In March of 2016 Donald Trump was getting a growing number of questions about who was advising him on foreign policy. He did not seem to have any foreign policy advisors. So when he met with The Washington Post editorial board on March 21st he announced a team of five foreign policy advisors. Walid Phares, Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, Joe Schmitz, and ret. Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg. Read More

I’m really glad we did this. I thought it would be helpful for me to understand the story better. Crack reporting by a number of news organizations have already identified most of the unnamed people in the Papadopoulos plea agreement document. But that’s not quite the sentence as reading the document and the individual sentences with the names of the people in place of anonymized titles like “high ranking campaign official” or “campaign supervisor.” So Allegra Kirkland pulled the reporting together and edited the document to replace those titles with the names of the people who published reports have now securely identified. Check it out.

A former federal prosecutor with highly relevant experience weighs in on what we learned from yesterday. Upshot: Manafort’s strategy is a pardon. Read More

One interesting backstory to the Manafort-Gates indictment: the pre-indictment fight over whether they could invoke attorney-client privilege to block their lawyer from having to testify to the Mueller grand jury. The details of that skirmish–which Manafort and Gates lost–emerged when the case was unsealed this week. Tierney Sneed explains the significance.

Often when we are trying to understand a complex story it is the facts that we are most acclimated to that are most significant. Since they are familiar, they can hide in plain sight. With this in mind, I was particularly struck by a passage on page three of George Papadopoulos’s plea document. Read More

President Trump took time to attack Senator Schumer on Twitter. He has yet to call either the Mayor of New York City or the Governor of New York.

President Trump took time to attack Sen Schumer on Twitter. Has not called NYC Mayor or Gov of New York. pic.twitter.com/QlLC2Pvske

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) November 1, 2017

You may already have seen it. But for the record I wanted to post both the transcript and the video of President Trump’s rant against the US Justice system in which he called it a “joke” and a “laughingstock”. Read More

We and many others reported the release of a bundle of Russian-intelligence backed ad campaigns that ran on Facebook last year. I wanted to zoom in one of them. It’s simply an extraordinary example of the complexity and not online but in the real world impact of what was happening last year. Read More

It is worth considering why, when Sam Clovis was a key conduit directing and overseeing foreign policy advisors whose activities were at a minimum highly embarrassing, he was ever considered for any administration appointment.

Clovis, who is at the center of the expanding Papadopoulos revelations, today withdrew his nomination to be the top scientist at the Department of Agriculture.

Clovis is not a scientist.

It’s a little bewildering just how many news stories are bursting out today. Mercer resigning from his hedge fund and selling his stake in Breitbart, albeit to his daughter. Is this just deciding it no fun becoming a public villain? Or is there more. Read More