The Commentariat -- April 27, 2019

Afternoon Update:

Betsy Woodruff of the Daily Beast: "Carl Kline, the official who green-lit Jared Kushner's security clearance, has agreed to attend a voluntary interview next week with staff for the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, according to a letter from White House Counsel Pat Cipollone. The letter ... comes at the end of a week of fervid clashes between Chairman Elijah Cummings; Carl Kline...; and the White House Counsel's office. Cummings subpoenaed Kline on April 2 for an interview with his committee staff. Kline and the White House agreed that he would not attend if he couldn't bring lawyers from the White House Counsel's office, arguing that the interview could involve material potentially covered by executive privilege. Cummings' team told Kline he could not bring lawyers from that office, so Kline and the White House decided he would not go to the interview. Cummings subsequently moved to hold Kline in contempt, paving the way to make him the first official held in contempt under the newly Democratic-controlled Congress. That's when [Jim] Jordan, the top Republican on the committee and a White House ally, stepped in. Earlier on Friday, he wrote a letter to Kline inviting him to come in for a voluntary interview, with White House lawyers on hand. Jordan said the invitation was meant to 'avoid unnecessary conflict' and 'de-escalate Chairman Cummings' orchestrated interbranch confrontation.'"

Frances Robles of the New York Times: "Slipped into the ... special counsel report on Russian interference in the 2016 election last week was a single sentence that caused a stir throughout the state [of Florida] and raised new questions about the vulnerability of the nation's electoral systems. Although the spearphishing attempt in Florida had first been brought to light nearly two years ago when The Intercept cited a secret National Security Agency report, state officials said they were certain no elections computers had been compromised. The Mueller report turned that assertion on its head. 'The F.B.I.,' it said, 'believes that this operation enabled the G.R.U. to gain access to the network of at least one Florida county government.'... In an interview on Friday, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida took it one step further, saying that Russian hackers not only accessed a Florida voting system, but were 'in a position' to change voter roll data.... Mr. Rubio said in the interview that there was, in fact, an intrusion, but the target or targets were never notified."

Ollie in Another Nice Mess. Michael Brice-Saddler of the Washington Post: "National Rifle Association president Oliver North has been ousted by the organization's board after an alleged extortion scheme within the group's highest-ranking officials came to light on Friday. The NRA's chief executive, Wayne LaPierre, wrote a letter to the board Thursday accusing North of plotting to remove him from the group by threatening to release to the board 'damaging' information about LaPierre. He claimed North, a retired Marine Corps lieutenant colonel perhaps best known for his role in the Iran-contra affair, was pressuring LaPierre to resign over alleged financial transgressions."

Mike Barber of the Richmond Times-Dispatch: "After winning the national championship, the Virginia basketball team won't be following the tradition of visiting the White House. 'We have received inquiries about a visit to the White House,' UVA coach Tony Bennett said in a statement the school released Friday. 'With several players either pursuing pro opportunities or moving on from UVA, it would be difficult, if not impossible to get everyone back together. We would have to respectfully decline an invitation.'... Sophomore forward De'Andre Hunter... retweeted the school's announcement, adding the words 'No Thanks Trump,' followed by two laughing emojis."

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Katie Rogers of the New York Times: "In a speech to National Rifle Association members on Friday that was part political rally and part pep talk, President Trump called himself a champion of gun rights. Then he proved it, whipping out a pen onstage to sign a letter that would effectively cease America's involvement in an arms treaty designed to regulate the international sale of conventional weapons. Mr. Trump said that his administration 'will never' ratify the Arms Trade Treaty, which seeks to discourage the sale of conventional weapons to countries that do not protect human rights. Although the accord was brokered by the United Nations and signed by President Barack Obama, it has never been ratified by the Senate. Experts in arms control note that the accord, even if ratified by the Senate, would not require the United States to alter any existing domestic laws or procedures governing how it sells conventional weapons overseas." ...

... MEANWHILE. Danny Hakim of the New York Times: "Turmoil wracking the National Rifle Association is threatening to turn the group's annual convention into outright civil war, as insurgents maneuver to oust Wayne LaPierre, the foremost voice of the American gun rights movement. The confrontation pits Mr. LaPierre, the organization's longtime chief executive, against its recently installed president, Oliver L. North, the central figure in the Reagan-era Iran-contra affair, who remains a hero to many on the right. Behind it is a widening crisis involving a legal battle between the N.R.A. and its most influential contractor, Ackerman McQueen, amid renewed threats from regulators in New York, where the N.R.A. is chartered, to investigate the group's tax-exempt status. With contributions lagging, the N.R.A. is also facing an increasingly well-financed gun control movement, motivated by a string of mass shootings. Mr. North asked Mr. LaPierre to resign on Wednesday, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times.... Mr. LaPierre, in a stinging letter sent on Thursday night to the N.R.A.'s board, accused Mr. North of threatening to leak damaging information about him and other N.R.A. executives unless he stepped down." Mrs. McC: Sad! But in a good way.

John Wagner & Barb Berggoetz of the Washington Post: "President Trump renewed his vow Friday to repeal the Affordable Care Act, seemingly putting him at odds with a top Republican senator who insisted that Congress will not scrap President Barack Obama's signature health-care law. Appearing at a National Rifle Association conference in Indianapolis, Trump touted Republicans' success in eliminating the individual mandate, which he called 'the absolute worst part of Obamacare.... Now we're going for the rest,' Trump said before again blaming the late senator John McCain (R-Ariz) for his party's failure to repeal the entire law last year. It was unclear whether Trump was referring to his administration's involvement in an ongoing lawsuit aiming to declare the ACA unconstitutional or whether he was pushing for congressional action before the 2020 elections."

Mrs. Bea McCrabbie: On Friday morning, Trump was on his familiar I-didn't-say-what-they-say-I-said tour:

Trump "Answered Perfectly." Katie Galioto of Politico: "... Donald Trump on Friday defended his 2017 statement that there were 'very fine people' on both sides of the deadly white supremacist protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, comments that recently came under fire again after former Vice President Joe Biden attacked Trump for them.... 'If you look at what I said you will see that that question was answered perfectly,' Trump told reporters on the White House lawn ahead of a trip to Indianapolis to speak at the National Rifle Association's annual meeting. 'I was talking about people that went because they felt very strongly about the monument to Robert E. Lee, a great general[, whether you like it or not].'... In the days following the deadly protests, Trump did not denounce the marchers, instead condemning violence on both sides and calling for Americans to 'come together.'" ...

... Actually, No. Aaron Blake of the Washington Post reviews the transcript of the Q&A surrounding Trump's "very fine people' exposition: "REPORTER: You said there was hatred and violence on both sides -- TRUMP: Well, I do think there's blame, yes, I think there's blame on both sides. You look at both sides. I think there's blame on both sides.... You had some very bad people in that group. But you also had people that were very fine people on both sides." (Emphasis Blake's.) Blake goes on with the transcript. "Trump does this a lot. He will say something suggestive -- in this case, suggestive that the violence in Charlottesville wasn't really such a clear-cut result of resurgent racism -- and then he will later say something else to give himself plausible deniability. But the plausibility here is basically nil. Trump seemed to find something redeeming in a group of protesters that was clearly full of racists.... [In his presidential announcement video,] Biden correctly described who was marching that day, and then he correctly characterized Trump's comments. The idea that he's launching his campaign on the 'Charlottesville hoax' or the 'Charlottesville lie' is a rather amazing contention." ...

     ... Mrs. McCrabbie: Apparently Trump is unaware that Robert E. Lee was one of the most significant traitors in American history. Update: That a little something not lost on Philip Bump. ...

... Philip Bump of the Washington Post: "In Trump's world, FBI agents are traitors, and Robert E. Lee isn't.... Trump claimed that he had spoken with many generals at the White House who said that Lee was perhaps their favorite general. This is a bit surprising, because Lee's most notable service was as a military enemy of the United States.... Few people are as directly responsible for as many American deaths as Lee.... He was a traitor, in the most direct sense of the word.... [At the NRA convention, Trump turned to assailing the FBI:] 'And you see it now better than ever, with all of the resignations of bad apples -- they're bad apples! They tried for a coup...,' he said. 'All was taking place at the highest levels in Washington, D.C. You've been watching, you've been seeing, you've been looking at things that you wouldn't have believed possible in our country. Corruption at the highest level. A disgrace. Spying. Surveillance. Trying for an overthrow. And we caught 'em. We caught 'em.'" ...

... Annals of "Journalism," Ctd. Maxwell Tani & Andrew Kirell of the Daily Beast: "A Fox News reporter on Thursday called out two of his colleagues for sounding 'like a White Supremacist chat room' when they attempted to defend President Trump's infamous 'both sides' comment about white supremacists in Charlottesville, according to internal emails reviewed by The Daily Beast." Fox "News" reporter Doug McKelway e-mailed dozens of colleagues defending Trump's remarks against Joe Biden's criticism. Then "Fox News digital senior editor Cody Derespina replied-all, agreeing with McKelway, and adding to it a snippet of a Fox News interview with Jarrod Kuhn, a Charlottesville marcher who claimed he was not a white supremacist, but simply there to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee.... Fox News Radio's White House correspondent Jon Decker ... [wrote,] 'I really don't understand the point you are making... Jarrod Kuhn was one of those individuals in Charlottesville holding a tiki torch while the mob chanted "Jews will not replace us."'"

Three Lies In One Breath. Brett Samuels of the Hill: "President Trump on Friday insisted that he did not order former White House counsel Don McGahn to fire special counsel Robert Mueller, despite McGahn's testimony to the contrary, explaining that he was aware of the potential consequences. 'I'm a student of history. I see what you get when you fire people, and it's not good,' Trump told reporters as he departed the White House for a National Rifle Association conference in Indianapolis. The president maintained he had the legal right to fire Mueller, but that he chose not to." Mrs. McC: Three lies: "(1) didn't order McGahn to fire Mueller; (2) student of history; (3) doesn't fire people because it's bad. Not only does the Trump administration have the highest turnover rate in recent history, largely because Trump has a lot of people fired, he also has (what I think is) the highest percentage of "acting" people in top-level positions because, he says, that gives him "flexibility."

** The Master Toady. Matt Zapotosky, et al., of the Washington Post: Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein "sought to defuse the volatile situation [that arose in September 2018 from a New York Times report that he had suggesting wearing a wire to record Trump] and assure the president he was on his team, according to people familiar with matter. [In a phone call with Trump, Rosenstein] criticized the Times report, published in late September, and blamed it on former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe, whose recollections formed its basis. Then he talked about special counsel Robert S. Mueller III's investigation of Russia's interference in the 2016 election and told the president he would make sure Trump was treated fairly, people familiar with the conversation said. 'I give the investigation credibility,' Rosenstein said, in the words of one administration official offering their own characterization of the call. 'I can land the plane.'" Read on. ...

