Trump Team Knew Flynn Was Under Investigation Before He Came to White House

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By MATTHEW ROSENBERG and MARK MAZZETTI

 Michael T. Flynn told President Trump’s transition team weeks before the inauguration that he was under federal investigation for secretly working as a paid lobbyist for Turkey during the campaign, according to two people familiar with the case.

Despite this warning, which came about a month after the Justice Department notified Mr. Flynn of the inquiry, Mr. Trump made Mr. Flynn his national security adviser. The job gave Mr. Flynn access to the president and nearly every secret held by American intelligence agencies.

Mr. Flynn’s disclosure, on Jan. 4, was first made to the transition team’s chief lawyer, Donald F. McGahn II, who is now the White House counsel. That conversation, and another one two days later between Mr. Flynn’s lawyer and transition lawyers, shows that the Trump team knew about the investigation of Mr. Flynn far earlier than has been previously reported.

His legal issues have been a problem for the White House from the beginning and are at the center of a growing political crisis for Mr. Trump. Mr. Flynn, who was fired after 24 days in the job, was initially kept on even after the acting attorney general, Sally Q. Yates, warned the White House that he might be subject to blackmail by the Russians for misleading Vice President Mike Pence about the nature of conversations he had with the Russian ambassador to Washington.

After Mr. Flynn’s dismissal, Mr. Trump tried to get James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director, to drop the investigation — an act that some legal experts say is grounds for an investigation of Mr. Trump for possible obstruction of justice. He fired Mr. Comey on May 9.

The White House declined to comment on whether officials there had known about Mr. Flynn’s legal troubles before the inauguration.

Mr. Flynn, a retired general, is one of a handful of Trump associates under scrutiny in intertwined federal investigations into their financial links to foreign governments and whether any of them helped Russia interfere in the presidential election.

In congressional testimony, the acting F.B.I. director, Andrew G. McCabe, has confirmed the existence of a “highly significant” investigation into possible collusion between Mr. Trump’s associates and Russian operatives to sway the presidential election. The pace of the investigations has intensified in recent weeks, with a veteran espionage prosecutor, Brandon Van Grack, now leading a grand jury inquiry in Northern Virginia that is scrutinizing Mr. Flynn’s foreign lobbying and has begun issuing subpoenas to businesses that worked with Mr. Flynn and his associates.

The New York Times has reviewed one of the subpoenas. It demands all “records, research, contracts, bank records, communications” and other documents related to work with Mr. Flynn and the Flynn Intel Group, the business he set up after he was forced out as chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2014.

The subpoena also asks for similar records about Ekim Alptekin, a Turkish businessman who is close to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey and is chairman of the Turkish-American Business Council. There is no indication that Mr. Alptekin is under investigation.

Signed by Dana J. Boente, the United States attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, the subpoena instructs the recipient to direct any questions about its contents to Mr. Van Grack.

Mr. Van Grack, a national security prosecutor based at the Justice Department headquarters in Washington, has experience conducting espionage investigations. He prosecuted a businessman for illegally exporting thousands of sensitive electronics components to Iran and a suspected hacker in the Syrian Electronic Army. In 2015, he prosecuted a Virginia man for acting as an unregistered agent of Syria’s intelligence services.

According to people who have talked to Mr. Flynn about the case, he sees the Justice Department’s investigation as part of an effort by the Obama administration and its holdovers in the government to keep him out of the White House. In his view, this effort began immediately after the election, when President Barack Obama, who had fired Mr. Flynn as the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told Mr. Trump that he would have profound concerns about Mr. Flynn’s becoming a top national security aide.

The people close to Mr. Flynn said he believed that when that warning did not dissuade Mr. Trump from making him national security adviser, the Justice Department opened its investigation into his lobbying work. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid angering Justice Department or White House officials.

The investigation stems from the work Mr. Flynn did for Inovo BV, a Dutch company owned by Mr. Alptekin, the Turkish businessman. On Aug. 9, Mr. Flynn and the Flynn Intel Group signed a contract with Inovo for $600,000 over 90 days to run an influence campaign aimed at discrediting Fethullah Gulen, an reclusive cleric who lives in Pennsylvania and whom Mr. Erdogan has accused of orchestrating a failed coup in Turkey last summer.

When he was hired by Mr. Alptekin, Mr. Flynn did not register as a foreign agent, as required by law when an American represents the interests of a foreign government. Only in March did he file a retroactive registration with the Justice Department because his lawyer, Robert K. Kelner, said that “the engagement could be construed to have principally benefited the Republic of Turkey.”

