There was a key point in Chairman Cummings opening statement that is worth noting. He said that he’d agreed with the DOJ and the House Intelligence committee that his committee would not ask questions about Russia. He then noted that Cohen had nonetheless brought up Russia in his opening statement and that members of the committee they would be able to ask about those points – Stone and Wikileaks, the Trump Tower Moscow project and the Trump Tower meeting.
Cummings then made a key point, that those issues “do not raise concerns with the Department of Justice” but that there were other Russia topics that were still subjects of on-going investigation and thus remain off limits.
Video after the jump … Read More
Out of the gate, House Republicans demand that the Cohen hearing be postponed because he didn’t give them his testimony long enough in advance.
Out of the gate, GOP demands Cohen hearing be canceled/postponed. pic.twitter.com/ZXf6HFdm4d
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) February 27, 2019
This was followed by claims that CNN had gotten the testimony first, seemingly an homage to the Roger Stone arrest conspiracy theory.
10:18 AM: Here’s my run-down of Cohen’s prepared testimony.
In the first of what will certainly be many attacks today, Rudy Giuliani is out with a round of attacks on Michael Cohen. A central one is that Cohen was “connected to Russian organized crime” and that – relatedly – he got his money from his Ukrainian immigrant father-in-law Fima Shusterman. You’ve seen me writing for months about Trump’s odd gambit and history with Shusterman. I’ve been writing for two years about Cohen’s ties to Russian/Ukrainian organized crime. Rudy is not making this up. But in the nature of things, with the current questions before the public, accusing Trump’s former fixer of being tied to Russian organized crime seems like a perilous line of attack.
Before we get started, here are some key passages in Cohen’s testimony. There’s a lot of stuff in there. But here are four key pages. Read More
This bada boom bada bing style threat from Rep. Matt Gaetz is so specific and so careful to invoke Cohen’s father-in-law it is highly, highly likely that it originates from Trump or the Trump family.
An even more probable connection, as someone just flagged to me: Where do you think Enquirer Tablord David Pecker fits into this?
Latest: Even better, Gaetz tells Sam Stein that his gangster threat is “what it looks like to compete in the marketplace of ideas.”
Printing some responses from readers to my post from yesterday about the slippery politics of MMT. From TPM Reader MO …
What we have now is a fiat currency pretending it’s still on a gold standard. That is, we have a financial system designed around using the natural scarcity of commodity commodity money, but we’ve abandoned commodity money. oddly, we persist in acting like money is in natural limited supply, and we can only get more of it by taking taxes, say.
Printing some responses from readers to my post from yesterday about the slippery politics of MMT. From TPM Reader A …
Hi, Josh. I’m an economist and Prime member (hoping to upgrade soon but have to convince hubs of necessity of expense first…). I read you every day, and the work you and your staff do is indispensable.
I just read your MMT post, and it is spot on. I would go even further. I consider MMTers to be the left-wing equivalent of Hayek/gold standard acolytes. Both of them defy what we know about how the economy works, theoretically and empirically.
Printing some responses from readers to my post from yesterday about the slippery politics of MMT. From TPM Reader PJ …
I read with interest your thoughts on MMT, and am in the kind of academic circles where people will give talks where they think about and discuss MMT as part of some suite of solutions to the excesses or problems of late capitalism (or even straight up liberalism, in the conventional sense). I think perhaps both you and Matt are focusing too much on the practicalities of MMT rather than its rhetorical function, though there might be reasons to maintain the skepticism, there’s another possibility about policy facilitation therein.
Ivanka debuts as admin spokesperson for rugged individualism: "I don't think most Americans want to be given something. People want to work for what they get." pic.twitter.com/RerMUQ7aIj
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) February 26, 2019
British PM Theresa May has announced today that if her latest Brexit proposal fails Parliament will vote on delaying Brexit or proceeding to a no-deal Brexit. The failure of her latest plan seems highly likely, if not certain. That would simply match every other plan she’s cobbled together. I have not followed the inner workings of each of these deals to have much ability to predict. The basic issue has been clear for a while. There’s no majority for any actual deal since the whole thing was sold on false pretenses, with false promises and none of the challenging obstacles in view.
But if Parliament votes for a delay, it’s hard for me to see how that doesn’t sound the death knell of Brexit altogether. It has been crystal clear that there’s no parliamentary majority for any actual Brexit plan, though perhaps the concept could get a bare majority. Without the hammer of a deadline, why will it move forward at all? Read More