Trump Assails Mueller, Drawing Rebukes From Republicans
March 19, 2018 by admin
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Among them was Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona, a sharp critic of Mr. Trump who appeared on the same program. “People see that as a massive red line that can’t be crossed,” he said. He urged Mr. Trump’s advisers to prevail on him not to fire Mr. Mueller. “We have confidence in Mueller.”
Representative Trey Gowdy, Republican of South Carolina, said if the president was innocent, he should “act like it” and leave Mr. Mueller alone, warning of dire repercussions if the president tried to fire the special counsel.
“I would just counsel the president — it’s going to be a very, very long, bad 2018, and it’s going to be distracting from other things that he wants to do and he was elected do,” Mr. Gowdy said on “Fox News Sunday.” “Let it play out its course. If you’ve done nothing wrong, you should want the investigation to be as fulsome and thorough as possible.”
The House speaker, Paul D. Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin, issued a statement likewise warning Mr. Trump to back off. “As the speaker has always said, Mr. Mueller and his team should be able to do their job,” said AshLee Strong, a spokeswoman. His counterpart, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, had no comment, as did a number of other top Senate Republicans.
Late in the day, the White House tried to douse the furor. “In response to media speculation and related questions being posed to the administration, the White House yet again confirms that the president is not considering or discussing the firing of the special counsel, Robert Mueller,” Ty Cobb, a White House lawyer, said in a statement.
The president’s tweet followed a statement by Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, John Dowd, on Saturday calling on the Justice Department to end the special counsel investigation. Mr. Trump followed up that evening with a tweet arguing that “the Mueller probe should never have been started in that there was no collusion and there was no crime.”
The two weekend tweets were the first time Mr. Trump has used Mr. Mueller’s name on Twitter, not counting a message he once retweeted, and reflected what advisers called a growing impatience fueled by anger that the investigation was now looking at his business activities.
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The New York Times reported last week that Mr. Mueller has subpoenaed records from the Trump Organization. Mr. Trump’s lawyers met with Mr. Mueller’s team last week and received more details about how the special counsel is approaching the investigation, including the scope of his interest in the Trump Organization.
For months, Mr. Trump had been reassured by his lawyers that the investigation would wrap up soon — by Thanksgiving, then Christmas, then New Year’s. But with the expansion into Mr. Trump’s business, it seems increasingly clear that Mr. Mueller is not ready to conclude his inquiry.
A top adviser to Mr. Trump said on Sunday that the White House had grown weary of the inquiry. “We have cooperated in every single way, every single paper they’ve asked for, every single interview,” Marc Short, the president’s legislative director, said on “Face the Nation” on CBS. “There’s a growing frustration that after a year and millions and millions of dollars spent on this, there remains no evidence of collusion with Russia.”
A president cannot directly fire a special counsel but can order his attorney general to do so. Even then, a cause has to be cited, like conflict of interest. Since Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a former campaign adviser, has recused himself from the Russia investigation — to Mr. Trump’s continuing irritation — the task would fall to the deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein.
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But Mr. Rosenstein said as recently as last week that he sees no justification for firing Mr. Mueller, meaning that he would either have to change his mind or be removed himself. The third-ranking official at the Justice Department, Rachel Brand, knowing this issue could reach her, decided last month to step down. The next official in line would be the solicitor general, Noel J. Francisco, a former White House and Justice Department lawyer under Mr. Bush.
Mr. Trump sought to have Mr. Mueller fired last June but backed down after his White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, threatened to quit. The president told The Times a month later that Mr. Mueller would be crossing a red line if he looked into his family’s finances beyond any relationship with Russia.
The White House made no assertion last week that the subpoena to the Trump Organization crossed that red line, but Mr. Trump evidently has grown tired of the strategy of being respectful to the special counsel. His focus on Democrats working for Mr. Mueller could be aimed at demonstrating conflict of interest that would merit dismissal.
When Mr. Mueller assembled his team, he surrounded himself with trusted former colleagues and experts on specific crimes like money laundering. As the team filled out, Republican allies of Mr. Trump noted that some members had previously contributed to Democratic candidates.
