It’s the first full week of February, and Donald Trump has been president for nearly two and a half weeks. So why, besides the executive orders, do things seem to be moving so slowly for the Trump administration?
For starters, Senate Democrats are doing everything in their power to slow down the confirmation process for most of Trump’s cabinet picks. That should change after this week (stretching “this week” into Saturday, that is), with several more nominees expected to have their votes and get through.
And those executive orders haven’t been easy to move on from. The legal zoo surrounding Trump’s travel restriction, which a federal court ordered suspended over the weekend, continues. The Ninth Circuit federal appeals court will hear arguments Tuesday afternoon, the Washington Post reports.
But what about Obamacare repeal? Tax reform? Other elements of the Trump legislative agenda? The White House is keeping quiet on all this until the cabinet is confirmed, I’m told. That doesn’t mean the administration isn’t getting ready for these big fights behind the scenes. But for the moment, we don’t know much yet about if and how the White House is getting ready for the upcoming battles. What we do know is that Vice President Mike Pence will be on Capitol Hill Tuesday, attending the weekly Republican Senate policy lunch and possibly conferring with senators about the path forward on these issues.
Trump Admin Says Obama Did Not Sabotage the NSC
For a couple of weeks, a rumor has been percolating among national-security types in Washington. In a final act of indignity, so people were saying, the Obama administration left the incoming Trump White House with a drained staff budget for the National Security Council—by handing out bonuses to its staff as they were headed out the door.
A source in the Trump administration says this isn’t quite right, or even close to a fair characterization. It is true the NSC is operating on a limited budget, and National Security Advisor Mike Flynn has had a difficult time making direct hires for budgetary reasons. But the administration source says the reason isn’t something nefarious, like last-minute bonuses for Obama appointees. Instead, the NSC was required to honor mandated accumulated leave for outgoing staff members, which subsequently constrained its hiring budget for the new year and administration.
But the NSC is nonetheless nearly fully staffed, thanks to detailees to the office from other departments, agencies, and the military, who are paid out of their “home” agency’s budget. There were reportedly 200 or so staff at an all-hands meeting for the NSC at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building last week.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Incidental Deadhead
One of the notable things about the new administration is that the White House doesn’t yet feel like home to the staff. Take the West Wing office of deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, which has a nice view of the North Lawn and is a step away from her boss Sean Spicer’s own workspace. The walls in Sanders’s office are pretty bare, except for two photographs of the Grateful Dead in concert.
Sanders says they were there when she moved in. She’s not much of a Deadhead herself, but she’s thinking of keeping them, anyway, since she doesn’t have much time to spend on decorating. What I’d like to know: Who in the Obama press team was such a fan of the classic jam band that they needed two photos of the Dead in their office?
Will Abrams Get the Nod?
President Trump will meet Tuesday afternoon with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and a leading candidate for Tillerson’s deputy, Elliott Abrams. The deputy secretary of state is the second-most powerful position at the State Department, and Abrams may be among the most qualified Republicans to fill the role.
A foreign policy and national security veteran of the Reagan State Department and the George W. Bush White House, he has the expertise and knowledge of government and diplomacy that Tillerson, a newcomer to Washington and politics, would likely want in a top advisor. That could cut against Trump’s tendency to favor political outsiders, but Abrams is hardly a creature of the State Department establishment. Having worked both for Reagan’s secretary of state George Shultz and on Bush’s National Security Council, Abrams has an understanding of how to manage the important relationships between Foggy Bottom’s entrenched bureaucracy and those working for the president’s agenda in the White House and cabinet.
If Abrams receives the approval of President Trump, his next hurdle will be confirmation by the U.S. Senate—and the biggest stick for his opponents on Capitol Hill will be Abrams’s 1991 guilty plea on two misdemeanor counts of withholding information from Congress. The plea bargain stemmed from the independent counsel’s investigation into the Iran-contra scandal, and Abrams has maintained the special prosecutor unfairly targeted him as political retribution. Abrams, then an assistant secretary of state on Latin American issues, voluntarily testified before Congress in 1986 and unknowingly made false statements about the government’s funding of the contra rebels in Nicaragua—only learning after the fact that his statements were not true. Abrams argued in his 1992 book his prosecution was an ex-post-facto witch-hunt, with Iran-contra investigators looking for a scalp. In late 1992, he was pardoned by President George H.W. Bush.
Liberals have already begun to raise concerns about a “criminal” serving in the State Department, but worth a read is a defense of Abrams from an unlikely source: Aryeh Neier, a far-left ideological opponent of Abrams. In a review of Abrams’s book in the Winter 1993 issue of Dissent, Neier wrote critically of Abrams and his worldview—before noting concluding that the “prosecution wronged him.”
“Abrams did not give his deceptive testimony under oath, nor in response to questions that had been submitted in advance, nor under a threat of a citation for contempt if he withheld information,” Neier wrote. “Nothing was done to put him on notice on the two occasions subsequently singled out by the prosecutors that he might be venturing into the territory where the criminal law would be applied.”
Another big obstacle for Abrams comes from within his own party. An aide to Rand Paul of Kentucky is telling reporters the libertarian senator will oppose Abrams’s nomination, should the president choose him.
Song of the Day
“Friend of the Devil,” the Grateful Dead
