You do realize that I don’t believe in the Deep State, yes? I was just stating what Trump supporters will say.
If I’m weighing the reporting of someone of Woodward’s caliber against someone whose continued employment depends on them lying, ill side with the former.
This deserves more attention. The NYT reporters, Adam Goldman and Michael S. Schmidt, and their editors, appear to me to have been markedly irresponsible in their search for a scoop.
As you noted, the witnesses in the room say Rosenstein’s remark about wearing a wire was made sarcastically. I’m suggesting that it makes NO sense to suggest, and Goldman and Schmidt did, that the remark was made seriously and as part of a concerted plan.
To suggest Rosenstein was seriously thinking of wearing a wire, means that we must accept:
First, that Rosenstein would be willing to wear a wire to record the utterances of an American citizen (who happened to be the president). On this topic, those who’ve worked closely with Rosenstein would be the best authorities on whether he’s likely to do such a thing.
Second–and most incredibly–we are asked to accept that Rosenstein believed that any tape of the president’s voice he’d acquire WOULD HAVE AN EFFECT ON REPUBLICANS—presumably the Cabinet and/or VP, who constitutionally would be tasked with transmitting to Speaker Ryan and President pro tempore Hatch, the claim that Trump must be removed from office. And moreover, Rosenstein would have to have believed that this tape of Trump speaking would convince TWO-THIRDS of Republican Senators and TWO-THIRDS of Republican Representatives that Trump should be removed.
It strains credulity past the breaking point to think that Rosenstein could have imagined that any tape of Trump speaking would achieve this result.
At the time of the remarks, we had all heard Trump speaking for months. What would he supposedly have said that would be a deal breaker for Republicans, after members of both Congress and the Cabinet had been listening to him since mid-2015 (at least)?
The NYT story is ridiculous. It is based on an implicit assumption that Rosenstein is a brain-dead idiot—because only such a person could genuinely believe that a new tape of Trump speaking would make any difference whatsoever to his GOP enablers.
There’s one other fact being regularly overlooked that adds to my skepticism about Rosenstein’s intentions: If Rosenstein wore a wire, he would instantly become an important witness in the investigation he had only just been tasked with overseeing. Given that Rosenstein had already undergone an ethics department evaluation – made at his own request to ensure he had no conflicts of interest such that he himself had an obligation to recuse himself – I can think of no reasonable explanation why he would immediately create a huge one.
It’s legal in DC. Omarosa & Bob Woodward both claim to have tapes, recall.
At this point, I’d assume everyone and their grannies and their grannies’ cats are all wearing wires.
By the way, I should have said ‘about one third’ of Republican Senators and Reps, of course, given that the Dems wouldn’t be much of a hard sell.
Would it be illegal for Rosenstein to record trump? If not, he’s got nothing. It’s perfectly fine to talk about removing him with any means necessary. The 25th, impeachment whatever. He’s a moronic imbalanced criminal after all. Nothing wrong about talking about removing him. In fact most of the nation is.
In fact, I think we should start trolling him with the number 25. He is, after all, unfit in about a dozen ways.
Excellent point.
We are left wondering how Goldman, Schmidt, and their editor(s) could have thought that their story would pass without any scrutiny. Apparently they didn’t even try to speak to anyone who was actually in the room–and thought no one would notice!
Did someone in NYT subscriptions say “we’ve got way too many subscribers, so think of a way to get rid of some of them”…???
It’s bizarre.
That’s fine, but please understand that you’re assuming that the people you now believe are lying were telling the truth to reporters previously. That’s … weird. But of course, you can choose to believe it, and probably will because it conforms to your preferred worldview.
I feel like everyone in this thread, while nominally fighting the news, are all fighting it within the context of the Republican, partisan theory that it plays into rather than fighting it on the basis of reality.
Let me explain.
The partisan theory would be that there’s a deep state trying to commit a coup against the President using legalistic means. In that context, it matters whether Rosenstein said this, whether he meant it for real or was joking, etc.
But that context isn’t the real context.
