Politico: ‘An avoidable, unforced error’: Trump’s Ukraine trap starts worrying allies

High-level Trump supporters who have stood by the president for years are growing increasingly unsettled by his latest strategy of dismissing the latest fight as Russia 2.0. Half-a-dozen senior Republicans, including those who both talk directly to Trump and advise him on everything from campaign strategy to policy, communications and fundraising, said in interviews that they fear the president's plan to tie Russia and Ukraine could be ineffective because it dismisses the seriousness of the allegations and the fact that he admitted his actions. [...]

None of the advisers think Trump will be removed from office — not enough Senate Republicans would vote for that — but they say he’s hurt himself in what is expected to be a tight reelection campaign. A Republican close to the president said the notion that impeaching Trump will help his campaign, as some are pushing, is ludicrous. “It isn’t a positive,” the person said flatly. [...]

Michael Steel, a Republican strategist who worked for the presidential campaigns of Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney, said the Ukraine controversy is much more clear-cut than Russia because Trump was personally involved, he admitted what he did and, perhaps most important, it happened while he already was sworn into office. [...]

A second Republican close to the president said Trump's problem is that he‘s still so fixated on anyone trying to discredit him during the 2016 election — including former President Barack Obama and his vice president — that he went after Biden. “Should he have mentioned Biden? No,” the person said. “I wish he wouldn’t have. ... But I don’t fault him as much as other people.”

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Politico: Mueller remarks put Barr back into harsh spotlight

Moments after Robert Mueller gave brief concluding remarks about his Russia probe on Wednesday, the former Republican New Jersey governor and sometime Trump adviser Chris Christie declared that the special counsel’s statement “definitely contradicts what the attorney general said when he summarized Mueller’s report.” [...]

Wittingly or not, Mueller spotlighted differences with Barr on several points. While Barr stated in his April news conference that there was “no evidence of collusion,” Mueller said Wednesday he found “insufficient evidence to charge a broader conspiracy.” And while Mueller gave a nod to Congress when he said that “the Constitution requires a process other than the criminal justice system to formally accuse a sitting president of wrongdoing,” Barr said he hoped Mueller hadn’t intended to leave the decision to Congress “since we don’t convene grand juries and conduct criminal investigations for that purpose.” [...]

Perhaps the most significant divergence between Barr and Mueller, who are longtime friends, dating back to their service at the Department of Justice during the George H.W. Bush administration, came on the explosive question of a potential indictment of Trump for obstructing justice. In Mueller’s telling, a Justice Department policy that a sitting president cannot be indicted guided his investigation and informed his decision not to reach a conclusion about whether Trump obstructed justice. Charging the president with a crime was “not an option,” Mueller said, and accusing him of committing one when he could not try the case in court, Mueller added, violated what he considered “principles of fairness.” [...]

Both Barr and Mueller on Wednesday evening sought to tamp down the fury over their perceived split. In a rare joint statement from Department of Justice spokeswoman Kerri Kupec and Special Counsel spokesman Peter Carr, the two said, “The Attorney General has previously stated that the Special Counsel repeatedly affirmed that he was not saying that, but for the OLC opinion, he would have found the President obstructed justice. The Special Counsel’s report and his statement today made clear that the office concluded it would not reach a determination — one way or the other — about whether the President committed a crime. There is no conflict between these statements.”

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Vox: Contempt of Congress and what it means for William Barr, explain

Contempt is another way for Congress to get subpoenaed documents, by asking the US attorney of the District of Columbia or the Department of Justice to charge Barr with criminal contempt for not complying with a congressional subpoena. In theory, a charge of contempt could result in a fine or jail time for the attorney general (though in reality, that likely won’t happen).

As serious as contempt sounds, it realistically won’t amount to more than Congress sending a powerful message — unless Democrats pass a different resolution to authorize suing Barr and the Trump administration to try to get the Mueller report. [...]

But it’s crucial to remember Congress is just making another a request here — if a more strongly worded one. Actually getting the executive branch to comply can be difficult, precisely because the executive branch is the one with the power to prosecute the individual who isn’t complying with the subpoena request. [...]

