The following article by James Hohmann with Breanne Deppisch and Joanie Greve was posted on the Washington Post website July 14, 2017:
THE BIG IDEA: You can’t fire family.
Clinton certainly wouldn’t give that answer anymore, especially after what’s transpired this week.
— Trump yesterday defended Donald Jr.’s sit-down with a Russian attorney during last year’s campaign, saying “zero” improprieties occurred and “most people would have taken” the meeting.
“My son is a wonderful young man,” the president said during a news conference in Paris.
“He’s a good boy,” the president added during a gaggle on Air Force One. “He’s a good kid.”
In fact, Don Jr. is 39. He’s the same age as the president of France, Emmanuel Macron, who was standing next to Trump when he gave that quote. Both kids/boys/young men — whatever he wants to call them — were born in 1977.
Don Jr. pulled his brother-in-law Jared Kushner, who is 36, into a meeting with someone he was told had dirt on Clinton from the Russian government. Then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who is 68, also attended.
A youthful indiscretion this was not.
It’s also a reminder that you don’t have to be young to be stupid.
Perhaps most importantly, though, Trump’s spirited defense offered a window into how much more complex dealing with the Russia scandal is for the White House when multiple members of the president’s family are now implicated.
— Trump’s embrace of a kind of nepotism that’s historically been more common in banana republics than the first world continues to backfire on him — creating a myriad legal and political headaches. And they’re probably only going to get worse.
— Trump has no problem shunting aside staff when he concludes that they’ve outlived their usefulness to him or become more trouble than they’re worth. In addition to Manafort, there’s a cast of characters from Sam Nunberg to Corey Lewandowski, Carter Page and Michael Flynn. Other fall guys have been left in Trump’s wake, especially if you broaden your time horizon to include the casinos he drove into bankruptcy and his many other failures in business.
Remember when White House press secretary Sean Spicer ludicrously claimed that Manafort, who ran the campaign for months, “played a very limited role for a very limited period of time”? Or when Sean insisted that Flynn, the former national security adviser, was merely a “volunteer of the campaign”?
But, as The Fix’s Aaron Blake notes, “Disowning or minimizing his own family isn’t really an option for Trump.”
— Most White House aides are trying to protect the principal: the president and, really, the presidency itself. But Trump himself seems focused primarily on protecting his personal interests, which includes his family. He was reportedly involved in the preparation of Don Jr.’s initial, misleading statement to the New York Times, which claimed the meeting with the Russian lawyer was about adoption. The personal and the political have come into conflict quite a lot over the past week, and by all indications they will continue to.
— This has exasperated Republicans on Capitol Hill. Rep. Bill Flores (R-Tex.) said on-the-record what many feel privately when he told the Texas CBS affiliate KBT: “I’m going out on a limb here, but I would say that I think it would be in the president’s best interest if he removed all of his children from the White House. Not only Donald Trump, but Ivanka and Jared Kushner.”
— The president’s shifting version of events continues to unravel in other ways. Trump has maintained that he was unaware of his eldest son’s June 2016 meeting with the Russian lawyer until right before the New York Times broke the story. He said on Wednesday night that he “just heard about it two or three days ago.”
Yahoo News’ Michael Isikoff now reports that Marc Kasowitz, Trump’s personal attorney, and Alan Garten, the top lawyer for the Trump Organization, were both informed about the emails three weeks ago by Kushner’s legal team. “The discovery of the emails prompted Kushner to amend his security clearance form to reflect the meeting, which he had failed to report when he originally sought [his security clearance],” Isikoff writes. “That revision — his second — to the so-called SF-86, was done on June 21. The change to the security form prompted the FBI to question Kushner on June 23, the second time he was interviewed by agents about his security clearance … But the information that Trump’s lawyers were told about the emails in June raises questions about why they would not have immediately informed the president. Pushing back the discovery of the emails to the third week in June also raises additional questions about the initial public statements made by the White House after the existence of the meeting was first reported.”
— Kasowitz has labored to underscore the potential risk to the president if he engages without a lawyer in discussions with other people under scrutiny in the investigation, including Kushner. Philip Rucker, Ashley Parker and Devlin Barrett have some fantastic reporting this morning on the growing tensions behind the scenes: “Nearly two months after Trump retained outside counsel to represent him in the investigations of alleged Russian meddling in last year’s election, his and Kushner’s attorneys are struggling to enforce traditional legal boundaries to protect their clients, according to half a dozen people with knowledge of the internal dynamics and ongoing interactions … A third faction could complicate the dynamic further. Trump’s eldest child, Donald Trump Jr., hired his own criminal defense attorney this week … Trump Jr. also is considering hiring his own outside public relations team. …
“The challenge for President Trump’s attorneys has become, at its core, managing the unmanageable — their client. He won’t follow instructions. After one meeting in which they urged Trump to steer clear of a certain topic, he sent a tweet about that very theme before they arrived back at their office. He won’t compartmentalize. With aides, advisers and friends breezing in and out of the Oval Office, it is not uncommon for the president to suddenly turn the conversation to Russia — a subject that perpetually gnaws at him — in a meeting about something else entirely. … Senior White House officials are increasingly reluctant to discuss the issue internally or publicly and worry about overhearing sensitive conversations, for fear of legal exposure. … As in Trump’s West Wing, lawyers on the outside teams have been deeply distrustful of one another and suspicious of motivations. They also are engaged in a circular firing squad of private speculation about who may have disclosed information about Trump Jr.’s meeting…”
Trump, for his part, is also now trying to force the Republican Party to pick up his legal tab. Another scoop from Phil, Ashley and Devlin’s story: “Some in Trump’s orbit are pushing the Republican National Committee to bear the costs … Although the RNC does have a legal defense fund, it well predates the Russia investigations and is intended to be used for legal challenges facing the Republican Party, such as a potential election recount. The RNC has not made a decision, in part because the committee is still researching whether the money could legally be used to help pay legal costs related to Russia. But many within the organization are resisting the effort, thinking it would be more appropriate to create a separate legal defense fund for the case. … The White House has not said whether Trump, Kushner and other officials are paying their legal bills themselves or whether they are being covered by an outside entity.”
