The news this morning is that a Senate Intelligence Committee staffer was arrested for lying to the FBI about leaking to reporters, and prosecutors also secretly seized years’ worth of a New York Times reporter’s phone and email records. Trump is very happy.

As near as I can tell, most of the leaks were related to Carter Page. The Right is furious about the “deep state” leaks; not so much that a foreign policy advisor to the Trump campaign appears to have been a Russian asset. Go figure.

Lying to the FBI is a bad thing, but I’m concerned that the Justice Department is going after reporters.

I mentioned the upcoming Inspector General report on the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton awhile back. It seems it is about to be released. Mike Levine at ABC News got some leaks about what’s in it.

The Justice Department’s internal watchdog has concluded that James Comey defied authority at times during his tenure as FBI director, according to sources familiar with a draft report on the matter.

One source told ABC News that the draft report explicitly used the word “insubordinate” to describe Comey’s behavior. Another source agreed with that characterization but could not confirm the use of the term.

In the draft report, Inspector General Michael Horowitz also rebuked former Attorney General Loretta Lynch for her handling of the federal investigation into Hillary Clinton‘s personal email server, the sources said.

That much, the Right will be happy with. But mostly what they’re blasting Comey about is the infamous Comey letter.

The draft of Horowitz’s wide-ranging report specifically called out Comey for ignoring objections from the Justice Department when he disclosed in a letter to Congress just days before the 2016 presidential election that FBI agents had reopened the Clinton probe, according to sources. Clinton has said that letter doomed her campaign.

Before Comey sent the letter to Congress, at least one senior Justice Department official told the FBI that publicizing the bombshell move so close to an election would violate longstanding department policy, and it would ignore federal guidelines prohibiting the disclosure of information related to an ongoing investigation, ABC News was told.

Of all the things that Clinton has claimed doomed her campaign, the Comey letter is one she’s got a legitimate complaint about. Her poll numbers dipped as soon as the letter was made public, and that was just a week before the election.

Nevertheless, ABC News has confirmed that Horowitz’s draft report went on to criticize senior FBI officials, including Comey and fired FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe, for their response to the late discovery of a laptop containing evidence that may have related to the Clinton investigation. …

… It took weeks for the FBI to start analyzing the laptop’s contents, and Horowitz’s draft report criticized senior FBI officials for how long the laptop languished inside the bureau, sources told ABC News.

In other words, Anthony Weiner’s laptop had been sitting around in the bureau unexamined for months, and then a week before the election somebody looked at it and saw that it had a bunch of Clinton emails on it that had been forwarded by Huma Abedin. And before they had even looked at the emails Comey rushed to Congress and said they were reopening the investigation into Clinton. A week before the election.

Loretta Lynch is getting called out for the meeting with Bill Clinton on the tarmac while HRC was still under investigation. The meeting was stupid on both of their parts, yeah, but I think if they were really plotting something they would have met somewhere less public.

The best comment on this is from Kevin Drum:

This is going to be such a clusterfuck when it’s released. Comey obviously deserves censure for influencing the election in the face of nearly unanimous advice to the contrary. At the same time, I’m really not sure I can stand to watch as Trump and his fellow Republicans pretend to be outraged over the fact that Comey was responsible for making Trump president. Maybe the IG can give me a heads up about the release date so that I can plan to be at the North Pole that day photographing penguins. Or polar bears. Or vast expanses of ice. Or whatever they have there. Anything would be better than paying attention to the news that day.

Trump and his minions have been impatiently waiting for a report that will reveal the FBI went easy on “crooked Hillary” and that the FBI was acting out of animus for Trump. A report that says the FBI was unfair to Clinton and helped elect Trump is not what they are waiting for, but they’ll manage to blow it up as a victory for their side anyway. Just watch.

Not that they’re doing a good job of keeping their stories straight, as the stories tend to devolve from “that didn’t happen” to “well, it happened, but it’s not what you think” to “okay, maybe it’s what you think, but it wasn’t illegal” to “HILLARY’S EMAILS, DAMMIT.” Even so, before we get around to wallowing in schadenfreude about Manafort’s possibly getting his bail revoked any minute now, let us consider what appears to be one hell of a coincidence about the stories.

