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Donald Trump's highly abnormal presidency: the week of Oct. 2

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Donald Trump made it clear at the beginning of his campaign that he wasn’t going to follow the normal rules or tone of politics. We’re keeping track of all the ways his presidency veers from the norm in terms of policy and rhetoric.

Day 260 Oct. 6

Another Trump appointee is under investigation for flying private

Members of the Trump administration keep traveling on private jets, and government watchdogs have had it.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s office of the inspector general is widening its investigation into administrator Scott Pruitt’s travel to include his use of private and military aircraft, Reuters reported Friday. Originally, the office was only looking into Pruitt’s extensive travel to his home state of Oklahoma, where he spent nearly half of his first three months in office — but now, it’s investigating whether Pruitt actually needed to take at least four flights on non-commercial planes.

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EPA spokesperson Liz Bowman told Reuters that EPA lawyers had cleared the flights, but the inspector general will now determine if “EPA’s policies and procedures are sufficiently designed to prevent fraud, waste and abuse with the Administrator’s travel.”

Read: All the Trump officials who took private jets and still have jobs

Pruitt is now the second member of the Trump administration under investigation for his jet setting. The inspector general for the Interior Department is also looking at Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s multiple flights on government and private jets.

In other private jet news, Energy Secretary Rick Perry hopped on a $11,000 chartered flight last Thursday, Reuters reported Thursday, just one day before Tom Price resigned as health and human services secretary over the eye-popping $500,000 price tag on his own travel bills.

— Carter Sherman

Former coal lobbyist up for position at EPA

Rumors have been floating around for months that former coal lobbyist Andrew Wheeler was up for the job of deputy administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, and on Friday he was officially nominated.

Wheeler was a registered lobbyist for Murray Energy — the coal giant run by outspoken climate denier Robert Murray — until August 11 of this year. Prior to that, he was a legislative aide to Republican Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, who famously brought a snowball onto the Senate floor to “disprove” climate change.

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Despite his qualifications, Wheeler might need waiver from the Trump administration in order to do his job at EPA. That’s because in January, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that barred lobbyists from participating in “any particular matter involving specific parties that is directly and substantially related to my former employer or former clients, including regulations and contracts.”

But luckily, Trump put a backdoor in the order — he can issue waivers, which don’t have to be disclose to the public.

— Alex Lubben

Day 259 Oct. 5

White House chief of staff John Kelly’s cell phone reportedly compromised

White House chief of staff John Kelly’s personal cell phone was likely compromised, U.S. government officials told Politico Thursday. The breach may have occurred as early as December, when Kelly still headed the Department of Homeland Security.

White House IT staff discovered the compromise when Kelly turned in his phone for tech support this summer, saying that many of its functions had stopped working. The White House later circulated a one-page memo about the incident.

When reached for comment by Politico, a White House official didn’t deny the memo’s existence, but said that Kelly had relied on his government phone for most business and has since switched to a different phone since joining the administration.

It’s unclear what data may have been accessed, if any — or by whom.

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— Carter Sherman

San Juan mayor wears “Nasty” T-shirt after Trump calls her nasty

President Trump tweeted last week that the mayor of Puerto Rico’s capital city, Carmen Yulin Cruz, was being “nasty” to him. This week she turned his insult into a fashion statement.

In an interview on Univision on Wednesday, Cruz boldly wore a T-shirt imprinted with the word “NASTY.” Although Cruz didn’t specify her intention, the shirt not only slaps back at Trump’s tweet but also evokes the iconic moment in the final debate of the U.S. presidential election when Trump called Hillary Clinton a “nasty woman.”

“What is really nasty is that anyone would turn their back on the Puerto Rican people,” Cruz said on the show. “When someone is bothered by someone claiming lack of drinking water, lack of medicine for the sick, and lack of food for the hungry, that person has problems too deep to be explained in an interview.”

The T-shirt was a direct hit at Trump, who has accused Cruz of “poor leadership” and told Puerto Ricans during his visit Tuesday that they’ve thrown the budget “a little out of whack.” Cruz has been extremely critical of the federal government’s relief efforts in Puerto Rico, arguing they aren’t enough. She even called Trump the “miscommunicator-in-chief.”

— Alexa Liautaud

Mueller’s Russia probe is now looking into the “pee tape” dossier

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian meddling in the U.S. election is now looking into the explosive dossier that details alleged ties between Moscow and the Trump campaign, sources familiar with the inquiry told Reuters.

The dossier, compiled by ex-MI6 agent Christopher Steele, contains unverified claims that businessmen fronting for Russian intelligence helped the Trump team sway the election. The contents also detail more salacious sexual allegations against Trump — namely, that he got prostitutes to urinate on a Moscow hotel bed — that could make him susceptible to blackmail.

