News from the Note
A round up of the day’s news that you might find useful…
Nikki Haley warns that U.S. forces ‘locked and loaded’ if Syria stages another chemical attack
That attack involved 59 Tomahawk missiles fired from two U.S. warships in the Mediterranean Sea. It fulfilled Trump’s vow that chemical weapons are a “red line” that he, unlike his predecessor Barack Obama, would not allow Assad to cross. But the airfield targeted by the Pentagon resumed operations shortly after the attack and, according to Western intelligence assessments, chemical attacks resumed.
Trump catches flak for declaring ‘mission accomplished’ in Syria
Twitter users criticized President Trump after he used a phrase made infamous by former President George W. Bush to declare victory in an ongoing military mission.
Trump tweeted “Mission Accomplished!” on Saturday to declare a successful missile strike in Syria the previous night.
Trump sought advice on Syria from legal team defending him in Russia probe: report
President Trump reportedly cast a wide net in seeking advice on a military strike in Syria, including from the legal counsel defending him in the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
In the days since an evident chemical weapons attack on the country by the government forces of Syrian leader Bashar Assad last Saturday, Trump sought advice from a wide variety of sources on what the U.S. response should be, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Infowars’s Alex Jones blasts Trump over airstrikes: ‘He’s crapping all over us’
Infowars founder Alex Jones ripped into President Trump on Friday night after the president authorized military airstrikes in Syria, saying the decision made him “sick.”
“If he had been a piece of crap from the beginning, it wouldn’t be so bad,” a visibly emotional Jones said of Trump. “We’ve made so many sacrifices and now he’s crapping all over us. It makes me sick.”
Comey says assumption Clinton would win “was a factor” in email probe
In an exclusive interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, James Comey revealed that his belief that Hillary Clinton would win the 2016 election “was a factor” in why he announced the FBI would be looking in to her emails, ABC reports.
Michael Cohen and the End Stage of the Trump Presidency
Of course Trump is raging and furious and terrified. Prosecutors are now looking at his core. Cohen was the key intermediary between the Trump family and its partners around the world; he was chief consigliere and dealmaker throughout its period of expansion into global partnerships with sketchy oligarchs. He wasn’t a slick politico who showed up for a few months. He knows everything, he recorded much of it, and now prosecutors will know it, too. It seems inevitable that much will be made public. We don’t know when. We don’t know the precise path the next few months will take. There will be resistance and denial and counterattacks. But it seems likely that, when we look back on this week, we will see it as a turning point. We are now in the end stages of the Trump Presidency.
