1. Charles Blow: Constitutional Crisis in Slow Motion

Donald Trump will destroy this entire country — its institutions and its safeguards, the rule of law and the customs of civility, the concept of truth and the inviolable nature of valor — to protect his own skin.

We are not dealing with a normal person here, let alone a normal president.

This is a damaged man, a man who has always lived in his own reality and played by his own rules. When the truth didn’t suit him, he simply, with a devilish ease, invented an alternate reality. There were no hard and fast absolutes in his realm of rubber. Everything was malleable, and he had an abundance of gall and a deficit of integrity to push everything until it bent.  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/04/opinion/constitutional-crisis-in-slow-motion.html

2. David Rothkoff: Who's worse, Trump or Nixon?

As Watergate unfolded, Republican Party leaders stepped up and began to challenge Nixon. They eventually forced his resignation. Except for a very small minority, today's Republicans have actively joined in the president's war on the justice and intelligence professionals. They are behaving much like an autoimmune disorder in which cells that are supposed to protect the body politic turn against it.

Nixon lied; Trump lies pathologically. Fact-checkers have documented more than 2,000 falsehoods in his first year in office. Nixon offered racist slurs in private; Trump has made racism and misogyny a leitmotif in his administration.

Nixon was an experienced politician and in many respects an effective president. Trump, despite majorities in both houses of Congress, has gotten precious little done and in some areas — such as environmental, immigration, trade and foreign policy — he has been a disaster. Above and beyond this, however, he manages to constantly debase the office daily in ways Nixon, for all his flaws, would never have dreamed of doing.

We congratulate ourselves that the republic and its system of checks and balances withstood the likes of Nixon. Will it survive Trump?  http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-rothkopf-watergate-trump-20180205-story.html

3. Andrew Sullivan: When Two Tribes Go to War

The problem with tribalism is that it knows no real limiting principle.

It triggers a deep and visceral response: a defense of the tribe before all other considerations. That means, in its modern manifestation, that the tribe comes before the country as a whole, before any neutral institutions that get in its way, before reason and empiricism, and before the rule of law. It means loyalty to the tribe — and its current chief — is enforced relentlessly. And this, it seems to me, is the underlying reason why the investigation into Russian interference in the last election is now under such attack and in such trouble. In a tribalized society, there can be no legitimacy for an independent inquiry, indifferent to tribal politics. In this fray, no one is allowed to be above it.

The release of the Nunes memo is just the latest, deeply dangerous manifestation of this. Congressman Nunes saw his task, from the get-go, not as investigating the underlying issue as a congressman concerned with the integrity of elections, but as finding a way to protect his tribal chieftain, Donald Trump, from suspicions that his own campaign might have invited such intervention, or that he might have obstructed justice to stymie Mueller’s inquiry. The entire concept of digging fairly into the facts to discover exactly what relationship, if any, the Trump campaign had with agents of the Russian government is close to meaningless to Nunes. So is any cooperation with Democrats or waiting until the full investigation is finished. More to the point, all this is meaningless to the Republican base as well. Their tribal chief has said there was no Russian interference and no collusion, and that’s all they need to know.  http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/02/andrew-sullivan-when-two-tribes-go-to-war.html

4. Norman Eisen, Caroline Fredrickson And Noah Bookbinder: Trump’s Saturday Night Massacre Is Happening Right Before Our Eyes

The aim of the campaign against the Mueller investigation and the FBI is clear: Obstructing justice.

The FBI issued an extraordinary statement on Wednesday, pushing back on the release of a partisan congressional memo alleging the bureau used improper evidence to obtain legal permission to surveil a Trump campaign adviser. We’ve never seen anything like it. “[T]he FBI was provided a limited opportunity to review this memo the day before the committee voted to release it,” the bureau said. “As expressed during our initial review, we have grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy.”