When the police get a wiretap to go in and place in Tony Soprano’s home, it’s not an evil conspiracy, it’s them doing their job. When a psychiatrist gives a kid in school a test for ADHD, it’s not a scheme to deprive the parents of thousands of dollars in fake medication prescriptions, again it’s just that person doing their job.
What’s missing from the report, notably, is any statement that McCabe or Rosenstein were saying, “Hey, we should wiretap the President, so that we can edit the tape down, rearrange the words, and create a modified statement from him that would incriminate him or cause him to seem crazy when in fact he is not.”
The report does not mention McCabe nor Rosenstein saying, “We should find all of the people loyal to Vice President Pence and start a campaign within the White House, inserting false documents into reports, telling lies about the President’s behavior, etc. to convince those who are still loyal to President Trump that Trump is crazy, so that we can use the 25th Amendment to put Pence into power.”
The partisan theory is that there’s a conspiracy to do something illicit. But that illicit portion is missing. There’s an implication that wiretapping can only be used for nefarious purposes and with some unwholesome end in mind.
But what about the possibility that the members of the FBI and DOJ are charged with the duty of investigating and prosecuting criminals? What about the possibility that it’s one of the tasks for a member of the cabinet to ensure that the President is mentally fit to perform the duties of his office?
I realize it may be a surprise at this point, but actually if you follow the news, you would be aware that the President has been under criminal investigation for all of his time in office and probably from even before that point. Discovering that the law enforcement agents were having a discussion about options for performing an investigation of him, a year and a half ago is…not surprising? I’m not feeling like this is evidence of anything we didn’t already know?
And while, yes, it is only a new revelation that there have been substantive discussions of the 25th Amendment in the White House, I’m just personally not very surprised by that. Trump has lived his whole life being coddled by an entourage and simply isn’t aware of reality and the ramifications of his choices. If we define insanity as someone who could not function as a useful member of society without significant aid to oversee and guide that person, then Trump is insane. But, at the moment, we generally don’t consider famous people who have been messed up by their fame and fortune as crazy, just damaged. It’s the same as people getting screwed up by winning the lottery. They don’t suddenly become diagnosable as crazy, but they are suddenly unsuited by their previous life for the new life that they have been given, and unable to adapt to it in a healthy way.
Having a discussion about Trump, once you’ve spent enough time with him to realize the problem, it would be reasonable to start having these discussions. That’s not a sinister coup. Rosenstein doesn’t become President by ousting Trump; he probably doesn’t have any loyalty to Pence nor unethical motive to see that Pence become President. If they’re talking about it, and there’s no motive that anyone can suggest beyond, “it needed to be asked”, then the defense is not that Rosenstein was joking, it’s that he was executing the duties of his office.
I think if you read my first post #6 in this thread, you’d find I already made that point. Twice.
But the OP’s concern is for how it will be received among Republicans – who are in charge. And that’s where I spent most of my effort responding.
“What happened to now”? Shit, what happened to yesterday?! Nowadays, tomorrow ain’t what it used to be.
Fair enough. I just think it’s important that those of us who aren’t Trump supporters need to push back, hard, against any notion that Trump’s own Cabinet invoking the 25th Amendment to remove him from office has something to do with the “Deep State”.
Were you under the impression that it was e.g. John Dowd himself who told Bob Woodward, personally, that he had called Trump a goddamn dumbbell? Or that such a thing was even claimed? Otherwise I don’t see how your comment is the slightest bit apropos. Obviously anyone who acts as an anonymous source isn’t going to say “ah, you got me” the first time they’re asked something about it by the press.
Axios just tweeted that Rosenstein is resigning.
Twist – NBC’s Pete Williams has reported that Rosenstein is not resigning, forcing the WH to fire him.
CNN is all over the place as to it’s a resignation or a firing. It seems to make a difference as to how his replacement would be determined.
Can I request just a couple points-of-clarification regarding this stuff?
