This is notable. I mentioned Thursday that the Trump White House is now trying to hold up China as the ‘real’ meddler in US elections, attempting to delegitimize the investigation into members of the Trump entourage conspiring with Russia. As I wrote then, we should be able to recognize this manipulation without needing to make any excuses for China’s documented and assumed behavior. Like all great powers, China has active and robust espionage and cyber-espionage operations. But Politico talked to various leaders in the private sector cyber-security industry and they say they’re not seeing any of what the Trump White House is claiming. So the White House line on this seems to be even more bogus than I’d imagined. Read More

Barring some almost unimaginable development, Brett Kavanaugh will be elevated to the Supreme Court tomorrow. In all likelihood he will serve there for decades into the future. I know many of you are disappointed, angry, resolved. I have nothing wise to add to those sentiments. But I do have an observation I would like to share, one which I think helps put in perspective what we’ve witnessed and experienced over the last two to three weeks. Read More

Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation is now basically a certainty. It will be finalized tomorrow. But this won’t be entirely the end of the story. Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) has made clear that if the Democrats take over the House of Representatives next year his committee will set about doing the investigation Senate Republicans and the White House refused to do. But now there’s this: FOIA lawsuits by Senate Democrats and the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) that have unearthed information “about potentially thousands of Brett Kavanaugh’s White House emails and other records related to the Senate hacking scandal from early in the George W. Bush administration and other controversial subjects that have not been disclosed to the Senate.” Read More

For everything that’s happened in this process, in many ways what stuns me most is what Sen. Grassley is doing right now. He is again going back to this claim that the Democrats held the sexual misconduct accusations against Kavanaugh “in reserve” for the last moment to spring on the helpless judge.

We now know quite a bit about the chain of events that brought these accusations to light. Blasey Ford wrote a letter to Dianne Feinstein and asked her not to share it with anyone else. It seems clear that it was Feinstein’s intention to allow the confirmation to go to a vote without these allegations ever being made public. Late in the process some of her colleagues were reportedly getting upset with her because she wasn’t revealing an allegation she knew about. Read More

Hard for me to believe they let this oped get published if they had all their votes lined up.

Chuck Grassley just did some weird, disturbing freestyle Grandpa Simpson imitation, yelling (literally yelling) at the press over bias against Kavanaugh. Watch.

Vice President Pence is giving a speech today at the Hudson Institute. Normally that wouldn’t get a lot of attention, especially with so much else going on. But this is a bigger deal than it might appear. Seeing portions of the speech now on Twitter, it is crystal clear that the White House is trying to delegitimize the on-going Mueller probe by setting up China is the real meddler in US internal affairs and democratic practice.

Most importantly, they are claiming that China is working against Donald Trump in 2018 and 2020. This is a big, big deal and I expect they will be expanding on it in the coming weeks and likely going into 2020.

Look at these tweets. Seldin is a reporter with Voice of America. Read More

The ‘investigation’ is done. Senators are now reviewing it. And well, everyone is lining up. Susan Collins says “it appears to be a very thorough investigation.” Lindsey Graham says he’s good to go. Feinstein calls it a “incomplete.” Jeff Flake seems to be in line with Susan Collins in calling it a thorough investigation, according to CNN’s Manu Raju.

Chuck Grassley declares that the handcuffed FBI probe turned up nothing new on Brett Kavanaugh.

Brett Kavanaugh’s yearbook, the ur-text of Kavanologists, is now online.