Special counsel’s job is safe, says Trump
Philando Castile was just one of some 900 people shot by police last year – it’s a statistic that appears to be growing.
US President Donald Trump has no intention of firing the special counsel investigating charges of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, even though he questioned the official’s impartiality in an interview, the White House says.
White House spokesman Sean Spicer told reporters that while Trump ‘‘retains the authority’’ to dismiss special counsel Robert Mueller, ‘‘he has no intention of doing that’’.
Trump voiced concern in a TV interview on Fox News on Friday about what he said was the close relationship between former FBI director James Comey and Mueller, who was named to take over the Russia investigation after Trump fired Comey.
Lawmakers investigating allegations of Russian interference in the election have raised questions about whether Comey’s May 9 firing was an attempt by Trump to stop the Russia probe.
While White House officials have said the firing was due to concerns about Comey’s actions at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Trump told an interviewer the Russia investigation was one of his concerns in taking the action.
But the president insisted that his campaign did not collude with Russia, and that his firing of Comey did not obstruct justice.
In excerpts from a separate interview, Trump criticised his predecessor Barack Obama for inaction in the face of Russian meddling.
‘‘Well, I just heard today for the first time that Obama knew about Russia a long time before the election, and he did nothing about it,’’ Trump said, according to excerpts from a Fox News interview to be broadcast today.
In congressional testimony this week, Jeh Johnson, who headed the Homeland Security Department under Obama, said his department had warned about hacking into voter databases.
When asked why the Obama administration did not do more to warn the public, he said: ‘‘We were very concerned that we would not be perceived as taking sides in the election, injecting ourselves into a very heated campaign.’’
Meanwhile, the White said in a letter yesterday House that a tweet by Trump on Friday was the formal answer to a request by the House of Representatives intelligence committee for information about records of conversations with Comey.
The letter said: ‘‘In response to the committee’s inquiry, we refer you to President Trump’s June 22, 2017 statement regarding this matter.’’
The House panel wrote to Don McGahn, the White House counsel, asking about the existence of any recordings or memos covering Comey’s conversations with Trump, and asked that copies of the materials be provided to the panel by June 23.
Trump wrote on Twitter a day before the deadline that he did not know if there were recordings of his conversations with Comey, but he did not make or have any such recordings.
The panel’s Republican chairman, Michael Conaway, who is leading the committee’s investigation, said Trump’s tweet was not a sufficient response. It was winter 2003. Sitting with friends at a high-top table at the Red Lion, a bar in Vail, Colorado, I looked up to see a very tall African-American guy mingling in the crowd, wearing a white visor. It was O J Simpson.
I felt the hot shock of celebrity recognition. What were the chances, I wondered.
An hour or so later, needing to get to the toilets near the front door on the other side of the bar, I waded into the crowd. Midway through the crowded space, I bumped up against Simpson. I looked directly up, into his face, well above mine, and kept moving.
Images filled my head: O J as Detective Nordberg in The Naked Gun. O J in a San Francisco 49ers uniform. Helicopter footage of the slow-speed car chase of the white Bronco on the LA freeway. Bloody scenes from the SimpsonBrown murder. His ‘‘trial of the century’’ had captivated me and the rest of the world. The verdict was received with joyous vindication by LA’s embattled African-American community after the 1992 Rodney King beating by police and subsequent acquittals. It was received with shock by most of the rest of the world.
Did I just come face to face with a murderer?
We learned this week that O J is up for parole in next month, and could be released in September, after serving a nine-year sentence for armed robbery. As I cast my mind back to the mid1990s, it occurred to me that as politically divided as this country feels right now, there are no riots in the streets. As strained as the relationship between police and communities has become in some parts of the country, there is no looting or burning. We are not turning in on ourselves. And yet...
This week, another acquittal of a police officer who shot and killed a black man during a routine police stop. Philando Castile, a school cafeteria worker, who legally carried a gun and told officer Jeronimo Yanez he was armed, was shot by Yanez seven times through the open window of his car in Falcon Heights, a suburb of Minneapolis. His girlfriend and her 4-year-old daughter were in the car, too. She live-streamed the aftermath on Facebook, and this week the dashcam footage of the shooting was released. It was, in a word, brutal.
In the aftermath of Rodney King’s beating, 100 fires were started across LA. After the acquittal of the officers who beat him, the LA riots – one of the most destructive acts of civil disobedience in the 20th century – saw 3000 buildings burned, 60 people killed, and thousands more injured. President George H W Bush sent in troops to quell the uprising.
After Yanez was acquitted, a few hundred protesters in Minneapolis marched, yelling ‘‘No justice, no peace’’. They closed down a local highway. There were 18 arrests.
Data on police killings is opaque. Castile was one of about 900 people shot dead by police last year. The trend appears to be increasing.
Are we just better behaved now? Are we suffering from outrage fatigue. Or have we normalised to this?