This relates to the infamous Trump Tower meeting of June 2016. One of the tidbits we learned from the letter from Trump’s lawyers to Bob Mueller that was leaked to the New York Times is that yeah, okay, the statement released in Donald Junior’s name that the meeting was really about Russian adoptions had been dictated by Trump. They’d been denying it for months, even though everybody pretty much knew the statement was Senior’s and not Junior’s.

Now, here’s the coincidence.

I think about this every day.

Trump discussed adoption policy with Putin one day before ‘dictating’ son’s statement about ‘adoptions’ https://t.co/COP7SVsshl

— Natasha Bertrand (@NatashaBertrand) June 4, 2018

In July 2017 Trump and Putin both attended the G20 Summit in Hamburg, Germany. Per Josh Marshall, on July 7, while Trump was en route to Germany, the New York Times contacted the White House for comments on a story it was preparing about the Trump Tower meeting (here’s the original story, dated July 8). The White House asked for some time to respond, since Trump was literally up in the air at the time. A conference call was arranged for the next day, but then the White House canceled. The Times then sent a list of questions to the White House, but I take it the White House didn’t respond.

This happened during the G20 meeting (you’ll probably remember this) on July 8, the day the Times‘s article came out. Josh Marshall:

During the day Trump had his first meeting as President (and apparently ever) with Vladimir Putin. They discussed various issues including U.S. charges of Russian interference in the 2016 election. As is normally the case, they were accompanied by key aides on both sides. But the two men met a second time that evening during a gala dinner for the heads of state at the summit. This meeting was unplanned and reportedly included only Trump, Putin and Putin’s translator. No Americans. (This left everyone gobsmacked last year. But it was before these other details and thus the full context of the meeting became clear.) There were different accounts of the meeting. The President later said it was only about 15 minutes. A senior White House officials told CNN it lasted as long as an hour. What did the two men talk about? Two weeks later, the President sat for an interview with The New York Times and said he and Putin talked about Russian adoptions.

Here’s the passage.

TRUMP: She was sitting next to Putin and somebody else, and that’s the way it is. So the meal was going, and toward dessert I went down just to say hello to Melania, and while I was there I said hello to Putin. Really, pleasantries more than anything else. It was not a long conversation, but it was, you know, could be 15 minutes. Just talked about — things. Actually, it was very interesting, we talked about adoption.

HABERMAN: You did?

TRUMP: We talked about Russian adoption. Yeah. I always found that interesting. Because, you know, he ended that years ago. And I actually talked about Russian adoption with him, which is interesting because it was a part of the conversation that Don [Jr., Mr. Trump’s son] had in that meeting. As I’ve said — most other people, you know, when they call up and say, “By the way, we have information on your opponent,” I think most politicians — I was just with a lot of people, they said [inaudible], “Who wouldn’t have taken a meeting like that?” They just said——

The “adoption” story may have pre-dated the dinner meeting, however, because this appeared in the Times’s original story:

In his statement, Donald Trump Jr. said: “It was a short introductory meeting. I asked Jared and Paul to stop by. We primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children that was active and popular with American families years ago and was since ended by the Russian government, but it was not a campaign issue at the time and there was no follow up.”

He added: “I was asked to attend the meeting by an acquaintance, but was not told the name of the person I would be meeting with beforehand.”

Given that Hamburg is several hours ahead of the U.S. east coast, it’s hard to know which came first — the dinner meeting or the initial statement. In any event, one does wonder if Donald and Vlad were whispering to each other about keeping their stories straight.

Now I draw your attention to this handy dandy timeline from FactCheck.org. It tells us that by July 9 the Times was reporting that Junior had been “promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton before agreeing to meet with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer during the 2016 campaign.” And on July 11,

The New York Times reports that “the president signed off” on Donald Trump Jr.’s initial statement to the Times “that was so incomplete that it required day after day of follow-up statements.”

(See also Donald Trump Jr.’s evolving statements.)

If you keep going with the timeline, you see a series of media reports saying Trump dictated the response to Junior, and the White House — through lawyers and Sarah Sanders — denying this. But now the lawyers have admitted yeah, he dictated this. And the Trumpettes haven’t even bothered to stick to the Russian adoption story; the next version of the story was that yeah, they expected dirt on Hillary but the Russians didn’t dish any. So no collusion, see?

Anyway — the Manafort story is that Mueller has strong evidence that Manafort has been involved in witness tampering while out on bail, and he has asked a federal judge to revoke his bail. So stay tuned.

