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By Colleen Shalby

April 10, 2017

It started with a string of Saturday morning tweets. From his weekend retreat in Florida, President Trump lashed out at his predecessor, igniting a chain of events that veered between tragedy and farce. U.S. intelligence agencies, former Obama administration officials, Americas closest foreign ally and one of Trumps most ardent congressional supporters would be swept up in the drama. And there are no signs its over.

Saturday, March 4:

In the early hours of March 4, the president went on Twitter.

By various accounts, his mood was sour.

It was just two days after news reports revealed that Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions had twice met with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the 2016 campaign. The disclosure was embarrassing, to say the least, since Sessions had testified at his Senate confirmation hearing that he had not met with any Russian officials. Bowing to an outcry on Capitol Hill, Sessions recused himself from the Justice Department investigation into Russian interference in the election.

The president was peeved that the Sessions news had eclipsed his well-received address to a joint session of Congress a few days earlier.

A disgruntled Trump on Twitter: an explosive combination. In four tweets just minutes apart, he alternated between denying any collusion with Russia and accusing President Obama of wiretapping Trump Tower during the campaign.

Then Trump took a break from social media to get in some golf. He seemed relaxed while greeting supporters outside his Mar-a-Lago resort. But his tweets had unleashed a whirlwind.

Politicians from both parties called on Trump to explain his accusation or retract it. FBI Director James B. Comey pressed his bosses at the Justice Department to publicly reject Trumps claims. They did not. Trump, meanwhile, asked the House and Senate intelligence committees both busy investigating the possible Russian connection to his campaign to look into his wiretapping claim too.

This is McCarthyism, Trump tweeted. Then he invoked the scandal that brought down President Nixon.

March 13:

Pressed to produce proof for Trumps accusation, his aides struggled to explain what he meant. Their statements offered little clarity. Asked whether she believed Trump Tower had been bugged, Kellyanne Conway, the presidents senior counselor, riffed on the vast reach of surveillance. The government, she said, can spy on citizens through their phones and televisions. Not even kitchens are secure, she suggested. There are microwave ovens that turn into cameras.

The House and Senate intelligence committees had asked the Justice Department to produce any information it had to support Trumps allegation by March 13. When the deadline came, the department said it needed more time.

At this point, the story could have quietly faded away. Instead, it took another stranger-than-fiction twist.

March 15:

I don't think there was an actual tap of Trump Tower, the House Intelligence Committee chairman, Rep. Devin Nunes, told reporters. Clearly the president was wrong.

The Tulare Republican went on to say that it was possible the president and his associates were swept up in a broader surveillance.

More on that later.

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March 16-17

The White House tried to defend the president by blaming Britain.

Press Secretary Sean Spicer said reporters looking for evidence to support the wiretapping claim should check out a report by Fox News commentator Andrew Napolitano, a former New Jersey judge. Napolitano said three sources told him that Obama had dodged U.S. restrictions on surveillance by having Britains Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) spy on Trump. The British intelligence agency called the allegation nonsense and utterly ridiculous.

Trump tried to distance himself from the commotion the next day but without apologizing to the Brits.

All we did was quote a certain very talented legal mind who was the one responsible for saying that on television, he said. You shouldnt be talking to me. You should be talking to Fox.

Napolitanos colleague, Fox News anchor Shepard Smith, disavowed the report, saying the network had no evidence to back it up. Napolitano then disappeared from the Fox lineup for a time. It didnt help his credibility when Larry Johnson, a former CIA officer turned conspiracy theorist, said that he was one of Napolitanos sources and that the former judge mischaracterized what he told him.

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March 20

The start of House Intelligence Committee hearings put Russia back in the spotlight. On the same day that Trump dismissed the issue as fake news, Comey and National Security Agency Director Michael S. Rogers testified for more than five hours. With TV cameras rolling, the FBI director confirmed that his agency was investigating Russian interference in the election, including possible collusion by the Trump campaign, and both he and Rogers said they knew of no evidence to support Trumps allegation that Obama had wiretapped him.

March 22

Comeys testimony had put another dent in Trumps credibility. He had essentially called the president a liar, and Democratic politicians and liberal commentators were making the most of it.

To make matters worse, news surfaced that onetime Trump campaign Chairman Paul Manafort had worked for a Russian billionaire to advance Russian President Vladimir Putins agenda.

