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A political operative who frequented the White House in the early days of President Trump’s administration, George Nader, was indicted in 1985 on charges of importing to the United States obscene material, including photos of nude boys “engaged in a variety of sexual acts,” according to publicly available court records. Nader pleaded not guilty, and the charges against him were ultimately dismissed several months after evidence seized from Nader’s home was thrown out on procedural grounds. “Mr. Nader vigorously denies the allegations now, as he did then,” a lawyer representing Nader said.

Nader often visited the White House in the months after Trump was inaugurated, Axios reported earlier this year. On January 17, he was en route to Trump’s Palm Beach estate, Mar-a-Lago, to celebrate the anniversary of the inauguration when he was served a grand-jury subpoena at Dulles Airport outside of Washington, D.C.

Nader, an influential yet under-the-radar operative who edited a foreign-policy magazine in the 1990s, had “remarkable access to key political and business leaders throughout” the Middle East, former West Virginia Representative Nick Rahall said in 1996, according to a Congressional Record transcript of his remarks. In May 1987, for example, Nader described a meeting he had attended with Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, along with “leaders of the Afghan mujahedin, some senior officials of the Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah, and some Islamic fundamentalists from Egypt.”

As Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, tweeted Friday:“@realDonaldTrump is now set for war on 3 fronts: political vs Bob Mueller, economic vs China/others on trade, and actual vs. Iran and/or North Korea. This is the most perilous moment in modern American history — and it has been largely brought about by ourselves, not by events.”

While pundits mull whether the cloud of chaos Trump keeps swirling around him is simple incompetence or strategic plotting, The New York Times reported Friday:“Aides said there was no grand strategy to the president’s actions, and that he got up each morning this week not knowing what he would do. Much as he did as a New York businessman at Trump Tower, Mr. Trump watched television, reacted to what he saw on television and then reacted to the reaction.”

This is all gut and instinct. This is all reactionary emoting by a man of poor character, one addicted to affirmation. He desperately needs to be the king-of-every-hill he sees in the mirror: He was the ladies’ man, businessman, smartest man, toughest man. There was nothing beyond him, and he didn’t have to follow the rules, he only had to follow his instincts.

In the 1920s, the US pursued isolationism in foreign policy and rejected participation in international organizations like the League of Nations. America First was America alone, except for financial agreements like the Dawes and Young Plans aimed at ensuring that our “free-loading” former allies could pay back their war loans. At the same time, high tariffs crippled international trade, making the repayment of those loans especially difficult. The country witnessed an increase in income disparity and a concentration of wealth at the top, and both Congress and the courts eschewed regulations to protect against the self-inflicted calamities of free enterprise run amok. The government also adopted a highly restrictionist immigration policy aimed at preserving the hegemony of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants against an influx of Catholic and Jewish immigrants. (Various measures barring Asian immigration had already been implemented between 1882 and 1917.) These policies left the country unable to respond constructively to either the Great Depression or the rise of fascism, the growing threat to peace, and the refugee crisis of the 1930s.

Today, President Trump seems intent on withdrawing the US from the entire post–World War II structure of interlocking diplomatic, military, and economic agreements and organizations that have preserved peace, stability, and prosperity since 1945.

Paul von Hindenburg, elected president of Germany in 1925, was endowed by the Weimar Constitution with various emergency powers to defend German democracy should it be in dire peril. Instead of defending it, Hindenburg became its gravedigger, using these powers first to destroy democratic norms and then to ally with the Nazis to replace parliamentary government with authoritarian rule. Hindenburg began using his emergency powers in 1930, appointing a sequence of chancellors who ruled by decree rather than through parliamentary majorities, which had become increasingly impossible to obtain as a result of the Great Depression and the hyperpolarization of German politics.

If we accept that Comey’s story has been remarkably consistent over time, and has been corroborated, as Comey has also said, by the contemporaneous FBI witnesses to whom he claims to have told about the events in real time—a few points follow.

First, the president will not realistically defeat an obstruction-of-justice charge—whether it arises in a criminal context or, as is more likely, as an allegation he has to contend with in the political realm—by throwing dust in the air about what happened.

