Tomorrow at 3:30 PM eastern we’re holding an Inside Briefing on voting rights, the on-going court fight over the 2020 Census and various and sundry Trump administration abuses. We’ll be speaking with Dale Ho, Director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project. TPM’s Tierney Sneed, who covers these issues for us, will also join us for the Q&A If you’re an Inside member, you should have received an invitation email.

Michael Cohen is going to back for more testimony on March 6th. On March 14th, Felix Sater will testify before the House Intelligence committee in open session. Josh Kovensky talked to Sater on the phone earlier today.

This is, frankly, a critical hearing.

To refresh your memory, here’s one look at Sater’s background I wrote way back in February 2017. Here’s another on Cohen/Sater and the Trump/Russia money channel. Here’s another on the same topic. What happened to the “peace plan” dossier that Cohen hand delivered to Mike Flynn at the White House. Sater is at the center of that too. Finally, Sater is a critical piece of the puzzle in trying to understand what US law enforcement and intelligence knew when about Trump’s business ties with Russia, Ukraine and ex-Soviet organized crime figures.

Pretty obvious now that the Rep. Gaetz threat to Michael Cohen came from, was at the direction of the President.

Who’s the green eyeshade at the center of every Trump scam? This guy.

Yesterday was such a torrent of news from Michael Cohen and his all-day testimony that I confess I’m still trying to absorb it. News is an inherently social phenomenon. That’s what makes it news as opposed to information. Our process of absorbing the news, which is notionally individual, is also communal. As the Russia story and Trump administration drags on, we increasingly see two stories, which are both increasingly distinct and yet deeply related, indeed inseparable parts of the same story. Read More

It was understated and didn’t make for the biggest fireworks. But this moment was likely the biggest moment of the day: Cohen clearly pointing to other investigations of the President that are on-going and apparently serious.

Florida bar opens an investigation into Rep. Matt Gaetz threat tweets.

Here’s a key, too little noted, part of the testimony today. Cohen has actually burnished his credibility quite a bit by defending Trump on questions on which there is likely no evidence that could impeach him if he did otherwise. For instance, he said that he simply didn’t believe it was in character for Trump to ever hit his wife. But it’s more than about his credibility. Cohen has also knocked down a lot of questions and accusations that have loomed around Trump.

This is one of the weirder parts of this hearing. Rep. Clay Higgins (R-LA) has now twice demanded to know the whereabouts of boxes of documents that were seized by the FBI in the Cohen raids and later returned to him. He then demanded that they be seized by law enforcement.

Here’s one snippet of the video. Read More

A quick reaction to the first couple hours of testimony. I’d say that in general, there haven’t been big revelations beyond those included in the prepared remarks. The Democrats have gotten some more granular detail on key points like the Trump Moscow project and the Wikileaks drops. The Republicans in general have not done terribly well. They’ve triggered some defensiveness on Cohen’s part a few times with respect to his crimes. Read More