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      Donald Trump v the United States review: how democracy came under assault

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      Now disgraced, Jerry Falwell Jr once announced that Donald Trump was entitled to an extra two years on the job as “reparations” for a “failed coup”, meaning the Mueller investigation. Joe Biden has gone so far as to predict the president will try to steal the election.Trump and his backers openly speak of four terms in office. “If you really want to drive them crazy, say 12 more years,” the president cackles, despite express constitutional strictures to the contrary.Even as doubts surrounding its legitimacy grow, the election assumes ever greater significance. Michael Schmidt’s first book is aptly subtitled: “Inside the Struggle to Stop a President.”The Pulitzer-winning New York Times reporter chronicles what he has seen from his “front-row seat”. It was Schmidt who broke news of Hillary Clinton’s use of personal email while secretary of state, and of James Comey authoring a memo that detailed the president ordering him to end the FBI investigation of Gen Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser.Hindering Trump is one thing, stopping him something elseSchmidt argues persuasively that the Trump presidency has highlighted the fragility of American democracy, and that Trump views the rule of law as something for others. More precisely, the president believes prison is meant for his political adversaries but not so much for his convicted cronies and for himself, never. Schmidt documents how Trump sought to prosecute Clinton and Comey: literally and seriously.A central premise of Donald Trump v the United States is that those who have sought to thwart the president have failed. Comey is no longer FBI director, Gen John Kelly is no longer White House chief of staff. Donald McGahn, Trump’s first White House counsel, is back in private practice.Trump usually gets what he wants. Jared Kushner, for example, holds a “top secret” security clearance despite persistent objections from senior White House staff and the intelligence community. After all others refused, Trump personally granted his son-in-law his clearance. Hindering Trump is one thing, stopping him something else. Over on Capitol Hill, according to Schmidt, Trump has “routinely outflanked the Democratic lawmakers investigating him”, while Republican leaders have emerged as “Trump’s public defenders”. Career civil servants, including those at the Food and Drug Administration, are “maligned” as part of a ‘Deep State’.” So what if a pandemic rages?Similarly, Trump targets journalists as “fake news” and as “enemies of the people”, a term popularized by Joseph Stalin. As one administration insider has said, it’s all a “bit” reminiscent of the “late” Weimar Republic.Schmidt frames his book as a four-act play, Comey and McGahn the central actors, a quote from King Lear as prelude. Chapters weave context with drama, even as they inform.The reader is continuously reminded of how many days remained before a particular event, such as “Donald Trump is sworn in as president”, “the appointment of special counsel Robert S Mueller III” or the “release of the Mueller Report”. It difficult to forget what came next. Donald Trump v the United States is laden with direct quotes and attribution. It is credible and intriguing. Beyond that, it is also unsettling.Schmidt details McGahn’s cooperation with the special counsel. Here, he recalls a conversation for the ages, with McGahn while he was still White House counsel and Mueller’s investigation was months away from its end.“You did a lot of damage to the president,” Schmidt tells McGahn, minutes before a thunderstorm over the White House. “I understand that. You understand that. But [Trump] doesn’t understand that.”McGahn replies: “I damaged the office of the president. I damaged the office.”Schmidt parries: “That’s not it. You damaged him, and he doesn’t understand that.”Ultimately, McGahn responds: “This is the last time we ever talk.”On cue, the rain begins to fall.Equally vivid are exchanges between Comey and his wife, Patrice, she of a keener sense of peril. As he moved toward announcing the FBI’s determination surrounding Clinton’s emails, in late June 2016, she presciently warned: “This is going to be bad for you.”According to Schmidt, Patrice Comey also pleaded, “You’re going to get shot … you’re going to get slammed.” Months later, her husband would tell the Senate judiciary committee it made him “mildly nauseous to think we might have had some impact on the election”.The book also clears up the mystery of what happened to the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation, which if concluded would likely have examined Trump’s broader ties with Moscow. One day it was there, the next day it had vanished.Specifically, the special counsel’s report addressed conspiracy and obstruction of justice but did not discuss related counterintelligence issues. Schmidt reveals that we can blame that on Rod Rosenstein, then deputy attorney general.According to Schmidt, in the hand-off of the FBI investigation to Mueller, in the aftermath of the firing of Comey, Rosenstein deliberately narrowed the special counsel’s remit. The deputy attorney general directed Mueller to concentrate on criminality. Whether Trump was a Russian agent was not on the special counsel’s plate.According to Schmidt, Rosenstein “had foreclosed any deeper inquiry before investigation even began”. This is the same Rosenstein who in spring 2017 suggested he secretly record the president, and that the cabinet consider removing him from office.“The president had bent Washington to his will,” Schmidt writes.The question now is whether the electorate follows. America goes to the polls in little more than nine weeks. More