Second, it follows that the president will have to make his defense on obstruction on different grounds: Ultimately, he’s going to have to argue that the conduct Comey is describing is acceptable behavior

The Republican Party is learning what should have been obvious from the outset: Mr. Trump’s chaotic personality can’t be contained. Indeed, combining it with the awesome power of the presidency virtually guaranteed he would become more volatile and transgressive. His presidency is infecting the entire party.

policy is hardly the whole story. When it comes to the Republican Party and Mr. Trump, the most profound and dangerous shift has occurred not in policy but in the province of disposition and demeanor, temperament and cast of mind. This arena is more amorphous than policy but can be at least as important.

At the national level the Republican Party has become a destructive and anarchic political force in American life.

Director Christopher Wray is forcing the Trump White House to choose between the national interest and President Donald Trump's political hide.

Wray's formal opposition to the release of a secret partisan memo, supported by Republicans critical of the bureau, also sets the stage for a showdown over the future of the nation's most revered law enforcement agency which, before Trump, enjoyed longstanding support from the GOP.

According to Politico, Trump decided in mid-January that he would attack his own administration's Justice Department and FBI in response to the Robert Mueller probe.

President Trump’s former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski revealed on Sunday that he is expected to appear this week before a House panel probing Russian involvement in the 2016 election.

Bannon got into hot water with Trump over startling comments he made about the president and his family in Michael Wolff’s blockbuster tell-all – “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.”

Lewandowski, who left the campaign in June 2016, said he hasn’t yet been contacted by special counsel Robert Mueller, who’s also investigating Moscow meddling and whether there was any collusion with the Trump campaign.

The House Intelligence Committee voted unanimously on Monday to make public a classified Democratic memorandum rebutting Republican claims that the F.B.I. and the Justice Department had abused their powers to wiretap a former Trump campaign official, setting up a possible clash with President Trump.

The vote gives Mr. Trump five days to review the Democratic memo and determine whether he will try to block its release

Democrats have said the memo corrects mischaracterizations by the Republicans and adds crucial context to actions by the F.B.I. and the Justice Department in obtaining a secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court order to wiretap the former Trump aide, Carter Page, in October 2016.

There are good reasons to be wary of impeachment talk.

Congressional Republicans show zero interest, and they’re the ones in charge.

Democrats, for their part, need to focus on retaking Congress, and railing about impeachment probably won’t help them win votes.

The logic here is pure Roy Cohn.

And the tactics Cohn once deployed are now all around us: throw back the exact same charges you’re facing against those investigating you. Invent a conspiracy theory to rival a collusion theory. Throw sand in everyone’s eyes. Get your allegations out first, in as inflammatory and scandalous a way as possible. Ransack people’s private lives and communications to more effectively demonize them.

Dominate the news cycles. Do anything to muddy the conflict and to sow suspicion. Lie, if you have to. Exercise not the slightest concern for the stability of the system as a whole — because tribe comes first.

Within hours of opening an investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia in the summer of 2016, the F.B.I. dispatched a pair of agents to London on a mission so secretive that all but a handful of officials were kept in the dark

Their assignment, which has not been previously reported, was to meet the Australian ambassador, who had evidence that one of Donald J. Trump’s advisers knew in advance about Russian election meddling

Their report helped provide the foundation for a case that, a year ago Thursday, became the special counsel investigation.

The South Carolina Republican, who roared into Congress in the tea-party election of 2010, has been one of the most partisan, vitriolic and conspiracy-minded legislators in his eight years here. As recently as January, he was demanding answers about a bogus “secret society” within the FBI and special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s probe.

Actually, we know exactly what Gowdy is smoking: the sweet herb of retirement. He announced at the end of January that he was leaving Congress, which freed him to speak his mind without fear of a political price

But he was, in his eight years, one of the great GOP flamethrowers. He referred to his lengthy Benghazi probe as a “trial” of Clinton, and after a promising initial hearing, it quickly devolved into a partisan fight that singled out bugbears of the right such as Clinton aides Sidney Blumenthal and Huma Abedin.

The former acting F.B.I. director, Andrew G. McCabe, wrote a confidential memo last spring recounting a conversation that offered significant behind-the-scenes details on the firing of Mr. McCabe’s predecessor, James B. Comey, according to several people familiar with the discussion.

Mr. Comey’s firing is a central focus of the special counsel’s investigation into whether President Trump tried to obstruct the investigation into his campaign’s ties to Russia. Mr. McCabe has turned over his memo to the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III.

In the document, whose contents have not been previously reported, Mr. McCabe described a conversation at the Justice Department with the deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, in the chaotic days last May after Mr. Comey’s abrupt firing.

