joan1984 · 281539
0 Members and 4 Guests are viewing this topic.
#Resist
LMAO! Wa it that good for you?
On Wednesday, Michael Cohen, the former lawyer and fixer for Donald Trump, testified against his former boss before an open session of the House Oversight Committee. Cohen called the President “a racist,” “a conman,” and “a cheat,” and provided evidence that Trump personally reimbursed him for hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels. Cohen said that Trump, indirectly, “in his own way,” instructed him to lie to Congress about the timing of the Trump Tower project in Moscow, and that Trump “knew that Roger Stone was talking with Julian Assange about a WikiLeaks drop of Democratic National Committee e-mails.” (Stone has denied that they spoke about the matter.) Cohen, of course, is not a perfect witness: he has been sentenced to three years in prison for tax evasion, campaign-finance violations, and lying to Congress.What did we learn today, and where does the Trump-Russia story stand after his testimony? To talk about all that, I spoke by phone with Quinta Jurecic, the managing editor of Lawfare. The following is an edited and condensed version of our conversation.What was your biggest takeaway from the morning testimony?Cohen did really well, honestly. I don’t know what I expected, or if I expected anything, but it was pretty striking to see the Republicans on the committee routinely try to discredit him, and he ran rings around them. Even when he would talk over them and push back against some of the implications they were making, they would shut up and let him keep talking. It was really an interesting power dynamic that I didn’t expect to see.What takeaways did you have from the afternoon session?What I was struck by is how careful Cohen has been in what he says Trump has and hasn’t done. The Republicans and Trump himself and his family members have really tried to push this idea of Cohen as someone who has been spurned, who’s out to get Trump, but there are plenty of questions where Democrats will ask whether Trump did such-and-such egregious thing and Cohen will actually say no. The main examples were congresswoman Jackie Speier’s questions about the National Enquirer story [which was never published] about a possible illegitimate child of Trump’s, and the rumor about Trump assaulting Melania in an elevator. And Cohen went out of his way, in both cases, to basically say he didn’t believe that they were true. I think that actually does a lot for him in terms of his credibility.Maybe the biggest revelation today was that Cohen testified that the President’s legal team changed his previous congressional testimony. [Jay Sekulow, a lawyer for Trump, said in a statement that the claims were “completely false.”] If the testimony was false, would that be lawful?That’s a really good question. I believe Cohen has said that he shared the prepared testimony with them, pursuant to a joint-defense agreement. As we all learned when the F.B.I. seized Michael Cohen’s documents, including some documents Trump said were privileged, there is such a thing as the crime-fraud exception, which means attorney-client privilege can be pierced if the lawyer is involved in criminal conduct. I don’t want to go as far as to say that that may have taken place here, but it is certainly not the case that, just because they are Trump’s lawyers, we will be shielded from ever finding out.So, if the Mueller team wanted to ask Trump’s lawyers about that, would they be able to do so?I believe Trump’s lawyers would be able to put up a fight, but I can’t say whether they would be successful. But I imagine they would immediately point to attorney-client privilege, to not turn over that information.And I suppose they could say they weren’t telling Cohen to lie but correcting the record, based on their understanding of it from Trump?Sure, sure. They could certainly make the case that they didn’t understand Cohen to have been lying. Given the facts that we now know, that would seem to be the best case that they would have.To take a step back—Mueller’s office must have cleared Cohen to testify. Why do you think they did that, and does it tell you anything about where their case is?I did not expect him to talk about Russia at all, I have to say, and I was surprised to see the material about Roger Stone in his prepared statement. His comments about Donald Trump, Jr., murmuring to his father, potentially about the Trump Tower meeting, struck me as more speculative. But the Stone thing—saying that Stone was on speakerphone telling Trump about WikiLeaks—is potentially a really big deal.Legally or politically?Politically. I would have to go and look at the statutes, but it is too early to make a legal determination there. Politically speaking, if it is true, it is absolutely damaging, because it ties Trump directly to Stone’s efforts to contact WikiLeaks in a way we haven’t seen before.The testimony today could very well be damning politically and legally for Trump. But does the testimony make you think that more extreme versions of a Russia conspiracy are not true?It depends how you define what constitutes an extreme theory. It’s interesting that you say that, because my reaction to reading Cohen’s prepared statement was actually the opposite. I felt, like, Oh, right, this is a reminder of how big and how serious this is. In recent weeks, maybe because the investigation has been relatively quiet and there have been reports of it wrapping up, I felt like the mood has shifted toward wondering whether the report will be kind of a dud—that there wasn’t really collusion and there was just a disorganized effort that didn’t really come together.The Cohen statement, on the other hand, seemed to me to be a splash of cold water. If he is telling the truth, it sounds like Trump really did know about Roger Stone’s alleged efforts to contact WikiLeaks and approved of them, and that strikes me as a lot more than a dud. It doesn’t corroborate the most explosive details of the Steele dossier—it is not the most extreme version—but it is pretty bad politically.What have you made of the quality of the questions from the Democrats? Do you think they should bring in an outside person, as Republicans did with the Kavanaugh hearing?I don’t want to point to the Kavanaugh hearing as an example of something that worked well, because I thought that experiment was pretty much a failure. But the Democrats have taken up a lot of time speechifying and not really digging in ways that they could. That’s not true across the board. But you can certainly see how someone with experience in questioning a witness would make better use of that time.I can’t believe that no one asked what Trump’s attitude was when he was talking to Roger Stone about WikiLeaks. Did he act like he had heard about this before? Did he seem like he had talked to Roger Stone about this before?Right. So, if you look at the time line, Cohen has said he thinks that that Stone call was July 18th or 19th, 2016, and the “Russia, If You Are Listening” speech is on July 27th, about ten days later. That is notable. I don’t want to draw any conclusions from it, because it could just be a kind of ambient awareness, but that time line seems impossible to ignore. Let’s put it that way.Cohen is supposed to testify before Adam Schiff’s House Intelligence Committee, in a closed hearing, on Thursday. What would you like him to be asked?I think it is important what words Trump used in giving Cohen the impression that he should lie to Congress. That may come up in an open hearing, but, in the space of a closed hearing, he will be able to answer that question with fewer concerns about impeding the investigation. I think that, given the dispute over what Trump told Cohen to do, and given what it would mean if Trump really did tell him to lie, the specific wording is very important.