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      Ex-White House lawyer endured 'some crazy shit' from Trump, book reveals

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      Former White House counsel Don McGahn endured screaming matches with Donald Trump, badgering phone calls at home on his birthday and the president saying “some crazy shit” in order to advance the project closest to McGahn’s heart: packing the federal judiciary with activist conservative judges.McGahn’s lead role in developing the roster of judges used by Trump to remake the federal judiciary – Trump has elevated 201 judges and counting, including two supreme court justices – has long been known.But a new book by the New York Time reporter Michael Schmidt reveals for the first time the trials that McGahn, a libertarian who saw extreme judges as the best way to limit the scope of government, underwent to take advantage of the “once-in-a-never-again” opportunity he had in the chaotic early days of the Trump White House.The book, Donald Trump v The United States: Inside the Struggle to Stop a President, a copy of which was obtained by the Guardian, hits bookstores next week.In the book Schmidt, who originally broke the news that McGahn had cooperated extensively with special counsel Robert Mueller in the investigation of the Trump campaign’s Russia ties, deepens the picture of that cooperation. “McGahn had turned into the Mueller team’s personal Forrest Gump,” Schmidt writes, “the guy with the front-row seat to all the awful history of the Trump administration he had never wanted to witness.”Schmidt’s book focuses on the roles McGahn and former FBI director James Comey played in attempting to contain a president both men recognized as mercurial and potentially threatening to the country.Comey was fired by Trump in May 2017, leading to the appointment of Mueller, one of many dramatic developments in Trump’s first term that Schmidt was on the vanguard of reporting at the time. Schmidt recounts that episode and many others with new details, to dramatic effect, in the book.McGahn left the White House in October 2018, after the successful confirmation of the man McGahn personally picked as Trump’s second supreme court justice, Brett Kavanaugh.While not seeming to share Comey’s anguished concern for the independence of the judiciary and the balance of powers under Trump, McGahn – a campaign law expert – had plenty of personal frustration with Trump, whom he referred to as “Kong” or “King Kong” or “fucking Kong”, after the hostile movie gorilla, Schmidt reports.The Mueller report previously documented McGahn’s run-ins with his boss. One of the key descriptions of potential obstruction of justice by Trump in the report describes Trump calling McGahn at home and instructing McGahn to put in motion Mueller’s firing, an instruction McGahn ignored apart from relaying it to his personal lawyer.But Schmidt reveals the previously unknown extent to which McGahn cooperated with Mueller, turning over “nearly a thousand pages of handwritten White House notes” to the special counsel. The cooperation was so fruitful, Schmidt writes, that Mueller’s team tried to “run” McGahn, or recruit him to gather information in real time about what was happening inside the White House. No such arrangement was explicitly made.Much of the book expands on major scoops by Schmidt during the special counsel’s investigation, including the revelations that then attorney general Jeff Sessions was looking for dirt on Comey; that Trump had moved to fire Mueller; and scenes such as Trump’s explosion upon learning that deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein had appointed Mueller as special counsel: “It’s your fucking fault!” Trump thundered at Sessions.On multiple occasions, Schmidt writes, McGahn prepared his resignation as White House counsel, whose role is to give the president legal advice as it relates to the office of the presidency.McGahn prepared a one-line resignation letter after the White House came under pressure to withdraw Trump’s first nomination to the US supreme court, Neil Gorsuch, whom McGahn also had personally picked, according to the book.“Nominating judges was why he had taken the job,” Schmidt writes. “He was told this was going to be his turf, entirely.”Later, after Trump called him at home on his birthday – twice – and told him to tell Rosenstein to fire Mueller, McGahn went so far as to clean out his office at the White House and prepare another letter.“I have a real fucking problem,” McGahn told his personal lawyer about Trump, according to Schmidt. “I don’t want to speak out of school, but he’s saying some crazy shit.”But the resignation letter was never sent. The greater project, for McGahn, of appointing judges, as well as slashing government regulations, held precedence.Schmidt writes: “McGahn knew that he would never have this power again.” More

