Just a reminder that today’s decision on presidential immunity involves an investigation into hush money payments from Trump to a porn star and to a Playboy model.
This may be a relatively minor point and it’s a bit in the weeds. But it’s important to note. On CNN a couple days ago I saw David Chalian say that polling numbers are getting more complicated for Democrats on impeachment because independents are moving from significant support to more like evenly divided. But that’s actually not quite true. What has happened is that the question pollsters are asking, and especially the ones they and the press are focusing on, are changing.
I am going to work my way through the docs, which are pretty voluminous. But they show what we’ve been saying for months and really years. The Trump/Ukraine and Trump/Russia story are the same story. And the “the real collusion was Ukraine and the DNC” storyline goes back to Paul Manafort (and his Russian intelligence associates) who has continued to provide back channel and guidance from prison to Giuliani and Trump.
Wow. We just recorded a special episode of the podcast with Errol Morris about his new Steve Bannon documentary. It was actually pretty contentious. But I think a pretty interesting listen. At one point I thought Morris was going to walk out of the interview. But we chatted afterwards and now we’re like best buds.
Hopefully for your listening pleasure by this evening.
Our design team this week put together a really fantastic interactive that tracks who has testified/turned over documents in the impeachment probe and who is refusing to cooperate.
With so many closed door depositions and witnesses’ cooperating status changing constantly, this chart makes it easy to understand just how far along the probe is on any given day. And we’re able to update it in real time, so it will be a great resource through the duration of the inquiry.
Check it out here.
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For Inside members, if you weren’t able to join us for our Inside Members’ Briefing this afternoon you can watch the recording of the discussion here. Today was a Q&A Briefing with me and TPM Reporter Josh Kovensky. We discussed the latest on the Trump/Ukraine investigation and took members questions.
For Inside members, I wanted to give you a quick reminder that TPM investigative reporter Josh Kovensky and I will be holding a briefing tomorrow at 1 p.m. Eastern. We will be briefing you on and taking your questions about the latest developments in the Trump/Ukraine scandal.
Tomorrow will be a very big news day. Sometimes the best way to capture it is in our own internal staff update for the morning crew, which I quote here:
Tim Morrison deposition in House impeachment inquiry — he’s a key witness
House vote on impeachment resolution — Matt will cover the vote but there could be spillover
Hearing on McGahn subpoena at 2 p.m. that Tierney will cover
Hearing on Kupperman testimony at 3 p.m. that Tierney will likely not be able to get to
If you haven’t had a chance to register for this week’s briefing you can do so here.
Remember, even if you can’t tune into our Inside Briefings live you can still watch the recorded version in your Inside Briefing portal. They usually post the evening after the call. And we will now be posting them in the Editor’s Blog for Inside members as well.
And there it is. I mentioned earlier today that as the first witness who was on the notorious July 25th Trump-Zelensky call, Alex Vindman could clear up whether there were any material omissions in the rough transcript of the call. It turns out there were. They don’t appear to be ones that dramatically change the content of the call. But according to the Times, Vindman testified that “the White House transcript of a July call between President Trump and Ukraine’s president omitted crucial words and phrases.”