In particular, Republicans pointed to Andrew Weissmann, who served as F.B.I. general counsel under Mr. Mueller. Mr. Weissmann is a career prosecutor but, while in private law practice, donated thousands of dollars toward President Barack Obama’s election effort.
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In his Sunday morning Twitter blasts, Mr. Trump also renewed his attacks on James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, and Andrew G. McCabe, his former deputy, both of whom, like Mr. Mueller, are longtime Republicans. Mr. Trump fired Mr. Comey last May, at first attributing the decision to the F.B.I. director’s handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server but later telling an interviewer that he had the Russia investigation in mind when he made the decision.
Mr. Sessions, under intense public pressure from Mr. Trump, fired Mr. McCabe on Friday after an inspector general found that he had not been forthcoming about authorizing F.B.I. officials to provide information about the Clinton inquiry in 2016 to a reporter.
“Wow, watch Comey lie under oath to Senator G when asked ‘have you ever been an anonymous source…or known someone else to be an anonymous source…?’” Mr. Trump wrote. “He said strongly ‘never, no.’ He lied as shown clearly on @foxandfriends.”
Mr. Trump went on to dismiss reports that Mr. McCabe kept detailed memos of his time as deputy F.B.I. director, just as Mr. Comey did. Mr. McCabe left those memos with the F.B.I., which means Mr. Mueller’s team has access to them.
“Spent very little time with Andrew McCabe, but he never took notes when he was with me,” Mr. Trump wrote. “I don’t believe he made memos except to help his own agenda, probably at a later date. Same with lying James Comey. Can we call them Fake Memos?”
Michael R. Bromwich, Mr. McCabe’s lawyer, fired back by accusing the president of corrupting the law enforcement system. “We will not be responding to each childish, defamatory, disgusting false tweet by the President,” he wrote on Twitter. “The whole truth will come out in due course. But the tweets confirm that he has corrupted the entire process that led to Mr. McCabe’s termination and has rendered it illegitimate.”
In suggesting that Mr. Comey lied under oath to Congress, Mr. Trump appeared to refer to a comment by Mr. McCabe that the former director had authorized the news media interaction at the heart of the complaint against him. The president’s Republican allies picked up the point on Sunday and pressed for appointment of a prosecutor to look at the origin of the Russia investigation.
“So we know that McCabe has lied” because the inspector general concluded he had not been fully candid, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the House majority leader, said on Fox News. “Now he’s saying about Comey — Comey may have lied as well. So I don’t think this is the end of it. But that’s why we need a second special counsel.”
Other Republicans, however, suggested that the Trump administration was going too far. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida criticized the decision to fire Mr. McCabe on a Friday night shortly before his retirement took effect, jeopardizing his pension.
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“I don’t like the way it happened,” Mr. Rubio said on “Meet the Press” on NBC. “He should’ve been allowed to finish through the weekend.” Speaking of the president, he added: “Obviously he doesn’t like McCabe and he’s made that pretty clear now for over a year. We need to be very careful about taking these very important entities and smearing everybody in them with a broad stroke.”
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Austin Struck by Fourth Explosion Only Hours After Televised Appeal to Bomber
March 19, 2018 by admin
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Investigators from the F.B.I. and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives also responded to the neighborhood known as Travis Country, which is about five miles southwest of downtown Austin and in a different area from the three previous explosions. Bomb technicians with the A.T.F. were conducting a secondary sweep, officials said.
Because the device exploded after nightfall, the chief said, the police could not fully inspect the scene and would have to wait until sunrise on Monday to better examine it. It was not immediately clear if Sunday’s explosion was directly connected to the three previous bombings.
“We have not had an opportunity to really look at this blast site to determine what has happened,” Chief Manley said at the evening news conference. “It’s obvious that there’s been an explosion, and it’s obvious it’s caused significant injuries to two people.”
At a news conference before Sunday’s explosion, the Austin police made a rare public appeal for the bomber or bombers responsible for the first three explosions to contact the police so officials could learn more about the “message” behind the attacks.
“These events in Austin have garnered worldwide attention, and we assure you that we are listening,” Chief Manley said in addressing the unknown bomber or bombers at the earlier news conference. “We want to understand what brought you to this point, and we want to listen to you.”