According to this prepared statement of former Trump lawyer and confidant Michael Cohen released by Politico and other news outlets, Cohen is prepared to testify before Congress today under oath that Donald Trump: Was a presidential candidate who knew that Roger Stone was talking with Julian Assange about a WikiLeaks drop of Democratic National Committee emails.”Whether this statement holds up as true will depend on several things. First, it will depend on whether Cohen has any evidence backing up his claim. Members of the House oversight committee will want to explore whether he has any text messages, audio files or other corroborating evidence backing up this statement. They will also want to determine whether he can recommend to the committee any other witnesses who can corroborate his account. Second, it will depend on how credible he appears before the committee in his appearance today. Does he come off as someone truly remorseful and full of regret for having been loyal to a corrupt individual and enterprise for a substantial portion of his professional career? Or does he present as someone out to get his former boss in order to aid his own position going forward?But more importantly: Assuming that Cohen’s statement is true, why does it matter?It matters because WikiLeaks has a long and documented history of engaging in activities damaging to U.S. national security.Verification that candidate Trump knew what was going on behind the scenes with Stone’s communications with WikiLeaks about the release of information obtained through the hack of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) may explain a whole lot. It may explain, in part, why the candidate made favorable statements regarding Russia throughout the campaign. Most significantly, it may explain why, in July 2016, candidate Donald Trump openly called for Russia’s assistance in his infamous, “Russia, if you’re listening I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing” statement.This statement was alarming—to put it mildly—to anyone who had previously worked on counterintelligence matters. Cohen’s confirmation that Trump knew Stone was communicating with WikiLeaks explains this and other statements candidate Trump made at the time. But more than just confirming what was going on behind the scenes, the fact that Trump knew and, one can presume, either implicitly or explicitly blessed the coordination or communication with WikiLeaks matters because WikiLeaks is, according to the current secretary of state when he was the director of the CIA: “a non-state, hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors, like Russia.”Pompeo made this statement in April 2017, presumably based on intelligence information he obtained shortly after becoming director of the CIA. I previously laid out additional breadcrumbs the intelligence community has been dropping publicly about its understanding of WikiLeaks, here.Based on the information available publicly so far, I am inclined to think that, even if Michael Cohen’s statement is true, the attenuated chain between Trump, Stone and Assange may be stretched too thin to establish criminal charges against Trump or campaign officials for the DNC intrusion itself. In other words, even if true, it does not yet appear that Trump himself could be implicated in the criminal conspiracy to hack the DNC. More facts are required to make that leap.However, Michael Cohen’s imminent allegation alone (who is a witness in a position to know who has been confirmed by the special counsel’s office as having provided credible information to aid their investigation) is that the president knew that Stone, an adviser spanning decades, was communicating with WikiLeaks about activities in support of his campaign.The information that a presidential candidate, now president, had knowledge of this communication or coordination and either allowed or consented means that he put his political ambitions over the national security of the United States of America. He worked, or allowed his surrogates to work, with a “non-state, hostile intelligence service.”Moreover, no defender of the president’s or anyone involved in the campaign over the summer of 2016 can credibly claim that they did not know WikiLeaks was engaged in activity contrary to U.S. national security interests. Although Pompeo’s statement went further than prior intelligence chiefs and was not until April 2017 (after Trump was in office), there was already a sufficient public record revealing WikiLeaks activity as extremely harmful to U.S. national security interests. Dating all the way back to 2010, WikiLeaks facilitated the public disclosure of reams of sensitive classified documents and information from the unauthorized disclosure by Chelsea Manning. This information was in the public domain. WikiLeaks was also involved behind the scenes in certain activities related to Edward Snowden’s voluminous unauthorized disclosures. This, too, in the public domain. And Trump’s national security adviser throughout the campaign and short-lived national security adviser Michael Flynn would have been well aware of WikiLeaks and its activities. Here’s what then-Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) chief Michael Flynn included in his threat assessment of 2014: “DIA is leading an Information Review Task Force to examine grave damage caused to the Department of Defense equities and U.S. national security as a result of the unauthorized NSA disclosures.”Moreover, since the president has been in office, WikiLeaks has continued its activities of facilitating the release of information damaging to U.S. national security interests, including the release of sensitive CIA hacking tools. As a result, even if one were to believe that the Trump campaign was ignorant of WikiLeaks’s role in damaging U.S. security, the Trump administration is presumably fully aware of what WikiLeaks is and does and has done. Which means that if the president has hidden his knowledge of communications his campaign was having with WikiLeaks or what his political surrogates were doing in the summer of 2016, he has actively thwarted what are likely ongoing counterintelligence investigations related to WikiLeaks and its role in facilitating the criminal acquisition and/or unauthorized release of years’ worth of highly sensitive and classified information.I wrote on this site in April 2018 that the intelligence community should release publicly, consistent with its responsibilities, what it knows about WikiLeaks in order to assist the public’s understanding of why it is not a benign entity. The public’s understanding of what it is learning would be enhanced by credible information distinguishing WikiLeaks from legitimate journalistic enterprise, a territory it exited long ago, if it ever was even there. There is important context missing from the public’s understanding of why it matters that an American political campaign engaged with a foreign entity that has spent years degrading U.S. intelligence capabilities and exposing sensitive information. The intelligence community presumably has not done so because there is either an ongoing counterintelligence investigation and/or there are ongoing criminal proceedings that have active investigative equities.But as we watch Michael Cohen testify today that an American presidential candidate knew a longtime political adviser communicated or coordinated with WikiLeaks, we need to keep in mind that there is a deeper story here. Senior intelligence overseers in Congress likely know it. The rest of Congress and the public need to, and soon.
