The Persecuted President: In a long, rambling, and off-script speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference yesterday, Donald Trump took on the mantle of victim in the Special Counsel investigation. Trump attacked former Attorney Gen. Jeff Sessions, former FBI Director James Comey, and Special Counsel Robert Mueller, just to name a few. 

  “Robert Mueller never received a vote and neither did the person that appointed him,” Trump said in an apparent reference to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, whowas appointed by Trump and in turn appointed Mueller.

  “So now we’re waiting for a report, and we’ll find out … who we’re dealing with,” Trump said. “We’re waiting for a report by people that weren’t elected.”

  Trump also whined that he’s suspected of obstruction of justice for firing FBI Director James Comey, who was investigating whether Trump was in cahoots with the Russians during the 2016 campaign. “That’s the other thing — if you use your rights, if you use your power, if you use Article 2, it’s called obstruction, but only for Trump, for nobody else,” he said.

  Trump went off script about 10 minutes into what may have been the longest presidential speech in US history. He said, “You know, I don’t know, maybe you know. You know, I’m totally off script, right. … You know, I’m totally off script right now. And this is how I got elected, by being off script. True. And if we don’t go off script, our country is in big trouble, folks. ‘Cause we have to get it back.”

Standing Down:At the end of a week in which President Trump failed to make progress negotiating with North Korea, the Pentagon announced the US and South Korea are ending the joint military exercises that have long annoyed the North.

  The US and South Korean forces would have to work closely with each other in the event that Kim Jong-un invades. They need to train for it.

  A Pentagon statement said, “The Minister and Secretary made clear that the Alliance decision to adapt our training program reflected our desire to reduce tension and support our diplomatic efforts to achieve complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula in a final, fully verified manner.” 

 In other words, the Trump administration has given North Korea something it has wanted for years and gotten nothing in return.

Police Beat:Nearly a year after two Sacramento police officers shot and killed a 22-year-old unarmed black man who was the father of two children, prosecutors announced yesterday that no charges will be filed against the officers.

  The cops were responding to a call about a man breaking into cars when they encountered Stephon Clark running through a back yard to his grandmother’s home. The police fired 20 shots, hitting Clark seven times, six of them in the back.

  Clark’s death sparked immediate protests in the streets of Sacramento.

 Officers said they thought Clark had a gun. He was carrying a cellphone.

  Clark was later found to be the man who had smashed car windows. The local prosecutor said officers have to make split-second decisions and the whole incident was a tragedy.

No Problem, Houston:  SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule successfully attached to the International Space Station, just after 6 eastern time this morning, about 27 hours after taking off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

  It’s the first successful mission by a commercial company launching a rocket capable of carrying humans into space, although no one was on board this flight.

The Crew Dragon is capable of carrying seven astronauts, but on this trip it was carrying only a robot named Ripley, a nod to Sigourney Weaver in the movie “Alien.”

  Ripley is loaded with sensors to tell engineers everything a human would experience during the ride. “From liftoff to splashdown, essentially she’s going to tell us how she feels during the whole mission,” a SpaceX senior engineer says in a company video.

 The Tin Hat Report: In his speech to CPAC President Trump re-visited his claim that he had the largest inauguration crowd ever. He talked about women making the long walk to the National Mall in high heels — just to see him. He said, “It was raining. And it was wet, and the grass was wet. And women and men, and I consider them totally equal so I’m not going to say it’s harder—in fact it’s probably, with the men I know, it’s actually easier for the women to make the walk.”

  Let that sink in for a moment.

  Then Trump said, “I looked and I made a speech, and I said, before I got on, I said to the people that were sitting next to me, ‘I’ve never seen anything like this. Look at that crowd.’ And it was wide! Wide! We had a crowd—I’ve never seen a thing like it. And I have to live—I have to live with ‘crowd size.’ It is all a phony deal, folks. But I saw a picture just the other night of practically no people. It was taken hours before our great day.”

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