. 27 executive order restricting immigration, high-tech has gone full-tilt political. Companies are being pushed by their employees, by their customers and sometimes by their ideals. They are trying to go far enough without going too far.

Nearly 130 companies, most of them in the technology field, filed an amicus brief late Sunday in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which declined to reinstate the travel ban after a lower court blocked it. The brief, which was signed by an unusually broad coalition of large and small tech companies that included Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Tesla, Uber and Intel, said Mr. Trump’s order “violates the immigration laws and the Constitution.”

“Silicon Valley is stepping up,” said Sam Altman, who runs the valley’s most prominent start-up incubator, Y Combinator. “The companies are working on three fronts: They are vociferously objecting to the Trump policies they think are bad, they are trying to engage with him to influence his behavior, and they are developing new technology to work against policies and political discourse they don’t support.”

It is an improvised and complicated strategy. The companies are among the richest and most popular of American brands, which means they have a good deal of leverage. Yet they are also uniquely vulnerable — not only to presidential postings on Twitter and executive orders, but to the sentiments of their customers and employees, some of whom have more radical ideas in mind.

Many of the companies initially placed their bets on engagement after an upbeat meeting with the president-elect in December. That modest approach, which even the most risk-averse executive can endorse, showed its limits last week. After widespread customer defections, Travis Kalanick, the chief executive of Uber, was forced to step down from one of the administration’s advisory councils.

“People voted with their feet, and Travis listened,” said Dave McClure, who runs the 500 Startups incubator and started the Nerdz 4 Hillary group that tried to raise the $100,000. “We need to hold the other tech leaders accountable in the same way.”

Resistance, Mr. McClure said, begins at home.

The Full Story (February 6, 2017)

New York Times: Justice Department Urges Appeals Court to Reinstate Trump’s Travel Ban

By Adam Liptak:

“At most,” the brief said, the court order blocking the ban should be limited to “previously admitted aliens who are temporarily abroad now or who wish to travel and return to the United States in the future.” That would allow the federal government to block people who have never visited the United States.

On Monday, Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, said the administration stood ready to reinstate the entire ban. “Once we win the case, it will go right back into action,” he said.

Later on Monday night, Mr. Trump called threats “from radical Islamic terrorism is very real.”

“Courts must act fast!” Mr. Trump said on Twitter.

Trial judges around the country have blocked aspects of Mr. Trump’s executive order, which suspended travel from the seven countries and limited the nation’s refugee program, but none of those cases have reached an appeals court. And none of the lower-court rulings were as broad as the one under review in the case, State of Washington v. Trump.

The Full Story (February 6, 2017)

New York Times: Trump Strategist Stephen Bannon Says Media Should ‘Keep Its Mouth Shut’

By Michael M. Grynbaum:

“The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while,” Mr. Bannon said in an interview on Wednesday.

“I want you to quote this,” Mr. Bannon added. “The media here is the opposition party. They don’t understand this country. They still do not understand why Donald Trump is the president of the United States.”

The scathing assessment — delivered by one of Mr. Trump’s most trusted and influential advisers, in the first days of his presidency — comes at a moment of high tension between the news media and the administration, with skirmishes over the size of Mr. Trump’s inaugural crowd and the president’s false claims that millions of illegal votes by undocumented immigrants swayed the popular vote against him.

Mr. Bannon, who rarely grants interviews to journalists outside of Breitbart News, the provocative right-wing website he ran until August, was echoing comments by Mr. Trump last weekend, when the president said he was in “a running war” with the media and called journalists “among the most dishonest people on earth.” Mr. Bannon’s remarks added to the growing acrimony between the press and a president who made attacks on the media a rallying point of his election campaign.

Among Mr. Trump’s advisers in the White House, Mr. Bannon is responsible for putting into action the nationalist vision that Mr. Trump channeled during the later months of the campaign, one that stemmed from Mr. Bannon himself. And in many ways Mr. Trump has acted on that vision during his first week in office — from the description of “American carnage” he laid out in his inauguration speech to a series of executive actions outlining policies on trade agreements, immigration and the building of a border wall.

The Full Story (January 26, 2017)

New York Times: It’s No Trump Tower, but White House Has ‘Beautiful’ Phones

By Maggie Haberman:

His mornings, he said, are spent as they were in Trump Tower. He rises before 6 a.m., watches television tuned to a cable channel first in the residence, and later in a small dining room in the West Wing, and looks through the morning newspapers: The New York Times, The New York Post and now The Washington Post.