Of all the things that President Trump’s former personal lawyer revealed in his remarkable day of congressional testimony Wednesday, the one that shed the greatest light was this: Trump never expected — or even really wanted — to win the 2016 election.“Donald Trump is a man who ran for office to make his brand great, not to make our country great. He had no desire or intention to lead this nation — only to market himself and to build his wealth and power,” Michael Cohen told the House Oversight Committee. “Mr. Trump would often say, this campaign was going to be the ‘greatest infomercial in political history.’ ”In other words, what we have been living through for the past two years has been an alternate reality. It is far different from the one Trump envisioned when he came down the Trump Tower escalator in June 2015 and announced what was pretty much universally regarded as a preposterous bid for the presidency.This, of course, is not the first time someone has reported that Trump himself was surprised by his victory. It was a major part of the narrative in Michael Wolff’s best-selling “Fire and Fury,” explaining Trump’s lack of preparation when he assumed the most powerful office in the world.And to be fair, this failure of imagination was not Trump’s alone. The Democrats, the media and even most Republicans were also convinced that Hillary Clinton would be the next president. When the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape became public during the closing weeks of the campaign, then-Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus pleaded with Trump to drop out, or face the worst electoral defeat in U.S. history.Cohen is far from the most credible of witnesses, having pleaded guilty last year to lying to Congress, plus an additional eight counts that included tax evasion and violating campaign finance laws. He has been disbarred and is likely to begin a three-year prison sentence in May.Now, however, he has little left to lose. So when he laid out Trump’s motivations, it carried a ring of truth, and not only because the self-described “fixer” was in a position to see and understand the many levels of calculation that went into the endeavor that put Trump in the White House. In Cohen’s telling, Trump’s expectation that he would lose became the predicate for many of his otherwise inexplicable actions during the campaign.The silver lining for the president may be that his former lawyer also undercut theories that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to change the course of the election. Cohen claims Trump’s primary interest in dealing with Moscow had little to do with influencing who won in November 2016, because he assumed it would not be him. He was instead fixated on building a hotel there — a long-yearned-for project that remained alive, even after Trump became the Republican nominee.“Mr. Trump knew of and directed the Trump Moscow negotiations throughout the campaign and lied about it. He lied about it because he never expected to win the election. He also lied about it because he stood to make hundreds of millions of dollars on the Moscow real estate project,” Cohen testified.If the whole exercise of running for president was a pretense, just another reality show, then the lying and manipulation required to pull it off might have seemed, as Cohen claimed, “trivial.” So Cohen made hush payments to women with whom Trump allegedly had affairs, lodged threats of legal action to keep Trump’s presumably embarrassing academic record a secret and fibbed about the possibly nonexistent bone spurs that kept his client from being drafted to fight in Vietnam.Still, for this con to work to Trump’s benefit in the long run, he would have to create a second-season plot line that would preserve his relevance after he lost the election. And that meant damaging the legitimacy of the person whom even Trump assumed would win it.All of which brings us to what is possibly Cohen’s most explosive new claim, which is that Trump knew in advance of WikiLeaks’s July 2016 release of Democratic National Committee emails.According to Cohen, the Republican nominee was informed of that impending email dump just days before the Democratic convention, in a telephone conversation with his longtime political adviser Roger Stone (who denies it).In Cohen’s recollection, Trump was delighted to hear the news, saying something along the lines of: “Wouldn’t that be great?” What Cohen now realizes is that the biggest surprise of all would be the one that awaited in November.
Sounds like Lil' Donnie, Kushner, Ivanka and Weisselberg at least all are gonna get to talk to Representative Cummings and the crew.Lil' Donnie is especially in hot water for lying to Congress.#Resist
President Trump’s former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen will finish his congressional testimony circuit Thursday with a closed-door hearing of the House Intelligence Committee, where he is being grilled for details about the president’s plans to build a tower in Moscow, Trump’s financial ties to other foreign actors and what he knew about Russian efforts to meddle in the 2016 presidential campaign.Cohen, who will soon go to prison for the lies he told lawmakers in 2017 to protect Trump, has been pulling no punches this week as he offers scathing anecdotes, insight and a paper trail that he thinks shows Trump to be a “con man,” a “racist” and a “cheat.”But his claims have drawn the ire of Trump allies who have insisted that Cohen is not credible — and are now asking the Justice Department to investigate him for potentially having lied to Congress again, during a public hearing this week.During testimony Wednesday before the House Oversight Committee, Cohen told lawmakers that Trump knew in advance that the anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks would release emails damaging to former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, his Democratic presidential opponent. Cohen also displayed copies of financial statements he said Trump used to inflate his assets and procure a loan from Deutsche Bank. He also produced copies of checks the president and his family wrote to him after Trump took office — checks that Cohen said were reimbursements for $130,000 he paid adult-film actress Stormy Daniels shortly before the election to keep her from discussing an alleged sexual encounter with Trump.[Cohen tells Congress Trump knew about WikiLeaks’ plans, directed hush-money payments]Cohen named Trump Organization CFO Alan Weisselberg as being privy to many of these transactions. On Thursday, a House Intelligence Committee aide said that the panel anticipates bringing in Weisselberg for an interview, but did not name a date for when they planned to make that happen.Republicans rarely challenged Cohen directly on the substance of his testimony, choosing instead to point out that Cohen had pleaded guilty to lying to Congress once, and could not be trusted.“Liar, liar, pants on fire,” Rep. Paul A. Gosar (Ariz.) jeered at Cohen at one point. “No one should ever listen to you or give you credibility.”GOP lawmakers also insisted on several occasions that Cohen was trying to misrepresent his past to lawmakers, such as when he insisted that he had not wanted a job in the Trump administration and had been content, even happy, to serve as Trump’s personal lawyer.That claim contradicts reporting and statements by the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, who stated in court documents that in private communications, Cohen had told friends that he wanted a Trump administration job — and that when he didn’t get one, he “found a way to monetize his relationship with an access to the President.”In a letter to Attorney General William P. Barr, Rep. Jim Jordan (Ohio), the ranking Republican on the oversight committee, and Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), also a panel member, list six complaints about Cohen’s testimony that they think might rise to the level of perjury or false statements to Congress. They include allegations that Cohen participated in illegal lobbying and did not disclose contracts linked to foreign governments, as well as accusations that he misrepresented his prowess as a lawyer.Cohen pushed back on all those charges during Wednesday’s hearing, in which he also frequently apologized for “mistakes” he made while working for Trump.Part of his tour through Capitol Hill is to correct the record of lies he pleaded guilty to telling the Senate and House intelligence committees in 2017, both of which are interviewing him behind closed doors this week.On Wednesday, Cohen said that some of Trump’s lawyers, including Jay Sekulow, had edited his planned comments before his previous testimony — including references to the timeline of Trump’s efforts to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. Sekulow denied the claim. In general, Cohen said, Trump viewed the 2016 presidential campaign as a potential moneymaking operation because he never thought he would win — right up until he did.The House Intelligence Committee is expected to investigate that admission further on Thursday. Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) has long speculated that Trump and his close affiliates may have laundered money or engaged in financial dealings that could have given foreign actors — not just Russia — leverage over Trump that could affect his actions as president.“Today Cohen provided the American public with a firsthand account of serious misconduct by Trump & those around him,” Schiff tweeted Wednesday evening. “Tomorrow we’ll examine in depth many of those topics including Trump Tower Moscow, Roger Stone/WikiLeaks and any WH role in Cohen’s false statements to Congress.”Lawmakers on the House intelligence panel said Thursday that they expected the hearing with Cohen to go “deeper” than his public appearance did — and guessed that the interview would continue into the night.But there were early signs that Cohen’s audience behind closed doors would be just as politically divided as it was out in the open. When asked whether Cohen seemed more credible during this appearance, Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), who is on the intelligence panel, said that Cohen appeared “liberated.” Rep. Chris Stewart (R-Utah), who also is on the committee, said Cohen simply appeared “interesting.”