Trump campaign officials first became aware of a problem with Mr. Flynn’s business dealings in early November. On Nov. 8, the day of the election, Mr. Flynn wrote an op-ed in The Hill that advocated improved relations between Turkey and the United States and called Mr. Gulen “a shady Islamic mullah.”

“If he were in reality a moderate, he would not be in exile, nor would he excite the animus of Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his government,” the op-ed said.

Days later, after an article in The Daily Caller revealed that the Flynn Intel Group had a contract with Inovo, a Trump campaign lawyer held a conference call with members of the Flynn Intel Group, according to one person with knowledge of the call. The lawyer, William McGinley, was seeking more information about the nature of the group’s foreign work and wanted to know whether Mr. Flynn had been paid for the op-ed.

Mr. McGinley now works in the White House as cabinet secretary and deputy assistant to the president.

The Justice Department also took notice. The op-ed in The Hill raised suspicions that Mr. Flynn was working as a foreign agent, and in a letter dated Nov. 30, the Justice Department notified Mr. Flynn that it was scrutinizing his lobbying work.

Mr. Flynn hired a lawyer a few weeks later. By Jan. 4, the day Mr. Flynn informed Mr. McGahn of the inquiry, the Justice Department was investigating the matter.

Mr. Kelner then followed up with another call to the Trump transition’s legal team. He ended up leaving a message, identifying himself as Mr. Flynn’s lawyer. According to a person familiar with the case, Mr. Kelner did not get a call back until two days later, on Jan. 6.

Around the time of Mr. Flynn’s call with Mr. McGahn, the F.B.I. began investigating Mr. Flynn on a separate matter: phone conversations he had in late December with Sergey I. Kislyak, Russia’s ambassador to the United States. Current and former American officials said that, on the calls, Mr. Flynn discussed sanctions that the Obama administration had imposed on Russia for disrupting the November election.

After news of the calls became public, Mr. Flynn misled Mr. Pence about what he had discussed with Mr. Kislyak, telling him that the two had only exchanged holiday pleasantries.

Days after the inauguration, Ms. Yates, the acting attorney general, spoke with Mr. McGahn at the White House, telling him Justice Department lawyers believed that Mr. Flynn might be vulnerable to Russian blackmail. Since the Russians knew that Mr. Flynn had lied to the vice president, she said, they might have leverage over him.

The 25th Amendment Solution for Removing Trump

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By Ross Douthat

It was just three days and a lifetime ago that I wrote a column about Donald Trump’s unfitness for the presidency that affected a world-weary tone. Nothing about this White House’s chaos was surprising given the style of Trump’s campaign, I argued. None of the breaking scandals necessarily suggested high crimes as opposed to simple omni-incompetence. And given that Republicans made their peace with Trump’s unfitness many months ago, it seemed pointless to expect their leaders to move against him unless something far, far worse came out.

As I said, three days and a lifetime. If the G.O.P.’s surrender to candidate Trump made exhortations about Republican politicians’ duty to their country seem like so much pointless verbiage, now President Trump has managed to make exhortation seem unavoidable again.

He has done so, if several days’ worth of entirely credible leaks and revelations are to be believed, by demonstrating in a particularly egregious fashion why the question of “fitness” matters in the first place.

The presidency is not just another office. It has become, for good reasons and bad ones, a seat of semi-monarchical political power, a fixed place on which unimaginable pressures are daily brought to bear, and the final stopping point for decisions that can lead very swiftly to life or death for people the world over.

One does not need to be a Marvel superhero or Nietzschean Übermensch to rise to this responsibility. But one needs some basic attributes: a reasonable level of intellectual curiosity, a certain seriousness of purpose, a basic level of managerial competence, a decent attention span, a functional moral compass, a measure of restraint and self-control. And if a president is deficient in one or more of them, you can be sure it will be exposed.

Trump is seemingly deficient in them all. Some he perhaps never had, others have presumably atrophied with age. He certainly has political talent — charisma, a raw cunning, an instinct for the jugular, a form of the common touch, a certain creativity that normal politicians lack. He would not have been elected without these qualities. But they are not enough, they cannot fill the void where other, very normal human gifts should be.

