There are now five former Ohio State wrestlers who say Jim Jordan knew about but took no action about sexual abuse by the team doctor on the University wrestling team during the time he was an assistant coach. (The team Doctor, Richard Strauss, has since died.) Jordan deserves due process and a presumption of innocence, despite giving those to no one else who has entered his crosshairs. In Congress, that means an Ethics Committee investigation. The accusations in this case precede Jordan’s time in Congress. And I think the House Ethics Committee’s purview may not extend to that. But from what I can tell there’s been no move to call for any investigation from Jordan’s Republican colleagues. Read More
Pruitt may be the most comically corrupt member of the administration — the only agency head we know of, yet, to spend taxpayer money on obtaining fancy lotion and “tactical pants.” But there’s plenty to swampiness to go around, Matt Shuham writes in his Weekly Primer.
One example: Chuck Rettig, Trump’s pick to lead the IRS, failed to disclose to Congress that two properties he owns are, in fact, in the Trump International Hotel Waikiki and Tower — a detail that certainly seems relevant to his nomination.
The Pentagon has recruited lawful US residents into the military with the promise of a pathway to citizenship for their service. In recent weeks, the administration has begun discharging these recruits, often with no clear explanation and sometimes with claims that they are security risks or that they were recruited in error.
President Trump announces via Twitter the resignation of EPA administrator Scott Pruitt.
President Trump is insisting on meeting Vladimir Putin one on one, without any aides present, according to CNN. Trump appears to have a special affinity for private meetings with Putin. When the two met last year in Hamburg, Germany they met first with only Rex Tillerson present on the U.S. side. Trump and Putin later had an unscheduled meeting in which Trump met for roughly an hour with Putin and Putin’s English language translator. In other words, in the second meeting, no one from the U.S. was privy to what was discussed. The United States has no record or knowledge of what was discussed, other than what President Trump may have chosen to share after the fact.
In Helsinki, it appears (if I’m reading the CNN story right) that the two men will meet with translators, presumably one from each country. This is a little different. There would be one more person from the U.S. government: the translator. But a translator cannot be a notetaker in the same setting. So even though a U.S. translator would have some recollection of what was discussed, there would be no formal or detailed record. Read More
We know that President Trump routinely lies about the “diversity lottery” program run by the United States, claiming that countries choose their least desirable, criminal elements and leeches and then send them to the United States where they are unvetted and sent into the civilian population. We also know that every attack President Trump levels is in fact a projection, a pretended offense which in fact matches some actual wrongdoing committed by him or a member of his family. So with all that, I just learned this morning that we’ve finally found a criminal immigrant who was booted from his home country and foisted on to America: Trump’s grandfather, Friedrich Trump. Read More
“Abolish ICE” is now taking flight as a Democratic rallying cry well beyond DSA and immigrants’ rights rallies. We have an on-going debate about “civility” among Democratic party activists and strategists. Through each of these developments and many others there is a recurrent refrain: If Democrats can’t avoid rhetorical excess and policy maximalism they’ll lose big time. There are even different flavors of the risk. Maybe it will just turn off Trump supporters. Maybe it will turn off moderate Democrats. You can’t win the Midwest with a platform that wins in the Bronx, etc. etc. etc. Any Democrat basically knows this conversation like mother’s milk. In The Washington Post, the headline of a column by a Never-Trump conservative reads “Outrage works for Trump. If Democrats abandon civility, it will backfire.”
Are Democrats really caught in this cosmic no-win situation? Read More
That’s interesting.
Tune in tomorrow morning on @GMA for more on my conversation with President Trump’s longtime personal lawyer Michael Cohen. pic.twitter.com/W7xYoMo4DD
— GeorgeStephanopoulos (@GStephanopoulos) July 2, 2018
One throughline in our latest Trump Swamp Weekly Primer — focusing on corruption and abuse of power within the administration — is retaliation. Those who blow the whistle or make public the shady things their bosses are up to find themselves reassigned, forced out of a job, or receiving intimidating visits from the Department of Homeland Security.
I’d missed this. This is from a press conference at the G-7 Summit in Charlevoix, Canada. He seems to argue that Russia has done a kind of gut renovation in Crimea. Sort of like a hotel refurb …
Well, you know, you have to ask President Obama, because he was the one that let Crimea get away. That was during his administration. And he was the one that let Russia go and spend a lot of money on Crimea, because they’ve spent a lot of money on rebuilding it. I guess they have their submarine port there and such. But Crimea was let go during the Obama administration. And, you know, Obama can say all he wants, but he allowed Russia to take Crimea. I may have had a much different attitude. So you’d really have to ask that question to President Obama — you know, why did he do that; why did he do that. But with that being said, it’s been done a long time.