     ... Mrs. McCrabbie: It seems to me Rosenstein willingly went where Comey would not -- in his "Team Trump" assurances, he pledged his loyalty to Trump, or at least gave the dimwitted Trump the impression he had done so. Rosenstein's fingerprints are all over the Mueller investigation, & his complicity in Trump's obstruction efforts are, as Susan Collins might say, "unflattering." In the meantime, if you are in a position where, to stay in that position, you must go along to get along, there is no better teacher than Rod Rosenstein. ...

... Molly Olmstead of Slate: "On Thursday night, after being contacted by the Post for comment, Rosenstein gave an unusual speech railing on the news media. 'Some of the nonsense that passes for breaking news today would not be worth the paper was printed on, if anybody bothered to print it,' he said." ...

... digby: "The moment I read that ridiculous 'Comey firing' memo that Rosenstein wrote for Trump I knew he was a brown-noser (or, as Comey reportedly said, 'a survivor'.) He was clearly ready to take out Comey, which wasn't wrong in itself since Comey had behaved very badly. But he did it to curry favor with Trump, knowing that his reasoning was being used dishonestly. I think we were all misled into thinking that he was protecting the investigation when, according to the Mueller Report, it appears that the investigation was being protected from inside the White House. Now he's out there giving speeches basically sucking up to Trump and blaming the Obama administration for the Russian interference[.]" digby also points out something that I think I missed at the time: a contemporaneous AP report that Rosenstein had flown from Washington, D.C., to Florida with Trump in early October 2018. "The flight provided an opportunity for their most extensive conversation since news reports last month that Rosenstein had discussed possibly secretly recording Trump to expose chaos in the White House and invoking constitutional provisions to get him removed from office," the AP reported. As digby writes, "You want a 'tarmac meeting'? This is the one that really stinks." Emphasis added. ...

     ... Mrs. McCrabbie: Trump does stuff all the time that are similar or worse than things Democrats have done that cause Republicans to go ballistic. The Bill Clinton-Loretta Lynch tarmac meeting -- and the GOP war-cry that ensued -- is what led Jim Comey to call a presser in which he announced that although the DOJ would not bring charges against Hillary Clinton for the e-mails!, she was "extremely careless." (Comey had intended to call her "grossly negligent," but reportedly then-FBI counterintelligence expert Peter "Strzok changed the language from 'grossly negligent' to 'extremely careless,' scrubbing a key word that could have had legal ramifications for Clinton. An individual who mishandled classified material could be prosecuted under federal law for 'gross negligence.'" Rosenstein of course later used Comey's awful presser as a cover for Trump, who wanted to & did fire Comey because of Comey's refusal to express his "loyalty" to Trump by curtailing the ongoing FBI Russia investigation.) Meanwhile, Trump's acts go almost unnoticed & unremarked. IMO, Democrats & their supporters need to greatly step up their outrage game.

Jacqueline Thomsen of the Hill: "A federal judge on Friday ordered Russian agent Maria Butina to serve 18 months in prison. She will get credit for nine months already served. Butina, who was arrested in 2018, had pleaded guilty to acting as an unregistered foreign agent on behalf of the Russian government." ...

     ... The New York Times story, by Sharon LaFraniere & Eileen Sullivan, is here.

Lock 'Em Up. Caroline Kelly & Kevin Liptak of CNN: "A Democratic lawmaker on Thursday ratcheted up warnings to the Trump administration amid a growing standoff over subpoenas and oversight requests the White House says it will resist. Rep. Gerry Connolly threatened jail time for White House officials who are declining to comply with congressional committees' efforts to conduct oversight of ... Donald Trump's administration.... Connolly, who sits on the Oversight Committee, told CNN's Wolf Blitzer on 'The Situation Room,' 'We're going to resist, and if a subpoena is issued and you're told you must testify, we will back that up.'"

Michael Isikoff of Yahoo! News: "A member of the independent counsel team that recommended the impeachment of President Bill Clinton says that President Trump's attempts to obstruct justice are 'blunter by a thousandfold' than anything Clinton did and more than justifies the House Judiciary Committee opening impeachment proceedings. In an interview with the Yahoo News podcast 'Skullduggery,' Paul Rosenzweig, who served as a senior counsel to Ken Starr, said that a 'significant number' of his former colleagues from the independent counsel office share his views — although notably not Starr himself. 'My view is that there's ample reason right now for the House Judiciary Committee to begin an impeachment inquiry ... and if it were up to me, I would recommend them to impeach,' said Rosenzweig. '... Trump's obstruction of justice and frankly, more importantly, Trump's dereliction of duty in failing to address the issue of Russian interference in our electoral processes, are by themselves grounds for his impeachment. Add to that, his recalcitrance in responding to [special counsel Robert] Mueller and his stonewalling of congressional investigations and the case becomes ... much more compelling than that which attended the [impeachment] recommendation with respect to Clinton,' Rosenzweig added." ...

     ... Mrs. McCrabbie: Another member of the Starr team who doesn't seem to agree with Rosenzweig: Rod Rosenstein. ...

... Digby in Salon: "There is one faction of the Republican party that may be peeling off..., and it's the faction that Trump has been counting on to keep the Democrats at bay. I'm speaking of conservative lawyers, some of whom seem to feel a bit queasy about what they saw in the Mueller report and Trump's reaction to it. [Don] McGahn's testimony in the report is likely a big part of the realization that this is getting serious.... Presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway's husband George has formed a group of high-powered conservative legal scholars called Checks and Balances, which has now called on Congress to open an impeachment inquiry on the basis of the Mueller report[.]... Law professor and former Trump transition official J.W. Verret wrote an essay for The Atlantic stating that the evidence clearly showed obstruction of justice and likewise called for impeachment hearings. Even Fox News' Andrew Napolitano is on the record with the opinion that Trump obstructed justice.... By slamming McGahn, Trump is unwittingly playing into his former lawyer's self-serving heroic narrative. That may inspire others to follow his lead."

Caitlin Oprysko of Politico: "... Donald Trump on Friday issued a forceful denial that his administration paid any money for the return of Otto Warmbier following reports that North Korea issued a $2 million medical bill in exchange for his release. 'No money was paid to North Korea for Otto Warmbier, not two Million Dollars, not anything else,' Trump wrote in a tweet in which he falsely contrasted his position with that of his predecessor and criticized a hostage swap that took place in 2014.... The Washington Post first reported the $2 million bill's existence Thursday, writing that North Korea refused to release Warmbier until a U.S. official signed an agreement to pay it. Joseph Yun, the State Department's envoy to North Korea at the time, signed that agreement at Trump's direction, the Post reported, but as of 2017 it remained unpaid."

Sebastian Rotella & Tim Golden of ProPublica with Shane Kavanaugh of the Oregonian: "The government of Saudi Arabia has repeatedly helped Saudi citizens evade prosecutors and the police in the United States and flee back to their homeland after being accused of serious crimes here, current and former U.S. officials said. The FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies have been aware of the Saudi actions for at least a decade, officials said. But successive American administrations have avoided confronting the government in Riyadh out of concern that doing so might jeopardize U.S. interests, particularly Saudi cooperation in the fight against Islamist terrorism, current and former officials said. 'It's not that the issue of Saudi fugitives from the U.S. wasn't important,' said retired FBI agent Jeffrey Danik, who served as the agency's assistant legal attache in Riyadh from 2010 to 2012. 'It's that the security relationship was so much more important. On counterterrorism, on protecting the U.S. and its partners, on opposing Iran, the Saudis were invaluable allies.'"

Elections 2020

Julian Barnes & Adam Goldman of the New York Times: "The F.B.I. director warned anew on Friday about Russia's continued meddling in American elections, calling it a 'significant counterintelligence threat.' The bureau has shifted additional agents and analysts to shore up defenses against foreign interference, according to a senior F.B.I. official. The Trump administration has come to see that Russia's influence operations have morphed into a persistent threat. The F.B.I., the intelligence agencies and the Department of Homeland Security have made permanent the task forces they created to confront 2018 midterm election interference, senior American national security officials said. 'We recognize that our adversaries are going to keep adapting and upping their game,' Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director, said Friday in a speech in Washington, citing the presence of Russian intelligence officers in the United States and the Kremlin's record of malign influence operations." ...

     ... ** Mrs. McCrabbie: Since Rudy Giuliani has publicly argued, "There's nothing wrong with taking information from Russians," we must assume that Trump is planning to accept the same or similar help this go-round. When Wray warns of Russian interference, he is warning, among other things, that the President* who appointed him will take advantage of that interference.

John Bowden of the Hill: "In an interview with CNN, [Pat] Schroeder [D-Colo.], who advocated for [Anita] Hill during her time in Congress and advised Hill prior to her testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, described [Joe] Biden's conduct towards her and other women of the House when they demanded Hill be allowed to testify in 1991. '... congresswomen gave one-minute-speeches on the floor [prior to (Clarence) Thomas's hearing], and then walked over to the Senate because we were so upset that they weren't even going to let her testify. And remember, [Biden] was the chairman,' Schroeder said. Schroeder asserted that Biden was pressured by then-Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell (D-Maine) into letting Hill testify, adding that Biden would not have allowed it otherwise. 'He said to us: You really don't understand. I promised [former] Sen. [John] Danforth [(R-Mo.)] in the gym that this would be a quick hearing,' Schroeder said, adding that Biden was a member of the 'boys' club.'... Biden refused to apologize for his own conduct during the 1991 hearings Friday during an interview with 'The View' on ABC when questioned about Hill's remarks. 'I'm sorry for the way she got treated,' he said. 'Look at what I said and didn't say; I don't think I treated her badly.'"

     ... Mrs. McCrabbie: I saw clips of the "View" interview. Joy Behar patiently explained to Uncle Joe why Hill deserved an apology for the way he treated her, not for the way she "was treated," as Biden had put it. Biden refused. In addition, he is still treating the "hugging" issue as one that is only about his own intent, not about women's reactions. I don't know that we need another president who has trouble empathizing with others & can't admit mistakes he's made, even those made in the long-distant past. Moreover, one has to suspect Biden's political advisors have explained to him what's wrong with his responses. ...

... Update. Monica Hesse of the Washington Post: "It's almost impossible to know how to deal with a candidate who almost gets it, but not quite.... It feels petty, in some ways, to be cataloguing the sins of Joe Biden, when the other fish to fry right now are actually more like whales.... It's not his previous actions that are disappointing. It's the way he tries to distance himself from them. As if he were a victim of backward times, rather than a powerful legislator who should have been in charge of defining them.... Seeing how Anita Hill was treated led a generation of women to decide silence was a better option than coming forward to report how they had been harassed. We're still paying for the failures of 30 years ago. That's what Joe Biden needs to apologize for."

     ... Mrs. McCrabbie: It's interesting that the best thing people were saying about Bill Barr was that he was an "institutionalist"; that is, someone who would not tear down the institutional norms of the DOJ. (That turned out not to be true, of course.) But what you see in Joe Biden is that being called an "institutionalist" is not a compliment. Biden propped up the institutional norms of the Senate -- as Pat Schroeder put it, "the boys' club" -- at the expense of Anita Hill, of the women whom he denied the chance to testify at all, and of all women who worked in hostile environments. And he won't cop to that. ...

