How Trump Digs a Deeper Legal Hole When He Tweets - Bloomberg

How Trump Digs a Deeper Legal Hole When He Tweets

Violating the lawyer’s rule of thumb that clients remain quiet is rarely a good idea.

by Paul Barrett

12 June 2017, 6:00 pm AEST

U.S. President Donald Trump.  Photographer: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA

President Donald Trump can’t be stopped from tweeting and otherwise talking about the Russia investigation. But by continuing to expostulate, he risks not only incriminating himself but irritating the prosecutor overseeing the probe. 

Some observers speculated that the arrival of Trump’s personal lawyer, Marc Kasowitz, would spell the end of the president’s off-the-cuff comments. Not so. Whatever Kasowitz has told his longtime client, the president is still running his mouth. 

On Sunday morning, the president tweeted: “I believe the James Comey leaks will be far more prevalent than anyone ever thought possible. Totally illegal? Very ‘cowardly!’”

Two days earlier, during a testy Rose Garden press conference, he accusedComey of perjury during his testimony last Thursday before the Senate Intelligence Committee. In addition, Trump declared that the hearing failed to establish that he’d colluded with the Russians to manipulate the 2016 election or tried to stop the federal probe of whether Trump aides helped the Russians with their hacking. “No collusion. No obstruction. He’s a leaker,” Trump said, the last part referring again to Comey, whom Trump fired as FBI director in May. Asked if he’d testify under oath, Trump answered, “100 percent.”

So, why does this matter? First, there’s the attorney’s rule of thumb that a client anywhere in the vicinity of a criminal investigation ought to keep his trap shut. “It’s 100 percent clear that the rule in the normal criminal case is not a word from the client,” says Harry Litman, a former federal prosecutor who teaches at UCLA Law School and practices with the firm Constantine Cannon. “A president may have different political imperatives, but Trump’s tweet logorrhea does not reflect a well-thought-out strategy.”

Appearing on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina imagined warning Trump: “You may be the first president in history to go down because you can’t stop inappropriately talking about an investigation that, if you just were quiet, would clear you.” 

A talkative client runs the risk of intensifying prosecutorial scrutiny. In this case, the prosecutor is Special Counsel Robert Mueller. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that it’s highly unlikely Mueller saw the Comey hearing as exonerating Trump of obstruction of justice. To the contrary, Mueller is almost certainly investigating the related Michael Flynn and Comey-firing angles.

Flynn  probe: According to Comey, the president said in February that he hoped Comey would drop the part of the investigation focused on Flynn, the dismissed national security adviser. Three times during the Friday press conference Trump replied to questions by unreservedly denying he said any such thing to Comey. If Mueller finds Comey more credible on this point—and Comey says he’s turned over to Mueller contemporaneous notes of all his conversations with the president—Trump’s public denials make it more likely the special counsel will view the president as a liar.

Comey firing: Mueller will also explore whether Trump’s firing of Comey was part of an attempt to obstruct the investigation. Comey certainly thinks so, having testified, “I take the president at his word that I was fired because of the Russia investigation.” Trump himself provided the basis for Comey’s position. During a May 11 television interview, the president admitted that he was thinking about the Russia probe when he decided to oust Comey.

Trump, through his comments, has limited his lawyer’s maneuvering room. The “100 percent” promise means that if Mueller asks the president to testify under oath—and Mueller eventually will ask—the president has unilaterally disarmed himself from arguing that there’s some reason he shouldn’t have to be questioned under penalty of perjury.

Finally, there’s the squishier issue that Trump’s attempts to smear Comey may well bother Mueller on a personal level. When he was FBI director in the 2000s, Mueller worked with Comey, then the deputy U.S. attorney general. The Boston Globe observes: “The two men have had similar careers. Both have been top federal prosecutors. Both have been FBI directors. Several people who know both men say they respect each other.”

Mueller has a reputation for independence, and he’s not going to go after Trump to vindicate a former colleague. But even prosecutors are human beings. There’s simply no way that the president’s attempted assassination of Comey’s character can fail to color Mueller’s opinion of Trump’s credibility and stature. 

