Trump-Russia: Feinstein Releases the Fusion GPS’s Glenn Simpson’s testimony, which the Republicans had decided to not share with the public. Simpson had already requested that his testimony be released and had summarized it in last week’s Times op-ed noted here last week.
Their refusal was part of their effort to build a phony case against Fusion GPS and retired MI6 agent Christopher Steele who had compiled the dossier from intelligence reports, part of their desperate attempt to discredit any and all connected to the Mueller probe. That is coupled with their refusal to take the Russian interference seriously and to back up the Trump Administration’s denial of Russia’s actions.
A necessary contrast: Steele went to the FBI with his concerns about Russian penetration of our elections. Donald Jr and Jared said nothing, attended meetings with Russians. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/02/opinion/republicans-investigation-fusion-gps.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fopinion-contributors&action=click&contentCollection=contributors®ion=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=4&pgtype=sectionfront
Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, defied her Republican colleagues on Tuesday to unilaterally make public a much-discussed transcript of the committee’s interview with one of the founders of the firm that produced a salacious and unsubstantiated dossier outlining a Russian effort to aid the Trump campaign.
The interview, with Glenn R. Simpson of Fusion GPS, provided few revelatory details about the firm’s findings on the Russian election effort or on President Trump and his campaign. But both the circumstances of its release and the vivid picture it paints of Mr. Simpson’s operation and his chief Russia investigator, Christopher Steele, provided fresh ammunition to both sides of a growing fight over the dossier.
In his testimony, Mr. Simpson sought to portray himself as an astute researcher well versed in the Russian government and that country’s organized crime. And he said Mr. Steele, the former British spy he hired to investigate the campaign’s ties to Russia, had “a Sterling reputation as a person who doesn’t exaggerate, doesn’t make things up, doesn’t sell baloney.”
Mr. Steele believed that his investigation had unearthed “a security issue about whether a presidential candidate was being blackmailed,” Mr. Simpson told the committee.
Mr. Simpson and Peter Fritsch, the firm’s co-founders, had called for the Judiciary Committee to release the transcript in an Op-Ed essay in The New York Times, arguing that it would show that Republicans were unfairly smearing their work. The request inspired a tart back-and-forth with Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the committee’s Republican chairman, but appeared to be going nowhere until Tuesday, when Ms. Feinstein took the side of Fusion.
“The American people deserve the opportunity to see what he said and judge for themselves,” she said. “The innuendo and misinformation circulating about the transcript are part of a deeply troubling effort to undermine the investigation into potential collusion and obstruction of justice. The only way to set the record straight is to make the transcript public.”
For Ms. Feinstein and Mr. Grassley, two senior senators who worked closely last summer to initiate a joint Russia investigation, the breach was striking. But it reflects the growing divide between the two parties.
Republicans have repeatedly and vocally raised concerns that the dossier — a set of reports paid for by Democrats — could have been mishandled by the F.B.I. as it was opening its own investigation into the Russian effort and the Trump campaign. Democrats say scrutiny of the dossier’s provenance is a distraction from the central question: Did the Trump campaign knowingly seek aid from Russia? https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/09/us/politics/feinstein-fusion-gps-glenn-simpson-transcript.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
Trump-Russia: So, who tipped the FBI as to concerns about Trump connections to Putin’s Russia? We know the Steele Dossier which had referred to several foreign intelligence agencies as being alarmed was not first; the FBI noted that the Dossier backed up information the FBI already had. According to the Dossier, a source within the Trump campaign had also sought out the FBI.
Alan Yuhas, Julian Borger:
A source within the Trump campaign reported concerns to the FBI, according to the man behind a controversial dossier on Donald Trump, a new transcript suggests.
Senator Dianne Feinstein on Tuesday unilaterally released the transcript of a congressional interview with Glenn Simpson, whose research firm, Fusion GPS, was behind the dossier on alleged contacts between Donald Trump’s campaign and the Russian government.
The dossier – compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele – makes an allegation that there was a “conspiracy of cooperation” between Russian agents and the Trump campaign, and the president has frequently scorned it since its publication last January.
According to the transcript, Simpson told Congress that Steele, the former British spy, stopped sharing information with the FBI just one week before the US election because of concerns that the law enforcement agency was being “manipulated” by Trump insiders.
According to Simpson, Steele “severed his relationship with the FBI” after the New York Times published a story in late October 2016 that said agents had not found “any conclusive or direct link between Mr Trump and the Russian government”. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jan/09/trump-russia-dossier-senator-dianne-feinstein-glenn-simpson
Report: A White House Official Floated U.S. Withdrawal of Troops in Europe so as to please Putin. Appeasement ! Still another ‘overture’ to Putin…
Spencer Ackerman:
A senior National Security Council official proposed withdrawing some U.S. military forces from Eastern Europe as an overture to Vladimir Putin during the early days of the Trump administration, according to a former administration official in the room with him.