... Frank Rich: "For all the chatter about whether AOC Democrats in the party's base will accept a centrist like Biden, the real threat to Biden's viability is Biden himself. Not just his checkered past record, but his ability to adapt to present circumstances and react to them in real time.... The issue is not necessarily whether his views are progressive enough but whether he is culturally limber enough in a fast-moving new order. (This may also be a growing challenge for the didactic [Bernie] Sanders, Biden's current runner-up in polling.)... While I have no more idea than anyone else who will win the Democratic nomination, history is rife with generals who lose by refighting the last war."

Beyond the Beltway

Kansas. Sabrina Tavernise & Campbell Robertson of the New York Times: "The Kansas Supreme Court on Friday blocked a law that would have banned the most commonly used procedure for second-trimester abortions, arguing that the state Constitution protected the right of women to 'decide whether to continue a pregnancy.' The court sided in a 6-1 majority with the plaintiffs in the case, two physicians who performed the procedure, in a sweeping ruling that opens the door for abortion rights activists to challenge a series of other restrictions that the state's Republican-controlled Legislature has enacted."

Kentucky. Christine Hauser of the New York Times: "Kentucky's Republican governor, Matt Bevin, came under criticism from state Democrats on Friday for suggesting that teachers on strike were to blame for the shooting of a 7-year-old girl who had stayed home because of school closures. The remarks were the latest to ignite controversy for the governor, who faces low approval ratings ahead of an election in November."

California. Vivian Ewing of the New York Times: "A man who plowed his Toyota Corolla into a group of pedestrians at a crowded intersection in Sunnyvale, Calif., on Tuesday apparently did so in part because he thought at least some were Muslim, the police said Friday. The man, Isaiah J. Peoples, 34, faces eight counts of attempted murder in the episode, in which eight people were injured. Three of the victims were minors, and one, a 13-year-old girl, remained in critical condition on Friday evening." Peoples appears to be black.

News Lede

New Your Times: "A man has been taken into custody in connection with a shooting at a synagogue in California on Saturday afternoon that resulted in injuries, the authorities said. The Poway Station of the San Diego County Sheriff's Department said on Twitter that the shooting happened around 11:30 a.m. local time at the Chabad of Poway synagogue in Poway, Calif., about 25 miles north of San Diego. It said that there were injuries but that no additional details were immediately available." ...

     ... New Lede: "The gunman entered the synagogue on Saturday yelling anti-Semitic slurs, and opened fire with an A.R. 15-style gun. He paused when the rabbi of the congregation tried to talk with him. But he fired again, shooting the rabbi in the hand. His attack left a 60-year-old woman dead, the rabbi wounded and a 34-year-old man and a girl with shrapnel wounds. It was the Sabbath and the last day of Passover...."

The Commentariat -- April 26, 2019

Late Morning Update:

Mrs. McCrabbie: Trump is on his familiar I-didn't-say-what-they-say-I-said tour:

Trump "Answered Perfectly." Katie Galioto of Politico: "... Donald Trump on Friday defended his 2017 statement that there were 'very fine people' on both sides of the deadly white supremacist protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, comments that recently came under fire again after former Vice President Joe Biden attacked Trump for them.... 'If you look at what I said you will see that that question was answered perfectly,' Trump told reporters on the White House lawn ahead of a trip to Indianapolis to speak at the National Rifle Association's annual meeting. 'I was talking about people that went because they felt very strongly about the monument to Robert E. Lee, a great general[, whether you like it or not].'... In the days following the deadly protests, Trump did not denounce the marchers, instead condemning violence on both sides and calling for Americans to 'come together.'" ...

... Actually, No. Aaron Blake of the Washington Post reviews the transcript of the Q&A surrounding Trump's "very fine people": "REPORTER: You said there was hatred and violence on both sides -- TRUMP: Well, I do think there's blame, yes, I think there's blame on both sides. You look at both sides. I think there's blame on both sides.... You had some very bad people in that group. But you also had people that were very fine people on both sides." (Emphasis Blake's.) Blake goes on with the transcript. "Trump does this a lot. He will say something suggestive -- in this case, suggestive that the violence in Charlottesville wasn't really such a clear-cut result of resurgent racism -- and then he will later say something else to give himself plausible deniability. But the plausibility here is basically nil. Trump seemed to find something redeeming in a group of protesters that was clearly full of racists.... [In is presidential announcement video,] Biden correctly described who was marching that day, and then he correctly characterized Trump's comments. The idea that he's launching his campaign on the 'Charlottesville hoax' or the 'Charlottesville lie' is a rather amazing contention."

Three Lies In One Breath. Brett Samuels of the Hill: "President Trump on Friday insisted that he did not order former White House counsel Don McGahn to fire special counsel Robert Mueller, despite McGahn's testimony to the contrary, explaining that he was aware of the potential consequences. 'I'm a student of history. I see what you get when you fire people, and it's not good,' Trump told reporters as he departed the White House for a National Rifle Association conference in Indianapolis. The president maintained he had the legal right to fire Mueller, but that he chose not to." Mrs. McC: "(1) didn't order McGahn to fire Mueller; (2) student of history; (3) doesn't fire people because it's bad. Not only does the Trump administration have the highest turnover rate in recent history, largely because Trump has a lot of people fired, he also has (what I think is) the highest percentage of "acting" people in top-level positions because, he says, that gives him "flexibility."

Caitlin Oprysko of Politico: "... Donald Trump on Friday issued a forceful denial that his administration paid any money for the return of Otto Warmbier following reports that North Korea issued a $2 million medical bill in exchange for his release. 'No money was paid to North Korea for Otto Warmbier, not two Million Dollars, not anything else,' Trump wrote in a tweet in which he falsely contrasted his position with that of his predecessor and criticized a hostage swap that took place in 2014."

Jacqueline Thomsen of the Hill: "A federal judge on Friday ordered Russian agent Maria Butina to serve 18 months in prison. She will get credit for nine months already served. Butina, who was arrested in 2018, had pleaded guilty to acting as an unregistered foreign agent on behalf of the Russian government."

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Justin Baragona of the Daily Beast: "In his first television interview since the release of the redacted version of the Mueller report, President Trump told Fox News host Sean Hannity on Thursday night that the investigation into Russian interference during the 2016 presidential election was a 'coup' and an 'attempted overthrow of the United States government.'" Mrs. McC: You can click on the link to read more of the conspiracy theories Trump shared with Hannity's followers.

John Wagner of the Washington Post: "President Trump disputed Thursday that he had told then-White House counsel Donald McGahn to seek the firing of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III in the midst of his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.... 'I never told then White House Counsel Don McGahn to fire Robert Mueller, even though I had the legal right to do so,' Trump wrote. 'If I wanted to fire Mueller, I didn't need McGahn to do it, I could have done it myself. Nevertheless, Mueller was NOT fired and was respectfully allowed to finish his work on what I, and many others, say was an illegal investigation.'... McGahn emerged as a key witness in Mueller's 448-page report, detailing several occasions when Trump ordered him to 'do crazy shit,' according to the special counsel's findings.... In television interviews Sunday and Monday, Trump legal spokesman Rudolph W. Giuliani and former Trump lawyer John Dowd also sought to cast doubt on McGahn's recollection of Trump's order to seek Mueller's firing. Both argued that Trump wasn't as direct as McGahn seemingly believed. Trump was only seeking to have Mueller 'vetted,' Dowd said during an appearance on Fox News." ...

... Ken W., in today's thread, finds himself in a quandary: Whom to believe? McGahn or the Pretender? The guy who 'couldn't remember' thirty times in his written responses to Mueller's questions -- or the real lawyer who takes notes? That's another tough one.

... Aaron Blake of the Washington Post: "President Trump told The Washington Post's Robert Costa on Tuesday that the White House plans to try to block [Don] McGahn's testimony, and aides confirmed they may invoke executive privilege.... But the ... White House has already effectively waived its right to executive privilege twice when it comes to McGahn. The first time came when it authorized him to speak extensively to special counsel Robert S. Mueller III -- a decision that resulted in 30 hours of interviews and one that Trump has reportedly come to rue. And then it declined to assert executive privilege over redactions in the Mueller report ahead of the report's release last week." ...

     ... Mrs. McCrabbie: As Harry Litman pointed out on MSNBC Thursday, Trump waived executive privilege re: McGahn a third time when he (mis)characterized their conversations in those tweets John Wagner reports in the article linked above. McGahn is a private citizen now, so it will be up to him to decide whether or not to answer the House subpoena.

Asawin Suebsaeng of The Daily Beast: "Three months before Robert Mueller's report was even delivered to the Department of Justice, Donald Trump was already meeting with his lawyers about how to resist, combat, and impede the possible Democratic investigations that might arise from the special counsel's findings.... Starting early this year, the president demanded briefings on his options for how to best go on the offensive.... In these meetings, Trump would repeatedly stress that '[we] can't cooperate' with what was coming down the pike on Capitol Hill.... The president also indicated ... that he wanted Democrats to pay for what they've done to him and his associates." --s

A Clear Case of Obstruction. Ashley Parker, et al., of the Washington Post: The day after Don McGahn refused to carry out Trump's order to fire Robert Mueller, "Trump turned to ... Corey Lewandowski, his former campaign manager, described by senior White House advisers to investigators as a Trump 'devotee.' In a private Oval Office meeting, the president dictated a message he wanted delivered to then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions: that he needed to give a speech announcing he was limiting the scope of the investigation.... The episode, which discomfited even some of Trump's most loyal advisers, was read by some legal observers as one of the clearest cases laid out in Mueller's report of potential obstruction of justice by the president. In unequivocal terms, the report states that there was 'substantial evidence' that Trump hoped his actions would derail Mueller's investigation and prevent further scrutiny of his campaign and his own conduct.... The roughly month-long period in the summer of 2017 depicted in Mueller's report details repeated and escalating efforts by the president to stymie the Russia probe -- laying out evidence that former prosecutors said meets the elements required in an obstruction-of-justice charge."

Uh, thanks to forrest m.Mueller Proved Conspiracy. Jed Shugerman in a New York Times op-ed: "Attorney General William Barr accurately quoted [the Mueller report] as saying that 'the investigation did not establish' that the Trump campaign 'conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.' But the opposite is also true.... It's the difference between the report's criminal prosecution standard of proof 'beyond a reasonable doubt' and a lower standard -- the preponderance standard of 'more likely than not' --; ... and closer to the proper standard for impeachment.... The 'prosecution and declination decisions' part of the report uses proof 'beyond a reasonable doubt' 10 times, particularly with respect to declining indictments for Russian contacts crimes for Paul Manafort and Donald Trump Jr.... By the preponderance of evidence standard, the report contains ample evidence to establish conspiracy and coordination with the Russian government.... Contrast the Mueller report with the Starr report on President Clinton, which framed itself as an impeachment referral, not a prosecution decision, and thus avoided having to reach the more daunting standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt.... Even without knowing what is redacted, the report offers 'substantial and credible information' of the Trump campaign conspiring or coordinating with the Russian government. Under federal criminal law, 'conspiracy' does not require direct proof or explicit words of agreement." ...

