This Week: Comey Won’t Be Charged For Leaking Memos, Trump Dismisses Russia Threat
President Trump started and ended the week with moves heaping doubt on his intelligence community’s assessment about Russian meddling in the 2016 election. Over the weekend he announced that departing Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats — who mocked Trump’s trust of Vladimir Putin and issued grave warnings about Russian meddling — would be replaced with Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-TX), a deeply pro-Trump legislator who’s spent years calling for an “investigate the investigators”-esque response to the Russia probe.
And on Thursday, Trump scoffed at his intelligence community’s — and special counsel Robert Mueller’s — warnings about ongoing Russian election meddling, asking reporters: “You don’t really believe this. Do you believe this?” when asked about a recent call with Putin.
Ratcliffe’s would-be nomination was short lived: Trump announced Friday afternoon that Ratcliffe decided to pull himself out of the running; the President cited what he claimed would be a “miserable” confirmation process for Ratcliffe because of the “LameStream” media. He said he would announce a new nomination “shortly.”
Here’s a rundown of other things you might have missed on the Trump investigations front this week:
Comey can rest easy, carry on with his moody nature tweets: The Justice Department determined it won’t charge former FBI Director James Comey for leaking those infamous Trump memos to a friend and Columbia University professor, who in turn shared the information with the media. The memos detailed a conversation Comey had with Trump regarding former national security advisor Michael Flynn. Inspector General Michael Horowitz referred the incident to the Justice Department to determine whether charges should be filed, but prosecutors opted to drop the matter, with one official telling Fox News that “everyone at the DOJ involved in the decision said it wasn’t a close call.”
Rick Gates wants to be sentenced ASAP: Federal prosecutors and Rick Gates, former business associate of ex-Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, asked in a new court filing for the probation office to begin writing Gates’ pre-sentencing report, even though he has not yet finished his cooperation with the federal government.
Manhattan DA takes a bite out of Stormy Daniels deal: The Manhattan district attorney’s office subpoenaed the Trump Organization on Thursday for documents related to hush money payments that Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen arranged between two women during the 2016 election. State prosecutors are reportedly interested in whether any Trump Organization executives filed false business records related to the $130,000 payment made to porn actress Stormy Daniels to keep her quiet about an alleged affair with Trump.
Trump is really annoyed with Elijah Cummings for investigating his favorite daughter: Reports surfaced last Friday that the House Oversight Committee voted to subpoena White House officials for their use of personal email accounts to do government business. The move is seen as specifically targeting first daughter and senior adviser Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner. Since then, Trump can’t keep Chairman Elijah Cummings’ (D-MD) name out of his mouth or off his Twitter feed. The President has spent the past week lobbing racist insults at Cummings and his district in Baltimore and claimed mid-week that African Americans were calling him by the “thousands” to thank him for highlighting crime in the city.
Stone gets to see some redacted portions of the Mueller report: While a federal judge knocked most of Roger Stone’s requests to get his case tossed out, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson did make one concession. Stone and his attorneys will be allowed to view redacted parts of Mueller’s report related specifically to his review of Wikileaks’ release of hacked DNC emails. But don’t get too excited about any new juicy Mueller deets getting shared with the public — Jackson ordered that the redacted material be kept within the confines of Stone’s legal team.
Trump admin contradicts itself on Carter Page FOIA case: The Justice Department has been pushing to get a case — involving members of the media seeking the release of unredacted materials related to the FBI’s surveillance of Carter Page — thrown out. But last September the White House issued a statement calling for the documents in question to be declassified, contradicting the DOJ’s argument that the information was classified and not covered by the Freedom of Information Act. The judge on the case gave the DOJ until the end of the month to offer an explanation.
Judge tosses DNC lawsuit against Trump campaign, Russia: U.S. District Judge John Koeltl threw out the Democratic National Committee’s lawsuit against the Trump campaign, the Russian government, and Wikileaks for the hack of its email servers in 2016 because the DNC failed to prove the campaign actively helped the foreign entity get access to the emails.