daily 05/17/2017
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“I would bring in a device roughly the size of a book of matches, very small,” he said. “It would be set up to record on audio record, audio activated. It would store that data locally. And then, within a certain amount of time and in a burst of transmission, it would transmit that to a server.”
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It would eventually be found,” he said. “It is an office that does get an extensive sweep by well-trained professionals” — although not necessarily after every meeting. Such a sweep, he said, would include far more than simply holding up some electronic gizmo that would ping if it detected a signal. It would mean looking in every imaginable place — behind electrical outlets, inside cushions — for anything that might be used to spy on Oval Office meetings. “They really disassemble most of the room,” Morris said.
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Reporting indicates that Russian President Vladimir Putin asked Trump to host Lavrov in the White House, emphasizing how unusual such access would be. It also makes clear that the Russian government actively sought that access, which is relevant to the current discussion.
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Morris figured that he’d send out the data after about 12 hours, although it would also be useful to send a burst after only a few hours, given that you’d then have captured the conversation debriefing the Russians’ visit.
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Morris said, it probably has a special device attached to the windows that causes them to vibrate, preventing someone from remotely training a laser on the glass to detect the vibrations caused by people speaking in the room.
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“Obviously the first line of defense for White House security is pre-screening of guests,” he said. “The White House is known traditionally as being one of the most secure places on the planet. The fact that someone got in who it sounds like held a dual role without good screening … is a little bit shocking.” You don’t get frisked when you enter the White House grounds, he said, because they don’t invite in people who might need to be frisked.
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Let’s be clear about what the 25th Amendment does and doesn’t do – The Washington Post
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It is not meant for a situation in which the president is so stupid as to raise questions about whether he is a danger to the country.
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The 25th Amendment Solution for Removing Trump – The New York Times
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One does not need to be a Marvel superhero or Nietzschean Übermensch to rise to this responsibility. But one needs some basic attributes: a reasonable level of intellectual curiosity, a certain seriousness of purpose, a basic level of managerial competence, a decent attention span, a functional moral compass, a measure of restraint and self-control. And if a president is deficient in one or more of them, you can be sure it will be exposed.
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But ultimately I do not believe that our president sufficiently understands the nature of the office that he holds, the nature of the legal constraints that are supposed to bind him, perhaps even the nature of normal human interactions, to be guilty of obstruction of justice in the Nixonian or even Clintonian sense of the phrase.
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Which is not an argument for allowing him to occupy that office. It is an argument, instead, for using a constitutional mechanism more appropriate to this strange situation than impeachment: the 25th Amendment to the Constitution, which allows for the removal of the president if the vice president and a majority of the cabinet informs the Congress that he is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office” and (should the president contest his own removal) a two-thirds vote by Congress confirms the cabinet’s judgment.
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They have no respect for him, indeed they seem to palpitate with contempt for him, and to regard their mission as equivalent to being stewards for a syphilitic emperor.
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Trump, Saying He Is Treated ‘Unfairly,’ Signals a Fight – The New York Times
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“With national security also comes public trust, and the two of those are interwoven,” said Admiral Zufunkt. “You don’t have both of those unless you have leaders of character.”
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“Tell the truth to your seniors,” said Mr. Kelly, a retired four-star Marine general. “Even if it’s uncomfortable.”
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Why the G.O.P. Isn’t Pushing Hard for a Trump Inquiry – The New York Times
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Trump Is Delivering
Like many of the voters in their states and districts, congressional Republicans are happy with the steps being taken by the Trump administration on immigration, crime, trade and deregulation. They see the president through an entirely different lens than that of his fierce critics.
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Republicans, given their own experience with Bill and Hillary Clinton, are well aware of how special inquiries can have a long and seemingly endless reach.
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Given that foresight — and Miller’s experience in the DOJ during the Obama administration — I thought it worthwhile to find out what else he saw coming down the pike. As you’ll see below, he thinks that this is the tip of the spear and that Comey’s actions suggest he may have been building a legal case against the president of the United States.
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Again, how could LibertyU hire the AD who was in the middle of this #Baylor sexual scandal? https://t.co/BB0sm9vtGX via @wacotrib
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Somebody gets into trouble, then gets out of it ag
Somebody gets into trouble, then gets out of it again. People love that story. They never get tired of it.
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let this golet this gocan’t investigate any more
let this go
let this go
can’t investigate any more
let this go
let this go
(send Sessions away and slam the door) -
Guess we all picked the wrong week to stop sniffin
Guess we all picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue
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Come on out tonight! The Majors Season Championshi
Come on out tonight! The Majors Season Championship game starts at 7:45 between the Cubs and Dodgers. It’s sure… https://t.co/7Y6CeaUlnj
- Main Rahoon Ya na Rahoon.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdZmRcwe7Fs – post by siya1cool
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this is fair https://t.co/baqKe39msc
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HI in two weeks I’m going to b
HI in two weeks I’m going to be starting over at Wired where I will be blogging about my original and longtime passion, Sports
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Oh man this Trump news is really gonna make GOP le
Oh man this Trump news is really gonna make GOP leaders say, “I’m troubled by this,” then go back to sleep on beds made of poor people.
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“An F.B.I. agent’s contemporaneous notes are widely held up in court as credible evidence of conversations,” Michael Schmidt notes on the front page of the Times. “Alone in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump began the discussion by condemning leaks to the news media, saying that Mr. Comey should consider putting reporters in prison for publishing classified information … Mr. Trump then turned the discussion to Mr. Flynn.”
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We know he underestimated Democratic attacks because he believed they were mad at Comey for hurting Hillary Clinton.
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What might he know that the president doesn’t want to get out? Many unanswered questions remain about why it took 18 DAYS for Flynn to resign after the acting attorney general warned the White House counsel that he had been compromised and was susceptible to blackmail by the Russians. Could Trump have secretly authorized Flynn’s contacts with Sergey Kislyak during the transition?
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Trump, who, over the course of the campaign and now in office, has betrayed no — zero — understanding of the necessary separation of the president and his Justice Department when it comes to making independent judgments about political matters and political opponents.”
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that he did not even know FBI agents had interviewed Flynn until she told him.
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Every lawyer worth his or her salt creates a copious paper trail for C.Y.A. purposes, but Comey especially is legendary within elite Washington legal circles for doing so.
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Perhaps more importantly, did anyone warn Trump about what role Comey had played in George W. Bush’s U.S. attorney scandal?
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Alberto R. Gonzales and President Bush’s chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., were on their way to the hospital to persuade Ashcroft to reauthorize Bush’s domestic surveillance program,
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. Ashcroft, summoning the strength to lift his head and speak, refused to sign the papers they had brought.
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resolved only when Bush overruled Gonzales and Card.
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W was OK
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The laws governing obstruction require prosecutors to show a person ‘corruptly’ tried to influence a probe — meaning investigators have to find some evidence of what a person was thinking when taking a particular action.
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as with any other sort of criminal law — intent is key, and intent here can be difficult to prove.”
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Transform Data By Example—a Microsoft Garage project for Excel – Office Blogs
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Cost-Effective Digital Marketing May Require Outsourcing Your Next CMO
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
