Washington Post

A veteran Washington reporter says he was manhandled by security guards at the Federal Communications Commission, then forced out of the agency’s headquarters as he tried to ask a commissioner questions at a public meeting May 18. John M. Donnelly, a senior writer at CQ Roll Call, said he was trying to talk with FCC Commissioner Michael O’Rielly one-on-one after a news conference when two plainclothes guards pinned him against a wall with the backs of their bodies. Commissioner O’Rielly saw the encounter but continued walking, Donnelly said in a statement through the National Press Club, where he heads the Press Freedom Team. After Commissioner O’Rielly passed, the statement read, one of the guards asked why Donnelly hadn’t brought up his questions while the commissioner was at the podium. The guard then made him leave the building “under implied threat of force,” the statement read.

President Donald Trump warmly welcomed Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to the White House. Just hours later, we found out that President Trump would like to put reporters in jail. There’s a connection here. And it’s not good news for America’s journalists or the citizens who depend on them to hold their government accountable. Both as a candidate and as president, President Trump has shown no regard for the role of a free press in a democracy. New York Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet told me he found appalling Trump’s suggestion, but not entirely surprising. “He doesn’t understand our role. He wants ‘Fox & Friends’ coverage instead,” Baquet said. So Trump’s embrace of Erdogan — who may be the leading jailer of journalists in the world — should come as no surprise. The same goes for his regard for the leadership of Russian President Vladi­mir Putin or Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sissi, clear enemies of a free press in their countries.

On May 16, a brief but violent altercation erupted outside the home of the Turkish ambassador on Washington’s Embassy Row. At least nine people were injured in the fighting. Video taken at the scene would indicate that most of the injured were protesters standing across the street from the ambassador’s residence. At least some of those involved in causing the injuries were guards for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

It’s worth noting that this is not the first time that Erdogan’s bodyguards have been implicated in harassing or assaulting people on American soil. When Erdogan visited Washington in March 2016, Turkish journalists charged his guards with verbally attacking them and, in at least one instance, kicking a journalist hard enough to make him bleed. But the incident on Tuesday was of another scale entirely. In the video, a group of men, many in suits and wearing badges, charge into the group of demonstrators, who were protesting Erdogan’s policies in Turkey, Syria and Iraq, according to a Facebook video. Turkey’s state news agency said the security team sought to disperse the protest because D.C. “police did not heed to Turkish demands to intervene” — sensibly, since American police are expected to allow peaceful protests to continue. After the fighting begins, D.C. police are seen trying to break up the brawl but appear outnumbered. At a news conference, D.C. Police Chief Peter Newsham said that several of the guards involved in the melee were armed, making intervention “dicey.” He also noted that applying legal remedies might be tricky because some of those involved might have diplomatic immunity.

Many presidents issue signing statements. If Trump’s statement is different from his predecessors’ in any way, it’s that he’s returning to a pattern set by President George W. Bush that had been set aside by President Barack Obama. Our research into signing statements from FDR forward indicates that they serve many purposes. Signing statements are used to:

• get the attention of the press and the public,
• shape views about legislative accomplishments and who deserves credit,
• influence the courts by offering the president’s interpretation and understanding of various provisions,
• instruct and guide bureaucrats, and
• highlight provisions the president feels are constitutionally problematic.

[Evans is assistant professor and director of undergraduate studies in the department of politics and international relations at Florida International University. Marshall is professor and assistant chair of the department of political science at Miami University.]

President Donald Trump revealed highly classified information to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador in a White House meeting, according to current and former US officials, who said Trump’s disclosures jeopardized a critical source of intelligence on the Islamic State.

The information the President relayed had been provided by a US partner through an intelligence-sharing arrangement considered so sensitive that details have been withheld from allies and tightly restricted even within the U.S. government, officials said. The partner had not given the United States permission to share the material with Russia, and officials said Trump’s decision to do so endangers cooperation from an ally that has access to the inner workings of the Islamic State. After Trump’s meeting, senior White House officials took steps to contain the damage, placing calls to the CIA and the National Security Agency. “This is code-word information,” said a US official familiar with the matter, using terminology that refers to one of the highest classification levels used by American spy agencies. President Trump “revealed more information to the Russian ambassador than we have shared with our own allies.”

