It's Just Not Fun Anymore

In yesterday's column, titled "Does Donald Trump Want to Be Re-Elected?" and sub-titled "The president's inattention to the coronavirus doesn't suggest someone desperate to win in November," Jonathan Bernstein ponders Donald's inept handling of the crisis. This is the column in its entirety:

It’s becoming more and more obvious that President Donald Trump has simply stopped dealing with the coronavirus pandemic, and has no particular plan for confronting its economic fallout, either. In both cases, he’s pretty much substituted wishful thinking for action. The Atlantic’s David Graham had a good item about this disengagement earlier in the week, followed by one from Ezra Klein arguing that “the White House does not have a plan, it does not have a framework, it does not have a philosophy, and it does not have a goal.”

What surprised me was political scientist Lee Drutman’s conclusion, based on Klein’s article, that “the debate over what to do has polarized with depressing haste, because ‘winning’ in Washington is not defeating the virus, but winning the next election.” I argued a bit with Drutman on Twitter about this, but it’s worth a longer discussion. My basic sense is that Trump isn’t nearly concerned enough with winning re-election, and that the current catastrophe is in part a consequence of that.

There’s no way to know what’s really in the president’s mind. But we can compare his actions with what a president determined to be re-elected would probably do. A lot of Trump’s critics have claimed that he’s deliberately risking American lives by boosting the economy to improve his chances in November. And it’s true that he seems concerned mainly with re-opening businesses these days. But there are at least two reasons to doubt that this preference is due to the election. For one, public-health experts and economists broadly agree that opening too soon will be a disaster. For another, even if there is a trade-off, there’s no particular reason to think that restoring jobs at the cost of more illness and death will be a good electoral deal for Trump.

At any rate, the evidence that Trump has an economic plan is just as weak as the evidence that he’s engaged in dealing with the coronavirus.

What I think is more likely is that Trump simply isn’t finding this aspect of the presidency very much fun. You might remember when President George H.W. Bush declared that he didn’t like broccoli: “And I haven’t liked it since I was a little kid and my mother made me eat it. And I’m president of the United States, and I’m not going to eat any more broccoli!” Trump acts this way about doing most of the mundane jobs of the presidency. Thus his newly invented scandal, “Obamagate.” As the New Yorker’s Susan Glasser points out: “For Trump, spending the week attacking Obama, no matter what the subject, is the political equivalent of retreating to his bedroom and hiding under the blanket. It’s his safe space, his comfort zone.” Except it’s not so much a political equivalent as it is a retreat from politics altogether, along with the duties and responsibilities of his office.

A politician who desperately wanted re-election would’ve been hard at work, from the moment he or she was alerted to the danger, attempting to contain the pandemic and limit the economic damage, and would persevere no matter what the setbacks, never wavering in an effort to produce the policy results that might lead to a big win in November. Such presidents might sacrifice the long term for the short term, as Lyndon Johnson did in goosing the economy in 1964, or Richard Nixon did in 1972. But they would never just give up when things went wrong.

That’s not this president. That’s not Donald Trump.

Mr. Bernstein may be indulging in a little reverse psychology because in actual fact, of course Donald wants to be re-elected. I'd say he cares about winning in November more that life itself, if only to avoid being branded a LOSER. Why hasn't he been hard at work from the start, attempting to contain the pandemic and limit the economic damage, persevering no matter what the setbacks, etc? That's easy. He's just not capable of it.

What does surprise me is that there is apparently no one in the administration who has the smarts to handle a crisis. In truth, it doesn't surprise me, it's been clear all along. It's just that this is the biggest crisis the Trump administration had faced and it's happening within sight of the election. You would think that Ivanka, Jared and the vice president, in particular, would have a vested interest in helping Donald to succeed at this, but nope. The slobbering, ass-kissing sycophantic-ness of Mike Pence continues to astonish (and disgust) me, but it's not just him. There's mind-boggling incompetence from one end of the White House to the other.

And one more thing: In November, Steve Schmidt, a former Republican political operative and one of the Never Trumpers behind the Lincoln Project (read more here,) said that he thinks Donald will dump Mike Pence for Nikki Haley as his running mate this year. (I wrote about it here.) This was before the coronavirus crisis started but it occurs to me now that with Pence in charge of the response, doesn't that make him a convenient scapegoat for the whole bungled mess? Maybe Donald really will give him the boot. 