That itself is risky. If a judge rules against Congress and in favor of the Trump administration, it could set new legal precedent that could make it easier for future presidential administrations to withhold information from future Congressional committees.

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WorldAffairs: Putin's World: Russia’s Return to the World Stage

Over the last decade, Russia has re-emerged as a powerful global player. In this week’s episode, we’re considering how President Vladimir Putin reinvigorated Russia's influence on the global stage and the potential impact of his future ambitions. Angela Stent,director of the center for Eurasian, Russian and East European studies at Georgetown University and author of the new book “Putin’s World: Russia Against the West and With the Rest,” discusses what Russian resurgence means for the world with WorldAffairs Co-Host Ray Suarez.

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The New York Times: The Surprising Place Mueller Found Resistance to Trump

The strongest pushback against President Trump came instead from a source never contemplated by the founders: his own branch of the government. The F.B.I. and the intelligence agencies opened their investigations of Russian interference in the 2016 election even before Mr. Trump took the oath of office. The president thought that he could quash this inquiry by dismissing James Comey, the F.B.I. director, but as the president’s strategist Steve Bannon reportedly cautioned, “you can’t fire the F.B.I.” Mr. Trump’s appointee as deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, initiated the special counsel inquiry and appointed Mr. Mueller to lead it, while Attorney General Jeff Sessions — an early Trump backer — refused to “unrecuse” himself from the Russia investigation.

Even more surprising, resistance arose from key White House personnel. In June 2017, when Mr. Trump tried to remove Mr. Mueller, the White House counsel Donald McGahn refused to carry out the directive. The next month, when Trump tried to get Mr. Sessions to limit the special counsel’s jurisdiction, the White House deputy chief of staff, Rick Dearborn, declined to relay the order to the attorney general. Later in July 2017, when Mr. Trump told White House chief of staff Reince Priebus to demand Mr. Sessions’s resignation, Mr. Priebus refused. Mr. McGahn also disobeyed the president’s early 2018 directive to create a false paper trail obscuring an earlier effort by Mr. Trump to have the special counsel fired.

The resistance to the president from within the executive branch is not a new phenomenon. Clashes between the president and cabinet officials date back to George Washington’s conflicts with his first secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson. President Richard Nixon’s national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, routinely disobeyed his boss’s instructions on matters ranging from press contacts to arms control talks. What makes the pushback to President Trump unique is that it has trumpeted its existence in the open.

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Vox: Mueller report: the controversy about a Sarah Sanders lie, explained

Even at the time, Sanders’s claim about Comey not having the support of the FBI agents was implausible. It was almost immediately contradicted during congressional testimony by Comey’s successor, Andrew McCabe, and as the exchange in the below video indicates, reporters made it clear during a press briefing that they didn’t buy what she was trying to sell them.

When the time came for Sanders to be interviewed under oath by investigators working for the special counsel, her story suddenly changed. She told the special counsel’s team that her comment about FBI agents contacting her to express concerns about Comey was actually a “slip of the tongue” that was not based on anything. So she acknowledged pushing a falsehood to Mueller’s team, but said it was just an accident.

During a string of media appearances last week, Sanders stuck to her “slip of the tongue” talking point. She was grilled about its implausibleness by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos during an interview on Friday, but bizarrely tried to pin blame for her lie on Democrats, saying ,“I’m sorry I wasn’t a robot like the Democratic Party that went out for two-and-a-half years and stated time and time again that there was definitely Russian collusion between the president and his campaign, that they had evidence to show it, and that the president and his team deserved to be in jail.”

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Vox: Democrats’ impeachment dilemma, explained

Pursuing articles of impeachment against Trump would be politically explosive. Democrats know the Republican-led Senate under Mitch McConnell won’t take the next step after impeachment — a trial in the Senate — and they doubt the public would support them. In March, just 36 percent of voters polled by CNN supported impeachment. That number dropped to 34 percent after the Mueller report’s release, according to a Morning Consult poll released Monday. [...]

