President taunts Russia with the threat of “nice and new and smart! missiles” heading toward Syria, the Mueller probe is firing on all cylinders and the President appears determined to stop it, and, oh, Paul Ryan is not running for re-election.
A few telling morsels as we end the day. First Fox was out tonight with a breaking news alert about the drama of the day but with a jarring and revealing framing. Said Fox’s Bret Baier: The President is facing “the most serious and consequential personnel decision of his life tonight.”
Well, what personnel decision would that be? There’s no big personnel decision. Except of course that they’re referring to whether or not President Trump will decide to “pull the plug” on the Russia probe, as Baier put it. Read More
If you’re worried about the John Bolton situation in the White House, don’t miss the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast where I talk to Steve Clemons, a true Bolton expert. He predicted when we recorded the episode on Sunday that Tom Bossert, the President’s Homeland Security Advisor, would be pushed out. Sure enough he was forced out this morning. Steve also told us a surreal story about how Iranian hackers were trying to hack neoconservatives in the AEI orbit using Facebook and other platforms to create a sort of ersatz John Bolton fan club. Steve’s actually the one who took it to the FBI. Listen here. It’s wild.
And don’e forget, please subscribe to The Josh Marshall Podcast on iTunes and Google Play. You’re subscribing plays a huge role in helping us spread the word about this new effort.
We’ve been telling you for years that Michael Cohen’s business history couldn’t survive first contact with serious investigative scrutiny. He’s been tied his entire life to emigres from Russia and Ukraine; he’s been their business partners, and they’ve been the source of rivers of money from that part of the world which Cohen has used to make himself a very wealthy man. A number of them have reputed ties to organized crime. Taxis, real estate, casino cruise boats. These are all businesses that require large amounts of cash to operate. They’re all good ways to channel cash into the United States. With Cohen taxis have always been the biggest red flag in our reporting. Read More
Here’s a pointer to keep in mind on today’s Zuckerberg/Facebook testimony. Read More
It is normal that a new National Security Advisor would bring in his or her own team over time. But Tom Bossert, in the structure of the Trump White House, isn’t really even under Bolton’s purview. He plainly has no ‘team’ on hand to replace him with on day one. We have a new episode of the podcast that is coming up shortly where Steve Clemons and I discussed this and Bossert specifically over the weekend. This is what it looks like. Bolton will purge the people who may not be great in ideological terms but are still legitimate foreign policy hands. Bolton is a militaristic/nationalist. International agreements, diplomacy, alliances, let alone international institutions or international law are all so much drapery to him – frippery at best and tools to constrain U.S. power at worst. Relationships between nations are purely ones of force. He’ll act on that mindset. Expect many others to go.
Yesterday a reader asked me if we had a list of our key Michael Cohen articles and, if we didn’t, could I recommend a few key ones. First, I think this piece from 13 months ago remains the best look at Cohen’s backstory. To go deeper you can read this piece on Cohen, Sater and the Trump-Russia money channel, this piece on what the CIA and FBI knew about it before 2016, and the eye-popping details about Cohen’s childhood friend and later fellow Trump associate Felix Sater. If you missed it, I explained last night to subscribers why I don’t buy that yesterday’s events were about the Stormy Daniels case. Read More
The President’s democracy-shaking comments late today — flanked by Vice President Mike Pence and National Security Adviser John Bolton, and in the presence of the nation’s military leaders — is deservedly overshadowing the underlying FBI raids on his attorney, Michael Cohen. But Tierney Sneed scrambled to get the immediate reaction of leading legal experts on the Justice Department’s big move against Cohen and what it means. Here’s her report.
The New York Times is reporting this evening that Special Counsel Robert Mueller is investigating a $150,000 donation — in 2015, during the campaign — to Donald Trump’s foundation from Ukrainian billionaire Victor Pinchuk which was solicited by none other than Michael Cohen. In return, Trump made a 20-minute appearance via video link to a Kiev conference, the Times reports: