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Michael Flynn resigned as President Trump's national security adviser after just 23 days
Lawyers for former top White House aide Michael Flynn have told Donald Trump's legal team they can no longer discuss the investigation into alleged Russia interference in the 2016 US election, media reports say.
The move suggests Mr Flynn may be cooperating with
A day after a years-long effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act collapsed on Capitol Hill, President Donald Trump castigated Republican senators for their inability to pass legislation.
"They look like fools," Trump tweeted on Saturday morning. He also renewed his demand that the Senate abolish a rule requiring 60 votes for some bills, despite the fact that the filibuster had nothing to do with the health-care bill's failure on Friday.
US Senators have set their sights on their next star witness as they probe Trump campaign ties to Russia, saying they want to interview the President’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.
The fallout had hardly settled on the bombshell testimony of James Comey, the fired FBI director who accused Donald Trump of lying and trying to thwart his investigation, before
President Donald Trump's personal attorney Marc Kasowitz, said the president 'never, in form or substance' directed former FBI Director James Comey to stop investigating
Donald Trump and James Comey at the White House in January
Donald Trump’s former FBI director is expected to stop short of accusing the president of obstructing justice when he gives evidence before a Senate committee on Thursday in the latest twist of a saga that has evoked comparisons with the Watergate scandal that brought
Donald Trump attacks FBI director James Comey before he testifies on Russia investigation
Senate Committee to receive update on probe into alleged Kremlin interference in US election
Donald Trump attacks FBI director James Comey before
The president proclaims a successful first month despite falling short on major pledges.
Despite dizzying sound and fury, the president failed to halt immigration from Muslim countries, to label China a currency manipulator, to deliver a serious plan for funding his border wall or to repeal Obamacare—all among his many promises during last year’s campaign. He even weakened ethics rules affecting lobbyists, in the guise of a promised ban.
The Muslim travel ban, Trump’s most consequential and controversial executive order, one of 23 signed so far, lies dead in the courts. He has achieved no noticeable progress on tax reform. The White House is already facing multiple investigations by a Republican-controlled Congress while the intelligence community investigates possible collusion last year between Trump’s campaign and Russia. Trump has appointed just three of the 15 required deputy secretary Cabinet positions; fewer than 40 of the 700 key administration jobs requiring Senate confirmation have been filled.
Presidential historian Douglas Brinkley said Trump was “off to the worst start of a presidency in a very long time”—and that was two days after he’d taken office, before Trump's bellicose calls with foreign leaders, before his National security adviser, Michael Flynn, was forced to resign after just 24 days in the job, before he attacked the nation’s independent courts and declared the media an “enemy of the American people.”
“There's no precedent in the modern history of the presidency for what we've seen over the last month,” said Republican operative Steve Schmidt. “If you combine the dishonesty, the sloppiness and incompetence, the result is deep concern and anxiety across allied capitals, glee in the capitals of foreign enemies, and an American public that regard him one month in with the lowest levels of support in the modern era. We’ve just never seen an American administration collapse from a credibility perspective as quickly as this one has.”
According to Gallup, Trump’s 40 percent approval rating after one month is 21 points below the historical average rating for new presidents in mid-February and 11 points below the lowest mid-February rating for any other new president.
At his news conference last week, Trump touted what he views as significant accomplishments during his first month on the job, calling his talks with foreign leaders "enormously productive," noting that he has already instructed Secretary of Defense James Mattis to submit a plan to defeat ISIS, developed a new council to promote female entrepreneurs and outlined plans to bolster the military and local law enforcement agencies.
Mostly, he spoke in generalities. “I’m keeping my promises to the American people,” he said. “These are campaign promises. Some people are so surprised that we’re having strong borders.”
Trump appears likely to stick to those generalities with the general public, particularly among excited supporters who may be less concerned with the details and more interested in his commitment to decimating the Washington establishment.
“He’s beginning to understand where his power truly lies. Washington is not a safe space for Trump,” said Bruce Haynes, a GOP consultant.
“Trump in the White House feels like a lion caged up in the zoo,” Haynes said. “When he escapes Washington, he is in his natural habitat and becomes his full and complete self. I expect him to find ways to spend more time outside of D.C., with the voters who made him their champion, as opposed to inside D.C., with the bureaucracy that is threatened by him and wants to emasculate him.”