Then along came something to change the narrative courtesy of Nunes.

The House Intelligence Committee chairman held an impromptu news conference to make an explosive allegation: U.S. intelligence officials, he said, had intercepted communications involving Trumps transition team. He had seen the evidence with own eyes, he said, and the intercepted communications had nothing to do with Russia.

Nunes, who had worked on Trumps transition team, said he was alarmed by what hed seen and felt compelled to go to the White House and tell Trump about it in person. The president needs to know these intelligence reports are out there, he said.

Nunes hurried from the Capitol to the White House to brief the president, then held another news conference about the briefing.

Trump said later he felt somewhat vindicated.

But Nunes hadnt told the whole story.

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March 23

With reporters scrutinizing his White House visit and Democrats sharply questioning its propriety, Nunes began to change his story. He said he had learned about surveillance summaries, but had not seen any, and that it was possible that no Trump aides had been the subjects of surveillance. Their names could have appeared in intelligence reports simply because foreign figures under surveillance were talking about them. Whats more, he apologized for going public with sensitive information before sharing it with his own committee.

Then the story took another turn. Or rather, a car ride.

A nighttime White House meeting

On March 21, the night before he dropped his bombshell, it turned out that Nunes had been riding in an Uber with a congressional staffer when he received a message. Nunes had abruptly gotten out of the car and headed for an unknown destination. Rep. Adam B. Schiff, Nunes fellow Californian and the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, called it a midnight run. News leaks suggested that Nunes had visited the White House to obtain the alarming information on which he briefed the White House the following day.

The source could not simply put the documents in a backpack and walk them over to the House Intelligence Committee space.

Nunes spokesman Jack Langer

March 24

Nunes abruptly canceled a public hearing, scheduled for March 28, at which former acting Atty. Gen. Sally Yates, former Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper and former CIA Director John Brennan were to testify before the House Intelligence Committee.

Nunes said he wanted to give Comey and Rogers time to address the committee in private first. Schiff sensed a different motive.

He said it looked like Nunes had postponed the hearing to protect the White House.

We dont welcome cutting off public access to information, Schiff said. I think that there must have been a very strong pushback from the White House.

Three days later, Schiff called on Nunes to recuse himself from the Russia investigation.

March 27

Nunes spokesman Jack Langer confirmed that the congressman had gone to the White House complex the night before he briefed Trump. Nunes had rushed there to meet with a source. Langer didnt say whom.

The information comprised executive branch documents that have not been provided to Congress, he said by email. Because of classification rules, the source could not simply put the documents in a backpack and walk them over to the House Intelligence Committee space.

Any thought that this explanation would put matters to rest was mistaken.

March 30

The New York Times reported that Nunes sources for the intelligence reports were two White House officials Ezra Cohen-Watnick, senior director for intelligence at the National Security Council, and Michael Ellis, a lawyer in the White House counsel's office.

At his daily news briefing, Spicer would neither confirm nor deny the report.

Later that day, the White House sent a letter to ranking members of the House and Senate intelligence committees, inviting them to view newly discovered classified materials. To Democrats, it looked like an effort to quiet the controversy over Nunes conduct by letting both committees see what Nunes had already seen.

Why all the cloak-and-dagger stuff? asked Schiff.

April 1-4

Going on Twitter once again, Trump trumpeted reports he had heard on Fox News.

Trumps transition team members had been spied on, and a senior Obama administration official had tried to unmask their identities, Fox reported. The network suggested the attempted unmasking was improper, an abuse of authority for political purposes.

Unmasking itself is legal and not uncommon within the intelligence community. An official with the appropriate security clearance can ask to know the identity of an anonymous person mentioned in an intelligence report when its necessary to understand the information in the report. Its not the same as making the persons name public.

The latest villain in this saga? Obamas national security advisor, Susan Rice. She had previously pushed back against Trumps wiretap claims, saying that nothing of the sort had occurred. Now, Trump and the conservative media were accusing her of unmasking people improperly.

The allegations were first reported by Mike Cernovich, a conspiracy theorist, blogger and self-described American nationalist. Cernovich had been an ardent backer of the Pizzagate theory an online hoax that tied Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to a child-trafficking ring supposedly operating from a Washington, D.C., pizzeria called Comet Ping Pong.

