White House meeting on clemency process has wrapped up and I'm hearing from participants that @KimKardashian was engaged and attentive.

“She made some really strong points today," says @JessyMichele. “It was a serious, engaged discussion of the clemency process involving people from very different perspectives. I am encouraged about real work being done to fix something that is broken and important," says @Oslerguy.

The White House statement denouncing Bob Woodward's new book calls it "fabricated stories" by "former disgruntled employees."

But that's actually somewhat muted compared with earlier counterattacks against books by Michael Wolff and Omarosa Manigault. Omarosa's book was "riddled with lies and false accusations," and Omarosa herself was "trying to profit off these false attacks."

I went back and looked at the clemency that President Trump granted to Dwight and Steven Hammond last month and discovered something really unusual: They were given both pardons and commutations on the same day. It's possible to get both a pardon and a commutation, but they usually happen years apart. Patty Hearst is one famous example: President Carter commuted her sentence for bank robbery, and President Clinton later gave her a full pardon.

The Justice Department just released a bunch of previously unpublished opinions from the Office of Legal Counsel. This one from 2014 says the Justice Department has prosecutorial discretion whether to pursue a contempt of Congress charge. justice.gov/olc/file/10780… This opinion cleared the way for Robert Lighthizer to be appointed U.S. Trade Representative by claiming it was unconstitutional for Congress to bar anyone “who has directly represented, aided, or advised a foreign entity" from holding that office. justice.gov/olc/file/10780…

Trump's executive order on family separations instructs the Defense Department to make military bases available to house immigrant families — or to build more facilities to house them if necessary. Trump is also asking for a court to sign off on his new policy, changing a 20-year-old consent decree to allow children to be imprisoned with their parents.

The @WhiteHouse just sent Congress a long list of 40 different concerns and objections it has to the defense authorization bill.

These statements of administration policy are usually technical, but President Trump is making some interesting demands here: <thread> 1. President Obama used to threaten vetoes of bills that barred him from closing Guantanamo Bay. Trump "strongly objects" because Congress doesn't want to spend enough on #Gitmo. "It also does not meet the requirements of the aging detainee population."

Six days ago, a source of mine unexpectedly emailed me a treasure trove of data. So far as I know, it was the last thing he did before committing murder-suicide. P.S. Ruckman Jr., who went by the twitter handle @pardonpower, was a leading expert on the presidential pardon power and clemency in general.