While the proposal was ultimately not adopted, it is the first known case of senior aides to Donald Trump seeking to reposition U.S. military forces to please Putin—something that smelled, to a colleague, like a return on Russia’s election-time investment in President Trump. The White House did not immediately respond to The Daily Beast’s request for comment.
The official who offered the proposal, a deputy assistant to Trump for strategic planning, mused in February 2017 about withdrawing U.S. troops close to Russian borders as part of a strategy proposal to “refram[e] our interests within the context of a new relationship with Russia,” the former official told The Daily Beast, who heard this directly from the official, Kevin Harrington.
Harrington is the NSC’s senior official for strategic planning. He had neither military experience nor significant government experience before joining the White House. But he had an influential credential: As a managing director for the Thiel Macro hedge fund, he was close to Trump patron and ally Peter Thiel. Trump’s first national security adviser, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, announced Harrington’s arrival in early February as part of a “talented group” ready to bring “fresh ideas to the table.”
Among Harrington’s ideas were a fervent belief that economic sanctions, particularly those on Russia, were ultimately harmful to the United States. Early on in his tenure, Harrington prepared a paper for Flynn fleshing out those ideas into something approaching a grand strategy—and then going further than any gesture toward Russia thus far reported. https://www.thedailybeast.com/white-house-official-floated-withdrawing-us-forces-to-please-putin?ref=home
Trump’s Obstruction of Justice: An Easy Case for Mueller And, not just Trump, sine anyone involved in Trump actions is vulnerable to charges of conspiracy to obstruct justice-whether Sessions who was allegedly commissioning people to find negative info on Comey to feed to the press, or others who sat with Trump in drafting the concocted explanation for Don Jr’s-organized Trump Tower meeting to receive ‘dirt on Hillary.’
Barry Berke, Noah Bookbinder, Norman Eisen:
Did Mr. Trump wrongfully intend to obstruct the criminal and congressional investigations? The facts contained in these reports strongly suggest he did.
We now know, for example, that the president took aggressive steps to prevent Attorney General Jeff Sessions from recusing himself from the Justice Department’s investigation because he needed Mr. Sessions to protect and safeguard him, as he believed Eric Holder Jr. and Robert Kennedy did for their presidents. This shows that from the outset the president was concerned that he needed protection from the impact of any investigation. In fact, when the president’s efforts were unsuccessful, he purportedly responded by saying, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” perhaps suggesting that Mr. Trump wanted the attorney general of the United States to act as his personal criminal defense lawyer — a startling view into his state of mind.
Equally significant are new revelations that the president had drafted a letter to the F.B.I. director at the time, James Comey, describing the Russian investigation as “fabricated and politically motivated.” Those disclosures support that the president’s statements to the press and the public in connection with firing Mr. Comey were misleading. The president, of course, publicly claimed that Mr. Comey was fired because of his handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails. This matters because attempts to cover up the truth are classic indicators of a culpable state of mind under the obstruction statutes.
In this same vein, the Wolff book claims that the president’s lawyers believed that his efforts aboard Air Force One last summer to shape his son Donald Jr.’s statement about a meeting at Trump Tower with Russians was “an explicit attempt to throw sand into the investigation’s gears.” Mr. Wolff also asserts that one of Mr. Trump’s spokesmen quit over the incident because of a concern that it was obstruction of justice. That was a wise move. If the president knowingly caused his son to make a false statement to interfere with the investigations or cover up the facts, that alone could constitute obstruction of justice.
Another ominous note for the president is The Times’s reporting that the special counsel, Robert Mueller, has substantiated Mr. Comey’s narrative of his dealings with the president, including through notes maintained by members of the White House staff. Whatever one may think of some of Mr. Comey’s decisions, he has a spotless reputation for candor. The president’s reputation is the opposite. But in a swearing contest between two witnesses, a responsible prosecutor looks for independent corroboration no matter who those witnesses are. It seems Mr. Mueller is finding it. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/05/opinion/trump-mueller-wolff-obstruction.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-left-region®ion=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region&_r=0
The Republicans are ‘all-in’ with supporting/ protecting ‘stable genius’ Trump, full-time enablers in the misdirection and obstruction.
Paul Krugman:
The really important news from last week, as I see it, involved indications that leading Republicans in Congress are increasingly determined to participate in obstruction of justice.
Until now, it wasn’t entirely clear whether pro-cover-up members of Congress, like Devin Nunes, who has been harassing the Justice Department as it attempts to investigate Russian election interference, were freelancing. But Paul Ryan, the House speaker, has now fully taken Nunes’s side, in effect going all in on obstruction.
At the same time, two Republican senators made the first known congressional referral for criminal charges related to Russian intervention — not against those who may have worked with a hostile foreign power, but against the former British spy who prepared a dossier about possible Trump-Russia collusion.