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      Roger Stone speaks in Fox News interview after Trump commutation

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      Donald Trump’s longtime confidant Roger Stone gushed over his political allies during an interview on Fox News on Monday, his first major television appearance since the president commuted Stone’s prison sentence on Friday.Stone had been convicted of seven felony counts – including obstruction of justice, lying to Congress and witness tampering in the congressional investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election – and was sentenced to more than three years in jail. The president, in defending his commutation, said Stone was treated “very unfairly”.The commutation was met with widespread criticism from Democrats and several Republicans, including Pennsylvania senator Pat Toomey and Utah senator Mitt Romney, who called it an act of “historic corruption”.Stone appeared on the Monday night interview show with Fox News’s Sean Hannity alongside his lawyer, David Schoen. “I have deep, deep affection for Donald Trump because I’ve known him for 40 years,” Stone said. “He’s a man of great justice and fairness, he’s a man of enormous courage … He saved my life. And, at least on paper, he gave me a chance to fight for vindication.”On Saturday, special counsel Robert Mueller spoke out publicly for the first time in a year to defend his investigation against criticism from Trump and his supporters.“We did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired with the Russian government in its activities,” Mueller wrote. “The investigation did, however, establish that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome. It also established that the campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts.”Stone has consistently denied any wrongdoing and argued that the investigation was a sham.“I had a biased judge, I had a stacked jury, I had a corrupt jury forewoman,” Stone said, going on to thank Hannity and a host of public conservative figures including General Mike Flynn and Tucker Carlson. “And also Congressman Matt Gaetz from Florida who I hope to live long enough to live in the White House.”Stone used his interview with Hannity to argue that the prison sentence would have effectively been a death sentence because of his ongoing asthma and the multiple inmates with Covid-19 cases.“I’m 67 years old, I’ve had lifelong respiratory problems,” Stone said.At another point in the interview, Stone said prosecutors wanted to use Stone to fuel an impeachment effort against the president.“They wanted me to be the ham in their ham sandwich because they knew the Mueller report, particularly on Russia, it was a dud. It was a goose egg,” Stone said. The Mueller report did not conclude that Trump directly coordinated with Russia or obstructed justice but it did not absolve him completely. The report did, however, argue that Trump may have played a role in Russia’s effort to interfere in the 2016 election. Nevertheless, Trump himself has argued that the fact that the report did not completely implicate him means he is innocent and the investigation is just an effort to undermine his presidency. Mueller himself has pushed back on that and noted that Trump could be charged after he left office.Schoen spoke only briefly during the interview and, like his client, thanked Trump.“This commutation was a great tribute to President Trump,” Schoen said, saying the president was “sending the message that the Mueller team was rotten to the core”. “The president saved a life here.”Trump called Stone on Friday after commuting his sentence, a call Stone told ABC News was a “normal conversation” and “brief”.Stone, a longtime friend and former campaign adviser to the president, was due to begin his sentence this week. The commutation does not erase Stone’s felony convictions but allows Stone to avoid setting foot in prison for his crimes. More

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      Roger Stone has escaped punishment for his crimes. Trump is sending a signal | Andrew Gawthorpe