I Knew It! - Updated

photo credit: Carolyn Kaster/AP

I've said many times here at Writing The World that Jared Kushner is the reason Chris Christie never got a job in the Trump White House; now apparently Christie's new book confirms it. The Guardian got hold of a pre-publication copy of Let Me Finish; the article about it was so interesting I cut-and-pasted it whole:

Chris Christie, who was ousted as chairman of Donald Trump’s White House transition team in 2016, has written a blistering attack on Jared Kushner, whom he accuses of having carried out a political “hit job” on him as an act of revenge for prosecuting his father, Charles Kushner, a decade ago.

In his soon to be published book, Let Me Finish, Christie unleashes both barrels on Trump’s son-in-law, who remains a senior White House adviser with responsibilities for Middle Eastern peace, sentencing reform and “American Innovation”.

Christie blames this key player in the president’s inner circle for his ignominious dismissal shortly after Trump’s election victory in November 2016. Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, writes that Kushner’s role in his sacking was confirmed to him by Steve Bannon, Trump’s campaign chief, in real time.

As Bannon was carrying out the firing, at Trump Tower in New York, Christie forced him to tell him who was really behind the dismissal by threatening to go to the media and point the finger at Bannon instead.

“Steve Bannon … made clear to me that one person and one person only was responsible for the faceless execution that Steve was now attempting to carry out. Jared Kushner, still apparently seething over events that had occurred a decade ago.”

The political assassination was carried out by Kushner as a personal vendetta, Christie writes, that had its roots in his prosecution, as a then federal attorney, of Charles Kushner in 2005. The real estate tycoon was charged with witness tampering and tax evasion and served more than a year in federal prison.

Even for a White House that has generated an extraordinary cornucopia of hypercritical kiss-and-tell books, Christie’s is exceptional for its excoriating description of events at which he was present. As he points out in Let Me Finish, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian ahead of publication on 29 January, none of the other authors “has known Trump for as long or as well as I have – or was right there in the room when much of this occurred”.

It is also exceptional as a chronicle of the score-settling and animosity that drove key decision-making in Trump’s nascent presidency. As political scientists look for the roots of the mayhem in the current White House, the book provides new clues.

At the heart of it is Christie’s desire to tell the American people that had his transition plan been adopted after Trump’s shock victory on election night in November 2016, the Trump White House would be a much more effective place today. Once he had been tossed overboard, the new transition team led by Vice President-elect Mike Pence had a “thrown-together approach” that led to appalling choices of senior personnel “over and over again”.

But the emotional heart of the book is Christie’s account of the actions of Jared Kushner. In this telling, Christie was ditched by a young man who made it his business to discredit and denounce him because of what he had done to his father.

“The kid’s been taking an ax to your head with the boss ever since I got here,” Bannon confessed at Christie’s dismissal.

Christie was the US attorney in New Jersey when he spearheaded the prosecution of Charles Kushner for witness tampering. The case arose out of a bitter family feud.

The elder Kushner hired a sex worker to seduce his brother-in-law Bill Schulder, then filmed them having sex in a motel and sent the tape to his own sister, Esther. The bizarre plot was an attempt to blackmail the Schulders into keeping their silence about Bill’s knowledge of Charles’s fraudulent activities.

Charles Kushner pleaded guilty to 18 charges and served 14 months in a federal prison in Alabama.

In one of the most visceral passages of the book, Christie recounts for the first time how Jared Kushner badmouthed him to Trump in April 2016, pleading with his father-in-law not to make Christie transition chairman. Remarkably, he did so while Christie was in the room.

“He implied I had acted unethically and inappropriately but didn’t state one fact to back that up,” Christie writes. “Just a lot of feelings – very raw feelings that had been simmering for a dozen years.”

Kushner went on to tell Trump that it wasn’t fair his father spent so long in prison. He insisted the sex tape and blackmailing was a family matter that should have been kept away from federal authorities: “This was a family matter, a matter to be handled by the family or by the rabbis.”

Trump, in an effort to settle the dispute, proposed a dinner between him, Jared and Charles Kushner, and Christie. Much to Christie’s relief, Jared didn’t acquiesce.

In the end, Trump gave Christie the job. But according to Let Me Finish, Kushner had the final say.

Let Me Finish bears all the hallmarks of classic, brash Chris Christie. Its language is blunt, caustic and at times self-satisfied, much like his political reputation.

