I wanted to flag your attention to a really important opinion column that appeared yesterday in the Times. It’s by Jed Shugerman, a law professor at Fordham. Shugerman gets into a number of points about the collusion portion of the Mueller Report that I’ve been trying to make sense of myself. To put it more specifically, I’ve been trying to make sense of the disconnect between the Report itself and its media portrayal. Trump’s campaign didn’t just collude. They conspired and coordinated with Russia. And Mueller proves it.
In a short Q&A with reporters on the White House lawn, President Trump called Don McGahn, his former White House Counsel, a liar, called Robert Mueller a “Trump hater” and doubled down on his notorious “very fine people” comment about Charlottesville. Clips after the jump … Read More
Former, now on-going, employment-status-ambiguous Rod Rosenstein gave a churlish passive-aggressive “I’m awesome!” festivus kind of speech last night. Kate Riga gives us the highlights.
Feds charge a Massachusetts state judge and court officer with obstruction for helping a undocumented man leave by the backdoor of a courthouse to evade ICE officers who were trolling the courthouse looking for people to arrest.
Joe Biden is the hardest to figure of all the Democratic candidates in the presidential field. He is at once an obvious choice and also unsuited to the moment in almost every way imaginable. Read More
As President Trump has — unsurprisingly — dramatically ramped up his refusal to comply with any congressional scrutiny and oversight, the impeachment debate has moved in a new direction. Or at least one part of the existing argument has become much more salient. That is this: the claim that by moving into a formal impeachment process, perhaps as little as beginning a formal impeachment inquiry, the House will strengthen its ability to compel cooperation from the executive branch on all the documents and testimony it is now trying to get. In other words, whatever you think about the politics or wisdom of impeachment, Democrats need to start the process because that’s the only way they’ll have the standing to do effective investigation.
The problem is I see no evidence this is true. Read More
A lot more evidence emerging about the depth of the compromise of the Trump team in the government’s sentencing argument for Maria Buttina. Get used to the phrase “spot and access.”
I’ve said a number of times that I think impeachment under the present circumstances is a mistake. There are two reasons. The lesser of them is the near impossibility of removing President Trump from office. The greater one is that moving quickly toward impeachment rather that holding it as a cudgel in the process of on-going investigation gets in the way of aggressive investigations. If people want to apply pressure, that’s where to apply it. Yesterday it was revealed that Chairman Cummings had agreed to delay the Oversight Committee’s subpoena deadline until after a court hearing on May 14th, when a court holds a hearing into President Trump’s suit against Cummings and the Trump’s accounting firm Mazars USA.
This is a mistake. Read More
Steve King says facing the House scapegoating him for white supremacist comments gave him “better insight” into what Jesus faced when he was crucified.