I’m watching the President’s rally tonight in Michigan and his recurrent theme is asking for money back from New York Democrats he said he gave campaign contributions to twenty or thirty years ago.

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A New York judge on Wednesday dismissed a criminal case against Paul Manafort, halting a prosecution that was widely seen as a form of insurance against a possible presidential pardon for the former Trump campaign manager.

While the Manhattan district attorney plans on appealing the decision, the ruling means Manafort could go free immediately should he be pardoned.

On the latest episode of the podcast, we preview the House impeachment vote and take a look at the curious case of Rep. Jeff Van Drew (D-NJ) maybe (or maybe not?) switching to the Republican Party. We also take stock of the absolutely massive amount of news that happened in 2019. Listen to it here, or your preferred podcast app.

With the day now upon us, I wanted to lay out some points on impeachment which seem to me essential and definitional.

The signature reality of the Trump Era is confusion. False stories crowd out real ones – false stories driven less by ignorance than as a mode of attack. We hear endlessly about ‘two realities’, in which partisans on either side of the political divide see the same things and come away with radically different understandings of them. This is mainly false. We see and understand the same things but simply react differently. The great threat we face as a country isn’t poor logical reasoning but the growth of authoritarianism and leader-worship.

Here are three points that, for me, function as a sort of north star through this addled and chaotic process.
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Happy Wednesday, December 18. President Donald Trump is expected to be impeached today, joining former Presidents Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton in a very small club. Here’s more on that and the other stories we’re watching.

With the President likely to be impeached tomorrow, we are likely to be entering into a period of some polling volatility. Remember that in the short-term polls fluctuate not only with changes in public opinion but what is called differential response. The excited or agitated side responds to pollsters more and the demoralized or disenchanted side does less. But for the moment, or over the course of the last week, the President’s support numbers have popped up. The numbers aren’t dramatic. But for instance they’re now up to 43.9% in the 538 trend chart. Still pretty poor for an incumbent president but ever so slightly past the edge of the band he’s been in for years. I wouldn’t put too much stock in a few days of numbers. But it is worth keeping an eye on.

I wanted to flag this article in the Post which, amidst so much other news, does not appear to have garnered a lot of attention. In brief, it details a new report into how what appears to be a Russian disinformation effort amplified and tried to advance various conspiracy theories first seen in the reporting of John Solomon in The Hill.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has a lot of balls to juggle when it comes how to handle the coming impeachment trial in his chamber: from President Trump’s desire for a long, witness-filled trial that would air out his conspiracy theories about Ukraine; to wobbly moderates in his own conference who are at least somewhat uncomfortable with the President’s Ukraine behavior; to McConnell’s own preference for a swift and witness-less procedure.

Former prosecutor TPM Reader captures this pretty nicely. In fact, it leaves quite a lot out.

Stunning news out of federal court this afternoon: that mystery million dollars that Lev Parnas got from abroad was money from Dmitry Firtash, the former Manafort business partner and Putin-aligned oligarch who is currently fighting extradition to the United States to face bribery charges. We’ve had a lot of hints to date that Firtash was the guy funding Rudy’s team in Ukraine. But this seems to confirm it. Where’s the money for all of this coming from? Why is Giuliani working for free? Why did his fellow Trump lawyers and Fox news regulars DiGenova and Toensing get over a million for a few months of legal work for Firtash. This news tells us what many have suspected: the President’s legal defense – Giuliani, Parnas, Fruman, DiGenova and Toensing and the rest of the collusion squad – is being funded by Firtash.