A major error that media made in 2016 was not demanding every single day that Trump release his tax returns. They still don't demand it. They still should.
And what happens when one of the kids gets indicted? What’s he gonna do?
Conor Friedersdorf/Atlantic:
Donald Trump Gave Russia Leverage Over His Presidency
A foreign adversary has possessed potentially damaging information about the president for an extended period of time.
That he lied has long been clear—all sorts of people with whom he dealt had extensive, well-documented dealings with Russia and Russians. But additional evidence that he lied was revealed Thursday during an appearance in federal court by his former attorney Michael Cohen, who admitted that he negotiated on Trump’s behalf to build a skyscraper in Moscow; that his efforts lasted until at least June 2016; that he briefed Trump and members of Trump’s family about the matter; and that he later lied to Congress, to avoid contradicting Trump’s political message.
Consider the implications. At the very beginning of Trump’s presidency, as soon as he lied in that press conference, Vladimir Putin and Russian intelligence possessed the ability to unmask Trump as a liar to the American public, revealing damaging information to Congress and the public about which they had previously been ignorant. BuzzFeed’s account of the negotiations involving a potential Trump Tower in Moscow hints at the wealth of documentary evidence that the Russians would possess to back up their claims.
Of course in addition to allergy to jail time, the biggest frustration for the WH is that Robert Mueller controls the narrative, not Donald Trump. Big reminder of how true this is this week, along with a big reminder of how much media failed us in 2016. If only they consistently called Trump a liar instead of treating him as a celebrity.
Well, this week, that’s what they did. Liar, liar 24 x 7.
WSJ:
Matthew Whitaker Knew of Fraud Allegations at Company He Advised
Documents show now-acting U.S. attorney general regularly emailed with firm’s CEO
Matthew Whitaker, the acting U.S. attorney general, had much more involvement in an invention-promotion company shut down in 2017 by federal regulators than has been previously known, company documents show.
The documents released by the Federal Trade Commission to The Wall Street Journal under the Freedom of Information Act show that Mr. Whitaker had numerous email exchanges in 2015 about customer-fraud complaints with the chief executive of the company, World Patent Marketing, for which Mr. Whitaker was a paid adviser. Those emails indicate he had some advance warning of potential problems that ultimately led to government allegations of fraud and an FBI investigation.
Mr. Whitaker has said he was unaware of any fraudulent activity at the company. He didn’t respond to requests for comment Friday. The Justice Department has also said he was unaware of any problems at the company.
Oh. So the guy was a grifter. You pay this company for inventions, they do nothing. And the chief law enforcement figure in the U.S. of A., advising them, was cool with that.
CNN:
Records show Whitaker knew of allegations of fraud at Florida scam company
Don’t sweat him interfering with Mueller. He’s lucky if he’s still AG next week.
Raúl M. Grijalva/USA Today:
Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke must resign. His multiple scandals show he's unfit to serve
Ryan Zinke needs to resign immediately as Secretary of the Interior.
I take no pleasure in calling for this step, and I have resisted it even as questions have grown about Mr. Zinke’s ethical and managerial failings. Unfortunately, his conduct in office and President Donald Trump’s neglect in setting ethical standards for his own cabinet have made it unavoidable.
While the secretary continues to project confidence, questions have grown since the election about his future plans, and the White House reportedly fears that he would be unable to withstand scrutiny on Capitol Hill. Those fears are justified. Mr. Zinke has never even tried to offer an explanation for the sheer scope of his well-documented scandals.
They’re all compromised. The lot of them.
Um….
Pond scum is higher on the evolutionary ladder than Zinke.
Greg Sargent/Washington Post:
Trumpism is rotten to its core. And the stench of corruption and failure is everywhere.
The Post weaves these strands together this way: “Investigators have evidence that Trump was in close contact with his lieutenants as they made outreach to both Russia and WikiLeaks — and that they tried to conceal the extent of their activities.”
The precise nature of all these contacts probably won’t, by itself, bring down Trump. But they provide a new glimpse into just how corrupted his ascension to the presidency really was. He repeatedly praised Russian President Vladimir Putin and called for better relations with Russia — positions presented as good-faith proposals in the national interest — while pursuing a lucrative deal that required Kremlin approval.