Rallying supporters in Melbourne, Florida, Saturday evening, Trump reveled further in his unlikely electoral win and celebrated the “great movement” he leads, one that is defined mostly in opposition to large blocs and institutions: organized political parties, cultural and socioeconomic “elites” and, most of all, the mass media. “They could not defeat us in the primaries, and they could not defeat us in the general election, and we will continue to expose them for what they are, and most important, we will continue to win, win, win.”
If the scoreboard, aside from a healthy stock market, does not seem to reflect much winning just yet, Trump has an easy explanation — that he “inherited a mess,” a notable shift from his promise last July that “I alone can fix it.”
Despite those attacks on the media, Trump’s own credibility has been weakened by a torrent of falsehoods coming from top surrogates, his Twitter feed and his mouth: unsupported or easily disproved assertions about the inauguration crowd size, crime statistics, claims of fraudulent voting even though he won the election, the size of his Electoral College victory and, on Saturday, a passing statement about a recent terror attack in Sweden. (There wasn’t one.)
Though Trump’s victory validated his cult-of-personality approach to politics, it is no guarantee that the same approach will be effective when it comes to governing itself. Doubts are growing, for instance, among national security experts in both parties about the new administration’s preparedness for its first serious geopolitical test.
“The National Security Council hasn't even met formally. So that means that the very structure that is required in order to provide thoughtful and careful information to the president is not working right now,” Leon Panetta, a Democrat who served as CIA director and secretary of defense under President Barack Obama, said Sunday on NBC’s "Meet the Press." “What happens if there's a major crisis that faces this country? If Russia engages in a provocation, if Iran does something stupid, if North Korea does something stupid, and we have to respond, where is the structure to be able to evaluate that threat, consider it, and provide options to the president? Right now, that's dysfunctional, and that's what worries me a great deal.”
Congressional Republicans, meanwhile, were far more optimistic a month ago about realizing the potential of a governing moment in which they control both houses of Congress and the White House than they are now.
Although relieved that Trump nominated a competent and charismatic conservative, Neil Gorsuch, to the Supreme Court, GOP lawmakers are increasingly frustrated by the president’s inability to focus and worry about their legislative agenda bogging down in a quagmire of daily controversies and petty fights. Many of them, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, have expressed dismay about the president’s constant tweeting.
Sen. John McCain, an elder GOP statesman with little to lose politically at the outset of his final six-year term, is emerging as one of party’s most outspoken anti-Trump voices after delivering a speech this weekend to NATO allies in Munich that was a stunning rebuke to the president.
Suggesting the postwar global democratic order is now threatened by “an increasing turn away from universal values and toward old ties of blood and race and sectarianism,” McCain lamented that the founders of the Munich Conference “would be alarmed that more and more of our fellow citizens seem to be flirting with authoritarianism and romanticizing it as our moral equivalent.”
McCain went further in an interview broadcast Sunday morning on "Meet the Press," sounding an alarm about Trump’s constant efforts to undermine and weaken the media. “We need a free press. We must have it. It's vital. If you want to preserve — I'm very serious now — if you want to preserve democracy as we know it, you have to have a free and many times adversarial press.
“And without it, I am afraid that we would lose so much of our individual liberties over time,” McCain said. “That's how dictators get started.”
From top left, Montenegro’s former prime minister Milo Djukanovic, plotter Nemanja Ristic with Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, informant Mirko Velimirovic, and the two Serbs and two Russians tasked with carrying out the attack
Russia plotted to assassinate the prime minister of a European nation and overthrow its government last year, according to senior Whitehall sources.
An election day coup plot to attack Montenegro’s parliament and kill the pro-Western leader was directed by Russian intelligence officers with the support and blessing of Moscow, to sabotage the country’s plan to join Nato.
Predrag Bogicevic, Nemanja Ristic, Vladimir Popov and Eduard Shirokov, who were allegedly tasked with carrying out the attack
The plot was foiled only hours before it was due to be carried out, but would have caused heavy bloodshed and plunged the tiny country into turmoil on the eve of becoming Nato’s 29th member.
The allegation came as Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, criticised Nato as a “Cold War institution” whose expansion had led to unprecedented tensions in Europe over the past 30 years.
The planned Montenegro coup, scheduled for Oct 16 last year, was one of the most blatant recent examples of an increasingly aggressive campaign of interference in Western affairs, Whitehall sources told the Telegraph.
Boris Johnson, the Foreign Secretary, and his US counterpart, Rex Tillerson, are understood to have discussed the issue last week at their first face-to-face meeting.
