Trump has spent more than a year provoking North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un with childish taunts, but on Tuesday he declared the brutal dictator “very honorable.” At an expanded bilateral meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron, Trump spoke before cameras on a variety of subjects, including his upcoming summit with Kim.
The Trump White House continues to do an amazing job helping writers sell books that slam the Trump White House. And former FBI Director James Comey is the latest beneficiary. In January, Michael Wolff’s exposé “Fire and Fury” painted a devastating portrait of Trump and his administration. The book has sold an astonishing two million copies to date, thanks in part to incessant attacks and weeks of free publicity from the White House.
Sean Hannity, the Fox News host and adviser to President Donald Trump who has turned his broadcast into a nightly attack on special counsel Robert Mueller, smeared the head of the Russia probe by referencing one of the darkest chapters in the FBI’s history on four consecutive broadcasts last week.
A growing number of Republican lawmakers have endorsed legislation to protect Mueller in recent days following the president’s fury over the federal raid on his attorney Michael Cohen. Neil Cavuto, the Fox News host who interviewed McConnell, pointed this fact out to the majority leader.
If anyone needed a stellar defense team right now, it’s Trump. But his legal search continues in vain as elite, white-collar attorneys in Washington, D.C., and around the country continue to turn down White House offers to lead Trump’s defense.
Donald Trump shares those preferences, but he finds them colliding with each other in Syria, where the United States has 2,000 troops fighting the Islamic State. On March 29, he promised that our men and women will “be coming out of Syria, like, very soon. Let the other people take care of it now.”
And so on Saturday night, Sanders tweeted out an “official” photo of the Situation Room, writing, “Last night the President put our adversaries on notice: when he draws a red line he enforces it. (Inside the Situation Room as President is briefed on Syria – Official WH photos by Shealah Craighead).”
Trump is reportedly considering firing Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who approved the raid and oversees Mueller’s probe in light of Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ recusal from the case. Following the raid, the president also left open the idea of firing Mueller, and the White House confirmed that he believes he has the power to do so directly.
That leader was summoning those within the sound of his voice to self-sacrifice. Contrast that with another leader’s explanation, some 25 years after the fact, on why he, a Yale alumnus, had chosen not to answer his country’s draft call to serve in the U.S. military and join his contemporaries then fighting and dying: “I confess I had no desire to die in a Southeast Asian rice paddy. I considered the war in Vietnam already lost.”
“The Kremlin’s confidence is growing as its agents conduct their sustained campaigns to undermine our confidence in ourselves and in one another,” McMaster said, referencing Moscow’s cyber intrusions targeting the U.S. energy sector and the billions of dollars in damages caused by last year’s NotPetya cyber attack.
Signed by more than 200 senior diplomats who served under both Republican and Democratic administrations, the letter urges lawmakers to “focus public attention on the urgent need to restore the power and influence of American diplomacy,” which has suffered under the Trump administration.
For John Bolton, warmongering abroad and partisan politics at home go hand in hand. As Bolton has advocated waging war on Iran and North Korea in recent years, he has built an empire of political influence with two political action committees that spread his hawkish views and support like-minded Republican candidates.
“They were unable to take on the representation due to business conflicts. However they consider the opportunity to represent the President to be the highest honor and they sincerely regret that they cannot do so,” the firm said in a statement to reporters. “They wish the president the best and believe he has excellent representation in Ty Cobb and Jay Sekulow.”
McMaster’s exit is the latest in a string of high-profile departures from the White House that started with national security advisor Michael Flynn and has also included chief of staff Reince Priebus, chief strategist Steve Bannon, economic advisor Gary Cohn and secretary of state Rex Tillerson.
Whistleblowers allege that top staffers at the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), the agency that oversees U.S. government-backed news outlets around the world, plotted to illegally replace the BBG’s CEO in an effort to slant the agency’s coverage in a manner more favorable to President Donald Trump’s administration, according to a letter from the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan said Tuesday he has been assured that President Donald Trump will not fire special counsel Robert Mueller, even though the president has criticized Mueller and his investigation of Trump’s alleged 2016 campaign links to Russia.
Finally, finally, there’s talk of hitting back at Putin where his filthy-rich cronies hurt — their mansions, Bentleys and other baubles of the posh life in Britain. A study released by Deutsche Bank in 2015 says that Russians were a major source of the $129 billion that had made its way into Britain through secret offshore dealings the previous nine years.
“Today, I feel that Fox News is assaulting our constitutional order and the rule of law, while fostering corrosive and unjustified paranoia among viewers,” Peters wrote in a Dear Colleagues email, as reported by BuzzFeed. “Over my decade with Fox, I long was proud of the association. Now I am ashamed.”
There are all sorts of possible reasons to admire Donald Trump, but none more imaginative than one offered by a fan attending his Pennsylvania rally before Tuesday’s congressional election. Trump’s planned meeting with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, said retiree Paul Ambrose, was the product of his unflinching toughness.
Retired four-star Army general Barry McCaffrey issued a dire warning Friday, saying he has reached the conclusion that Trump poses a “serious threat to US national security.” In a tweet posted late Friday afternoon, McCaffrey said he “reluctantly” came to that conclusion based on Trump’s refusal “to protect vital US interests from active Russian attacks.”
Following the lead of smear artists at conservative propaganda sites, the Trump administration tried to oust Sahar Nowrouzzadeh, an expert working at the State Department on Iranian issues. She also may have been targeted for this harassment due to her ethnicity, which would violate federal anti-discrimination laws.
Further, the inept and dishonest way the White House and Trump’s personal lawyer have handled the matter underlines the many facts that establish this administration is a kakistocracy, a government of the venal, the corrupt and the incompetent. Instead of the best and the brightest, the Trump administration draws on the worst and the dullest.
Gorka, who was forced to resign from his position as a former deputy assistant to the President in major part due to his apparent membership in a Hungarian “knighthood” that collaborated with the Nazis in World War II, thinks quite highly indeed of the former Kansas congressman.
It’s not Richard Nixon’s opening to China. It’s not Neville Chamberlain’s journey to Munich. But President Donald Trump’s announcement that he’s willing to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is one of those decisions that could produce important results, good or bad. The administration portrays this as a triumph for Trump’s tough approach, which has allegedly forced the enemy to the negotiating table.
“We must stop Iran and we will stop Iran,” declared Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Tuesday at the American Israeli Political Action Committee’s annual conference in Washington. Amid thunderous ovation, the prime minister said that “darkness is descending on our region,” adding that “Iran is building an aggressive empire.”