The revelations also suggest with fresh urgency that Trump may have been compromised. Former deputy solicitor general Neal Katyal told Chris Hayes that by concealing business dealings with Russia, Trump left himself vulnerable to blackmail. “The Russians have known that Trump lied to the American people for two years,” Katyal said, which they could have used against Trump to “get their bidding d
Good big-picture piece.
Michelle Goldberg/NY Times:
Trump Is Compromised by Russia
Michael Cohen's latest plea is proof
That’s also why evidence of Trump’s business involvement with Russia would be significant, as Trump himself acknowledged shortly before his inauguration, when he tweeted, “Russia has never tried to use leverage over me. I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH RUSSIA — NO DEALS, NO LOANS, NO NOTHING!”
We still don’t know for certain if Russia has used leverage over Trump. But there should no longer be any doubt that Russia has leverage over him.
Mark Liebovich/NYT Magazine:
On the Trump-Mood Beat — But Why?
The stories typically begin with an anecdote, often featuring the president’s being upset or defensive about something. Unsuspecting foreign leaders are frequent targets. The same themes and stories recur, with a revolving cast of Trump explainers purporting to guide us through the foggy mood maze. By reflex, Trump will take issue with these “people close to the president” when they portray him as anything short of a stable genius overseeing a well-oiled machine. If they are speaking on the condition of anonymity in exchange for their candor, Trump will maintain these “sources” do not exist.
“Some of these people do exist,” Trump’s onetime campaign manager Corey Lewandowski conceded to me. A recurring cast member of the Trump-mood series, Lewandowski has a new book, “Trump’s Enemies,” written with a fellow Republican operative, David Bossie — Lewandowski’s second Trump’s explainer tome in less than a year. As with many of Trump’s most steadfast apologists, Lewandowski, when he is on the record, insists the president is not complicated at all. He attributes these limitations of understanding to smaller minds that have simply “not figured out Donald Trump.” The least we could do is avail ourselves of wisdom from better authorities, like him.
Lewandowski embodies a particular dilemma of the Donald-decoding enterprise: The people who seem to traffic the most in “explaining Trump” are more or less by definition the people whose main currency in Washington is their supposed closeness to him.
Can’t wait for Maggie Haberman’s next piece.
John Ray, Alissa Stollwerk and Sean McElwee/What the hell happened:
Switchers: Who changed their vote in 2018?
To analyze these groups, we broke down voters into several types:
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Those who voted for President Obama in 2012, Hillary Clinton in 2016, and their House Democratic candidate in 2018 (“Dem-Dem-Dem voters,” or “loyal Democrats”)
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Those who voted for Mitt Romney in 2012, Hillary Clinton in 2016, and a Democratic candidate in 2018 (“Rep-Dem-Dem”)
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Those who voted for President Obama in 2012, Trump in 2016, and a Democratic candidate in 2018 (“Dem-Rep-Dem”)
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Those who voted for Romney in 2012, Trump in 2016, and a Democratic candidate in 2018 (“Rep-Rep-Dem”)
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Those who voted for President Obama in 2012, Trump in 2016, and a Republican candidate in 2018 (“Dem-Rep-Rep”)
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Those who voted for Mitt Romney in 2012, Trump in 2016, and a Republican candidate in 2018 (“Rep-Rep-Rep,” or “loyal Republicans”)
....
An important feature of most of these groups, aside from the loyal Democrats and loyal Republicans, is that these groups are very small. Most voters are consistent partisans, and switchers are rare, something that is not surprising given the increased polarization that has dominated national politics for the past half-century. The survey includes 1,152 loyal Democrats, 1,017 loyal Republicans, 35 Rep-Dem-Dem voters, 30 Dem-Rep-Dem voters, 44 Rep-Rep-Dem voters, and 70 Dem-Rep-Rep voters…
Additionally, we find that Romney-Trump voters who defected to the Democrats in 2018 typically came from the suburbs, while Obama-Trump voters who returned to the Democrats in 2018 were split between living in suburban and rural areas. A plurality of loyal Republicans in our sample lived in rural areas, while Democrats were split between living in urban and in suburban areas. Consistent with some other work on the 2018 electorate, we find that voters who shifted from President Obama to the Republicans in recent years lopsidedly live in rural areas.
The effect of Sinclair and Fox News?
