| | | |  President Trump was clearly angry with the FBI's Monday raid on the office and hotel room of his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen—so angry, in fact, he spoke extemporaneously about his frustration to the White House press corps just before his Monday evening meeting with defense and military leaders. Blaming the special counsel investigation headed by Robert Mueller, Trump called the raid—executed by the U.S. attorney's office in New York City under warrants issued by a judge—a "whole new level of unfairness," a "disgrace," and an "attack on our country." President Trump was clearly angry with the FBI's Monday raid on the office and hotel room of his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen—so angry, in fact, he spoke extemporaneously about his frustration to the White House press corps just before his Monday evening meeting with defense and military leaders. Blaming the special counsel investigation headed by Robert Mueller, Trump called the raid—executed by the U.S. attorney's office in New York City under warrants issued by a judge—a "whole new level of unfairness," a "disgrace," and an "attack on our country." "Why don't you just fire Mueller?" asked one reporter in the room. "We'll see what happens," Trump responded. "Many people have said 'you should fire him.'" |
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One More Thing—Despite the president's claim the FBI "broke into" Cohen's office, there's plenty of reason to believe the raid is both very serious and was not lightly considered. Ken White, an attorney and blogger, has a very useful post explaining just what the FBI and the U.S. attorney's office had to do to get the warrants to conduct the raid—and what we can infer from the fact that the feds sought the raid of a lawyer's office in the first place.
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| | Mueller Watch—The special counsel, meanwhile, is investigating a $150,000 payment made to the Trump Foundation in September 2015, shortly after Trump began his presidential campaign. The New York Times broke the story:
Investigators subpoenaed the Trump Organization this year for an array of records about business with foreign nationals. In response, the company handed over documents about a $150,000 donation that the Ukrainian billionaire, Victor Pinchuk, made in September 2015 to the Donald J. Trump Foundation in exchange for a 20-minute appearance by Mr. Trump that month through a video link to a conference in Kiev.
Michael D. Cohen, the president’s personal lawyer whose office and hotel room were raided on Monday in an apparently unrelated case, solicited the donation. The contribution from Mr. Pinchuk, who has sought closer ties for Ukraine to the West, was the largest the foundation received in 2015 from anyone besides Mr. Trump himself.
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| | Could the apparent chemical-weapons attack by the Assad regime on its own people recalibrate President Trump's desire to pull American troops out of Syria? It's a question the White House and the president are facing. Asked by the press Monday about when he will withdraw the military from Syria, Trump said, "We're going to make a decision on all of that, in particular Syria. We'll be making that decision very quickly, probably by the end of today. But we cannot allow atrocities like that. Cannot allow it."
Pressed if military action to respond to the weekend's attack was "off the table", Trump replied, "Nothing is off the table. Nothing is off the table."
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New National Security Adviser John Bolton listens to President Trump during a cabinet meeting at the White House in Washington, DC, on April 9, 2018. (NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty Images) |
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| | White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders responded Monday to questions about President Trump’s unsupported claim, which he resurrected last week, that “millions and millions” of illegal votes were cast for Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election. Sanders didn’t double down on Trump’s comments, but pivoted to attack Democrats for trying to stymie Trump’s voter fraud commission from last year.
“The president still strongly feels that there was a large amount of voter fraud, and attempted to do a thorough review of it,” Sanders said. “But a lot of the states didn’t want to cooperate and participate. We certainly know that there were a large number of incidences reported, but we can’t be sure exactly how much because we weren’t able to conduct the full review that the president wanted.”
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Must-Read of the Day—In the new issue of the magazine, my colleague Ethan Epstein explores America's growing homelessness problem in one of its epicenters: Seattle. "Why are some of the country's most prominent cities seeing such a surge in homelessness? And why now, when the economy is booming, nowhere more so than in the Emerald City, which is drowning in Amazonian riches?" Epstein writes. "The answer may provide a cautionary tale about the perverse impacts of a hypercharged tech economy." Read the whole thing here.
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On the President's Schedule—In addition to a West Wing meeting and working lunch with the amir of Qatar, President Trump on Tuesday will host the NCAA national champions in football, the Alabama Crimson Tide, at the White House.
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| | Pruitt Watch—The House Oversight committee announced Monday they are reviewing documents concerning the alleged ethical transgressions that have hounded EPA administrator Scott Pruitt for weeks. But although Pruitt’s time in the hot seat is far from over, any immediate danger to him seems to have passed—President Trump praised him last week for doing “an incredible job” and being “very courageous.”
On Monday, Sarah Huckabee Sanders declined to answer questions about the allegations against Pruitt, several times referring reporters back to the EPA. “We are reviewing the specifics of each of those components,” Sanders said. “I know there was a much larger number of security issues surrounding the EPA Administrator than in the past… I’m not going to lay out an arbitrary timeline, but it’s something that we’re looking into and continuing to take under consideration.”
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