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Nick Wagner/Austin American-Statesman, via Associated Press
Chief Manley told reporters that he hoped the person or people responsible were watching, and that they would get in touch by calling 911 or reaching out online. He said investigators had not established a motive for the explosive packages.
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“There’s the message behind what’s happening in our community, and we’re not going to understand that until the suspect or suspects reaches out to us to talk to us about what that message was,” Chief Manley said. “We still do not know what ideology may be behind this and what the motive was behind this.”
Before Sunday, three separate bombings this month in the eastern and northeastern parts of the city left two people dead and a third seriously wounded. In each case, the victims handled packages that were left on their doorsteps and were outfitted with homemade but sophisticated explosive devices.
Officials said the first bombing, on Haverford Drive on March 2, and two more on March 12, on Oldfort Hill Drive and Galindo Street, were connected. None of the packages were mailed. Instead, they were apparently placed directly near the doors of homes for the victims to find. In two cases, the bombs detonated when the victims picked them up; in the third, the package exploded after it had been carried inside and opened.
More than 500 federal agents are assisting the investigation from agencies including the F.B.I. and the A.T.F. Fred Milanowski, the A.T.F. special agent in charge of its Houston division, said he believed that the same person built all three devices.
“Every bomber that makes these leaves a signature,” Mr. Milanowski said. “Obviously, once they find something successful for them, they don’t want to deviate from that because they don’t want something to blow up on them.”
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Ricardo B. Brazziell/Austin American-Statesman, via Associated Press
Mr. Milanowski said a degree of skill was required to assemble, transport and deliver the devices without an accidental explosion. He declined to identify the materials that were used to make them.
“It wouldn’t be a typical household that would have all these components, but I would say that all the components are commercially available,” he said.
Since March 12, the day when two bombings occurred, anxious residents have reported hundreds of suspicious packages to the authorities; Austin police officers have responded to 735 such calls. Officials have continued to urge residents to call 911 if they receive a package that they were not expecting and that did not appear to have been delivered by the Postal Service or a legitimate commercial service like U.P.S. or FedEx.
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Law enforcement officials said they were looking for possible links to similar residential package bombings across the country.
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“The scope goes beyond just Austin,” said a law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a continuing investigation. “We’re looking for anyone that could have been involved in making bombs in the past in Texas, and really anywhere in the United States.”
Asked at the news conference whether investigators were looking for links to bombings elsewhere, Chief Manley said they were pursuing all avenues. “We are not going to rule anything out until we have a reason to rule it out,” he said, “because when we do that, it narrows our focus and we may limit considering things that we should be considering.”
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Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times
Over the past 30 years or so, package bombings have killed or wounded more than two dozen people across the country, excluding those connected to the Unabomber case. Many of the attacks have been solved by the authorities; they often stemmed from domestic disputes, and sometimes involved pipe bombs in packages wrapped like holiday presents.
The bombings in Austin have alarmed black leaders because the two people killed were African-American and the seriously wounded victim was a 75-year-old Hispanic woman. Law enforcement officials said that they did not have conclusive evidence that race played a role in the bombings, but that they were continuing to explore the possibility.
Nelson E. Linder, the president of the Austin branch of the N.A.A.C.P., said on Sunday evening that he did not know the race of the two men injured in the latest explosion. “It’s important for the whole city to understand this is a danger, and I think tonight kind of confirms that,” Mr. Linder said. “I think that’s what this means tonight, that this whole city is at risk.”
Investigators are examining connections between the two black victims, who both belonged to prominent African-American families. Officials said investigators were also looking into the possibility that the bomb that wounded the Hispanic woman may have been intended for someone else, but that nothing definitive had been established.
Chief Manley said on Sunday that the combined rewards offered for information leading to an arrest and conviction in the case had been increased to $115,000, from $65,000.
A concert featuring the Roots that was part of the South by Southwest festival in Austin was canceled on Saturday after the concert venue received a bomb threat in an email, the authorities said. No device was found, and the police later arrested a man on a charge of making a terroristic threat. The police said the man, Trevor Weldon Ingram, 26, was not a suspect in the package bombings.
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