Let’s be clear about what’s happening here: This memo is the latest escalation in an eight-month effort to tarnish the Russia investigation that might be the most significant smear campaign against the executive branch since Joe McCarthy—only here, the effort is being led by the head of that branch himself. As the New York Times reported, the Nunes memo seems like a dagger aimed by President Trump at Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who is supervising the Russia probe for the Justice Department.
Republican huzzahs over Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s appointment were still echoing when the opening salvo of this shocking campaign was launched: the claim that Mueller had disqualifying “conflicts.” Never mind that the Justice Department cleared Mueller of conflicts before he was appointed. Or that ethical standards do not remotely support disqualification over issues like Mueller’s professional acquaintance with James Comey, his employment at a firm that represented Trump associates, or even a long-ago dispute over the amount of fees Mueller owed at a Trump golf course. These meritless conflicts claims have continued to resurface like a game of whack-a-mole, popping up elsewhere after they are knocked down.  https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/01/31/trumps-saturday-night-massacre-is-happening-right-before-our-eyes-216560

5. Tom Nichols: Trump’s first year: A damage assessment

Trump has made good on the prediction that he would lead the conservative movement to disgrace, and he has gravely — perhaps even mortally — wounded the Republican Party. His endorsement of an accused child molester in Alabama’s Senate race coaxed a final humiliation of evangelical and “family values” conservatives that was a long time coming — and for many of us who are more moderate conservatives, our only regret is that it didn’t happen sooner. Yet the Trump effect has rippled further, attaching a repulsive hypocrisy to anything involving the word “conservative.” People who once insisted on religious beliefs and a sterling character as paramount in their evaluation of a president now wave away alleged payoffs to porn stars; fiscal conservatives now blithely applaud the addition of $1 trillion in debt; foreign policy hawks now mumble quietly as the president draws moral equivalences between the United States and Russia.

All of this means the next president will have to rebuild the office almost from the ground up. Americans will have to learn once again to take the presidency seriously. Congress will have to return to the assumption that the president understands — and cares about — policy. International alliances will have to be healed. Foreign enemies will have to be reminded that the word of the commander in chief matters. An entire branch of government will have to be reestablished at home and abroad.

Will Americans and their next president be up to the task? Three more years of this, and any such restoration of the republic may be out of reach.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/trumps-first-year-a-damage-assessment/2018/01/19/0b410f3c-fa66-11e7-a46b-a3614530bd87_story.html

6. Jennifer Rubin: More bread crumbs for Mueller to follow

Republican antics concerning the memo drafted by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) threaten to damage our national security, the FBI and the entire congressional oversight process. Meanwhile, President Trump faces a constant drip-drip-drip of new revelations giving heft to a possible obstruction-of-justice charge.

Collectively, they amount to one of the most sustained smear campaigns against honest government officials since Senator Joe McCarthy’s attacks of the 1950’s. We address them collectively in this report because a pattern has emerged of the President and/or his enablers making wild allegations, dominating a media cycle, then pivoting away as the falsity of the claims emerge. Rather than defending the spurious attacks, after a short interval, a new and baseless charge is launched, and the vicious cycle is repeated. We think the pattern is highly relevant to the credibility of each new charge relating to the [special counsel]–the latest coming in the form of the Nunes memo—and that it is important for a rebuttal of them all to be on the record.

Trump and Nunes can create a cloud of confusion and feed the Fox News state TV programming beast, but Trump has left himself wide open (with a slew of witnesses) to a charge of obstruction. Nunes is making Trump’s predicament worse in that regard; he’s inadvertently demonstrating the lengths to which Republicans, and not only Trump, will go to protect Trump from legal and political peril. This is unlikely to end well for Nunes, Trump or the GOP.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2018/02/01/more-bread-crumbs-for-mueller-to-follow/

7. Margaret Carlson: The GOP’s Sad Stockholm Syndrome

What was a hostile takeover of the GOP by an outsider is now a merger, accepted by a group with a serious case of Stockholm Syndrome. Trump can insult the old GOP, threaten to primary them, libel and tweet-shame them and all that has gone to show that they need him more than he needs them.

The newfound devotion is crucial given the rough times ahead. Nothing Trump tweets or does—getting funding for a smart, or dumb, wall; becoming consoler-in-chief after a national tragedy as he hinted at a pre-SOTU lunch for TV anchors—will divert attention from the Trump vs. Mueller drama that’s coming to a theater near you. In one form or another Trump is going to have to appear before Mueller where honesty is the best policy under penalty of perjury. At least one son and one son-in-law are witnesses if not targets. Former national security adviser Michael Flynn is testifying reluctantly and former chief strategist Steve Bannon seems happy to sing like a bird if executive privilege doesn’t interfere. Just a cursory look at Trump’s own words and tweets shows obstruction of justice.

