OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE? TRUMP ASKED COMEY TO END FLYNN INVESTIGATION

Trump urged halt to Flynn probe, former FBI director’s notes say.

‘I hope you can let this go,’ Trump said, according to notes taken by Comey and described by associates.

According to a set of notes taken by former FBI director James Comey following a February meeting with President Trump, the president brought up the counterintelligence investigation into Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser, and urged Comey to drop it.

By Devlin Barrett, Ellen Nakashima and Matt Zapotosky

Trump might have obstructed justice if Comey’s allegation is true, legal analysts say.

More evidence would likely be required to warrant action and, as one expert noted, “Intent is key, and intent here can be difficult to prove.” But Comey’s memo offers a plausible case that the president obstructed justice.

By Matt Zapotosky

Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Tuesday that he was 'shaken' by news of Comey's memo, and warned: 'History is watching'

Sean Spicer answers questions on Trump's 'Comey twitter threat'

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As scandals grow, GOP senators say they’re ‘troubled’ but not much else.

....as lawmakers grapple with troubles in the fallout of another scandal in the Trump administration, nobody was exactly sure what to do about the situation, at least not yet.

• By Ben Terris and Monica Hesse

• Comey (whom Trump fired last week, drawing accusations that he was trying to chill the FBI’s ongoing investigation into contact between the Trump campaign and Russian officials) was known for taking careful and exhaustive notes when in circumstances he was worried would provoke later controversy — providing a paper trail to tell his side of the story. [Matthew A. Miller via Twitter]
• And while it’s not clear who leaked the existence of the memo to the Times, it wouldn’t be surprising if the leak came from within the FBI — which has a history of reacting extremely badly to any perceived threat to its independence, and a lot of ways to make politicians’ lives hell. [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

 Getty

Trump is careening toward an inevitable showdown with an undeniable truth.

Time and time again, the public has been forced to decide: Whom do you believe — Donald Trump, or some other source? Whether it’s Trump’s word against that of his campaign rivals or of the media or of James Comey, it seems only a matter of time until Trump is up against someone or something that leaves him no wiggle room.

• By Philip Bump

Trump 'told Comey to JAIL journalists who publish classified information.'

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4513042/Trump-told-Comey-jail-reporters-classified-leaks.html#ixzz4hIqgocTI 
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Is President Trump turning on Jared Kushner? 'Sour and dark' president has unleashed his fury on his White House staff - including his son-in law - following the Russia revelations.

• A New York Times report suggests that the White House has been thrown into turmoil following the report that the president disclosed top secret information to top Russian officials

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4510100/How-West-Wing-reacted-newest-Trump-Russia-claims.html#ixzz4hIrK9JYR
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As reports of Trump released classified information to Russia broke, White House aides were 'hiding in offices' and Sean Spicer's communications team was turning up the volume of televisions to mask the sound of shouting

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The Fix: Will Trump be impeached? It’s less likely than some Democrats are suggesting.

• In practice, though, there’s no automatic trigger for impeachment. It’s a process that requires a majority of the House (and removing an impeached president requires two-thirds of the Senate). So unless Republicans decide that this is the violation that’s going to shake them from their support of Trump, the newest revelations won’t change anything. [Vox / Dylan Matthews]

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David Friedman, (R) the new United States Ambassador to Israel, with Israeli President Reuven Rivlin (L) 

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Trump 'risked life of Israeli spy who is embedded in ISIS' by sharing classified information with Russia.

• 
  
• The classified information Trump shared with Russia came from an Israeli spy who is embedded in ISIS. 
• ABC reports that Israel shared their reports with the US on the condition they remain anonymous.
• 
  
• Trump relayed the information to Russian's foreign minister and ambassador to the US.
• He defended it on Tuesday, saying he was within his rights to do so as president. 
• 
  
• Former Mossad director Danny Yatom  said it could be a 'grave violation' and could lead to 'harm to the source' 
• 
  
• An Israeli intelligence officer said a 'special understanding' was violated and it represented 'our worst fears confirmed.'

The disclosure ensures that Trump will have plenty to discuss when he visits Israel, where Trump will meet Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and pray at the Western Wall. 

