We’ve just had some highly disturbing, vaguely surreal new information reported by CNN. Two days ago The Washington Post reported that James Comey’s decision not to notify the Department of Justice about his July Clinton emails press conference was driven in part by emails or documents describing emails the FBI had found in troves of Russian-hacked emails which appeared to compromise Attorney General Lynch’s independence. The gist of the Post story was that Comey may have relied on what was in fact an exquisitely successful disinformation operation to make what turned out to be a highly consequential decision affecting the 2016 election.

This new CNN story contains an important twist. Read More

It’s been a few months (actually back to February 12th) since I did my last full timeline trying to make sense of Michael Flynn’s and the rest of the Trump Entourage’s role in the unfolding Russia drama. We’ve learned quite a lot since early February, to put it mildly. Why timelines? We think and exist in time. It’s the premise and check on the key dynamic necessary to understand anything: causality. For all these reasons I’ve always found them a critical first step to help me synthesize scatterings of information. So I’m back to constructing another. There’s so much out there that I’m going to need your help putting it all together. I’m going to start with the key developments but once I have that in place, I’m going to ask for your help filling in the details. More soon.

We are a mere 16 Prime sign ups short of our goal of 1000 sign ups for May. Awesome. Sign up now to get us past that milestone today. That will help us get a leg up on our annual drive which starts June 1st.

We’ve had a number of disquieting reports today from President Trump’s trip to Brussels and a meeting of NATO leaders. I want to step back from the particulars and look at the larger picture.  Read More

We seem to have our first full GOP/Rus collusion story, albeit with a relatively low level GOP operative in Florida.

Strongly suspect there are many more to come.

Professor of History and author, Allan Lichtman will be in The Hive on Thursday, June 1st at 1 PM EST to discuss impeachment. Over the course of his career he has correctly predicted the outcomes of all US presidential elections since 1984, including Trump’s victory in 2016. His latest work, “A Case For Impeachment,” illuminates exactly how the impeachment of President Trump might work by showing how his actions—past or future—make him uniquely vulnerable to impeachment proceedings. Submit your questions at any time or join us on Thursday! If you’d like to participate but don’t have TPM Prime, sign up here.

We just saw this embarrassing spectacle of President Trump not stating an unequivocal commitment to honoring Article 5 of the NATO Treaty, which requires all member state to defend another member state under attack. But Trump also returned to this issue of NATO members being behind on their payments and owing the United States huge sums of money. This is simply false. And it is a falsehood in the service of President Trump’s still not fully explained desire to undermine NATO. Read More

You can see that last night we had what I think has to be close to an unprecedented development in a US political race. The frontrunner candidate body-slammed a reporter for pressing for an answer about the new CBO score of Trumpcare. (It’s a secondary element of this story how charged and threatening that CBO is.) I’ve seen scuffles with reporters, shoves. Jostling in a press scrum is not uncommon and occasionally someone will get knocked down. But I genuinely can’t remember anything comparable to this. Read More

Tomorrow is the big special election for the open House seat in Montana. But something wild and really crazy apparently just happened. The GOP candidate Greg Gianforte reportedly body-slammed reporter Ben Jacobs of The Guardian. “Body slam” is often a loosely even comically used phrase. But Jacobs’ account as well as that of witnesses seems to confirm something like a literal and unprovoked body slamming. Read More

It’s so far in the weeds and doesn’t directly implicate or exonerate Trump. So I suspect it may somehow not get the attention it deserves. But the new report from the Post that James Comey’s decision to announce the Clinton “no charges” decision on his own in July 2016 may itself have been the product of a successful Russian disinformation campaign is simply remarkable. Read More