We’re getting the first exit polls out of today’s election in Israel. And they are showing unexpected strength for Benny Gantz’s Blue and White party over Netanyahu’s Likud. It seems clear Gantz’s is doing better than expected. But it’s less clear whether he’s ahead. And if he is ahead the coalition of the right still seems larger, even though a number of parties on the right appear to have come under the electoral threshold. If this seems hyper-cautious, I’ve learned over time, Netanyahu always ends up winning. It’s a law of nature. But things look to be turning out at least a bit differently. Read More
We’ll have the video shortly. But in his brief comments this morning, President Trump said this: Ending child separation is “why you see many more people coming. They’re coming like it’s a picnic. Because let’s go to Disneyland.”
In recent years we’ve witnessed the increasing ideological marriage of the Israeli Likud and the American GOP. Nor is it just ideological and cultural. There is increasingly transnational cooperation, with longtime Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu frequently intervening in US politics on Republicans’ behalf. But Likud took a big step today adopting more or less wholesale GOP ‘voter fraud’ tactics to suppress minority voters.
Today is election day in Israel, an election the right again seems likely to win by a narrow but decisive margin. But the big story of the day in the Israeli press is Likud sending party activists to Arab majority precincts with hidden cameras to monitor “voter fraud.” The party reportedly distributed 1200 hidden cameras to activists. Read More
We’ve got a potentially big news day tomorrow – mostly focusing on congressional testimony. At 9:30 AM and 10 AM Attorney General Bill Barr and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin will appear before the the respective subcommittees of the House Appropriations subcommittee. They both have a lot we’d like answered on the Mueller Report and President Trump’s taxes. But it’s possible they’ll punt, arguing that that’s not what these hearings are about. These are appropriations hearing, budgeting and management of their departments.
Meanwhile the House Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing about White Nationalism. That’s also at 10 AM.
The witness list for the White Nationalism hearing is as follows. Read More
There’s always something more going on when we have these periods of maximal chaos coming out of the White House. There’s a lot of stuff contained in this article that just dropped from CNN. But there’s a remarkable passage. When he was at the border last week Trump reportedly told agents to stop allowing migrants to come across the border. After the President left, supervisors had to tell the agents that if they followed the President’s order they’d be breaking the law. Read More
This is a nugget of reporting from Maggie Haberman of the Times about the departure Kirstjen Nielsen from the Department of Homeland Security.
People close to her say one reason – perhaps not only one – is that she was aware how awful life would/will be for her on the outside after defending his policies for a long tome. https://t.co/XghCBWhNNw
— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) April 8, 2019
Whether this is true or not I do not know. Read More
A Secret Service agent testified that while he was interrogating Yujing Zhang at Mar-a-Lago another agent took one of her thumb drives and put it in his laptop. It immediately began installing malware.
It sounds like there may be a broader round of firings at DHS, in addition to Secretary Nielsen’s ouster. And the Secret Service is part of DHS, albeit quite independent within it. But not that the head of the Secret Service getting fired comes just after the revelations about security at Mar-a-Lago. Makes me wonder whether it is over laxity or because the incident itself and the Secret Service’s aggressiveness somehow embarrassed the President.
Late Update: NBC’s Pete Williams says an administration official says the firing was “not based on any single precipitating even” and that the decision was made 10-14 days ago, i.e., before the Mar-a-Lago security breach.
I am … very skeptical of that account.
Sounds like there might be a generalized Millerite purge at DHS. Not just Nielsen.