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Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4513366/Trump-spy-s-life-risk-sharing-info-Russia.html#ixzz4hIp1RDx4 

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House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz. Photo: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images

JONATHAN CHAIT, NEW YORK

Trump’s Protective Republican Wall in Congress Cracks

By Jonathan Chait

The Republican Congress has surrounded the Trump administration with a protective wall. The majority party has denied Democratic demands for independent investigations, quashed bills to force President Trump to release his tax returns, and avoided any serious effort at oversight. Hours after the New York Times reported that James Comey has memos describing Donald Trump attempting to steer him away from the Russia investigation, that wall began to crack.

Jason Chaffetz, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, and heretofore a staunch Trump defender, has subpoenaed all records of Comey’s meetings with the president. Cathy McMorris-Rogers, the fourth-ranking House Republican, endorsed the request, followed within hours by House Speaker Paul Ryan.

Opening up Comey’s trove of evidence is hardly a radical step. But it paves the way for a series of revelations are are extremely likely to depict the president having committed an impeachable offense. The implication of the next step is apparent to many Republicans. Senator John McCain says the charges have “reached Watergate size and scale.” Dana Bash reports that Congressional Republicans are discussing an independent prosecutor or an independent commission – two steps the party has avoided so far.

Trump’s new ‘voter fraud’ commission: A tool to help GOP win elections.



WASHINGTON POST


 Trump’s commission on ‘election integrity’ could instead restrict voting

WASHINGTON POST (2)

This is why Richard Nixon taped his White House conversations

 (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

This is why Richard Nixon taped his White House conversations

Nixon and others recorded conversations to gain political advantage and help write lucrative memoirs.

By Richard A. Moss and Luke Nichter  •  Read more »

WASHINGTON POST

American Fascism, in 1944 and Today

HENRY SCOTT WALLACE, NY TIMES

Seventy-three years ago, The New York Times asked the sitting vice president to write an article about whether there are fascists in America, and what they’re up to.

It was an alarming question. And the vice president took it quite seriously. His article, “The Danger of American Fascism,” described a breed of super-nationalist who pursues political power by deceiving Americans and playing to their fears, but is really interested only in protecting his own wealth and privilege.

That vice president was my grandfather, Henry A. Wallace. And in my view, he predicted President Trump.

....Mussolini was a proponent of “corporatism,” defined by some as “a merger of state and corporate power.” And through that lens, using that term, my grandfather’s warning looks prescient.

----

My grandfather warned about hucksters spouting populist themes but manipulating people and institutions to achieve the opposite. They pretend to be on the side of ordinary working people — “paying lip service to democracy and the common welfare,” he wrote. But at the same time, they “distrust democracy because it stands for equal opportunity.”

They invariably put “money and power ahead of human beings,” he continued. “They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest.” They also “claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution.”

They bloviate about putting America first, but it’s just a cover. “They use isolationism as a slogan to conceal their own selfish imperialism.”

They need scapegoats and harbor “an intensity of intolerance toward those of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions or nations.”

----

They “poison the channels of public information,” he wrote. Their “problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public” into giving them more money or power.

In fact, they use lies strategically, to promote civic division, which then justifies authoritarian crackdowns. Through “deliberate perversion of truth and fact,” he said, “their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity.”

Thus might lying about unprecedented high crime rates legitimize a police state. Lying about immigrants being rapists and terrorists might justify a huge border wall, mass expulsions and religion-based immigration bans. Lying about millions of illegal votes might excuse suppression of voting by disfavored groups.

----

The antidote? For my grandfather, it lay in that phrase the “common man.” In 1942, he famously rebutted conservatives calling for an “American Century” after the war — America, the greatest country on earth, dominating the world.

Nonsense, my grandfather said in that speech: We Americans “are no more a master race than the Nazis.” He called for a “century of the common man” — ordinary people, standing up and fighting for their rights, with decent jobs, organized (into unions), demanding accountable government committed to the “general welfare” rather than the privilege of the few, and decent schools for their kids (teaching “truths of the real world”). Democracy, he said in his 1944 essay, must “put human beings first and dollars second.”