Someday the Grand Old Party may see that by normalizing Trump they’ve violated every traditional and constitutional norm. If that’s the price of power, for now they are willing to pay it.  https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-gops-sad-stockholm-syndrome

8. NY Times Editorial: The Republican Plot Against the F.B.I.

First, Mr. Nunes and his fellow Republicans have treated the dossier like the holy grail for the Russia investigation, but it didn’t reach the F.B.I. until the inquiry was already underway — prompted in mid-2016 by suspicious contacts between Russians and George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign. Mr. Papadopoulos has pleaded guilty to lying about those contacts and is now cooperating with the special counsel’s investigation.

Second, the F.B.I. didn’t zero in on Mr. Page for the hell of it. He has been in the government’s sights since 2013, when investigators learned he was being targeted for recruitment by a Russian agent. To obtain a warrant to spy on someone like Mr. Page, an American citizen, investigators must show probable cause that he is working as a foreign intelligence agent. This would require reams of documentary and other evidence gathered over the years, of which the dossier would have been only one part. In addition, the 90-day warrant for Mr. Page has already been extended at least once, which means investigators had to show the intelligence court new information, beyond the dossier, justifying the basis of the original warrant.

Third, even if Mr. Nunes shows that investigators did not tell the court who financed the dossier — which originated as a Republican-backed effortduring the primaries — that is hardly a scandal. It’s not clear that the court, in Mr. Page’s case, relied on the dossier at all, but even if it did, courts rarely deny warrants on the grounds that an informant had some bias. They always assume some bias exists, as it frequently does, and then weigh the information in light of that assumption.

Finally, the idea that investigators were out to fool a federal judge shows a profound ignorance of how the intelligence courts actually work, and of the degree of vetting that precedes every warrant application. As one former F.B.I. agent explained, a conspiracy to obtain a warrant based on bad information would have required the involvement of at least a dozen agents and prosecutors, a corrupt or incompetent federal judge and the director of the F.B.I. — all working in concert to undermine Donald Trump.  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/01/opinion/nunes-memo-fbi-trump.html

9. Roger Cohen: Trump’s Corruption of the American Republic

President Trump’s most significant, and ominous, achievement in his first year in office is the corruption of the Republic. I don’t mean that he has succeeded in destroying the checks and balances on which American freedom rests. I mean that he has so soiled the discourse that a kind of numbness has set in, an exhaustion of outrage that allows him to proceed with the unthinkable.

The greatest danger from a man so unerring in his detection of human weakness, so attuned to the thrill of cruelty, so aware of the manipulative powers of entertainment, so unrelenting in his disregard for truth, so contemptuous of ethics and culture, so attracted to blood and soil, was always that he would use the immense powers of his office to drag Americans down with him into the vortex.

Trump is succeeding in this. He is having his way, for all the investigative vigor of the free press he derides, for all the honor of the judiciary that has pushed back against his attempts to stain with bigotry the law of the land. Slowly but surely, the president is getting people to shrug.

The appalling becomes excusable, the heinous becomes debatable, the outrageous becomes comical, lies become fibs, spite becomes banal, and hymns to American might become cause for giddy chants of national greatness.  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/02/opinion/trump-corruption-republic.html

10. Paul Waldman: Can Trump's battalion of buffoons really defeat the FBI?

In 1962, as the hapless New York Mets headed for yet another loss, their manager Casey Stengel supposedly cried out, "Can't anybody here play this game?" Which may be what President Trump is asking himself as he watches the battalion of buffoons charged with protecting him from the Russia investigation tripping all over themselves as they scuttle around Washington trying to make the whole thing go away.

Or that would be what he would ask, were Trump not himself the biggest fool of all. For all we know, he may think they're doing a bang-up job.