Erin Cassese and Meredith Conroy/What the hell happened:
What the Hell Happened with White Women Voters?
All of these factors suggested that women voters would swing hard in the Democratic direction. But preliminary evidence suggests the change was more modest than anticipated. According to CNN’s exit polls, there was a 3-point decline in white women voters’ support for Republican candidates – 49 percent voted for the Republican house candidate in 2018 compared with 52 percent who voted for Trump in 2016. But a larger shift was evident among college-educated white women, 52 percent of whom supported Clinton in 2016 to compared to 59 percent who supported a Democratic House candidate in 2018. Therefore, educated white women’s support continues to grow within the Democratic Party.
However, political science scholarship finds that women are not a monolith, and that commentators and pundits tend to underestimate the power of partisanship, and overestimate psychological attachments to one’s gender, causing them to over-emphasize women’s attraction to Democratic candidates and causes. Research shows that women have different views on the meaning and importance of their gender, and thus gender attitudes do not have a uniform effect on their political thinking and behavior.
To get a sense of the diversity of political thinking among women voters and the extent of recent shifts away from the Republican Party, we compare responses from the 2016 American National Election Study survey to a likely-voter survey of about 8,600 Americans conducted by YouGov Blue. Both of these surveys include several questions in common, therefore lending themselves to comparison.
What a wave looks like:
SV Date/HuffPost:
If Trump Thinks Michael Cohen’s Plea Is Bad, Wait Till Dems Run The House Intel Committee
The panel under Republican control has been helping Trump undermine the Mueller investigation. That’s about to change as Democrats are poised to take control of the chamber.
Come Jan. 3, the House version of that committee will no longer help Trump undercut special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation and will almost certainly help it instead.
“Playtime is over,” said Rick Wilson, a prominent Republican critic of Trump who has been sounding the alarm about Trump’s connections to Russia since 2016. “There is no more fun, funny, amusing moment when Donald Trump gets to have Devin Nunes run interference for him, go out and lie to the press for him.”
Nunes is a Republican congressman from California and Trump loyalist and was a member of his transition team. For the past 22 months, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, which Nunes chairs, has openly worked with Trump and his White House aides to discredit Mueller with selective leaks to conservative media. Nunes even wrote a memo that he claimed would prove Mueller’s investigation was an abuse of power and then had Trump declassify it for general release.
Nunes’ office did not respond to a request for comment.
Jonathan Bernstein/Bloomberg:
Trump Is Losing His Influence
The president can no longer count on his party’s support. That suggests dangerous times ahead.
Perhaps this revolt won’t extend to the multiple scandals swirling around Trump. (And this was a pretty bad week for him on that front: See my Bloomberg Opinion colleagues Noah Feldman and Timothy L. O'Brien (twice) on Trump’s legal problems; Ken White on Michael Cohen’s plea; the Lawfare group on Cohen and the Trump Organization; and Bob Bauer and Ryan Goodman on Jerome Corsi – and that’s just from Thursday.)
But it would surprise me if there aren’t quite a few congressional Republicans, and a fair number of party actors, who daydream about having a nice, reliable, normal president again. Perhaps some of them once believed that Mueller’s probe, which has now netted so many guilty pleas and indictments, was a witch hunt. Perhaps they believed Trump’s lawyers that Mueller would surely be wrapping things up by Thanksgiving, or New Year’s at the latest. (Oops – that was Thanksgiving 2017.)
Now, though, they surely understand that the Trump-Russia story and other scandals aren’t going away any time soon. Even in the best-case scenario, they will continue producing stories that Republicans don’t want in the headlines. And at the very worst … well, surely some Republicans are also having nightmares about just how bad the very worst could be
Charles P. Pierce/Esquire:
This North Carolina Election Stinks to High Heaven
It's more evidence we need a national system of elections.
The hinkiness of the electoral system here in the World's Greatest Democracy never sleeps. There's some authentic weirdness going on right now regarding the election just passed in the Ninth Congressional District of the newly insane state of North Carolina. As it stands at the moment, Republican Mark Harris has beaten Democratic candidate Dan McCready by 907 votes.
However, as it stands now, the result stinks—so much so that the state's Board of Elections has taken the remarkable step of unanimously refusing to certify the current results
Much more to come on this, and the House has the last word on who to seat. But it could be a 41st pickup forDemocrats.