President Trump: “Hey, he is the head of a country and I mean he is the strong head. Don’t let anyone think anything different. He speaks and his people sit up at attention. I want my people to do the same.” Video.

This evening on Sean Hannity’s program Rudy Giuliani demanded that Robert Mueller suspend his investigation and then said that Sessions and Rosenstein had one day to “redeem” themselves by ending Mueller’s probe and jailing FBI agent Peter Strzok. This is the President’s lead lawyer. Read More

Remarkable discussion today from Jeff Sessions and Sarah Sanders explaining why the Bible supports aggressive enforcement of the administration’s family separation policy. Read More

I’ve just been doing an initial read-through of the portion of the report about the decision to send the October 2016 “Comey Letter” to Congress. It’s like watching a 4x Slo-Mo video of a horrible car accident. It gets worse and worse. You know what’s coming. It’s endless and yet you know how it ends.

There’s a lot of fancy explanations and discussions. But by the end, it all comes down to just ignoring longstanding DOJ guidelines and precedent that you make every effort to avoid election-influencing actions on the heels of an election. You’re not supposed to do that. They came out with various arguments about how this case was an exception and they should do it. And they did it. Or rather, James Comey did it. It ends up really being that simple. It was a huge mistake. And the IG says as much. Read More

Another point perhaps lost in the welter of news coming out today is this. The New York State Attorney General’s suit against the Trump Foundation, President Trump, and his children contains substantial evidence that Trump and his family violated numerous federal laws. These are laws which are often dealt with as civil offenses, fines, etc. But here they seem sufficiently egregious and systematic that I think there would be solid arguments for criminal prosecution. (I’d be curious what people with relevant legal experience make of that question.) Read More

Most of the commentary I hear is whether 95% of the IG Report fails to vindicate Trump or 97%. Good Lord. Everything we know so far has a clear message. James Comey made major mistakes and those mistakes dramatically damaged Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. Democrats have been saying this for two years. They said it in July. They screamed it in October. They are totally vindicated. It may not have been political bias per se (I don’t believe it was) but James Comey probably did more than any other single individual to make Donald Trump President. Irony! Sad! Hillary’s vindicated. Democratic partisans are vindicated. She was wronged, cheated, mistreated. She has a very legitimate beef. That is overwhelmingly the verdict of all the information we’ve heard so far from the IG Report.

Before we get caught up in today’s cacophony of news, I wanted to direct your attention to this open letter to DHS Secretary Nielsen and Attorney General Sessions organized by Physicians for Human Rights. It’s signed by a crazy long number of physicians and other experts. But I’m publishing this link to it because it collects together a wealth of clinical evidence for the permanent mental health, cognitive and other damage caused by traumatic events like separation of children from parents. Most of us realize this is morally wrong. It’s wrong in policy terms. We can imagine because we’re human, the emotional pain involved. But there’s a lot of evidence that these actions do serious and permanent damage to the children who are separated from their parents. Having experienced a very different kind of traumatic event as a child this resonates with me because I know how these events can impact and ramify through the decades of adult life. Here’s the letter.

North Korea releases footage of President Trump saluting North Korean General.

Buried in a footnote of page 19 of the New York attorney general’s lawsuit against the Trump Foundation and Trump family is this interesting note. One of the organizations that received the Foundation’s largesse was The Mission Continues, the vets charity founded by disgraced former Missouri Governor Eric Greitens. The Mission Continues came up in the Greitens scandals because Greitens got the group’s donor list which he then used for political fundraising. May would have been the period when Trump had numerically sealed up the nomination but was facing deep resistance from GOP stakeholders. Spreading money around had a strong logic.

Just to be clear, the New York attorney general has sued the President and three of his children, each in their individual capacities, for alleged wrongdoing in the operation of what was supposed to be a charity, the Trump Foundation. The foundation itself is also a defendant in the lawsuit, but the alleged (and to be honest pretty obvious) self-dealing and mismanagement of the foundation by the Trumps, including Don Jr., Eric, and Ivanka, now has them potentially on the hook personally. It’s no less remarkable just because we already knew about some of the wrongdoing via great reporting by the Post.