I want to take a moment to thank everyone who joined us for our TPM congressional oversight event last night in Washington, DC. It was great to see all of you and I and all of my colleagues want to thank you for your dedicated readership and support of our work.
If you’re still worried about the collusion described in the Mueller Report forgot about that because it probably means you’re not focused enough on how President Trump’s top advisors are already, more or less openly, trying to muscle Ukraine into targeting Trump’s political enemies in the US to throw the 2020 election in Trump’s favor.
I really cannot overstate how important this is.
This to me is one of those classic TPM stories. In fact, the man at the center of the story, James Russell Bolton Jr., is an embodiment of the Trump Era. Bolton runs a militia. But on the side he was posing as a Mexican drug cartel allegedly kidnapping his wife in order to extort money from the dorks who had joined his militia.
We’re so thick into constitutional crises today. But you’ve got to read this piece by Josh Kovensky. It’s about how the NRA tried to save itself financially or at least open up a critical new revenue stream by hawking what is not unfairly called “murder insurance.” Basically, if you’re a good guy with a gun and you kill someone, who’s going to cover you expenses? It turns out that even on its own morally dubious terms it wasn’t very good insurance and not necessarily legal. But beyond that, the contractors who created the plans were branching out from old fashioned defending your home style ‘self-defense’ to more like free range out and about waiting for bad guys to show themselves sort of ‘self-defense’. Proactive self-defense. Call it George Zimmerman insurance. Anyway, it’s simultaneously hilarious and really horrifying and on top of all that the NRA seems to have lost some serious cash on it. Read the whole story here.
In another impromptu White House appearance just now, President Trump went off on special counsel Robert Mueller all over again. In an especially bonkers moment, the President lamented the friendship between Mueller and fired FBI Director James Comey, citing a “picture file.”
“They were supposedly best friends,” Trump said. “You look at the picture file and you see hundreds of pictures of him and Comey.”
What is he talking about? A picture file?
I hear Trump toadies on Capitol Hill, now in full rage on Don Jr.’s behalf, may have reasons to worry.
Last week I flagged this stunning and egregious story about Rudy Giuliani, the President’s private lawyer, going abroad to use to use the President’s power to enlist other governments to attack President Trump’s enemies. Giuliani has been globe-trotting like this for two years. In most cases, we don’t really know what he’s doing. In most cases he’s likely just collecting money. But in this case he’s using threat or inducement of the President’s power to target the President’s political enemies and then looping the corrupt Attorney General into the process.
This latest Trump/Giuliani gambit managed to get laundered into The New York Times via outlets like the propaganda chop shop at The Hill under John Solomon.
But here are some key new details.
Let’s talk about this eye-popping story from Reuters which claims that back in 2015 Michael Cohen helped early Trump endorser and now-consummate supporter Jerry Falwell, Jr. make some embarrassing photos disappear. This is at least the third story Aram Roston has written on this saga (this one at Reuters, the earlier two when he was at Buzzfeed). Each has reported a series eye-popping or bizarre facts. But each also reads with the clear sense that Roston either knows more than he can write or believes there’s much more to the story than he can prove.
The Times is out with an extensive story based on newly obtained tax documents for President Trump … but they’re for 1985-1994, not more recent years. Still, it’s a key period in the making of the myth of Donald Trump, and far from being the dealmaking whiz of lore, he was declaring staggering losses, more than $1 billion over that stretch:
Below I mentioned this article penned by one of Vladimir Putin’s advisors claiming that the incoming Ukrainian President might cleanse eastern Ukraine of ethnic Russians and repopulate it with Jews. TPM Reporter Josh Kovensky speaks Russian (before coming to TPM he worked at the English language Kyiv Post in Ukraine) and he’s written this piece which goes deeper into what the article says and translates key parts of it. Must read.