... AND David Knolls of AOL.com: "In a scathing op-ed and accompanying video published Thursday, [Fox News legal analyst Judge Andrew] Napolitano said that special counsel Robert Mueller's report ... and Trump's efforts to cover it up showed a clear pattern of criminal behavior. 'When the president asks his former adviser and my former colleague K.T. McFarland to write an untruthful letter to the file knowing the government would subpoena it, that's obstruction of justice,' Napolitano said in his video. 'When the president asks Cory Lewandowski, his former campaign manager, to get Mueller fired, that's obstruction of justice. When the president asks his then-White House counsel to get Mueller fired and then lie about it, that's obstruction of justice. When he asked Don McGahn to go back to the special counsel and then change his testimony, that's obstruction of justice. When he dangled the pardon in front of Michael Cohen in order to keep Cohen from testifying against him, that's obstruction of justice.'" ...

     ... Mrs. McCrabbie: Here's Napolitano's Fox op-ed, which tracks closely to the video. It appears to me that Napolitano's video did not appear on the Fox "News" channel but only on Fox "News" Digital, wherever that may be.

Elizabeth Drew in a New York Times op-ed: "... the Democrats would ... run enormous risks if they didn't hold to account a president who has clearly abused power and the Constitution, who has not honored the oath of office and who has had a wave of campaign and White House aides plead guilty to or be convicted of crimes.... Even if the Republican-controlled Senate doesn't vote to remove Mr. Trump, a statement by the House that the president has abused his office is preferable to total silence from the Congress. The Republicans will have to face the charge that they protected someone they knew to be a dangerous man in the White House.... The report by Robert Mueller, the special counsel, left clear openings, perhaps even obligations, for Congress to act.... If [House Democrats] choose to ignore clear abuses of the Constitution, they'll also turn a blind eye to the precedent they're setting and how feckless they'll look in history." (Also linked yesterday afternoon.)

The Party of Corruption & Obstruction. Glenn Thrush of the New York Times: "Senate Republicans see the special counsel's report -- with its stark evidence that President Trump repeatedly impeded the investigation into Russian election interference -- as a summons for collective inaction. Republicans in the upper chamber, who would serve as Mr. Trump's jury if House Democrats were to impeach him, reacted to the report's release with a range of tsk-tsk adjectives like 'brash,' 'inappropriate' or 'unflattering.' Only Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, called out the president's behavior as 'sickening.' Yet no Republican, not even Mr. Romney, a political brand-name who does not face his state's voters until 2022, has pressed for even a cursory inquiry into the findings by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III...." ...

     ... Mrs. McCrabbie: As I read Senators' forced responses to reporters questions about the Mueller report, it dawned on me that one of Bill Barr's prime target audiences for his Operation Whitewash was the GOP Senate caucus. Barr's memos & remarks comprised, not a "roadmap to impeachment," as some have characterized the report, but a Roadmap to Talking Points. So instead of just following Trump's lead & screaming "NO COLLUSION!!! NO OBSTRUCTION!!!" Republican senators have followed Barr's lead. For instance, Thrush writes, "Senator Cory Gardner of Colorado, perhaps the most vulnerable Republican up for re-election next year, told Politico, 'Look, it's clear there were no merit badges earned at the White House for behavior.' He added, 'You have to focus on the heart of this conclusion, which is there is no collusion, no cooperation....'" Merit badges!!!

Philip Bump & Devlin Barrett of the Washington Post: "Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein hit back hard against politicians and the press Thursday night.... Speaking at the Public Servants Dinner of the Armenian Bar Association, Rosenstein unleashed his sharpest critique yet of those who have attacked his handling of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III's investigative report.... He also tried to joke off questions that emerged over his appearance last week at Barr's press conference ahead of the release of the Mueller report, in which he appeared ashen-faced. 'Last week, the big topic of discussion was: "What were you thinking when you stood behind Bill Barr at that press conference, with a deadpan expression?" The answer is: I was thinking, "My job is to stand here with a deadpan expression."'... The deputy attorney general recalled that at his confirmation hearing, he made promises about how the Russia investigation would be handled. 'I did pledge to do it right and take it to the appropriate conclusion. I did not promise to report all results to the public, because grand jury investigations are ex parte proceedings. It is not our job to render conclusive factual findings,' he said. 'We just decide whether it is appropriate to file criminal charges.'" ...

     ... Mrs. McCrabbie: That last remark is curious, inasmuch as during that period Rosenstein was standing behind Barr with a deadpan expression, Barr was in fact doing what Rosenstein said was not the DOJ's job: "render[ing] conclusive factual findings."

Caroline Zhang of CREW: "President Trump's hand-picked IRS Commissioner, Charles Rettig, earns as much as $1 million in rental income from the Trump-branded properties he co-owns while facing demands from Congress to release Trump's tax returns. The IRS has already missed more than one deadline set by the House Ways and Means Committee to turn over Trump's tax returns. (Rettig has stated that he will decide whether or not to release the tax returns, under the supervision of Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin.) When Trump nominated Rettig to lead the IRS in February 2018, Rettig initially failed to disclose that the Hawaii real estate he owned was at a Trump-branded property. He bought a 50 percent interest in two units at Trump International Waikiki in 2006 ahead of the building's completion in 2009. It is likely that Trump profited off of his future-IRS commissioner's purchase; although the Trump Organization does not own the Waikiki property, its branding deal gave it a 10 percent share of total pre-sales."

Mrs. McCrabbie: Remember that time Steve Mnuchin told Rep. Maxine Waters "to take the gravel [not a typo] and bang it" to close the House hearing at which he was testifying because he had an "important meeting" to attend? Now, you may agree with me that it's important to keep one's appointments, no matter who your date is, but Eleanor Clift just revealed on MSNBC that Mnuchin's "important meeting," which he apparently scheduled to conflict with the end of a Congressional hearing, was with the interior minister of Bangladesh.

Uh-Oh. Kyle Atwood & Nicole Gaouette of CNN: "... Donald Trump has his eyes on a new foreign policy prize: a grand nuclear deal with Russia and China, that he sees as a potential signature foreign policy achievement. However, some arms control experts are concerned the effort could backfire.... The White House is conducting intense interagency talks to develop options for the President to pursue such a deal, building off another nuclear pact, the New START Treaty, which expires in 2021, multiple White House officials told CNN.... But the scale of those ambitions, Trump's past criticism of New START as a 'bad deal' and the role of national security advisr John Bolton -- a longstanding critic of arms control agreements -- have some observers concerned that the administration's true goal might be find a way to exit a second nuclear pact it sees as constraining and outdated. 'The only reason you bring up China is if you have no intention of extending the New START Treaty,' said Alexandra Bell [of] ... the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation." ...

     ... Mrs. McCrabbie: Looks as if Trump has asked aides to slap together the ingredients of a Nobel Peace Prize.

Wesley Morgan of Politico: "A quarter of the Pentagon's most senior civilian posts remain filled by temporary personnel who are unconfirmed by the Senate -- a high number that has slowed decisions, handicapped the department in policy disputes and shifted more power to the White House, according to recently departed Pentagon officials. Including acting Defense Secretary Pat Shanahan, who has served in a temporary capacity for an unprecedented 115 days, nine of the Pentagon's 45 secretaries, deputy secretaries, undersecretaries, deputy undersecretaries, and assistant secretaries are serving in an acting capacity or fall into a related category of officials who are 'performing the duties of' the position...." ...

     ... Mrs. McCrabbie: Wait, wait! How is this possible? Trump boasts to everyone including the Easter Bunny & random 5-year-olds that he is "completely rebuilding our military. It was very depleted, as you know. A lot of the military folks can tell you, and it is being rebuilt to a level that we have never seen before, all with great product."

Wesley Morgan of Politico: "Acting Defense Secretary Pat Shanahan did not violate ethics agreements or promote his longtime employer, Boeing, the Defense Department inspector general has concluded in a probe that was viewed as the major obstacle preventing his nomination to be Pentagon chief." Mrs. McC: What? Ethical? The guy is totally doomed in Trumpworld. (Also linked yesterday afternoon.)

Marcus Gilmer of Mashable: "While [Sarah] Sanders was fine hosting a group of kids (mostly the children of the White House press corps) [at the annual Take Your Daughters & Sons to Work Day yesterday], she hasn't hosted an actual press briefing for actual reporters in 45 days which is a new record.... Perhaps unsurprisingly, this year's event was mostly 'off the record.'... [Zeke Miller of the AP reported in a tweet,] 'A bunch of the questions were "favorite color" and "favorite dinosaur," but Sanders was asked about child separation policy by one kid. She replied Trump wants to 'keep families together'."

Annie Fifield of the Washington Post: "North Korea issued a $2 million bill for the hospital care of comatose American Otto Warmbier, insisting that a U.S. official sign a pledge to pay it before being allowed to fly the University of Virginia student from Pyongyang in 2017. The presentation of the invoice -- not previously disclosed by U.S. or North Korean officials -- was extraordinarily brazen even for a regime known for its aggressive tactics. But the main U.S. envoy sent to retrieve Warmbier signed an agreement to pay the medical bill on instructions passed down from President Trump, according to two people familiar with the situation.... The bill went to the Treasury Department, where it remained -- unpaid -- throughout 2017, the people said. However, it is unclear whether the Trump administration later paid the bill, or whether it came up during preparations for Trump's two summits with Kim Jong Un.... Trump, as recently as Sept. 30, asserted that his administration paid 'nothing' to get American 'hostages' out of North Korea.... Fred Warmbier, Otto's father, said he was never told about the hospital bill. He said it sounded like a 'ransom' for his son." ...

      ... Mrs. McCrabbie: Since North Korea doesn't issue hospital bills. at least to its own citizens, the $2MM is -- as Fred Warmbier speculated -- essentially a ransom.

E. A. Crunden of ThinkProgress: "Interior Secretary David Bernhardt said the agency has abruptly paused its controversial plans to open virtually all U.S. waters to offshore drilling, a stunning reversal following more than a year of bipartisan uproar from coastal communities.... In an interview Thursday with the Wall Street Journal, Bernhardt said the administration's long-anticipated five-year leasing plan targeting the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) has been sidelined following a federal court decision in Alaska earlier this month." --s ...

     ... Mrs. McCrabbie: Nah, can't be. Bernhardt must have something else up his sleeve. ...

