1600: Democrats are ready to give Trump agita for AG Whitaker

Taking it to the Matt

If President Donald Trump thought naming Matthew Whitaker as acting attorney general was going to solve his Robert Mueller problem, Democrats who appeared on the Sunday talk shows are determined to make him think again.

The next House Judiciary Committee chairman, Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-Manhattan), said Whitaker will be the first witness brought before the panel when Democrats take over in January.

"He's totally unqualified," Nadler said on ABC's "This Week." "And his only qualification seems to be that he wants to be — that the president wants him to be the hatchet man to destroy the Mueller investigation."

The Democratic leaders of the House and Senate, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, aren't waiting for January. They wrote to the Justice Department's top ethics officer Sunday seeking Whitaker's "immediate recusal" from the investigation.

Schumer said on CNN's "State of the Union" that if there's no recusal, he would try to attach legislation to the federal spending bill, due by Dec. 8, that would prevent Whitaker from interfering in Mueller's investigation. "There's no reason we shouldn't add this and avoid a constitutional crisis," New York's senior senator said.

Republicans and the White House portrayed the Democrats' suspicions as unfounded, never mind Whitaker's extensive record of attacks on the Russia investigation and Trump's transparent eagerness to get rid of Jeff Sessions and make himself the boss of Mueller's boss.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said on CBS' "Face the Nation" that he spoke with Whitaker and "I'm confident that Mr. Mueller will be allowed to do his job without interference." White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, on "Fox News Sunday," said Whitaker's past comments as "a private citizen" shouldn't disqualify him. For more, see Scott Eidler's story for Newsday.

Janison: Passing Trump's bar

Ethics questions about Whitaker should not cost him much of Trump’s confidence, writes Newsday's Dan Janison.

Whitaker doesn't give off a "see-where-the-facts-lead" vibe. But his resume as a partisan operative has Trump appeal, and the president always warms to people who defend him on TV. He also seems to like the look of the hulking former football player for the University of Iowa.

Prepping the Trumposcopies

House Democrats are planning deep and personal exams of Trump on several fronts. 

A Democratic aide on the House Oversight Committee tells The Wall Street Journal they will be looking at Trump's involvement in paying hush money to porn star Stormy Daniels. The Journal reported Friday that Trump, contrary to his public denials, was involved in nearly every step of the deal arranged by lawyer Michael Cohen. If Trump violated campaign-finance law, Nadler said that might  "very well be an impeachable offense.”

Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), in line to chair Oversight, said he wants to look at possible Trump violations of the Constitution's emoluments clause through his business interests. "We've got to figure out when is he acting on behalf of the American people in a lot of his decisions or is he acting on his own behalf," Cummings said.

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) said Democrats may examine whether Trump is threatening corporate interests linked to CNN and The Washington Post to retaliate against coverage he doesn't like.

While Democratic leaders have sought to hose down calls from the left to fast-track impeachment, Pelosi told The Atlantic, “What Mueller might not think is indictable could be impeachable.” 

The clouds follow him

Critics roasted Trump for canceling a visit to an American World War I military cemetery 50 miles from Paris on Saturday because of rain. The White House said the weather grounded his helicopter, but a White House official from the Obama administration, Ben Rhodes, said they commonly put backup transportation options in place.

"Those veterans the president didn’t bother to honor fought in the rain, in the mud, in the snow — & many died in trenches for the cause of freedom," tweeted former Secretary of State John Kerry, a Vietnam War veteran. "Rain didn’t stop them & it shouldn’t have stopped an American president." 

Among the leaders who made it out despite the rain to pay respects at memorials and cemeteries were France's Emmanuel Macron, Germany's Angela Merkel and Canada's Justin Trudeau.

It rained again on Sunday, but this time Trump kept to his schedule and visited another U.S. military cemetery just outside Paris. He spoke without an umbrella. On Sunday night, the White House said the Saturday visit was scrubbed because a motorcade would have been too disruptive for traffic.

A lonely American in Paris

In more ways than one, Trump stood apart from America's allies as they gathered in Paris for the centennial of the World War I armistice.

He was absent when a line of world leaders walked shoulder-to-shoulder in a somber, rain-soaked procession as the bells marked the exact moment that fighting ended — 11 a.m. on Nov. 11, 1918. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders gave security as the reason.

Trump caught up to them for a ceremony and speeches at the Arc de Triomphe, where Macron rebuked the U.S. president's “America first” approach to international affairs. “Nationalism is a betrayal of patriotism,” Macron said. “By saying, ‘Our interests first, who cares about the others,’ we erase what a nation holds dearest, what gives it life, what gives it grace and what is essential: its moral values."

Trump did have a separate meeting with Macron, who was far chummier with Angela Merkel.

Trump also joined other leaders at a Saturday night dinner and Sunday lunch. Sources told The Associated Press that some of those private conversations were terse and Trump was grumpy. But he had a wide smile for Russia's Vladimir Putin, who arrived separately at the Armistice ceremony after Trump.

Wrong time for fire and fury

Trump angered Californians, including firefighter groups, with a tweet blaming the state's deadly wildfires on "gross mismanagement of the forests" by officials there and threatening to cut off federal funding for such efforts.

"The president's message attacking California and threatening to withhold aid to the victims of the cataclysmic fires is ill-informed, ill-timed and demeaning to those who are suffering, as well as the men and women on the front lines," said Brian Rice, president of California Professional Firefighters.

The Pasadena Fire Association tweeted that the fires in Southern California are "urban interface fires and have NOTHING to do with forest management."

What else is happening:

• Offering zero evidence, Trump is telling people around him that Puerto Rico is using federal disaster relief aid to pay off debt — a rationale to stop financing recovery efforts, Axios reports.
• More evidence of Trump's diplomatic failure in North Korea surfaces with satellite photos showing Kim Jung-Un building up his missile bases.
• Conway, who coined the phrase "alternative facts," offered a mind-boggling defense for the White House using a doctored video to falsely accuse CNN's Jim Acosta of physical aggression against a White House intern who grabbed for his mic. "Oh, well, that's not altered, it's sped up. They do it all the time in sports to see if there's actually a first down or touchdown," said Conway.
• Trump sought to undermine confidence in any Florida recount process with another Twitter taunt. 
• With the election over, Trump has gone largely quiet about the migrant caravan. But the 5,600 troops he ordered to the southwest border remain there in what Pentagon officials privately deride as an expensive waste of time and resources, and a morale killer, The New York Times reported.
• France's Le Monde reports that in an April meeting, Trump chastised leaders of the Baltic states — Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia — for starting wars in the 1990s. He had confused the Baltics with the Balkans, where the breakup of Yugoslavia sparked conflicts two decades ago.
• A new spate of insults by Trump against black reporters last week, along with his verbal assaults against African-American lawmakers and candidates, has renewed criticism that he traffics in racist tropes, depicting his targets as unintelligent, untrustworthy and unqualified, The Washington Post writes.
• First lady Melania Trump and first daughter Ivanka Trump rarely appear together, and chief of staff John Kelly has to manage a sometimes uneasy coexistence between their two staffs, The New York Times reported. One point of friction was Melania announcing her Africa trip while Ivanka had been planning one of her own.
• Carnage continues in Afghanistan where a suicide bomber struck near an anti-Taliban rally, killing at least four people. 
• No comment issued from the White House early Monday after the second jet in a month from the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan crashed into the sea northeast of the Philippines. Its two pilots were rescued safely.