But his meetings now begin at 9 a.m., earlier than they used to, which significantly curtails his television time. Still, Mr. Trump, who does not read books, is able to end his evenings with plenty of television.

In between, Mr. Trump signs executive orders in the Oval Office and has meetings in the West Wing.

“They have a lot of board rooms,” he said of the White House, an apparent reference to the Cabinet Room and the Roosevelt Room.

The White House is the only property that Mr. Trump has slept in that is more famous than one of his own, and he seems in awe. Although he made his name building extravagant, gilded properties, the new president has marveled to aides about the splendor of the White House and the lengths he must walk to retrieve something from a far-flung room.

His preference during the day is to work in the Oval Office. And to stare at it, still. So do his staff members and relatives. “I’ve had people come in; they walk in here and they just want to stare for a long period of time,” Mr. Trump said.

The Full Story (January 25, 2017)

Editor's Note: The headline has been changed to "A Homebody Finds the Ultimate Home Office" since the initial publication of this article.

New York Times: Trump’s Voter Fraud Example? A Troubled Tale With Bernhard Langer

By Glenn Thrush:

Mr. Trump kicked off the meeting, participants said, by retelling his debunked claim that he would have won the popular vote if not for the three million to five million ballots cast by “illegals.” He followed it up with a Twitter post early Wednesday calling for a major investigation into voter fraud.

When one of the Democrats protested, Mr. Trump said he was told a story by “the very famous golfer, Bernhard Langer,” whom he described as a friend, according to three staff members who were in the room for the meeting.

In the emerging Trump era, the story was a memorable example, for the legislators and the country, of how an off-the-cuff yarn — unverifiable and of confusing origin — became a prime policy mover for a president whose fact-gathering owes more to the oral tradition than the written word.

* * *

The anecdote, the aides said, was greeted with silence, and Mr. Trump was prodded to change the subject by Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff, and Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas.

Just one problem: Mr. Langer, who lives in Boca Raton, Fla., is a German citizen with permanent residence status in the United States who is, by law, barred from voting, according to Mr. Langer’s daughter Christina.

“He is a citizen of Germany,” she said, when reached on her father’s cellphone. “He is not a friend of President Trump’s, and I don’t know why he would talk about him.”

She said her father was “very busy” and would not be able to answer any questions.

But a senior White House staff member, who was not at the Monday reception but has heard Mr. Trump tell the story, said Mr. Langer saw Mr. Trump in Florida during the Thanksgiving break and told him the story of a friend of Mr. Langer’s who had been blocked from voting.

Either way, the tale left its mark on Mr. Trump, who is known to act on anecdote, and on Wednesday redoubled his efforts to build a border wall and crack down on immigrants crossing the border from Mexico.

The Full Story (January 25, 2017)

New York Times: 'We the People' Demand Mr. Trump Release His Tax Returns

By Times Editorial Board:

The administration dismisses these pleas for honesty, arguing that only journalists care about Mr. Trump’s tax returns and conflicts of interest — a claim that a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll disproved. It found that 74 percent of Americans, including 53 percent of Republicans, believe that Mr. Trump’s tax returns should be made public.

Kellyanne Conway, counselor to Mr. Trump and his chief obfuscator, told ABC News on Sunday that “he’s not going to release his tax returns,” adding that the election showed that “people didn’t care.” On Monday, she pulled back a tad, tweeting that “POTUS is under audit and will not release until that is completed.” Of course, even that comment is a ruse. The Internal Revenue Service has made clear that being under audit wouldn’t preclude Mr. Trump from making his returns public.

Yet, the Trump campaign used that excuse over and over, and now Mr. Trump has carried it into the White House. White House officials are probably hoping that the longer they stonewall, the more likely that public demands on this matter will be pushed aside as torrents of controversial policies and statements from Mr. Trump dominate the news cycle. Even so, voters and members of Congress who care about ethics in the nation’s highest office should not let up.

Full Story (January 24, 2017)

New York Times: Trump Abandons Trans-Pacific Partnership, Obama’s Signature Trade Deal

By Peter Baker:

Mr. Trump may also move quickly to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement. He is scheduling meetings with the leaders of Canada and Mexico, the two main partners in that pact, which was negotiated by President George Bush and pushed through Congress by President Bill Clinton. While Nafta has been a major driver of American trade for nearly two decades, it has long been divisive, with critics blaming it for lost jobs and lower wages.

