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Published on May 14, 2017
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Published on May 14, 2017
On State of the Union, Jake Tapper asks Sen. Chuck Schumer if the President asking FBI Director Comey for his loyalty constitutes obstruction of justice
Published on May 14, 2017
Chuck Schumer says that he supports Sen. Warner's proposal for Democrats to refuse to vote on an FBI Director nominee until a special prosecutor is appointed
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Former House speaker shares his views on 'Sunday Morning Futures'
Published on May 14, 2017
The State of the Union panel Neera Tanden, Amanda Carpenter, Bill Kristol and Rep. Stephanie Murphy discuss the president's firing of Comey with Jake Tapper
The Russian piano player: Putin plays the music. And who pays for it? by Mike Nova (noreply@blogger.com)
| NYT > World: In Beijing, Putin Plays Two Piano Tunes From His Childhood |
President Xi Jinping of China, right, and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia arriving for a banquet at the forum in Beijing on Sunday.   |
News and Opinions - Новости и Мнения: A blog about Russia and her relations with The West
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| NYT > World: In Beijing, Putin Plays Two Piano Tunes From His Childhood |
President Xi Jinping of China, right, and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia arriving for a banquet at the forum in Beijing on Sunday. |
Published on May 14, 2017
James Clapper discusses the 'pattern' of dead Russians tied to the investigation who have surfaced in the past three months on State of the Union
President Xi Jinping of China, right, and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia arriving for a banquet at the forum in Beijing on Sunday.
JUDY WOODRUFF: The president’s decision to fire FBI Director Comey, the various rationales that are being given, and the interview the president gave today to NBC are again prompting many questions about the way Mr. Trump makes decisions and carries out his job as chief executive.
A TIME magazine team had a chance earlier this week to get a look at what life is like inside the Trump White House.
Michael Scherer, TIME’s Washington bureau chief, was part of the group that met with the president, as it turned out, before the Comey firing. And he joins me now.
Michael Scherer, welcome back to the NewsHour.
You and the TIME magazine folks had an unusual access at the White House. Tell us about what it was like.
MICHAEL SCHERER, TIME: We got there about 6:30. And we were invited into the Oval Office, where he was meeting with a number of senior staff, signing the final orders of the day, and from there began an almost three-hour, two-and-a-half-hour evening, in which he took us to many parts of the White House that most presidents never take the press.
That includes starting in his private dining room, which is just down the hallway from the Oval Office in the West Wing, where he played us some DVRed clips of that day’s Senate hearings with color commentary attached.
And then we walked down the Colonnade. And he took us in his elevator up to the residence on the second floor of the executive mansion and toured us through the rooms there. That was followed by dinner in the Blue Room, which is the big oval room on the first floor of the residence.
JUDY WOODRUFF: What did you take away from this? I read the piece today. And you had, as you said, an extraordinary two-and-a-half-hours with him.
From the outside, this is a presidency that’s almost bathed in controversy. Did you sense that kind of tension inside?
MICHAEL SCHERER: There’s an enormous amount of grievance he feels to the way he’s been treated. And that was evident almost from the moment we got there.
He was talking about how the press has mistreated him. Sometimes, he included us in that, although he was also very gracious and hospitable, and talking about how his message had not gotten out, how the good things he had been doing were not being recognized.
And he returned to that time and again. So, there was a clear frustration. And, at times, he was very emotional. Even when he was watching the day’s hearing, he was sort of mocking the witnesses — and these are former federal officials testifying before the Senate — because I think he’s angry at the way the American people have been presented the story of his presidency.
JUDY WOODRUFF: What do you think he wanted to get across most to you?
MICHAEL SCHERER: I think he wanted to get that across. He wanted to make the case that his presidency is far more successful than has been recognized.
There was an interesting moment where I asked him, do you think there has been too much conflict at the White House at some points? And he actually answered by saying, I think that may be true, and then he said, but you have to understand there’s so much meanness out there.
And then he reverted back to name-calling of various other television correspondents and things like that. But I feel like he is someone who is trying to adjust his own personality, his own history, his own instincts to an office that is a very different structure around him.
And I think he’s waffling back and forth between the desire to lash out, to come back over the top, to confront, which has been actually very successful for him through his career, and the realities of the White House, which are that the president has enormous power, but he also is enormously limited in his power, that there are lots of institutions, the press, the courts, the Congress, that can constrain him.
JUDY WOODRUFF: It’s interesting. I think you were telling us earlier today that it was almost like there were two operations going on at the same time. He has one operation around him to sort of protect him, make sure he’s all right, protect his brand, you said, and then, on the other hand, the operation to keep the business of the presidency going.
MICHAEL SCHERER: Yes, he is enormously focused on his personal reputation and experience in office.
And I think he spends a lot of time watching TV at night, seeing how things are being digested. He’s an incredibly erudite media critic, which we saw during the campaign. And that is really separate, I think, from what the business of the presidency is, which is running a very large and complicated government.
Now, he’s involved in those issues, too. It’s not as if he’s not engaged in the details of, you know, getting Obamacare repeal through Congress or something like that. It’s just that I think, more than other presidents, he’s spending a lot of time focused on this other thing.
And he does have staff around him who are essentially personal staff. They’re not staff that are plugged into the hierarchy of a traditional White House. They’re not reporting directly to the chief of staff, and they help him with that.
