Jeff Session’s recusal, James Comey’s firing, and Robert Mueller’s appointment as special counsel
From July 2016 a secret investigation had been conducted into possible collusion between Russian officials and prominent members of the Trump campaign. On March 2, 2017, Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from oversight of that no-longer secret investigation after controversy grew regarding his own meetings with Kislyak before the election and over statements Sessions had made during his confirmation hearing regarding the possibility of preelection contacts between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. Almost from the outset of the first reports of Russian involvement in the election, Trump had been dubious of the veracity of the accusations and downplayed their significance, casting them as an outgrowth of Democrats’ sour-grapes frustration at losing the presidential election.
In May Trump dismissed Comey as director of the FBI shortly after Comey testified before Congress, in part about the bureau’s investigation of possible Russian intervention in the election. Purportedly, Trump fired Comey at the recommendation of recently appointed Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who, in a memo solicited by the president, criticized Comey’s handling of the public announcements related to Clinton’s e-mails. Soon after Comey’s dismissal, however, the president made it known that he had planned to fire Comey regardless of the Justice Department’s recommendation, at least partly because of Comey’s handling of “this Russia thing,” which Trump repeatedly characterized as a politically motivated witch hunt. Following his ouster, a memo written by Comey came to light summarizing a meeting with Trump in January 2017 at which Comey claimed that the president had both sought a pledge of loyalty and indirectly asked him to halt the investigation of Flynn’s activities.
Comey’s description of the encounter (which would be repeated in new testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee in June) sparked concern, even among some members of Trump’s own party, that the president’s actions may have constituted obstruction of justice. Four congressional committees—the Senate and House intelligence committees, the House oversight committee, and the Senate Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism—were actively investigating Russian interference in the election. In the wake of the Comey memo, however, protracted calls by many Democrats and even some Republicans for the appointment of an independent prosecutor or special committee were answered on May 17 by the Justice Department’s appointment of former FBI director Robert Mueller as special counsel to oversee the FBI’s investigation of Russian interference in the election and possible collusion between Russian officials and the Trump campaign.
Hurricanes Harvey and Maria and the mass shootings in Las Vegas, Parkland, and Santa Fe
In August Hurricane Harvey, the most forceful storm to make landfall in the United States in more than a decade, inundated the Houston area. The city received more than 16 inches (400 mm) of rain in a 24-hour period. Catastrophic flooding claimed several lives, more than 100,000 homes were damaged, and thousands of people remained displaced months afterward. Already challenged by the events in Houston, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) responded to another natural disaster when Puerto Rico was hammered by Hurricane Maria, a nearly category 5 cyclone, in September. That storm caused more than $90 billion in property damage and left some 400,000 of the island’s electricity customers without power for nearly five months. Puerto Rico’s Department of Public Safety’s initial official death toll from the storm was 64 lives, but some later estimates put the figure in the thousands, and in August 2018 the Puerto Rican government upped the official estimate to nearly 3,000 deaths.
Mass shootings continued to afflict the country. In October 2017 in Las Vegas, 58 people were killed and hundreds more were wounded when a man used as many as 23 guns to rain fire on the audience of a country music festival from the window of a 32nd-floor hotel room. In February 2018 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, 14 students and three staff members were killed when a former student who had been expelled for disciplinary reasons went on a rampage. Some of the students who survived the shooting became outspoken advocates for tighter gun-control laws and played prominent roles in the March for Our Lives protest that drew hundreds of thousands of demonstrators to Washington, D.C., on March 24, 2018, as well as to some 800 other gun-control rallies across the country and around the globe. Nonetheless, fewer than two months later, on May 18 in Santa Fe, Texas, another 10 people were killed in a shooting at a high school.
The #MeToov movement, the Alabama U.S. Senate special election, and the Trump tax cut
A different kind of social movement began shaking American society in October 2017, after it was revealed that film mogul Harvey Weinstein had for years with impunity sexually harassed and assaulted women in the industry. After one of his victims, actress Alyssa Milano, made her story known, a multitude of others who had been victims of sexual harassment or assault began sharing their experiences on social media. The resulting movement, which took its name from the social media hashtag used to post the stories, #MeToo, grew over the coming months to bring condemnation to dozens of powerful men in politics, business, entertainment, and the news media, including political commentator Bill O’Reilly, television newsmen Charlie Rose and Matt Lauer, actors Kevin Spacey and Sylvester Stallone, and U.S. Sen. Al Franken.
Allegations of sexual misconduct also played a pivotal role in the special election in December 2017 to fill the seat in the U.S. Senate for Alabama vacated by Jeff Sessions when he became attorney general. During the general election campaign, allegations surfaced that the Republican candidate, controversial former Alabama supreme court justice Roy Moore, had, when in his 30s, not only romantically pursued a number of teenage girls but also engaged in improper behaviour with some of them, including alleged assault. Seemingly in response to the allegations and as a reflection of growing discontent with the Trump presidency, Alabama voters elected a Democrat (Doug Jones) to the Senate for the first time in more than two decades.
The Alabama election was a setback for Trump, who had prominently supported Moore. Nevertheless, the president saw the implementation of a number of policy initiatives that pleased both his solid base of supporters and Republicans in general. Most notably, some two weeks after Jones’s election, Trump signed into law sweeping tax-cutting legislation that had been at the top of Republican wish lists for years. The new law reduced the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, kept the existing seven tax brackets for individuals but reduced rates almost across the board from 39.6 percent to 37 percent for the highest earners and from 15 percent to 12 percent for those in the second lowest bracket, and eliminated the tax penalty for individuals who had not purchased health insurance.