White House

Critics of the sentencing reform measure note that the Fraternal Order of Police dropped its opposition to the measure at a time when its chief, Chuck Canterbury, is a candidate to run the ATF.

President Donald Trump is considering a top national police official to be his director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, an appointment that critics say could be a potential reward for his support of a White House-backed sentencing reform bill.

Opponents of bipartisan legislation to overhaul federal sentencing guidelines were surprised to see Chuck Canterbury, the head of the influential Fraternal Order of Police, standing beside Trump on Wednesday at an event celebrating the proposed measure. The police group, which Canterbury has headed for more than a decade, had previously opposed the legislation.

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It was an unusual move for the law enforcement veteran, who enthusiastically testified at last year’s Senate confirmation hearing on behalf of Jeff Sessions, Trump’s recently dismissed attorney general and a high-profile opponent of the criminal justice reform legislation. Canterbury’s group said in a statement ahead of the president’s endorsement that the First Step Act would boost safety “in our streets and neighborhoods” and better protect police.

“We are proud to stand with President Trump on this issue,” he said Wednesday.

But Congressional opponents of the bill are suspicious of the FOP’s endorsement, given that Canterbury has been seeking a top job in the Trump administration, according to two Republican aides.

“They should get something out of this,” said one law enforcement official, who opposed the plan and thought Canterbury went “out on a limb” by signing off on it. “I would guess in some way this is not going to be the perfect bill.”

The legislation hit an additional snag after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he may not have time to bring it to the Senate floor for a vote this year, emphasizing that time is tight and he plans to prioritize a spending bill that would prevent the government from partially shutting down on Dec. 7, as well as a farm bill that will funnel money to rural parts of the country that form the bedrock of the Republican Party’s support.

Canterbury recently emerged as a contender for ATF, where deputy director Thomas Brandon has served as the acting head since April 2015, according to three sources familiar with the situation. He has for months been lobbying for a “big job” in the administration, according to a former White House official, who said Canterbury’s name was bandied about for several roles.

Canterbury has a “very good relationship” with Trump, according to a close friend, and has been a regular presence at White House listening sessions on immigration and issues affecting law enforcement. At a late October board meeting, he told colleagues he was flattered to have had his name floated for ATF chief, but had not formally been offered the job, according to a person in the room. This person said Canterbury is currently running for an eighth term as head of the FOP, describing the competitive re-election process as “like running for Congress nationwide.”

“Chuck is one of the most honorable people I’ve ever worked with and if he is selected, I can’t think of a finer person to take the position,” Jonathan Thompson, executive director of the National Sheriffs’ Association, told POLITICO.

But Thompson’s group, which represents over 3,000 elected sheriffs in the U.S., was among several to forcefully push back on the legislation, claiming in a statement this week that the bill would “release dangerous criminals back into our communities… [and] falls far short in the funding, personnel and social services needed to protect our communities.”

Republican senators who have withheld support for the measure, which would require 60 “yes” votes to pass the upper chamber, cited the opposition by Thompson’s organization in defending their own position.

“I put great weight on the views of those sheriffs,” said Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.). “They have grave concerns about a ‘social experiment’ of this kind.”

Like other opponents, Cotton said he would prefer that the legislation “focus on prison reform and give prisoners who are on their way out of prison a chance to land on their feet,” instead of introducing greater leniency in mandatory minimum sentencing for serious offenders.

The Fraternal Order’s endorsement puzzled its law enforcement community allies in part because it was a reversal of its earlier position.

Canterbury and his team had several meetings and phone calls with White House officials, including the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, between August, when the group reportedly described the proposal as “unworkable,” and Trump’s declaration of support this week. “There were regular phone conversations with staff and we sent a letter to the president articulating our concerns,” said FOP executive director Jim Pasco.

Pasco said the group struck “common ground” once language in the bill that would have ratcheted down early release restrictions for fentanyl dealers was removed, as well as conditions that would have eased existing limitations on early release for persons who used firearms in the commission of their crimes.

“We wanted it to be well-defined that violent felons wouldn’t get reduced sentences,” Canterbury told the Washington Post.