The first thing to remember about Michael Cohen’s lengthy appearance on Wednesday, Feb. 27, before the House Committee on Oversight and Reform is that it was presumably a pale shadow of the full testimony Cohen could offer. The president’s former lawyer spent Tuesday testifying behind closed doors at the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence; Sen. Susan Collins told reporters that he seemed like “a very different guy” compared to his previous appearance before the panel. And he will spend the day on Thursday at a closed hearing of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. What became public on Wednesday was just the slice of Cohen’s story that is not currently at issue in Robert Mueller’s investigation of L’Affaire Russe, the subject of separate investigation in the Southern District of New York, or of concern to the intelligence committees.In other words, Cohen’s testimony, both written and live, is not the whole story. It may well not be the most important parts of his story. It is only the most currently presentable parts of Cohen’s story.The second notable feature of the hearing was that it was really two hearings. One was a sometimes frustrating, sometimes incompetent, sometimes serious effort to learn what the committee could about the conduct of the man who currently serves as president of the United States. The other hearing alternated in five-minute increments with the first but was a different exercise entirely. It involved a confrontation between a man who had devoted a decade of his life to making Trump’s legal, ethical and personal problems go away—a man who once reveled in being dubbed Trump’s “fixer”—yet who now had become one of those problems, and was being confronted by a phalanx of 17 applicants for his old role.Indeed, with the notable exception of Rep. Justin Amash, who engaged in a serious colloquy with Cohen about how Trump communicates indirect orders to his subordinates, none of the Republican members of the committee showed any serious interest in developing the factual record about the president’s conduct: not on matters related to L’Affaire Russe, not on payments to paramours, not on other corruption matters. They showed up, rather, as fixers—very much as Cohen himself would only recently have done. They were there merely to discredit the witness. And in this project they confronted a problem: It is actually hard to brand someone as a liar when he walks in, having recently pleaded guilty to any number of lies, and brands himself as a teller of untruths. There’s not much you can say about such a person that he hasn’t just said about himself.This didn’t stop members from trying. They berated Cohen. They declared him not credible. They attacked the committee majority for having a witness who would soon go to prison for lying to Congress. And they almost entirely refused to engage the substance of what Cohen was saying. But at the end of the day, the spectacle this generated had changed very little. Cohen was saying the things he was saying; he still had the documents he had brought. And the man about whom he was talking was still of a character that lent credence to his allegations. Despite the spectacle, Cohen’s testimony revealed a lot.Checks and BalancesThe most damaging aspect of Cohen’s testimony for Trump concerned the president’s involvement in two offense patterns to which Cohen has pleaded guilty. The first of these was Trump’s involvement in the payments Cohen coordinated to Stephanie Clifford (better known as Stormy Daniels) and Karen McDougal—the matter regarding which Cohen originally pleaded guilty in the Southern District of New York on charges of campaign finance violations. Prosecutors have already alleged that Cohen “acted in coordination with and at the direction of” Trump himself in making those payments. But Cohen’s testimony provided unmistakable evidence of direct, personal involvement by Trump in the scheme—first as a presidential candidate and, perhaps most significantly, continuing months after he swore the oath of office.Cohen testified in response to questions by Rep. Katie Hill that he received payments over the course of 2017, drawn either from Trump’s personal account or from his trust account. He promised that he could provide copies of all checks to Congress. Along with his written testimony, he included a copy of a check Trump had written him from his personal bank account reimbursing Cohen for the Daniels and McDougal payments—from August 2017, well into Trump’s presidency. He also included a check from the trust account dated to March 2017, which Cohen identified to Chairman Elijah Cummings as signed by Donald Trump, Jr. and Trump Organization Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg.The timing of the checks is important for two reasons. The first is legal. Technically speaking, under federal election law, the balance Trump owed Cohen at any given time could constitute an ongoing illegal contribution by Cohen. Leaving aside the problem of indicting a president while he remains in office, any prosecutor seeking to bring a case against Trump would need to prove that he had “knowingly and willfully” violated the law, and that is far from clear. But it is noteworthy that the president’s potential criminal exposure in the Daniels and McDougal matter now extends beyond his time as a private citizen into his tenure as a public official.On this note, Cohen’s opening testimony describes an exchange with Trump in the Oval Office in February 2017 in which Trump assures him that his reimbursement checks are on their way: “They were FedExed from New York,” Cohen paraphrases him as saying, “and it takes a while for that to get through the White House system.” In other words, the president of the United States was signing those checks—made out to his personal fixer in exchange for paying off two women for their silence regarding sexual relationships with him—in the White House itself.This points to the second reason why the timing is important. Cohen’s testimony makes clear that the president repeatedly lied to the American people and made efforts to ensure the public would not find out the truth. After signing some of those checks to Cohen in the White House, Trump told reporters on Air Force One that he knew nothing about the Daniels payment in April 2018. In an exchange with Hill, Cohen said that Trump had called him just two months earlier, in February 2018, to ensure that Cohen would tell reporters that Trump had had no knowledge of or involvement in the reimbursements or Cohen’s original payments to Daniels. This systematic deception may not be a legal problem for the president, but it is a moral affront and a breach of his responsibility as the leader of the country.The second area involves Cohen’s allegation that Trump indirectly encouraged him to lie to Congress about the abortive Trump Tower Moscow project—the subject of Cohen’s second guilty plea, this time to the special counsel’s office. This was the subject of the BuzzFeed News story alleging that Trump personally directed Cohen to lie to Congress about the date the Moscow project was terminated in order to hide Trump’s involvement. That story caused a fracas when Mueller’s office broke its customary silence to issue a rare statement denying unspecified aspects of the story: “BuzzFeed’s description of specific statements to the Special Counsel’s Office, and characterization of documents and testimony obtained by this office, regarding Michael Cohen’s Congressional testimony are not accurate.”Cohen’s testimony begins to square this particular circle, claiming that Trump made his desire clear without explicitly “directing” Cohen to lie, and that Cohen followed what he took to be an instruction. In his prepared statement, Cohen says that Trump had made clear to him over months what the party line was—saying to him that there was no business in Russia even as he supervised Cohen’s efforts to build a tower there. Moreover, Cohen writes, “Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers reviewed and edited my statement to Congress about the timing of the Moscow Tower negotiations before I gave it,” referring to the August 2017 letter Cohen submitted to the House and Senate intelligence committees, which contained the false assertion that the negotiations ended in January 2016. Cohen continues, “Mr. Trump had made clear to me, through his personal statements to me that we both knew were false and through his lies to the country, that he wanted me to lie” about the duration