Editor’s Blog
Roger Ailes, October 16th, 1968, campaign staff working for candidate Richard Nixon.
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Allegra Kirkland sums up all the critical developments in the Russia probe in this week’s Weekly Primer (sub req.).
Also see this week’s Weekly Primer’s on Voting Rights/Democracy and the Fight for Obamacare.
There are a host of revelations and confirmations in the Comey memos released yesterday evening. I want to zero in on one point: The President repeatedly and demonstrably lied about his November 2013 trip to Moscow. This is the visit in which the ‘pee tape’ was purportedly recorded. There’s no evidence in the memos that that tape exists or that the President spent the night with prostitutes. But again, he clearly and repeatedly lies about the trip itself, specifically how long he was there. This seems highly significant to me.
Let’s look at the details. Read More
In covering any election, it’s easy to get hung up on winners and losers. After all,
that’s kind of the point.
But if we’re interested in what this year’s special elections tell us about November, the winner doesn’t matter much. A very red district swinging 20 points toward Dems compared to the last election, even while Republicans narrowly hold on, is a much worse sign for the GOP than a more competitive district swinging five points and leading to a Dem pickup.
All this explains why, even though Dems are likely to lose a special election for a congressional seat in a deep red Arizona district next week, they’re feeling pretty good about it. Cam Joseph has the details.
We have the complete Comey Memos right here.
Nice exclusive from TPM’s Cam Joseph.
TPM Reader KM gives us some color on the El Caribe social club …
Being from Brooklyn, I wanted to drill down on exactly where it is and give it some color.
It’s actually in Mill Basin. It may not matter to a national audience, but that’s actually a few neighborhoods away from Russian immigrant communities of Brighton Beach and Sheepshead Bay. It’s off the Marine Park / Flatlands neighborhoods.
So Rudy Giuliani is joining President Trump’s legal team, a guy who’s never really been a defense litigator and hasn’t been a prosecutor in thirty years. He says he’s joining to “negotiate an end” to the Mueller probe. This sounds like another example of selling the President on comical nonsense like Ty Cobb’s assurances that the Mueller probe would wrap up in late 2017. But here’s another thing to keep in mind. Does Rudy have his own legal trouble coming down the pike?
Check out this Reuters piece about the DOJ Inspector General’s probe … Read More
We’ve learned so much new information about Michael Cohen just in the last 36 hours – about the Russia mob, how he got the job with Trump – that we decided we needed to do an update on Tuesday’s episode, which had all the Michael Cohen information as of Tuesday. Here’s the new episode and here’s Tuesday’s. If you’ve already subscribed to the podcast on iTunes or Google Play, it’s already on your device.
TPM’s Alice Ollstein just spent a couple days in Ohio getting a read on the political situation and upcoming redistricting. The points about redistricting are key. Prime Editor John Light just sat down (virtually) with Dave Daley to discuss the critical points about what’s going to be necessary in 2018 and 2020. Read it here (Prime access).
Yesterday we reported that the law firm representing Michael Cohen in both the Russia investigation and the federal probe into Cohen’s own finances has received payments from the Trump campaign. That could complicate any efforts by prosecutors to get Cohen to cooperate against the president.
And today comes additional evidence that the possibility of Cohen flipping is at the forefront of Trump’s mind. A lawyer who has worked for Trump in the past tells the Wall Street Journal that when the president called him for advice last week, he cautioned that Trump shouldn’t count on Cohen staying strong if he’s charged with serious crimes.
“Michael will never stand up” for you, the lawyer, Jay Goldberg, says he told Trump.
And let’s take a step back: All this talk about Cohen potentially flipping on Trump assumes up front that the president has done things that could put him in severe legal jeopardy. At this point, no one seems to be making much effort to deny that.
Arizona GOP lawmakers appear to have abandoned their attempt to rig the game for potential McCain successor, at least for now.