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Trump has dismissed the dossier, published by BuzzFeed News in January, as “fake news.” A January report, however, said that four U.S. intelligence agencies were taking the allegations seriously.

Trump’s Republicans rivals had originally funded the dossier during the primaries. Pro-Hillary Clinton groups took over support once Trump became the GOP nominee.

The report that Mueller is taking over the FBI investigation into the dossier came just hours after the Senate Intelligence Committee said it had “hit a wall” trying to verify the document’s claims.

The Committee, which failed to convince Steele to appear and give evidence, said they could not determine if the Trump campaign coordinated with Moscow to influence the election.

— David Gilbert

Day 258 Oct. 4

Ivanka and Don Jr. were nearly charged with felony fraud, report says

President Trump’s kids Don Jr. and Ivanka narrowly avoided felony fraud charges for misleading buyers interested in a failing real estate development in SoHo back in 2012, according to a joint report from The New Yorker, ProPublica, and WNYC. The charges mysteriously disappeared after longtime Trump attorney Marc Kasowitz made a handful of large contributions to the campaign fund of the Manhattan district attorney handling the case.

At the time, Ivanka and Don Jr. knew they were circulating false information to prospective buyers for the Trump SoHo, a hotel and condo development that just wasn’t selling. The siblings were also worried that investigators and the press might be onto them, according to several unnamed sources who reviewed emails between the two.

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As it turns out, Ivanka and Don Jr. were being investigated by the Major Economic Crimes Bureau of the office of the Manhattan district attorney, Cy Vance, who was building a strong case. “You couldn’t have a better email trail,” a person close to the investigation told the publications.

Then, Ivanka and Don Jr.’s  lawyer, Marc Kasowitz — who’s now defending President Trump in the Russia investigation — dropped $25,000 to support Vance’s reelection campaign. Kasowitz also helped Vance fundraise from others, according to the report.

Vance reportedly overruled his own prosecutors, who wanted to keep the case alive.

“I donated to Cy Vance’s campaign because I was and remain extremely impressed by him as a person of impeccable integrity, as a brilliant lawyer, and as a public servant with creative ideas and tremendous ability,” Kasowitz wrote in a statement sent to the reporters from ProPublica, the New Yorker, and WNYC.

— Alex Lubben

Trump wants to wipe out Puerto Rico’s debt (even though he can’t)

Hours after joking that Puerto Rico had screwed up the federal budget during his visit there Tuesday, President Trump told Fox News he was going to wipe out the storm-ravaged island’s significant debt. But there’s almost nothing he can do about that as president.

“You know, they owe a lot of money to your friends on Wall Street, and we’re going to have to wipe that out,” Trump told correspondent Geraldo Rivera. “You can say goodbye to that.”

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The president’s bold promise comes after previous comments that seemed to criticize Puerto Rico’s finances.

Earlier that morning, Trump joked with Puerto Rican officials, “Now, I hate to tell you, Puerto Rico, but you’ve thrown our budget a little out of whack because we’ve spent a lot of money on Puerto Rico, and that’s fine.”

Just after the storm hit the island, Trump was focusing on the debt too.

Despite Trump’s fixation on Puerto Rico’s bottom line, he doesn’t have a say over it. Most of Puerto Rico’s debt is in municipal bonds held by a wide variety of hedge funds and individuals, which the federal government and president don’t control.

“We are not going to bail them out. We are not going to pay off those debts. We are not going to bail out those bond holders,” Trump’s budget chief Mick Mulvaney told Bloomberg Wednesday.

Josh Marcus

Rex Tillerson reportedly called Trump a “moron”

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson reportedly doesn’t think very highly of his boss. In fact, he might want to quit.

After a July 20 meeting in a secure room at the Pentagon known as “The Tank,” Tillerson called President Trump a “moron” in front of a handful of senior administration officials, three unnamed sources familiar with the event told NBC News. Just a day earlier, Trump had hinted he might fire the military’s top commander in Afghanistan and compared deciding troop levels there to renovating a high-end restaurant, officials in the meeting told NBC.

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Tillerson has reportedly been frustrated with Trump for months. According to three of NBC’s anonymous sources, he almost quit after Trump’s inappropriate and highly political speech to the Boy Scouts in July. (Tillerson used to be the president of the organization.)

At the end of July, State Department officials had to beg Tillerson to stay on, and Vice President Mike Pence urged him to keep his spats with the president private, an unnamed White House official told NBC.

During a press conference Wednesday morning, however, Tillerson vehemently denied that he had ever considered resigning and affirmed his “commitment” to the administration. When asked directly if he had called the president a moron, Tillerson refused to respond to the “petty nonsense.”

The president wasn’t happy with NBC’s report either.

