By Allan Lengel
ticklethewire.com

Donny Deutsch, a good friend of embattled lawyer Michael Cohen, says President Trump has a lot to worry about in New York where the U.S. Attorney is dealing with the Cohen case.

Deutsch, who considers himself an ex-friend of Trump, appeared Wednesday night on NBC’s Late Night With Seth Meyers Show, said of Cohen and Trump:

“I think one of the reasons Trump is so panicked,  I mean, he was his guy. Other than his kids, he was front and center.”

Meyers asks should Trump be worried about Cohen cooperating, to which he says:

“He should be very worried…What’s going to take him down is, and Michael Cohen will be one of the people very important to this, is I believe, the Southern District, and there going to what I call, RICO him.”

Timothy L. O’Brien is the executive editor of Bloomberg Opinion.

Andrew McCabe

By Timothy O’Brien
Bloomberg

Andrew McCabe, who briefly served as acting director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation during the tumultuous months in 2017 after President Donald Trump fired James Comey, is making the rounds to promote his new book, “The Threat.”

Senior law enforcement officials putting their names to sensitive details of ongoing investigations – particularly ones as consequential and fraught as the current examination of the president’s intersection with Russia – is problematic. Going on tour is doubly ticklish. If G-Men are really dedicated to ensuring that justice is served and investigations are sacrosanct, then the public might expect them to remain behind the scenes until a probe runs its course.

To read the full column click here.

Former FBI Director James Comey on ABC’s 20/20.

By Allan Lengel
ticklethewire.com

By Allan Lengel
ticklethewire.com

Suffice to say, the book does not portray President Trump in a flattering light.

“The FBI has always been the nemesis of criminals. Today the FBI is under attack by the president of the United States,’ writes McCabe, a lifelong Republican who is married to a Democrat.

He also takes shots at others, according to a review in the Guardian newspaper:

Pulling no punches, he takes to task Loretta Lynch, Obama’s second attorney general, for her refusal to recuse from the Clinton email investigation while attempting to maintain a show of being above it all. As McCabe sees it, Lynch and Sally Yates, then deputy attorney general, wrongly viewed “the investigation of Hillary Clinton … likely nominee of the Democratic party, who was being supported by the president of the United States, to whom they owed their jobs … as a case they could handle without prejudice”.

According to McCabe, Lynch and Yates “made a feckless compromise”. Specifically, “they designated career professionals in the National Security Division as decision-makers in this case but didn’t unambiguously commit to abide by those people’s decisions”. It was, he writes, “the worst possible choice afforded by the situation”.

It didn’t end there. There is Lynch’s meeting with Bill Clinton at the Phoenix airport and again McCabe does not mince words: “The tarmac meeting was a horrible lapse in judgment by Loretta Lynch. She should have recused herself … she did not – she made things worse.”

With the advantage of hindsight, McCabe is critical of the decision taken by Comey, his boss at the time, to publicly announce the FBI’s recommendation that no charges should be pursued against Hillary Clinton. In “retrospect”, as McCabe frames it, “perhaps I would have said to Comey, ‘Don’t do it. Let’s be the normal Bob Mueller, say-nothing FBI of old.’”

President Trump at his inaugural address in January 2018, via the White House.

By Steve Neavling
Ticklethewire.com

Federal prosecutors have ordered President Trump’s inauguration committee to turn over documents related to donors, spending and event attendees.

The subpoenas, first reported by ABC News, signifies that prosecutors are digger deeper into a commitee that raised $107 million.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan also is trying to determine whether the nonprofit accepted illegal foreign contributions, The New York Times reports. Under federal law, inaugural funds cannot accept foreign donations.

“It is our intention to cooperate with in the inquiry,” inaugural committee spokeswoman Krisitn Celauro told The Associated Press.

The wide-ranging subpoena seeks documents involving the committee’s bank accounts, donors, perks, contracts, vendors, event attendees and foreign contributors.

Prosecutors are investigating crimes ranging from conspiracy to defraud the U.S. and money laundering to mail fraud and making false statements to federal authorities.

Michael Chertoff

By Steve Neavling
Ticklethewire.com

Former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff called President Trump’s border wall “a symbol” and a waste of tax dollars.

Chertoff, who led the country’s Homeland Security Department from February 2005 to January 2009, told Newsweek that a border wall would “fulfill some sort of visual image” for Trump but would do little to prevent undocumented immigrants from coming to the U.S.

““I think the idea of a wall in and of itself is a symbol. It’s not a real tool,” Chertoff said. “It is not an efficient or effective tool.” 

Chertoff said the better alternative to a wall would be comprehensive reform.

“The right way to do border security is to look at the entire system,” Chertoff said. “And that begins with what is pushing people to leave their countries and come to the U.S. in the first place. In some cases, it’s violence and the rule of law not being in existence.” 

By Allan Lengel
ticklethewire.com

Who is Roger Stone, President Donald Trump’s buddy who was arrested last week in Ft. Lauderdale?

A documentary on Netflix, “Get Me Roger Stone,” gives a pretty good insight into the 66-year-old dirty trickster who has done work for different presidents and has a tattoo of Richard Nixon on his back.

What becomes clear is that Stone is a longtime Washington insider who doesn’t mind being called negative things. He loves the attention, good or bad.

If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s definitely worth watching.

U.S. Capitol Building

By Steve Neavling
Ticklethewire.com

The powerful House Oversight Committee will investigate the Trump administration’s decision to prevent the relocation of the outdated FBI headquarters.

Chief among the concerns is Trump’s role in the decision because the current headquarters is a stone’s throw from his Washington D.C. hotel.

The watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington has filed multiple lawsuits, claiming the president violated the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution by tampering with American security to avoid damaging his business. 

Trump’s administration scrapped a longtime plan to move the headquarters to the suburbs and instead wants to build a new building where the current one stands. If the headquarters was relocated, a hotel competitor could replace the current building.

The GSA’s inspector general also has accused the agency’s administrator, Emily Murphy, of misleading Congress about the role the White House played in the project.

Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., will lead the committee’s investigation.

“We have a constitutional job to provide that because we’re a separate but coequal branch of government, and we got a mandate in November to do just that,” Connolly told NBC 4 Washington. “The public clearly wants checks and balances on this president — as they do on every president — and we’re going to take that mission very seriously and that constitutional oath very seriously. I take an oath every two years in this job, and I’m going to live up to that oath.”