After Cernovichs report on Rice and her alleged unmasking of innocents, Donald Trump Jr. chimed in to say the blogger deserved a Pulitzer Prize. Trump Jr. was not Cernovichs only admirer in the White House. A day earlier, Conway had tweeted out a link to a 60 Minutes interview with Cernovich.

April 5

In an interview with MSNBC, Rice denied the allegations. She said she never unmasked anyone for political reasons and never leaked the name of anyone who had been unmasked nor had she ever leaked any classified information, period.

But Trump wasnt letting up.

In an interview with the New York Times, the president said Rice might be guilty of a crime, without citing any evidence. He couldnt understand why the mainstream media werent all over it.

The Russia story is a total hoax, he said. There has been absolutely nothing coming out of that.

April 6

The House Intelligence Committee chairman stunned Washington with the announcement that he was stepping aside from the Russia investigation because he himself was under investigation. The House Ethics Committee, in a separate announcement, said it was looking into allegations that Nunes had improperly disclosed classified material the same material involved in his nighttime White House meeting.

With Nunes sidelined, Rep. K. Michael Conaway (R-Texas) will lead the intelligence committees Russia inquiry, with help from Reps. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) and Tom Rooney (R-Fla.).

Conaway made headlines in January when he suggested that Russian interference in the 2016 election wasnt such a big deal, given that Mexican celebrities had appeared in Nevada to help get out the Latino vote for Democratic candidates.

Those are foreign actors, foreign people, influencing the vote in Nevada, Conaway told the Dallas Morning News. You dont hear the Democrats screaming and saying one word about that.

Read the original here:
The news was focused on Russia. Then Trump accused Obama of spying on his campaign. - Los Angeles Times

Trump was spotted Sunday driving a golf cart and making a putt at his Trump International Golf Course -- the only sign of his activities at the facility since his handlers have declined to detail what he's doing inside the private establishment.

President Barack Obama, also an avid golfer, waited months before playing a round when he first entered office. His first documented golf outing came April 26, 2009, just shy of the 100-day mark in his presidency.

Obama didn't avoid recreation when he first entered office. He spent several weekends with his family at Camp David, the presidential retreat in the Catoctin Mountains of Maryland, and returned to Chicago for a weekend at his private home.

But he did steer clear of the links. When he did make his first outing, he traveled just outside Washington to the course at Joint Base Andrews (which, back then, was still called Andrews Air Force Base).

Trump hasn't ventured to that course, but he has traveled to his own golf facility in Sterling, Virginia, just a 45-minute drive from the White House. He's also played at the two courses he owns near his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.

Some of his visits don't involve golf; Trump has held meetings with senior staff and Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul at his Virginia club without venturing onto the course itself.

When he does pick up a club, White House officials have declined to list names of Trump's golf partners, breaking the practice of the Obama White House.

The regular visits stand in marked contrast to Trump's insistence during last year's campaign that he wouldn't spend time playing golf if elected president, including at the courses he owns.

"You know what -- and I love golf -- but if I were in the White House, I don't think I'd ever see Turnberry [in Scotland] again. I don't think I'd ever see Doral again -- I own Doral, in Miami. I don't think I'd ever see many of the places that I have," Trump said last year. "I don't ever think that I'd see anything. I just wanna stay in the White House and work my ass off, make great deals, right? Who's gonna leave? I mean, who's gonna leave?"

Trump also went after Obama repeatedly for his penchant for golf including in 2013 when Obama was considering striking Syria for its use of chemical weapons. Trump said he should been consulting lawmakers instead.

"PresObama is not busy talking to Congress about Syria..he is playing golf ... go figure," Trump tweeted.

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Trump, who scorned Obama's golf habits, outpacing him in rounds - CNN

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David Garrow, the author of the upcoming book on Obamas life, said he uncovered lots of revelations about the former U.S. president during his research for the book, the Daily Mail reported.

Garrow, who spent a total of eight years working on the biography, told the Jamie Weinstein Showthat if any of those revelations he discovered surfaced during Obamas presidential run in 2008, the former presidents candidacy would have been derailed.

The historian said Obama wrote hundreds of pages for a proposed book along with his friend Robert Fischer in the early 1990s when the two were still in law school, but the manuscript was never published.