Friedrich Hayek was, of course, the author of the book The Road to Serfdom, first published in 1944, which was enormously influential in the last half of the 20th century. Hayek’s basic arguments would become a cornerstone of movement conservatism and libertarianism.

For those who don’t remember: Hayek was certain that the ultimate evil that would destroy democracy and individual liberty is central planning of the economy. Free markets equal free people. The key to maintaining individual liberty is to support the free exercise of capitalism and markets. Conversely, it was self-evident to conservatives that capitalism and tyranny cannot co-exist, and that if (for example) Communist countries would become more capitalist, individual liberty for their citizens would follow closely behind.

These days, of course, a lot of serious thinkers are asking if capitalism and democracy can co-exist, but let’s put that aside for now.  Eric Levitz at New York magazine points out that Trump is assuming the role of Central Economic Planner, and the Right seems to not be objecting.

On Friday, President Trump formally endorsed a plan to keep struggling coal power plants open — by forcing energy-grid operators to purchase power from them at uncompetitive rates — for the sake of “national security.”

This proposal is bonkers for a variety of reasons. The notion that it is in America’s national-security interest to prop up the coal industry is patently absurd. Our nation’s power grid has plenty of alternative sources of reliable energy — and keeping coal plants in business exacerbates climate change, which is itself a major national-security threat (if you believe those tree huggers at the Pentagon, anyway). Further, the costs of subsidizing inefficient, dirty energy will fall partially on consumers in the form of higher electricity bills. Which is to say: The administration has found a way to combine the (supposed) short-term economic costs of environmental protection with the long-term ecological risks of laissez-faire.

Where is the principled outraged from conservative intelligensia? Oh, wait … is there a conservative intelligensia any more?

The libertarian crew at Reason magazine do object (mildly) to Trump’s tariffs, but they haven’t gotten around to the coal power plan yet. I checked at National Review — nope, although their site search engine isn’t working so I couldn’t look past the front page. I checked at the American Conservative, which does occasionally make sense and seems to be the last refuge of conservatives who haven’t utterly sold out. Nothing. Maybe they need more time.

You know that if Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama had proposed the coal power plan, Republicans would all be screaming about Communism at the top of their lungs and hauling out their dog-eared copies of Hayek to frantically point at relevant paragraphs. But with the Right, the evil of an act does not depend on what is done but who is doing it. Just as white evangelicals threw Jesus and the Gospels under the bus to support Trump, the American Right in general seems ready to turn a blind eye to a blatant violation of Hayek’s principles, for the sake of … what? Their tribe? Or are they all in on the take?

Back to Levitz:

But the craziest aspect of the Energy Department’s proposal isn’t that it puts the profits of coal magnates above the survival of the planet. That much, we have learned to expect. The wild thing about Trump’s plan is that it rests on an interpretation of executive authority that is incredibly dangerous to the conservative movement.

Generally speaking, the president is not supposed to be able to unilaterally direct subsidies at his favorite industries; that’s Congress’s job. But Trump’s attempt to pay back his coal-magnate donors would never survive on Capitol Hill — it is that rare energy policy that is opposed by wind power, solar energy, and oil companies, alike.

There is absolutely no justification for it, except that Trump wants to do it. Somewhere in his developmentally arrested brain he may dimly remember that he promised to save coal miner jobs, and maybe this is his plan to save them. Or else his company is poised to exploit the coal industry somehow. That’s all I can figure.

Thus, the administration has decided to simply deliver the handouts itself — by invoking the Defense Production Act, a Cold War-era law that empowers the president to “effectively nationalize private industry to ensure the U.S. has resources that could be needed amid a war or after a disaster.”

As Bloomberg notes, this authority was most famously exercised by Harry Truman, who used it to cap wages and impose price controls on the steel industry during the Korean War.

The steel thing happened in 1952, and conservatives at the time threw a fit about it.

If our current president can wield this power to prop up coal plants, it’s hard to see why a future one couldn’t use it to shut them down:

This takes us to Levitz’s argument, that a future president with socialist leanings (the article is illustrated with photos of Bernie Sanders) could use the same presidential authority to shut down fossil fuel industries altogether, because how will America defend itself if its major coastal cities are underwater?

