Trump’s national security staff “didn’t know line [about NATO’s collective self-defense] had been removed. It was only upon delivery.”

Developments on Day 137 of the Trump Administration:

Trump Overruled Mattis, McMaster to Remove US Commitment to NATO

Donald Trump overruled his top national security advisors last month when he refused to affirm the US commitment to NATO’s collective self-defense.

National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, Defense Secretary James Mattis, and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson all worked in the weeks leading up to the European leg of Trump’s first overseas trip to make sure the President endorse Article 5, a fundamental principle of NATO since its formation in 1949. A White House aide said the day before the May 25 speech that the line was included.

But Trump spent most of the address chiding NATO members for not paying money “owed” to the US, a misunderstanding of the guidelines for each member to make a 2% commitment of GDP by 2024, and never mentioned Article 5. The other heads of state listened uneasily, and even quietly laughed at points.

It was only as Trump started talking at the ceremony for NATO’s new Brussels headquarters, that his advisors realized that the President had taken unilateral action.

“They had the right speech and it was cleared through McMaster,” said “a source briefed by National Security Council officials” after the NATO meeting. “As late as that same morning, it was the right one.”

A “senior White House official” said, “There was a fully coordinated other speech everybody else had worked on.” A third national security confirmed, “They didn’t know [the line] had been removed. It was only upon delivery.”

One version of events says Trump deleted the reference ot Article 5. Another is that chief strategist Steve Bannon and his assistant Stephen Miller played a role.

The episode has raised uncertainty among analysts who said that, despite Trump’s lack of reliability and incoherence in US foreign policy, he could be guided and controlled by experienced diplomatic and military personnel.

Trump’s Discontent with Attorney General Sessions

Donald Trump’s discontent grows with Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the Justice Department, amid the President’s tweet-stream trying to restore his “Muslim Ban”.

“People close to Trump ” say he has been angered since the beginning of March, when Sessions recused himself from the Trump-Russia investigation because of the Attorney General’s own contacts — in 2016, while a member of the Trump transition team — with Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak.

On Monday, Trump chided the Justice Department for not returning to his initial executive order, issued in late January, which banned refugees and citizens of seven mainly-Muslim countries from entering the US. Instead, the Department’s attorneys have been trying to overcome judicial suspension of a revised version of the ban, which is more narrowly defined and no longer covers Iraqi citizens.

Asked why Trump signed the revised executive order in March if he did not support it, White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said he did it only to convince the federal appeals court which barred the initial order: “He was looking to, again, match the demands laid out by the Ninth Circuit and, for the purpose of expediency, to start looking at the best way possible to move that process forward.”

A Papal Response to Trump on Climate Change?

Four days after Donald Trump announces US withdrawal from the Paris Accord, the Pope tweets:

Bush Administration Lawyer on “Instability” of Donald Trump

Jack Goldsmith, who led the Office of Legal Counsel in the George W. Bush Administration, posts a Twitter thread challenging the “instability” of Donald Trump:

Goldsmith expresses “sympathies for the honorable people working around Donald Trump” which are “greater than ever”, but asks, “How long do they continue to serve? How long should they apply normal executive branch principles to buck up this president?”

Contractor Charged with Leak on Russian Influence Operations in Election

An intelligence contractor is charged with circulating a classified report about Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, the Justice Department announces.

The case is the first amid Donald Trump’s insistence that the problem lies with those giving information to the media, rather than any collusion between his adies and Russian officials.

The contractor, Reality Leigh Winner, was charged under the Espionage Act about an hour after The Intercept published the May 5 report from the National Security Agency. It described two cyberattacks by Russian military intelligence unit GRU — one in August against a company that sells voter registration-related software and another, a few days before the election, against 122 local election officials.

The Intercept summarized the intelligence analysis:

The report adds significant new detail to the picture that emerged from the unclassified intelligence assessment about Russian election meddling released by the Obama administration in January. The January assessment presented the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusions but omitted many specifics, citing concerns about disclosing sensitive sources and methods. The assessment concluded with high confidence that the Kremlin ordered an extensive, multi-pronged propaganda effort “to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency.”

That review did not attempt to assess what effect the Russian efforts had on the election, despite the fact that “Russian intelligence obtained and maintained access to elements of multiple US state or local electoral boards.” According to the Department of Homeland Security, the assessment reported reassuringly, “the types of systems we observed Russian actors targeting or compromising are not involved in vote tallying.”

The NSA has now learned, however, that Russian government hackers, part of a team with a “cyber espionage mandate specifically directed at U.S. and foreign elections,” focused on parts of the system directly connected to the voter registration process, including a private sector manufacturer of devices that maintain and verify the voter rolls. Some of the company’s devices are advertised as having wireless internet and Bluetooth connectivity, which could have provided an ideal staging point for further malicious actions.

Winner has worked for Pluribus International Corporation at a government facility in Georgia since February 13. The NSA uses Pluribus contractors and opened a branch facility in the suburbs outside Augusta in 2012.

US Diplomats Break With Trump

Two more American diplomats have broken publicly with Donald Trump, amid increasing concern about his temperament and approach to foreign policy.

On Monday, the chargé d’affaires at the American Embassy in Beijing, David Rank, announced his resignation and told staff that he could not defend Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Accord on climate change.

The previous day, the US Embassy in London — led by acting Ambassador Lewis Lukens — rebuffed Trump’s derision of the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, after an attack that killed seven people and the three assailants.

See TrumpWatch, Day 136: Trump Picks Fight Over the London Attack

A day earlier, the acting ambassador to Britain, Lewis A. Lukens, tweeted his support of London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, in the wake of a deadly terrorist attack there. On Sunday morning, President Trump had picked a fight with the mayor on Twitter.

Last month, US Ambassador to Qatar Dana Shell Smith responded to Trump’s dismissal of FBI Director James Comey, “Increasingly difficult to wake up overseas to news from home, knowing I will spend today explaining our democracy and institutions.”

EPA Head’s Falsehood Over “50,000 Jobs Gained in Coal Mining”

The Washington Post takes apart the false claim of Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt that the Trump Administration has added almost 50,000 jobs in coal mining.

Appearing on a series of Sunday morning talk shows to push the withdrawal from the Paris Accord on climate change, Pruitt proclaimed, “Since the fourth quarter of last year until most recently, we’ve added almost 50,000 jobs in the coal sector.”

In fact, the gain from September to December under the Obama Administration was 1,400 jobs, and only 1,000 between January and April.

Pruitt later amended his claim to “mining and coal” jobs. Technically, there have been 47,000 added jobs in the mining sector since October, with 33,000 since January.

However, more than 40,000 of the jobs are in “support activities for mining”, and more than 75% are in oil and gas rather than coal, as global oil prices have stabilized.