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Donald Trump, Emmanuel Macron, Google: Your Thursday Briefing New York Times Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian president, offered to give Congress a record of Mr. Trump's recent meeting with the Russian foreign minister to show that the American leader had not divulged any secrets so long as Mr. Trump did not object. In the ... After speaking to Donald Trump, Turkish president's bodyguards beat up Kurdish protesterSalon Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Donald Trump hold talksAljazeera.com all 1,087 news articles »

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Donald Trump, Emmanuel Macron, Google: Your Thursday Briefing - New York Times

A battalion of White House aides entered the Oval Office together to present a unified front after the bombshell.

The Justice Department had appointed a special prosecutor to oversee the probe into Russia's alleged involvement in the 2016 presidential election, White House counsel Don McGahn had just told President Donald Trump. Many of Trumps top aides gathered with the president Wednesday evening just after Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein signed the order and called McGahn and just before the news exploded publicly in Washington.

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Trump handled it better than anyone expected, according to a person in the room. His reaction was extremely measured, another said.

He didn't yell or scream. He told the assembled crowd they had nothing to hide.

But that levelheadedness was quickly replaced Thursday morning by a wounded tweeter in chief lashing out as some of his staffers had been expecting the news would bring out.

With all of the illegal acts that took place in the Clinton campaign & Obama Administration, there was never a special councel appointed! Trump tweeted, after an unusually quiet 24 hours online.

He added in a second tweet: This is the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history!

The change in attitude followed a typical pattern with Trump: accepting a defeat in real time, then later raging against it after talking to friends and watching television. After his first attempt at repealing and replacing Obamacare failed, he was calm and conciliatory, then later began blasting the House Freedom Caucus from his online pulpit.

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True to form, Thursdays screed was a stark contrast to the response Wednesday night in the Oval Office, according to aides present, where the mood in the room appeared to be one of resigned acceptance even though they were blindsided. Everyone knew this wasn't good news," this person said.

The announcement marked yet another severe blow to the 45th president just 118 days into his term. It followed eight days of chaos inside the White House after the president suddenly fired FBI Director James Comey, further crippling an administration already struggling with internal discord and mounting crises at home and abroad.

The president Wednesday afternoon had been interviewing candidates for FBI director when the news arrived. His staff had no advance notice that a special prosecutor would be appointed.

The crowd entering Trumps office was sizable, as is often the case: chief of staff Reince Priebus, McGahn and other lawyers, senior advisers Kellyanne Conway and Jared Kushner, communications aides Michael Dubke and Hope Hicks and others.

Aides outlined the background of the special counsel, former FBI Director Robert Mueller, who Trump had met before. Some explained to the president what a special prosecutor can do.

Over the course of about 40 minutes, aides streamed in and out of the Oval Office. The team drafted a statement from the president for Trumps approval. A gaggle of reporters camped outside press secretary Sean Spicers office to wait for it.

It was released Wednesday at about 7:20 p.m., 80 minutes after the Justice Departments public announcement and two hours after staff first got word of the action.

As I have stated many times, a thorough investigation will confirm what we already know there was no collusion between my campaign and any foreign entity, Trump said in the statement. I look forward to this matter concluding quickly. In the meantime, I will never stop fighting for the people and the issues that matter most to the future of our country.

Priebus and Trump together delivered a rally-the-troops message to the team: This is an opportunity to let them do their work so we can do ours, Priebus and Trump both reiterated multiple times to the aides gathered.

Outside the White House grounds, the news would soon be interpreted as a potential step that could drain the presidency for months to come.

Trump's upbeat response surprised some aides, though it brought the team together in the face of a common outside threat, according to a source who was present Wednesday.

No one really thinks having a special prosecutor is good and no one is happy" about it, a senior administration official said.

But the communications staff agreed on a positive message for the wrenching news: Because of the special prosecutor, the brewing Russia-related controversies would become something that we just can't talk about, one aide said.

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In the communications office, which has suffered some of the most brutal criticism internally from Trump, the feeling was the special counsel would be a burden off its shoulders.