Interpol is now hunting two Russians the Montenegrin government says are intelligence officers who hatched the plot.
The pair spent months overseeing the recruitment and equipping of a small force of Serbian nationalists to attack the parliament building, disguised as local police, and kill Milo Djukanovic, the prime minister at the time.
Montenegro's former Socialist prime minister Milo DjukanovicCREDIT: SAVO PRELEVIC/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
The Kremlin has strongly denied any involvement, and the Montenegrin special prosecutor has publically stopped short of alleging Moscow’s involvement in a plot it has blamed on “Russian nationalists”. The country’s pro-Russian opposition bloc says the alleged coup was “fake”.
But British and American intelligence agencies called in to help the Montenegrin authorities unravel the conspiracy are understood to have gathered evidence of high-level Russian complicity.
Encrypted phone calls, email traffic and testimony from plotters-turned-informants are now part of the criminal investigation of 21 conspirators accused of terrorism and “preparing acts against the constitutional order of Montenegro”.
Predrag Bosković, Montenegrin defence minister, told the Telegraph there is “not any doubt” that the plot was financed and organised by Russian intelligence officers alongside local radicals.
Montenegro's defence minister Predrag Boskovic, left, with US defence minister James Mattis at a Nato Defence Ministers council on Feb 16CREDIT: STEPHANIE LECOCQ/EPA
Sources said the plot appeared to have been constructed so it was deniable and could be blamed on rogue Russian agents and nationalists, but evidence showed it was inconceivable it did not have high-level backing.
“You are talking about a plot to disrupt or take over a government in some way," one source said. "You can’t imagine that there wasn’t some kind of approval process.”
Nemanja Ristic, one of the alleged plotters wanted by Montenegrin authorities, was recently photographed standing next to Sergei Lavrov as he visited Serbia.
Alleged plotter Nemanja Ristic, far left, is seen in a photograph with Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov, rightCREDIT: AP
Details of the conspiracy have been disclosed after Sir Michael Fallon, the defence secretary, warned of a “step change” in the Kremlin’s meddling in Western countries during 2016.
The October plot followed repeated warnings from Moscow that Montenegro should abandon plans to join Nato later this year.
Moscow has been keen for the country of 600,000 people to remain inside its own sphere of influence, or at least neutral, and has in the past lobbied hard for naval access to its Adriatic ports.
In the months before the coup was due to take place, the Kremlin is suspected of pouring millions of pounds into a slick pro-Russian election campaign run by the country’s main opposition bloc, the Democratic Front.
The country’s special prosecutor told the Telegraph that the plotters would have mingled with Democratic Front protesters outside the parliament building in the country’s capital, Podgorica, as the election results were announced.
The plan was to attack Montenegro's parliament in PodgoricaCREDIT: ADEL OMERAGIC/ANADOLU AGENCY/GETTY IMAGES
At an appointed sign, the conspirators would have forced their way inside and, in the confusion, colleagues dressed in police uniforms would have also opened fire on the crowd “so that citizens would think that the official police are shooting at them”.
“Had it been executed, such a scenario would have had an unforeseeable consequence," he said.
The prosecutor, Milivoje Katnic, said he had “obtained evidence that the plan was not only to deprive of liberty, but also to deprive of life the then prime minister.”
On Saturday, America’s vice president tried to reassure European nations worried that Donald Trump intends to sell them out while forging a new relationship with Vladimir Putin.
Mike Pence told European leaders at the Munich Security Conference that the new administration would “hold Russia accountable, even as we search for new common ground which as you know President Trump believes can be found”.
US vice president Mike PenceCREDIT: AARON P. BERNSTEIN/GETTY IMAGES
He said the new American president promised to “stand with Europe today and every day”.
But he went on to warn that the failure of some of Europe’s biggest economies to keep their Nato promise of spending two per cent of GDP on their militaries was undermining the transatlantic defence pact.
He said the failure to meet the Nato spending "erodes the very foundation of our alliance".
"Let me be clear on this point: The president of the United States expects our allies to keep their word, to fulfill this commitment and, for most, that means the time has come to do more," he said.
Only five Nato members, including Britain and America, reach the target at present and some of Europe’s biggest economies spend only half that.
America has long complained of Nato partners shirking their end of the alliance’s defence burden, but the election of Mr Trump had ushered in a new “political reality”, the Pentagon chief told his Nato counterparts earlier this week.