On one side, there’s a handful of Democrats, including Reps. Rashida Tlaib (MI), Ilhan Omar (MN), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY), Al Green (TX), and Steve Cohen (TN), who have been vocal about their belief that Trump is unfit for office. Many of them have signed on to articles of impeachment. On the other side, a number of moderate Democrats believe impeachment is a distraction from issues like infrastructure and health care — the very things that got them to a Democratic majority in the first place. And then there’s a bunch of people in the middle who aren’t ruling out impeachment but want more information before they make a decision. [...]

Even Democrats skeptical of impeachment took notice of the 10 specific episodes in which Mueller investigated Trump for obstruction of justice. Part of Mueller’s reason for not charging Trump himself was clearly the Justice Department’s longstanding practice not to indict a sitting president. Instead, Mueller wrote that Congress gets to decide what happens next. [...]

Even though Trump’s 40 percent public approval rating is extremely low, Pelosi and the majority of her caucus only want to move toward impeachment if there’s something so bad that Republicans can also get on board. They remember when Republicans who impeached President Bill Clinton in the 1990s reaped the political consequences in the 1998 midterms, when they lost seats in the House and made few gains in the Senate. Historians later concluded that backlash against Republicans for Clinton’s impeachment resulted in the GOP’s weak showing in the midterms.

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The Guardian view on the Mueller report: now we see it. What next?

It details the “sweeping and systematic” Russian interference. It lays out the multiple links between the campaign and those with ties to the Russian state, reminds us that it “expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts”, and was at times receptive to Russian offers of help, even if conspiracy or coordination could not be established. It lists 11 possible instances of obstruction. It states that there was evidence which precluded the investigators from conclusively determining that the president did not commit a crime. Attempts to influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful “largely because persons surrounding the president declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests”. [...]

The document released on Thursday, however, is not the complete story. It is copiously redacted, often in striking places. There are valid legal reasons to excise material from such a text. But no confidence can be placed in the man overseeing the process, Mr Trump’s hand-picked attorney-general, particularly after his almost comical attempts to misrepresent the document. In William Barr’s world, the president’s refusal to be interviewed amounted to the White House’s “full cooperation”. The entire tenor of his remarks implied that the matter was now done and dusted: “GAME OVER”, as his boss posted on Twitter.

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Vox: The Mueller report’s collusion section is much worse than you think

We learned that, after Trump publicly called on Russia to find Hillary Clinton’s emails, he privately ordered future National Security Adviser Michael Flynn to find them. Flynn reached out to a man named Peter Smith who (apparently falsely) told a number of people that he was in contact with Russian agents. [...]

As the report takes pains to point out, “collusion” has no legal definition and is not a federal crime. So while the report did not establish conspiracy or coordination, it does not make a determination on “collusion” — and in fact, it strongly suggests that there was at least an attempt to collude by Trump’s campaign and agents of the Russian government. [...]

Although Attorney General William Barr said that there was “no collusion” in his press conference before the report’s release, Mueller is actually quite explicit that he did not address the question of “collusion.” This is because, to his mind, the term is not precise enough, nor does it fall within the ambit of what was essentially a criminal investigation. [...]

I want to be clear: I am not disputing Mueller’s conclusions on whether a crime was committed. Criminal conspiracy has a very particular legal definition, and Mueller is persuasive on why none of the activities detailed in the report constituted illegal “coordination” in a way that would run afoul of the statute. [...]

What the report finds is not clear-cut evidence of a quid-pro-quo. Instead, what we see is a series of bungled and abortive attempts to create ties between the two sides, a situation in which the Trump team and Russia worked to reach out to each other (and vice versa) without ever developing a formal arrangement to coordinate.

