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. 

Washington Post: Justice Department Warned White House That Flynn Could be Vulnerable to Russian Blackmail, Officials Say

By Adam Entous, Ellen Nakashima and Philip Rucker:

The acting attorney general informed the Trump White House late last month that she believed Michael Flynn had misled senior administration officials about the nature of his communications with the Russian ambassador to the United States, and warned that the national security adviser was potentially vulnerable to Russian blackmail, current and former U.S. officials said.

The message, delivered by Sally Q. Yates and a senior career national security official to the White House counsel, was prompted by concerns that ­Flynn, when asked about his calls and texts with the ­Russian diplomat, had told Vice ­President-elect Mike Pence and others that he had not discussed the Obama administration sanctions on Russia for its interference in the 2016 election, the officials said. It is unclear what the White House counsel, Donald McGahn, did with the ­information.

Flynn resigned Monday night in the wake of revelations about his contacts with the Russian ambassador.

In the waning days of the Obama administration, James R. Clapper Jr., who was the director of national intelligence, and John Brennan, the CIA director at the time, shared Yates’s concerns and concurred with her recommendation to inform the Trump White House. They feared that “Flynn had put himself in a compromising position” and thought that Pence had a right to know that he had been misled, according to one of the officials, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters.

A senior Trump administration official said before Flynn’s resignation that the White House was aware of the matter, adding that “we’ve been working on this for weeks.”

The current and former officials said that although they believed that Pence was misled about the contents of Flynn’s communications with the Russian ambassador, they couldn’t rule out that Flynn was acting with the knowledge of others in the transition.

The Full Story (February 13, 2017)

Belly of the Beast: Praising Stephen Miller? Seriously?

By Stephen J. Harper:

“Congratulations Stephen Miller – on representing me this morning on the various Sunday morning shows. Great job!” Trump tweeted, as the world pondered North Korea’s missile test.

Question: What had the 31-year-old Miller — a non-lawyer who had been Jeff Sessions’ communications director before joining the Trump campaign — done to deserve such praise from his boss?

Answer: Betray a tragic ignorance of the U.S. Constitution while continuing Trump’s assault on the judiciary.

* * *

“There’s no such thing as judicial supremacy,” Miller told NBC’s Chuck Todd.

“The judiciary is not supreme,” he said to ABC’s George Stephanopoulos.

“We have a judiciary that has taken far too much power and become in many cases a supreme branch of government,” Miller explained to CBS’s John Dickerson. Then came his most chilling line: “The end result of this, though, is that our opponents, the media and the whole world will soon see as we begin to take further actions, that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned.”

That’s third world dictator-type rhetoric coming from a top presidential adviser. No competent attorney who cared about the U.S. Constitution could have vetted Miller’s talking points. Judicial review and the power of federal judges to invalidate unconstitutional executive and legislative actions date to the early years of the republic.

The Full Story (February 13, 2017)

(Editor's Note: I added a new tag "judiciary," which is long overdue given Trump's inclination to war with Judges. I may go back and edit the tag into earlier posts.)

Think Progress: Michael Flynn is Still National Security Adviser. Why?

By Ned Resnikoff:

As of Monday, February 13, Michael Flynn is still President Donald Trump’s National Security Adviser.

Flynn remains in this position even though the Washington Post revealed on February 9 that he had discussed U.S. sanctions against Russia with a Russian diplomat prior to Trump’s inauguration — something Flynn, other administration officials, and even Vice President Mike Pence have all personally denied.

Now the White House is no longer denying it. In fact, after the Post published its report, an administration source told the press that Pence had “based his comments on his conversation with Gen. Flynn.”

* * *

Nonetheless, Michael Flynn remains the National Security Adviser. The president has yet to even issue a public defense or condemnation of his chief national security aide. Multiple news outlets published articles Monday about Flynn’s “tenuous” position and the “growing pressure” he faces, but thus far he remains an employee of the Trump administration.

The Full Story (February 13, 2017)

Washington Post: Senate Confirms Mnuchin as Treasury Secretary

By Max Ehrenfreund:

The Senate confirmed Steven T. Mnuchin as treasury secretary Monday evening, putting an end to a contentious and protracted debate while adding another former banker to President Trump's roster of advisers.

Mnuchin ran a bank, OneWest, that foreclosed on tens of thousands of Americans amid the financial crisis, and Democrats had argued that he would not represent the financial interests of ordinary Americans in office. Mnuchin and his allies said OneWest's foreclosures were largely in accordance with federal guidelines.