Lester Holt’s interview with President Donald Trump made huge, splashy headlines when the President confirmed that he always intended to fire FBI Director James Comey, and that he was thinking of the investigation into Russia’s influence on the 2016 election when he did it. Holt’s wasn’t the only interview with Trump that aired during the week. Trump’s conversation with Fox News’s Jeanine Pirro was less explosive, but from a Trump watcher’s perspective, it was more revealing. The interview was a near-perfect example of what President Trump would like his relationship with the media to be. And it was proof of why no respectable news organization can give it to him. Making Trump comfortable means allowing him to seal any cracks or flaws in his facade, rather than eliciting any revelations or new insights from him. Trump wants the press to perform public relations, not journalism. And as long as people like Pirro are willing to flatter him, Trump will never understand why real journalists can’t give him what he wants without losing who we are.

Officials in nearly 100 countries raced May 13 to contain one of the biggest cybersecurity attacks in recent history, as British doctors were forced to cancel operations, Chinese students were blocked from accessing their graduation theses, and passengers at train stations in Germany were greeted by hacked arrival and departure screens.

Companies and organizations around the world potentially faced substantial costs after hackers threatened to keep computers disabled unless victims paid $300 or more in ransom, the latest and most brazen in a type of cyberattack known as “ransomware.” The malware hit Britain’s beloved but creaky National Health Service particularly hard, causing widespread disruptions and interrupting medical procedures across hospitals in England and Scotland. The government said that 48 of the NHS’s 248 organizations were affected, but by Saturday evening all but six were back to normal. The attack was notable because it took advantage of a security flaw in Microsoft software found by the National Security Agency for its surveillance tool kit. Files detailing the capability were leaked online in April 2017, though after Microsoft, alerted by the NSA to the vulnerability, had sent updates to computers to patch the hole. Still, countless systems were left vulnerable, either because system administrators failed to apply the patch or because they used outdated software.

Throughout Donald Trump’s business career, some executives who came to work for him were taken aside by colleagues and warned to assume that their discussions with the boss were being recorded.

“There was never any sense with Donald of the phone being used for private conversation,” said John O’Donnell, who was president of the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in the 1980s. For O’Donnell and others who have had regular dealings with Trump through the years, there was something viscerally real about the threat implied by the president’s tweet Friday morning warning that fired FBI director James B. Comey “better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!” “Talking on the phone with Donald was a public experience,” said O’Donnell, author of a book about his former boss, “Trumped: The Inside Story of the Real Donald Trump.” “You never knew who else was listening.”

The firing of James Comey as director of the FBI has left the credibility of President Trump’s White House in tatters. The White House now appears to be an institution where truth struggles to keep up with events, led by a president capable at any moment of undercutting those who serve him.

This wasn’t the first time that the president’s spokespeople have been asked to explain the inexplicable or defend the indefensible. But what it showed is that this is far more than a problem with the White House communications team, which initially bore the brunt of criticism for offering what turned out to be an inaccurate description of how the president came to dismiss Comey. Whether the communications team is or isn’t fully in the loop is not the pertinent issue.

Instead, the responsibility for what has been one of the most explosive weeks of the Trump presidency begins at the top, with the president, whose statements and tweets regularly shatter whatever plans have been laid for the day or week. It includes Vice President Pence, who in an appearance on Capitol Hill quadrupled down on what turned out to be, at its most benign interpretation, an incomplete and therefore misleading description of how the decision was made. It includes White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, who must try to bring discipline to White House operations in the face of a president with a practice of frustrating those efforts and who then blames others when things go bad.

The Trump administration has removed or tucked away a wide variety of information that until recently was provided to the public, limiting access, for instance, to disclosures about workplace violations, energy efficiency, and animal welfare abuses.

Some of the information relates to enforcement actions taken by federal agencies against companies and other employers. By lessening access, the administration is sheltering them from the kind of “naming and shaming” that federal officials previously used to influence company behavior, according to digital experts, activists and former Obama administration officials. The administration has also removed websites and other material supporting Obama-era policies that the White House no longer embraces.

“The President has made a commitment that his Administration will absolutely follow the law and disclose any information it is required to disclose,” said White House spokeswoman Kelly Love. The White House takes its ethics and conflict of interest rules seriously,” Love added, “and requires all employees to work closely with ethics counsel to ensure compliance. Per the President’s Executive Order, violators will be held accountable by the Department of Justice.”

But Norman Eisen, who served as President Barack Obama’s special counsel for ethics and government reform, said the changes have undermined the public’s ability to hold the federal government accountable. “The Trump administration seems determined to utilize a larger version of Harry Potter’s cloak of invisibility to cover the entire administration,” said Eisen, now a fellow with the Brookings Institution’s governance studies program.