E. A. Crunden: "From the day he was confirmed earlier this month..., [head of the Interior Department (DOI) David] Bernhardt has faced a wave of scandals.... Earlier this week, the department's Office of Inspector General (OIG) confirmed an investigation into potential ethics violations by six senior DOI officials...Senior political appointees are largely limited in the interactions they are allowed with former employers under an ethics pledge imposed by President Donald Trump... Bernhardt is similarly accused of breaching that ethics pledge. The Interior secretary, known for carrying around a card listing all of his conflicts of interest, is under investigation in relation to at least seven different complaints, according to an OIG letter sent April 15 to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR)." --s

Presidential Race 2020

Caitlin Oprysko of Politico: "Former President Barack Obama offered some warm words for Joe Biden on Thursday after his vice president officially jumped into the 2020 race, but notably did not endorse him. 'President Obama has long said that selecting Joe Biden as his running mate in 2008 was one of the best decisions he ever made,' Obama spokeswoman Katie Hill said. 'He relied on the vice president's knowledge, insight and judgment throughout both campaigns and the entire presidency. The two forged a special bond over the last 10 years and remain close today.' The cryptic message signals that Obama is likely to follow the precedent he set in 2016, when he did not endorse any candidate during the primary despite his former secretary of State's presence in the race." (Also linked yesterday afternoon.) ...

... Sheryl Stolberg & Jonathan Martin of the New York Times: "Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. called Anita Hill earlier this month to express his regret over' what she endured' testifying against Justice Clarence Thomas at the 1991 Supreme Court hearings that put a spotlight on sexual harassment of women, according to a spokeswoman for Mr. Biden. But Ms. Hill, in an interview Wednesday, said she left the conversation feeling deeply unsatisfied and declined to characterize his words to her as an apology. She said she is not convinced that Mr. Biden truly accepts the harm he caused her and other women who suffered sexual harassment and gender violence." ...

... Mrs. McCrabbie: The Washington Free Beacon is a right-wing Website, but this headline did make me laugh: "Joe Biden Secures Coveted Michael Avenatti Endorsement." Also, it's accurate; well, except for the "coveted" part.

Amanda Gomez of ThinkProgress: "A federal judge in Washington state temporarily blocked the Trump administration's overhaul of the nation's only federal family planning program. The Trump administration's rule barred abortion providers from participating in the program, which is currently relied upon by four million people. U.S. District Court Judge Stanley Bastian, an Obama appointee, issued a nationwide injunction from the bench on Thursday.... The decision comes just two days after a federal judge in Oregon said he would block the domestic gag rule.... If the rule was fully implemented, federal officials would bar abortion providers like Planned Parenthood (which serves 40% of Title X patients) from receiving Title X funds. The rule also prevents any Title X provider from even mentioning abortion during pregnancy counseling, which is why critics liken it to a gag. Currently, no federal dollars pay for abortions; providers looking to participate in the grant program use Title X funds to subsidize services like breast cancer screenings for low-income patients." --s

Michael Wines of the New York Times: "A panel of three federal judges ruled on Thursday that 34 congressional and state legislative districts in Michigan are partisan gerrymanders and unconstitutional. The judges ordered state lawmakers to redraw maps in time for the 2020 elections. Th panel wrote that it was joining 'the growing chorus of federal courts' that have held that drawing districts to unfairly favor the party in power is unconstitutional. The judges said the maps violated Democratic voters' constitutional rights.... This is a breaking news development. Check back for updates."

Arsalan Bukhari of CAIR in Informed Comment: "The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation's largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization today welcomed [Thursday] afternoon's landmark victory in CAIR's First Amendment lawsuit on behalf of Bahia Amawi, the Texas speech language pathologist who lost her job because she refused to sign a 'No Boycott of Israel' clause.... Judge [Robert] Pitman of the Western District of Texas issued a 56-page opinion striking down H.B. 89, the Texas Anti-BDS Act, as facially unconstitutional.... Every single 'No Boycott of Israel' clause in every single state contract in Texas has today been stricken as unconstitutional." --s Mrs. McC: Pitman is an Obama appointee.

What??? David Shortell & Kate Sullivan of CNN: "A federal judge in Maryland said Thursday that Christopher Hasson, a Coast Guard lieutenant accused of plotting a domestic terror attack, will be released from detention. Hasson had been indicted on weapons and drug charges, but did not face any charges related to terrorism or attempted murder -- a point his public defender.... He pleaded not guilty last month on the weapons and drug charges. Judge Charles Day agreed that the government had not met a standard for continued detention but said he still had 'grave concerns' about Hasson's alleged actions, which included amassing an arsenal of guns and tactical gear and searching online for the home addresses of two Supreme Court justices. Hasson's defense attorney will propose options for supervised release at a future hearing. 'He's got to have a whole lot of supervision,' Day said.... Prosecutors say Hasson is a white supremacist who had a hit list that included prominent Democratic politicians as well as several journalists from CNN and MSNBC. Hasson conducted an internet search for 'are Supreme Court justices protected' before searching for the home addresses of two unnamed justices...." ...

     ... Mrs. McCrabbie: According to Wikipedia, Day is a federal magistrate judge. President Obama nominated him for a District Court seat but withdrew his nomination after Republicans raised objections about something (not specified) that arose in his background check.

Tony Romm of the Washington Post: "Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey phoned Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar on Tuesday and stood by the company's decision to permit a tweet from President Trump that later resulted in a flood of death threats targeting the congresswoman. The previously unreported call focused on an incendiary video that Trump shared on April 12, which depicts Omar discussing the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks interspersed with footage of the Twin Towers burning. The clip did not include the full context of Omar's remarks, which were taken from a public event on the broader issue of Islamophobia. Omar pressed Dorsey to explain why Twitter didn't remove Trump's tweet outright, according to a person familiar with the conversation.... Dorsey said that the president's tweet didn't violate the company's rules, a second person from Twitter confirmed. Dorsey also pointed to the fact that the tweet and video already had been viewed and shared far beyond the site, one of the sources said. But the Twitter executive did tell Omar that the tech giant needed to do a better job generally in removing hate and harassment from the site...." ...

... Joseph Cox & Jason Koebler of Vice: "At a Twitter all-hands meeting on March 22, an employee asked...: Twitter has largely eradicated Islamic State propaganda off its platform. Why can't it do the same for white supremacist content?.... Twitter won't say that it can't treat white supremacy in the same way as it treated ISIS. But external experts Motherboard spoke to said that the measures taken against ISIS were so extreme that, if applied to white supremacy, there would certainly be backlash, because algorithms would obviously flag content that has been tweeted by prominent Republicans -- or, at the very least, their supporters." --s Mrs. McC: See more on Twitter's algorithms near the top of today's Comments.

Nice Timing. Michael Burke of the Hill: "Hundreds of families opposed to vaccinations piled into the California Capitol on Wednesday to protest a bill that would give the state control over which children are exempt from mandatory vaccinations, the Sacramento Bee reported. According to the paper, the families called the legislation 'draconian,' with one protester claiming that lawmakers supporting the bill are 'brainwashed.'... The protests came during a hearing on the bill in the Senate Committee on Health.... The protests came the same day federal health officials declared that measles cases in the U.S. have reached an all-time high since the disease was declared eliminated in the U.S. in 2000." Related story re: measles outbreaks linked below. (Also linked yesterday afternoon.)

Tom Englehardt of Tom Dispatch: "When it comes to climate change ... as the smoke began to appear and, in our own moment, the first flames began to leap..., no firemen arrived (just children)...Yes, there was the Paris climate accord but it was largely an agreement in principle without enforcement power of any genuine sort. In fact..., those who appeared weren't firefighters at all, but fire feeders who will likely prove to be the ultimate arsonists of human history.... Leaders who vied for, or actually gained, power not only refused to recognize the existence of climate change but were quite literally eager to aid and abet the phenomenon.... Understand this: Trump, [Brazil's Jair] Bolsonaro, [Poland's Andrzej] Duda, [Vladimir] Putin, and the others are just part of human history. Sooner or later, they will be gone. [The effects of] climate change, however.., could ... last for almost unimaginable periods of time.... Consider global warming a story for the ages, one that should put Notre Dame's near-destruction after almost nine centuries in grim perspective." --s

Zack Beauchamp of Vox did a year-long study on the "incel", or "involuntary celibacy" movement: "What I've found is more than just a community twisted into a grotesque parody of its original shape. I've found a story of how the deepest prejudices in a society can take purchase in new settings due to technology -- transforming not only online spaces but real lives and potentially even the trajectory of our politics.... [T]he focus on incels as potential killers risks missing a more subtle threat: that they will commit acts of everyday violence ranging from harassment to violent assault, or simply make the women in their lives miserable. Yet incels are not merely an isolated subculture, disconnected from the outside world. They are a dark reflection of a set of social values about women that is common, if not dominant, in broader Western society. The intersection between this age-old misogyny and new information technologies is reshaping our politics and culture in a way we may only dimly understand -- and may not be prepared to confront." --s

Beyond the Beltway

Ian Duncan & Luke Broadwater of the Baltimore Sun: "Federal law enforcement agents fanned out Thursday across Baltimore, raiding City Hall, the home of embattled Mayor Catherine Pugh and several other locations as the investigation into the mayor's business dealings widened.... Shortly after the raids began, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan called on Pugh, who has taken a leave of absence as mayor, to resign.... Two sources told The Baltimore Sun that the investigation that led to Thursday's raids began more than a year ago." (Also linked yesterday afternoon.)

News Lede

New York Times: "Gross domestic product, the broadest measure of goods and services produced in the economy, rose at a 3.2 percent annual rate in the first three months of the year, the Commerce Department said Friday. (Friday's figures are preliminary and will be revised at least twice in the months ahead.) Most economists expect a downshift as the year progresses. Hardly any independent economists expect that President Trump will be able to deliver the 3 percent growth he has promised this year. Still, after a rough winter, the economy appears to have entered the spring fundamentally intact."

The Commentariat -- April 25, 2019

Afternoon Update:

Elizabeth Drew in a New York Times op-ed: "... the Democrats would ... run enormous risks if they didn't hold to account a president who has clearly abused power and the Constitution, who has not honored the oath of office and who has had a wave of campaign and White House aides plead guilty to or be convicted of crimes.... Even if the Republican-controlled Senate doesn't vote to remove Mr. Trump, a statement by the House that the president has abused his office is preferable to total silence from the Congress. The Republicans will have to face the charge that they protected someone they knew to be a dangerous man in the White House.... The report by Robert Mueller, the special counsel, left clear openings, perhaps even obligations, for Congress to act.... If [House Democrats] choose to ignore clear abuses of the Constitution, they'll also turn a blind eye to the precedent they're setting and how feckless they'll look in history."

Wesley Morgan of Politico: "Acting Defense Secretary Pat Shanahan did not violate ethics agreements or promote his longtime employer, Boeing, the Defense Department inspector general has concluded in a probe that was viewed as the major obstacle preventing his nomination to be Pentagon chief." Mrs. McC: What? Ethical? The guy is totally doomed in Trumpworld.

