As you may have seen last night, Michael Cohen, President Trump’s purported longtime personal lawyer, conceded that he did pay adult actress Stormy Daniels $130,000 just before the 2016 election. But there’s a catch. It was his money! Or so Cohen says. Neither the Trump Organization nor the Trump campaign reimbursed him. “I am Mr. Trump’s longtime special counsel and I have proudly served in that role for more than a decade,” said Cohen in a statement released yesterday. “In a private transaction in 2016, I used my own personal funds to facilitate a payment of $130,000 to Ms. Stephanie Clifford. Just because something isn’t true doesn’t mean that it can’t cause you harm or damage. I will always protect Mr. Trump … Neither the Trump Organization nor the Trump campaign was a party to the transaction with Ms. Clifford, and neither reimbursed me for the payment, either directly or indirectly. The payment to Ms. Clifford was lawful, and was not a campaign contribution or a campaign expenditure by anyone.” Read More

It turns out the Maine GOP got into the Nunes fake GOP news site racket even before Devin Nunes did. Check out our story.

Some Prime members are continuing to have issues logging into the site. We are aware of the issue and working as rapidly as we can to solve it. We made one fix today which has minimized but not fixed the problem. Our team worked late into the evening tonight on a permanent fix and will be back at it in the morning. Please know: We are aware of the issue. This is affecting a small number of readers and a smaller number after this evening. But if it’s affecting you I know it’s very annoying. Fixing it is our top priority. I will continue to update you here in the Editors’ Blog. Thank you for your patience and understanding.

Only hours ago a gaggle of white supremacist on the 4Chan message board site were spinning up conspiracy theories about “secret sperm” in the Obama portrait unveiled yesterday. A short time later Sean Hannity had embraced the claim and was spreading the word on Twitter.

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