President Trump is scrambling to find a new chief of staff to replace John Kelly — and the turmoil is casting a harsh light on his administration.
The probe by special counsel Robert Mueller is picking up speed, amplifying the inherent risks in working for the volatile Trump. It has made a job that would once have been a career pinnacle fraught with peril.
“You’re not becoming the chief of staff for the president of the United States,” one Republican operative told The Hill on Monday. “You’re becoming the chief of staff for Individual-1.”
Someone needs to get the White House under control — but the president won’t let it happen.
Before a president begins thinking about who should be his White House chief of staff, he has to define both the job and the moment. There’s nothing magical about the chief of staff’s corner office in the West Wing. How any individuals perform in the job depends, first, on the power the president gives them to execute their responsibilities, and second, on their expertise facing whatever’s in front of the White House in that moment. So how should that inform President Donald Trump as John Kelly takes his leave?
Consider the first issue. Had they been given unlimited time and bandwidth, neither of the presidents I worked for would have even hired a chief of staff. Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama would have wanted to take every meeting, hear every perspective, mull every decision, game out every scenario, and address every challenge. They both loved the job of president—and arrived in the Oval Office every morning excited to see what they could accomplish.
But both also recognized that they simply couldn’t do it all. No president can. To get anything completed, and certainly to get the most important things done, they needed to discipline their own time and attention. They needed a gatekeeper. They needed someone to play traffic cop inside the bureaucracy. Without someone wielding the organizational tools that keep the executive branch moving apace, an administration can devolve into chaos. And so, however begrudgingly, both Clinton and Obama accepted that the limitations their chiefs of staff would impose on them and the rest of their administration would help them achieve their goals.
View the complete commentary by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel on The Atlantic websit here.
The departure of White House chief of staff John Kelly is raising concerns about how the White House will face potential legal and political challenges in 2019.
Kelly, who was thought to bring order to an often chaotic White House, will leave the West Wing as special counsel Robert Mueller‘s probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election appears to be closing in on President Trump.
Trump will also face a divided Congress next year, with Democrats slated to take control of the House in January, giving the party subpoena power.
Prince Mohammed bin Salman with Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump in Riyadh last year. Credit: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
Senior American officials were worried. Since the early months of the Trump administration, Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and Middle East adviser, had been having private, informal conversations with Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the favorite son of Saudi Arabia’s king.
Given Mr. Kushner’s political inexperience, the private exchanges could make him susceptible to Saudi manipulation, said three former senior American officials. In an effort to tighten practices at the White House, a new chief of staff tried to reimpose longstanding procedures stipulating that National Security Council staff members should participate in all calls with foreign leaders.
But even with the restrictions in place, Mr. Kushner, 37, and Prince Mohammed, 33, kept chatting, according to three former White House officials and two others briefed by the Saudi royal court. In fact, they said, the two men were on a first-name basis, calling each other Jared and Mohammed in text messages and phone calls.
White House officials tried to hide details about Ivanka Trump’s troubling use of a private email account used for government business, according to a bombshell new report by The Washington Post.
From December 2016 throughout last year, Ivanka sent hundreds of emails to government officials potentially in violation of the Presidential Records Act. Her use of the account under a personal domain created by her and husband Jared Kushner caused concern throughout the White House, according to the report.
However, when Politico first revealed the private Ivanka-Jared domain last year, White House officials let Kushner take the fall. Coverage at the time focused on Kushner’s use of the private account to conduct government business without being archived, and the original report stated there was “no indication” Ivanka used the account for government business.
A federal judge on Friday ordered the Trump administration to reinstate press credentials for Jim Acosta, CNN’s chief White House correspondent.
U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly, who was appointed to the bench by President Trump, granted CNN’s request to restore the press pass for Acosta, giving him regular access to the White House grounds to cover events and press conferences.
“I want to emphasize the very limited nature of this ruling,” Kelly said Friday in granting the temporary restraining order in favor of CNN.
The Trump administration on Wednesday pushed back against CNN’s request to immediately reinstate reporter Jim Acosta’s press pass, arguing that reporters do not have a Constitutional right to enter the White House.
The claim came in a Justice Department legal filing hours before a federal court hearing on CNN’s lawsuit over the White House’s decision to pull Acosta’s press pass after a heated exchange with President Trump last week during a news conference.
“No journalist has a First Amendment right to enter the White House,” three Justice Department lawyers wrote in the filing.
A former top White House official has revised her statement to investigators about a key event in the probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election, after her initial claim was contradicted by the guilty plea of former national security adviser Michael Flynn, according to people familiar with the matter.
K.T. McFarland, who briefly served as Flynn’s deputy, has now said that he may have been referring to sanctions when they spoke in late December 2016 after Flynn’s calls with Russia’s ambassador to the United States, these people said.
When FBI agents first visited her at her Long Island home in the summer of 2017, McFarland denied ever talking to Flynn about any discussion of sanctions between him and the ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, in December 2016, during the presidential transition.
The former White House aide had been releasing recordings of her time working for Trump.The former White House aide had been releasing recordings of her time working for Trump.
On @TheView, @OMAROSA releases secretly recorded Oct ’17 tape of Trump ranting during White House meeting about how “the real Russia story is Hillary & collusion”
“So the whole Russia thing seems to have turned around,” Trump can be heard saying.
Omarosa Manigault Newman, former White House aide and reality TV star, released a new recording of her time working for President Donald Trump Monday that reveals him joking to a group of staffers in a discussion about an ambush in Niger that killed four American soldiers.
“There were people in many cases, that were in the Middle East, that now got to Africa to try and, you know, cause problems there. And ultimately they wanna come back here, because this is where they really wanna be. So its a rough, uh, business. I wouldn’t, I don’t think I’d want to be a terrorist right now,” Trump said on the recording, eliciting laughter from the people he was with.
He continued jokingly, apparently encouraged by the laughter: “It’s not a good life but it’s uh, the only thing that — what else is there?”
The following article by Aaron Blake was posted on the Washington Post website September 6, 2018:
An anonymous Trump official wrote a column published by the New York Times on Sept. 5, describing how senior officials are working to protect the nation. (Reuters)
“Given the instability many witnessed, there were early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment, which would start a complex process for removing the president,” wrote the official, making some news. “But,” the official added, “no one wanted to precipitate a constitutional crisis. So we will do what we can to steer the administration in the right direction until — one way or another — it’s over.”
So the person who says members of Trump’s administration are actively working against him and trying to prevent him from acting upon his own decisions … doesn’t want this whole thing to turn into a crisis?