If there’s any comfort in his essay 73 years ago, it is that this struggle is not new. It wasn’t even new then. The main question today is how our democracy and our brash new generation of citizen activists deals with it.

SAUL LOEB

MICHAEL TOMASKY, DAILY BEAST

-----

[The Republicans] see Trump as an opportunity to get what they can. If they can pass their tax cuts for the rich, end Obamacare, and put conservative judges on the Supreme Court and the federal circuit courts, they’ll let Trump do what he wants.

-----

What will it take [to impeach him?]…two things. One, Trump gets so low in the polls that he’s clearly an albatross to the House Republicans in their pursuit to hold on to their majority in 2018. Two, he does or says something that just makes everyone throw up their hands and say “okay, enough.” We can’t say what that thing is, but it does exist. As Potter Stewart said, we’ll know it when we see it. Or maybe the Republicans will never know it when they see it, which will increase the chances that the Democrats will take the House in 2018, and then it's a different ball game.

1. CLUES

7 hours ago

Researchers Link Ransomware to N. Korea

SYMANTEC/HANDOUT VIA REUTERS

Researchers at Symantec and Kaspersky Lab have discovered a potential link between North Korea and the WannaCry ransomware virus, Reuters reports. Code from an earlier version of the virus reportedly matches code from used by the Lazarus Group, which researchers believe to be a North Korean hacking group. While the evidence is still too sparse to link WannaCry definitively to North Korea, the code “is the best clue we have seen to date as to the origins of WannaCry,” Kaspersky Lab researcher Kurt Baumgartner told Reuters. WannaCry has infected more than 300,000 computers since Friday, locking the machines until their owners pay a bitcoin ransom.

READ IT AT REUTERS

Whoops! I did it again. (Chris Kleponis-Pool/Getty Images)

Trump revealed highly classified information to Russian diplomats

President Donald Trump disclosed “highly classified information” during a meeting with Russian officials last week, according to The Washington Post. 

• The details had not even been shared with American allies, and the disclosure could jeopardize a crucial intelligence-sharing relationship.

The revelations raise new questions about the already controversial meeting of Trump, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Sergey Kislyak, who is the Russian ambassador to the U.S. While such a disclosure is likely not illegal, it raises concerns about both the consequences of Trump’s ad hoc style when interacting with foreign leaders and U.S. coordination with other nations on sensitive foreign policy issues.

The president’s disclosures to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador in their Oval Office meeting last week jeopardized a critical source of intelligence on the Islamic State — an information-sharing arrangement considered so sensitive that details have been withheld from allies and tightly restricted even within the U.S. government, current and former U.S. officials said. Trump appeared to be boasting of the “great intel” he receives when he described a looming terror threat, according to an official with knowledge of the exchange.
Trump told Foreign Minister  Lavrov and Ambassador  Kislyak details about an ISIS terrorist plots involving laptops on airplanes, and gave away the city in ISIS territory where a US intel-sharing ally found out about the threat.

resident Trump met with Sergey V. Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, in the White House last week. American journalists were barred, but Russia released photographs. CreditRussian Foreign Ministry

"Trump went on to discuss aspects of the threat that the United States learned only through the espionage capabilities of a key partner. He did not reveal the specific intelligence-gathering method, but he described how the Islamic State was pursuing elements of a specific plot and how much harm such an attack could cause under varying circumstances. Most alarmingly, officials said, Trump revealed the city in the Islamic State's territory where the U.S. intelligence partner detected the threat.

"The partner had not given the United States permission to share the material with Russia, and officials said Trump's decision to do so endangers 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 the 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.' "

So this is not intelligence that the United States gathered or owned. It wasn't up to the United States to share. And so doing so really jeopardizes that relationship. It potentially damages trust that's critical in these kinds of arrangements. And I think that's one of the really big worries here...And in this case it's important, because this is apparently an ongoing stream of intelligence into Islamic state plotting. I mean, what could be more important?"