of the Trump Tower Moscow negotiations. “And he made it clear to me because his personal attorneys reviewed my statement before I gave it to Congress.”Speaking at the hearing, Cohen told Rep. John Sarbanes that Trump’s lawyers had access to Cohen’s statement to Congress circulated because of Cohen’s joint defense agreement with Trump, but said that he couldn’t recall the nature of the edits. He identified both Trump’s personal lawyer Jay Sekulow and Jared Kushner’s lawyer Abbe Lowell as having reviewed the statement, and told Rep. Jamie Raskin that review by the president’s team led to changes in “how we were going to handle that message, … the length of time that the Trump Tower Moscow project stayed and remained alive.” He said he would try to provide the committee with an original draft of his statement from before the edits.Notably, Sekulow contested Cohen’s testimony, saying in a statement that “today’s testimony by Michael Cohen that attorneys for the President edited or changed his statement to Congress to alter the duration of the Trump Tower Moscow negotiations is completely false.”But there’s another element of Cohen’s testimony: He also stated during questioning by Rep. Gerry Connolly that he and Sekulow met with President Trump and specifically discussed the statement and impending testimony before the House intelligence committee. What did the president say? “He wanted me to cooperate. He also wanted just to ensure by making this statement—and I said it in my testimony—there is no collusion. There is no deal. He goes, ‘It’s all a witch hunt.’”“At the end of the day, I knew exactly what he wanted me to say,” Cohen testified.In other words, if Cohen is telling the truth, the president encouraged his false statements both in the general sense that he articulated the lies that became the party line Cohen was meant to represent and in the more specific sense that he met with Cohen in the run-up to the statement and testimony, reiterated the false party line, and then had his attorneys review and refine Cohen’s statement to help reflect that line.L’Affaire RusseCohen’s testimony also produced two other additional insights on L’Affaire Russe—one more significant than the other. The more significant one is that Cohen declared in his opening statement that Trump “knew that Roger Stone was talking with Julian Assange about a WikiLeaks drop of Democratic National Committee emails” during the summer of 2016. As Cohen wrote:In July 2016, days before the Democratic convention, I was in Mr. Trump’s office when his secretary announced that Roger Stone was on the phone. Mr. Trump put Mr. Stone on the speakerphone. Mr. Stone told Mr. Trump that he had just gotten off the phone with Julian Assange and that Mr. Assange told Mr. Stone that, within a couple of days, there would be a massive dump of emails that would damage Hillary Clinton's campaign.Mr. Trump responded by stating to the effect of “wouldn’t that be great.”This story, if true, is the first allegation that connects Trump personally to the efforts of his campaign and on the fringes of the campaign to benefit from Russia’s email theft. It has always been unclear how much Trump was personally aware of during the campaign of Russian outreach: not only Roger Stone’s outreach to WikiLeaks, but also the Trump Tower meeting and foreign policy aide George Papadopoulos’s knowledge of Russian “dirt” on Hillary Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails.” There has been plenty of speculation about how much the candidate knew. Cohen told Rep. Peter Welch that he was unaware of whether Trump or Stone knew where the emails came from, although the Washington Post had reported the previous month—and the media had covered widely since—that the Russians had stolen them. But Cohen’s testimony represents a direct allegation that Trump was aware that WikiLeaks was intending to release damaging material on Clinton before that material became public and was aware of contact between his campaign hangers-on and WikiLeaks on the subject.The timing is also noteworthy. Cohen estimated that the call took place on July 18 or 19 of 2016—which would place it just a few days before WikiLeaks released the emails hacked from the DNC on July 22. A week later, Trump would declare at a campaign event, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.” It is also consistent with paragraph 11 of the Roger Stone indictment, which states that “in or around June and July 2016, Stone informed senior Trump campaign officials” of his information on WikiLeaks’s plans.It’s unclear what the legal significance would be of Cohen’s story—if any. For one thing, it would be hard to prove, being an anecdote told by a convicted liar about another person charged for lying and a person who is famously disengaged from the truth. Cohen testified that there was no one else in the room during Stone’s call, though Trump’s secretary Rhona Graff allegedly patched the call through. Moreover, even if true, it’s not clear that the story involves anything illegal. After all, it’s not illegal to have advance knowledge that WikiLeaks is planning a release of something that was previously stolen.Unless, that is, you happen to tell a federal investigation that no such conversation took place. According to CNN several months ago, Trump said in his written answers to questions from the special counsel’s office that Roger Stone had not told him about any communications with WikiLeaks. Notably, CNN also reported that before Trump submitted his answers, Mueller requested call logs from Stone to Trump Tower—which presumably would show Stone’s call on July 17 or 18.Whether or not it suggests criminality, the incident—if true—is narratively significant in fleshing out the picture of Trump’s supposed knowledge of Russian outreach, and it is morally significant in that it underlines how little the highest levels of the Trump campaign cared about the provenance of the help it received. Whether it was illegal or not, it was a kind of collusion—coordination on damaging Trump’s opponent with an organization working hand in glove with a hostile intelligence service. Cohen testified that Trump had never expressed any sense that what Stone had done was wrong, nor had he suggested that they should contact the FBI in the wake of Stone’s revelations.The final aspect of Cohen’s testimony related to L’Affaire Russe is more attenuated. He describes an incident in “early June 2016” in which Cohen saw Donald Trump, Jr. walk behind his father’s desk and tell him, “The meeting is all set.” Cohen reasons—based on Trump’s control over the campaign, Donald Trump, Jr.’s deference to his father, and the fact that “Mr. Trump had frequently told me and others that his son Don Jr. had the worst judgment of anyone in the world”—that Trump, Jr. must have been coordinating the Trump Tower meeting.If Cohen’s assumption were proved true, this would be explosive. But it is even in Cohen’s account an assumption—one for which there is no evidence beyond the assumption. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Cohen faced relatively few questions about this aspect of his written testimony during the hearing.What’s NextEven where Cohen does not implicate the president in illegality, his account of Trump is relentlessly unflattering. There’s the allegations of racism. There’s the supposed absence of substantial medical records regarding the president’s alleged bone spurs, which had served as his justification for avoiding the Vietnam draft. Cohen even testified about threatening Fordham University to never release the president’s grades and SAT scores.Are there any positive aspects of Cohen’s testimony for the president? Sort of. At no point, to be sure, does Cohen’s testimony “totally clear the president,” as Trump once tweeted. But it does clear away some lingering and unpleasant questions. In response to a question from Rep. Raskin about any videotapes that could expose the president to “extortion or blackmail,” Cohen responded that he has “no reason to believe that that tape exists”—presumably referring to the sexual tape described in the Steele dossier. Cohen likewise flatly denied the allegation that he met with Russian operatives in Prague during the summer of 2016.He also put the kibosh on two other salacious stories that have hovered around the Trump presidency. First, he denied that Trump had fathered an illegitimate child, a rumor that American Media, Inc. CEO David Pecker paid $15,000 to “catch-and-kill.” Second, he directly addressed rumors of