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      At America’s birth, when delegates in Virginia were debating whether to ratify the constitution, a politician called George Mason had an objection. Mason, who was influential over the development of the bill of rights, wondered whether the presidential pardon power was too broad. Might not the president encourage people who worked for him to commit crimes, and then pardon them? If he could, there would be essentially no check on a president’s power to break the law. Given that sort of leeway, an unscrupulous president could “establish a monarchy, and destroy the republic”.Mason’s objection ought to concern us still today. Late on Friday, Donald Trump commuted the prison sentence of his longtime associate Roger Stone, all but guaranteeing that Stone will never face justice for crimes he committed while obstructing an investigation into the Trump campaign’s links with WikiLeaks and the Russian intelligence agencies who attempted to tip the 2016 election in Trump’s favor. Backlash to the decision has been swift, with Trump’s fellow Republican Mitt Romney condemning the president’s “unprecedented, historic corruption”.It is not quite true to say that there is no precedent for Trump’s act. As Mason foresaw, executive clemency has been misused by presidents throughout American history. George HW Bush pardoned six officials who had been involved in the Iran-Contra scandal – an act which may have been intended to cover up his own wrongdoing. George W Bush commuted the prison sentence of Lewis “Scooter” Libby, who obstructed a federal investigation into the illegal outing of a CIA operative who was critical of the Bush administration.This history doesn’t make Trump’s actions any less troubling. In fact, by revealing how little restraint there is on the use of executive clemency, it ought to make us worry how much further the president – whose disregard for political and constitutional norms truly is without precedent – might go in the future.Most presidents issue their most controversial pardons furtively, at the end of their terms in office. But Trump has reveled in his ability to toss aside the principle of the rule of law when it comes to his own allies. In 2017 he pardoned the former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, who had violated the constitutional rights of countless Arizonans. During the Mueller investigation – which exposed evidence that Trump himself may have committed obstruction of justice, a crime for which he could still be charged after leaving office – the president issued a full pardon to Libby, seemingly with the sole purpose of sending the message that he would forgive those – like Stone – who committed obstruction to protect himself.A president who is willing to use executive clemency to forgive violations of constitutional rights and protect himself from the rule of law could become, as Mason foresaw, a monarch. At the Virginia ratifying convention, James Madison replied to Mason that such a president would surely face impeachment. But today’s Republican party has made it clear that it will protect Trump from impeachment even in the face of overwhelming evidence of his abuses of power. Instead, by refusing to convict, they licensed Trump to double down.As America moves towards an election which Trump looks on course to lose, he is likely to become even less inhibited. The issuing of pardons and commutations for crimes already committed might pale in comparison with crimes yet to come. Trump could seek, once again, to sway the outcome of the election, promising pardons to his co-conspirators. He could order, as he did outside the White House, security forces to be used to disperse protesters who came into the streets in response, then issue pardons for any crimes tried by court martial or in Washington DC’s highest court.The fact that Trump has rarely shown the focus, intelligence or competence necessary to pull off such a conspiracy is little comfort. What he lacks in these qualities he makes up for in brazenness, in loyal subordinates equally willing to subvert the rule of law, and in the possession of a compliant conservative politico-media apparatus that will rationalize any action he takes. He could do incalculable damage to confidence in American democracy and the rule of law before he is finally wrested from the White House.In this sense, Roger Stone is the canary in the coal mine. Trump’s ability and willingness to commute his sentence is a reminder that for all its genius, the American founding left behind a structure which can be exploited and abused by an unscrupulous president. As we live through what are hopefully the dying days of the presidency of the most unscrupulous of them all, we have to remain on our guard. Partly because of his fears over the pardon power, George Mason ultimately became one of only three of the framers of the constitution to refuse to sign the final document, believing it created a blueprint for tyranny. Proving him wrong requires constant vigilance, now and in the future. More

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      Roger Stone case: Trump ally given special treatment, Congress hears

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      A federal prosecutor who was part of Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation told Congress on Wednesday Roger Stone, a close ally of Donald Trump, was given special treatment before sentencing because of his relationship with the US president. “What I heard repeatedly was that Stone was being treated differently from any other defendant because of his […] More

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      Trump: Sessions was not ‘mentally qualified’ to be attorney general

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      Sessions protests loyalty to Trump despite fierce abuse President endorses opponent in Alabama Senate election Donald Trump and Jeff Sessions’ playground fight continued into Sunday. In an interview with Sinclair TV, Trump said Sessions had not been “mentally qualified” to be his first attorney general. Related: Jeff Sessions snaps back after Trump tells Alabama not […] More

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      Supreme court temporarily blocks release of testimony from Mueller investigation

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      The US supreme court has temporarily prevented the House of Representatives from obtaining secret grand jury testimony from special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. The court granted the Trump administration’s request to keep previously undisclosed details from the investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election out of the hands of Democratic lawmakers, at least […] More