Michael Warren is out of town today for The Weekly Standard’s Broadmoor Summit in Colorado Springs, and Andrew Egger is filling in for him on White House Watch. Michael will be back in the saddle on Monday.
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Despite weeks of uncertainty about whether she’d have the votes, Gina Haspel has finally been confirmed as the Trump administration’s new CIA director. The Senate voted 54-45 to confirm Haspel Thursday afternoon, bringing an end to a frequently contentious process that saw red-state Democrats and civil liberties-focused Republicans alike break party ranks. She becomes the first woman in history to lead the CIA.
As the Senate deliberated, Haspel’s mostly-Republican advocates praised her as an unusually capable and qualified nominee with more than three decades of exemplary intelligence work under her belt. They were joined in this by Sen. Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee. “I feel safer knowing the CIA has Miss Haspel at the helm,” Warner said. Dissenters, including GOP senators Rand Paul, John McCain, and Jeff Flake, objected to her involvement in CIA “advanced interrogation” during the early days of the war on terror.
President Trump tweeted a cursory congratulations following the vote. He had previously praised her as “tough on terror” and “a leader wherever she has gone,” and said that “there is nobody even close to run the CIA!”
One More Thing—Haspel apparently made her own path to confirmation easier Monday when she sent a letter to Warner distancing herself from the CIA’s prior use of torture, as my colleague Jenna Lifhits reported:
The CIA nominee stuck to her refusal to condemn those officers and officials who participated in the program. “While I won’t condemn those that made these hard calls, and I have noted the valuable intelligence collected, the program ultimately did damage to our officers and our standing in the world,” she said.
Korea Watch—President Trump offered words of encouragement and warning for North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un Thursday, pledging “protections that will be very strong” for Korea—and that Kim would continue to hold power—should they continue to move in good faith toward denuclearization—but threatening severe reprisals should Kim slip back into his former pugnacious rhetoric.
“This would be with Kim Jong-un—something where he’d be there, he’d be in his country, he’d be running his country. His country would be very rich. His people are tremendously industrious,” Trump told reporters before a bilateral meeting with the secretary general of NATO.
Trump went on to contrast the situation with the 2011 overthrow of Muammar Qaddafi in Libya: “If you look at that model with Qaddafi, that was a total decimation. We went in there to beat him. Now that model would take place if we don’t make a deal, most likely. But if we make a deal, I think Kim Jong-un is going to be very, very happy.”
Trump’s comments come days after North Korea pulled an abrupt about-face on talk of peace, suddenly canceling a planned summit with South Korean leaders Monday, ostensibly due to a previously scheduled joint U.S.-South Korea military exercise.
Press secretary Sarah Sanders said Wednesday that the White House had “fully expected” such shenanigans from North Korea. “If they want to meet, we’ll be ready, and if they don’t, that’s okay too,” she told reporters. “The president is very used to and ready for tough negotiations.”
Mueller Watch—Despite the hair-pulling protestations of his legal team, President Trump has continued to insist in recent weeks that he hopes to sit for a face-to-face interview with special counsel Robert Mueller, which he believes will be the fastest way to clear his name and bring the process to a quick conclusion. Apparently the lawyers have finally accepted that he means it, and have started, attorney Rudy Giuliani said Thursday, to plan prep sessions in advance of the potential meeting.
“You can’t take a president away to Camp David and just prepare him for two or three weeks,” Giuliani told Politico. “I think of it as the way we prepared him for debates. He never liked to be sitting down for long stretches. We’d do an hour here, two hours there. . . . Maybe at nights, maybe in the morning.”
Giuliani’s comments come on the heels of a modest deescalation of tensions between the White House and the special counsel, after Mueller reportedly told Trump’s legal team that he intends to follow prior Justice Department guidance by not seeking an indictment against a sitting president.
President Trump has never shied away from harsh rhetoric on illegal immigration, and he again sparked outrage Wednesday when he appeared to refer to people who cross the border illegally as “animals.” But the White House insisted Thursday that the comments had been misreported, and that Trump had used the word in the context of discussing the violent criminal acts of the El Salvador-based gang MS-13.
“I’m referring, and you know I’m referring, to the MS-13 gangs that are coming in,” Trump told a reporter Thursday. “We have laws that are laughed at on immigration. So when the MS-13 comes in, when the other gang members come into our country, I refer to them as animals. And guess what—I always will.”
Press secretary Sarah Sanders fiercely defended Trump’s remark at the Thursday briefing, telling reporters that, if anything, “I don’t think the term is strong enough.”
“I think that the president should continue to use his platform and anything he can do to stop these kinds of horrible, horrible, disgusting people,” Sanders said.
Must-Read of the Day—In the magazine this week, Matt Labash has a remarkable profile of Charlie LeDuff, a Pulitzer-winning journalist and author who got sick enough of the talking-heads scene to quit his cushy TV job and go to work at a diner in Detroit:
When you’re done, you’re done. You punch out, and can see your handiwork—something is clean. Also, he says, it’s good for him personally. In TV, you can start to think you matter more than you do. But we’re all in it together. We all live with the same struggles and fears and uncertainties. “Humble yourself,” Charlie says. “I got a little bit tired of it. I’m redoing my life. A little bit of real people doesn’t hurt. A little bit of real life doesn’t hurt. Be on your knees, scrape some dirt. Love the other. Try to dig people. Whether you have God or not, God told you to focus on life on earth, and if you do, there’s a place for you in heaven. This is longstanding wisdom from our elders. Take this as wisdom. Take it.”
President Trump is donating his $100,000 quarterly salary to finance caregiver programs at the Department of Veterans Affairs, the White House announced Thursday.
“The president’s gift underscores his promise to do all he can for vets, which includes supporting those who care for veterans,” acting VA secretary Robert Wilkie told reporters. “Not just those of us at VA, but the husbands, the wives, the families and the community caregivers who are out there day in and day out.”
Wilkie was on hand to receive the check because President Trump has yet to nominate a replacement for former VA secretary David Shulkin, who was fired in March following an ethics scandal involving improper luxury travel in Europe on the taxpayer’s dime. Or rather, Trump has yet to nominate a replacement since his initial pick, former presidential doctor Ronny Jackson, bowed out over misconduct allegations of his own.
Song of the Day—“These Days” by Nico
