Oral arguments in DC Circuit Court of Appeals on House Oversight Committee’s subpoena of President Trump’s accounting firm for his financial records. Tierney Sneed is in the courtroom, and Josh Kovensky is live-blogging it via the streaming audio.
New NBC/WSJ Poll: Biden 26%, Warren 19%, Harris 13%, Sanders 13%, Buttigieg 7%. No one else over 2%.
This is turning out to be a quintessentially Trumpian day. The social media bias summit the White House is hosting today is made up of attendees best known as online pro-Trump hype men, pushing images, memes and videos portraying Trump as a sort of alternative reality he-man constantly stomping, vanquishing and owning his foes. And while all this has been going on the White House has been telling everyone Trump has some secret way to end-run the Supreme Court and get his census citizenship question on the census after all. And now, a couple hours before the announcement, we learn that this epic SCOTUS smackdown is actually a lot of don’t-look-behind-the-curtain razzmatazz to fuzz up what is actually Trump announcing he’s giving up, doing pretty much what his Justice Department announced a week ago but Trump apparently needed a week of hand holding and yessing to accept.
An overnight article from the Times is the first to press past questions about Jeffrey Epstein’s wealth to suggesting that – like Donald Trump – it may all simply be an illusion. No one disputes that he’s a very wealthy man by any normal standard. He appears to own almost a quarter of a billion in real estate alone. But the claims of being a billionaire or running a fund which manages tens of billions of dollars appears to be based on very little.
I watched the Acosta presser live all the way through and here’s my take.
Here’s Alex Acosta’s answer on that Daily Beast claim that he told Trump transition officials that he was told to lay off Epstein and that he was some sort of intelligence asset. That struck me as a pretty wild claim. But bizarrely Acosta non-denial denialed it with a claim about departmental policies which I don’t think adds up.
This was a pretty weird answer: "I can't address it directly because of our guidelines." pic.twitter.com/9SVi8HNKo2
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) July 10, 2019
In my earlier post I mentioned the reporting of Vicky Ward who did a lengthy piece on Epstein for Vanity Fair in 2003 and is now revisiting the story in The Daily Beast. (Ward had a detailed version of the underaged girls part of the story but Vanity Fair cut that from the 2003 story.) I wanted to flag your attention to a passage in her latest piece at The Daily Beast which reports that Acosta told Trump transition officials that he’d been told to back off the Epstein case at the time and that that was why he gave Epstein such a generous deal.
Here’s the passage …
We know the outlines of charges that Jeffrey Epstein for years had procurers recruiting underaged girls for sex. We know the suspicions that various wealthy and powerful men in his vast social circle may have been part of this organized system of statutory rape. But there’s another part of this emerging story I want to focus your attention on – one which is distinct but may not at all be separate.
No one seems to have a clear idea of where Jeffrey Epstein’s money comes from.
Here’s an issue you likely know intuitively but is worth knowing and considering in more depth. Partisan gerrymandering is a scourge on our democracy and Republicans played it to maximum advantage in 2010. But it’s only part of the reason that Democrats play at a deep structural disadvantage in the House of Representatives. An equally big culprit is Democrats’ concentration in major urban enclaves. Indeed, the two are deeply intertwined. What we think of as partisan gerrymandering in its recent Republican guise is largely a matter of taking the existing concentration of Democrats in urban areas and playing it to maximum advantage. Put another way, if Democrats controlled states and tried to partisan gerrymander to their maximum advantage rather than produce ‘fair’ districts through commissions it simply wouldn’t be possible to do it as successfully as Republicans did in 2010-12.
The key to a successful partisan gerrymander is creating a large number of districts where your party has a strong but not overwhelming advantage and creating a small number of safe seats for your opponents where they have an overwhelming advantage and thus ‘waste’ lots of votes. Geography and demography simply make that much more possible for Republicans than Democrats.
It seems like General Flynn may have gotten tired of cooperating with the Feds, for some reason.