In other words, even as much of the world is questioning Trump’s fitness for office, the only people who could constrain him are doing their best to place him above the rule of law.
So far, the implosion of our political norms has had remarkably little effect on daily life (unless you’re living in hurricane-battered Puerto Rico and still waiting for electricity thanks to an inadequate federal response). The president spends his mornings watching TV and rage-tweeting, he has wreaked havoc with the government’s competence and his party doesn’t want you to know if he’s a foreign agent. Yet stocks are up, the economy is growing and we haven’t gotten into any new wars.
… We spent more than two centuries building a great nation, and even a very stable genius probably needs a couple of years to complete its ruin.
Immigration- Trump Undercuts GOP (and his own) Position: ‘I’m for Comprehensive Immigration Reform.’ His words come cheap, are often worthless. Tuesday he held a staged, televised policy discussion with leading Republicans and Democrats, apparently in a necessary attempt to prove that he’s competent. The swiftly changing positions- he insisted that the Wall had to be part of any package two days ago- featured his talking favorably about comprehensive immigration reform, yet also insisting that they weren’t talking about “comprehensive,” while saying that a DACA fix has to be first, that he’s willing to “take the heat” from his supporters for any deal that the Republicans and Democrats (somehow) agree to.
It was no surprise that spokespeople and Trump himself started clarifying” his remarks in the hours that followed, including, “As I made very clear today, our country needs the security of the Wall on the Southern Border, which must be part of any DACA approval.”
President Trump on Tuesday appeared open to negotiating a sweeping immigration deal that would eventually grant millions of undocumented immigrants a pathway to citizenship, declaring that he was willing to “take the heat” politically for an approach that seemed to flatly contradict the anti-immigration stance that charged his political rise.
The president made the remarks during an extended meeting with congressional Republicans and Democrats who are weighing a shorter-term agreement that would extend legal status for undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children. The 90-minute session — more than half of which played out on national television — appeared to produce some progress: Mr. Trump agreed to a framework for a short-term immigration deal to couple protection for young, undocumented immigrants with border security.
But in suggesting that a broader immigration measure was possible next, Mr. Trump was giving a rare public glimpse of an impulse he has expressed privately to advisers and lawmakers — the desire to preside over a more far-reaching solution to the status of the 11 million undocumented immigrants already living and working in the United States. Passage of a comprehensive immigration law would give Mr. Trump success where Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush failed.
The push for an immigration deal with Democrats has the potential to alienate the hard-line anti-immigration activists who powered his political rise and helped him win the presidency, many of whom have described it as amnesty for lawbreakers. If he succeeds, it could be compared to Richard Nixon’s historic trip to China. Only an anti-Communist hard-liner could have made the opening acceptable to his supporters. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/09/us/politics/trump-daca-immigration.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
… while the Administration continues to force hundreds of thousands who had temporary protected status’ to leave the country.
Nearly 200,000 people from El Salvador who have been allowed to live in the United States for more than a decade must leave the country, government officials announced Monday. It is the Trump administration’s latest reversal of years of immigration policies and one of the most consequential to date.
Homeland security officials said that they were ending a humanitarian program, known as Temporary Protected Status, for Salvadorans who have been allowed to live and work legally in the United States since a pair of devastating earthquakes struck their country in 2001.
Salvadorans were by far the largest group of foreigners benefiting from temporary protected status, which shielded them from deportation if they had arrived in the United States illegally. The decision came just weeks after more than 45,000 Haitians lost protections granted after Haiti’s 2010 earthquake, and it suggested that others in the program, namely Hondurans, may soon lose them as well. Nicaraguans lost their protections last year.
Immigrant advocates and the El Salvadoran government had pleaded for the United States to extend the program, as it has several times since 2001. A sense of dread gripped Salvadorans and their employers in California, Texas, Virginia and elsewhere.https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/08/us/salvadorans-tps-end.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0
The SEC is investigating the Kushner Company, looking at its use of the federal investment-for-visa program.
The Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating the real-estate company run by the family of President Donald Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner for its use of a federal investment-for-visa program known as EB-5, according to people familiar with the matter.
In May 2017, Kushner Cos. received a subpoena from the SEC requesting information about its use of the program, one of these people said. As The Wall Street Journal reported last year, that month the company received a separate subpoena from New York federal prosecutors asking for information about development projects financed in part by the EB-5 program.
The SEC probe, which hasn’t been previously reported, is being conducted out of the commission’s Texas office and in collaboration with federal prosecutors from the Brooklyn U.S. attorney’s office, according to another person familiar with it. https://www.wsj.com/articles/sec-looks-into-kushner-cos-use-of-eb-5-program-for-immigrant-investors-1515240181
shermandigest 