As treasury secretary, Mnuchin will be responsible for managing the nation's day-to-day finances and will have to carry out a broad order from his new boss to review the rules imposed on the financial sector through the Dodd-Frank law of 2010. Also, he'll oversee a report to Congress on whether foreign countries are manipulating their currencies, due in April.

Beyond these immediate tasks, Mnuchin will confront broader questions, assuming an influential position in a new administration that has not clearly signaled how the president will approach the economy. The agenda that Republican lawmakers and several of Trump's advisers favor — tax relief, deregulation and limited economic intervention by the federal government — is in some respects at odds with Trump's populist and protectionist rhetoric, especially on whether the government will impose new barriers to global trade.

Mnuchin, a Hollywood financier and a former partner at Goldman Sachs, will join several other former bankers with senior positions in Trump's administration, including Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon and National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn. The White House's reliance on Wall Street in staffing the administration has drawn criticism from Democrats.

“For someone who pledged to drain the swamp and advocate for working people, President Trump’s nomination of Mr. Mnuchin to be Secretary of the Treasury amounts to another broken promise,” Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), the former vice-presidential candidate, said in a statement. “His complicity in the 2008 financial crisis raises serious doubts.”

The Full Story (February 13, 2017)

The Atlantic: Donald Trump and the Art of the Apology

By Michelle Cottle:

For a guy who largely treats words as meaningless, Trump is notably fixated on the ritual value of apologies––from other people, that is. He and his team are constantly calling on this person or that group to express contrition for some perceived offense. Trump isn’t much concerned about the sincerity of a mea culpa or the spirit in which it is offered. If anything, a grudging, coerced apology seems to delight him even more than a wholly voluntary one.

For Trump, apologies aren’t about resolving conflict or fostering relationships or even setting the record straight. Like so much of what he does, they are about besting someone. Trump expresses his displeasure at how he has been treated; the offending party feels compelled to make amends. An apology that requires threats or twitter trolls to extract only highlights Trump’s superior strength all the more. Your criticisms of Trump may not have been wrong. You may not feel one bit bad about them. You may loathe and disdain him even more after apologizing. What matters to him is that you have had to publicly ask for his forgiveness. Which proves you are a total loser.

Just last week, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer was all over Senator John McCain to apologize for saying that the January 28 raid in Yemen that Trump ordered––which resulted in the death of one Navy SEAL, the wounding of three others, the loss of a $70 million helicopter, and multiple civilian casualties—was not a success. For some reason, McCain irritably declined.

Not infrequently, Trump, in one of his signature Twitter fits, will call for an apology on behalf of a third party. He memorably demanded that the cast of Hamilton apologize for booing Mike Pence, that MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski apologize to a Trump supporter with whom she clashed on air, and that Pakistan apologize to the U.S. for harboring Osama bin Laden all those years.

Far more often, though, Trump is seeking an apology for Trump. The legions he has called on for apologies include, but are by no means limited to, CNN’s Jim Acosta, the New York Times, the intelligence community, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Wall Street Journal, Megyn Kelly, Fox News, National Review’s Rich Lowry, former Mexican president Vicente Fox, Carly Fiorina, Univision, ABC’s Tom Llamas, and Hillary Clinton. At this point, pretty much all of the mainstream media has a standing order from the White House to apologize for everything it does.

The Full Story (February 13, 2017)

[Special] Washington Post: Trump Revealed Highly Classified Information to Russian Foreign Minister and Ambassador

By Greg Miller and Greg Jaffe:

President Trump revealed highly classified information to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador in a White House meeting last week, according to current and former U.S. officials, who said that Trump’s disclosures jeopardized a critical source of intelligence on the Islamic State.

The information Trump relayed had been provided by a U.S. partner through an intelligence-sharing arrangement considered so sensitive that details have been withheld from allies and tightly restricted even within the U.S. government, officials said.

The partner had not given the United States permission to share the material with Russia, and officials said that Trump’s decision to do so risks cooperation from an ally that has access to the inner workings of the Islamic State. After Trump’s meeting, senior White House officials took steps to contain the damage, placing calls to the CIA and National Security Agency.

“This is code-word information,” said a U.S. official familiar with the matter, using terminology that refers to one of the highest classification levels used by American spy agencies. Trump “revealed more information to the Russian ambassador than we have shared with our own allies.”

The revelation comes as Trump faces rising legal and political pressure on multiple Russia-related fronts. Last week, he fired FBI Director James B. Comey in the midst of a bureau investigation into links between the Trump campaign and Moscow. Trump’s subsequent admission that his decision was driven by “this Russia thing” was seen by critics as attempted obstruction of justice.

The Full Story (May 15, 2017)