“Underpromise. Overdeliver.” That has been my advice to every young lawyer and journalist I’ve mentored over a 35-year legal career and a 28-year broadcasting career. It has never failed as advice, though many have failed to heed it.


With that in mind, some advice for commentators about the Paul Manafort conviction and the Michael Cohen guilty plea: They tell us a lot. They do not, however, tell us whether the president is going to be impeached. He might be impeached. In fact, a Democrat-controlled Congress in 2019 would almost certainly introduce, vote on and likely pass articles of impeachment based on the Cohen plea and other theories of various interpretations of the emoluments clause.


But we aren’t close to President Donald Trump’s removal from office or his resignation. It still looks as though the Republican Party is going to pick up seats in the Senate and may even hold the House.



We aren’t even in shouting range of “collusion and conspiracy” with Russia, in fact, though lots of pundits like to shout about It. Three Republican senators on the Intelligence Committee — Chairman Richard Burr of North Carolina, Tom Cotton of Arkansas and James Lankford of Oklahoma — have told the Associated Press, in Burr’s case, and me in the case of Cotton and Lankford, that they had not seen any factual evidence presented to the committee of collusion or conspiracy by the president or his 2016 campaign.


Flat-out rejections from three members of the committee of the overarching charge behind the special counsel’s appointment is a good indication that removal from office because of collusion with Russia isn’t in the cards for the president.


And none of this has any impact on Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination, no matter how much the president’s opponents wish otherwise. I don’t want to overpromise, but it still seems likely Judge Kavanaugh will be Justice Kavanaugh come the first Monday in October.


Now Special Counsel Robert Mueller is the master of underpromising. In fact, he hasn’t promised a thing. So it is possible he has plenty of evidence of collusion and conspiracy that hasn’t been shared with the Senate Intelligence Committee. Possible, but unlikely. It is possible that new and as yet undeveloped theories of impeachment will emerge — say, financial crimes involving the president’s development empire. But nothing to see there, yet. There’s been some speculation, but that’s not the stuff of impeachment.


Impeachments come in cases the public easily grasps, if not in complete detail, then with complete conviction: President Richard M. Nixon abused his power. President Bill Clinton lied about Monica Lewinsky. If you can’t state the premise in a simple sentence, you aren’t going to move the one key congressional committee, much less both chambers of Congress.


We do have, right now, two admitted/convicted felons in Cohen and Manafort who are both in a position to grievously wound the president politically. They might. They could flip — Cohen already seems to have done so — and tell many tales. All will come out eventually.


But anyone who says, “This means impeachment!” is either lying or looking for ratings. There’s a lot of the latter going around. The special counsel doesn’t care about ratings. The Republican Party doesn’t, either. It shouldn’t promise exoneration of the president, but neither should it be afraid to point out there are two investigations underway here: one into the president’s campaign to win the office in 2016, and one into whether some senior officials in the FBI and Justice Department made efforts to make sure he didn’t win. Both matter. And neither is close to being finished.


Cable news is entertainment. And pictures of Manafort and Cohen, even pictures of Stormy Daniels, aren’t that entertaining beyond those already addicted to one of the two story lines. Beyond the sliver of Americans that watch cable news at night (whether of the left or right variety), fantasies about impeaching Trump elicit a vast, giant “Huh?”


So, no, the world didn’t change Tuesday with the Cohen plea and the Manafort verdict. Twitter shook. But it will shake again today with something else. And tomorrow with another thing. When Mueller sends a subpoena to the White House, that’s when it gets interesting.

" At the U.S. Naval Academy, John McCain and his Omaha buddy Chuck Larson were academic opposites — but they became lifelong friends and now will lie side by side.


In his final book, “The Restless Wave,” the legendary U.S. senator and former prisoner of war who died Saturday of brain cancer wrote touchingly of their joint final resting place. It’s at the U.S. Naval Academy cemetery along the Severn River in Annapolis, Maryland.



After enjoying a last look at the beauty around his home in Sedona, Arizona, McCain wrote, he would “take my leave, bound for a place near my old friend Chuck Larson on the Severn — back where it began.”


Retired four-star Adm. Charles R. Larson, a graduate of Omaha North High School who twice served as superintendent of the Naval Academy, died of leukemia at age 77 in 2014. McCain attended the funeral.


They first met as plebes in their freshman year at Annapolis and became roommates and, McCain often said, “the closest of friends.” At graduation in 1958, they couldn’t know what lay ahead.


“They both had storied careers of public service,” said Omaha City Councilman Pete Festersen, a nephew of Larson. “They had a very special connection that lasted a lifetime.”


In 1998, at a change-of-command ceremony when Larson retired as academy superintendent, McCain told the audience that they had graduated as Navy ensigns exactly 40 years earlier to the day.


“As brigade commander and president of our class,” McCain said, “Chuck was marked for greatness.”


As a top student, Larson received his diploma and a handshake from President Dwight Eisenhower. McCain graduated fifth from the bottom of the class.


McCain and Larson earned aviator wings by 1960, but Larson soon went into the submarine service. By 1969, the Omahan was serving as naval aide to President Richard Nixon.


By that time, McCain quipped, “I was on extended leave in Southeast Asia, having accomplished no greater feat than intercepting a surface-to-air missile with my airplane.”


McCain, the son and grandson of Navy admirals, spent 5½ years as America’s most famous prisoner of war. He was released with others in 1973.


Larson, at 43, became the second-youngest admiral in the history of the Navy. He later became commander in chief of all U.S. forces in the Pacific, the largest unified military command in the world.


Festersen — whose mother, Sigrid Festersen of Omaha, was the admiral’s sister — said he first met McCain at the 1998 retirement ceremony, two years before his first try at the presidency.


A Democrat, the Omaha councilman said he respected Republican McCain for many reasons, including his willingness to work with those across the political aisle.


“I was honored to have met him,” Festersen said. “He spoke his mind, and he always put country first. Sen. McCain was a national hero.”