Chain Migration Cartoons 2017

Hell freezes over: Media start admitting that Trump's first year isn't a flop

I have sensed for weeks now that some in the media were on the verge of rolling out a contrary take on President Trump’s first year in office.

And in the wake of yesterday’s final passage of massive tax cuts, that moment has arrived.

The dominant media narrative, of course, is that Trump hasn’t gotten much done, that he’s in over his head, that he doesn’t understand government, that he keeps picking petty fights rather than winning big battles.
But the thing about the pundits is that they get tired of pushing the same line, week after week, month after month. Some inevitably want to seize credit for a new insight, for getting ahead of the pack with a burst of contrarian wisdom.
And that hot take is, hey, maybe Trump has gotten some important things done after all.
It’s true that the president had not gotten much from the Republican Congress this year. But a new law that cuts taxes for businesses and individuals—even though the measure polls poorly and is not mainly aimed at the middle class—puts an end to the verdict that Trump doesn’t know how to work the Hill. Like it or not, this is a sprawling piece of legislation that was quickly pushed through the House and Senate in a show of party-line muscle.
Trump hasn’t gotten much credit for the record-breaking stock market, but there is now some recognition that Dow-Almost-25,000 can’t be completely divorced from his policies. And there’s starting to be a greater appreciation for the president’s progress on slashing regulations and appointing judges (even though three nominees recently had to withdraw, one because he couldn’t answer a Senate panel’s questions about basic court procedures).
On Axios, Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen stake out the new ground:
"The media often appraises presidencies and politics through liberal-tinted glasses. But the vast majority of the Republican Party like, even love, these policies ...
"We have been saying all year: Watch what he does, not what he says. Until recently, he hasn't done much. But these wins are substantial, with consequences for millions of people and many years to come."

They note that Trump has won approval not just for Neil Gorsuch but for a dozen Circuit Court judges.
And while Trump failed in repeated attempts to scrap ObamaCare, he boasted yesterday abolishing the individual mandate—a provision added to the tax bill—amounts to repealing the health care program. That’s an overstatement, but letting people wait until they get sick to buy insurance could well undermine the exchanges created by Barack Obama.
On foreign policy, there is a telling New York Times piece by conservative columnist Ross Douthat, a harsh critic of Trump. He says the decimation of ISIS has drawn scant media attention:
"There is nothing more characteristic of the Trump era, with its fire hose of misinformation, scandal and hyperbole, than that America and its allies recently managed to win a war that just two years ago consumed headlines and dominated political debate and helped Donald Trump himself get elected president — and somehow nobody seemed to notice."

It’s true there was no surrender ceremony and ISIS still exists, but it has lost physical stronghold in Iraq.
Says Douthat: “This is also a press failure, a case where the media is not adequately reporting an important success because it does not fit into the narrative of Trumpian disaster in which our journalistic entities are all invested.”
But the narrative is changing a bit. While Trump remains quite unpopular, at least according to the polls, the media are reluctantly starting to acknowledge that his presidency is having a significant impact.
Howard Kurtz is a Fox News analyst and the host of "MediaBuzz" (Sundays 11 a.m.). He is the author of five books and is based in Washington. Follow him at @HowardKurtz. Click here for more information on Howard Kurtz. 

From Omarosa and Huckabee to Joe and Mika, politics of feuding takes center stage

Media Buzz

6 days ago

In Washington, politics is personal. And lately it’s been getting intensely personal.

Kind of like when you were in high school.