National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster called the Washington Post story 'false', which claimed Trump leaked 'highly classified' information to the Russians during an Oval Office meeting last week

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4509414/Republicans-speak-latest-Trump-reports.html#ixzz4hDdrJ0Qc
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VOX

• This revelation by the Post comes after a week of speculation and concern over Trump’s willingness to allow a Russian state media photographer into the Oval Office as part of the visit. Counterintelligence experts said that was a needless security breach that could’ve let the photographer, a Russian government employee, install a listening device or other surveillance gear in the White House. [Washington Post / Carol Morello and Greg Miller]
• But it appears the more imminent security risk was just Trump running his mouth.
• How bad is this? In the words of national security law expert Benjamin Wittes: “This story is nauseating. You might have to work with natsec people to understand how bad it is, but it's horrible. Really really bad.” [Benjamin Wittes,Senior Fellow at Brookings. Editor in Chief: Lawfare  ]
• So is this all evidence of US-Russian collusion? Maybe, but again, the Post story suggests that maybe Trump is just extremely insecure and wanted to impress his guests. He reportedly told Lavrov and Kislyak, “I get great intel. I have people brief me on great intel every day.”
• And we can’t say we didn’t see this coming. Here's a Politico story from the day after inauguration, on intelligence community worries about Trump leaking to Russia: "Trump’s off-the-cuff communication style also alarms observers in the U.S. and abroad who worry he may, inadvertently or out of bravado, reveal classified information." [Politico / Nahal Toosi​]

The latest reports of Trump revealing classified information to the Russians comes just ahead of his first foreign trip as president. He's set to depart on Friday, traveling to Saudi Arabia, Israel, the Vatican,..and will attend a NATO meeting in Brussels, Belgium, and the G7 meeting in Italy.

"The Washington Post is withholding most plot details, including the name of the city, at the urging of officials who warned that revealing them would jeopardize important intelligence capability

Bob Corker, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman, was one of the first Republicans to speak out about reports Trump shared classified information with Russia

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4509414/Republicans-speak-latest-Trump-reports.html#ixzz4hDdPM7vK
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Lawmakers express shock, concern about Oval Office disclosure.

The disclosure is likely to raise questions about the president’s handling of classified information and could also increase pressure on investigators looking into his possible ties to the Kremlin. “The chaos” in the administration “creates a worrisome environment,” said Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee.

Where Bashar al-Assad burns the people he kills

State Department/DigitalGlobe via AP

• In a press briefing Monday, acting Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Stuart Jones — a career foreign service officer who's served as ambassador to Iraq and Jordan — presented newly declassified satellite evidence suggesting that the Syrian government has built a crematorium to dispose of bodies at its notorious Saydnaya prison complex, outside Damascus. [NYT / Gardiner Harris and Anne Barnard]
• If Saydnaya sounds familiar, that’s probably due to a February report from Amnesty International that estimated that anywhere from 5,000 to 13,000 people have been executed there since the beginning of the Syrian civil war in 2011. Deaths due to disease or malnutrition were common, and guards torture inmates by withholding water, beating them with electrical cables and belts made of cut-up tank tracks, and forcing prisoners to rape each other. Prisoners are typically executed by hanging, after being blindfolded and told they’re going to a “good place.” [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]
• The Amnesty report said that the prison facility was enlarged in 2012 to enable more executions. "Our data … suggests as many as 50 murders a day coming out of the complex," the State Department's Jones told reporters. "If you have that level of production of mass murder, then using the crematorium would help." The photos released by State show the addition of HVAC facilities, a discharge stack, and other changes that suggest a crematorium has been constructed. [State Department / Stuart Jones]
• Jones further specified that he thinks the crematorium is a way to destroy evidence of the Syrian government’s crimes: “We believe that the building of a crematorium is an effort to cover up the extent of mass murders taking place in Saydnaya prison.”
• Jones’s remarks included a specific call-out to Russia, the Syrian government’s main foreign backer, calling on it to “exercise its great influence over the Syrian regime” to stop the mass murders at Saydnaya. [Washington Post / Karen DeYoung]
• The timing of the revelation is also important: Tomorrow, indirect peace talks between the Syrian government and opposition start up again in Geneva, and Jones is the highest-ranking American official involved in the details of the Syrian peace process. The Assad government has downplayed the Geneva talks in favor of a parallel process in Kazakhstan with Russia, Turkey, and Iran, to negotiate local ceasefire zones. Jones has been an observer for some of those talks too. [The Guardian / Julian Borger​]