video showing Trump assaulting his wife Melania in an elevator, which, the rumor goes, was ostensibly was put up for auction. “I don’t believe that auction was real,” Cohen said, saying that he knew people who had unsuccessfully sought to purchase it, “and I don’t believe that Mr. Trump ever struck Mrs. Trump, ever.”One of the most important features of any investigative hearing is the degree to which it can open up new leads and generate new potential witnesses. In this regard, Cohen’s testimony was a kind of gold mine for the committee. In addition to the Daniels and McDougal payments and L’Affaire Russe, Cohen’s testimony identified a number of other potential areas of legal concern for the president. Most notably, in response to a question from Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi about what the president told him the last time the two communicated directly, in the fall of 2018, Cohen declared that he could not answer two questions because it bore directly on an ongoing investigation by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. When Krishnamoorthi asked what other “wrongdoing or illegal acts” Trump may have committed, Cohen added that this question bore on the same investigation.There are other areas too. Cohen also testified that Trump exaggerated his own worth in an effort to obtain a loan from Deutsche Bank, that he similarly over- or under-represented his assets for insurance and tax purposes, and that he used funds from his charity to purchase a third portrait of himself (the purchases of the first two portraits had already been reported by the Washington Post). All of these could give rise to further hearings or investigations.The committee will also not lack for witnesses—although Cummings has said he plans to proceed “very cautiously” in this investigation out of concern for not compromising criminal probes. Under questioning both from Cummings and from Rep. Carolyn Maloney, Cohen specifically flagged the role of Trump Organization Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg’s role in the payments to women. Cohen testified that he and Weisselberg left Trump’s office in order to discuss the details of precisely how to repay Cohen for the money he would pay to Stephanie Clifford. Cohen’s testimony in response to Maloney’s questions was very specific; he said that he and Weisselberg explored several ideas, including putting money in the “IOLA” (Interest on the Lawyer’s Account) account, or sending the funds to Keith Davidson, or having Cohen obtain payment from someone who wanted to have a party at one of Trump’s clubs or wanted to join one of Trump’s golf clubs. When Maloney asked Cohen whom he thought the committee should talk to about “catch-and-kill” and payments to individuals prior to the 2016 presidential election, Cohen specifically indicated that the committee should talk to David Pecker, Dylan Howard, and Barry Levine of American Media, Inc., as well as Allen Weisselberg and Alan Garten (executive vice president and chief legal officer at the Trump Organization). In discussing allegations of insurance fraud, he mentioned two other names, in addition to Weisselberg, in an exchange with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Matthew Calamari and Ron Lieberman.The bottom line is that Michael Cohen’s testimony was informative and useful. People will have to make their own credibility judgments about the man. Some of what he said can be corroborated or refuted by others. Some of what he said has varying degrees of documentary support. Some of it, however, rests only on the word of a disbarred lawyer who is headed to prison soon for, among other things, lying. That is shaky ground. But here’s the thing: If a congressional committee wants to understand the conduct of the president of the United States, are there better options?
House Democrats moved quickly Thursday to investigate a host of fresh allegations made this week by President Trump’s former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, including potentially calling top Trump business associates and family members as witnesses on Capitol Hill.A House Intelligence Committee aide said that the panel anticipates bringing in for an interview Allen Weisselberg, Trump Organization’s chief financial officer, but did not name a date for when they planned to make that happen.And House Oversight and Reform Committee Chairman Elijah E. Cummings said Thursday that any person Cohen named during public testimony the day before will “have a good chance of hearing from us” for “at least an interview.”“All you have to do is follow the transcript,” the Maryland Democrat said. “If there were names that were mentioned, or records that were mentioned during the hearing, we want to take a look at all of that. . . . We’ll go through, we’ll figure out who we want to talk to, and we’ll bring them in.”Cohen, who worked as Trump’s fixer for more than a decade, testified Wednesday about a number of key players, including Weisselberg; Trump’s children, Donald Trump Jr., and Ivanka Trump; and his longtime secretary, Rhona Graff.Multiple House Democrats echoed Cummings’s vow to pursue witnesses, from senior Oversight members such as Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.) to newly elected progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). The chairmen of other committees also said they were exploring new lines of inquiry in the wake of Cohen’s testimony this week.House Financial Services Chairman Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) pointed to new allegations about Trump’s use of his now-defunct foundation to avoid tax obligations.“There’s one thing that I think should not be missed that came out of the hearing . . . and that is how [Trump] directed payments into the foundation to keep from paying taxes,” Waters said. “I think there’s more than we know about at this time. I think that’s an area that should be looked at because I think the foundation has been used by him to avoid paying taxes on money he’s earned.”The Democratic reaction Thursday morning underscores the number of bread crumbs Cohen left for Democrats to follow as they investigate Trump. “He set a very rich table,” Connolly said. “We’re now looking at a 10-course meal.”Democrats are talking first and foremost about bringing in Weisselberg and Trump Jr., pointing to their alleged involvement with hush payments during the 2016 election to women alleging sexual affairs with Trump. Cohen presented the panel with a check signed by both men, one of 11 checks he said were reimbursements for purchasing adult-film star Stormy Daniels’s silence.That Weisselberg would be called to the Hill was first reported by the Daily Beast.Democrats on the Oversight panel have also noted that a March 17, 2017, check listed as coming from Trump’s trust account was written after the president “held a press conference announcing that he was no longer exercising control over the Trump businesses.” They are questioning that assertion and intend to explore it.“Mr. Cohen testified that President Trump, Donald Trump Jr., and Mr. Weisselberg were all active participants in this financial conspiracy,” Democrats wrote in a series of findings from the hearing released Wednesday evening.Democrats also want to learn more about what Trump’s children, Donald Jr. and Ivanka, knew about the Trump Tower Moscow project, an effort by the Trump Organization to secure a major development in Russia during the 2016 campaign. Cohen testified that he spoke with Trump “at least a half-dozen times” and also kept his children apprised of developments.“They seem like relevant witnesses,” said Rep. Eric Swalwell, (D-Calif.), who sits on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. “. . .They know things.”House Oversight Democrats on Wednesday night also followed up on alleged inconsistencies Trump’s lawyers submitted to a government watchdog’s office. Just after the hearing, Democratic staff members sent letters to former deputy White House counsel Stefan Passantino and Trump personal attorney Sheri Dillon requesting that they appear for transcribed interviews on what happened.The inconsistencies related to the hush-payments made to Daniels. According to House Democrats, Trump’s lawyers suggested to the Office of Government Ethics that the payments were actually part of a retainer agreement. Cohen, however, shot that notion down on Wednesday, giving Democrats a new line of inquiry. “We did get some new information, and so . . . we’ll parse it out,” Cummings vowed.