Omarosa's departure from the White House was always going to attract an unusual degree of attention—since she was not exactly a major policymaker—because Donald Trump had fired her on "The Apprentice." But yesterday it became about a feud.
While Omarosa Manigault insists she resigned, White House correspondent April Ryan reported that she was fired in a nasty confrontation—and was escorted off White House grounds.
Omarosa denied that on "Good Morning America," blaming the report on "one individual who has a personal vendetta against me"—meaning Ryan.
Ryan, a CNN contributor who also works for American Urban Radio Networks, pushed back on the air, saying she was a beat reporter doing her job. "That’s what a White House correspondent does: listens to sources inside the White House and outside of the White House," she said on CNN.
The Secret Service took the unusual step of denying any role in removing Omarosa from the White House. But several news outlets, including The New York Times, said she was hustled off the premises and was leaving after a clash with John Kelly, the chief of staff, who limited her access to Trump.
Omarosa did seem to hint at a coming book, or something, in telling Michael Strahan on "GMA" that as "the only African American woman in this White House senior staff, I have seen things that have made me uncomfortable, that have upset me and affected me deeply and emotionally and affected my people and my community."
Over the summer, Ryan said she and Omarosa had been friends but she was "screaming at the top of her lungs" about a false rumor involving the reporter, and "I embarrassed her in front of reporters and people in that office ... I made mincemeat of her."
See? Politics is personal.
And that also applies to the case of the Scarboroughs vs. the Huckabees.
To recap: Kirsten Gillibrand called on Trump to resign. The president ripped her in a tweet, saying she had been begging him for campaign contributions "and would do anything for them."
That set off a wave of media criticism, and Mika Brzezinski led the chorus. She’d had her own very personal clash with Trump, a onetime friend, when he claimed in a tweet that she was bleeding from a face lift. (Got it so far?)
So Brzezinski denounced the president on "Morning Joe" for what she described as a "reprehensible" attack on a woman. And then she turned to his press secretary, saying Sarah Huckabee Sanders should not defend her boss’s tweet (though that is sort of her job).
"Don’t lie," Brzezinski said. "And do not defend the president of the United States for what he did. If you do ... you should resign."
That didn’t sit well with the former governor of Arkansas, who of course is Sanders' dad.
Mike Huckabee said on Fox that "I was stunned that of all the people who are going to give a lecture on morality and family, and marriage, it’s going to be Mika?"
Huckabee defended the presidential tweet, said his daughter "deserves better from other women" and added, "Mika can go pound sand somewhere as far as I’m concerned."
Now that brought a blast from Mika’s partner and fiancé, Joe Scarborough, who was understandably upset at the reference to their romance, which became public only when they announced their engagement.
"What a sleazy thing to do," Morning Joe said, adding: "Mika never talked about marriage. She never lectured on the morality of any of that…What a judgmental, predictably stupid thing to do."
There are serious issues here—about the president and women, his battle with a leading senator, the responsibility of his press secretary. But with fathers and fiances getting involved, it became, like so much inside the Beltway, brutally personal.

Howard Kurtz is a Fox News analyst and the host of "MediaBuzz" (Sundays 11 a.m.). He is the author of five books and is based in Washington. Follow him at @HowardKurtz. Click here for more information on Howard Kurtz. 

Trump administration can retain DACA documents, Supreme Court rules

The Supreme Court on Wednesday lifted an order requiring the Trump administration and federal agencies to release internal documents related to the withdrawal of an Obama-era program that offered a deportation reprieve to illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as children.

In a unanimous ruling, the high court ordered lower courts to hold off any demands of documents from federal agencies until a ruling is reached on the Trump administration's attempts to dismiss five lawsuits in California that challenge the legality of the order to rescind DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), Politico reported.

The lawsuits argue that the acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) determination to completely rescind the limited amnesty program by March 2018 was unlawful because “It violates the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) and the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment.”
After the government provided only 250 pages of documents related to the program’s termination, the challengers accused the administration of concealing records, claiming the termination of such program would have created a large volume of documents.

Protesters demonstrating against the decision to rescind an Obama-era program that offered a deportation reprieve to illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as children.  (Associated Press)

U.S. District Judge William Alsup sided with the plaintiffs and ordered DHS and the Justice Department to turn over more documents related to the DACA reversal. This order, according to the Supreme Court’s opinion, was wrong and should have not been made.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions praised the high court’s ruling, saying it was “a crucially important ruling” and vowed to “continue to defend the Trump Administration’s lawful actions.”
“The discovery order in the DACA cases was dramatically intrusive and premature, and I am pleased with tonight’s decision that the district court’s order was ‘overly broad,’” Sessions said.
He added: “Make no mistake, this was a crucially important ruling, and the fact it was granted by a unanimous Supreme Court cannot be overstated. We will continue to defend the Trump administration’s lawful actions.”
But California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who brought one of the five lawsuits challenging the White House over the DACA decision, told Politico that the ruling was not a win for the administration as it left the possibility that the challengers were eligible to more information.
"Today the Supreme Court has essentially told us that no one — not even the president — can hide the facts," he said.
Both the White House and leaders in Congress were working on legislation to address the issue and replace the legally contentious DACA program with a legal status for those who are or were covered by the program, Fox News reported.
It is likely that a bipartisan deal will emerge in January and include border security measures at the request of the White House in exchange for a deal on DACA.

