Every day seems to bring a new unfavorable Trump-related “bombshell” report — at a time when a bombshell book is flying off the shelves at bookstores and has zoomed to the top of the Amazon.com bestsellers list. Some are calling the New York Times’ latest a “game changer” (when every day seems to bring anew “game changer.”)

President Trump gave firm instructions in March to the White House’s top lawyer: stop the attorney general, Jeff Sessions, from recusing himself in the Justice Department’s investigation into whether Mr. Trump’s associates had helped a Russian campaign to disrupt the 2016 election.

Public pressure was building for Mr. Sessions, who had been a senior member of the Trump campaign, to step aside. But the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, carried out the president’s orders and lobbied Mr. Sessions to remain in charge of the inquiry, according to two people with knowledge of the episode.

Mr. McGahn was unsuccessful, and the president erupted in anger in front of numerous White House officials, saying he needed his attorney general to protect him. Mr. Trump said he had expected his top law enforcement official to safeguard him the way he believed Robert F. Kennedy, as attorney general, had done for his brother John F. Kennedy and Eric H. Holder Jr. had for Barack Obama.

Mr. Trump then asked, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” He was referring to his former personal lawyer and fixer, who had been Senator Joseph R. McCarthy’s top aide during the investigations into communist activity in the 1950s and died in 1986.

Most likely, the departed Mr. Cohen is somewhere where he should have brought an asbestos suit.

But, that aside, the Times report further includes:

The lobbying of Mr. Sessions is one of several previously unreported episodes that the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, has learned about as he investigates whether Mr. Trump obstructed the F.B.I.’s Russia inquiry. The events occurred during a two-month period — from when Mr. Sessions recused himself in March until the appointment of Mr. Mueller in May — when Mr. Trump believed he was losing control over the investigation.

The special counsel has received handwritten notes from Mr. Trump’s former chief of staff, Reince Priebus, showing that Mr. Trump talked to Mr. Priebus about how he had called Mr. Comey to urge him to say publicly that he was not under investigation. The president’s determination to fire Mr. Comey even led one White House lawyer to take the extraordinary step of misleading Mr. Trump about whether he had the authority to remove him.

The New York Times has also learned that four days before Mr. Comey was fired, one of Mr. Sessions’s aides asked a congressional staff member whether he had damaging information about Mr. Comey, part of an apparent effort to undermine the F.B.I. director. It was not clear whether Mr. Mueller’s investigators knew about this episode.

Mr. Mueller has also been examining a false statement that the president reportedly dictated on Air Force One in July in response to an article in The Times about a meeting that Trump campaign officials had with Russians in 2016. A new book, “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” by Michael Wolff, says that the president’s lawyers believed that the statement was “an explicit attempt to throw sand into the investigation’s gears,” and that it led one of Mr. Trump’s spokesmen to quit because he believed it was obstruction of justice.

Ty Cobb, the White House lawyer dealing with the special counsel’s investigation, declined to comment.

Go the link to read the rest. So this means the GOP is starting to take this investigation more seriously, rather than play defense lawyer, enabler, and silent cheering section to keep Trump in power?

NOT:

The Senate Judiciary Committee, which is supposed to be probing whether the Russian government actively colluded with President Donald Trump’s campaign team to influence the outcome of the 2016 election, made its first public criminal referral Friday, targeting a former British intelligence agent who sought to reveal that alleged collusion.

The recommendation fuels criticism that the committee’s investigation has splintered along party lines, with Republicans reportedly more interested in probing matters involving Trump’s 2016 rival, Hillary Clinton, as Trump grows increasingly frustrated with the FBI’s Russia probe.

In a letter to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher Wray, Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) recommended criminal charges against Christopher Steele for potentially violating the U.S. law that prohibits individuals from making false statements to federal investigators.

Steele is the author of a now-infamous dossier of research memos that include damaging claims about Trump and his business dealings in Russia. The dossier was commissioned in June 2016 by Fusion GPS, a Washington, D.C.-based research firm.

FACT: This ain’t 1974. Those who assume the GOP will act as the GOP acted then must remember the old saying. “Assume” makes an “ass” of “u” and “me.”

JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief

Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.

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