US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman sat in on Israel’s weekly cabinet meeting today. Completely unprecedented. Not just in Israel. I’m curious whether a foreign ambassador has ever sat in on a cabinet meeting in any country ever.
This quick exchange with Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) and Chuck Todd on Meet the Press is a good illustration of how the GOP is now a thoroughly Trumpist party.
On CNN and NBC this morning, Reps. Schiff and Nadler addressed where the Democrats are on impeachment.
Democrats are wedging open the door on impeachment in legal escalation on grand jury testimony.
Fascinating update on the mystery of just where Jeffrey Epstein got all his money in this new report from the Times. The gist is that the entire fortune, the whole spectacle, may stem from (and perhaps may not go beyond) somehow brainwashing or casting a spell over a single billionaire.
As readers of TPM, I wanted to share with you that today I signed a three year collective bargaining agreement with the TPM union, represented by WGA East.
“House Democrats have spent the last two years waiting for someone else to solve the Trump conundrum,” career federal prosecutor Cynthia Alksne writes for Cafe.
What became clear Wednesday is that there is no savior here, no knight in shining armor is going to ride in and save the day. It is now up to them, and to them alone, to determine whether they follow the polls or whether they follow the evidence.
If you watched today’s hearings, you may remember there was one Republican member, Rep. Chris Stewart who held up what he said was a list or binder of 25 examples of leaks from the Mueller Special Counsel’s Office. This left a lot of people baffled since to reporters’ great dismay the SCO was notoriously leak free. Matt Shuham asked Stewart’s office for a copy of the leaks and they were kind enough to oblige. Here’s Matt’s report.
Among other things, these two hearings illustrate a basic, important point. Obstruction is very important. But the real issue is the collusion, the active encouragement and acceptance of help from a foreign power. In other words, the underlying substance.
Obstruction is important in large part because it blocked getting the full story. The most important point here has never been narrowly statutory crimes. It’s the President’s betrayal of his country to get elected. That’s what matters.
I’m very interested in this exchange. Mueller responded with a categorical affirmative when asked whether Paul Manafort shared campaign and polling information with Konstantin Kilimnik and Oleg Deripaska because he hoped to get millions of dollars either of new money or debt forgiveness. Here’s the exchange.
I've never seen this stated so definitively, that Manafort shared campaign and polling data with Kilimnik because he hoped to get paid money by Russian or Ukrainian oligarchs. pic.twitter.com/qJ43Kc8blJ
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) July 24, 2019