It has its lighter moments. At his first meeting with Trump in 2002, at a dinner in the Trump International Hotel and Tower, in New York, Trump ordered his food for him. He chose scallops, to which Christie is allergic, and lamb which he has always detested. Christie recalls wondering whether Trump took him to be “one of his chicks”.

At another dinner three years later Trump told the obese Christie he had to lose weight. Addressing him like one of the contestants in Miss Universe, the beauty contest organisation that he owned, Trump said “you gotta look better to be able to win” in politics.

Trump returned to the theme of girth during the 2016 presidential campaign, exhorting Christie to wear a longer tie as it would make him look thinner.

Meanwhile, Kushner is not the only subject of Christie’s wrath. The author is scathing about Michael Flynn, the retired general who was briefly national security adviser before resigning over his dealings with Russia, and who is now cooperating with the special counsel and awaiting sentencing for lying to the FBI.

In one of the book’s more memorable put-downs, Flynn is dubbed “the Russian lackey and future federal felon”. Christie also calls the former general “a train wreck from beginning to end … a slow-motion car crash”.

However, one central character escapes relatively unscathed: Trump himself. The president is utterly fearless and a unique communicator Christie writes – and his main flaw is that he speaks on impulse and surrounds himself with people he should not trust.

Christie gives a detailed account of his effort to be named as Trump’s vice-presidential running mate in the summer of 2016, after his own bid for the Republican nomination for president failed. He detects yet again the hand of Kushner – and that of his wife and Trump’s beloved daughter, Ivanka Trump – working against him. An anonymous “high-ranking Trump staffer” is depicted calling to warn that “the family is very upset that he says it will be you”. A mollifying call from son Eric Trump follows but that is as close as Christie gets. Trump chooses ultra-conservative Indiana politician, Mike Pence, after a mystifying wait. Christie repeatedly says he was not disappointed.

US attorney general, the other role Christie would have accepted, also eluded him. As with most appointments he is scathing about the man who got the job, Jeff Sessions, whom he calls “not-ready-for-prime-time” and whose recusal from the Russia investigation he blames for its ever-growing scale. Trump did apparently offer Christie “special assistant to the president in the White House”, which he turned down, prompting from the president-elect “an expression that said maybe he hadn’t heard me right”.

Christie would have taken chair of the Republican National Committee and seemed poised to get it. But according to Christie, once again Trump’s family worked against him. In a near-comic scene, Reince Priebus, the RNC chair who would become Trump’s first chief of staff, offers him role after role in a frantic attempt to fulfil the directive from Trump to “make Chris happy”. One by one, Christie turns down labor secretary, homeland security secretary and ambassadorships in Rome and the Vatican.

Christie is relatively forgiving of Kushner in the context of the infamous June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower between the candidate’s son-in-law, his son Donald Jr, his campaign manager and a group of Russians, some with Kremlin ties, offering “dirt” on his Democratic presidential opponent, Hillary Clinton. Bannon memorably told the author Michael Wolff the meeting was “treasonous” but Christie writes that taking the meeting was merely “dumb” or, in the case of Kushner and Trump Jr, a “sign of profound inexperience”. He faults Trump’s response to Robert Mueller’s investigation into links with Russia, but does not go into detail about the work of the special counsel.

He does, however, contend that Kushner misjudged two Russia-related firings: that of Flynn in February 2017 and most famously that of the FBI director James Comey in May the same year. According to Christie, Kushner thought firing Flynn would end talk of links between the Trump campaign and Russia – it did not – and that firing Comey would not provoke “an enormous shit-storm” in Washington. It did.

“Again,” Christie writes, having detailed conversations with Kushner in which he was acting in an informal capacity, “the president was ill served by poor advice.”

The book officially comes out two weeks from today; this is only the tip of a very juicy iceberg of coverage to come. Ryan Lizza points out that staffing really isn't the problem...

Any book that argues, as this one apparently does, that Trump’s real problem is just a staffing issue isn’t worth reading https://t.co/deJrVXFgzY

— Ryan Lizza (@RyanLizza) January 15, 2019

...then acknowledges that yes, staffing is part of the problem:

Ok, maybe there are some minor staffing issues pic.twitter.com/EjpGUoDqbS

— Ryan Lizza (@RyanLizza) January 15, 2019

Grab the popcorn and get comfy. This is going to be fun. Click here to read my previous posts about Chris Christie. 