JUDY WOODRUFF: And any inkling — of course, this was Monday, before we knew about the firing of FBI director — any inkling something like that was coming down?
MICHAEL SCHERER: There was no discussion of the FBI director, Comey.
The only inkling was, he returned several times to his frustration about the press not reporting that his wiretapping tweet of a few weeks ago saying that Barack Obama wiretapped me in Trump Tower, he still believes, he still argues, was true, even though Director Comey testified that there was no evidence …
(CROSSTALK)
JUDY WOODRUFF: That he was wiretapped. He argues that that …
(CROSSTALK)
MICHAEL SCHERER: And his argument is a little complicated. He is saying wiretapping is in quotes. It includes any unmasking by any officials of anyone in my campaign, which may have happened.
And he said he believes that, if an official was unmasked in a foreign intelligence tap, that would count as wiretapping. It’s a stretch, but his anger at — his feeling of being wronged by the way that’s been discussed, and I think that includes what the FBI director said before Congress, was very apparent.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Michael Scherer, TIME magazine, fascinating.
MICHAEL SCHERER: Thank you.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Thank you.
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FBI Director James Comey testifies before the House Intelligence Committee hearing into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. election, in Washington, D.C. Photo by Joshua Roberts/Reuters
CORONADO, Calif. — Chaos is President Donald Trump’s style, yet as long as the Republican delivers on health care, taxes and tapping a new FBI director as solid as his Supreme Court pick, GOP leaders say everything will be just fine.
While Trump’s abrupt firing of FBI Director James Comey roiled Washington, Republicans who attended the national committee’s spring meeting outside San Diego this week defended the president’s actions and insisted that they would have little political impact on midterm elections next year.
Even Trump’s Friday morning tweetstorm warning Comey that he had better hope there are no “tapes” of their private conversations and threatening to cancel White House media briefings failed to dent his support among several GOP leaders.
Peter Goldberg, an Alaska committeeman, said Trump’s latest tweets about Comey are “just a distraction” and that reaction to the firing is like “a bee buzzing around your head. It’s going to go away. I think it’s going to disappear.”
Goldberg, who grew up in New York, said he understood Trump’s style of governing.
“Even during the campaign, some people might have thought of him as brash and I just thought of it as just an average New Yorker. It wasn’t bad, it’s just part of the culture where he was living.”
Republicans said the issues that Trump campaigned on — repealing the Affordable Care Act, cutting taxes and boosting border security — would determine if the party keeps control of both houses of Congress.
Trump addressed the crowd in a five-minute video, telling them their support will help Republicans keep control of the House next year and make gains in the Senate.
“I’ll be going around to different states. I’ll be working hard for the people running for Congress and for the people running for the Senate. We could pick up a lot of seats, especially if it all keeps going like it’s going now,” the president said.
Ron Nehring, a former committee member and former California Republican Party chairman, said Comey’s firing was far more important to journalists and Washington insiders than voters.
“Every day that something unexpected comes up out of the White House, we see people freaking out and then outside of Washington it doesn’t really have that big of an impact,” he said.
Dirk Haire, chairman of the Maryland Republican Party, said every president brings a new style.
“President Trump’s style is chaos,” Haire said. “Would I personally like that? No, it would drive me nuts. That’s just the way he operates.”
Among leading talk radio conservatives on Friday, criticism was directed at the news media for the use of anonymous sources on the story, not Trump. Laura Ingraham tweeted that the reporting was “false,” while Hugh Hewitt said Comey’s successor was what mattered.
Hewitt did critique Trump’s suggestion that the White House cease holding briefings. Trump “needs more direct on-the-record” contact with the media, “not less,” Hewitt posted on Twitter.
The harshest criticism came from conservative Erick Erickson, who described Trump as “self-immolating.”
“The overwhelming majority of Trump voters will double down in their support of Trump,” Erickson wrote on his website Friday morning. “Many of us see this as unhinged, suspicious and headed toward impeachment-level.”
At the RNC meeting, Kris Warner, a West Virginia committeeman, predicted that Comey’s successor will put to rest any voter misgivings about Trump’s handling of the FBI, holding up the president’s selection of Neil Gorsuch for a long-vacant seat on the Supreme Court as an example.
“I expect nothing short of someone beyond reproach and (it) will be exactly what the country needs,” said Warner, a Trump delegate at last year’s party convention. “Look at his Supreme Court pick. Very impressed with that, and I would expect him to do the same with the FBI.”
Party leaders said Trump was right to fire Comey, or at least that he had a right to do it.
Kyle Hupfer, chairman of the Indiana Republican Party, said picking the FBI chief is a president’s prerogative, despite tradition that the post be held for 10 years regardless of who occupies the White House. He said backlash to Comey’s dismissal was “not resonating” with Indiana voters.
David Bossie, a Maryland committeeman who was Trump’s deputy campaign manager during the final leg of last year’s race, conceded the news could have been better explained.
“I think the White House communications shop needs to do a little better, and I think they’re going to get better at what they’re doing,” he said. “I think we had some mixed messages out there that didn’t help matters at all. But the president made the decision to fire Jim Comey. How that happened and the semantics of the timeline, people can debate over the next couple days.”
On Thursday, about 300 protesters marched on the beach, chanting, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Donald Trump has got to go!” They were kept a good distance from the iconic Hotel del Coronado, where some party members looked out from a patio bar.
Associated Press writer Thomas Beaumont in Des Moines, Iowa, contributed to this report.
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