Others suggested the FOP was never truly against the legislation and made it easy for the administration to secure their support. “They were ready to fold pretty quickly,” said the law enforcement official, who claimed the group at one point simply requested a “study on the effects” of the legislation in order to throw their weight behind it.

Those claiming the group’s endorsement was linked in some fashion to Canterbury angling for a Trump administration post are playing “part of the game in Washington,” Pasco said.

“It was a confluence of timing. I don’t think there’s anything nefarious or untoward,” added the person close to Canterbury.

Should the bill pass the Senate, it would return to the House where proponents of the legislation have already begun whipping support in its favor. One potential problem as the plan moves forward is acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker, who has privately warned Trump about aspects of the bill related to illicit drugs. However, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told the Post that Whitaker “doesn’t want to kill it” following a meeting with the interim attorney general.

White House

The White House chief of staff is trying to convince Trump that his embattled Homeland Security secretary is not to blame for a recent uptick in Mexican border crossings.

White House chief of staff John Kelly is fighting to save Kirstjen Nielsen, the Homeland Security chief whom the president has lashed out at for the rise in border apprehensions over the past several months.

Kelly, whose fate in the administration is also unclear, is working to convince the president that she is not to blame for a recent surge in arrests at the U.S.-Mexico border that has enraged him, according to two sources familiar with the conversations.

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Nielsen also has other supporters, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who have told Trump that Nielsen cannot control the border crossing rate.

Much like several since-fired officials before her, Nielsen — who stood next to Trump with hands clasped at a Friday photo-op to tout new cyber security legislation — has carried on with her duties well after Trump has signaled he wants her gone.

Kelly’s bid to save Nielsen may be motivated in part by an understanding that, with Nielsen gone, he will be almost completely isolated in an administration several of his one-time allies have departed. But the retired Marine general and his former top aide are hardly the only ones whose jobs are at risk in what could be one of the most dramatic Cabinet and staff shakeups in modern presidential history.

The two weeks since the midterm elections have served as a long wind-up for the president to make big changes to his cabinet. But aside from firing his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, Trump has yet to make a move, instead letting advisers from Nielsen and Kelly to Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross dangle in a state of awkward public limbo.

White House officials would like to plan for orderly firings and replacements, but acknowledge that — particularly when it comes to personnel issues — it is almost futile to expect Trump to follow a plan.

It’s far from an unfamiliar plight. Past officials including former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, former chief of staff Reince Priebus and former national security adviser H.R. McMaster were all treated to weeks or months of reports about their impending doom before their official dismissal, with Trump pawing at them like a cat toying with wounded mice. In the cases of Tillerson and Priebus, the deed was done with a presidential tweet.

But even longtime Trump observers say his public dithering is being exacerbated by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s intensifying probe and by the Democratic takeover of Congress, which threaten to constrain the Trump presidency in ways yet unknown. The president has spent hours with his lawyers over past the past several days answer written questions from Mueller and his team, and Trump told reporters on Friday that he had recently finished the process.

“I think he’s feeling the pressure of both the Mueller investigation and that the House is going to have all of this institutional power over him, and he likes to feel unfettered,” said Trump biographer Tim O’Brien. “And I think that’s why you have this heightened sense this week that everybody is walking on eggshells — these institutional forces are really causing him to lash out.”

The big question in the White House now is when — and how — Trump conducts the multiple firings and reassignments that his inner circle assumes will be coming.

White House aides are looking ahead to several upcoming Air Force One flights, which will provide the president with hours of open TV and iPhone time, as potential killing fields for advisers in jeopardy. The president will fly from Washington to California on Saturday to visit with victims of the wildfires that have ravaged the state, and then to his Mar-a-Lago resort on Wednesday for Thanksgiving.

“I wouldn’t want to be on that plane,” said a Trump friend who speaks with the president frequently.

In a move few White House aides were prepared for at the time, Trump dismissed Priebus by tweet while sitting aboard his plane — announcing Kelly as Priebus’ successor before he had formally offered Kelly the job.

“I am pleased to inform you that I have just named General/Secretary John F Kelly as White House Chief of Staff. He is a Great American and a Great Leader,” Trump wrote, as Air Force One idled on the tar mac at Andrews Air Force base.