Tuesday afternoon update. Some history from Steve Kornacki:

I saved the NY Post cover from one of the most memorable stories I followed in my NJ days: U.S. Attorney Chris Christie’s 2004 takedown of the Democratic governor’s top donor, Charles Kushner pic.twitter.com/4bT28Ez2sP

— Steve Kornacki (@SteveKornacki) January 15, 2019

A little Googling delivered the story below, which was published in the New York Post on July 15, 2004 under the headline "Sex Gal Now Helping Feds -- Hooker Turns On Kushner." I don't think it's the story referenced in Kornacki's tweet, which, if I squint really hard, appears to be dated July 14, but it does provide an overview of what happened and I have to ask. Could the Kushners be any classier? And how cool would it be if Sex Gal, if she's out there somewhere, would come forward and tell her side of the story?

The hooker hired by New Jersey real-estate tycoon Charles Kushner to carry out the steamy videotaped seduction of a key tax-fraud witness against him is cooperating with federal authorities, The Post has learned.

The blond bombshell agreed to testify against Kushner after she was given two options – cooperate or face arrest, according to sources familiar with the case.

Kushner, 50, was arrested Tuesday on charges he set up and taped the compromising motel-room sex romp in a bid to intimidate the witness – his brother-in-law William Schulder, who had worked for Kushner, according to a criminal complaint filed in Newark and prosecutors.

Schulder – who is married to Kushner’s sister, Esther – had been helping the feds investigate tax fraud and campaign-contribution violations allegedly committed by his brother-in-law, said Newark U.S. Attorney Christopher Christie.

Kushner recruited the prostitute – described by sources as a slender high-priced call girl – to lure Schulder to a motel room for secretly videotaped sex after two co-conspirators Kushner had hired failed to find a hooker to do the job.

The seductress Kushner recruited was “a high-end call girl for an elite escort service in Manhattan,” a source familiar with the case told The Post.

She’s “very attractive – really, really pretty,” with “shoulder-length, dirty-blond hair,” said the source.

Kushner paid her from $7,000 to $10,000 to lure Schulder to a motel for sex early last December so a videotape of the torrid tryst could be sent to his wife, according to the complaint.

The call girl delivered – enticing Schulder to a room in the Red Bull Inn in Bridgewater a day after he had “rescued” her outside a nearby diner when she asked for a ride, claiming her car had conked out, the complaint says.

Kushner had a tape of the X-rated encounter mailed to his sister in May – after some of his associates were notified they were targets of the federal probe, the complaint says.

But instead of being intimidated, his sister and her husband were enraged and reported the dirty deed to authorities.

The feds located the call girl – through a phone number she had given Schulder, sources said. She agreed to cooperate, rather than face prosecution, they said.

A bid to use the same scam to videotape a second witness having sex failed when the man targeted by Kushner resisted another call girl’s erotic overtures, the criminal complaint said.

The witness was Kushner’s former chief bookkeeper, Robert Yontef.

Kushner was released on $5 million bond on Tuesday after pleading not guilty to witness tampering, obstruction of justice and promoting interstate prostitution.

A top fund-raiser for New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevy and other Democrats, he became the target of federal investigators after a number of lawsuits were filed against him accusing him of financial mismanagement – including illegally using money from his businesses for political contributions.

Some of the suits were filed by Kushner’s close relatives, including his brother Murray, in a bitter family feud over their financial empire.

The two brothers had inherited the business from their father, Joseph, a Holocaust survivor, and built it up over the years – until Charles told his brother in 1999 they could no longer work together.

Update #2 on Friday afternoon. Politico published an excerpt from the book, with more details about Christie's interactions with Jared:

And Jared began to detail his ancient grievances against me. “He tried to destroy my father,” Jared said.

“There was a dispute inside the family,” Jared reminded Donald, severely underplaying the sordid details of the felony indictment of Charles Kushner and subsequent guilty plea and imprisonment. In Jared’s version, his uncle’s lawyer brought the matter to me, and I collected damaging evidence from members of the family who already hated his father. He implied I had acted unethically and inappropriately but didn’t state one fact to back that up. Just a lot of feelings — very raw feelings that had been simmering for nearly a dozen years. Those feelings were now, finally, coming to a boil in front of the man who had brought all this heat on the Kushner family — me.

“My father made those people rich, and they did nothing,” Jared said. “They just benefited from my father’s hard work. And those are the people who turned him in.”