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The journalistic standard I was taught (way back in the 1980’s in Journalism 101) was that a celebrity had essentially no right to privacy because, as a celebrity, the public had an interest in the celebrity’s activities, location, et cetera so he/she could be filmed or photographed just about anywhere. The whole papparazi industry relies heavily on this. However, that’s a standard that (at the time) I was taught deals with visual recordings. Does it also apply to audio recordings? It would seem to me that PresdentRump, in his constantly self-aggrandizing hubris, would be both accustomed to and encouraging of people always trying to record every little thing he says – if only for the purpose of mining all those gems of wisdom that he is constantly uttering. If something he said ended up as evidence in some legal case, wouldn’t that be solely his own fault for spouting off when he knows he’s constantly being recorded?
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My impression a couple years ago (back before I became thoroughly disgusted with the daily news and its incessant political coverage and just stopped paying attention to it at all) was that Pence was something of a prudent choice for The Donald to choose as a VP because he was one of the few politicians who could be considered worse to have in the Oval office than Donald Trump. How/Why?
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I’m assuming Pence hasn’t become a better (less objectionable) person; has The Donald become so much of a train wreck that Pence is now somehow considered more suitable for the Oval Office? How/why?
–G?
I’ll let P.J. O’Rourke answer #3 (substitute Pence for Hillary):
“I am endorsing Hillary, and all her lies and all her empty promises," O’Rourke continued. “It’s the second-worst thing that can happen to this country, but she’s way behind in second place. She’s wrong about absolutely everything, but she’s wrong within normal parameters.”
Pence seems to be a genuine Fundamentalist. As one might note, Fundamentalism has not done wonders for the Middle East and I don’t really see any reason to think that somehow we would discover some alternate path that makes it work.
Further, Pence is smarter than Trump, has closer ties to the Republican party, and a better understanding of politics and how to get things done.
Trump has the advantage that his incompetence often causes his activities to undo themselves. A President Pence would likely have been able to revoke ObamaCare, I would wager, and while he probably wouldn’t have enacted executive orders like the Travel Ban or the mandatory immigrant prosecution policy (AKA the child separation policy), had he done so they would have been implemented in ways that passed legal muster and couldn’t be stopped nor limited. If Pence wants to move the country towards Fundamentalism, he would likely succeed to a fair extent.
There was also always the fact that Trump was an unknown. We know that Pence sucks, because that’s the review his state gave him as Governor. But, with Trump, there was always the chance that he’d get into office and then decide to spend all of his time playing golf and tweeting about how great he is while letting experts run things. To some extent, that’s basically what we got.
Were that all, Trump would still be preferable to Pence (for me at least). But between laying sanctions on his own country, his behavior towards Putin at the Helsinki summit, and just the sheer likelihood that Russia has financial or sexual blackmail material on him (I’m betting video of underaged prostitutes, given his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, George Nader, and Tevfik Arif), I think the weight of evidence that he has been compromised is too great.
For as crappy as Pence would be, I at least trust that he would be working for the country.
With Trump, I’m sufficiently worried that he is not able to work for the United States that just continuing to investigate him, I think, runs the risk that we find evidence that he’s being managed by Russia. And if we prove that the President was installed by a foreign power, that’s war. And, with Russia being the opponent, that’s the potential for nuclear war. I mean, generally, blackmail material is kept tight and closely guarded. It’s highly unlikely that we will ever see what Russia has on the President - if it exists. But nuclear war is sufficiently disastrous an eventuality that I’d personally prefer to not tease the bear.
I think it’s reasonable to believe that the Republican party would not let Pence go all Fundie on the country after having Trump running the party through the muck for two years. They are aware that they’re on a downhill slope and that raw, unfettered Pence would just continue that vector. Pence is enough of a politician that he’d reign it in if the party told him to.
And, of course, half of Congress is likely to be Democratic in just a few months, so a Pence presidency would be further reined in.
For the most part, Pence would probably be a not-too-horrible President for the next two years, and I don’t see him winning in 2020. My only recommendation would be to get a Trump appointed Supreme Court Justice before starting any impeachment proceedings.