WASHINGTON — President Trump ordered his chief of staff to grant his son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, a top-secret security clearance last year, overruling concerns flagged by intelligence officials and the White House’s top lawyer, four people briefed on the matter said.Mr. Trump’s decision in May so troubled senior administration officials that at least one, the White House chief of staff at the time, John F. Kelly, wrote a contemporaneous internal memo about how he had been “ordered” to give Mr. Kushner the top-secret clearance.The White House counsel at the time, Donald F. McGahn II, also wrote an internal memo outlining the concerns that had been raised about Mr. Kushner — including by the C.I.A. — and how Mr. McGahn had recommended that he not be given a top-secret clearance.The disclosure of the memos contradicts statements made by the president, who told The New York Times in January in an Oval Office interview that he had no role in his son-in-law receiving his clearance.Mr. Kushner’s lawyer, Abbe D. Lowell, also said at the time the clearance was granted last year that his client went through a standard process. Ivanka Trump, the president’s eldest daughter and Mr. Kushner’s wife, said the same thing three weeks ago.Asked on Thursday about the memos contradicting the president’s account, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said, “We don’t comment on security clearances.”Peter Mirijanian, a spokesman for Mr. Lowell, said on Thursday, “In 2018, White House and security clearance officials affirmed that Mr. Kushner’s security clearance was handled in the regular process with no pressure from anyone. That was conveyed to the media at the time, and new stories, if accurate, do not change what was affirmed at the time.”The decision last year to grant Mr. Kushner a top-secret clearance upgraded him from earlier temporary and interim status. He never received a higher-level designation that would have given him access to need-to-know intelligence known as sensitive compartmented information.It is not known precisely what factors led to the problems with Mr. Kushner’s security clearance. Officials had raised questions about his own and his family’s real estate business’s ties to foreign governments and investors, and about initially unreported contacts he had with foreigners. The issue also generated criticism of Mr. Trump for having two family members serve in official capacities in the West Wing.Editors’ PicksFrom 1969 to 2019, a Day at The New York TimesLuka Doncic Is a Sore Loser. He Is Also a Sensation.The Lustful Middle School Girl RisesMr. Kushner has spent this week abroad working on a Middle East peace plan. Among his meetings was one with Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia.While the president has the legal authority to grant a clearance, in most cases, the White House’s personnel security office makes a determination about whether to grant the clearance after the F.B.I. has conducted a background check. If there is a dispute in the personnel security office about how to move forward — a rare occurrence — the White House counsel makes the decision. In highly unusual cases, the president weighs in and grants one himself.In Mr. Kushner’s case, personnel division officials were divided about whether to grant Mr. Kushner a top-secret clearance.In May 2018, the White House Counsel’s Office, which at the time was led by Mr. McGahn, recommended to Mr. Trump that Mr. Kushner not be given a clearance at that level. But the following day, Mr. Trump ordered Mr. Kelly to grant it to Mr. Kushner anyway, the people familiar with the events said.The question of Mr. Kushner’s access to intelligence was a flash point in the White House almost from the beginning of the administration. The initial background check into Mr. Kushner dragged on for more than a year, creating a distraction for the White House, which struggled to explain why one of the people closest to the president had yet to be given the proper approval to be trusted with the country’s most sensitive information.The full scope of intelligence officials’ concerns about Mr. Kushner is not known. But the clearance had been held up in part over questions from the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. about his foreign and business contacts, including those related to Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Russia, according to multiple people familiar with the events.During the campaign Mr. Kushner was part of a group that met with a Russian lawyer who came to Trump Tower claiming to have political “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. And during the presidential transition, Mr. Kushner had a meeting with the Russian ambassador, Sergey I. Kislyak, and the head of a Russian state-owned bank. When he applied for a security clearance, he did not reveal those meetings.He later made several amendments to that section of his application, known as an SF86. His aides at the time insisted he had omitted those meetings inadvertently.Mr. Kushner initially operated with a provisional clearance as his background check proceeded.In an entry to Mr. Kushner’s personnel file on Sept. 15, 2017, the head of the personnel security division, Carl Kline, wrote, “Per conversation with WH Counsel the clearance was changed to interim Top Secret until we can confirm that the DOJ or someone else actually granted a final clearance. This action is out of an abundance of caution because the background investigation has not been completed.”In a statement to The Times when Mr. Kushner received the clearance last year, Mr. Lowell said that “his application was properly submitted, reviewed by numerous career officials and underwent the normal process,” Mr. Lowell said.During a review of security clearances in February 2018 that was prompted by the controversy surrounding the then-White House staff secretary, Rob Porter, who had been accused of domestic abuse, Mr. Kushner’s clearance was downgraded from interim top secret to secret, limiting his access to classified information. At the time, Mr. Kelly wrote a five-page memo, revoking temporary clearances that had been in place since June 1, 2017.That affected both Mr. Kushner and Ms. Trump, who told friends and advisers that they believed that Mr. Kelly and Mr. McGahn were targeting them for petty reasons instead of legitimate concerns flagged by officials.Both complained to the president about the situation, current and former administration officials said. In Mr. Kushner’s case, Mr. Trump would often turn to other aides and say in frustration, “Why isn’t this getting done?” according to a former administration official. On at least one occasion, the president asked another senior official if the person could sort out the issue. That official said no, according to this account.Mr. Kelly did not believe it was appropriate to overrule the security clearance process and had brushed aside or avoided dealing with Mr. Kushner’s requests, a former administration official said. Mr. Kelly did not respond to a request for comment.House Democrats are in the early stages of an investigation into how several Trump administration officials obtained clearances, including Mr. Kushner.Mr. Trump’s precise language to Mr. Kelly about Mr. Kushner’s clearance in their direct conversation remains unclear. Two of the people familiar with Mr. Trump’s discussions with Mr. Kelly said that there might be different interpretations of what the president said. But Mr. Kelly’s believed it was an order, according to two people familiar with his thinking.And Mr. Trump was definitive in his statements to The Times in a January interview.“I was never involved with the security” clearances for his son-in-law, Mr. Trump said. “I know that there was issues back and forth about security for numerous people, actually. But I don’t want to get involved in that stuff.”A recent report by NBC revealed that Mr. Kline had overruled two career security specialists who had rejected Mr. Kushner’s application based on the F.B.I.’s concerns. A senior administration official confirmed the details laid out in the NBC report.Mr. Kline was acting on the directive sent down by the president, one of the people familiar with the matter said.The day that Mr. Lowell described Mr. Kushner’s process as having gone through normal routes, aides to Mr. Kushner had asked White House officials to deliver a statement from Mr. Kelly supporting what Mr. Lowell had said. But Mr. Kelly refused to do so, according to a person with knowledge of the events.