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BBC4 Analysis: The Trumped Republicans

Republican insider Ron Christie discovers how Donald Trump's presidency is changing his party. Trump arrived in the White House offering a populist revolt in America, promising to drain what he calls "the swamp that is Washington D.C". So what does his own Republican Party - traditionally a bastion of the nation’s establishment - really make of him? Where is he taking them and what will he leave behind? Christie, a long-time Republican who has served in the West Wing under George W Bush, takes us on a journey behind the scenes to meet Trump’s inner circle - including figures like Mercedes Schlapp, White House director of strategic communications, and to influential conservative broadcaster Sean Hannity. He talks to the supporters and the sceptics alike who watch in amazement as one of the most controversial presidents of all time takes his country and his party by storm.

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The Guardian: 'I can’t hide my disgust, my disdain’: judge lambasts Michael Flynn

While Mueller’s prosecutors had argued Flynn’s decades of military service warranted a lenient sentence for the three-star general even after he had admitted lying to the FBI, it was Sullivan who, gesturing to the American flag beside him, accused Flynn of selling his country out. Minutes later, he ponderously asked the government’s lawyers whether they had ever considered charging Flynn with treason. (No, they later answered.) [...]

Sullivan also quickly clamped down on any suggestion that Flynn’s admitted crime – lying to federal investigators – had occurred in part because the retired general had been lulled into thinking his interview with the FBI was simply a chat, and not part of a criminal investigation.

Never in his decades on the bench, Sullivan said, had he accepted a guilty plea from a defendant who was not really guilty. “I don’t intend to start today,” Sullivan said, and then had Flynn sworn in. “Any false answers will get you in more trouble,” he added.

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The Atlantic: Mueller Is Laying Siege to the Trump Presidency

But the underlying metaphors are wrong. There is no sudden bend in the path of the investigation. There is no house of cards. The dominoes will not fall if gently tipped. The administration is not going to come crashing down in response to any single day’s events. The architecture of Trump’s power is more robust than that. [...]

Siege warfare is not a matter of striking precisely the correct blow at the correct moment at a particular stone in the wall. It is a campaign of degradation over a substantial period of time. While those inside the fortified city may rely only on the strength of their walls and their stored resources, the attackers can take their time. Volleys of projectiles—arrows or trebuchets—pepper the city walls and those atop them, while the strength of the defending army diminishes as soldiers slip away and food dwindles. Moreover, active conflict is an episodic, not a constant, feature of siege warfare; the enemy army can encamp outside the walled city and blockade it without firing a shot. Over time, the walls and defending forces become degraded to such a degree that the invaders are able to scale the walls and sack the city. [...]

Mueller’s forces also include a major encampment focused on obstruction of justice. This force has so far not done anything the public can see, but it may be getting ready to launch some kind of report against the castle. And this report, whenever it materializes, may prove devastating. But note that the day such a report is completed will also not be the “big one”—the cataclysmic event that causes the house of cards to collapse. After all, any report would likely have to undergo a lengthy approval process, either from within the Justice Department or by the courts, or both. It might have to be approved by Matthew Whitaker, the acting attorney general, before being released. It may have significant classified components. Even if the findings in this report are of bombshell proportions, given that it is unlikely Mueller will reject Office of Legal Counsel guidelines against the indictment of a sitting president, the damage that bombshell will inflict will ultimately be determined by Congress, and its detonation would likely be substantially delayed.

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The New Yorker: New Evidence Emerges of Steve Bannon and Cambridge Analytica’s Role in Brexit

Emma Briant, an academic expert on disinformation at George Washington University, has unearthed new e-mails that appear to reveal the earliest documented role played by Bannon in Brexit. The e-mails, which date back to October of 2015, show that Bannon, who was then the vice-president of Cambridge Analytica, an American firm largely owned by the U.S. hedge-fund billionaire Robert Mercer, was in the loop on discussions taking place at the time between his company and the leaders of Leave.EU, a far-right nationalist organization. The following month, Leave.EU publicly launched a campaign aimed at convincing British voters to support a referendum in favor of exiting the European Union. The U.K. narrowly voted for the so-called Brexit in June, 2016. The tumultuous fallout has roiled the U.K. ever since, threatening the government of the Conservative Prime Minister, Theresa May. [...]