Yesterday we noted that Michael Cohen grew up around the Brooklyn social club that served as the headquarters of the bosses of the Russian mob from the 1970s to the 1990s. Today we discussed the role of Cohen’s father-in-law Fima Shusterman, an immigrant from Ukraine. Shusterman had been in the taxi business for decades before Cohen got into the business and it was with loans and medallions from Shusterman that Cohen got his start. According to a former federal investigator who spoke to Seth Hettena, Cohen “was given the job with the Trump Org as a favor to Shusterman.” Read More
Yesterday afternoon I had one of those epiphanies about a story I usually have no more than once every few years. It was partly triggered by details I put in this post about Michael Cohen. But it wasn’t about that alone. It was the sum of a dozen developments since the raid on Cohen’s homes and office last Monday. Starting over a year ago we focused our resources tightly on Cohen, Sater and an assortment of lesser capos and goodfellas in the Trump syndicate. Read More
This is one of those facts that’s been sort of hiding in plain sight: The law firm representing Michael Cohen in the federal probe into his financial dealings has been paid recently by Trump’s campaign.
To be clear, those payments may have been for representing Cohen in the Russia investigation, not in the financial probe. Or, conceivably, for something totally different, though that seems unlikely.
Still, these are the lawyers who were fighting this week to shield Trump-Cohen communications from prosecutors. Which raises questions about whose interests are being represented.
Allegra Kirkland explains why it matters.
With such an avalanche of news on the Trump and Cohen fronts, it’s easy to lose track of other critical stories. That makes this week’s Weekly Primers on Voting Rights and Democracy and The Battle Over Obamacare and Health Care Policy must reads. Take three minutes to read the Primer on each topic and you’ll never be behind.
In today’s podcast, we look into the background of Michael Cohen. TPM first reported last year that Cohen was actually a childhood friend of Felix Sater, whose father was himself a reputed capo in the Mogilevich organized crime syndicate, said to be Russia’s largest and most dangerous. Filling out this picture of how Cohen fell into this milieu we’ve always been focused on the fact that Cohen’s uncle, Morton Levine, owned and ran a Brooklyn social club, El Caribe, which was a well-known meeting spot for members of Italian and Russian organized crime families in the 1970s and 1980s. (Levine, a medical doctor has never been charged with a crime.) But now it turns out there’s a bit more to this story. Read More
Get caught up on all that’s happened in the last week relating on two of TPM’s core issues: voting rights and democracy and the battle over the future of Obamacare (Prime access).
Today’s Episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is a bit different. Want to know how Donald Trump got this deep in with Michael Cohen? Where Cohen came from? We pack the whole story into a single episode from the early days at the mob social club with Felix and the crew (a la Spider and Henry Hill) to the Ukraine-money-backed taxi and casino cruise businesses, his Ukraine based operations, the big prize tens of millions dollar investments in New York City real estate. Trump brought Cohen in to the Trump Organization because he was a conduit for Russian and Ukrainian money. In the last ten years Cohen has touched virtually every part of the Russia story and Trump’s vast and opaque business dealings around the country and the world. Trump is worried because he should be worried. In this episode we explain why. I’m joined by my co-host David Taintor and TPM Reporter Allegra Kirkland who covers the Cohen beat and was in the court room downtown Friday and yesterday. Listen on iTunes or Google Play or use our Podcast RSS feed. If you’re on iTunes or Google Play please subscribe. That helps us build audience. We hope you enjoy.
For you junkies, the top GOP group trying to hold onto the House majority has signaled with a multimillion dollar ad reservation which seats it’s fighting to hold and which ones it may have already given up on.
In an earlier report, Allegra Kirkland described the scene in the federal courthouse when Sean Hannity was revealed to be Michael Cohen’s third client. We now have her full, must-read account (Prime access) of her day at the federal courthouse with Cohen and Stormy Daniels.
Allegra Kirkland on the scene in the courtroom when Hannity was unmasked as Michael Cohen’s third client.