That announcement came during another period of turmoil for the administration, the day after Trump named Anthony Scaramucci his communications chief.

Beginning on Election Night, Trump has made clear to virtually everybody he has come into contact with that he wants Nielsen gone. He acknowledged publicly on Wednesday that he is mulling widespread changes, telling the Daily Caller an interview that “always in an administration after the midterms you make changes, so, I’m looking at things and I’ve got a lot of options. A lot of people want to come in. A lot of politicians that have had very successful careers that are very good want to come in.”

“I will be making a decision on Homeland shortly,” he added. But by Friday evening, there was still no word from the White House.

While Trump has expressed skepticism about the 46-year-old Nielson from the time she succeeded Kelly as DHS chief last December, after he moved to the White House, the president has been particularly upset by recent data showing that border arrests — generally considered an indicator of illegal immigration rates — are on the rise.

Trump has boasted in the past about low border crossing rates, which he considers that a critical metric of a Homeland Security director’s effectiveness, even though many factors determine rates of illegal immigration, including how many jobs are available within the U.S. for migrants.

After a plunge in border apprehensions around the time of Trump’s 2016 election — a drop for which Trump has taken credit, and for which he also credited then-DHS chief John Kelly — that rate has steadily risen since mid-2017 and is now close to levels predating Trump’s presidency, according to the Pew Research Center.

While Kelly, Pompeo and others are pushing the president to keep her on, Nielsen is not without her critics in the administration. They include National Security Adviser John Bolton, who engaged in a heated argument with Kelly in the Oval Office last month after Bolton said her department was to blame for not doing more to discourage illegal immigration. Trump became particularly focused on the issue during this fall’s election campaign, when he warned that a caravan of several thousand Central American migrants headed to the U.S.-Mexico border amounted to an “invasion” of America.

Nielsen’s departure would leave Kelly more isolated than ever in the administration. Some of his closest West Wing collaborators have departed in recent months, including former White House counsel Don McGahn and former White House deputy chief of staff Joe Hagin. Nielsen’s ouster would serve as a exclamation mark.

Nielsen guided Kelly through his confirmation hearings to be Secretary of Homeland Security and accompanied him to the White House, where she served as his deputy, before was nominated to be Secretary of Homeland Security.

Republicans on Capitol Hill and in the White House speculated Wednesday that if Trump dismisses Nielsen in a humiliating manner, that might be enough to prompt Kelly to depart as well.

Some of the president’s allies are urging him to announce several dismissals at once, along with a handful of replacements, in order to staunch what one characterized as the “drip, drip” of salacious news stories.

Trump has upended his own administration’s plans for orderly mass firings before, though. His dismissal of his former national security adviser H.R. McMaster by tweet last March ruined plans for an announcement of a wider administration shakeup that included the dismissal of VA Secretary David Shulkin, among others.

The president has also made clear the blizzard of news coverage about personnel intrigue inside the White House is an irritant, declaring on Twitter Thursday, “The White House is running very smoothly and the results for our Nation are obviously very good. We are the envy of the world. But anytime I even think about making changes, the FAKE NEWS MEDIA goes crazy, always seeking to make us look as bad as possible! Very dishonest!”

Media

The administration is drawing up rules for White House reporters’ behavior, and the president said if journalists don’t follow them, ‘we’ll end up back in court, and we’ll win.’

CNN and Jim Acosta may have won their battle with the White House in court on Friday, but President Donald Trump has found a new weapon in his long war against the media.

After a judge ruled that the White House violated the CNN correspondent’s right to due process by stripping him of his press badge, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders declared that the administration was drawing up new rules to govern reporters’ behavior — and a process for booting them if those rules are broken.

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“We have to create rules and regulations for conduct,” Trump told Chris Wallace in a Fox News interview, echoing Sanders’ announcement. “It’s not a big deal. If he misbehaves, we’ll throw him out or we’ll stop the news conference.”

“If they don’t listen to the rules and regulations,” he told reporters at a separate event at the White House, “we’ll end up back in court, and we’ll win.”