As Jared spoke, he never raised his voice. But some strong emotions are not dependent on volume. Jared delivered his in a soft quiver. As he continued, his voice began to crack.

“It wasn’t fair,” he said.

He said I had worked with a bookkeeper who’d stolen private information. He said that once I got involved in the case, I said false things about his father and, after the guilty plea, I made his father stay in prison longer than he was supposed to. He had it down to the exact number of additional days. Jared said I did all of that because I was vindictive and ambitious and untrustworthy.

“This was a family matter,” Jared said, “a matter to be handled by the family or by the rabbis” — not by a hard-charging federal prosecutor.

Jared glanced at me, then fixed his gaze on his father-in-law, Donald. “How can he be trusted to handle the transition?”

As Jared plowed through this litany, I didn’t dignify his decade-old rantings with a response of any kind. I just didn’t speak. Not to correct his version of the record. Not to add crucial details. I didn’t say a word. I looked right at him. I kept thinking to myself, What is this? — and shooting perplexed looks at Corey and across the desk at Donald. How long are we going to let this go on?

Finally, Donald spoke up.

“Jared, if you were in Chris’ position, you would have done exactly the same thing. It was a big case against a famous person who had done something wrong, and he did what he had to do. You’re a lawyer. You would have done exactly what Chris did if you would have had that job.”

Trump stopped there for a moment, letting his words sink in. Then he said one more thing that I didn’t expect to hear: “And your other problem was you didn’t know me at the time. Maybe if you would have known me, maybe I could have helped.”

I wasn’t entirely sure what Donald meant by that. But as I sat there and soaked it all in, the thoughts in my head had more to do with Donald than with Jared. (Read the article here.) 

Chris Christie For Attorney General? - Updated

Chris Christie is at the White House

— Michael Del Moro (@MikeDelMoro) November 8, 2018

Who in their right mind would join the Trump administration at this point? My belief is that anyone with a brain and a pulse is frantically trying to get out before they're destroyed. (There are rumors that Trump alums are already having difficulty getting jobs post-White House.) Does Chris Christie really want to be Attorney General? It's possible. His name is on some of the lists I've seen. Will he get the job? Maybe. But consider the following.

Back in July, 2016, after Christie was considered for VP but not chosen, I wrote a post titled Unintended Consequences. It included this:

Does Chris Christie regret putting a man named Charles Kushner in jail back in 2005, when he was a U.S. attorney? Possibly. Is that the reason he wasn't chosen to be Donald Trump's running mate? Possibly. In a story dated March 4, 2005, the New York Times explains what happened:

NEWARK, March 4 - Charles Kushner, a multimillionaire real estate executive, philanthropist and one of the top Democratic donors in the country, was sentenced on Friday to two years in federal prison after pleading guilty to 18 counts of tax evasion, witness tampering and making illegal campaign donations.

Mr. Kushner, 50, built a construction business begun by his father into a private real estate empire that owned more than 25,000 apartments, millions of square feet of commercial and industrial space and thousands of acres of developable land.

But Mr. Kushner also became embroiled in a bitter family feud over the business and how proceeds were distributed. That dispute, plus his growing prominence as a political financier, helped lead to his downfall. The intrafamily acrimony was such that Mr. Kushner retaliated against his brother-in-law, who was cooperating with federal authorities, by hiring a prostitute to seduce him. He then arranged to have a secretly recorded videotape of the encounter sent to his sister, the man's wife.

The two-year sentence was the most Mr. Kushner could have received under a plea agreement, reached last September with the United States attorney, Christopher J. Christie, that called for 18 to 24 months in prison. But it was less than the sentence of nearly three years that Mr. Christie had sought in recent weeks after concluding that Mr. Kushner had failed to show "acceptance of responsibility" for his crimes as required by the plea deal. Read the article here. 

What does this have to do with the current Veepstakes? Charles Kushner's son Jared is now married to Ivanka Trump. He's The Donald's son-in-law and word on the street is that Jared Kushner does not want the man who put his father in jail on the ticket. How about that! (Read the entire post here.)

Jared didn't want Christie as the VP nominee and I've also seen reporting that claims Jared was behind Christie's dismissal as head of the transition team, once it became clear that there really was going to be a transition. In spite of the happy talk coming from the White House, insisting that Jared and Chris work well together and get along just fine, I'd bet that Jared still hates Chris Christie with the fury of God's own thunder. (Hat tip: Aaron Sorkin.) I just can't see Chris Christie being welcomed into the Trump White House as long as Jared is still there.