The precise role played by foreign entities in promoting and possibly funding Brexit has been clouded in mystery and controversy. British law forbids foreign contributions to its political campaigns—just as U.S. law bars foreign campaign contributions. The laws are designed to prevent international manipulation of domestic affairs. Executives working for Cambridge Analytica, which filed for bankruptcy this spring, have categorically denied that the firm was paid to do any work for the Leave.EU campaign. The new e-mails do not contradict that, but show that, even if the firm was not paid for its services, it laid some of the early groundwork for the Leave.EU campaign. The e-mails show that Banks and others in the Leave.EU leadership met with Cambridge Analytica executives in 2015, and discussed what Banks called a “two-stage process” that would “get CA”—Cambridge Analytica—“on the team.” [...]

Whether foreign funds secretly supported the Brexit movement has become the focus of intense speculation and investigation in the U.K. The British probes, in many respects, are parallel to the Robert Mueller investigation of possible Russian support for Trump’s 2016 campaign. Banks has drawn particular scrutiny because his business spent some nine million pounds supporting the Brexit campaign, making him the country’s single largest political-campaign donor by far, despite questions about whether he had the personal wealth to contribute that much on his own. Banks has insisted that his contributions were legal, and that foreign sources, including Russia, contributed no funds. But multiple British agencies have launched inquiries, including a criminal investigation into Banks’s role by the National Crime Agency, the U.K.’s equivalent to the F.B.I. [...]

The American investigations into foreign interference in Trump’s election, and British probes into Brexit, have increasingly become interwoven. The role of the Russian Ambassador to the U.K., Alexander Yakovenko, has reportedly been the subject of interest both to Mueller’s investigators and to those in the U.K., who have examined his relationship to Banks. The role of Nigel Farage, the former leader of the far-right, Euroskeptic U.K. Independence Party, who has been an ally of Bannon and Trump, has also reportedly stirred the interest of investigators in both countries, especially after he was spotted in 2017 leaving the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, in which Julian Assange has taken refuge. Assange’s media platform, WikiLeaks, published many of the e-mails stolen by Russia from the Hillary Clinton campaign during the 2016 election season.

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The Atlantic: Trump’s Evangelical Allies Really Didn’t Like Jeff Sessions

American Christian leaders did not like former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who resigned the day after the midterm elections at the president’s request. Not just progressive Christians who abhor the Trump administration: Many of President Donald Trump’s staunch evangelical allies, along with more moderate conservative leaders, also found Sessions lacking in his role. This is curious, because Sessions is himself a conservative Christian who promoted a religious-right brand of politics. And he spent much of his time in office supporting conservative religious causes. [...]

Johnnie Moore, the advisory council’s de facto spokesman and a member of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, told me there was “widespread dissatisfaction across the board from the conservative, evangelical elements of Trump’s base who believed Sessions to be weak and ineffective.” Notably, Moore added, Sessions alienated the “more moderate end of [Trump’s] evangelical base, who were dissatisfied with some of his enforcement actions, his visceral opposition to criminal-justice reform, and the tactics he supported for handling illegal immigration.”

Other Trump advisers had different reasons for their disapproval. He was seen as an obstacle to one of the main goals of the evangelical advisory group: instituting prison reform. And immigration, in particular, made Sessions unpopular among many conservative Christian groups. Sessions invoked the ire of a number of pastors, progressive and conservative alike, when he quoted the Bible to justify his department’s policy of separating families and children at the border.

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The Atlantic: What Sessions’s Resignation Means for Robert Mueller

Legal experts and political strategists who have either worked directly with the president or observed his behavior from afar attributed Trump’s reluctance to fire Sessions to two major considerations: fears in the White House that the move would cost the president support among GOP voters and members of Congress, who generally like and support Sessions, and the risk of provoking further allegations of obstruction of justice—both of which could deepen the challenges already facing the administration.