— Alex Lubben and Christina Sterbenz

Death toll doubles after Trump says Puerto Rico not “real catastrophe”

San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz attacked Donald Trump Tuesday following remarks he made to Hurricane Maria victims during his visit, suggesting Puerto Rico’s suffering was not “a real catastrophe like Katrina.”

The mayor, who clashed with Trump last week over his lack of leadership, said the president’s latest outburst showed a “lack of sensitivity.”

“I would hope that the president of the United States stops spouting out comments that really hurt the people of Puerto Rico, because rather than commander in chief he sort of becomes miscommunicator in chief,” she told CNN.

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Speaking at a roundtable event with federal and local officials, Trump celebrated the federal government’s widely criticized emergency response, contrasting the death toll in Puerto Rico with the death toll of Hurricane Katrina, noting the latter as a “real catastrophe.”

“Sixteen versus literally thousands of people,” he said of the dead. “You can be very proud.”

Trump’s comments came shortly before Puerto Rico’s Gov. Ricardo Rossello announced the revised official death toll, which doubled from 16 to 34. Gov. Rossello also said Hurricane Maria had caused an estimated $90 billion in damages.

Meeting survivors at Calvary Chapel outside the capital San Juan, Trump threw paper towels into the crowd and told one family to “have a good time.”

Trump’s visit was also criticized by some of the island’s residents.

“He takes two weeks to visit a disaster zone where 3.5 million American citizens live,” Joel Isaac told the Star. “He arrives with a smile on his face, makes fun of the situation, shows no empathy, and lies on camera as he does 24–7. And then throws paper towel rolls to people in need as if he was playing Go Fetch with dogs.”

— David Gilbert 

Day 257 Oct. 3

Trump blames Puerto Rico truck drivers for slow response

President Trump heads to Puerto Rico today to check on recovery efforts in the wake of Hurricane Maria, which has left vast segments of Puerto Rico’s 3.4 million populationwithout necessities like food, water, electricity, and medical care. But that hasn’t stopped him from criticizing the people of Puerto Rico for their response to the disaster.

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“But now the roads are cleared, communications is starting to come back. We need their truck drivers to start driving trucks,” he told reporters before getting on a flight to the island. “On a local level, they have to give us more help.”

While it’s true that there has been a shortage of truck drivers to deliver emergency supplies arriving in San Juan, Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rosselló explained to CNN Thursday that this was because of communications problems still plaguing the U.S. territory.

“When we say we don’t have truck drivers, we mean that we have not been able to contact them,” Rosselló said.

Only 40 percent of Puerto Ricans had cell service as of this morning, according to Puerto Rican government estimates. Ongoing fuel shortages and severe road damage have also hampered recovery efforts.

— Joshua Marcus

Household staff had access to Jared and Ivanka emails

“Hundreds” more private emails emanating from the Trump administration are being pored over by White House officials, according to a Monday report in Politico.

The latest batch is associated with an unreported third email account tied to a family domain for Ivanka and Jared Kushner, accessible by their household staff.

Reports emerged last month that Donald Trump’s daughter and son-in-law, both senior White House aides, had used their respective personal accounts for official business while in office.

Emails to the third account included “non-public travel documents, internal schedules and some official White House materials,” the report said.

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Last month, the New York Times reported at least six close advisors to President Trump occasionally used private email accounts for White House business.

The embarrassing revelations spurred an internal White House probe into private email use, and staff were instructed to comply with official “guidelines for work-related communications.”

During the 2016 campaign, Trump repeatedly savaged his opponent Hillary Clinton for her use of a private email server while secretary of state.

— Paul Vale

Day 256 Oct. 2

Another Trump official is being investigated for private flights

Four days after Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price resigned after spending hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars on private plans — often for personal reasons — investigators have locked onto another senior Trump administration official for his high-priced travel on private jets.

The Interior Department’s inspector general’s office launched an investigation into the head of the agency, Secretary Ryan Zinke, a spokesperson told Politico Monday, for a series of trips that included a $12,000 charter plane from Vegas to his home state of Montana, as well as private flights between Caribbean islands and military flights in Alaska, Norway, and Montana.

The investigation, launched late last week, comes on the heels of “numerous complaints,” the spokesperson said.

“All this travel was done only after department officials determined no other flights were available,” Zinke said during a speech on Friday at the Heritage Foundation. “Every time I travel, I submit travel plans to the department, who determines line by line that I follow the law. And I follow the law.”

All the extra scrutiny, Zinke added, was “a little B.S.”

“Just because something is legal doesn’t make it right,” Office of Management and Budget director Mick Mulvaney said in a White House memo on travel on Friday.

Now, according to the memo, almost all private travel requests must be approved by White House chief of staff John Kelly.

— Joshua Marcus