Update. Some thoughts from Josh Marshall about the Acting Attorney General:

Here's the part that I'm most focused on. This [firing Jeff Sessions/installing Whitaker] is clearly a corrupt act as to intention. We should now clearly see the Mueller probe as under direct attack, under immediate threat and likely to be damaged. However, I do not think we should assume this was well-planned or thought out. This isn't meant to be pollyanna-ish. It's really, really bad. But to me the Comey firing was instructive. It was also really, really bad. But it was also clear that it was impulsive, poorly thought out and in many ways counterproductive. It led immediately to the intensification of the investigation and the appointment of Robert Mueller. I think it's possible this move will have unpredicted outcomes which will be damaging to Trump.

Relatedly, Mueller is a career player in US law enforcement. Whitaker appears to be basically a punk. For all the fanfic we see about Mueller from the resistance, he's not a member of the resistance. He's never going to go rogue. He's a man of the Department of Justice. If Whitaker is the lawful AG I think he will follow his guidance and oversight to the degree it is lawful. But Mueller is clearly smarter than Whitaker and much, much more experienced. What I don't expect is that he would be cowed by bureaucratic game-playing. So I suspect we're in a slow motion Saturday Night Massacre but one that is on-going rather than done and in which the particulars of how it plays out are less predictable than we might imagine. (Read the entire post here.)

Update #2. More from TPM, posted at 7.56 a.m. Friday morning:

After the White House was met with rejection from two potential attorney general candidates, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is becoming a likelier possibility, according to a Thursday Politico report. 

President Donald Trump reportedly thinks that Christie deserves the post after patiently enduring the humiliation of being completely passed over during the 2016 transition. 

Christie was spotted at the White House on Thursday for a meeting with Jared Kushner about prison reform. He is reportedly working to mend his relationship with Kushner, one that has been acrimonious since Christie landed Kushner's father in jail. 

Per Politico, Christie could, however, face calls to recuse himself from special counsel Robert Mueller's probe if he got the job due to his role in Trump's 2016 election. A recusal would almost certainly earn Trump's enduring fury, as former attorney general Jeff Sessions knows well.

Interesting. This both reinforces my belief that at this point wise people aren't willing to destroy their futures by working for this president and challenges my belief that there's no way Christie would even be considered as long as Jared is around. Is it possible that Christie has sufficiently abased himself to earn Jared's forgiveness? Maybe, but imagine the scene: Big, loud, in-your-face New Jersey tough guy Chris Christie, slobbering all over slender, baby-faced born-on-third-base-thinks-he-hit-a-triple presidential son-in-law Jared... The mind reels. 

Even if Christie eventually gets the job, things are still pretty humiliating for him. On top of having to suck up to Jared Kushner, he'll have to live with a narrative that says he only got the job because no one else wanted it. The Politico article referred to above is headlined "Sessions' job is hard to fill. Enter Chris Christie." Yikes. (Read it here.) Who are the two smart people who said no? Their names will probably surface eventually; the New York Daily News is running a story that says Kris Kobach, Lindsey Graham, Pam Bondi and Rudy Giuliani are under consideration along with Christie. Read it here.

Update #3. AJ speaks some truth about the Christie situation: "[N]o one on the campaign impregnated him"

Always interesting when Trump reinforces that those who supported him deserve jobs.
Christie did (albeit late in the game) and no one the campaign impregnated him so he’s good to go. https://t.co/i7JkxPUmbu

— A.J. Delgado (@AJDelgado13) November 9, 2018

Update #4 on Monday, November 12. From Politico:

A scandal not nearly as infamous as Bridgegate could have major implications for former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie if he's nominated to become the next U.S. Attorney General. 

In 2016, the Christie administration paid a $1.5 million settlement to a former assistant county prosecutor who claimed the administration took over his office and fired him, all with the aim of dismissing the office's 43-count indictment against several of the governor's allies that embarrassed one of Christie's major contributors. 

That whistleblower, Bennett Barlyn, told POLITICO on Monday that he has grave concerns about Christie becoming the nation's top law enforcement official, and his case could take on new relevance, with the next attorney general poised to take over the department that oversees the special counsel's investigation in the 2016 election.