Racism against African Americans continues to exist throughout American society, an admittedly racist culture, Obama and Fischer wrote, according to Garrow. Precisely because America is a racist society we cannot realistically expect white America to make special concessions toward blacks over the long haul. The greatest testimony to the force of racist ideology in American culture is that it infects not only the mind of whites, but the minds of blacks as well.

Garrow said Obama reportedly wrote 140 pages on race in that manuscript, giving an insight into his thoughts as he left law school and was about to enter public life in Illinois.

He claimed that if Republican researchers got a hold of Obamas manuscript during the campaign, it would have impacted him negatively in the campaign.

Garrow said people would be profoundly astonished at how much of Obamas life has not yet been made public but added that it was not necessarily in a negative context.

He also questioned the accuracy of parts of Obamas memoir Dreams From My Father, which was published in 2004.

Garrow conducted 1,000 interviews for his soon-to-be released book on Obama. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1987 for his biography of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Read more:
Biographer Claims Barack Obama Called America 'Racist Society' in Unpublished Manuscript - Breitbart News

From the Left: Trumps Anti-Obama Doctrine

President Trumps first foreign-policy crisis came with Bashar al-Assads use of chemical weapons against Syrian civilians last week. So, asks Susan Glasser at Politico, whats the Trump Doctrine? Apparently, its to be the anti-Obama. Several Republicans in contact with Trumps foreign-policy team have told Glasser that this is the common thread connecting not just the Syria strike but also other projects like Israeli-Palestinian peace (after Obamas attempt failed) and Trumps outreach to Putin when he and Obama were on the outs. And the Syria strike did its job. As one former Obama official told Glasser: Our administration never would have gotten this done in 48 hours. Its a complete indictment of Obama.

Foreign Desk: The High Cost of Assads Rule

Whether or not the US strikes are the beginning of a process that will lead to Bashar al-Assads ouster, its worth taking stock of the increasing cost of his 17-year rule, say Nicholas Blanford and Scott Peterson in the Christian Science Monitor. His country has been devastated, the economy ruined, an estimated more than 400,000 people are dead, and the conflict has created the largest refugee crisis Europe has witnessed since World War II. At this point, Assads regime controls only about 35 percent of Syria, with the rest carved up between various Arab and Kurdish militias and the extremist Islamic State. And if he stays in office, it is difficult to see which countries or what global institutions would be willing to bankroll a multi-billion dollar reconstruction process with Assad still enthroned in the presidential palace.

Historian: Dems Should Follow Bill Clintons Example

David Greenberg says if Democrats want to recover while in exile, they should read Michael Tomaskys new biography of former President Bill Clinton, who rescued Dems from oblivion. Writing in the Washington Monthly, Greenberg notes that Clintonian moderation and triangulation get a bad rap on the left. There was the 1994 crime bill that included both Republican tough-on-crime measures and left-wing features like an assault weapons ban, support for community policing, and the Violence Against Women Act. And though liberals today decry welfare reform and banking deregulation, the booming prosperity over which Clinton presided, combined with his progressive tax and distribution policies, meant that for the first time since the 1960s, the lowest quintile of earners saw their lot improve during his presidency.

From the Right: The Fight Over Filibustering Legislation

The failure of a proposed deal to avoid nuking the filibuster for Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch probably cost Democrats more, writes Ed Morrissey at Hot Air: The numbers involved made it pretty clear that Republicans would have a hard time reassembling enough votes in this session to kill the filibuster for a different nominee. So why were they united now? First, Gorsuch was obviously well-qualified. Second was the Democrats rush to attack him personally despite his display of judicial temperament during the hearings, which indicated that this was obstructionism for obstructions sake. Plus, Democrats have much to lose in the near term, Morrissey writes, because now the legislative filibuster could be in danger, especially with tough fights on appropriations, tax reform and health care on the near horizon.

Yale Professor: Your Interview Probably Doesnt Matter

Job and admissions interviews are useless, declares Yale School of Management assistant professor Jason Dana in The New York Times. In 1979, a medical school in Texas admitted an extra 50 students whod earlier been rejected after their interviews, yet they did just as well as the other students. Dana and his colleagues recently tested interviewers ability to predict grade-point average and those interviewers G.P.A. predictions were significantly more accurate for the students they did not meet. The interviews had been counterproductive. Until we replace unstructured interviews with something else, we should be humble about the likelihood that our impressions will provide a reliable guide to a candidates future performance.