Elie Honig, a former federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, told me that Trump’s decision to oust Sessions and replace him with Whitaker probably wouldn’t be considered an obstructive act in and of itself. But it could add to the “totality of the circumstances” surrounding a series of moves Trump has taken to try to stymie the Russia investigation since early last year, Honig said, including his firing of former FBI Director James Comey and his attacks on Sessions.[...]

Whitaker will be the acting attorney general until a permanent replacement is nominated, Trump tweeted on Wednesday, and he’ll be overseeing the Mueller investigation directly in his new post. While he has touted Mueller’s character—“There is no honest person that sits in the world of politics, in the world of law, that can find anything wrong with Bob Mueller,” he told CNN last year—he seems to have already formed an opinion on the probe itself. In a tweet, Whitaker said an article that characterized Mueller’s investigators as a “lynch mob” was a “must read,” and he told CNN that if Sessions were fired, his replacement could “reduce” Mueller’s budget in such a way that it would grind his investigation almost to a halt. He also shared an article on Twitter that explored the process by which Trump could fire Mueller, said in a radio interview that “there is no criminal obstruction-of-justice charge to be had” against Trump, and defended the Trump campaign’s decision to meet with Russian nationals to obtain dirt on Hillary Clinton—a meeting Mueller has been closely examining.“You would always take the meeting,” Whitaker told CNN last year. “You certainly want to have any advantage, any legal advantage you can.” Whitaker is also friendly with Sam Clovis—a key grand-jury witness in the Mueller probe—and chaired his state-treasurer campaign in 2014.[...]

Trump’s move could still backfire. Without the administration’s protection, Sessions may now find himself both more vulnerable and more inclined to cooperate with Mueller, who has been investigating a period last summer when Trump privately discussed firing Sessions and attacked him in a series of tweets. At one point, the FBI opened an investigation into whether Sessions perjured himself in congressional testimony when he said he had no contact with Russians during the campaign.“It’s possible that Sessions will now be either angry or, at a minimum, no longer feel any need to curry favor with the president,” Kris said. Sessions’s conversations during the campaign with former Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and the Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos have been closely scrutinized by the special counsel, moreover, and Sessions’s campaign-era interactions with Trump would not be covered by executive privilege, Kris noted.

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The New York Review of Books: The Suffocation of Democracy

Because an ever-shrinking base of support for traditional conservatism made it impossible to carry out their authoritarian revision of the constitution, Hindenburg and the old right ultimately made their deal with Hitler and installed him as chancellor. Thinking that they could ultimately control Hitler while enjoying the benefits of his popular support, the conservatives were initially gratified by the fulfillment of their agenda: intensified rearmament, the outlawing of the Communist Party, the suspension first of freedom of speech, the press, and assembly and then of parliamentary government itself, a purge of the civil service, and the abolition of independent labor unions. Needless to say, the Nazis then proceeded far beyond the goals they shared with their conservative allies, who were powerless to hinder them in any significant way.

If the US has someone whom historians will look back on as the gravedigger of American democracy, it is Mitch McConnell. He stoked the hyperpolarization of American politics to make the Obama presidency as dysfunctional and paralyzed as he possibly could. As with parliamentary gridlock in Weimar, congressional gridlock in the US has diminished respect for democratic norms, allowing McConnell to trample them even more. Nowhere is this vicious circle clearer than in the obliteration of traditional precedents concerning judicial appointments. Systematic obstruction of nominations in Obama’s first term provoked Democrats to scrap the filibuster for all but Supreme Court nominations. Then McConnell’s unprecedented blocking of the Merrick Garland nomination required him in turn to scrap the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations in order to complete the “steal” of Antonin Scalia’s seat and confirm Neil Gorsuch. The extreme politicization of the judicial nomination process is once again on display in the current Kavanaugh hearings. [...]

But the potential impact of the Mueller report does suggest yet another eerie similarity to the interwar period—how the toxic divisions in domestic politics led to the complete inversion of previous political orientations. Both Mussolini and Hitler came to power in no small part because the fascist-conservative alliances on the right faced division and disarray on the left. The Catholic parties (Popolari in Italy, Zentrum in Germany), liberal moderates, Social Democrats, and Communists did not cooperate effectively in defense of democracy. In Germany this reached the absurd extreme of the Communists underestimating the Nazis as a transitory challenge while focusing on the Social Democrats—dubbed “red fascists”—as the true long-term threat to Communist triumph. [...]