Barlyn said that if Christie is nominated, the Senate should look at this case as just one way the former governor wielded justice, both as governor and U.S. Attorney, for political ends. Barlyn noted that during Christie's time as U.S. Attorney,  some companies entered into deferred prosecution agreements with the office in which, rather than face prosecution, they paid Christie's allies millions of dollars to monitor them. (Read the rest of the story here.)

Insulting ... To Nixon

Mid-afternoon update: Just when I thought I'd had enough "memories of Nixon" for one day, look who stopped by the White House to visit the POTUS:

Henry Kissinger’s White House visit is a haunting.  https://t.co/DCMsS38SuF

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) May 10, 2017

New Republic calls it "a haunting" and says the meeting was "rich with historical echoes." Read it here.

And one more thing: Wouldn't you have loved to be a fly on the wall when Kissinger passed Jared Kushner in the hallway?

Original post:
The president's firing of FBI Director James Comey is being compared, by some, to the infamous Saturday Night Massacre during the Watergate crisis. So much so that the Nixon Presidential Library felt compelled to defend their man:

FUN FACT: President Nixon never fired the Director of the FBI #FBIDirector #notNixonian pic.twitter.com/PatArKOZlk

— RichardNixonLibrary (@NixonLibrary) May 9, 2017

And here's what The Guardian, a British newspaper, had to say about that:

Comey was investigating the Trump campaign over alleged collusion with Russia – and Trump has fired him.

To the naked eye, that looks like obstruction of justice. It is quite true that a US president has the power to fire an FBI director. But it has only happened once before. (Bill Clinton dismissed William Sessions in 1993 for using a government plane for private business.) That’s because, as Harvard’s Prof Noah Feldman argues, the secure tenure of the FBI director has been understood as an inviolable norm, part of America’s unwritten constitution – designed to safeguard the independence of law enforcement from political interference. 

That is what Trump has trampled on. It’s why scholars and others are saying that, if the day ever comes when articles of impeachment are tabled against Trump, the first will be a charge of obstruction of justice. That was article 1 of the rap sheet against Richard Nixon too – though it’s striking that the library of the disgraced former president swiftly tweeted that their man had never actually sunk as low as firing an FBI director. Trump’s position is now so perilous that comparisons to Nixon are deemed insulting … to Nixon. (Read the story here.) 

Ode To Jared

You're Jared Kushner and you learn that you've been selected as one of Time magazine's 100 Most Influential people. That has to feel good.

You're Jared Kushner and you learn that no less than Henry Kissinger is writing the laudatory paragraphs that will accompany your picture. That has to feel good.

You're Jared Kushner and this is what Kissinger writes about you:

hilariously lukewarm writeup by Kissinger on Jared Kushner for the TIME 100 pic.twitter.com/mZyrMjIqGW

— Katherine Krueger (@kath_krueger) April 20, 2017

You're Jared Kushner and that has to feel really, really bad.

Late afternoon update: From Vox.com, five things of note in Kissinger's Ode to Jared:

1. The entire thing is the most lukewarm of lukewarm praise, about as generic and uninspired as it comes. One academic I follow on Twitter called it “the letter of recommendation you never want an advisor to send,” which sounds about right.
2. It may have been legitimately hard for Kissinger to say much more about someone who has no formal qualifications in foreign policy or experience in government and is now occupying arguably the most important policy role in the White House. Kissinger can’t be more specific because Kushner doesn’t really have any specific accomplishments in government to point to, other than marrying astutely.
3. In private life, contra Kissinger, Kushner doesn’t have a lot of successes. His tenure as head of the New York Observer was disastrous, his family real estate company’s flagship skyscraper has low occupancy rates and a serious debt problem, and it’s been credibly reported that his dad bought his place at Harvard with a $2.5 million donation.
4. It’s doubly biting because Kissinger is famous in Washington for his ability to flatter people in power in order to gain influence over public policy. If this is the best that America’s foremost master of diplomatic compliments can do — well, that’s pretty embarrassing for Kushner.
5. That last bit, about “flying close to the sun,” is particularly delicious. It’s a reference to the Greek fable of Icarus — son of the famous inventor Daedalus, who built a pair of wings held together with wax. Icarus used his father’s invention to fly too close to the sun, which melted the wax and caused poor Icarus to plummet to his death. It’s a morality tale about hubris, the arrogant belief in your own ability to accomplish more than you can. Kissinger’s phrasing heavily implies that, in this case, Kushner is Icarus.