Compiled by Seth Mandel

See the article here:
Trump's anti-Obama doctrine and other notable comments - New York Post

Susan Rice and other former Obama administration officials are taking heat for past claims that their 2013 Syria agreement successfully led to the Assad regime purging its entire chemical weapons stockpile -- in the wake of this week's alleged sarin gas attack.

On Thursday, President Trump launched a targeted strike at a Syrian airfield in response to what he called a barbaric chemical attack on innocent civilians at the hand of Syrian President Bashar Assad.

There can be no dispute that Syria used banned chemical weapons, violated its obligations under the Chemical Weapons Convention and ignored the urging of the U.N. Security Council, Trump said.

Video footage from the chemical attack scene immediately raised credibility problems for claims made by members of the Obama administration that the prior agreement had rid the war-torn country of chemical agents.

During an interview this past January with National Public Radio, former National Security Adviser Rice touted the success in Syria, in striking a deal with Russia's help that resulted in the prior administration dropping the threat of military action.

We were able to find a solution that didnt necessitate the use of force that actually removed the chemical weapons that were known from Syria, in a way that the use of force would never have accomplished, she boasted. We were able to get the Syrian government to voluntarily and verifiably give up its chemical weapons stockpile.

Rice has come under fire for making misleading comments in the past. Most recently, she grabbed headlines for allegedly being tied to allegations of improper surveillance of the Trump team prior to his inauguration.

Rice isnt the only Obama-era official who made self-congratulatory statements about removing chemical weapons from Syria.

In July 2014, then-Secretary of State John Kerry went on NBCs Meet the Press to discuss the September 2013 deal that resulted in Russia agreeing to help confiscate and then destroy Syrias stockpile.

We struck a deal where we got 100 percent of the chemical weapons out, Kerry claimed.

At the time, the fact-checking website PolitiFact found Kerrys comments to be mostly true. However, given new evidence that Assad had recently used chemical weapons against his own people, PolitiFact was forced to revisit and revise its assessment of Kerrys claims.

We dont know key details about the reported chemical attack in Syria on April 4, 2017, but it raises two clear possibilities: Either Syria never fulling complied with its 2013 promise to reveal all of its chemical weapons; or it did, but then converted otherwise non-lethal chemicals to military uses.

One way or another, subsequent events have proved Kerry wrong, the site ruled.

In August 2016, a U.N. report revealed that Assad had used chlorine gas against civilians on two separate occasions since the 2013 deal a clear violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention. Despite that report, members of the Obama administration continued to claim they had been successful in disarming Assads chemical weapons arsenal.

They routinely touted the diplomatic nature of the joint U.S.-and-Russia brokered deal.

Obama issued his infamous red line warning to Syrias leader in 2012 not to use chemical weapons. In 2013, when reports surfaced that Assad used sarin gas to kill his people, the deal to remove chemical weapons was intended to avert military action.

The president himself on Aug. 18. 2014 said that the most lethal declared chemical weapons possessed by the Syrian regime were destroyed by dedicated U.S. civilian and military professionals and that it had been done several weeks ahead of schedule.

On Jan. 6, 2015, then-White House Press Secretary John Earnest praised Russia for its role in destroying the chemical weapons stockpile of the Assad regime.

That was an important step, because it reduced, or essentially eliminated, the proliferation risk from that declared chemical weapons stockpile, that we could essentially destroy those chemical weapons and ensure that terrorists would not be able to get their hands on them and use them in other places.

Five months later on June 17, 2015, Earnest said that the declared chemical weapons stockpile that Assad previously denied existed has now been acknowledged, rounded up, removed from the country and destroyed precisely because of the work of this administration and our successful efforts to work with the Russians to accomplish that goal.

On Thursday night, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson slammed Russia for failing to do its part in preventing the Syrian government from using chemical weapons, despite the 2013 agreement to remove weapons from the country.

Either Russia has been complicit or Russia has been simply incompetent, Tillerson said.

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Susan Rice, Obama colleagues take heat for past claims on ...