US Politics Mega-thread - Page 7042

On March 05 2017 03:50 xDaunt wrote:
It strikes me as rather presumptuous to conclusively declare what wiretaps Trump is referring to without waiting for clarification from his Administration.

On March 05 2017 04:25 Nyxisto wrote:


you've ever entertained the idea that maybe Trump, as the person making the accusation, ought to clarify his statement?

A spokesman for Obama, Kevin Lewis, called "any suggestion" that Obama or any White House official ordered surveillance against Trump "simply false."
"A cardinal rule of the Obama administration was that no White House official ever interfered with any independent investigation led by the Department of Justice," Lewis said in a statement early Saturday afternoon. "As part of that practice, neither President Obama nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any US citizen. Any suggestion otherwise is simply false."
Warrants to tap into someone's phones in the course of a federal investigation would be sought by the Department of Justice, which conducts investigations independent of the White House and the president.

Before heading off to his so-called "winter White House" in Palm Beach, Florida, on Friday, President Donald Trump summoned some of his senior staff to the Oval Office and went "ballistic," senior White House sources told ABC News.

The president erupted with anger over the latest slew of news reports connecting Russia with the new administration -- specifically the abrupt decision by Attorney General Jeff Sessions to recuse himself from investigations into Russian meddling in the 2016 campaign.

Sources said the president felt Sessions' recusal was unnecessary and only served to embolden Trump's political opponents. The attorney general made his announcement Thursday just as Trump returned to Washington from a trip to the U.S.S. Gerald Ford in Virginia for a speech about his agenda as president.

Hours earlier, aboard the ship, the president had told reporters that he had "total" confidence in Sessions and saw no reason why the attorney general should recuse himself.

“We should have had a good week. We should have had a good weekend. But once again, back to Russia," a senior White House official said, expressing the frustration simmering in the West Wing following the news earlier in the week that Sessions failed to disclose during his confirmation process that he had met with the Russian ambassador twice during the election campaign. Sessions at the time was a senator on the Armed Services Committee and was also helping the Trump campaign.

Among those gathered in the Oval Office on Friday: Chief of staff Reince Priebus, chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon, White House Counsel Don McGahn, press secretary Sean Spicer, newly-hired Communications Director Mike Dubke, along with Trump son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner and his wife Ivanka Trump, the sources said.

With Marine One waiting on the South Lawn, Trump and his team engaged in an animated exchange -- captured by press pool cameras peering in through the windows from the White House South Lawn. Trump then left the office for the helicopter, taking the hands of his young grandchildren and joined by his daughter Ivanka and Kushner.

Priebus and Bannon were planning to join the trip, but suddenly after the president's eruption those plans changed. One source said both men volunteered to stay behind in Washington, with another source saying the president seemed to concur that they should. Sidelining key staffers with whom he was angry was an occasional Trump tactic during the campaign.

As President Trump was in the air aboard Marine One headed for Air Force One on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews, a last-minute phone call was made from the West Wing to the team on board the president’s plane with a directive to remove Priebus and Bannon from the manifest, sources said. They would not be coming to the Sunshine State.

Donald J. Trump mastered the New York tabloid terrain — and his own narrative — shaping his image with a combination of on-the-record bluster and off-the-record gossip.

He’s not in Manhattan anymore. This New York-iest of politicians, now an idiosyncratic, write-your-own-rules president, has stumbled into the most conventional of Washington traps: believing he can master an entrenched political press corps with far deeper connections to the permanent government of federal law enforcement and executive department officials than he has.

Instead, President Trump has found himself subsumed and increasingly infuriated by the leaks and criticisms he has long prided himself on vanquishing. Now, goaded by Stephen K. Bannon, his chief strategist, Mr. Trump has turned on the news media with escalating rhetoric, labeling major outlets as “the enemy of the American people.”

...

During his Page Six days, Mr. Trump was, by and large, trafficking in trivia. As president, he is dealing with the most serious issues of the day. They involve the nation’s safety and prosperity, and it is the role of news organizations to cover them.

If Mr. Trump’s slap-and-tickle relationship with reporters had a model back then, people close to him say, it was the gregarious, unavoidable-for-comment style of Edward I. Koch, the three-term New York mayor. But his mood in Washington has turned darker, and over the last week he has executed, alongside Mr. Bannon and Mr. Spicer, what amounts to the most sustained White House campaign against the news media since Richard M. Nixon’s second term.

“It’s like Nixonian times again,” said George Rush, a veteran New York gossip columnist who has covered Mr. Trump for decades. “I just thought he would have a thicker skin.”

Linda Stasi, who chronicled Mr. Trump’s up-and-down marriage to Marla Maples in the 1990s for two New York papers, said she could have predicted the presidential agita. “He would plant stories and he would get mad if they didn’t come out exactly as he wanted,” she recalled of earlier dealings with Mr. Trump. “It never occurred to him that he couldn’t control everything.”

Now, Ms. Stasi said, “he is shocked that he is not in control of the press.”

Attacking the news media, which has an abysmal approval rating among Republican voters, is sound politics in the short term. But Mr. Trump’s fury is less strategic than heartfelt. He watches cable TV at night and exhorts aides like Mr. Spicer and his policy adviser Stephen Miller to be tougher, according to White House aides.

...

To some extent, the clash with the press was inevitable. Mr. Trump may be noisier and more confrontational than many of his predecessors, but he is being force-fed lessons all presidents eventually learn — that the iron triangle of the Washington press corps, West Wing staff and federal bureaucracy is simply too powerful to bully.