In the weeks leading up to the decision to appoint a special counsel, Spicer and deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders both publicly said there was no need for the step Rosenstein finally took Wednesday.

Now, Spicer and other briefers would no longer have to look as if they were stonewalling on Russia questions, and could refer those elsewhere.

Aides are now urging Trump to tweet and speak cautiously. "I think he actually understands what a mess this is," one person said. "He has lawyers telling him nonstop what the stakes are here."

On Thursday, Trump was to meet at the White House with the president of Colombia and participate in a joint news conference in the afternoon.

He'll depart Friday for his first international trip as president: an eight-day, five-country journey from Saudi Arabia to Israel to the Vatican to Brussels to Sicily, where he is attempting to shift the narrative away from his domestic crises.

One of the things Trump is most looking forward to about his upcoming trip, according to a White House aide, is a reprieve from the daily press briefings.

On Wednesday night, a person close to him said, Trump was in the White House residence talking to friends and associates about how it was playing on TV.

Josh Gerstein contributed to this report.

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How Trump learned about the special prosecutor - Politico

Does Donald Trumphave even an ounce of shame?

As a presidential candidate, he spent much of the election campaign needling, critiquing, denouncing, and even threatening the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Yet as president, he is making his first foreign visit this weekend to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Even by Trumpian standards, the volte-face is brazen. In his first few months in power, we have witnessed the trademark Trump Turnabout on issues ranging from NATO to China to the Export-Import Bank. We have listened to him go from praising Bashar al-Assad and rebuking Janet Yellen on the campaign trail, to praising Yellen and rebuking Assad in office. Last October, he saidthat then-FBI DirectorJames Comey had guts for doing the right thing; last week, he sacked Comey and called him a showboat and a grandstander.

Trump, to put it mildly, is no stranger to the shameless U-turn. Still, the Trump Turnabout on Saudi Arabia one of Americas closest allies since President Franklin D. Roosevelt met with King Abdul Aziz ibn Saud aboard the USS Murphy in 1945 is a true sight to behold. This weekend, Trump will arrive in Saudi Arabia for a bilateral summit with King Salman as well as a series of meetings with members of the Gulf Cooperation Council.

There will be handshakes, hugs, and smiles galore. We will be expected to forget how Trump blasted the Saudi royals for being freeloaders and threatened them with an economic boycott. Speaking to the New York Times last year, Trump claimed that, without U.S. support and protection, Saudi Arabia wouldnt exist for very long. The real problem, he continued, was that the Saudis are a money machine and yet they dont reimburse us the way we should be reimbursed. Asked if he would be willing to stop buying oil from the Saudis if they refused to pull their weight, Trump responded: Oh yeah, sure. I would do that.

We will be also expected to ignore the fact that Trump slammed the Saudi government for executing homosexuals and treating women horribly. In the third presidential debate last October, Trump attacked Hillary Clinton for taking $25 million from the Saudis, from people that push gays off buildings. These are people that kill women and treat women horribly and yet you take their money.

Perhaps above all else, we will be expected to brush under the carpet the fact that, twice in a single day, Trump accused Saudi Arabia of being behind the 9/11 attacks. Who blew up the World Trade Center? Trump asked his pals at Fox and Friends on the morning of February 17, 2016. It wasnt the Iraqis, it was Saudi take a look at Saudi Arabia, open the documents.

At a campaign event in South Carolina later that day, he again cited secret papers that could prove it was the Saudis who were in fact responsible for the attacks on 9/11. It wasnt the Iraqis that knocked down the World Trade Center because they have papers in there that are very secret, you may find its the Saudis, OK?

(To be fair to Trump, far more credible and better-informed figures have come to a similar conclusion: I am convinced that there was a direct line between at least some of the terrorists who carried out the September 11 attacks and the government of Saudi Arabia, wrote former Florida Sen.Bob Graham, who co-chaired the Senate intelligence committees inquiry into 9/11, in an affidavit in 2012.)