A caveat: Trump’s status as president probably protects him from criminal prosecution while he’s in office. And impeachment, the constitutionally enshrined method for removing a president, isn’t likely as long as Republicans control Congress. 

But let’s imagine Mueller develops evidence of wrongdoing by Trump. Let’s further imagine that after due deliberation, Mueller issues a report, say, next year. That report could come just in time to help shape the 2018 elections and the chances that a potential Democratic-controlled Congress does take a swing at impeachment, using the report as its guide.

The president may not be thinking about this possibility, but his lawyers should be.

Four BRICs don’t quite make a wall - Economist

Four BRICs don’t quite make a wall

Brazil, Russia, India and China have done even better than forecast—thanks mainly to China

EMERGING markets have been through a lot over the past four years. The “taper tantrum” in 2013 (prompted by fears of a change in American monetary policy); the oil-price drop in 2014; China’s botched devaluation of its currency in 2015; and India’s botched “demonetisation” of much of its own currency in late 2016 (removing high-value banknotes from circulation). But 2017 has started more brightly. Indeed, for the first time in two and a half years, the world’s four biggest emerging economies (Brazil, Russia, India and China, known as the BRICs) are all growing at the same time.

Russia’s GDP bottomed out at the end of 2015 (using seasonally adjusted figures) after the longest recession since the 1990s. It has expanded at a gathering pace for the past three quarters. Higher oil prices have helped, though Russia cannot profit fully from the improved market by ramping up sales without violating the production limits that caused the market’s recovery.

During the collapse of the rouble in late 2014 and early 2015, it was easy to forget some of Russia’s economic strengths, such as its consistent trade surpluses and its substantial foreign-exchange reserves (which never fell below $300bn). As Russia has regained its footing, the rouble has rebounded, gaining 15% against the dollar over the past 12 months, making it one of the world’s best-performing currencies.

Brazil’s torment has been even more prolonged. Its economy contracted for eight consecutive quarters as commodity prices tumbled, a president was impeached and a corrupt political class was impugned. Brazil’s political scandals remain far from resolved, but at least the weather has improved. Generous summer rains in states like Bahia contributed to a bumper harvest of soyabeans and corn in the early months of the year. That helped Brazil’s GDP expand by 1% in the first quarter (an annualised pace of over 4%). Since bumper harvests cannot be repeated every three months, some economists fear GDP may shrink again in the second quarter, but many forecasters believe growth will be positive for 2017 as a whole.

Faster growth has not jeopardised price stability. Rather, inflation has eased in Brazil, just as in Russia and India. Whether lower inflation will allow Brazil’s central bank to make further big interest-rate cuts partly depends on a new political furore engulfing Michel Temer, the president. If that prevents the government from reforming social security and curbing fiscal excess, the central bank may be loth to soften its stance dramatically, lest fiscal indiscipline and monetary easing combine to weaken the currency and push up prices.

If inflation has been too high in recent years in Brazil, it has been too low in China. Thanks to downward pressure on prices and the currency, China’s economy actually shrank in dollar terms in 2016 for the first time in 22 years. But the deflationary threat has since receded and the yuan has strengthened this year against the greenback, as capital outflows have been tamed. Indeed, China’s central bank may have resumed adding to its foreign-exchange reserves, which increased by $24bn in May, having declined by about $1trn since their peak in 2014 as capital fled.

Will the resumption of growth in Brazil and Russia (and the return of “dollar growth” in China) breathe new life into the BRICs brand? The term was coined by Jim O’Neill, when he was chief economist of Goldman Sachs, and took on a life of its own. The countries’ leaders began holding an annual summit, inviting South Africa to join as an additional member. They also set up a development bank, with its headquarters in Shanghai but headed by an Indian, which now has operations in all five countries, having approved its first loan to Brazil in April. (Lord O’Neill has always felt that South Africa, a country of only 56m people with a GDP of less than $300bn, was too small to stand alongside his original quartet. And so far this year, the fifth member’s fortunes have diverged from the others’, as South Africa’s economy slipped into a recession in the first quarter.)

