House Democrats cast big nets in Trump probes

Binge watch-dogging

The suspenseful final episodes of the Robert Mueller show have yet to air, nor has the mystery still in production by prosecutors in the Southern District of New York. Here come the spinoffs.

The House Judiciary Committee on Monday launched a wide-ranging new probe of President Donald Trump, his White House, his campaign and his businesses. The central questions: Did Trump and his administration engage in obstruction of justice, corruption and/or abuse of power, and is there evidence to make a case for impeachment?

“Over the last several years, President Trump has evaded accountability for his near-daily attacks on our basic legal, ethical, and constitutional rules and norms," said committee chair Jerry Nadler (D-Manhattan).

The panel sent document requests to 81 people and entities linked to the president and his associates. They include Trump's sons Donald Jr. and Eric; son-in-law Jared Kushner; former personal secretary Rhona Graff; Allen Weisselberg, chief financial officer of the Trump Organization; and former top White House aides Hope Hicks, Sean Spicer and Stephen Bannon.

That's a lot, but that's not all. The Democratic chairs of the intelligence, oversight and foreign affairs committees on Monday requested a trove of documents from the White House and State Department on Trump's meetings and phone calls with Russia's Vladimir Putin  — encounters so secretive that senior U.S. officials were kept in the dark and Trump reportedly confiscated an interpreter's notes. The lack of information raises "profound national security, counterintelligence and foreign policy concerns,” the chairmen said.

But wait, there's more. The Ways and Means Committee is preparing a request for years of Trump's tax returns and girding for a court fight to get them, NBC News reported.

Trump dismissed via tweet the Nadler probe as a futile effort “in search of a crime” and told reporters, "It’s all a hoax.” For more, see Newsday's story by Laura Figueroa Hernandez.

Dances with Fox

The latest New Yorker magazine has a deep look at the mutual back-scratching relationship between Trump and his favorite network, Fox News, as well as Fox chairman Rupert Murdoch.

Their alliance, along with Trump's animus toward Fox rival CNN, set the stage for the president's 2017 moves pressuring the Justice Department to block the merger of AT&T and CNN's parent company, Time Warner, the report said. Trump's then-top economic adviser, Gary Cohn, tried to thwart the lawsuit as an improper effort to exact revenge for unfavorable news coverage.

Tweeted conservative lawyer George Conway, Kellyanne Conway's Trump-loathing husband: "If proven, such an attempt to use presidential authority to seek retribution for the exercise of First Amendment rights would unquestionably be grounds for impeachment." Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) said a congressional investigation is warranted.

The New Yorker also added details to a story first reported in January 2018 by CNN on how Fox News executives before the 2016 election spiked the explosive story on Trump's alleged affair with Stormy Daniels and the buying of her silence.

The Fox reporter, Diana Falzone, said her boss, Ken LaCorte, told her: "Good reporting, kiddo. But Rupert wants Donald Trump to win. So just let it go." LaCorte denied the quote. The Stormy story stayed buried until The Wall Street Journal (also Murdoch-owned) reported it more than a year later.

Janison: More wall hurdles

The Senate now likely will join the House in a resolution blocking Trump's declaration of a national emergency to build his border wall. Trump's expected veto likely will stick because the House and Senate are extremely unlikely to muster the two-thirds vote needed to override it.

But that won't be game over, writes Newsday's Dan Janison. Lawsuits are pending challenging Trump's emergency order, and even a vetoed congressional resolution could bolster the legal argument against him. That's because the measure would mark an official, forceful bipartisan statement from majorities in both houses of Congress, where the Constitution places the power for spending.

Hanoi heartbreak

Where should the blame go for the failure of Trump's summit on North Korea last week? Was it Kim Jong Un's intransigence on denuclearization? Was it overconfidence and underpreparation by Trump?

The president tweeted that it could be the fault of House Democrats for scheduling the hearing featuring Michael Cohen while Trump was in Vietnam. "For the Democrats to interview in open hearings a convicted liar & fraudster, at the same time as the very important Nuclear Summit with North Korea, is perhaps a new low in American politics and may have contributed to the ‘walk,’ ” Trump said.

But the White House tried again Monday to cast Trump's performance favorably, quoting editorials and commentaries that concluded "Trump Won by Walking Away."

Cuomo: Trump is scared

During an interview with The Atlantic, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said he has sensed fear in Trump during two White House meetings with the president.

"He is without long-term strategy and tactics, and he’s scared,” Cuomo said. Scared of what?

“All these investigations. All these people, what do they know?” Cuomo explained. Trump “led the life he led, played life the way he played it. Now the closest people to him are talking. That’s frightening. I think it has him clinging tighter to his base. Uh, which is not enough to win.”

Cuomo is still mulling whether he would run for the Democrats' 2020 nomination if former Vice President Joe Biden doesn't.

Trading down

New studies by some of the world's top trade economists suggest the U.S. has been a net loser so far from Trump's trade wars, Bloomberg News reported.

Economists from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Princeton University and Columbia University found that tariffs imposed last year by Trump were costing U.S. companies and consumers $3 billion a month in additional tax costs and companies a further $1.4 billion in dead-weight losses, which means inefficiency, and causing wide disruption to manufacturers' supply chains.

In a separate paper, four economists including Pinelopi Goldberg, the World Bank’s chief economist, put the annual losses from the higher cost of imports alone for the U.S. economy at $68.8 billion. That was offset in part by gains to U.S. producers from the protectionism and the tariff revenue, but the net annual loss for America's economy was $6.4 billion, the paper said.

What else is happening:

• The Trump administration won praise from a rare source, comedian/activist Jon Stewart, for how the Justice Department has run the Sept. 11 Victim Compensation Fund. After Trump retweeted of a video clip of the remarks, Stewart told the Daily News he hoped Trump will support a bill to replenish the fund.
• Matthew Whitaker, who served as acting attorney general for just over three months after Trump fired Jeff Sessions, has left the Justice Department. He served less than a month as senior counselor to Attorney General William Barr. Whitaker's next career move is unknown, NBC News reported.
• As Trump put out a spread of Big Macs and Chick-fil-A for the North Dakota State University football team, which won the NCAA Division I championship, The Washington Post noted Trump has never singled out a women's championship team for a White House visit. Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama regularly invited women’s teams.
• Felix Sater, a figure in the Trump investigations, is accused in a lawsuit of hacking a Hollywood friend's electronics for confidential information about her celebrity clients. Sater was a past Trump business associate and Michael Cohen's partner in pushing the Trump Tower Moscow project. His accuser, Stella Bulochnikov Stolper, is the former manager of Mariah Carey.
• The latest Democrat to join the 2020 presidential race, former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, is casting himself as a pragmatic uniter who accomplished liberal goals in a politically divided state. He has hedged on progressive causes like Medicare for All and the Green New Deal.
• The New Yorker's story on Trump and Fox News says the president has a 1-to-10 rating scale for the loyalty of the network's on-air personnel. Political anchor Bret Baier is a 6. Sean Hannity is a 10. "Fox & Friends" co-anchor Steve Doocy is so adoring that he gets a 12.