— Kasowitz, who is clearly under heavy strain, lashed out at a random stranger who criticized him in an email on Wednesday – firing off a blizzard of threatening, profanity-laced responses. ProPublica’s Justin Elliott got the emails.
— Because of the nature of their work inside the White House, the president’s daughter and son-in-law pose a unique set of additional problems.
Kushner has been pushing internally this week for a more aggressive defense of Trump Jr.’s meeting, which he also attended, but he has faced resistance from some of Trump’s top press aides. Sources tell Politico’s Tara Palmeri that “Kushner wants the White House to more aggressively push out surrogates and talking points to change the narrative … But some of the communications aides, including [Spicer] … have expressed reservations. They say it’s best to leave it to outside counsel to handle the furor around Trump Jr., and fear inviting further legal jeopardy if Trump aides and allies more forcefully defend a meeting that they don’t fully know the details of. … After hours of little defense from the White House on Tuesday following Trump Jr.’s release of the email chain … Kushner spoke with Spicer and [Sarah] Huckabee Sanders. During the conversation, Spicer and Sanders made the case for crafting a longer-term battle strategy … but Kushner called for full-on combat.”
Remember, The Post reported back in May that Kushner was already a focal point of the Russia investigation. He met last December with Russia’s ambassador to the United States and a banker with ties to the Kremlin. The Post has also reported that Sergey Kislyak told Moscow that Kushner floated the idea of a secret communications channel — or back channel — with Moscow.
“Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump have tried their best to soar gracefully above the raging dumpster fire that is the Trump administration. Unhappily for the handsome couple, gravity makes no allowances for charm,” Eugene Robinson quips in his column for today’s paper. “Kushner, already reported to be a ‘person of interest’ in the Justice Department probe of President Trump’s campaign, is arguably the individual with the most to lose from the revelation that the campaign did, after all, at least attempt to collude with the Russian government to boost Trump’s chances of winning the election. … Jared and Ivanka have first-class educations. They know how the Icarus story ends.”
- “All Roads Now Lead to Kushner,” Nicholas Kristof writes in his NYT column.
- “Kushner Keeps Making the Russia Scandal So Much Worse,” says New York Magazine.
- “Ivanka and Jared try to dodge reporters in Sun Valley” is a headline in today’s New York Post.
Kushner’s own business interests exposes the White House in other ways, as well. One of the most under-covered stories this week came from The Intercept: “Not long before a major crisis ripped through the Middle East, pitting the United States and a bloc of Gulf countries against Qatar, Jared Kushner’s real estate company had unsuccessfully sought a critical half-billion-dollar [bailout] from one of the richest and most influential men in the tiny nation … Kushner is a senior adviser to President Trump … and also the scion of a New York real estate empire that faces an extreme risk from an investment made by Kushner in the building at 666 Fifth Avenue, where the family is now severely underwater.”
— Don Jr. is on the cover of next week’s Time Magazine. It’s not one that will get framed and hung in Trump Tower.
The Atlantic’s Molly Ball explains that Don Jr. has always been “The Troublemaker”: “Many years ago, when his eldest son was still a boy, Donald Trump was interviewed by Barbara Walters, along with his family. Which child, she asked … did he consider the troublemaker in the family? Trump didn’t hesitate for a moment. ‘Don,’ he shot back … An angry and petulant youth, he actually didn’t fully buy into Trumphood until after college … [and] at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, Don was known mostly for drinking and picking fights. Brash, strong-willed, risk-taking: These qualities made Don Jr. the most visible of the Trump children during the campaign. But this week’s revelations … cast those same qualities in a different light … Once again, Don Jr. is his father’s troublemaker, but this time the trouble is much more than fun and games. On Wednesday, I texted Don and asked how he was doing. ‘Fantastic,’ he wrote back—followed by the ‘laughing crying’ emoji. He declined to comment further.”
— Speaking of progeny: Ronald Reagan’s daughter, Patti Davis, has written a post on her blog entitled “THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING.” The former first daughter expresses alarm: “One man, whose arrogance and ego lead him trippingly into chaos of his own making, can turn a shining city on the hill into a shadowy, taudry replica of itself. … If he was quiet for five minutes he might hear the echo of (Vladimir) Putin’s laughter carried on the wind across countries and oceans. But Trump’s ego is a loud, boisterous thing and will never allow him to hear anything that might cause him to reflect. … Our democracy, and the dignity of America, is wounded and bleeding out. It doesn’t mean that it can’t be restored and healed, but not by this administration. And it will only get worse if those intent on making excuses continue saying that Trump and his extended family are new at this governing thing, and are just bumbling a bit.”
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