Read Rosenstein’s prepared remarks. Here’s our run-down of the indictments themselves. Reactions from Schumer, Giuliani, Podesta.
TPM’s Tierney Sneed is at the DOJ for the press conference which is starting momentarily. There were hints that it was a new Mueller indictment to be announced. And it is. More soon.
We’ll have running updates in this post. Read More
Good explanation here of Wilbur Ross’s slimy stock trade hijinks (Prime access).
President Trump fumes over London’s “baby Trump” blimp, says it makes him feel “unwelcome.”
Learn some little-known TPM history and the inside logistics of covering the Paul Manafort trial as TPM Managing Editor David Kurtz joins us for a special episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast.
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— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) July 12, 2018
One of the curious dimensions of the evolving Jim Jordan story is that the defenses of Jordan often become close to indistinguishable from the accusations against him. The first instance was that interlude in Jordan’s interview with Fox News’s Bret Baier in which he switched from adamant denials to making a distinction between formal accusations and “conversations in a locker room.” When Baier asked what “locker room” talk he’d heard, Jordan shifted back and insisted he hadn’t heard any. Now there’s another instance of this, an admission that essentially demolishes Jordan’s denials. The head coach Jordan worked for, Russ Hellickson, admits he knew Dr. Strauss was acting inappropriately with wrestlers on his team and confronted him about it. Read More
The Washington Post has just confirmed that in his quest to sow chaos and generally blow up NATO President Trump is now demanding that NATO raise its member state defense spending from a current goal of 2% (by 2024) of GDP to 4%. This is of course blathering nonsense. But I thought I’d try to put some numbers to this in any case. Read More
In November 2017, a rising star in Republican politics, Wesley Goodman, was forced to resign from the Ohio State House seat he’d won the year before. A staunch family values Republican, the married Goodman had apparently had sex with a man in his State House office. When confronted about the incident by Ohio State House Speaker Clifford Roenberger, Goodman resigned. What quickly emerged was that Goodman lived a secret life as a gay man. But he also had a history of harassing behavior and at least one documented instance of sexual assault which remained secret even after it came to the attention of his de facto boss, Tony Perkins, President of the Council for National Policy.
Goodman was also a protege of and former senior staffer for Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH). Read More
Kate Riga explains how former RNC deputy finance chairman Elliot Broidy, a character in the Michael Cohen storyline, is now also part of the Michael Flynn storyline.