Akhilleus has a fine report in today's thread on Trump's excellent speech yesterday about opioids. Er, partly about opioids.

Caitlin Oprysko of Politico: "Former President Barack Obama offered some warm words for Joe Biden on Thursday after his vice president officially jumped into the 2020 race, but notably did not endorse him. 'President Obama has long said that selecting Joe Biden as his running mate in 2008 was one of the best decisions he ever made,' Obama spokeswoman Katie Hill said. 'He relied on the vice president's knowledge, insight and judgment throughout both campaigns and the entire presidency. The two forged a special bond over the last 10 years and remain close today.' The cryptic message signals that Obama is likely to follow the precedent he set in 2016, when he did not endorse any candidate during the primary despite his former secretary of State’s presence in the race."

Nice Timing. Michael Burke of the Hill: "Hundreds of families opposed to vaccinations piled into the California Capitol on Wednesday to protest a bill that would give the state control over which children are exempt from mandatory vaccinations, the Sacramento Bee reported. According to the paper, the families called the legislation "draconian," with one protester claiming that lawmakers supporting the bill are 'brainwashed.'... The protests came during a hearing on the bill in the Senate Committee on Health.... The protests came the same day federal health officials declared that measles cases in the U.S. have reached an all-time high since the disease was declared eliminated in the U.S. in 2000." Related story re: measles outbreaks linked below.

Ian Duncan & Luke Broadwater of the Baltimore Sun: "Federal law enforcement agents fanned out Thursday across Baltimore, raiding City Hall, the home of embattled Mayor Catherine Pugh and several other locations as the investigation into the mayor's business dealings widened.... Shortly after the raids began, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan called on Pugh, who has taken a leave of absence as mayor, to resign.... Two sources told The Baltimore Sun that the investigation that led to Thursday's raids began more than a year ago."

~~~~~~~~~~

Satire Post Mortem. Every day, RealTrumpNews reads more like the Onion. -- Mrs. Bea McCrabbie

Say What? John Wagner of the Washington Post: "President Trump suggested Wednesday that he would ask the Supreme Court to intervene if Democrats move to impeach him -- a notion that legal experts said showed a misunderstanding of the Constitution.... The Constitution delegates impeachment proceedings to Congress, not the courts. Trump mentioned the idea briefly in morning tweets in which he lashed out at Democrats who are continuing to investigate him after the release of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III's report. 'I DID NOTHING WRONG,' Trump wrote. 'If the partisan Dems ever tried to Impeach, I would first head to the U.S. Supreme Court. Not only are there no "High Crimes and Misdemeanors," there are no Crimes by me at all.'... The notion was ridiculed by several legal experts, including Laurence Tribe, a Harvard law professor, who accused Trump of 'idiocy.'" ...

     ... Mrs. McCrabbie: The ignorance of the man continues to astound. Or it could work. I'm going to write to the Supremes & ask them to crown me queen of England, tho not till after June, please, when Trump has come & gone from that sceptred isle. Anything is possible (tho I suppose my chances would be better if I told the Supremes I was a Tory). If not the throne, maybe they'll buy me a Bentley. ...

... Ian Millhiser of ThinkProgress: "[I]t's probably not a coincidence that President Trump claimed less than a day after arguments in Department of Commerce v. New York that the highest court in the land is his personal team of fixers.... The most recent example is the oral argument in New York -- but consider as well the Roberts Court's decision in Trump v. Hawaii, the Muslim Ban case.... Trump didn't just brag about his intention to violate the Constitution. He communicated the specific pretext he would use to make this violation appear legal.... Donald Trump knows little about policy.... But many of the lawyers who surround him ... are among the savviest attorneys in the country.... They are smart enough to understand, therefore, that the Supreme Court is signaling very loudly that the law does not apply to this president.... Chief Justice Roberts can put a stop to this by ruling against the Trump administration in the census case. If the Chief doesn't, Trump's lawyers are smart enough to tell the president what such a decision means." --s

Felicia Sonmez of the Washington Post: "President Trump suggested Wednesday that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and his team examined documents related to Trump's personal finances as part of their Russia probe, despite the fact that Mueller's report made no mention of doing so. 'Now Mueller, I assume, for $35 million, checked my taxes, checked my financials -- which are great, by the way,' Trump told reporters as he left the White House on Wednesday morning. 'They checked my financials, and they checked my taxes, I assume. It was the most thorough investigation probably in the history of our country.'" ...

     ... Mrs. McCrabbie: Can't find a published piece on this, but Rachel Maddow said the White House has since walked back Trump's claim, saying that it had no evidence Mueller had reviewed Trump's financial records.

Cover-ups Work. Dan Friedman of Mother Jones: "Since Richard Nixon resigned over Watergate, conventional wisdom on political scandals has been reduced to an axiom: 'It's not the crime, it's the cover-up.' In other words, scandal-plagued politicians tend to get caught concealing bad deeds. This idea is a fallacy. After all, we only hear about the covers-ups that fail. Cover-ups often work -- and that appears to be one takeaway from Robert Mueller's report on Russian inference in the 2016 election.... By refusing to cooperate with the investigators and using his pardon power and other means to encourage witnesses to mislead investigators or decline to cooperate, the president prevented Mueller from conclusively answering questions about the Trump campaign's interactions with Russia." --s ...

... Jonathan Chait: "Trump's attempts to quash the Russia investigation outright may have failed, but his efforts to impede it succeeded. Mueller failed to establish a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign an Russia in part because he could not nail down the activities of two Trump advisers: Roger Stone and Paul Manafort. A redacted sentence in the report states, 'The investigation was unable to resolve ... WikiLeaks's release of the stolen Podesta emails on October 7, 2016,' it concedes. It likewise failed to establish why Manafort delivered 75 pages of detailed polling analysis to a Russian agent. Stone and Manafort both declined to cooperate with the investigation. In both cases, Trump sent a combination of public and private messages encouraging both men to stay loyal, and floating the promise of pardons if they did.... The most important question hovering over Trump is ... whether Russia gained secret influence over him. That is not a question Mueller's report sets itself to answer.... The Mueller report is ... a story of sweeping misconduct and a cover-up that may have worked."

Peter Baker of the New York Times: "While Mr. Trump once welcomed [the Mueller report] as 'total exoneration,' he has spent the last few days assailing it as a 'total "hit job"' produced by 'true Trump Haters, including highly conflicted Bob Mueller himself.... Now we're finished with it, and I thought after two years we'd be finished with it,' he told reporters on the South Lawn of the White House on Wednesday after a morning of tweeting about Mr. Mueller's report. Declaring that 'it's enough,' he vowed again to resist all subpoenas by House Democrats seeking to investigate further. His bitterness rarely seems far from the surface.... Even when he is on top, he lapses into anger and resentment, convinced that he has been unfairly treated and determined to strike back."

Darren Samuelsohn, et al., of Politico: "Team Trump's bellicose tweets and public statements in the last few days are potentially exposing Trump to fresh charges of witness intimidation, obstruction of justice and impeding a congressional investigation -- not to mention giving lawmakers more fodder for their presidential probes -- according to Democrats and legal experts. Already, a fusillade of verbal assaults aimed at former White House counsel Don McGahn, a star witness in the Mueller report, have sparked questions about obstruction and witness intimidation as Democrats fight the Trump White House to get McGahn's documents and testimony. 'This is risky,' said William Jeffress, a prominent Washington defense attorney who represented President Richard Nixon after he left the White House. 'I find it surprising because he's taking these shots at witnesses who gave information to Mueller, and I think he's got to be careful because there's an explicit federal statute punishing retaliation against witnesses.'... The White House signaled Thursday they'd invoke executive privilege to block the Democrats' subpoena for McGahn, and Chairman Jerry Nadler swung back that the move 'represent[s] one more act of obstruction by an Administration desperate to prevent the public from talking about the President's behavior.'"

Greg Sargent of the Washington Post: "Nancy Pelosi has rebuffed pressure to initiate an impeachment inquiry by arguing that there are other means of holding President Trump accountable for his corruption and wrongdoing.... 'It is also important to know that the facts regarding holding the President accountable can be gained outside of impeachment hearings.' That's true. But what happens if the White House will not allow Congress to get access to the 'facts' that are necessary to carry out the task of 'holding the President accountable'?... If the White House continues down this path [of obstruction], it will make it still harder for House Democrats to resist an impeachment inquiry. Because if they launch one, their legal case ... will get even stronger than it already is.... If Trump blocks them from doing that, it would seem to force their hand and require an impeachment inquiry." ...

     ... Mrs. McCrabbie: I wonder: has Pelosi purposely set a trap for Trump? "Ooh, Donald, we really didn't want to impeach you, but your continuing obstruction leaves us no choice." ...

... Josh Marshall of TPM: "Many people are treating it as a given that beginning an impeachment inquiry will significantly or even dramatically increase the House's ability to compel the White House's cooperation. I see little or no evidence to believe that is true."

** Hillary Clinton in a Washington Post op-ed: "Our election was corrupted, our democracy assaulted, our sovereignty and security violated. This is the definitive conclusion of special counse Robert S. Mueller III's report. It documents a serious crime against the American people. The debate about how to respond to Russia's 'sweeping and systemic' attack -- and how to hold President Trump accountable for obstructing the investigation and possibly breaking the law -- has been reduced to a false choice: immediate impeachment or nothing.... Whether they like it or not, Republicans in Congress share the constitutional responsibility to protect the country. Mueller's report leaves many unanswered questions -- in part because of Attorney General William P. Barr's redactions and obfuscations. But it is a road map. It's up to members of both parties to see where that road map leads...." Clinton cites her own experiences with impeachment as instructive on how Congress should move forward now.

David Graham of the Atlantic: "... Donald Trump has often seemed to conflate himself with the government, and his own interests with the nation's. At times, the results are merely ridiculous. At others, they are actively dangerous. At the moment, Trump is declining to protect the United States from foreign interference in its elections, because it's politically inconvenient and personally irritating to him. Despite repeated evidence of Russian attempts to interfere in American elections -- most recently detailed in Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report, released last week -- the White House continues to refuse to take action, because the president can't separate the nation's security from questions about the legitimacy of his victory in the 2016 election.... He has repeatedly questioned whether Russia was really behind intrusions into the 2016 election, most prominently at the disastrous Helsinki conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin. He still hasn't condemned Russia. The U.S. shows little sign of taking action to prevent future foreign interference." Mrs. McC: Might be another article of impeachment.

** Eric Levitz of New York: "... there is no way to reconcile Mueller’s findings with the idea that Congress should allow Donald Trump to continue being president.... There is no credible argument for allowing a man who cares more about avoiding narcissistic injury than honoring the independence of federal law enforcement -- or protecting the integrity of U.S. elections -- to retain the powers of the presidency. And yet, almost no one in Congress is willing to say so. Republicans have made it clear that there is nothing Trump can do (save, perhaps, for raising taxes on people who live off Fifth Avenue) that would result in Mitch McConnell's caucus backing the president's removal. Democrats ... decided to pretend that their committees will somehow excavate evidence more dispositive than that which a years-long special investigation has already produced. Meanwhile, the president has carried on abusing his powers with reckless abandon.... The most pressing threat to our democracy is coming from inside the White House[, not from Russia]." Read the full post. Levitz highlights the MSM's complicity in deflecting the source of the crisis.

Michael Schmidt of the New York Times: In mid-2017, Donald Trump called Jeff Sessions at home to tell him "he wanted Mr. Sessions to reverse his recusal and order the prosecution of Hillary Clinton.... His request of Mr. Sessions -- and two similar ones detailed in the report — stands apart because it shows Mr. Trump trying to wield the power of law enforcement to target a political rival, a step that no president since Richard M. Nixon is known to have taken.... Like many of Mr. Trump's aides, as laid out in the report and other accounts, Mr. Sessions instead declined to act, preventing Mr. Trump from crossing a line that might have imperiled his presidency.... A month later, Mr. Sessions found a way to satisfy Mr. Trump's demands without opening a new investigation into Mrs. Clinton. He told Congress that he had asked the United States attorney in Utah, John W. Huber, to examine the allegations Mr. Trump and his allies made about Mrs. Clinton and the F.B.I. No charges have arisen from that examination, which is continuing." ...

     ... Mrs. McCrabbie: Bear in mind that Bill Barr appears to be more willing to accede to Trump's crazy commands, as in his promise to "review" the actions of officials who "spied" on the Trump campaign. "I think spying on a political campaign is a big deal," he told the Senate panel. "Spying did occur."

Betsy Woodruff of the Daily Beast: "John Gore, a top official in the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, will not appear for a deposition scheduled for tomorrow with the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, according to a letter the Justice Department sent the committee chairman on April 24. Stephen Boyd, the department's top Hill liaison, wrote in the letter ... that Gore will not appear as long as Chairman Elijah Cummings blocks him from bringing along lawyers from the Justice Department. 'We are disappointed that the Committee remains unwilling to permit Department counsel to represent the interests of the Executive Branch in the deposition of a senior Department official,' Boyd wrote. '... Attorney General Barr's determination that Mr. Gore will not appear at the Committee's deposition unless a Department attorney may accompany him remains in effect.'" ...

... BUT. Morgan Chalfont & Jacqueline Thomsen of the Hill: "Attorney General William Barr is scheduled to testify next Wednesday [beginning at 10 am ET] before the Senate Judiciary Committee on special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation." Mrs. McC: Should be illuminating ...

... Andrew Kaczynksi & David Shortell of CNN: "William Barr said in a 1998 interview that he was 'disturbed' that Attorney General Janet Reno had not defended independent counsel Ken Starr from 'spin control,' 'hatchet jobs' and 'ad hominem attacks.'... Barr is now ... defending another president who has repeatedly blasted a special counsel's investigation of his activities. Barr stayed silent as President Donald Trump railed against special counsel Robert Mueller's 'witch hunt.'... Barr's 1998 comments about 'spin control' came several months after he co-authored a public statement with three fellow former attorneys general expressing concern that attacks on Starr from officials in the Clinton administration appeared 'to have the improper purpose of influencing and impeding an ongoing criminal investigation and intimidating possible jurors, witnesses and even investigators.'" --s ...

     ... Mrs. McCrabbie: Barr did more than "stay silent." He excused Trump's hundreds of attacks on investigators, Mueller & the Justice Department, saying that poor Trump was "frustrated & angry" at them. Another IOKIYAR moment. I hope someone in Congress (or the press) asks Barr why it wasn't okay for Clinton to be "frustrated & angry," but it's a good reason for Trump to make unsubstantiated claims against federal officials.

Eli Watkins of CNN: "... Donald Trump's former personal attorney told an actor he did not actually do some of the crimes included in his guilty plea, a recording obtained by The Wall Street Journal showed. The paper published audio of Michael Cohen speaking with actor Tom Arnold, who provided the Journal a 36-minute recording.... Last year, Cohen pleaded guilty to a slew of charges, including campaign finance violations related to Trump as well as financial crimes and later for misleading Congress. In the recording, Cohen specifically denies tax evasion and a crime related to a home equity line of credit application, both of which are included in his plea agreement.... Cohen said on the recording that 'they had me on campaign finance,' which is a portion of his plea agreement. But the Journal said later on in the conversation, Cohen claimed he went forward with some of his guilty plea in part to protect his wife.... Arnold told the Journal that Cohen did not know he was being recorded."