There is, as my colleague David Brooks wrote Tuesday, a basic childishness to the man who now occupies the presidency. That is the simplest way of understanding what has come tumbling into light in the last few days: The presidency now has kinglike qualities, and we have a child upon the throne.

It is a child who blurts out classified information in order to impress distinguished visitors. It is a child who asks the head of the F.B.I. why the rules cannot be suspended for his friend and ally. It is a child who does not understand the obvious consequences of his more vindictive actions — like firing the very same man whom you had asked to potentially obstruct justice on your say-so.

A child cannot be president. I love my children; they cannot have the nuclear codes.

But a child also cannot really commit “high crimes and misdemeanors” in any usual meaning of the term. There will be more talk of impeachment now, more talk of a special prosecutor for the Russia business; well and good. But ultimately I do not believe that our president sufficiently understands the nature of the office that he holds, the nature of the legal constraints that are supposed to bind him, perhaps even the nature of normal human interactions, to be guilty of obstruction of justice in the Nixonian or even Clintonian sense of the phrase. I do not believe he is really capable of the behind-the-scenes conspiring that the darker Russia theories envision. And it is hard to betray an oath of office whose obligations you evince no sign of really understanding or respecting.

Which is not an argument for allowing him to occupy that office. It is an argument, instead, for using a constitutional mechanism more appropriate to this strange situation than impeachment: the 25th Amendment to the Constitution, which allows for the removal of the president if the vice president and a majority of the cabinet informs the Congress that he is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office” and (should the president contest his own removal) a two-thirds vote by Congress confirms the cabinet’s judgment.

The Trump situation is not exactly the sort that the amendment’s Cold War-era designers were envisioning. He has not endured an assassination attempt or suffered a stroke or fallen prey to Alzheimer’s. But his incapacity to really govern, to truly execute the serious duties that fall to him to carry out, is nevertheless testified to daily — not by his enemies or external critics, but by precisely the men and women whom the Constitution asks to stand in judgment on him, the men and women who serve around him in the White House and the cabinet.

Read the things that these people, members of his inner circle, his personally selected appointees, say daily through anonymous quotations to the press. (And I assure you they say worse off the record.) They have no respect for him, indeed they seem to palpitate with contempt for him, and to regard their mission as equivalent to being stewards for a syphilitic emperor.

It is not squishy New York Times conservatives who regard the president as a child, an intellectual void, a hopeless case, a threat to national security; it is people who are self-selected loyalists, who supported him in the campaign, who daily go to work for him. And all this, in the fourth month of his administration.

This will not get better. It could easily get worse. And as hard and controversial as a 25th Amendment remedy would be, there are ways in which Trump’s removal today should be less painful for conservatives than abandoning him in the campaign would have been — since Hillary Clinton will not be retroactively elected if Trump is removed, nor will Neil Gorsuch be unseated. Any cost to Republicans will be counted in internal divisions and future primary challenges, not in immediate policy defeats.

Meanwhile, from the perspective of the Republican leadership’s duty to their country, and indeed to the world that our imperium bestrides, leaving a man this witless and unmastered in an office with these powers and responsibilities is an act of gross negligence, which no objective on the near-term political horizon seems remotely significant enough to justify.

There will be time to return again to world-weariness and cynicism as this agony drags on. Right now, though, I will be boring in my sincerity: I respectfully ask Mike Pence and Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell to reconsider their support for a man who never should have had his party’s nomination, never should have been elevated to this office, never should have been endorsed and propped up and defended by people who understood his unfitness all along.

Now is a day for redemption. Now is an acceptable time.

Trump's Immigration Police Have Already Arrested 41,000 Undocumented Immigrants

Roughly a quarter of them had no criminal convictions.

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By LAURA SMITH

Immigration and Customs Enforcement confirmed Wednesday morning what many immigrants already knew: President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown has resulted in a surge of arrests. In a splashy statement, ICE said its agents arrested more than 41,000 people in the 100 days since Trump signed his executive orderson immigration—a spike of nearly 40 percent when compared to the same period last year. "These statistics reflect President Trump's commitment to enforce our immigration laws fairly and across the board," the statement reads.

The ICE statement reported that the majority were "convicted criminals, with offenses ranging from homicide and assault to sexual abuse and drug-related charges," listing anecdotes of immigrants who had committed violent crimes. But it also notes that roughly 11,000 of the immigrants arrested had no criminal convictions—up from about 4,200 at this time a year ago. (The Washington Postreported late last month that half of those apprehended so far during Trump's presidency had no criminal record or were convicted only of traffic violations.)