To reporters, the threatened new rules — which one person close to the White House said were in the works before the court ruling Friday — represent another obstacle to covering Trump, who views his battle with the media as an unambiguous positive with his conservative base. It was Trump and Sanders, after all, who escalated the Acosta situation after a dispute at a press conference by yanking his press pass and, to justify it, pointing to an apparently altered video of his interaction with a White House aide. Now, future legal encounters appear certain, as journalists deemed to have broken the rules are also likely to take the administration to court.

The situation is akin to having a “sword hanging over our heads,” said New York Times chief White House correspondent Peter Baker. “It leaves this idea that they are going to be the judge of who gets to cover them based on some probably arbitrary criteria that they will be the only ones to determine.”

He added, “The idea that suddenly you’re going to try to determine who is polite enough to ask the president questions is just kind of ridiculous.”

White House Correspondents’ Association president Olivier Knox said Friday afternoon that the White House had not reached out to him for input on any new rules for reporter behavior.

“As the organization that defends the interest of a free and independent news media at the White House, we have our role to play, but what that role will be, I don’t know yet,” he said.

The White House might see political victory in battling the media, but the court ruling Friday was a legal win for CNN, long a favorite target of Trump’s. Federal Judge Timothy Kelly, a Trump appointee, ruled that the administration had denied Acosta due process in revoking his security pass, citing shifting White House explanations, no clear process, no advance notification to Acosta and no chance for him to rebut the allegations. Kelly ordered the White House to return Acosta’s credential on a temporary basis, while the rest of the case moves forward.

The White House did not reply to questions Friday about whether it would continue fighting Acosta and CNN in court. But Trump has kept up a confrontational stance with reporters in the last two weeks.

He berated CNN’s Abby Phillip for asking a “stupid question,” after she asked whether he wanted acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker to rein in the Russia investigation. And at the same press conference in which he tussled with Acosta, Trump accused PBS NewsHour’s Yamiche Alcindor of asking a “racist question” when she brought up his use of the phrase “nationalist” and its links to white nationalism.

“Acosta is one thing, but I think they tip their hand by going after people like Abby Phillip and going after Yamiche Alcindor, who have done nothing but show how professional they are,” Baker said. “This is meant to intimidate.”

Trump’s frustration with relatively straightforward questions such as those will almost certainly lead reporters to wonder if they are being targeted for their coverage, not their behavior.

CNN has argued that was the case with Acosta, alleging that the White House yanked his hard pass — which allows reporters to freely enter and exit the grounds — because it was attempting to stifle coverage it disliked in violation of the First Amendment. But Kelly did not address that in his ruling, saying only that Acosta’s due process rights were clearly violated.

Now, the administration says it’s creating a process for banning reporters who do not show “decorum” at events.

In excerpts of the Fox News interview — which will air in full Sunday — Wallace asked Trump what the rules for reporters should be. “You can’t keep asking questions,” the president replied. “We had a lot of reporters in that room, many, many reporters in that room, and they were unable to ask questions because this guy gets up and starts…just shouting out questions. And making statements, too.”

Trump added, “But I will say this: Nobody believes in the First Amendment more than I do. And If I think somebody is acting out of sorts, I will leave and say, ‘Thank you very much. Thanks for coming.’ And I’ll leave. Those reporters will not be too friendly to whoever it is that’s acting up.”

The White House will have broad discretion in formulating rules for reporters’ behavior, so long as none of them discriminate against anyone based on their views or coverage, said Katie Fallow, a senior attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.

“The fight will likely be over how they’re applied,” she said.

Once the new rules are established, the White House likely would not be able to kick Acosta, or anyone else, out for past offenses, said Nathan Siegel, a First Amendment lawyer with Davis Wright Tremaine who previously served as in-house counsel for ABC.

“Probably the biggest question is whether it will use those rules to try to eject reporters, whether it’s Acosta or others, in the future,” Siegel said.

He said any reporter ejected from the White House under the new rules and procedures would be able to challenge them in court. The result could be an ongoing carousel of legal fights between Trump and the press — something the president seems to relish.

In the case of Acosta, Baker said the White House has an easy solution before it.

“If they really think that Jim Acosta is too rude, don’t call on him,” he said. “They want what’s happening right now. They want to be in a war with us.”

Gabby Orr contributed to this report.