Given the significance of the early release of James Comey’s testimony, I took a moment to annotate the document as just released this afternoon. Most of my underlines and comments will be things that others will also have keyed in on. Some are just obvious. Still, given how packed with significance and factual assertions these seven pages are, I thought this would be a helpful exercise and that readers might be interested.

Before the annotated document, let me briefly share with you the points that jumped out at me as new or significant. Read More

With everyone prepping for the big testimony tomorrow, I wanted to share a few miscellaneous thoughts on the testimony and the state of the Trump/Russia investigation. Read More

Intel Committee Chair Nunes adopts Trump’s policy of strategic surprise about whether he really stepped down from running the Trump/Russia probe, refuses to tell reporters whether he has or hasn’t.

Allegra Kirkland found a DC nonprofit which is the Kevin Bacon of Mike Flynn lobbying scandals.

As Allegra Kirkland reports, the key players in Michael Flynn’s Turkey lobbying scandal have at least one other thing in common – and much to our delight it’s well-documented in photographs.

I do this all the time. I want to buy this, sign up for that, subscribe to the other. But my success rate is maybe 20%. I have a long backlog of these things. It’s the human version of entropy or a high frictional coefficient or something like that. In any case, point being, I’m the same way. I get it. This weekend I talked to a bunch of TPM fans and a number told me they were planning to subscribe to TPM Prime but hadn’t found the time yet. I get it. But if you’re planning on doing it, take a moment right now. Like actually, literally stop right now. This will only work if you do that. Right now. Take out your wallet. Grab your credit card and click this link. There’s no time like the present. Really. You’ll help us make progress toward our sign up goal. It will take a couple minutes and you’ll be happy you did.

Our list of the 9 senators to watch as the GOP enters long twilight struggle to eliminate health care coverage for more than twenty million Americans.

Remember President Trump’s big, triumphant arms deal in Saudi Arabia? It turns out it didn’t really happen. It was Trump’s own fake news, a feat of supply chain vertical integration and more importantly for the MAGA agenda repatriating jobs from Russia. In all seriousness, at the end of the day it didn’t happen. There are no contracts or sales. At all. Read More

Bob Dylan recorded his Nobel Prize address yesterday. It’s remarkable. Audio after the jump.  Read More

Since President Trump was inaugurated in January we’ve heard an on-going discussion about how to interpret and understand Trump in the context of other authoritarian leaders around the world and from the past. That is an important conversation because that is, in most respects, the proper context in which to understand Trump.

But there’s another prism which has become increasingly clear over the last four months – that is the model of monarchy and the incapacitated king. I noted recently that the U.S. president is, largely by design, in key respects something like an elected monarch, albeit one bounded by two theoretically co-equal branches of government. The President isn’t president because he enjoys the support of his party or congressional majorities. He is president because being president means that he has a panoply of rights, prerogatives and powers as a person. Read More