But free-trade advocates said that in canceling the Pacific pact, Mr. Trump lost an agreement that had already renegotiated Nafta under more modern rules governing intellectual property, internet access and agriculture, since both Mexico and Canada were signatories. He also undercut Mr. Obama’s so-called pivot to Asia and, critics said, essentially ceded the field to China, which was not part of the agreement.

“There’s no doubt that this action will be seen as a huge, huge win for China,” Michael B. Froman, the trade representative who negotiated the pact for Mr. Obama, said in an interview. “For the Trump administration, after all this talk about being tough on China, for their first action to basically hand the keys to China and say we’re withdrawing from our leadership position in this region is geostrategically damaging.”

Some Republicans agreed, but only a few would publicly challenge the president. Senator John McCain of Arizona called the decision “a serious mistake” that would hurt America. “It will send a troubling signal of American disengagement in the Asia-Pacific region at a time we can least afford it,” he said in a statement.

The Full Story (January 23, 2017)

New York Times: Inaugural Speech Dims G.O.P. Hopes for a More Conservative Trump Agenda

By Jonathan Martin:

But Mr. Trump is about to discover that his hopes for a realignment may not come easily. As in his campaign, he faces an array of obstacles: his historic unpopularity and lack of discipline, advisers who hope to nudge him back toward conventional Republicanism and, perhaps most significant, other party leaders who have a more conservative outlook on domestic policy and government spending and a more hawkish attitude on foreign affairs.

The alarm and anxiety within the Republican Party’s congressional wing toward its own president are remarkable. And among Mr. Trump’s most outspoken intraparty critics, the warnings of resistance are unambiguous.

The Full Story (January 21, 2017)

New York Times: With False Claims, Trump Attacks Media on Turnout and Intelligence Rift

By Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Matthew Rosenberg:

President Trump used his first full day in office on Saturday to unleash a remarkably bitter attack on the news media, falsely accusing journalists of both inventing a rift between him and intelligence agencies and deliberately understating the size of his inauguration crowd.

In a visit to the Central Intelligence Agency intended to showcase his support for the intelligence community, Mr. Trump ignored his own repeated public statements criticizing the intelligence community, a group he compared to Nazis just over a week ago.

He also called journalists “among the most dishonest human beings on earth,” and he said that up to 1.5 million people had attended his inauguration, a claim that photographs disproved.

Later, at the White House, he dispatched Sean Spicer, the press secretary, to the briefing room in the West Wing, where Mr. Spicer scolded reporters and made a series of false statements.

He said news organizations had deliberately misstated the size of the crowd at Mr. Trump’s inauguration on Friday in an attempt to sow divisions at a time when Mr. Trump was trying to unify the country, warning that the new administration would hold them to account.
The Full Story (January 21, 2017)

New York Times: Intercepted Russian Communications Part of Inquiry Into Trump Associates

By Michael S. Schmidt, Matthew Rosenberg, Adam Goldman and Matt Apuzzo:

American law enforcement and intelligence agencies are examining intercepted communications and financial transactions as part of a broad investigation into possible links between Russian officials and associates of President-elect Donald J. Trump, including his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, current and former senior American officials said.

The continuing counterintelligence investigation means that Mr. Trump will take the oath of office on Friday with his associates under investigation and after the intelligence agencies concluded that the Russian government had worked to help elect him. As president, Mr. Trump will oversee those agencies and have the authority to redirect or stop at least some of these efforts.

It is not clear whether the intercepted communications had anything to do with Mr. Trump’s campaign, or Mr. Trump himself. It is also unclear whether the inquiry has anything to do with an investigation into the hacking of the Democratic National Committee’s computers and other attempts to disrupt the elections in November. The American government has concluded that the Russian government was responsible for a broad computer hacking campaign, including the operation against the D.N.C.

The counterintelligence investigation centers at least in part on the business dealings that some of the president-elect’s past and present advisers have had with Russia. Mr. Manafort has done business in Ukraine and Russia. Some of his contacts there were under surveillance by the National Security Agency for suspected links to Russia’s Federal Security Service, one of the officials said.

Mr. Manafort is among at least three Trump campaign advisers whose possible links to Russia are under scrutiny. Two others are Carter Page, a businessman and former foreign policy adviser to the campaign, and Roger Stone, a longtime Republican operative.

The F.B.I. is leading the investigations, aided by the National Security Agency, the C.I.A. and the Treasury Department’s financial crimes unit. The investigators have accelerated their efforts in recent weeks but have found no conclusive evidence of wrongdoing, the officials said. One official said intelligence reports based on some of the wiretapped communications had been provided to the White House.

The Full Story (January 19, 2017)