When the domestic violence history that top White House staffers already knew about went public Rob Porter was on the cusp of getting a big promotion.
We’re going to bring you some more details about this shortly. But the White House’s position on the Porter background check was that it was an on-going process, so in key ways out of their hands. FBI Director Christopher Wray just confirmed that that is not true – that the check was mainly completed last year and that the file was officially closed in January, before any of the scandal broke. Here’s Dana Bash explaining.
Trump's handpicked FBI Director flatly contradicts White House story on Porter background check. Dana Bash explains. pic.twitter.com/N2g3lnSD2T
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) February 13, 2018
As Bash notes, it was on the calendar that Wray would be testifying in a public setting. So all but certain he’d be asked about this and presumably wouldn’t lie, in an easily impeachable fashion, on their behalf.
Here’s installment #3 of our weekly Sum Up on state and national health care policy developments. We are now publishing weekly health policy Sum Ups on Tuesdays. We publish week Sum Ups on Voting Rights and Democracy on Mondays and the Russia Probe on Fridays.
In recent weeks we have seen a flurry of Fox News hothouse scandals which blow up for a day before collapsing under the weight of their own ridiculousness. Last week we had the story about how President Obama supposedly wanted to hear all the information about the Clinton emails investigation before it was clear that the date of the text in question made it clear it was about the Russia probe. Now we have some related but demonstrating a different tendency. Read More
Here is the debut edition of our weekly Sum-Up on Voting Rights and Democracy. (What’s a Sum-Up? Here’s our explanation.)
At the outset of the Rob Porter scandal, I was baffled by the way this scandal seemed to be hamstringing and damaging the White House in ways few others have. This is not to say the Porter story isn’t bad enough. It’s plenty bad. It’s egregiously bad. But this President has had a lot of scandals that are egregiously bad. Set aside for the moment that there is every reason to believe that the President himself is a chronic sexual predator – a fact that now seems more or less accepted as part of the political firmament. This is a President who literally stood up for Nazis against anti-Nazi protestors. There’s a lot of competition for bad. Individual wrongdoing should largely be centered on the person in question. It doesn’t naturally attach to their coworkers or employers. But from the start, in this case, everyone around Rob Porter seemed compromised by his offenses – and not in random ways. His story, this ignored and covered up offense, has managed to expose and highlight all the failings of the President and his coterie – not simply their indifference to racism or gender violence but interwoven factors like indifference to the rule of law and personal loyalty to leader as the highest, indeed singular, value. Read More
In the chaos of the Trump Era, we are all forced to read tea leaves because nothing is transparent and nothing proceeds in an orderly way. We’re now a day after news broke that Rachel Brand is stepping down as Associate Attorney General, the third ranking appointee at the Justice Department. Given the possible effects on the Mueller investigation, there’s no end of speculation about why she’s leaving. Read More
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We know about Friday night news dumps. This is looking more like an avalanche. We already noted the departure of DOJ #3 Rachel Brand. I noted why this seems like very worrisome news here.
Just a few moments ago news broke that President Trump has refused to okay the release of the Democrats’ rebuttal memo which was drafted in response to the Nunes Memo. This, needless to say, seems highly suspicious given the alacrity with which the President rushed to release the earlier document.
Here’s the letter sent to Capitol Hill announcing the decision … Read More
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