As many longterm TPM Readers know, Elizabeth Warren has a history with this site. Soon after TPM had raised a lot of ruckus over President Bush’s attempt to privatize Social Security in late 2004 and early 2005, Warren and her law students approached me about setting a short term blog to advocate against the bankruptcy bill then moving through Congress. That led to the creation of the TPM Bankruptcy Bill Blog, which launched on March 6th 2005. A few months later when we launched TPMCafe we made it a standing proposition as Warren Reports, which ran from 2005 to 2008 when Warren was preparing to enter the Obama administration.
We’re going to be republishing all of Warren’s posts since they are newly relevant as she moves into front runner status in the Democratic presidential nomination. Our team has been working on that project in the background. But last night I went back into my email from the period to remind myself of the precise order of events.
We are nearing the end of our critical 2019 membership drive. We’re still a ways to go. If you’ve been thinking about it, please make today the day you join us. It’s super easy, super fast and pretty cheap. Just take a moment right now, take out your wallet and join our team. Just click right here. Thank you.
These are all real quotes from the pool report filed just moments ago.
On whistleblower:
“Do we have to protect a whistleblower who gives a false account? I don’t know. You tell me.”
“It’s possibly Schiff.”
“Why didn’t he say he met with the whistleblower.”“I’m trying to get out of wars. We may have to get in wars, too.”
“I have to fight off these lowlifes at the same time I’m negotiating these deals.”
I know this is the first thing we learned about Trump. It’s obvious, ingrained, just basic to his whole personality. But it is still remarkable the degree to which at least half of Trump’s emotional life seems based on anger at close advisors and associates who are unable to clean up his messes to his own standards and satisfaction. Sometimes perhaps a staffer is hapless. But in virtually every case it is simply that his own actions make clean ups close to impossible. It is just a remarkable, beyond-caricature example of absent self-awareness, entitlement and, yes, narcissism.
One quick observation. We’ve now seen President Trump green light a Turkish invasion of northeastern Syria and then (perhaps?) try to undo it after it was too late to undo it. He decided to feather his own nest by hosting the G-7 at his Doral golf resort (a guaranteed political firestorm) before reversing course after roughly 48 hours. It is probably fair to say that both – though especially the first – have garnered Trump more criticism from Republicans than the Ukraine extortion plot that is all but certain to get him impeached. This all fits a pattern: under threat over probable impeachment and at least conceivable removal from office Trump is lashing out right and left in efforts to demonstrate power and dominance and succeeding mainly in further eroding his political support.
And there it is, the other quid pro quo. Notorious Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash would help Rudy and DiGenova and Toensing cook up dirt on Joe Biden. In return, they’d work with Trump to get US corruption charges against Firtash tossed. Firtash has been fighting extradition to the US on federal corruption charges since 2014.
Among many other things, in his just concluded remarks, White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney slightly shifted the White House explanation. He said one reason for the hold up of weapons aid to Ukraine was about the “corruption related to the DNC server.” This needs to be unpacked.
It is just a shard of information. But it is a reference to the Seth Rich/DNC Server conspiracy theory which holds the following … Read More
While it’s pretty obvious that President Trump is the one who flipped out in yesterday’s meeting in White House, it’s still true that every narrator will have their own point of view and own slant to their description. But Democrats in the meeting who have spoken to the press suggest that it was pressing Trump on “all roads lead to Putin” that pushed Trump over the edge. Here’s Pelosi’s explanation of what lead to the ‘meltdown’.
New episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is out. We discuss the latest Trump/Ukraine investigation developments and try to make sense of the Dems’ marathon twelve-person on one stage debate. Listen here or it should be on your device if you signed up.
The 68-year-old Maryland Democrat who chaired the House Committee on Oversight and Reform died Thursday.
His wife, Maya Rockeymoore Cummings, the chair of the Maryland Democratic Party, released the following statement: