When the director of the Bureau of Indian Affairs abruptly quit after just six months on the job, BIA didn’t give an explanation. Now, Alice Ollstein exclusively reports that a BIA employee claimed the director, Bryan Rice, acted in an aggressive and intimidating manner towards her, and called him “an insidious perpetrator of harassment.” She’s urging supporters to use the FOIA process to get security camera footage of the incident.

It now seems pretty clear, at least according to Dr. Harold Bornstein’s account, that Keith Schiller, Alan Garten and an unidentified “large man” committed what could fairly be construed as robbery. That’s Bornstein’s claim. He says they barged into his office, pushed aside a patient and without permission confiscated the original copies of President Trump’s medical records. The patient has the right to copies of those records and has a claim to the information. But the records themselves, the originals, belong to the care provider, in this case Dr. Bornstein. In fact, under state law Bornstein has an affirmative responsibility to retain those records for at least six years.

Now it seems clear that Trump went too far with Dr. Bornstein and there’s no going back. Just a few moments ago CNN published a story in which Bornstein now says that that notorious doctor’s letter which Bornstein provided for Trump during the 2016 election was in fact dictated by President Trump. Read More

Michael Cohen staggers in response to President Trump’s latest attacks. Will he flip. We dig into the latest revelations in Episode #11 of The Josh Marshall Podcast. Click here and listen right here on the site or subscribe on iTunes or Google Play.

Deputy AG on threats to him privately and publicly: The Justice Department “is not going to be extorted.” Watch.

We now have the first explanation from the Trump side about what happened in Dr. Bornstein’s records. The explanation is different. But it raises some big questions, some big legal questions on it’s own. According to CNN: A source very familiar with what happened “said that the doctor overreacted, made a very big deal about the question and then couldn’t get his photo copy machine to work.”

Full video after the jump. Read More

I mentioned below that there appear to be HIPAA violations on both sides in the Bornstein case and that Keith Schiller and Trump Organization Alan Garten might be in legal trouble for what amounts to robbery. But there’s another part of the equation that I wasn’t aware of and could deepen their legal jeopardy. Read More

A few initial thoughts on President Trump’s former doctor and what he describes as a “raid” on his office carried out by Trump’s longtime bodyguard, then a government employee at the White House, the top lawyer at the Trump organization and an unidentified “team” of Schiller’s. Read More

Disgraced ex-con West Virginia Senate candidate Don Blankenship launches new ad with attack on “Cocaine Mitch McConnell.”

Here is a very interesting development which may seem gossipy but goes to the heart of our story. The National Enquirer, which has emerged as a de facto arm of the Trump political operation, has a front page story this week attacking Michael Cohen’s “secrets and lies.” Given the relationship between Trump and the Enquirer, that’s a pretty clear indication that Trump is turning on his most loyal and obsequious servant. Read More

The massacre last week in Toronto has spurred a public conversation about so-called “incels,” a subculture of self-described “involuntarily celibate” men. To say that misogyny is fairly endemic in this community is something of an understatement. In the case of Alek Minassian, it appears to have led to mass murder.

Over the weekend, as I read various pieces of commentary, I got pulled more deeply than I wanted to go into the intricacies of the subculture. A central concept is “sexual market value” — yes, I know — which is a metric by which incels express anger at women who they believe are as sexually unappealing as they are and yet nonetheless refuse to have sex with them. One proposed policy is to have the government assign each person a sexual market value (so no one can deny their actual value). People can only have sex with people of their own value. And for women, the more partners they have, the further their market value number falls. (A sort of big data of slut-shaming.) So basically, the more sexually active a woman becomes the greater obligation she incurs to have sex with the least sexually appealing men. The only way to up her “score” is through exercise. Basically in the incel social taxonomy a sexually active woman gets caught in this Black Mirror-type dystopia of alternating bouts of servicing sexually enraged losers and logging nonstop hours at the gym but never getting ahead of the curve. (It really is blue-sky policy formation in the form of nearly murderous sexualized rage.)

Needless to say, these are some pretty enraged and f’d up dudes, probably all the more so as they marinate in the rage of kindred spirits on forums like 4chan and Reddit. But the whole story took a bit of a different turn when I noticed that a tenured economist at George Mason University was basically endorsing at least the premises of this argument. I was reminded of this this afternoon when I saw this entirely separate article about how the Koch Brothers were apparently allowed to give hiring and evaluation input in the George Mason econ department in exchange for their donations to the University. Read More