Donald Trump walks from a campaign stop Feb. 17, 2016, in Bluffton, S.C. At the event, he cited secret papers that could prove it was the Saudis who were responsible for the attacks on 9/11.

Photo: Matt Rourke/AP

Whether or not the Saudi government played a role in the 9/11 attacks and we may never know for a leading U.S. presidential candidate to claim that they did, not once but twice, had to be seen to be believed. And yet, astonishingly, a little over a year later, it is to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia that Trump has chosen to make his maiden foreign voyage rather than to Canada or Mexico, as every president since Ronald Reagan has.

Will Trump return from his Saudi jaunt with a big fat check? His much-hyped reimbursement? Will he dare raise the issue of gay rights while in Riyadh? Or womens rights? Will he manage to bring back a Saudi royal or two in handcuffs for their (alleged) role in the 9/11 attacks?Please. There are greater odds of the American president coming back as a proud convert to Islam.

Hypocrisy is not the exclusive preserve of Trump or the United States, of course. Saudi Arabia sees itself as the the birthplace of Islam, ruled by a king who styles himself custodian of the two holy mosques. Yet this coming weekend, the Saudi government will offer a warm and lavish welcome to a president who has said Islam hates us and wanted to ban all of the worlds 1.6 billion Muslims from entering the United States. The Saudi position on the latest iteration of the Trump travel ban, targeted at 170 million-odd Muslims? A sovereign decision aimed, apparently, at preventing terrorists from entering the United States of America and made by a true friend of Muslims.

On Sunday, the fawning Saudis will offer a platform to the worlds most famous Islamophobe, to give a speech on Islam in the birthplace of Islam. AndTrump will likely take the opportunity to decry radical Islamic terrorism while visiting a country thathas perhaps done more than any other to incite, fund, and fuel it.

Hypocrisy unites them both. So too does their fear and loathing of the Iranians the Saudis are busying dropping bombs and backing militants to push back Iranian influence in Yemen and Syria. The Trump administration, filled with Iran hawks, is on the verge of inking a series of arms deals with Riyadh worth more than $100 billion.

To be clear: Trumps U-turn on Saudi Arabia has little to do with being moderated by the realities of high office or swayed by the Beltways foreign policy elites. Despite his bombastic campaign rhetoric, he never planned to go after the Saudis in office even after publicly accusing them of murdering 3,000 Americans. Early on in the campaign, in 2015, a senior Arab diplomat told me, on condition of anonymity, that Trump had informed most of the Gulf governments, in private, that his anti-Muslim and anti-Arab rhetoric was all for the campaign and that it would be business as usual once he was elected (or, for that matter, defeated).

As ever, for Trump, it is always, above all else, about the bottom line his bottom line. The Saudi-bashing Trump sold an entire floor of the Trump World Tower to the Saudis for $4.5 million in 2001. And would it surprise you to discover that Trump also registered eight companies tied to hotel interests in Saudi Arabia inthe midst of his Saudi-bashing presidential campaign?

Of course not. Business is business. Trump is Trump. You might be repulsed by his deceitfulness but you have to admire his chutzpah.

Top photo: A view aboard an American warship at Great Bitter Lake, Egypt, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt conferred with King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia in 1945.

Excerpt from:
Donald Trump Said Saudi Arabia Was Behind 9/11. Now He's Going There on His First Foreign Trip. - The Intercept

I've been a Republican political consultant for almost 30 years, and I've dispensed a lot of private advice. But now it's time for me to reach out publicly to my fellow Republicans working in the Trump administration.

We really need to talk.

Whether you're a 20-something fresh off the campaign trail or a seasoned Washington insider serving in the Cabinet, by now you're painfully aware that you're not making America great again; you're barely making it to the end of the daily news cycle before your verbally incontinent boss, the putative leader of the free world, once again steers the proverbial car into a ditch. On every front, you're faced with legal, political and moral hazards. The president's job, and yours, is a lot harder than it looked, and you know the problem originates in the Oval Office.

You hate that people are shying away from the administration jobs in droves: Just this week, in rapid succession, both Texas Sen. John Cornyn and South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy withdrew their names from consideration as replacements for former FBI Director James Comey, the guy your boss fired. Whatever department you're in, it's a safe bet that it's a whispering graveyard of empty appointments and unfilled jobs.

I know: many of you serving in Cabinet, sub-Cabinet and White House roles joined Team Trump in good faith, believing you could help steady the ship, smooth the rough edges and, just maybe, put some conservative policy wins up on the board. You could see that President Donald Trump's undisciplined style was risky, but you hoped the big show playing over at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue would provide you with cover to work steadily and enthusiastically on the administration's legislative priorities. Some of you even bought into the 'Merica First new nationalism. Many of you quietly assured friends in the Washington ecosystem that Trump would settle into his job - after all, just a few days after taking office, he assured us, "I can be the most presidential person ever."

You figured Trump would turn his political capital into big wins, and that his lack of interest in policy details would let you and your friends in Congress set the agenda. Sure, you knew you'd have to feed Trump's ego and let him take a victory lap after every success, but you also thought you might claim a smidgen of credit for a popular infrastructure bill, a big tax cut, repeal of Obamacare or a host of other "easy" lifts. Because we're all ambitious, right? It's OK to admit it.

Instead, your president botched Trumpcare 1.0 and contributed little as Speaker Paul Ryan managed to ram the public-relations nightmare, Trumpcare 2.0, through the House at the cost of much political blood and treasure. Instead, Trump's fumbles have left many members of Congress ducking town hall meetings as if they're in the Witness Protection Program. The DOA tax bill and the rest of Trump's agenda are deader and more pungent than six-day-old fish. Maybe your particular bureau is still afloat, but you're really not doing much except playing defense and wondering which of your colleagues is leaking to The Post.

You learned quickly that your job isn't actually to serve the nation, manage your agency or fulfill the role you ostensibly play according to the White House org chart. In reality, you spend most of your time fluffing Trump's ego. Either that or you're making excuses for not being a more aggressive suck-up. If you've been ordained to appear on television as an administration surrogate, you know by now that your task isn't to advocate for your agency or issue, but to lavish the president with praise.

Now, you see the daily train wreck; you see a White House in turmoil and a president drawing an ever-tighter circle of family and corporate vassals around himself. You worry that the scandals and legal troubles, that have been rumbling on the horizon like a summer thunderstorm, are drawing nearer. You should worry.

Every day you get up, slide into the seat of your Prius or Tahoe (and, if you're senior enough, exchange a few polite words with your driver) and start checking Twitter. Whatever it is that you're feeling, it doesn't feel anything like Morning in America. It feels like some far-away kleptocracy where the center hasn't held, the airfield and radio station have fallen to the rebels, and the Maximum Leader is holed up in his secret bunker waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Soon (and by soon, I mean now) you'll have to make a choice. You'll have to decide if "I'm here to help" has morphed into "I'm helping this president dismantle the republic." In D.C., principle is as rare as hen's teeth, but, GOP friends, I'm here to help you.

You already know you can't save the president because he doesn't want to be saved. You already know there's not another, better version of Trump getting ready to show up. You're smart. You're loyal. You're sniffing the wind like a gazelle, nose filled with the scents of predators. You don't want to break from the pack too soon, but there's greater risk in waiting too long.

When regimes collapse, dead-enders are the most fascinating to watch the ones who end up with the profitable concessions and sought after mistresses. You know already, though, that's probably not you. So, when this regime falls, ask yourself, do you want to be among those who said "not me," or do you want to go out like a Ba'ath Party generalissimo?

Sticking with Trump to the bitter end and pretending the unfolding chaos is just "fake news" won't save your reputation as the walls close in. It won't ease the judgment of history. It won't do anything to polish up your future Wikipedia entry.

Cutting ties with a man who is destructive to our values, profoundly divisive, contemptuous of the rule of law and incontrovertibly unfit to serve in the highest office in the land just might. Do it now.

Washington Post

Rick Wilson is a Republican consultant and a columnist for the Daily Beast.