During his presidency, Barack Obama was heavily criticized for deporting large numbers of immigrants without criminal records who were apprehended along the US-Mexico border, including thousands of women and children fleeing gang violence in Central America. The latest ICE stats have advocates particularly worried that arrests are increasingly happening away from the border, in the country's interior—and, as Human Rights Watch senior researcher Grace Meng tweeted, "interior arrests means lots more families being torn apart."

Donald Trump to announce $350bn arms deal with Saudi Arabia – one of the largest in history

The deal will be part of the president's proposal that Gulf nations form an 'Arab Nato'

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By Mythili Sampathkumar

Donald Trump will use his upcoming Saudi Arabia trip to announce one of the largest arms sales deals in US history - somewhere in the neighbouhood of $98bn to $128bn worth of arms. That could add up to $350bn over ten years.

The deal will be what the Washington Post said is a “cornerstone” of the proposal encouraging the Gulf states to form its own alliance like the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) military alliance, dubbed “Arab Nato."

Nato is comprised of 28 countries including the US. Mr Trump been an outspoken critic of the organisation but after a face-to-face meeting with Nato Secretary General Jens Stollenberg, he said the alliance was "no longer obsolete." 

The White House said the president will propose it as a template for an alliance that will fight terrorism and keep Iran in check.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman began negotiations on this deal shortly after the 2016 US election when he sent a delegation to Trump Tower to meet with the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who is serving as a senior advisor of sorts to Mr Trump. 

The idea of an Arab Nato is not new.

There was talk in 2015 of a “response force” in Egypt, comprised of approximately 40,000 troops from Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and a few other Gulf nations. 

The “response force” would have had a Nato-like command structure, with soldiers paid for by their own countries and the Gulf Cooperation Council made up of wealthy oil economies finance operations and management of the force. 

However, intra-regional tensions and centuries-old disputes prevented it from ever being established. 

The Trump administration has not addressed that problem as yet, but the “America First” doctrine seems to be driving the arms deal and proposal. 

More American involvement, a more entrenched Nato-like military structure, and increased professional capability to match Nato forces may come about in the new Arab Nato alliance in part due to the motivation of Saudi Arabia. 

President Barack Obama's administration brokered more arms sales than any US administration since World War II - estimated at $200bn. They sold Saudi Arabia alone $60bn in arms, which sparked criticism by Democrats concerned with Saudi Arabia's alleged human rights violations. 

Trump Wants to Cut Energy Dept's Renewables Budget. Big Time.

Draft 2018 budget proposal obtained by Axios reveals a 70-percent cut

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By Andrea Germanos

The Trump administration is weighing putting the Energy Department's budget for its renewable energy and energy efficiency program on the chopping block with a proposal to slash it by 70 percent.

That's according to a draft 2018 budget proposal obtained by Axios.

It shows $613 million for sustainable transportation in 2017, but just $184 million for 2018—a nearly 70-percent drop. There was $451 million for renewable power in the budget for 2017 but $134 million proposed for 2018—a 70-percent drop. There was $762 million for energy efficiency in 2017, and $160 proposed for 2018. That's a 79-percent drop.

In total, the data obtained by Axios show that Energy Department's office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy budget went from $2,073 million in 2017 to a proposed $636 million for 2018, which marks a nearly 70-percent decrease.

The news outlet's Amy Harder writes that the plan is unlikely to get congressional approval but is important nonetheless, as "[i]t puts a low marker down to negotiate with Congress. The lower the starting point, the lower the ultimate numbers could well end up."

Rep. Keith Ellison reacted to the news on Twitter, writing: "Cutting renewable energy by 70% will not only cost us jobs, it will worsen public health & hurt our environment!"

A recent analysis of Department of Energy data by the Sierra Club backs up the Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chair's claim about the job costs.

"Clean energy jobs, including those from solar, wind, energy efficiency, smart grid technology, and battery storage, vastly outnumber all fossil fuel jobs nationwide from the coal, oil, and gas sectors. That includes jobs in power generation, mining, and other forms of fossil fuel extraction," the conservation group found.

Nationwide, "clean energy jobs outnumber all fossil fuel jobs by over 2.5 to 1; and they outnumber all jobs in coal and gas by 5 to 1," the group wrote.

The Energy Department's offices for nuclear power and fossil-fuel energy, would also be cut, Axios also reported, though by a smaller margin—31 percent and 54 percent respectively.