Similarly, one could imagine the Warren-Sanders administration finding a progressive use for the expansive trade powers that Trump has claimed. Creatively abusing another Cold War-era law, Trump has assumed the right to unilaterally impose tariffs on any nation he chooses — so long as he offers a specious national-security justification for doing so. After the next Democratic president uses the Defense Production Act to rapidly reduce America’s carbon emissions, it could threaten massive tariffs on any (developed) foreign nation that refuses to aggressively pursue its own emission-reductions targets — thereby turning America’s coveted consumer market into a force for climate justice.

Levitz says there are arguments that, under existing law, a president could override pharmaceutical patents to provide low-cost drugs to beneficiaries of federal programs. A president might also use executive power to turn post offices into public banks. And perhaps, if the next Democratic president is saddled with an obstructionist Republican Congress, that sort of thing could happen.

But if Trump’s plan for propping up the coal industry isn’t challenged by Republicans in Congress, I think we can officially declare that Hayek is dead. I can’t say I’m sorry, since his arguments were way too simplistic. Unregulated industrial capitalism in the 19th century created Communism, after all. And the young folks today are far more open to socialist ideas than their parents were. If there are still any Republicans who believe Hayek was right, let them speak now or forever hold their peace.

Update: Arghh — the SCOTUS ruled in favor of the homophobic wedding cake baker.

The letter from Trump’s lawyers to Bob Mueller that the New York Times published is a bit of a slog, so if you want to skip it just go straight to this analysis by David Kris at Lawfare that refutes the letter’s legal claims.

First, per David Kris, Trump can’t argue that he doesn’t need to be interviewed because other evidence is available.

I’m not going to try to sum up this paragraph:

Second, even if Trump did order Comey to drop the investigation, the letter says, his defense lawyers have identified a criminal statute, 18 U.S.C. § 1505, that couldn’t have been violated because (they say, as have some courts) it doesn’t apply to FBI investigations. In connection with this legal argument, the letter seems to argue several fallback positions, although they are presented in ways I found a bit hard to follow. Among them are claims that there was no FBI investigation; that if there was an investigation it was closed (or at least was thought to be closed by certain members of the White House staff) by the time the president spoke to Comey about Flynn; that Flynn didn’t lie to the FBI; that Flynn did lie to the White House about various matters (and was fired for it); and that in any event he ultimately pleaded guilty so there could not have been any obstruction. I am not sure how the special counsel will react to all of this, except that he and his team will likely get at least as far as Charlie Savage of the New York Times did in noting that there are several statutes that may have been violated, see, e.g., 18 U.S.C. § 1512, and that obstruction need not succeed to be a crime.

Third — well, I’ll go to the letter from Trump’s lawyers here —

Many in the media have relied on mischaracterizations of the President’s remarks in a May 11, 2017, interview with Mr. Lester Holt of NBC News, to claim or suggest that in that interview, the President stated that the real reason he fired Comey is the Russia investigation.49 Unfortunately, so has Mr. Comey. He testified that: “I [take] the president, at his word, that I was fired because of the Russia investigation.”50 Regrettably, no one asked Mr. Comey when he thought the President had actually said any such thing because, in fact, the President did not ever say such a thing.

We all know what Trump said in the Lester Holt interview, but here it is for the record.

Trump actually started out to make the argument that Comey was incompetent, but he did say the fatal words —

But regardless of recommendation, I was going to fire Comey knowing there was no good time to do it

And in fact, when I decided to just do it, I said to myself — I said, you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story. It’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should’ve won.

In the continuing interview, Trump did say he expected the investigation to continue, which Trump’s lawyers claimed supported Trump’s support for the investigation. But since then there have been copious reports — a regular plethora of reports — about all the ways Trump has had to be talked down from shutting down the investigation by firing anybody involved in it. And how many times has he badmouthed the investigation on Twitter?

Here’s another bit from the letter —

There have also been press reports — citing anonymous sources — about comments the President allegedly made during a May 9, 2017, meeting with Russian government officials that Comey was a “real nut job’’ and that “great pressure because of Russia” has been “taken off” him.54 Assuming arguendo the President said any such things, it (i) does not establish that the termination was because of the Russia investigation (regardless of the validity of such an opinion, presumably any President would not want someone he considered a “nut job” running the FBI); and (ii) in any event would be irrelevant to the constitutional analysis. A short, separate, classified response addressing this subject will be submitted to the Office of Special Counsel.

