AMERICAN TRIBALISM

The knee-jerk reaction to James Comey’s very credible and very serious allegations, which the former FBI director made under oath and has contemporaneous notes to back up, is the strongest proof point yet of the rising tribalism that has infected our politics.

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“It has been many years since a witness appeared on Capitol Hill and put a president in such potential jeopardy,” writes Dan Balz, The Post’s chief correspondent, in a smart take. “The investigation is far from its conclusion and, as with so much about the probe, the evidence is murky or disputable. But for the president and his White House … this was not a good day."

On the front page of the New York Times, Peter Baker calls it “the most damning j’accuse moment by a senior law enforcement official against a president in a generation.”

“Comey emerged as a superb institutionalist, a man who believes we are a nation of laws,” adds columnist David Brooks. “Trump emerged as a tribalist and a clannist, who simply cannot understand the way modern government works.”

 CreditDoug Mills/The New York Times

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We’ll know soon if the hearing moves the numbers, but don’t hold your breath. 
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Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

Trump has long been adept at muddying the waters by employing the crisis management playbook that he learned from Joseph McCarthy’s protégé Roy Cohn. The difference this time: He can count on the official Republican Party apparatus to do his bidding.

The Republican National Committee deployed a whopping 60 staff members as part of its rapid-response “war room” effort to counter-punch at Comey, according to the Wall Street Journal.

“The RNC’s output was punchy, snarky and at times contradictory,” David Weigel reports. “It neatly captured the fog of confusion that the president’s defenders wanted to churn.”

Even Trump’s former political opponents, including Marco Rubio and John McCain, acted sort of like his political defense team, Paul Kane writes.



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Legal experts, meanwhile, said Comey’s testimony clarified and bolstered the case that the president obstructed justice, Matt Zapotosky reports.

-- But sitting presidents do not get indicted on obstruction-of-justice charges. It is Congress that must ultimately determine if his behavior deserves impeachment.

 There is a chicken-egg dynamic at play. Most rank-and-file Republicans look to their party leaders for cues about what to believe, but these same lawmakers are waiting on the base of the party to turn on Trump before they find the “courage” to say publicly what many of them already believe privately.

This window-dressing is unlikely to change until members of Congress conclude that the cost of standing with Trump exceeds the risk of defending him. Rep. Martha McSally (R-Ariz.) said during a private appearance last week that the president could cost her party the House. “Any Republican member of Congress, you are going down with the ship,” McSally warned, according to the Tucson Weekly. “And we're going to hand the gavel to (Nancy) Pelosi in 2018. They only need 28 seats...

Erick Erickson warns his fellow Republicans that their blind loyalty to Trump is going to damage the party bigly in the long-term. “If your goal is to stop the left, all Trump is doing is both emboldening them and driving independent voters to them,” he explains in a new piece for The Resurgent. “Soon he will be a catalyst for a leftwing resurgence if Republicans do not sort this out themselves.”

-- The challenge for the politicians who would like to make a break is that Trump supporters who dwell in the alternative-reality fever swamps of the Internet were thrilled by the hearing, which they believe somehow offered total vindication of their president. 

(Rachel Orr/Washington Post illustration; Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post; iStock

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And it has not stopped at the water’s edge. When Barack Obama was president, a Post-ABC poll found that only 22 percent of Republicans supported missile strikes against Syria in response to Bashar al-Assad using chemical weapons against civilians. After Trump did it, 86 percent of Republicans supported strikes for the exact same reason.

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Whether there are tapes has become more significant than ever. ... If it turns out there were tapes, and Trump destroyed them, that could constitute a smoking gun of obstruction. It would also represent a tacit confession that Comey’s testimony is accurate.

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After that meeting, Comey said he told Sessions that he did not want to be alone anymore with Trump and “it can’t happen that you get kicked out of the room and the president talks to me.” Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) asked Comey how the attorney general responded. “I have a recollection of him just kind of looking at me,” he replied. “I kind of got — his body language gave me the sense like, ‘What am I going to do?’ . . . He didn’t say anything.”...