The new reporting comes as the U.K.-based accounting firm Ernst & Young's most recent Renewable Energy Country Attractiveness Index shows that the U.S. has fallen from the top spot to number three. It's a less attractive to market to invest in renewables thanks in part to President Donald Trump's order to gut his predecessor's Clean Power Plan.

"A marked shift in U.S. policy has resulted in the demise of the Clean Power Plan, which has made renewable investors more nervous about possible reductions to the Investment Tax Credit and Production Tax Credit. Concerns also include if gas prices continue to remain low and transmission capacity remains stagnant," the index states.

The most attractive market is now China, with India coming in at number two.

And those two countries, Climate Action Tracker said Monday, "are set to overachieve their Paris Agreement climate pledges." Trump, meanwhile, has aimed a "wrecking ball" at the climate.  

"The highly adverse rollbacks of U.S. climate policies by the Trump Administration, if fully implemented and not compensated by other actors, are projected to flatten U.S. emissions instead of continuing on a downward trend," said professor Niklas Höhne of NewClimate Institute.

Trump turns to ex-campaign aides as scandals pile up

The president has brought Corey Lewandowski, Jason Miller and David Bossie back into his orbit.

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By TARA PALMERI

President Donald Trump, frustrated by his aides’ handling of the multiple scandals engulfing the White House, is turning to the comfort of his old campaign advisers.

Former officials including Jason Miller, David Bossie and Corey Lewandowski have slid back into the president’s group of advisers as Trump has chafed at the steady stream of damaging leaks and critical blind quotes that have flowed out of the West Wing.

While it’s not clear any of these old hands will ultimately land a job in the White House, Trump has been weighing a major staff overhaul, according to multiple people familiar with the matter, and has openly called his current press team “incompetent.”

Those close to Trump say it may be time for the president to make a change.

“I’ve known the president for 40 years, I consider myself a hard-core Trump loyalist,” said former campaign adviser Roger Stone. “I look at the White House staff list and I know two people on the staff. He has surrounded himself with quislings, and they leak like a sieve. He beat the establishment and then he immediately hired them, that doesn’t make any sense.”

In recent days, some of Trump’s top campaign aides – some of whom were ousted – have made an appearance at the White House.

Bossie, a former deputy campaign manager who briefly ran a pro-Trump super PAC, sat in a meeting on Monday morning during which Trump blasted press secretary Sean Spicer and communications director Mike Dubke for their handling of the fallout of Trump’s firing of former FBI Director James Comey, according to a White House official and an outside adviser.

Another White House official confirmed Bossie’s presence, but disputed the nature of Trump’s displeasure. "It was more out of frustration, not anyone, directed at the media, not the people who work there," the official said.

Meanwhile, Lewandowski, who was pushed out as Trump’s campaign manager after a power struggle with campaign chairman Paul Manafort, was spotted in the West Wing lobby on Tuesday, according to two White House officials, as Trump’s aides were dealing with another damaging report that Trump allegedly shared highly classified information with Russian officials.

Lewandowski declined to comment on whether he met with Trump in the Oval Office.

A White House official said that Trump has floated the idea of bringing back his longest-serving campaign manager, who recently resigned from his lobbying shop Avenue Strategies amid allegations that he appeared to be selling access to the White House. He has told people that the president has asked him to “bring order” to Trump’s feuding White House staff, according to a GOP operative briefed on the situation.

The operative said Lewandowski is already talking up the idea that he has been helping “broker” conversations between the White House and other prospective new staff – something Lewandowski denied.

"I have never said the things you are reporting," Lewandowski told POLITICO.

Trump has also turned to his former campaign communications director Jason Miller for messaging advice, as his frustrations grows with Dubke, whom Trump believes is an ineffective defender and advocate, according to four people with knowledge of the situation.

Miller, who has visited the White House multiple times and regularly talks with Trump by phone, has become one of the president’s favorite surrogates and informal advisers. Trump has openly mused about taking Miller on in Dubke’s role as communications director, according to an outside adviser, but Miller has told friends in the administration that he plans on remaining on the outside.

The White House declined to comment.

Many of the loyalists Trump is increasingly turning to were frozen out during the transition when chief of staff Reince Priebus, the former Republican National Committee chairman, brought on a slew of his own staffers.

Within the White House there's a clear divide between RNC staffers, who critics say are preoccupied with protecting Priebus, and the rest of the staff, who former RNC staffers say don't have the political and governing experience to run the White House.