They are arguing that Trump didn’t say this; that if he did say it, it doesn’t necessarily mean the termination had anything to do with the  Russia investigation; if he did say it, that doesn’t necessarily mean Comey is a “nut job”; but would you want a “nut job running the FBI?; and none of this is unconstitutional, so screw you.

Back to the David Kris analysis:

Finally, the letter says, although Trump may have helped Donald Trump, Jr. lie about the meeting at Trump Tower in which a purported Russian government official was supposed to provide dirt on Hillary Clinton, that was just “a private matter with the New York Times,” not an interview with the FBI, and therefore not a crime about which he can be questioned. As arguments for Trump’s innocence despite his prior statements, these arguments are strained. As arguments against even asking him about the statements, they strike me as pretty silly.

The final sentences of the letter are perhaps the most meaningful, albeit unintentionally. They say that Trump’s lawyers are prepared to “provide . . . the answers” to the Special Counsel’s questions, apparently instead of having Trump do so himself, in order to help “preserve the dignity of the Office of the President of the United States.” I spent a moment wondering, but in the end I think they didn’t mean this the way it sounds.

A large part of the rest of the letter is given over to arguments that boil down to “if the President does it, it’s not illegal.” Yeah, somebody tried that one already.

Jonathan Chait writes,

Should Trump’s legal case prevail in the courts — and the legality of such broad claims remains largely untested — it would confer upon any president, but immediately Trump, the ability to open charges against anybody the president wants to charge, and prevent investigations of anybody the president wants to protect, beginning with himself. This is l’état, c’est moi rendered as a formal legal case.

I can’t believe that any court would support the position of Trump’s lawyers. But I’ve been wrong before.

The problem with the current administration is that there are more atrocities coming out of it than I have time to comment on. But I do want to say a couple more things about Puerto Rico.

First, was obvious even just days after Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico that the death could would continue to climb because of conditions on the island. And, not surprisingly, the Harvard study is reporting that many people died because they lacked access to medical services.

When Trump strutted around San Juan as if he’d just won a world championship title it ought to have been his “heckufa job, Brownie” moment. The tossing of paper towels to a crowd after such massive devastation was a perfect metaphor for Trump’s incompetence. But there was so little follow up news coverage of what was happening on Puerto Rico that the point was never driven home.

And what isn’t being discussed on Fox & Friends, Trump doesn’t know about.

Alvin Chang reported at Vox:

This week, we learned that Hurricane Maria may be the deadliest natural disaster on US soil in the past 100 years, according to a new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine. The study found that most of the estimated 4,600 deaths were because of delayed medical care.

But on cable news, the top story by a wide margin was ABC canceling Roseanne after a racist tweet from its star, Roseanne Barr. In the New York Times, Roseanne was on the front page and Puerto Rico was on A13.

This was yet another example of the media putting the Puerto Rico story on the back burner — something it’s been doing for a long time now. We analyzed the amount of airtime the major cable news networks devoted to Puerto Rico and found that after the first month, coverage has been virtually nonexistent….

I can see how an average American who is not a news junkie might have assumed that Puerto Rico was being taken care of, since few ever said anything otherwise. But it really wasn’t. And New Orleans got covered much more thoroughly.

I don’t blame reporters. I think those reporters assigned to Puerto Rico were doing their best:

Kaur: Has it been frustrating to see other stories instead dominate much of the news cycle? Have you felt like the story hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves?

Sutter: I do find that frustrating. I’m not sure people on the mainland realize how severe the crisis has been — and continues to be.

In March, I was reporting a story on people in a remote town, Maunabo, where people were dying because they lacked basic services like electricity. Breathing machines weren’t working. People couldn’t get medical help. There was just this cloud of despair that hung over the place.

I worried that our readers might not get it — or might not care, that they’d be focused on a Trump tweet. PR is part of the United States — but it can feel like living on another planet down here. The experiences people are having, and that we’re reporting, don’t translate for many Americans.

The Washington Post is running a story that says the NAFTA re-negotiation that Trump insisted on broke down because Mike Pence, who was the one negotiating for the White House, insisted that any new treaty contained a five-year sunset clause. Mexico and Canada took the position that the sunset clause was a non-starter because it left business in the dark about planning for trade rules in the future.

Why in the world would the Trumpettes have insisted on a sunset clause? That makes no sense.

See also Trump’s Tariffs Threaten National Security and Trump has officially put more tariffs on U.S. allies than on China. Of course he has. Canada should hustle and offer Ivanka some trademarks, already!