/cdn0.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/8124905/Flynn.jpg) |
| Drew Angerer/Getty Images |
Why [does] Trump want to protect Flynn? What might he know that the president doesn’t want to get out? Many unanswered questions remain about why it took 18 DAYS for Flynn to resign after the acting attorney general warned the White House counsel that he had been compromised and was susceptible to blackmail by the Russians. Could Trump have secretly authorized Flynn’s contacts with Sergey Kislyak during the transition?
VOX
- ...the New York Times reported last night that Flynn informed the Trump transition team on January 4, ahead of inauguration, that he was under FBI investigation. They let him become national security adviser anyway. Keep in mind that the head of the transition was Mike Pence. [NYT / Matthew Rosenberg and Mark Mazzetti]
- Then McClatchy revealed that Flynn halted an Obama administration plan to use Kurdish fighters to retake Raqqa from ISIS. Given that we know Flynn took money to lobby for the Turkish government, and the Turkish government opposed this operation, that looks … suspicious. [McClatchy / Vera Bergengruen]
- So is President Trump disturbed by his former aide's behavior? Apparently not. The president apparently sent a message to Flynn telling him to "stay strong." [Yahoo! / Michael Isikoff]
- Multiple White House sources told the Daily Beast that Trump wants to rehire Flynn, that he "feels really, really, really bad about firing him, and he genuinely thinks if the investigation is over Flynn can come back." [The Daily Beast / Lachlan Markay, Asawin Suebsaeng, Kimberly Dozier, and Jana Winter]
- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Trump was also vocally frustrated publicly, saying on Twitter, "This is the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history!” [NYT / Mark Landler and Glenn Thrush]
- Seth Moulton, the Congress member from Salem, Massachusetts, disputed this claim. [Seth Moulton]
- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/cdn0.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/54846801/684291142.0.jpg) |
| Win McNamee/Getty Images |
- And Trump is getting close to picking a new FBI director, and the frontrunner appears to be … Joe Lieberman. Who, in addition to being a loathed turncoat by most Democratic rank and file, who watered down Obamacare and endorsed McCain in 2008, is currently working at a law firm representing Trump. [Vox / Matthew Yglesias]
- It makes sense that Trump would want someone friendly to him in federal law enforcement. Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general who wrote the memo explaining the reasons why FBI Director James Comey was fired, apparently told senators that Trump decided to fire Comey before Rosenstein wrote the memo. Since FBI directors are only supposed to be fired for cause, that’s … bad. [NYT / Matthew Rosenberg and Rebecca Ruiz]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, said he has “no doubt” that Republicans would have already voted to impeach Hillary Clinton if she had done what Trump did. "For one millionth of what has happened with Trump, they would have impeached her,” Cummings said in a radio interview picked up by CNN. “I'm just telling you. They would have been going crazy. That's what makes this so egregious.”
 |
| Doug Mills/The New York Times |
New York Times conservative columnist Ross Douthat floats another idea for removing Trump: “Ultimately I do not believe that our president sufficiently understands the nature of the office that he holds, the nature of the legal constraints that are supposed to bind him, perhaps even the nature of normal human interactions, to be guilty of obstruction of justice in the Nixonian or even Clintonian sense of the phrase. I do not believe he is really capable of the behind-the-scenes conspiring that the darker Russia theories envision. And it is hard to betray an oath of office whose obligations you evince no sign of really understanding or respecting. Which is not an argument for allowing him to occupy that office. It is an argument, instead, for using a constitutional mechanism more appropriate to this strange situation than impeachment: the 25th Amendment to the Constitution.… The Trump situation is not exactly the sort that the amendment’s Cold War-era designers were envisioning. But his incapacity to really govern, to truly execute the serious duties that fall to him to carry out, is nevertheless testified to daily — not by his enemies or external critics, but by precisely the men and women whom the Constitution asks to stand in judgment on him, the men and women who serve around him in the White House and the cabinet.”
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 |
| President Trump escorting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel into the White House in February.tephen Crowley/The New York Times |
Trump's disclosure endangered spy placed inside ISIS by Israel, officials say.
-- ABC News says Trump’s disclosure has endangered the life of a spy placed inside ISIS by Israel. From Brian Ross, James Gordon Meek and Randy Kreider: “The spy provided intelligence involving an active ISIS plot to bring down a passenger jet en route to the United States, with a bomb hidden in a laptop that U.S. officials believe can get through airport screening machines undetected. The information was reliable enough that the U.S. is considering a ban on laptops on all flights from Europe to the United States. 'The real risk is not just this source,' said Matt Olsen, the former director of the National Counterterrorism Center … 'but future sources of information about plots against us' ... 'Russia is not part of the ISIS coalition,' Olsen said. 'They are not our partner.' Dan Shapiro, the former U.S. ambassador to Israel, agreed -- saying in an interview that Trump and his team were 'careless,' and that the disclosures demonstrate a “poor understanding of how to guard sensitive information."
The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times both reported that ...The Israeli source was considered so sensitive that the U.S. hadn't shared it with its closest allies in the so-called Five Eyes group, which includes the U.K. and Canada." (Israel's biggest enemy is Iran, which is one of Russia's close allies, so it seems very plausible that what Trump said could wind up in the hands of Jerusalem's enemies in Tehran.)
-- “Trump Called Netanyahu, but White House and Israel Kept Mum,” from Haaretz’s Barak Ravid.