McCabe draws blank on Democrats’ funding of Trump dossier, new subpoenas planned

EXCLUSIVE: Congressional investigators tell Fox News that Tuesday’s seven-hour interrogation of Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe contained numerous conflicts with the testimony of previous witnesses, prompting the Republican majority staff of the House Intelligence Committee to decide to issue fresh subpoenas next week on Justice Department and FBI personnel.

While HPSCI staff would not confirm who will be summoned for testimony, all indications point to demoted DOJ official Bruce G. Ohr and FBI General Counsel James A. Baker, who accompanied McCabe, along with other lawyers, to Tuesday’s HPSCI session.

The issuance of a subpoena against the Justice Department’s top lawyer could provoke a new constitutional clash between the two branches, even worse than the months-long tug of war over documents and witnesses that has already led House Speaker Paul Ryan to accuse DOJ and FBI of “stonewalling” and HPSCI Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., to threaten contempt-of-Congress citations against Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher Wray.
“It’s hard to know who’s telling us the truth,” said one House investigator after McCabe’s questioning.
Fox News is told that several lawmakers participated in the questioning of McCabe, led chiefly by Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C.

Bruce G. Ohr was demoted at the DOJ for concealing his meetings with the men behind the anti-Trump 'dossier.'  (AP)

Sources close to the investigation say that McCabe was a “friendly witness” to the Democrats in the room, who are said to have pressed the deputy director, without success, to help them build a case against President Trump for obstruction of justice in the Russia-collusion probe. “If he could have, he would have,” said one participant in the questioning.
Investigators say McCabe recounted to the panel how hard the FBI had worked to verify the contents of the anti-Trump “dossier” and stood by its credibility. But when pressed to identify what in the salacious document the bureau had actually corroborated, the sources said, McCabe cited only the fact that Trump campaign adviser Carter Page had traveled to Moscow. Beyond that, investigators said, McCabe could not even say that the bureau had verified the dossier’s allegations about the specific meetings Page supposedly held in Moscow.
The sources said that when asked when he learned that the dossier had been funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, McCabe claimed he could not recall – despite the reported existence of documents with McCabe’s own signature on them establishing his knowledge of the dossier’s financing and provenance.
The decision by HPSCI staff to subpoena Ohr comes as he is set to appear before the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is conducting its own probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Until earlier this month, when Fox News began investigating him, Ohr held two titles at DOJ: associate deputy attorney general, a post that placed him four doors down from his boss, Rosenstein; and director of the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces (OCDETF), a program described by the department as “the centerpiece of the attorney general’s drug strategy.”
Ohr will retain his OCDETF title but was stripped of his higher post and ousted from his office on the fourth floor of “Main Justice.” Department officials confirmed that Ohr had withheld from superiors his secret meetings in 2016 with Christopher Steele, the former British spy who authored the dossier with input from Russian sources; and with Glenn Simpson, the founder of Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm that hired Steele with funds supplied by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
Subsequently, Fox News disclosed that Ohr’s wife Nellie, an academic expert on Russia, had worked for Fusion GPS through the summer and fall of 2016.

Glenn Simpson, shown here, met with DOJ official Bruce Ohr in 2016.

Former FBI Director James Comey, testifying before the House in March, described the dossier as a compendium of “salacious and unverified” allegations against then-candidate Donald Trump and his associates. The Nunes panel has spent much of this year investigating whether DOJ, under then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch, used the dossier to justify a foreign surveillance warrant against Page, a foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign.
DOJ and FBI say they have cooperated extensively with Nunes and his team, including the provision of several hundred pages of classified documents relating to the dossier. The DOJ has also made McCabe available to the House Judiciary Committee for a closed-door interview on Thursday.
The Justice Department and FBI declined to comment for this report.
James Rosen joined FOX News Channel (FNC) in 1999 and is the network’s chief Washington correspondent.
Jake Gibson is a producer working at the Fox News Washington bureau who covers politics, law enforcement and intelligence issues.