 In case you missed it: Trump’s lawyer has clients with Kremlin ties. From Shawn Boburg: “Kasowitz’s clients include Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch who is close to President Vladimir Putin and has done business with Trump’s former campaign manager. Kasowitz also represents Sberbank, Russia’s largest state-owned bank … Kasowitz has represented one of Deripaska’s companies for years in a civil lawsuit in New York and was scheduled to argue on the company’s behalf May 25, two days after news broke that Trump had hired him. A different lawyer in Kasowitz’s firm showed up in court instead, avoiding a scenario that would have highlighted Kasowitz’s extensive work for high-profile Russian clients.”


-- Mueller has been stocking his own team with highly-experienced prosecutors. One of the federal government’s top criminal law specialists is going to work part-time on the project. Justice Department deputy solicitor general Michael Dreeben, who has argued more than 100 cases before the Supreme Court, is the department’s go-to lawyer on criminal justice cases, Sari Horwitz reports. “Former and current Justice Department officials say that Mueller’s recruitment of Dreeben shows how serious he is about the investigation and signals complexities in the probe. … Mueller’s team includes … Andrew Weissmann, the chief of the Justice Department’s fraud section who oversaw corruption investigations including the probe into cheating by Volkswagen on diesel emissions tests.”

With the Affordable Care Act, Democrats over-promised and under-delivered. 

WASHINGTON POST

Climate change as culture war: Trump’s Paris pullout is a giant middle finger to the left.

SALON

MAY-HEM IN THE U.K.

Conservatives lose majority, prompting calls for May’s resignation.
Prime minister’s gamble on snap election backfires: ‘She’s in a very difficult place’

A projection based on final results in most districts showed Prime Minister Theresa May’s Conservatives seven seats short of keeping their majority, while Labour was forecast to pick up dozens of seats.

May has decided against stepping down and probably will try to form a coalition government.

But it was not guaranteed that May would be allowed to stay on, given that the results represented a catastrophic outcome for Tories.

• The Conservative Party will try to form a minority government with help from a party in Northern Ireland.

•  Theresa May, high on good polling and anxious to unify her party behind a “hard Brexit” (involving leaving the EU’s trade and immigration agreements), called a snap election in spring in the name of selecting a Brexit negotiating team. [The Atlantic / Samuel Earle] 
• But Brexit really wasn’t the topic of the election. Instead — after the Conservatives floated, then backpedaled on, a proposal to have seniors pay part of their medical care that was called the “dementia tax” — it became an election about social services in Britain. And that primed many voters, especially young people, to Labour and Jeremy Corbyn, who promised more funding to the National Health Service and tuition-free college. [NME / Mike Williams] 

Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain addressed the news media outside 10 Downing Street in London on Friday, announcing plans to form a minority government. CreditTim Ireland/Associated Press

NY TIMES

Minority governments tend to be fragile and short-lived, and many expect that Mrs. May will be a lame-duck prime minister, that she may not last as long as a year and that she will not lead her party into another election.

For European Union leaders, who were expecting her to emerge with a reinforced majority, the uncertainty is unwelcome, especially as they try to prioritize issues such as climate change and their relationship with an unpredictable and unfriendly President Trump. There is also resentment that, once again, the British have complicated things out of political hubris and partisan self-interest.

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Without question now, Britain is not ready for the negotiations, having spent the past year largely avoiding a real debate on the topic, other than a vague argument over the merits of a “hard Brexit” (as a clean break from the European Union is known), versus a “soft Brexit,” which would require more compromise.

An Upheaval Just as ‘Brexit’ Talks Begin

Mrs May faced open calls from her own MPs to 'consider her position' while a jubilant Jeremy Corbyn demanded she make way for him to become PM. But an ashen-faced Mrs May insisted the Conservatives were still the largest party with an expected 318 seats. She insisted the country needed a 'period of stability', adding: 'It is incumbent on us to ensure that we have that.' As the knives came out for Mrs May, former chancellor George Osborne lambasted her campaign performance as 'wooden' and her manifesto as a disaster, making clear he did not believe she could survive for long.