The fascist movements of that time prided themselves on being overtly antidemocratic, and those that came to power in Italy and Germany boasted that their regimes were totalitarian. The most original revelation of the current wave of authoritarians is that the construction of overtly antidemocratic dictatorships aspiring to totalitarianism is unnecessary for holding power. Perhaps the most apt designation of this new authoritarianism is the insidious term “illiberal democracy.” Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Putin in Russia, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, and Viktor Orbán in Hungary have all discovered that opposition parties can be left in existence and elections can be held in order to provide a fig leaf of democratic legitimacy, while in reality elections pose scant challenge to their power. Truly dangerous opposition leaders are neutralized or eliminated one way or another.

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The New York Review of Books: Mike Pence, Star Witness

Because of these extraordinary circumstances, some of the president’s men decided that they had to take extraordinary action. I have learned that, in order to force the president’s hand in firing Flynn, two senior government officials instructed aides over the weekend that followed to leak sensitive information to The Washington Post and other news organizations in order to underscore that Flynn had likely lied about his conversations with Kislyak, and that there were concerns at the highest levels of the Justice Department and the FBI about Flynn’s conduct. These two officials believed that they were, in the words of one person familiar with the effort, “protecting Trump’s presidency from himself” and the country’s “national security from the president.” I have no information that Vice President Pence was involved in the leaking of this information, but Pence had certainly by then become a strong advocate of Flynn’s firing and, together with Priebus and McGahn, was extremely frustrated that the president had taken no action. [...]

This new information suggests that Vice President Pence could prove to be a crucial witness in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into whether Trump obstructed justice. There is no evidence of wrongdoing by the vice president. If the special counsel questions him, it would almost certainly be only as a witness, and it is far from certain that he will necessarily be questioned by investigators. [...]

Pence, Priebus, and McGahn then spoke with the president. All three counseled Trump that Flynn should be asked to resign, or be fired, according to White House records. Pence “took the lead” during this discussion, one well-placed source with knowledge of the matter told me. The vice president was uncharacteristically outspoken during their conversation because he no longer had any doubt that Flynn had lied to him and had done severe damage not only to the White House’s reputation, but also to Pence’s personal reputation, according to two people familiar with the matter. Attempting to depersonalize the issue, Pence said that the issue was not only that he had been lied to, but that Flynn had embarrassed the president and the administration. But as one person familiar with this presidential discussion told me, it was also about Pence himself, who felt that “for the president to not care about that aspect of it was disrespect for the vice president personally.” [...]

To date, Pence has played the part of deferential deputy to the president who, above all, demands loyalty from his subordinates. It is clear from this new account, though, that Pence interceded forcefully with the president about firing Flynn. There are few other people who know as much as Pence does about whether the president possibly broke the law. The president and his legal team have based their claim that Trump did not obstruct justice on the premise that Trump did not know that Flynn was under FBI investigation and did not know that Flynn had possibly lied to the FBI. Pence, according to the new information in this story, has some knowledge as to whether that is true. Pence also would have significant insight into the president’s frame of mind—his intent and motivation, the foundational building blocks of any obstruction case—when he allegedly pressured Comey to shut down his investigation of Flynn.

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The Atlantic: The Awkward Alliance Between Democrats and Jeff Sessions

Senate Democrats were aghast when Donald Trump, then the president-elect, named one of his staunchest campaign supporters to lead the Justice Department a few weeks after his surprise election victory. They viewed Sessions as a virulently anti-immigrant legislator with a racist past, and as a Trump loyalist who would do the president’s bidding as attorney general while blocking criminal-justice reform and taking a buzz saw to civil and voting rights. All but one Democrat—Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia—voted against Sessions’s confirmation. And Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts fought so strenuously to defeat him that Senate Republicans used an obscure parliamentary rule to silence her.