Having christened the BRICs in 2001, Goldman Sachs later sketched out their futures over the next five decades in a paper entitled “Dreaming with BRICs”, published in 2003. The investment bank then upgraded those growth projections in 2011 in light of the BRICs’ strong performance over the previous decade. That proved to be a mistake. Of the four economies, only China’s dollar GDP has kept pace with those optimistic 2011 projections (see chart). The others have fallen short of them by a combined $3trn.

A similar disappointment befell stockmarket investors. The BRIC equity index compiled by MSCI has lost 40% since its 2007 peak. In October 2015 Goldman Sachs folded one of its BRIC equity funds, meant for American investors, into a broader emerging-market product (“a more holistic solution in emerging-markets equity”, in its words). These setbacks seemed to vindicate the curmudgeonly sneer cited by Peter Tasker, of Arcus Investment, dismissing the BRICs as a “Bloody Ridiculous Investment Concept”.

But if the BRICs have not sustained the euphoria of 2011, they have amply fulfilled the original “dream”, as articulated by Lord O’Neill in 2001 and quantified by his team two years later. Even after their recent tribulations, their combined GDP ($16.6trn) remains far greater than the Goldman team envisaged back in 2003 ($11.6trn). Only Russia has failed to live up to those early expectations. China has easily surpassed them. In Brazil, growth was slower than Goldman Sachs projected but the country’s real exchange rate appreciated further than they imagined, boosting its GDP in dollar terms.

Moreover, at some point after 2015, the BRICs became unmodish enough to count once again as good investments. Since Goldman Sachs closed its fund, the BRIC stockmarket index has gained almost 20%.

The trickiest problem for the BRIC concept may be its final consonant. China contributed about half of the club’s GDP in 2001 and now accounts for fully two-thirds of it. China is also home to most of the group’s biggest companies. Eight out of the ten largest stocks in the MSCI BRIC index are from China, including Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent (a tech trio that have their own acronym, BAT). As its markets grow and open up to capital inflows, China seems destined to become an asset class in its own right, one that is hard to contain in a “holistic” emerging-market fund, let alone a narrower four-country vehicle. The biggest threat to the BRIC idea may not be the quartet’s economic shortcomings but the singular success of its largest member.

This article appeared in the Finance and economicssection of the print edition under the headline "Awaking with BRICs"

Donald Trump state visit: Timing now in doubt after President 'voices protest fears' - Independent

Donald Trump state visit: Timing now in doubt after President 'voices protest fears'

The President does not want to visit the UK until the public supports him, sources say

• Emily Shugerman New York  
• Sunday 11 June 2017 17:54 BST

Donald Trump has reportedly told Theresa May that he does not want to visit the UK soon for fear of large-scale protests against him.

Ms May invited Mr Trump to Britain seven days after his inauguration. Now he apparently wants to wait until the British public supports him coming.

The US President made the 

admission in a recent phone call to the Prime Minister, a Downing Street adviser who was present for the call told The Guardian. The aide said Ms May seemed surprised. 

Mr Trump – never a favouriteamong British voters – stoked outcry in recent weeks for attacking London Mayor Sadiq Khan in the wake of terrorist attacks in the city.

The President ridiculed Mr Khan’s calls for calm, and later condemned the Mayor’s “pathetic excuse” for his statements.

The comments drove even Ms May to say that Mr Trump was “wrong”. Some MPs – and Mr Khan himself – suggested she cancel Mr Trump’s visit to the UK.

“Show some bottle please PM,” David Lammy, senior Labour MP, tweeted. “Cancel the state visit and tell Trump where to get off.”

Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, has also expressed his support for cancelling the trip.

A spokesperson for Ms May, however, told Reuters that “the Queen extended an invitation to President Trump to visit the UK and there is no change to those plans”.

British police stopped sharing intelligence with the US about the Manchester terrorist attack after photos of the investigation were leaked to the media.

The Foreign Office was also reportedly upset with Mr Trump’s decision to remove the US from the Paris climate agreement.

Mr Trump did not visit the UK on his first foreign trip as President, choosing instead to visit Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the Vatican. He also attended summits in Italy and Belgium. The White House recently announced that his next foreign trip will include a visit Poland.

Businessman Woody Johnson has been named as the new US ambassador to the UK, but the President has yet to formally nominate him.

The Independent has contacted the White House for comment.