What to read next:

And now, a special counsel. How Trump still could save his disaster-prone presidency.

Dear Republicans: It is possible to say no to Trump

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If you work for President Trump, it's time to quit - Chicago Tribune

President Donald Trump walks on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, before his departure to Groton, Connecticut, May 17, 2017.Yuri GripasReuters

Ferguson is an internationally ranked chess player and the Attorney General for Washington state.

The most aggressive opening in chess is called the King's Gambit. On the second move, White sacrifices a pawn that typically protects his king for a blitzkrieg assault on Black. It's audacious. With no preparation, no careful groundwork, White signals his intent to wipe his opponent off the board. In the early 20th century, the King's Gambit led to many brilliant victories. But through careful preparation, grand masters discovered that they could place White on the defensive by capitalizing on weaknesses created by the aggressive opening.

President Trump is playing the political version of the King's Gambit--and his electoral victory was certainly an example of early success. But his approach leaves vulnerabilities that undermine his attacks.

Trump's first defeat--his travel ban targeting people from Muslim-majority countries --is a good example. My office brought a lawsuit challenging that Executive Order and, within a week, stopped it nationwide. How did we do it?

First, we studied Trump's moves and prepared. During his campaign, Trump said he wanted to create "a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States." His adviser Rudy Giuliani explained to Fox News, "When he first announced it, he said, 'Muslim ban.' He called me up. He said, 'Put a commission together. Show me the right way to do it legally.'" Like White sacrificing a pawn on the second move, the President telegraphed his intent to act aggressively. Once Trump told the nation he wanted the travel ban, we marshalled our resources and prepared arguments for the move we knew was coming.

Second, we did not accept Trump's playing field as he presented it. We blunted his action by moving the field of battle to the courtroom. In that setting, Trump was on the defensive. After all, it isn't the loudest voice that prevails before a federal judge--it's the Constitution.

Third, we capitalized on the weaknesses created by Trump's early moves. For example, Trump's team did little, if any, vetting of the travel ban. They failed to ask their own executive agencies to review the Executive Order. In short, it was sloppy.

Additionally, we used Trump's words against him. Those statements about creating a "Muslim ban"? They became evidence in our complaint that the Executive Order was partly motivated by animus against Muslims.

After we stopped the President's original travel ban, Trump issued an all-caps tweet: "See you in court!" But we had already seen him in court--and defeated him there twice. His tweet revealed only one thing: that the President was playing two moves behind.

Trump's aggressive nature will be his undoing. His firing of FBI Director James Comey is the latest egregious example.

We have seen this story before: disregard for the rule of law. Sloppy execution with shifting rationales. A President's own Administration caught off guard.

The key to restoring the rule of law is to blunt Trump's aggression and put him on the defensive. That's why I joined 19 fellow attorneys general in calling for the appointment of an independent special counsel to continue Comey's work investigating Russian interference in our elections.

We will see more reckless and aggressive behavior from this Administration. And I will continue to meet weekly with key members of my team to anticipate Trump's next moves.

When Trump recently signed an Executive Order designed to threaten our national monuments, we were prepared. I penned a letter to Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, warning that any harm to our treasured landmarks would run contrary to federal precedent dating back to Theodore Roosevelt--and would result in legal action from my office.

Additionally, the President recently restarted a coal-leasing program on federal land, despite his refusal to obtain an updated environmental assessment, as required by law. Together with the attorneys general of California, New Mexico and New York, I challenged the Administration's action, filing suit in federal court.

My fellow attorneys general and I will continue to anticipate Trump's aggressive moves and hold him accountable. We will be prepared. And we will counter his unlawful, ill-conceived gambits. Frankly, that's our job. We represent the first line of defense to uphold the rule of law.

What became of the King's Gambit? Today it is rarely seen at the top levels of international chess, because elite players know how to react--by turning aggression into weakness.

Ferguson is an internationally rated chess master and the attorney general for Washington State

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Washington AG: President Trump's Aggression Will Be His Undoing - TIME