I can’t get past the lede of this AP article about the latest at the EPA …

A key aide to Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt has been granted permission to make extra money moonlighting for private clients whose identities are being kept secret.

Here’s the rest.

We decided that the Trump/Russia story looks so much darker and more sinister over the last ten days that we needed to dedicate this week’s entire podcast to explaining just how it all fits together. We just published it and you listen right here.

In this new piece, Alice Ollstein looks at the critical aspect of the trade equation right now. The President has zero constitutional authority over tariffs. Modern tariff legislation gives President great leeway to adjust tariffs based on various ‘findings’. Congress can pull back that power at any moment. Republicans are panicked about what the President is threatening. But they pretty clearly have no will to act to stop him.

CNN just moved a story about George Nader. We heard about him last week. He’s a Lebanese-American businessman with some history in Washington. But he’s been sort of off the radar for more than a decade. He was involved in some way as an intermediary between Trump family members and people in the Persian Gulf. Now we hear this from CNN. He was met at Dulles airport by the FBI in January on his return from abroad. “Since then, he has been talking to Mueller’s investigators and providing information to the grand jury.” Read More

Earlier this evening I told you about startling new revelations appearing to tie together the Russia probe with various of Donald Trump’s and Jared Kushner’s shenanigans in the Persian Gulf region. It’s stunning stuff but it’s complicated stuff. So check out the earlier post and the underlying articles from the Times and CNN to get the details. But no sooner did that happen than an attorney for Stormy Daniels posted a legal filing in which she asks a court to declare the “hush agreement” between her and Donald Trump and his lawyer, Michael Cohen, to be null and void.

But this rather sterile description doesn’t do justice to what is contained in the filing – which includes the original “hush agreement” itself and another related document. Suffice it to say, it focuses not so much on Stormy Daniels staying mum about a sexual relationship with Donald Trump but on “certain still images and/or text messages which were authored by or relate to” Donald Trump. Let’s put this baldly: Stormy appears to be saying she’s got or had sexts and maybe even “dick pics” from President Trump.

So with that, let’s get to the horrid details. Read More

In case you missed it, Episode #3 of The Josh Marshall Podcast is out. David Taintor and I break down a slew of critical developments in the Trump/Russia story over the last week. Listen here or download from iTunes or Google Play. I hope you enjoy it. Please send us feedback and please subscribe.

This was hinted at in last night’s reports. But the Post has a story this evening suggesting not only that Erik Prince acted as an intermediary in a back channel between the Trump Transition but lied about it to congressional investigators. This goes back to that meeting in the Seychelles where emissaries from President-Elect Trump, Vladimir Putin and the government of the United Arab Emirates met in January, 2017. As the Post story relates, Prince told congressional investigators that he was there to meet with representatives of the UAE. The meeting with Kirill Dmitriev, the head of a Russia state investment fund, was simply a chance encounter. George Nader, Bob Mueller’s newly-cooperating witness, who was there at the meeting and who we discussed earlier, says thats not true. The meeting was set up in advance so that a representative of President-Elect Trump could meet an emissary from Moscow. Read More

News comes this morning that President Trump is angry with Sarah Sanders for how she handled the Stormy Daniels questions in yesterday’s White House press briefing. Much as I find Sanders a disreputable wretch, it is quite rich to hear he’s unhappy with how she handled the story of his seeking and receiving a restraining order against his porn star girlfriend. Some stories are easier to spin than others! Jay Carney and Josh Earnest had it easy.

Still, it was a fatal error to say repeatedly that President Trump had “won” the case in secret arbitration. Let’s look at specifically what she said.
Read More

The trial over Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach’s controversial voting law is in its third day, and Tierney Sneed is in Kansas covering all the action for us.

Today, after a bit of a struggle, Kobach succeeded in getting a piece of evidence that’s central to his case admitted. It’s a spreadsheet that he claims shows a significant rate of non-citizen voting. Kobach needs to show that non-citizen voting is a real problem, in order to justify his law requiring people to show proof of citizenship when they register.

You can expect the ACLU to try to raise serious doubts about the spreadsheet’s claims. Still, it sounds a little better for Kobach than what happened Wednesday, when the judge kept having to lecture Kobach’s team of lawyers on the correct trial procedure. Kobach is defending the law himself, rather than relying on the state AG’s office.

Oh and Kobach also reportedly came to court today with an armed escort, citing potential security threats.

You can follow Tierney’s live updates here.

Here’s another aspect of the Stormy Daniels lawsuit that has yet to get much attention. Section 4.2 details other people who Daniels either talked to or gave copies of the texts and images before she made her agreement with Trump and Cohen. Notably, it lists four of those individuals. Read More