Jay Sekulow is not Donald Trump Jr.’s lawyer. The Republican attorney, who works on the private legal team for President Donald Trump, reiterated on many of the five Sunday political talk shows that he does not represent the president’s son. Nor did Sekulow represent the Trump presidential campaign, on whose behalf Trump Jr. met in June 2016 with a Russian lawyer under the belief that he would be receiving good opposition research on Hillary Clinton from a Russian government source.
So how is it that we can trust that Sekulow knows for sure when he told Chris Wallace of Fox News on Sunday that the opposition research promised to Trump Jr. “never materialized”? How can we be sure of the accuracy of Sekulow’s description of the June 9 meeting at Trump Tower? “What took place at that meeting, and it’s been well-reported and you reported this as well, the discussions involving the Magnitsky Act and Russian adoptions. It was quickly ended,” Sekulow said.
Sekulow’s account of the meeting presumably comes from his client, President Trump and from the public statements of Trump Jr., Natalia Veselnitskaya (the Russian lawyer), and other participants in the meeting.
But why should we assume these people’s public accounts are complete or accurate? Trump Jr.’s first public comment on the meeting, in the July 8 New York Times article that broke the story, said the meeting was only about the issue of Russian adoptions. Only over the next several days, and with additional reporting from journalists, did Trump Jr. and others at the meeting reveal or admit more of what happened. It took four days from the initial Times report before Trump Jr. released his email exchanges with the acquaintance who set up the meeting—emails that revealed that his statements up to that point were incomplete. He had been under the impression he was getting opposition research on Clinton and the Democrats. He had been informed he would be meeting with people connected to the Russian government. He had believed the information he was seeking was from the Russian government.
It was supposedly just a few days before July 8 that President Trump and his surrogates claim he learned about the 2016 meeting—involving his son, his son-in-law, and his campaign chairman—in the first place. And nearly every day since the Times broke it, we’ve learned a little (or a lot) more about what happened than what Trump or anyone in his orbit had previously provided. Perhaps the public has finally learned the whole truth and nothing but the truth about that meeting. But given the track record over the past week of Trump Jr. and those around him and the president, there’s more reason than ever to be skeptical of that.
And what’s more important, practically speaking, is whether the special counsel, Robert Mueller, has learned the complete story—and whether or not that full story warrants further investigation or criminal charges.
Iran Deal Recertification Comes Monday
Monday is the Congress-imposed deadline for the Trump administration to make a decision on recertifying that the Iran nuclear deal is being fulfilled. As Steve Hayes and I reported last week, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is likely to recertify, despite an intense internal debate within the president’s national security team and a particular distaste for doing so from Trump himself.
There’s no indication plans have changed, which means this will be the second time the Trump administration has recertified that Iran is fulfilling the provisions of the deal. (Congress requires recertification every 90 days.) There are a couple reasons the administration of President Trump, who promised to “tear up” the Iran deal, is effectively allowing sanctions relief on Iran to continue under the pretext that the regime in Tehran is complying with the demands of the agreement. The National Security Council-led, multi-agency Iran policy review is ongoing, so recertification buys the administration more time to figure out exactly how it wants to proceed more formally on the Iran issue.
In addition, there’s this, which Jenna Lifhits and I reported: “A White House source characterizes the administration’s ideal outcome as neither scrapping the JCPOA nor modifying it. Instead, the administration would seek a new follow-on deal with buy-in from the European allies who signed onto the agreement in Vienna two years ago.” If a new nuclear deal with Iran is the goal of this administration, then antagonizing European allies by not recertifying the deal makes it all that much harder to craft something new. Or so the thinking goes.
President Trump, on the other hand, agrees with four hawkish senators who sent him a letter recently urging him not to approve recertifying the deal. Iran is not in compliance with the agreement’s restrictions on its nuclear program. Recertifying gives Iran the go-ahead to continue violating these restrictions. Trump may grudgingly accept the argument that it’s necessary to kick the can down the road for now. But as people in the White House say, the president’s patience on Iran and the Iran nuclear deal will grow very thin if nothing has changed that country’s behavior when the next 90 days are expired.
Health Care Vote Delayed?
It’s been three weeks since Senate Republicans released their Obamacare replacement plan, and after several stops and starts, the bill’s chances are as tenuous as ever. As the final vote approaches, the White House continues to throw its full support behind the bill, at least rhetorically.
In his weekly address on Friday, President Trump characterized the bill as “legislation to save Americans from the Obamacare disaster.”
“Obamacare has wreaked havoc on American lives, and if we don’t replace it, the calamity will only get worse—and I mean get worse by a lot,” Trump said.
But two weeks after an attempt to corral Senate republicans via a caucus-wide White House meeting failed to create a functional coalition, the Trump administration seems to have washed its hands of the political work of passage, opting instead to entrust the logistics of passage to Senate leadership.
Senate Republicans, too, have despaired of creating a bill that satisfies the existential concerns of their whole caucus. Instead they simply hope that, by bringing the bill to the floor, they will be able to sweeten it enough through amendments to woo back a few holdouts.
But as the Senate geared up for the final push this week, they were met with yet another delay Saturday as Senator John McCain retreated to Arizona to recover from an unexpected surgery to remove a blood clot above his left eye. Even under Senate leadership’s best-case scenario, the bill would pass by a razor-thin margin, and they are thus unable to proceed until McCain returns to the capital.
This stagnation continues to rankle Republicans. Appearing on NBC’s Meet the Press Sunday, Majority Whip John Cornyn admitted the difficulties of passing healthcare legislation but excoriated Democratic unwillingness to come to the table to help.
“Healthcare is hard, and we know we have no choice but to try to come to the rescue of the millions of people who are being failed as a result of the problems of Obamacare,” Cornyn said.
The White House, meanwhile, has reserved one role in the healthcare fight for itself: continuing to go on the attack against institutions that oppose the bill. In a Washington Post editorial Friday, White House officials Marc Short and Brian Blase piled contempt on the Congressional Budget Office, which will release its scoring of the Senate bill later this week.
“The CBO will likely predict lower health insurance coverage rates if the bill becomes law,” Short and Blase wrote. “The American people and Congress should give the prediction little weight in assessing the bill’s merit. The reason: The CBO’s methodology, which favors mandates over choice and competition, is fundamentally flawed. As a result, its past predictions regarding health-care legislation have not borne much resemblance to reality. Its prediction about the Senate bill is unlikely to fare much better.”