As attorney general, Sessions has confirmed many of Democrats’ worst fears when it comes to policy, and in the early months of the Trump administration, a number of them called on him to resign over one controversy or another. But after the president’s latest round of attacks on his attorney general, and new comments from Republicans suggesting that he might be fired, Democrats now find themselves in the uncomfortable position of wanting Sessions to stay for one simple reason: He’s one of the only people standing between Trump and an abrupt end to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian collusion and obstruction of justice. [...]

Senate Republicans have generally tried to protect their former colleague , warning Trump that it would be all but impossible to confirm a successor if Sessions was fired. Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley even said at one point in 2017 that he would have no time to hold confirmation hearings on a replacement. But in recent days, that wall of support appears to have weakened a bit.[...]

Jeffries acknowledged that the calculus might change if Democrats win at least the House majority in November, giving them more power to protect Mueller on their own and making Sessions expendable. Winning the Senate would mean they could block confirmation of a new attorney general without help from Republicans.

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The Atlantic: The Double Damage of the President’s Trump Tower Admission

Both Trump and Trump Jr. have at times in the past denied that the purpose of the June 9, 2016, meeting was to get damaging information about Hillary Clinton, but the president has now flatly acknowledged it. Despite the limitations of the medium, the president packed a great deal of potential trouble into less than 280 characters. First, he seems to proceed from the assumption that by declaring the purpose legal, that makes it so, when in fact the acknowledgement points to the ways the meeting may have broken federal laws.

Second, by contradicting his earlier claims, the president again underscores his prior dishonesty. This is not just a matter of public trust: The changing accounts also get at accusations that the president obstructed justice.

Finally, the tweet is riddled with internal contradictions. If the president is unconcerned about his son, why is he tweeting angrily about the story? And if what happened was entirely legal, why is he so quick to deny that he knew about the meeting? [...]

Sunday’s tweet is the most direct statement yet that the purpose of the June 2016 meeting was to get damaging information from Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer who has deep ties to the Kremlin. Trump Jr. had also been told in an email ahead of the meeting that the government of President Vladimir Putin supported his father’s candidacy. But declaring the meeting legal does not make it so. Over the last week, the president and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani have focused on the claim that “collusion” with the Russians, or anyone else, is not a crime per se.

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FiveThirtyEight: GOP Criticism Of Trump Is All Talk — But It Still Matters

Political scientists have done a great deal of research to figure out how much the president’s words matter — if they matter at all. Here’s what’s generally agreed upon: Presidential communication matters in a number of important ways. It can shape what issues citizens think about in the first place, how the public views the particular meaning or context of a major event, and provide important cues to partisans about where the party stands on a given issue.

Trump is facing a different dynamic than other presidents, though: He’s regularly contradicted by members of his own party on Capitol Hill. Take the president’s downplaying of Russian interference in the 2016 election. It will be harder for Trump to convince even most Republicans of these arguments as long as senators from his own party, like South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham, keep saying there was interference. Indeed, a (small) majority of Republicans believe the U.S. intelligence agencies’ finding that Russia interfered.  [...]

On paper, Trump, particularly on foreign policy, can still largely ignore Congress and implement his agenda if he chooses. But in reality, he keeps backtracking. Take his interest in implementing a more pro-Russia foreign policy. We think the criticism from congressional Republicans is a big part of that hesitancy on Trump’s part. The verbal opposition from fellow Republicans tends to lead to an escalation of opposition against Trump. Criticism by fellow Republicans frees the press, always leery of appearing too liberal, to attack controversial Trump initiatives more directly. That bipartisan and media opposition helps move the public in these instances to oppose what Trump is doing. Facing such opposition, the president often retreats. [...]

When the White House said last week that it was considering allowing the Russian government to interrogate Michael McFaul, who was the U.S. ambassador to Russia under Obama, the Senate passed a 98-0 nonbinding resolution condemning the idea, which the administration had by then disavowed.

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