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White House Watch: Don’t Forget About the Other Russia Investigations

By Michael Warren

Another week means another round of questions about Russian interference for associates of the Trump campaign. Fox News reports that on Tuesday, former White House adviser Steve Bannon will testify before the House Intelligence committee. Former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski is also expected to testify at an unspecified date this week. Meanwhile, CNN reports that longtime Trump aide Hope Hicks, who worked on the campaign from the very beginning and is now the White House communications director, could testify before the House committee as early as Friday.

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It’s this last testimony that could be the most consequential—Hicks will be just the second sitting White House official, after Jared Kushner, to testify before the intelligence committee for its investigation into Russian interference. Hicks also recently met with investigators from the office of the special counsel headed by Robert Mueller. Last summer, Kushner also testified before the Senate Intelligence committee, which is conducting its own investigation.

It’s worth remembering that, for all the president’s caterwauling about the Mueller investigation, both houses of Congress—for now, controlled by the GOP—have their own investigations into Russian meddling. And like the special counsel with the guilty plea it extracted from former national security adviser Mike Flynn, the congressional investigations have penetrated the West Wing. What this all means remains to be seen—the three major investigations could exonerate Team Trump from wrongdoing regarding the 2016 election and even most process crimes (like what Flynn copped to, lying to the FBI). But until the investigations end, we just don’t know what we don’t know.

Photo of the Day

Protestors near Mar-a-Lago resort, where President Donald Trump spent the last few days, condemn his reported statement about immigrants from Haiti and to ask that he apologize to them, on January 15, 2018 in West Palm Beach. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images) (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)


Mar-a-Lago Watch—From the Miami Herald on the so-called Winter White House:

Trump’s club, located on a beachfront property where the historic main house was built in the 1920s for cereals heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post, was cited Nov. 8 for two violations deemed high priority: the lack of smoke detectors capable of alerting the hearing impaired through flashing bright lights; and slabs of concrete missing from a staircase, exposing steel rebar that could cause someone to fall. “High priority lodging violations are those which could pose a direct or significant threat to the public health, safety, or welfare,” the inspection code reads. The club was re-checked Nov. 17, a week before Trump’s return for his Thanksgiving vacation, and this time “met inspection standards,” according to the state inspection report.

Trump Tweet of the Day


My colleague Terry Eastland has a terrific item about how the Trump administration—and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, specifically—has taken on the task of limiting executive power to rein in the regulatory state. Here’s a taste:

A major theme of the Trump administration lies in its effort to discipline the regulatory state, with the Justice Department playing a key role. In November Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that the agency would scrupulously follow the rule-making process provided by Congress, which includes public comment on proposed rules. The Obama administration did not always adhere to that process and instead provided “guidance” as to what it thought a particular rule should be, even if Congress had not given it the authority to do that. Said Sessions: “Any guidance . . . used to circumvent the regulatory process or that improperly goes beyond what is provided for in statutes or regulation,” should not be given effect.” Nor, he added, should any guidance that is “outdated.” Shortly before Christmas, Sessions announced he had withdrawn some 25 guidance documents, dating to 1975, that the department had judged to be “improper” or “unnecessary” (meaning outdated). Sessions did not say how many of the 25 fell into either category, but a senior department official said that the majority were outdated. Guidance documents tend to “sit there and stack up and are rarely repealed.” Today there may be thousands of guidance documents in government storage. If that is the case, most of the documents are probably no longer needed and thus candidates for quick repeal.

Op-Ed of the Day—Bari Weiss at the New York Times: “Aziz Ansari Is Guilty. Of Not Being a Mind Reader.”

Song of the Day— “Dreams” by the Cranberries (RIP Dolores O’Riordan)


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