Good Lord, watch this. We're going to be at "Collusion is Awesome!" by next week. pic.twitter.com/U2w52YvAxk
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) August 1, 2018
For Prime subscribers, Tierney Sneed’s account of a remarkably fast first day of trial for a high profile case: jury selection, opening statements, and the first witness all in under eight hours!
Important new reporting from CNN that special counsel Robert Mueller has referred several cases of failure to register as a foreign agent to federal prosecutors in Manhattan:
It’s always a bit hard to know what to make of polls of such wild questions. But Yahoo Finance used SurveyMonkey to poll all voters and particularly Republicans about whether or not they think it’s okay for Russia to help the Republican party in US elections. Trumpers have long been edging their way toward a “collusion is awesome” defense for some time. They’re in luck. Republicans are basically already there. Here are the numbers.
Looking toward the 2018 midterm, 11% of Republicans say it’s “appropriate” for Russia to help the GOP maintain control of Congress. Another 29% say it’s “not appropriate but wouldn’t be a big deal.” So fully 40% of Republicans, according to this poll, either think Russian election is assistance is actually great or at least aren’t going to lose any sleep over it. Read More
People frequently mock President Trump’s press strategies, or rather lack of strategies. They mock Rudy Giuliani’s floundering press appearances. Let’s put a finer point on this: I mock all of them! A lot. But recent days have seen a series of revelations that paradoxically show how relatively successful the President and his toadies have been in warning observers off more or less obvious conclusions about the President’s actions.
Consider the recent claims from Michael Cohen that President Trump knew about the Trump Tower collusion meeting in advance. Some pointed out that we shouldn’t take Michael Cohen’s apparent claims at face value. He lacks credibility. This is a massive understatement. Few people have more checks against his credibility than Cohen. Only President Trump is a more notorious liar. But an eagerness to believe the worst about President Trump isn’t the main reason many were and are inclined to believe this claim. Why would they? Because it’s really obvious that it is almost certainly true. Of course the President knew in advance. Read More
To have have any chance of acquittal, Paul Manafort is going to have to shred the credibility of Rick Gates, his former protege and the key prosecution witness against him, and his defense team lost no time in doing so in today’s opening statement to the jury.
TPM is hiring a reporter to join our investigations desk. Full listing after the jump. Read More
An interesting moment in the prosecution’s opening statement in the trial of Paul Manafort: The judge in the case interrupted the prosecutor, who was going on about Manafort’s lavish lifestyle, to note that it’s not a crime to be rich and implore him to focus on the alleged crimes. Our full report from Caitlin MacNeal.
I wanted to share one more observation about Facebook and particularly how it compares to that other online behemoth, Google. As we’ve discussed, both these companies exercise various kinds of monopolistic power and anti-competitive behavior. But there’s one very big difference that is important to keep in mind as we assess their role in the 21st century cultural, informational and economic infrastructure.
Facebook has literally billions of users. Never in the history of the world has one thing had so many members or users or whatever else you want to call it. But if you set aside whatever loss would be suffered by people who want to use Facebook, Facebook could disappear tomorrow and it would have pretty little effect on the Internet as a whole. As I said, you might be bummed you can’t log on to see what your friends are doing. There would be a lot of broken “like” and “share” buttons around the web. Certain businesses, though many fewer than before, might tank because their business model was just an outgrowth of Facebook. But big picture, the Internet as we know it would be pretty much what it is today. Read More