For Trump, lying is central to his disturbed psyche, and to his success. The brazenness of it unbalances and stupefies sane and adjusted people, thereby constantly giving him an edge and a little breathing space while we try to absorb it, during which he proceeds to the next lie. And on it goes. It’s like swimming in choppy water. Just when you get to the surface to breathe, another wave crashes into you.

Bannon, Wolff writes, came to understand that the lies were “compulsive, persistent and without even a minimal grounding in reality.” This is not to deceive the public. This is simply the way Trump behaves — in private and public

Recall this famous passage from Ron Suskind, reporting on the Bush White House for the Times:

WASHINGTON — After five months of hearings, investigations and revelations about President Trump’s dealings with Ukraine, a divided United States Senate acquitted him on Wednesday of charges that he abused his power and obstructed Congress to aid his own re-election, bringing an acrimonious impeachment trial to its expected end.

It was the third impeachment trial of a president and the third acquittal in American history, and it ended the way it began: with Republicans and Democrats at odds. They disagreed over Mr. Trump’s conduct and his fitness for office, even as some members of his own party conceded the basic allegations that undergirded the charges, that he sought to pressure Ukraine to smear his political rivals.

Like this one, the trials of Presidents Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton also ended in acquittal — a reflection of the Constitution’s high burden for removing a chief executive.

"Putin, sadly, has got all of our political class, every single one of us, including the media, exactly where he wants us. He's got us feeling vulnerable...on edge, and he's got us questioning the legitimacy of our own systems," Fiona Hill told CBS' Lesley Stahl in an interview set to air on "60 Minutes" Sunday.

The interview marks the former top White House official's first since testifying in the impeachment inquiry into Trump. During congressional hearings in the inquiry, Hill warned that the Republican defense of the President -- by peddling Ukraine conspiracy theories -- was in danger of extending Russia's meddling in the 2016 US presidential election.

Russian interference in the last presidential election -- which the US intelligence community believes was aimed at boosting Trump's candidacy and hurting his opponent, Hillary Clinton -- led to special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation. Part of the election interference included a Russian government-linked troll operation that sought to help Trump's candidacy and undercut that of Clinton in part by posting messages in support of Sanders.

In July, I had dinner with a friend who has worked as a lawyer in the Justice Department for decades. My friend bemoaned the recent tweets by the president of the United States that called into question the integrity of the Justice Department. Why isn’t Attorney General Jeff Sessions “looking into Crooked Hillarys crimes & Russia relations?,” asked President Trump in one such (ungrammatical) tweet. And why didn’t Sessions “replace Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, a Comey friend who was in charge of Clinton investigation?

The critique of these tweets is now familiar. They violate norms of law-enforcement independence from presidential influence. Their proximate aim is to discredit the Justice Department and FBI, probably in order to delegitimize it as the investigation of Robert Mueller gets ever closer to the president. And they appear to be part of an effort to weaken public confidence in American institutions more generally—not just DOJ, but also the “so-called” courts, the “fake news” media, the supposedly lying, incompetent intelligence community, and others.

Trump’s assault on executive branch departments and employees is crippling these cultures of commitment. I know this from talking to several Justice Department friends, including the one with whom I dined last summer. I see it in stories about how the State Department’s ranks are thinning fast. And it stands to reason that employees throughout the government feel the same way. It is hard to work for a president who attacks you weekly if not daily; who calls into public doubt your independence and integrity; and who shames you with his persistent shamelessness, deceit, and ignorance. The president is succeeding not just in diminishing the reputation of these institutions before the nation, but also in wrecking their aspirations within.

This week marked 14 years since retired FBI Special Agent Bob Levinson vanished almost without a trace on Iran's Kish Island, and one year since his family finally accepted U.S. assessments that he died in captivity -- but they still haven't been able to adequately say goodbye to the beloved husband, father and grandfather.

As a result, the whereabouts of his remains are as much a mystery as the timing and circumstances of his death, which was assessed by the U.S. intelligence community in large part because of the duration of his disappearance, his diabetes, his age -- he would have turned 73 on Wednesday -- and because the only video released by his unknown captors came early in his ordeal.

None of the American hostages in Syria or Iraq were ever recovered after they were killed in ISIS captivity in 2014-2015, including American journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff and humanitarian aid workers Peter Kassig and Kayla Mueller.