But to quote a certain someone, when the GOP sends out people to dismantle the case against Trump, they aren't sending their best. You only have to look at Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who is engaged in an extended clown routine over a four-page he had staffers prepare, supposedly proving that the FBI is the site of a nefarious anti-Trump conspiracy. With the help of his Republican colleagues and an eager conservative media, Nunes has built the memo up to be an earth-shaking blockbuster, raising expectations beyond what can possibly be fulfilled. And according to the committee's ranking Democrat, after the committee voted on party lines to release it to the public, Nunes made alterations to it before giving it to the White House, apparently thinking no one would notice; that might mean they'd have to vote all over again to release his new version. It may not be surprising that Nunes' hometown paper calls him "Trump's stooge" and says his performance "has been nothing short of embarrassing."  http://theweek.com/articles/752524/trumps-battalion-buffoons-really-defeat-fbi

11. Jeet Heer: Trump’s Brazen War on the FBI Defies History

Trump claims the FBI has “politicized the sacred investigative process in favor of Democrats and against Republicans,” but historically, the FBI has been a very conservative, and often reactionary, institution. The first and longest-serving head of the agency, J. Edgar Hoover, was notorious for his right-wing politics, often using the agency to target Civil Rights leaders like Martin Luther King and other political radicals. The FBI reformed itself, but remains conservative in orientation. Every non-interim director of the agency has been a Republican, even those appointed by Democratic presidents.

Waging war against the FBI might seem a risky proposition for a Republican president, but here as elsewhere, Trump is proving that partisanship triumphs over older allegiances. As HuffPost reports, there has been a steep decline in Republicans saying they have faith in the FBI in the last two years. Only 10 percent of Republicanssay they have a “great deal” of trust in the FBI, versus 30 percent of Democrats. In this topsy-turvy world under Trump, hating the FBI could soon be a core part of Republican identity.  https://newrepublic.com/article/146932/trumps-brazen-war-fbi-defies-history

12. Dana Milbank: U.S. history, as taught by Devin Nunes

Wouldn’t it be great to be Devin Nunes?

Not only does the California Republican get to be chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, but he simultaneously gets to serve President Trump by making public tidbits of classified information given to him by the White House. He is recused from the Russia investigation but still gets to use committee staff to undermine the Russia investigation.

Now, best of all, he gets to release a memo (possibly written with White House help) to exonerate Trump in the Russia probe by using cherry-picked information implying wrongdoing by the FBI — while at the same time blocking declassification of a memo from committee Democrats providing context and exculpatory information that Nunes omitted. And the FBI, which under its Trump-appointed director says it has “grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy,” can’t defend itself because, well, the information is classified.

In essence, Nunes is free to allege whatever he wants, even if false, and nobody, by law, can contradict him.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/us-history-abridged-by-devin-nunes/2018/02/02/a8fb6818-084d-11e8-b48c-b07fea957bd5_story.html

13. Jonathan Chait: The Backward Logic of the Nunes Memo

The newly released memo by Republican staff contends that the FBI used the work of a biased source (Christopher Steele, a British intelligence agent with expertise in Russia) to justify surveillance of Carter Page, a Trump campaign adviser. The memo highlights Steele’s opposition to Trump (he “was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected”), along with the beliefs of FBI agents Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, both of whom “demonstrated a clear bias against Trump and in favor of Clinton.”

As a legal matter, as law professor Orin Kerr has explained, there is no merit to the argument that a politically biased source cannot be used to obtain a warrant. Indeed, the FBI used journalism funded by Steve Bannon to investigate Hillary Clinton. In the place of any strong legal claim, the memo substitutes the assumption that intelligence sources who don’t want Trump to be president must be up to no good.

Trump believes to his core that he is entitled to federal law enforcement run by personal loyalists, and that any investigation of him is per se evidence of disqualifying bias. Nunes’s memo places the House Republicans foursquare behind that grotesquely authoritarian belief.  http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/02/the-backward-logic-of-the-nunes-memo.html

14. Michael Gerson: The Cowardice Among Republicans Is Staggering

With the blessing of Republican leaders, the lickspittle wing of the GOP is now firmly in charge. The existence of reckless partisans such as Nunes is hardly surprising. The nearly uniform cowardice among elected Republicans is staggering. One is left wishing that Obamacare covered spine transplants. The Republican-led Congress is now an adjunct of the White House. The White House is now an adjunct of Trump’s chaotic will.”

And what to make of Ryan (R-WI)? I have been a consistent defender of his good intentions. But after the 17th time saying “He knows better,” it dawns that he may not. By his recent actions, the speaker has provided political cover for a weakening of the constitutional order. He has been used as a tool while loudly insisting he is not a tool. The way Ryan is headed, history offers two possible verdicts: Either he enabled an autocrat, or he was intimidated by a fool.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-cowardice-among-republicans-is-staggering/2018/02/05/41852454-0aa9-11e8-8890-372e2047c935_story.html