Many hoped that chief strategist Steve Bannon would be a champion for campaign loyalists, but he has shown little interest in building an extensive staff network within the administration the way Priebus has, according to allies and White House staffers.

It’s not clear, however, that Trump is ready to formally bring his old campaign advisers into the West Wing. Trump has floated the idea of staff shakeups, especially regarding Priebus and Bannon, since early in his presidency but he has yet to pull the trigger on dramatic personnel changes.

And some wonder whether nostalgia is driving Trump’s contact with his former advisers.

"It's less about bringing back old campaign aides and more about missing the days when he trusted his staff," said one close adviser.

Sheriff who likened Black Lives Matter to KKK to join Trump administration

David Clarke, who acted as surrogate for president during election campaign, says he will be link between federal government and local law enforcement

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By Ed Pilkington

The controversial Milwaukee County sheriff, David Clarke, who has compared Black Lives Matter to the Ku Klux Klan, has said he is joining the Trump administration as a point person between federal government and local and state law enforcement.

Clarke broke the news of his appointment on the local Wisconsin radio station 1130 WISN Radio. The move brings to an end a long courtship between Trump and the sheriff, who acted as a surrogate for the Republican nominee on the campaign trail last year and was one of few African American speakers at the Republican national convention, at which he proclaimed “blue lives matter” in homage to police officers.

The appointment of Clarke as assistant secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, and his consequent stepping down as sheriff in Wisconsin’s biggest city, will be greeted with delight by Milwaukee immigrant and minority groups who have accused him of encouraging racial profiling among his deputies. The move suggests that the Trump administration may continue to push local police jurisdictions to play a bigger role alongside federal immigration officials in rounding up undocumented immigrants – a policy that Clarke himself had begun to adopt in Milwaukee.

In an interview with the Guardian in March, the sheriff said he was in favor of local law enforcers acting as immigration agents in apprehending undocumented individuals who had committed even the most basic misdemeanours. “I don’t think it’s too much to ask for someone in this country illegally to abide by all our laws – I don’t care what the crime is. If I went to Mexico, I don’t get to engage in misdemeanor crimes and then say, ‘Well, it’s just a misdemeanor.”

He also dismissed accusations of racial profiling. “Let’s define what we profile: we profile criminal behavior, not ethnicity. This term ‘racial profiling’ is thrown out there as flame-throwing – call them racist! – I’m not afraid of that crap.”

Clarke’s critics have questioned his suitability for federal office, given the patchy track record of the sheriff’s department in Milwaukee County. One of his duties is overseeing the county jail, which in the past year has seen four deaths among its inmates.

One of those to die was a 38-year-old man with bipolar disorder who was found to have suffered dehydration after his water supply was cut off for six days in response to his erratic behavior. The death was ruled a homicide.

Clarke said that all four deaths were routine, but when asked by the Guardian how he explained a death by dehydration under his care, he replied: “This guy was in bad health. It was a contributing factor.”

Reacting to his announcement on Wednesday, the immigrant advocacy group Voces de la Frontera said he was “unfit for office” and should face charges over the deaths in jail. The group, which also called on Governor Scott Walker to end collaboration with Trump’s immigration crackdown, said: “Trump’s appointment of Clarke shows this administration’s disregard for human rights.”

The sheriff is known for his colourful and provocative use of language, and has been dubbed the “black Rush Limbaugh with a badge”. He frequently makes pugilistic remarks on social media and at rallies, including calling a Milwaukee resident a “snowflake” after a contretemps onboard a plane.

At Trump’s inauguration celebrations in January, he told a crowd that the only time he would reach across the aisle to work with liberals would be to “grab one of them by the throat”.

“I play smash-mouth politics,” he told the Guardian. “Politics is a contact sport. I didn’t create the rules. It’s hit or be hit. I understand the environment. People are trying to slit my throat politically and personally, so you better be ready when they come after you.”

At a time when Trump has been advised by senior Republicans to impose greater message discipline on the White House, Clarke’s promotion to the national stage is unlikely to introduce a calmer tone to political debate. He is a fierce partisan, even though he stands for election in Milwaukee as a Democrat – a necessary compromise for one seeking office in that historically Democratic city.

In a recent tweet, he lashed out at media coverage of Trump’s recent travails, using forthright language that surpassed even the president’s own. “The swamp creatures in the Beltway have mounted yet another all out assault on @realDonaldTrump. He beat em back before & he’ll do it again,” he wrote.