Daniel Leal-Olivas/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party may have finished second but still won big

The far-left firebrand, who many believed was headed for political oblivion, vastly outperformed expectations.Labour, under Jeremy Corbyn, ran what political analysts regard as an excellent and optimistic campaign, promising an end to austerity, more money for health and social welfare and free tuition

• Corbyn is something of a throwback to the quasisocialist Labour Party of the 1970s — he wants to nationalize several industries. And he’s been a pretty dysfunctional leader of the party in Parliament. But many outsiders like him — he was elected because of a surge of new Labour Party members who joined to vote for him — which might have provided the motivation boost to spur the party toward a better-than-expected performance Thursday. [BBC Newsnight / Stephen Bush] 

NY TIMES

“He’s had a brilliant campaign,” said Chuka Umunna, a senior member of the Labour Party who was among those openly disgruntled with Mr. Corbyn’s leadership last year. “Jeremy has fought this campaign with enthusiasm, energy, verve, has clearly loved being surrounded in the mix with people. That’s what politics is all about.”

And a striking contrast to Mrs. May, who was roundly criticized as wooden, robotic and manifestly uncomfortable when meeting voters.

When the election campaign started last month, few took the 68-year-old Mr. Corbyn seriously. But his unorthodox path fits a broader pattern of outsiders and, some would say, populists who are shaking up the political center in Western countries from left and right.

A five-time winner of the parliamentary beard of the year, Mr. Corbyn is Britain’s Bernie Sanders, another grizzled firebrand who inspired a generation of young voters to become politicized and, at least this week, turn out to vote. Mr. Corbyn’s fans call themselves Corbynistas.

Some already say that with his rejection of free-market economics and his quiet but more compromising approach to Britain’s exit from the European Union, he might not just change the Labour Party but also shift British politics more broadly.

Mr. Corbyn is a different type of politician, one happier on the campaign trail speaking to fellow activists through a megaphone than debating in the neo-Gothic splendor of the British Parliament with its arcane rules and obscure traditions.

In 2015, after more than three decades as a lawmaker, he had to be persuaded to stand for the party leadership, agreeing only reluctantly and in order to enable the left to present a candidate. No one, not even Mr. Corbyn himself, expected him to win. If ever there were an accidental leader, he is it.

During his 34 years in Parliament, Mr. Corbyn has essentially been in permanent opposition, not just to Mrs. May’s Conservative Party but also to his own Labour Party. He voted against the Iraq invasion, has opposed successive attempts to roll back civil liberties in the fight against terrorism and has long argued against deregulation and free-market reforms.

The biggest problem, he has said, is that since Margaret Thatcher established neoliberalism as the dominant economic consensus in Britain in the 1980s, Labour allowed the Conservatives to set the agenda on the economy and never offered an alternative narrative.

Mr. Corbyn offered that alternative: Under the banner of “For the Many Not the Few,” he vowed to nationalize the railroads, make universities free again and inject billions into the National Health Service by raising taxes on companies and the top 5 percent of income earners.

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The causes that he has been passionate about are many, including the rights of Palestinians and South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle. But he has also come under fire for showing sympathy over the years to the Irish Republican Army and Hamas, the militant group ruling Gaza that is dedicated to eradicating Israel.

He and his inner circle have been accused of anti-Semitism for their strong criticism of Israel; of a latent anti-Americanism; of wanting to do away with Britain’s nuclear deterrent policy; and of being lukewarm toward NATO — accusations that he denies.

All of that faded into the background on Friday.

Mr. Corbyn, said Mr.  Steven Fielding, a professor of political history at the University of Nottingham. “has rewritten the rules, but he hasn’t won.” The question, he added, was “how viable is a Corbyn approach to winning power, rather than doing well in defeat?”

With his core vote for now still far to the left of Middle England, Mr. Corbyn seems unlikely ever to run Britain.

NY TIMES: 

Writers From the Right and Left React to Comey’s Testimony

AFP PHOTO / Brendan Smialowski

Comey Says Trump Tried to Derail Inquiry and Accuses the White House of ‘Lies’

Ex-F.B.I. Chief Gives a Blunt Account of Presidential Run-Ins

• In Senate testimony, James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, offered a plain-spoken assessment of a president whose conversations unnerved him from the day they met.
• His testimony squarely raised the question of whether President Trump tried to obstruct justice.

