Attorney General Bill Barr has dramatically escalated his Mueller Report coverup and effort to effectively end independent oversight of his Department by Congress. According to this report, he is refusing to show up to testify this week before the House Judiciary Committee unless he is accorded a veto right over the questioning format. Read More
Details now firming up on the synagogue shooting. It appears that there were four shooting victims, one of whom died.
Summarizing the threads of information we’ve received so far about the Poway (near San Diego, CA) synagogue shooting.
A man police believe is the shooter is in custody. No details on his identity. Town Mayor says the synagogue was clearly targeted.
A local medical center confirms receiving four shooting victims from the incident. There’s no clarity on the extent of the injuries. There are unconfirmed reports of a single fatality. The town mayor referred to “unconfirmed reports” of a fatality in TV appearances shortly after the shooting.
[At roughly 4:59 PM, the mayor appeared on CNN and appeared to confirm a single fatality.]
The rabbi was apparently shot in the hand and continued trying to calm the congregants and the shooter – what that meant about the shooter wasn’t entirely clear. There are reports that the congregants somehow “engaged” with the shooter. Unclear whether this was trying to talk down the shooter or physically engage him.
Early reports of a shooting at a synagogue in Poway, California. Reports suggest that there are shooting victims (extent of injuries not clear) and that someone has been detained for questioning. But beyond that details are sketchy.
3:48 PM: Union-Tribune says “As many as four people have reportedly been shot”, so you can see, reports from the local press remain imprecise, sketchy. Police were reported first called to the scene at 11:30 AM local time. Numerous reports refer to a man being “detained” in connection with the shooting. But we can’t assume that that person is the shooter or that the incident is over.
4:16 PM: Local TV report suggests that police on the scene seem confident that the man taken into custody was the shooter, according to this report taken into custody a few blocks from the synagogue. Notably, this report refers to the Rabbi, who was reportedly shot in the hand, trying to calm both congregants and the shooter. So possibly, he was able to disrupt the shooting or the shooter panicked in some way. Obviously, all these reports should be treated as highly tentative.
Additional details in this local affiliate report from on the scene in Poway. More clarity on presumed shooter in custody, injuries, etc. pic.twitter.com/erU7RWbZPN
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) April 27, 2019
4:22 PM: Mayor of Poway says he has “unconfirmed reports of one fatality,” also refers to members of the congregation “engaging” with the shooter and in some way limiting the injuries. Unclear whether this is verbal engagement or some attempt to physically disrupt the shooting.
The good thing about presidential primaries and electability is that we aren’t just limited to guessing. Everyone’s running (almost literally). We’ve got the better part of a year to see how the different contenders campaign and hold up under the pressure of a campaign. For the moment, Joe Biden clearly polls better than any other current candidate against Donald Trump.
I really want to focus your attention on what seems like the implosion of the National Rifle Association. To be clear, I don’t mean that pro-gun activism is going anywhere or even that the NRA is. But as you’ve seen in our reports in recent days, the leadership of the group is engaged in what seems like a professional life or death battle, with each side accusing the other of corruption, self-dealing and double-dipping into the organizations funds. And this all seems to be amidst and to a significant degree triggered by the organization’s financial woes, which have prompted all the bigwigs to try to out each other’s grifts. Read More
I’ve been publishing a series of emails about Joe Biden and his candidacy. Here I want to share something different. It’s an window into his candidacy and potential presidency. Back in 2004 I was writing an article for The Atlantic about John Kerry’s foreign policy. I did a range of interviews for that piece and one of them was with then-Senator Biden, in his office one evening up on Capitol Hill. It was loose and unstructured. When you talk with Biden he’s thinking out loud, discussing ideas, not a lot of couching or sound-biting or hedging. It’s very immediate and unfiltered. The issues then were quite different. This was maybe 15 months after the invasion of Iraq. George W. Bush was late in his first term. But even if the issues are from 15 years ago, you still get a pretty immediate sense of the man, how he thinks and specifically how he approaches the world abroad. So with that, I went back into my notes and pulled out the transcript of the conversation, which you can read here …
Josh Marshall: There’s several points I wanted to touch on, and a number of these — if you can answer them descriptively, or prescriptively I’d be interested in both. One of the main points of the piece, a hypothetical Democratic administration 9 months from now, what the continuities and discontinuities would be with where Clinton left off in 2000. I mean obviously the chessboard has moved all around, and that’s a given, but on an issue like North Korea, an issue like Iran, the Atlantic relationship and so forth, and broad kind of questions about how you mix diplomatic muscle and military force. What would you identify as the main continuities and main discontinuities? Again, either descriptively or prescriptively.
Joe Biden: I wouldn’t even try. I wouldn’t. I don’t think you can connect those dots prescriptively or descriptively. I think it is a false — I think the paradigm is the wrong one. I mean I think it is literally impossible to suggest how the policies of the Clinton administration would be continued, augmented, changed, morphed, discarded in the year 2005. The world has fundamentally changed since he left office and the damage done to our relationships around the world, coupled with the emergence of what was a perceived threat — but even the Clinton administration never fully contemplated knowingly the potential consequence of a serious international terrorist organization coordinating a lethal attack against the United States. There isn’t anybody who wrote about it. Read More
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.