Wall Street Wonders What’s Next After Trump Jolts Markets

• Dow average sinks 370 points in worst day since September
• Gold rallies, volatility spikes as politics spills to markets

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By Dani Burger, Brian Chappatta, and Nabila Ahmed

For the first time, a Wall Street that’s been giddy over Donald Trump is starting to ask some hard questions.

From Day 1, markets have rallied, defying what many of the same Wall Street types said would be a disastrous election outcome. Since then, U.S. stocks have hit record after record, driving up shares of Goldman Sachs to JPMorgan Chase to Apple, as investors quickly focused on what his pro-business, tax-cutting agenda would mean for corporate profits.

But the steady drumbeat of bad news may finally be taking its toll. On Wednesday, stocks tumbled, Treasuries soared and volatility came roaring back as a series of damaging revelations -- from Trump’s disclosure of classified information to Russian officials to reports that he pressed FBI Director James Comey to drop a probe into former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn -- prompted many on Wall Street to wonder whether the turbulence that has shattered the market’s calm might be the start of something bigger. And that was before news broke that former FBI Director Robert Mueller was named special counsel to oversee the probe of Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 election.

It’s all also left many to ask whether the market was blinded by its own optimism over Trump’s business-friendly agenda.

“Crazy times, huh?” said Matt Maley, an equity strategist at Miller Tabak & Co. “I’ve talked to a few personal friends and a few customers who I know are supportive of Trump that are saying, boy, this isn’t good.”

Of course, financial markets are often punctuated by bouts of alarm that have unsettled traders during normal times. And up to now, it’s been easy to dismiss the president’s missteps as the price of electing an outsider. But now, the biggest question is whether Trump’s presidency is in trouble.

For some of the world’s largest banks, Trump’s firing of Comey last week was a signal moment. At least two global firms have started mapping out how financial markets might react to an impeachment -- a scenario they still saw as improbable, according to people with knowledge of the matter, who declined to speak publicly because such deliberations are politically sensitive. While their work is just beginning and it’s too early to draw conclusions, the people said, it’s a telling sign of just how serious things have become.

“The political risk has been upped here -- things sound more ominous and serious than a week ago,” said Gary Pollack, the head of fixed-income trading at Deutsche Bank AG’s Private Wealth Management unit.

Much of the problem is how pervasively investors had tuned out Trump in the months before the latest scandal broke. The CBOE Volatility Index’s average level since December has been 25 percent below that of 2016 -- not exactly a turbulent year to begin with. Everything from Treasuries to currencies and stocks had been limping along without a care -- before Wednesday.

“Markets are very blasé about political risk until the very last moment,” former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said at the SkyBridge Alternatives Conference, known as SALT, in Las Vegas. “They go along until something happens that pulls the rug out from under their assumptions.”

The S&P 500 Index, which set another all-time high just two days ago, was routed in the worst selloff in eight months, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average’s 372-point slide was its steepest since the election. The dollar fell a sixth day, while yields on 10-year Treasuries tumbled by the most since the day after the Brexit vote.

Trump is facing the deepest crisis of his presidency after contents of a memo written by Comey surfaced Tuesday, alleging that the president asked him to drop an investigation of Flynn. That came after Trump disclosed highly classified intelligence to Russian officials in a meeting last week.

“The market is running with politics,” said Bret Barker, who oversees U.S. fixed-income at TCW Group Inc., which manages $194 billion. “There’s just not much out there to change fundamentals right now.”

A vacuum of catalysts faced anyone hoping the traditional saviors of markets would step up to calm things down. Earnings season is over, the next report on U.S. employment is 16 days away, and the Fed doesn’t meet again for a month. That’s potentially bad news for a stock market whose 10 percent rally since Election Day has pushed valuations to the highest levels since just after the dot-com bubble.

The biggest beneficiaries of the Trump trade were bearing the brunt of the carnage on Wednesday. Exchange-traded funds tuned to stocks with the most sensitivity to market swings were having their worst day in two months. Bank shares in the S&P 500 plunged 3 percent, bringing the slide from a March 1 record to 8.6 percent.

“That’s one of the problems with rather a quiet market that even a small ripple could look pretty big,” said Brian Jacobsen, chief portfolio strategist at Wells Fargo Funds Management. “Sometimes if it’s too quiet, people think things can only get worse.”