I’m looking for people who decided a while ago they want to sign up for TPM Prime, our membership program, but haven’t gotten around to it. If that’s you, I need you to take the plunge and sign up. Today we’re kicking off the final two weeks of our annual membership drive. I know there are a lot of you out there. I get it. I don’t get around to things myself. My goal over these next two weeks is to pull you over the line. It’s really important to TPM’s future and you get access to an expanding menu of features and original content. It’s easy to sign up. It’s just 14 cents a day. And it makes all the difference in the world. If this is you, just click here. Thank you.
CNN is reporting that last year, during the campaign, Paul Manafort was the target of a FISA warrant. The FISA warrant was active before and after the November election. President Trump and Manafort apparently continued to be in contact in the early part of 2017, when the warrant was still active.
From CNN …
The conversations between Manafort and Trump continued after the President took office, long after the FBI investigation into Manafort was publicly known, the sources told CNN. They went on until lawyers for the President and Manafort insisted that they stop, according to the sources.
Obamacare repeal has been turned back now two times? Three times? It’s hard for me to know or keep track of how we score what counted as a ‘time’. We’ve been through this again and again. But this new round is as real as it gets. The CBO announced today that it will not be able to produce a full score of the Graham-Cassidy repeal bill for “at least several weeks.” But the Senate only has until the end of September to pass a bill with only 50 votes (complicated but those are the rules). So it appears they’re likely to plow ahead without knowing the cost or how many people will lose coverage under the new bill if they think they have the votes. This is real. It could happen very quickly.
It’s great that the Mueller probe appears to be almost leak free. At least in theory it’s great. It’s not great if you want to understand the progress of the investigation or what is likely to come of it – something we have an understandable, even pressing interest in. We’re reduced to making inferences based on the slivers of information which emerge from the probe. Here Tierney Sneed explains why the fact that Mueller got a search warrant to get information from Facebook actually tells us some key information about the progress of the probe because of what Mueller’s lawyers had to prove to a judge to get that warrant. Read this piece. It’s important context to understand where things are. Read More
Arizona’s Governor is on-board with the new Obamacare repeal bill. That means McCain will likely fall in line.
Scott Weaver leads the climate science team at the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF). The team conducts, assesses, and communicates climate science research to support the scientific foundation for cross-programmatic activities and policy development. Scott will be joining us in The Hive to discuss the scientific aspects of the climate change debate and the importance of federal budgets for science research. Post your questions and come join the chat on Friday! If you’d like to participate but don’t have TPM Prime, sign up here.
In Episode 21 of the Josh Marshall Show podcast David Frum and I talk Trump.
I confess that I’m feeling pretty good about sitting out the ‘Dean Heller might not actually be awful on taking away your health care’ market bubble from earlier this year. Now he’s a key driver of the latest push to repeal Obamacare. A pro-Obamacare group is already up with a digital ad campaign targeting Heller’s flip.
This is quite a paragraph (emphasis added)…
Tension between the two comes as life in the White House is shadowed by the investigation. Not only do Mr. Trump, Mr. Kushner and Mr. McGahn all have lawyers, but so do other senior officials. The uncertainty has grown to the point that White House officials privately express fear that colleagues may be wearing a wire to surreptitiously record conversations for Mr. Mueller.
I’ve spent a lot of time in recent months thinking about how we should be covering the news in light of huge changes in the news business and the world we’re covering in the last two to three years. How do we, as a small news organization, use our resources most effectively to inform our readers? The most fundamental and important way is to do more original reporting, which is where you’ve seen us focus most of our resources this year. We hope to have hired three additional reporters by the end of 2017 – not a dramatic increase for larger organizations but a big expansion for us. But it’s not only a matter of numbers. It’s how we deploy those resources. More specifically, how do we react to this new environment to do what we do better? Read More