~~~~~

WE take a break from our regularly-scheduled programming to return to a development in the Tale of the Pee Tapes:

Stephanie Baker & Helena Bedwell of Bloomberg News: “A Georgian-American businessman is accusing Special Counsel Robert Mueller of 'glaring inaccuracies' and sensationalizing texts about alleged salacious tapes involving Donald Trump's 2013 trip to Moscow. In a letter to U.S. Attorney General William Barr on Tuesday, lawyers for Giorgi Rtskhiladze ... [say] [a] footnote [in the Mueller report] includes only part of Rtskhiladze's text exchange with then-Trump personal attorney Michael Cohen, failing to provide the full context.... In his texts, Rtskhiladze tells Cohen: 'Stopped flow of some tapes from Russia.' Rtskhiladze, who had business dealings with Trump, said in an interview Wednesday that his texts had been misinterpreted to mean he'd seen and destroyed compromising tapes of Trump, when he was only conveying a rumor.... The texts between Rtskhiladze and Cohen came ... before a dossier of unverified allegations about Trump and his campaign, compiled by ... Christopher Steele, was published." ...

... As Rachel Maddow pointed out Wednesday, the text exchange also occurred well before Jim Comey, during the transition, privately informed Trump about the Steele dossier. Whether or not the tapes exist or existed & could be used to compromise Trump, this is further confirmation of Michael Cohen's Congressional testimony in February 2019 that "I've heard about these tapes for a long time.... I've had many people contact me over the years. I have no reason to believe that that tape exists." As Tina Nguyen of Vanity Fair reports in the linked story, "Russian President Vladimir Putin has not denied that his government might have compromising information about Trump."

~~~~~

David Voreacos of Bloomberg: "Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report on Russian election interference ... doesn't conclude why Manafort, as chairman of Donald Trump's campaign, directed the handover of polling data about the key battleground states of Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Minnesota.... Prosecutors were unable to determine what became of the data or if [Putin stooge Oleg] Deripaska received it.... Manafort and [Konstantin] Kilimnik ... had discussed the peace plan at least four times and that their correspondence continued into 2018.... Much about Manafort's and Kilimnik's relationship remains unknown, as Mueller blacked out sections about it.... At Manafort's behest, [Rick] Gates 'periodically sent Kilimnik data' via an encrypted-messaging app and then deleted the communications daily.... Manafort denied he told Gates to send internal data to Kilimnik, according to the report." --s ...

     ... Mrs. McCrabbie: Since Manafort gave Kilimnik polling data for four battleground states, my guess is that Manafort instructed Kilimnik to have Russian trolls target those states, something the Russian operation would not necessarily think to do. If so, I'd call that a conspiracy, Bob.

Uh-Oh. Cristina Alesci of CNN: "Deutsche Bank has begun the process of providing financial records to New York state's attorney general in response to a subpoena for documents related to loans made to ... Donald Trump and his business, according to a person familiar with the production. Last month, the office of New York Attorney General Letitia James issued subpoenas for records tied to funding for several Trump Organization projects. The state's top legal officer opened a civil probe after Trump's former lawyer Michael Cohen testified to Congress in a public hearing that Trump had inflated his assets. Cohen at that time presented copies of financial statements he said had been provided to Deutsche Bank.... The bank is in the process of turning over documents ... related to Trump International Hotel in Washington, DC; the Trump National Doral Miami; the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago; and the unsuccessful effort to buy the NFL's Buffalo Bills.... The bank is already the subject of a joint investigation between the House Financial Services and Intelligence committees into Trump's businesses and money laundering."

David Corn of Mother Jones: "Though this matter was left unaddressed by the Mueller report, the Justice Department filing [last week] in the Butina case details how [Maria] Butina, the thirtysomething Russian native who described herself as a gun rights advocate, had used the NRA and the Republican Party in an effort to obtain clandestine influence for Moscow within US politics. And that submission included a statement from a former top FBI counterintelligence expert who noted that Butina's activities had 'tremendous intelligence value' for the Russian government ... The Justice Department memo is essentially a primer on how an influence operation is conducted." --s

Annals of "Journalism," Ctd. Trump TV. Aaron Rupar of Vox: "[A] new HuffPost/YouGov poll finds that 83 percent of respondents who got their information about the [Mueller] report from Fox News think it clears Trump.... Not only are Fox News viewers likely to agree with Trump's misleading talking points about the Mueller report, but when compared to CNN or MSNBC viewers, they're much more likely to report that they think they know what they're talking about.... In fact, 76 percent of respondents who got Mueller report information from Fox News say the report 'does not reveal anything damaging' about Trump -- a figure drastically different than the 50 percent of CNN viewers and 83 percent of MSNBC viewers who say the report demonstrates that Trump 'is unfit to be president.'... Fox News is amazingly effective at disseminating and getting people to buy in to Trumpian talking points. And in return, the president promotes Fox News's programming[.]" --s

Dan Sabbagh of the Guardian: "Donald Trump has repeated unproven and unverified accusations that British intelligence agencies spied on his election campaign, just a day after the UK confirmed he had been invited to London on a state visit to meet the Queen. The tweet also prompted GCHQ to reiterate that the US president's claims were 'utterly ridiculous', although the foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt, maintained that the 'special relationship' remained intact." --s

Trump's Foreign "Policy." Matt Stieb of New York: Earlier this month, the Trump administration gave mixed signals about its position on an attempted coup in Libya led by warlord Khalifa Haftar, with Trump & John Bolton supporting Haftar & other administration officials, like Acting Defense Secretary Pat Shanahan objecting to a "military solution." "Trump giving his own administration the foreign policy runaround is yet another example of his approach in the Middle East and North Africa: favoring the word of authoritarian governments...."

Manu Raju & Kate Sullivan of CNN: "The White House has informed the House Oversight Committee that aide Stephen Miller will not testify before the panel about his role in ... Donald Trump's controversial immigration policies, according to a letter obtained by CNN. In the Wednesday letter, White House counsel Pat Cipollone says there's 'long-standing precedent' for the White House to decline offers for staff to testify on Capitol Hill. Instead, the White House counsel said Cabinet secretaries and other executive branch officials would make a 'reasonable accommodation' for House Oversight Chairman Elijah Cummings' questions on immigration policy."

Special Shoutout to Trump Backers
Chinese Communist, Fake Lawyer-Grifter, Man-eating Media Critic

**Sarah Blaskey, et al., of the Miami Herald: "[Xinyue 'Daniel'] Lou is a United States-based promoter for the Chinese Communist Party and former writer for Chinese media.... He is also an avid Trump supporter. Last year.... Lou signed a contract with the Republican National Committee to become an official fundraiser for President Donald Trump's reelection campaign.... Lou's life overlapped with that of Li 'Cindy' Yang -- founder of a chain of South Florida Asian day spas, whose latest startup involved selling presidential access over Chinese-language social media.... Through their positions as high-level fundraisers, together Yang and Lou have brought dozens of guests to events where Trump, his family and top Republican advisers were present, according to a Herald analysis of social media accounts. Their efforts have been celebrated both by the RNC and event planners at Mar-a-Lago.... Lou told the Miami Herald that the RNC had advised him not to comment on his fundraising activities for the committee, his association with Yang, or his previous activities in conjunction with the Communist Party.... Lou [-- a U.S. citizen --] is not, nor has he ever been, registered as a lobbyist for a foreign government, according to the U.S. Department of Justice, which keeps a registry of all foreign agents." --s

Dartagnan of Daily Kos cites a story by Jack Newsham of the firewalled New York Law Journal: "A Tennessee man charged by New York prosecutors with pretending to be a Manhattan lawyer and taking thousands from would-be clients was the co-founder of Students for Trump, a national group that mobilized college campuses in the run-up to the 2016 election and plans to do so again in 2020. John Lambert, 23, was arrested last week and charged by Southern District of New York prosecutors with wire fraud for having invented a lawyer persona named 'Eric Pope' that he used to solicit legal work online. ALM reported last week that the fake firm website he created appeared to have attorney biographies cribbed from senior partners at Cravath, Swaine & Moore." Thanks to Ken W. for the link. Mrs. McC: Too bad Lambert might be on his way to jail. He sounds like the perfect candidate for a job in the Trump White House.

Will Sommer of the Daily Beast: "A Donald Trump supporter from Rhode Island allegedly threatened to kill and eat a college professor and 'eradicate' Democrats, according to federal officials. Matthew Haviland, a 30-year-old resident of North Kingstown, threatened to murder and eat the professor in a series of March 10 emails, according to prosecutors. Haviland was arrested on Wednesday after an FBI investigation, and faces federal cyberstalking and threat charges.... A friend of Haviland's told law enforcement that his political views had recently become 'more extreme,' according to the FBI affidavit, because he was angry over media coverage of Trump."

Presidential Race 2020

