Good Monday Morning.
Here’s what’s on President Trump’s agenda today:
- In the morning, President Donald J. Trump will receive a National Security Council briefing.
- The President will lead a Cabinet meeting.
- In the afternoon, the President will have lunch with Vice President Pence.
- The President will then welcome the 2016 NCAA Football National Champions: the Clemson Tigers.
Comey’s pants on fire?
This story is not getting enough play.
John Hinderacker at Powerline has written a piece titled “Proof That James Comey Misled the Senate Intelligence Committee.” In it, Hinderacker exposes some of Comey’s testimony last week to some fact checking. In particular, Hinderacker focuses on Comey’s claim that Trump was the only president he felt was a liar leading him to document his interactions with the president. However….
A sharp-eyed reader pointed out that, as it happens, Comey has left behind an account of that meeting with President Bush. It is recounted in Angler, a book-length attack on Dick Cheney by Barton Gellman. Comey was one of Gellman’s chief sources.
And the written description of the meeting with Bush, a meeting where he was alone, is “strikingly similar” to Comey’s description of his meeting with Trump.
Comey brought this episode up last week in order to paint himself, not as a sneak who dictated a memo to cover himself every time he had a conversation with a president, but rather as an honest man who was uniquely concerned about Donald Trump’s trustworthiness.
But Comey’s Senate testimony was untruthful. He told the committee that he didn’t document his important meeting with President Bush, but only “sent a quick email to my staff to let them know there was something going on.” Gellman reproduces that email in Angler.
The email was not just a “quick” one. And not only that, there was extensive documentation–two pages long–of the conversation between Bush and Comey in their private meeting. The dialogue between Bush and Comey was produced in a document titled “unclassified notes describing Comey’s report of the meeting shortly afterward.“
Remember, Comey told the Intel Committee that “I didn’t feel, with President Bush, the need to document it in that way” which, at the very least, is misleading. It looks like Comey was constantly covering his ass to promote his own narrative as “the last honest man” around town. Or gathering some insurance for himself.
Read the entire Hinderaker piece.
Gingrich to GOP: ‘abolish’ special counsel
Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich thinks it’s time to get rid of the special counsel investigation into Trump campaign/Russia “collusion.” Gingrich’s statement breaks with the GOP Congress, most of whom are slow-walking the Trump agenda while waiting for Trump to be impeached so they can work with President Pence.
“I think this is going to be a witch hunt,” Gingrich told “Fox News Sunday.
Comey orchestrated the appointment of a special counsel and admitted as much when he told the Senate Intelligence Committee he leaked his notes from a meeting with the president to get a special counsel appointed.
“It is very clear that Comey hates Trump,” Gingrich added in an interview Sunday with John Catsimatidis on AM 970 in New York.
It’s “nonsense” to think Mueller will be “neutral,” Gingrich told Fox News Sunday. The former presidential candidate said the team Mueller is assembling will be “dangerous” to Trump.
Witch hunt and process crime, yo.
D.C., Maryland to sue Trump
The blitz against President Trump continues with a new lawsuit that will be filed against the president “alleging that he has violated anti-corruption clauses in the Constitution by accepting millions in payments and benefits from foreign governments since moving into the White House.” This is the “Emolument Clause” your crazy liberal friends on Facebook keep ranting about.
The Washington Post reports that the lawsuit is the first of its kind.
But D.C. Attorney General Karl A. Racine (D) and Maryland Attorney General Brian E. Frosh (D) say Trump has broken many promises to keep separate his public duties and private business interests. For one, his son Eric Trump has said the president would continue to receive regular updates about his company’s financial health.
The lawsuit, a signed copy of which Racine and Frosh provided to The Washington Post on Sunday night, alleges “unprecedented constitutional violations” by Trump. The suit says Trump’s continued ownership of a global business empire has rendered the president “deeply enmeshed with a legion of foreign and domestic government actors” and has undermined the integrity of the U.S. political system.
D.C. Attorney General Racine said, “We’re getting in here to be the check and balance that it appears Congress is unwilling to be.”
In January, Trump said he moved his business assets into a trust managed by his sons to avoid potential conflicts of interest.
The suit will be filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland. There is another suit filed by the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics and there was a suit filed in March by a D.C. restaurant. Democratic members of Congress also said they will file suit.
Remember when the elites warned us Trump and his wacky supporters might not accept the results of the election? Good times.
Sessions to testify
Despite their on-again/off-again relationship with current on-again hero James Comey, confirming that President Trump was not under investigation for colluding with Russia, CNN has a totally unbiased article titled “Russia Cloud Settles in over Trump’s White House” about Attorney General Jeff Sessions testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee.
And nothing says “cloud of suspicion” more than agreeing to testify before the Senate, an agreement that CNN tells us “caught everyone — including the intelligence committee — by surprise.”
He had been scheduled to answer questions before the House and Senate spending committees Tuesday, but instead wants to show up to the intelligence committee instead. That possibility could mean a closed hearing, unlike the drama of last Thursday with Comey.
In an odd twist for Congress, senior members of the Senate intelligence committee were unsure if Sessions would even be allowed to appear.
“I don’t know whether it will happen — don’t know whether it’s going to be public,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein said.
The Democrats want Sessions to testify in an open hearing so they can get more sound bites on the news shows and use the footage for their campaign commercials. They are hoping for a Comey-like spectacle where there will be a “bombshell” moment…
“The American people also deserve to hear the attorney general’s answers to these questions, as well as others related to his meetings with the Russians and his failure to disclose those meetings to the Senate Judiciary Committee,” Sen. Ron Wyden wrote Sunday in a letter to intelligence panel leaders. “None of this needs be classified.”
Stay-tuned.
Barron and Melania move into the White House
Five months after the president moved into the White House, Melania and Barron have finally joined him. The first family came under fire for the temporary living arrangement in New York from the left, who suddenly concerned themselves with the cost of something: securing two different homes for the first family. The Trump family arrangement was to allow son Barron to finish out his school year.
Mother and son broke with tradition by living at Trump Tower in New York since the inauguration so that Barron, now 11, could finish the school year uninterrupted; the president lived and worked at the White House.
“Looking forward to the memories we’ll make in our new home! #Movingday,” the first lady tweeted Sunday evening after she and Barron arrived at the White House with Trump.
Barron will attend sixth grade at St. Andrew’s Episcopal School in Potomac, Maryland.
Other morsels:
Delta, Bank of America pulls sponsorship of Trump-Julius Caesar production
More insurers bailing out of Obamacare
Twitter CEO says meeting Trump was like getting waterboarded
School erases Trump slogans from yearbook
High school insists student cover U.S. Army uniform at graduation
WATCH: Obstruction of justice narrative smashed apart by lawyer on MSNBC
Adelson plans to keep GOP state power with new group
And that’s all I got, now go beat back the angry mob!
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