The way Comey understood his conversations with the president, Trump asked Comey for three things:

1.His loyalty while appearing to threaten his job security.

2.To “lift the cloud” of any perception the president was under investigation

3.To drop the FBI's investigation into Trump's fired national security adviser Michael Flynn.

“The ask was to get it out that I, the president, am not personally under investigation,” Comey said.

But, Comey testified, Trump did NOT ask him to drop the FBI's broader investigation into Russia meddling in the 2016 election and whether Trump's campaign helped.

Comey also declined to give a legal judgment on whether Trump obstructed justice or whether he colluded with Russia, saying that's up for the FBI and special counsel to investigate.

Comey thinks the president is a liar

The way Comey tells it, the first time he met Trump, Comey got the heebie-jeebies — for a whole bunch of small reasons but nothing in particular.

“I was honestly concerned he might lie about the nature of our meeting,” Comey said, as to why he left Trump Tower, hopped in an FBI car, opened a laptop and started writing down every detail he could recall about his first meeting with the president. “It led me to believe that I gotta write it down, and I gotta write it down in a detailed way. … I knew that there might come a day where I might need a record of what happened, not just to defend myself and FBI and the integrity of our situation, and the independence of our function.”

Comey also said the president lied about why he fired him:

“The administration then chose to defame me — and, more importantly — the FBI by saying the organization was in disarray and that it was poorly led, that the workforce had lost confidence in its leader. Those were lies, plain and simple.”

The way Trump handled Comey's firing is what prompted Comey to speak out.

After Trump's tweet, Comey said he couldn't stay silent.

“I woke up in the middle of the night Monday [thinking] that there might be corroboration for our conversation,” Comey testified. “And my judgment was that I needed to get that out in the public square. So I asked a friend of mine to share the content of [my memos] with a reporter.”

 Democrats are pretty sure Comey's firing is the key to what the president did wrong.

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 Republicans are critical of why Comey didn't speak up sooner.

The president never should have cleared the room,” said Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) of a key Oval Office private meeting between Comey and Trump. “And he never should have asked you to let [the investigation into Flynn] go.

“But I remain puzzled by your response. Your response was: 'I agree that Michael Flynn was a good guy.' You could have said: 'Mr. President, this meeting is inappropriate, this response could compromise the investigation.'"

Comey testified that he was “stunned” the president was asking him to drop an investigation and, in retrospect, he probably should have been more firm with the president. But he just wanted to say something — anything — to end the “awkward” conversations.

And, Comey said, he doesn't regret keeping the president's conversations within a tight circle: "No action was the most important thing I could do to make sure there was no interference in the investigation."

Senators Richard M. Burr, right, the Republican chairman of the committee, and Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat. CreditAl Drago/The New York Times

VOX

• We didn’t learn a ton of new information, strictly speaking. One highly notable exception: Comey alluded to not-yet-public information that led him to believe Attorney General Jeff Sessions would need to recuse himself from the FBI’s investigation into contacts between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. [Business Insider / Josh Barro] 

Associated Press/Susan Walsh

• (Based on what he proceeded to tell senators in a closed-door briefing Thursday afternoon, it looks like the information in question is that Sessions met with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak more times than he’d admitted to — and left all of those meetings out of his confirmation hearings and vetting documents.) [Vox / Dara Lind and Tara Golshan] 

• But the heart of the hearing was Comey building a case that President Donald Trump, either out of malice or ignorance, repeatedly attempted to violate the FBI’s independence. It was a case that required a pitch-perfect performance in the role of “upstanding FBI agent,” and Comey nailed it. [Washington Post / Alyssa Rosenberg] 
• Comey’s performance was probably sincere, but it’s important to remember that he knows exactly what he’s doing. He’s a seasoned operator within government structures. He’s trying to protect the reputation of the agency he formerly led against allegations that it’s mishandled both the 2016 election and the Trump administration. [The Intercept / Mattathias Schwartz and Ryan Devereaux] 

• The case that Trump actually committed obstruction of justice wasn’t really strengthened by Comey’s testimony, which is to say, it’s still debatable. What’s less debatable is that Trump acted wrongly. One legal expert described it as “lawful, but awful.” [MSNBC / Alex Seitz-Wald and Ken Dilanian] 
• At the end of the day, the legal argument is kind of irrelevant. The body that would be holding Trump to account would be Congress, if it decided to impeach him. Congress can impeach someone without charging them of a formal federal crime. But this Congress still appears profoundly uninterested in doing anything of the kind.