Alexander Burns of the New York Times: "Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. announced Thursday that he would seek the Democratic nomination to challenge President Trump in 2020, marshaling his experience and global stature in a bid to lead a party increasingly defined by a younger generation that might be skeptical of his age and ideological moderation.... In a three-and-a-half minute video laying out his reasons for running, Mr. Biden chose not to talk about policy issues or his biography but instead began by recalling the white supremacist march through Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 and a counterprotest, and Mr. Trump's comment that there were 'very fine people on both sides.' In that moment, Mr. Biden said, 'I knew the threat to our nation was unlike any I'd ever seen in my lifetime.'" ...

... Joseph Simonson & Naomi Lim of the Washington Examiner: "The late Sen. John McCain's family plans to support former Vice President Joe Biden's White House bid, backing the Democrat not only in his party's crowded primary race but also in a general election matchup with President Trump.... In an extraordinary snub to Trump, who derided McCain's Vietnam War service and mocked him even after his death last August at age 81, the McCain family is preparing to break with the Republican Party."

Adam Liptak of the New York Times: "The Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday that workers at a California business could not band together to seek compensation for what they said was their employer's failure to protect their data. The vote was 5 to 4, with the court's conservative members in the majority. The decision was the latest in a line of rulings allowing companies to use arbitration provisions to bar both class actions in court and class-wide arbitration proceedings. In earlier 5-to-4 decisions concerning fine-print contracts with consumers and employment agreements, the court ruled that arbitration provisions can require disputes to be resolved one by one. Those rulings can make it difficult for consumers and workers to pursue minor claims even where their collective harm was substantial." ...

     ... Mrs. Bea McCrabbie: Of course I don't know for certain how Merrick Garland would have ruled in this matter, but I still want to give a shoutout to Mitch McConnell, whose legacy will be that he made sure life would be harder for ordinary Americans. And he cheated to do it.

David Gans of The Atlantic: "On Tuesday, the Constitution was missing in action [at Tuesday's oral argument in Department of Commerce v. New York].... As the Constitution's text, history, and values mandate, the 'whole immigrant population should be numbered with the people, and counted with them.' This is not a mere policy preference but a hard and fast constitutional requirement necessary to ensure equal representation for all.... If the court ultimately upholds the addition of the citizenship question, it will be yet another decision from the Roberts court that undermines the Constitution's democratic promise. Under the chief justice's watch, the court has made it easier for corporations and the wealthy to spend unlimited amounts of money on political campaigns, while making it harder for citizens to exercise their fundamental right to vote. The Roberts court struck down the most important and successful part of the Voting Rights Act, opening the door to waves of racial voter suppression." --s ...

... Mark Stern of Slate: "By all indications, the Supreme Court is poised to let the Trump administration add a citizenship question to the 2020 census.... Hispanics and immigrants will be undercounted, leading to overrepresentation in the House of Representatives and state legislatures of disproportionately white and rural regions. The result will entrench Republican power into the 2030s, depriving Democrats of representation in Congress and state legislatures, as well as electoral votes. States with large immigrant communities will lose billions in federal funding. Ultimately, the citizenship question is not some wonky dispute about proper census protocol. It is a dispute over who counts in America.... In his opinion blocking the citizenship question, U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman listed six separate ways that the administration violated the law in its effort to rig the census.... To reverse Furman..., these justices deployed credulity and hypocrisy in equal measure, abandoning their principles to reach the outcome desired by the Trump administration and the Republican Party. It was a very bad day for truth at the Supreme Court." ...

... MEANWHILE, Caitlin Oprysko of Politico: "... Donald Trump wrote online Wednesday that 'the American people deserve to know who is in this country,' breaking with the Justice Department in its defense of Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross' efforts to place a citizenship question on next year's census questionnaire. The Commerce Department, in defending its efforts to ask everyone in the country next year if they are U.S. citizens, has said the question would be inserted at the request of the Justice Department as part of an effort to better protect voting rights. But Trump on Wednesday offered his own rationale for why the question is needed." ...

     ... Mrs. McCrabbie: In other words, Trump's rationale is, "Let's tell the 'real' American people about all the scary, terrorist non-citizens living in their neighborhoods."

Mike Isaac & Cecilia Kang of the New York Times: "Facebook said on Wednesday that it expected to be fined up to $5 billion by the Federal Trade Commission for privacy violations. The penalty would be a record by the agency against a technology company and a sign that the United States was willing to punish big tech companies. The social network disclosed the amount in its quarterly financial results, saying it estimated a one-time charge of $3 billion to $5 billion in connection with an 'ongoing inquiry' by the F.T.C. Facebook added that 'the matter remains unresolved, and there can be no assurance as to the timing or the terms of any final outcome.' Facebook has been in negotiations with the regulator for months over a financial penalty for claims that the company violated a 2011 privacy consent decree."

Triumph of the Anti-Vaxxers. Donald McNeil of the New York Times: "The number of measles cases in the United States has risen to 695, the highest annual number recorded since the disease was declared eliminated in this country in 2000, federal health officials said on Wednesday. The total has now surpassed the previous high of 667 set in 2014, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The virus has been detected in 22 states. Most cases are linked to two large and apparently unrelated outbreaks. One is centered in Orthodox Jewish communities in New York City and its suburbs; that outbreak began in October and recently spread to Orthodox communities in Michigan. The other outbreak began in Washington State.... The virus mostly has stricken families that do not vaccinate their children, and the C.D.C. blamed 'organizations that are deliberately targeting these communities with inaccurate and misleading information about vaccines.'"

Beyond the Beltway

New Jersey. Nick Corasaniti of the New York Times: “... Bridget Anne Kelly, a top aide to former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, [who in August 2013] fired off an email to a colleague at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey: 'Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee,' ... on Wednesday ... was sentenced to 13 months in prison.... She said that she still felt betrayed by the governor.... 'He knew what was going on,' Ms. Kelly [said]. 'And any claim that he didn't is absurd.'... A federal investigation targeted several top associates of Mr. Christie, who insisted repeatedly that he knew nothing about the plot until months after it ended, even though testimony at Ms. Kelly's trial revealed that he was told about the lane closings as they were happening and was involved in trying to cover up the scheme."

Texas. Campbell Robertson of the New York Times: At about 6 pm this evening, Texas will execute "John William King, 44, sentenced to die for his role in the 1998 murder of James Byrd Jr. in the East Texas town of Jasper.... Mr. King and two other white men attacked Mr. Byrd, a 49-year-old black man who had been offered a late-night ride home in a perverted gesture of neighborliness. The men beat him, spray-painted his face, chained him to the back of a pickup truck and dragged him to his death on an isolated back road. The motive seemed shockingly clear-cut: Mr. King had come out of a stint in prison a committed white supremacist, his body a billboard of racist tattoos, including one depicting a black man hanged in a noose. Less than a year after the killing, Mr. King became the first white man in modern Texas history to be sentenced to death for killing a black person." ...

     ... Update. Elliot Hannon of Slate: "White supremacist John William King, whose gruesome murder of James Byrd Jr. changed how the U.S. prosecutes hate crimes, was put to death Wednesday in Texas."

Way Beyond

Saudi Arabia. Kareen Fahim of the Washington Post: "Saudi Arabia said Tuesday it had executed 37 people convicted of terrorism-related offenses, bringing the number of executions there in the first four months of the year to 105, according to the Saudi interior ministry and Reprieve, a human rights group that tracks the use of the death penalty in the kingdom. It was the largest mass execution in Saudi Arabia since early 2016, when 47 people were put to death, also on terror-related charges. The vast majority of those executed on Tuesday were members of Saudi Arabia's Shiite Muslim minority, according to Shiite activists. Those put to death included at least three people who were minors at the time of their alleged crimes and confessed to prosecutors' charges under torture, according to Reprieve, which said it provided assistance to five of the people executed."

Sudan. Tim Lister, et al. of CNN: "When anti-government protests erupted in Sudan at the end of last year, the response of [now deposed] President Omar al-Bashir came straight from the dictators' playbook -- a crackdown that led to scores of civilian deaths.... The ... strategy ... was drawn up by a Russian company tied to an oligarch favored by the Kremlin: Yevgeny Prigozhin.... President Bashir cultivated a close relationship with the Kremlin, visiting Moscow in 2017. Russia supplied modern Su-35 fighter jets in the same year. Put simply, Russia had placed a big bet on Bashir. As protests against the regime gathered steam, that bet was at risk.... Prigozhin -- k[n]ow as 'Putin's chef' for the catering contracts he held with the Kremlin -- was one of 13 Russians charged as part of the investigation into Russian election interference by US special counsel Robert Mueller." --s