Trump Ordered Officials to Give Jared Kushner a Security ClearanceQuoteWASHINGTON — President Trump ordered his chief of staff to grant his son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, a top-secret security clearance last year, overruling concerns flagged by intelligence officials and the White House’s top lawyer, four people briefed on the matter said.Mr. Trump’s decision in May so troubled senior administration officials that at least one, the White House chief of staff at the time, John F. Kelly, wrote a contemporaneous internal memo about how he had been “ordered” to give Mr. Kushner the top-secret clearance.The White House counsel at the time, Donald F. McGahn II, also wrote an internal memo outlining the concerns that had been raised about Mr. Kushner — including by the C.I.A. — and how Mr. McGahn had recommended that he not be given a top-secret clearance.The disclosure of the memos contradicts statements made by the president, who told The New York Times in January in an Oval Office interview that he had no role in his son-in-law receiving his clearance.Mr. Kushner’s lawyer, Abbe D. Lowell, also said at the time the clearance was granted last year that his client went through a standard process. Ivanka Trump, the president’s eldest daughter and Mr. Kushner’s wife, said the same thing three weeks ago.Asked on Thursday about the memos contradicting the president’s account, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said, “We don’t comment on security clearances.”Peter Mirijanian, a spokesman for Mr. Lowell, said on Thursday, “In 2018, White House and security clearance officials affirmed that Mr. Kushner’s security clearance was handled in the regular process with no pressure from anyone. That was conveyed to the media at the time, and new stories, if accurate, do not change what was affirmed at the time.”The decision last year to grant Mr. Kushner a top-secret clearance upgraded him from earlier temporary and interim status. He never received a higher-level designation that would have given him access to need-to-know intelligence known as sensitive compartmented information.It is not known precisely what factors led to the problems with Mr. Kushner’s security clearance. Officials had raised questions about his own and his family’s real estate business’s ties to foreign governments and investors, and about initially unreported contacts he had with foreigners. The issue also generated criticism of Mr. Trump for having two family members serve in official capacities in the West Wing.Editors’ PicksFrom 1969 to 2019, a Day at The New York TimesLuka Doncic Is a Sore Loser. He Is Also a Sensation.The Lustful Middle School Girl RisesMr. Kushner has spent this week abroad working on a Middle East peace plan. Among his meetings was one with Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia.While the president has the legal authority to grant a clearance, in most cases, the White House’s personnel security office makes a determination about whether to grant the clearance after the F.B.I. has conducted a background check. If there is a dispute in the personnel security office about how to move forward — a rare occurrence — the White House counsel makes the decision. In highly unusual cases, the president weighs in and grants one himself.In Mr. Kushner’s case, personnel division officials were divided about whether to grant Mr. Kushner a top-secret clearance.In May 2018, the White House Counsel’s Office, which at the time was led by Mr. McGahn, recommended to Mr. Trump that Mr. Kushner not be given a clearance at that level. But the following day, Mr. Trump ordered Mr. Kelly to grant it to Mr. Kushner anyway, the people familiar with the events said.The question of Mr. Kushner’s access to intelligence was a flash point in the White House almost from the beginning of the administration. The initial background check into Mr. Kushner dragged on for more than a year, creating a distraction for the White House, which struggled to explain why one of the people closest to the president had yet to be given the proper approval to be trusted with the country’s most sensitive information.The full scope of intelligence officials’ concerns about Mr. Kushner is not known. But the clearance had been held up in part over questions from the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. about his foreign and business contacts, including those related to Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Russia, according to multiple people familiar with the events.During the campaign Mr. Kushner was part of a group that met with a Russian lawyer who came to Trump Tower claiming to have political “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. And during the presidential transition, Mr. Kushner had a meeting with the Russian ambassador, Sergey I. Kislyak, and the head of a Russian state-owned bank. When he applied for a security clearance, he did not reveal those meetings.He later made several amendments to that section of his application, known as an SF86. His aides at the time insisted he had omitted those meetings inadvertently.Mr. Kushner initially operated with a provisional clearance as his background check proceeded.In an entry to Mr. Kushner’s personnel file on Sept. 15, 2017, the head of the personnel security division, Carl Kline, wrote, “Per conversation with WH Counsel the clearance was changed to interim Top Secret until we can confirm that the DOJ or someone else actually granted a final clearance. This action is out of an abundance of caution because the background investigation has not been completed.”In a statement to The Times when Mr. Kushner received the clearance last year, Mr. Lowell said that “his application was properly submitted, reviewed by numerous career officials and underwent the normal process,” Mr. Lowell said.During a review of security clearances in February 2018 that was prompted by the controversy surrounding the then-White House staff secretary, Rob Porter, who had been accused of domestic abuse, Mr. Kushner’s clearance was downgraded from interim top secret to secret, limiting his access to classified information. At the time, Mr. Kelly wrote a five-page memo, revoking temporary clearances that had been in place since June 1, 2017.That affected both Mr. Kushner and Ms. Trump, who told friends and advisers that they believed that Mr. Kelly and Mr. McGahn were targeting them for petty reasons instead of legitimate concerns flagged by officials.Both complained to the president about the situation, current and former administration officials said. In Mr. Kushner’s case, Mr. Trump would often turn to other aides and say in frustration, “Why isn’t this getting done?” according to a former administration official. On at least one occasion, the president asked another senior official if the person could sort out the issue. That official said no, according to this account.Mr. Kelly did not believe it was appropriate to overrule the security clearance process and had brushed aside or avoided dealing with Mr. Kushner’s requests, a former administration official said. Mr. Kelly did not respond to a request for comment.House Democrats are in the early stages of an investigation into how several Trump administration officials obtained clearances, including Mr. Kushner.Mr. Trump’s precise language to Mr. Kelly about Mr. Kushner’s clearance in their direct conversation remains unclear. Two of the people familiar with Mr. Trump’s discussions with Mr. Kelly said that there might be different interpretations of what the president said. But Mr. Kelly’s believed it was an order, according to two people familiar with his thinking.And Mr. Trump was definitive in his statements to The Times in a January interview.“I was never involved with the security” clearances for his son-in-law, Mr. Trump said. “I know that there was issues back and forth about security for numerous people, actually. But I don’t want to get involved in that stuff.”A recent report by NBC revealed that Mr. Kline had overruled two career security specialists who had rejected Mr. Kushner’s application based on the F.B.I.’s concerns. A senior administration official confirmed the details laid out in the NBC report.Mr. Kline was acting on the directive sent down by the president, one of the people familiar with the matter said.The day that Mr. Lowell described Mr. Kushner’s process as having gone through normal routes, aides to Mr. Kushner had asked White House officials to deliver a statement from Mr. Kelly supporting what Mr. Lowell had said. But Mr. Kelly refused to do so, according to a person with knowledge of the events.#Resist
"...While the president has the legal authority to grant a clearance,.."
Go back to masturbating to Sebastian Gorka, Laura Ingraham and Rick Harrison at CPAC.#Resist
'Nuff said.