 Cheriss May/Sipa USA/AP

GOP’s emerging Trump defense: A naif in the Oval Office

“The president’s new at this,” House Speaker Paul D. Ryan said. While playing up Trump’s ­naivete is one strain of his political defense, legal analysts said it could also be a criminal defense.

A silent Trump? Why the counterpuncher let others do the punching.

For at least one day, the president exhibited restraint on Comey at the urging of his lawyers and advisers.

TOMORROW, COMEY TALKS,

I need loyalty’: James Comey’s riveting prepared testimony about what Trump asked him, annotated

WASHINGTON POST

By Amber Phillips

Holy …. word I can't say in a family newsletter. James Comey just dropped a bomb on President Trump. Ahead of the fired FBI director's testimony Thursday to Congress about his conversations with Trump, the Senate Intelligence Committee released Comey's seven-page statement detailing every single time the president asked him about the FBI's investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election and whether Trump's campaign helped. Ahead of the fired FBI director's testimony Thursday to Congress about his conversations with Trump, the Senate Intelligence Committee released Comey's seven-page statement detailing every single time the president asked him about the FBI's investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election and whether Trump's campaign helped. And forget meddling by Russia. Comey was concerned that Trump was meddling in the FBI's independent investigation into Russia. Specifically, Comey details, Trump appeared to be trying to get the FBI to lay off its investigation into Trump's now-fired national security adviser, Michael Flynn. Until this point, we've only heard secondhand accounts of these conversations. But this is the first we're hearing about them from Comey — and we'll hear more Thursday when he testifies in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee. We annotated Comey's entire statement here (and if you only click on one thing, make it that.) Comey testifying in July. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP) Here are the top lines: “My instincts told me that the one-on-one setting, and the pretense that this was our first discussion about my position, meant the dinner was, at least in part, an effort to have me ask for my job and create some sort of patronage relationship. That concerned me greatly, given the FBI’s traditionally independent status in the executive branch.” — This is how Comey describes a dinner Trump invited him to — just the two of them — on Jan. 27. At that dinner, Comey said, Trump asked him this: “A few moments later, the President said, 'I need loyalty, I expect loyalty.' I didn’t move, speak, or change my facial expression in any way during the awkward silence that followed. We simply looked at each other in silence. The conversation then moved on, but he returned to the subject near the end of our dinner.” At a Feb. 14 Oval Office meeting, after everyone else had left the room: “The door closed. The President then returned to the topic of Mike Flynn, saying, 'He is a good guy and has been through a lot.' He repeated that Flynn hadn’t done anything wrong on his calls with the Russians, but had misled the Vice President. He then said, 'I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.' I replied only that 'he is a good guy.' " In an April phone call: “On the morning of April 11, the President called me and asked what I had done about his request that I 'get out' that he is not personally under investigation.” Comey says Trump went on to say in that call: "'Because I have been very loyal to you, very loyal; we had that thing you know.' I did not reply or ask him what he meant by 'that thing.' " A month later, Trump fired Comey. What we still don't know Comey's testimony is absolutely remarkable for the level of detail, the candor and the implications it raises for the president. Mostly: Did Trump obstruct justice? We don't know that. And Comey's testimony raises a lot of questions that senators will be sure to ask him tomorrow, like: If you were so concerned about Trump's actions, why didn't you tell anyone about it, like your boss, Attorney General Jeff Sessions? Why are you telling basically the whole world all of this now, after Trump fired you? Why should we trust your recollection, given you misstated a key fact about Hillary Clinton's emails last time you testified to Congress?