GET ME ROGER STONE

VARIETY

Nicolas Ortega

Political chaos in Washington is a return on investment for Moscow

President Trump’s decision to fire James Comey as FBI director was the latest destabilizing jolt to a core institution of the U.S. government that current and former officials say serves broader Russian interests. While the Kremlin may have hoped for sanctions relief and recognition of its annexation of Crimea from the Trump administration, the tumult in the United States is a welcome alternative.

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Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, 

CreditStephen Crowley/The New York Times

Top lawmakers: If Trump has tapes, Congress needs access to them

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham and Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer were among leaders in both parties requesting that any recordings of White House conversations be turned over for review immediately. Sen. Mike Lee, a former federal prosecutor, said “it’s probably inevitable” that such tapes would be subpoenaed.

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President Trump’s signature on an executive order. CreditStephen Crowley/The New York Times

Under Trump, inconvenient data that was previously public is being sidelined

Workplace violations, climate data, animal welfare and ethics records are among the types of information that has been obscured. In some cases, data that was once easily accessible has moved to locations that are harder to find, while others have entirely vanished.

The administration has deleted or tucked away important information, removed Obama-era webpages and broken with precedent by refusing to disclose even basic public information when it does not help advance Trump's agenda. Juliet Eilperin rounds up some of the startling assaults on transparency:

• Some of the moves lessen public access to information about companies and other employers – shielding them from the so-called “naming and shaming” that federal officials previously used to influence company behavior. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration dramatically scaled back on publicizing fines against firms. The Agriculture Department removed from the web a list of animal welfare enforcement actions, which listed abuses in dog breeding operations and horse farms.
• 
  
• The administration no longer publishes ethics waivers granted to employees who would otherwise be barred from joining the government because of lobbying activities. Nor is the White House releasing its visitor logs.
• 
  
• They've removed websites and other material supporting Obama-era policies – such as a White House web page directing prospective donors to private groups that aid Syrian refugees, and websites providing information about climate change.
• 
  
• Officials removed websites run by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Interior Department that provided scientific information about climate change, eliminating access, for instance, to documents evaluating the danger that the desert ecology in the Southwest could face from future warming.
• 
  
• The White House also retired the two-year-old Federal Supplier Greenhouse Gas Management Scorecard, which ranks firms with major federal contracts on their energy efficiency and policies to curb carbon output.

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United States Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley delivers remarks at a Security Council meeting in April. (Stephanie Keith/Reuters

Launching missiles is not the path to talks with the U.S., Haley tells Pyongyang

 The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations commented after analysts said North Korea appeared to have tested a new kind of missile with a longer range.

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Schumer: Special Counsel Needed Before Senate Confirms New FBI Director

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said on Sunday that the upper chamber should not vote to confirm a new FBI director until the Department of Justice appoints a special counsel to oversee the investigation into possible collusion between Trump associates and Russian operatives. “I think there are a lot of Democrats who feel that way,” Schumer said on CNN’s State of the Union. “We’ll have to discuss it as a caucus, but I would support that move.” Republican congressional leaders have pushed back at the suggestion of a special counsel, while Democrats have said it is necessary after President Donald Trump abruptly fired James Comey. Schumer added that Trump’s nominee to replace Comey should be nonpartisan and have prosecutorial experience. “If there is interference, or attempted interference, to shut down the investigation, to misdirect it—you need somebody who’s going to stand up,” Schumer said.

—Andrew Desiderio

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Russia, a Victim of the Cyberattack, Voices Outrage

By ANDREW E. KRAMER 4:55 PM ET

The country was hit the hardest in the first wave of a global hacking effort, with banks, cellphone operators and railroads fending off attacks.

With North Korea, we do have cards to play.

With North Korea, we do have cards to play.
DAILY BEAST


WASHINGTON POST

Nearly 100 Countries Hit in Massive Cyberattack.

DAILY BEAST