Over the last three days, a GoFundMe account for fired former acting Director of the FBI Andrew McCabe has raised more than $500,000 for legal defense expenses. In response I’ve seen a number of people pillory the effort as a sort of liberal do-gooderism gone off the rails. Rather than flooding money on a guy who is at worst very solidly in the upper middle class, people should focus their charity on climate activism or poverty or cancer research. In a similar vein, Damon Linker has this column up about Donald Trump’s criticisms of Amazon. As he puts it, “Liberals find the president so morally repulsive and so transparently dishonest that they now respond to everything he says with instantaneous outrage and disgust, while presuming in each and every case that his statements are made in bad faith, concealing baser motives.” As he later concludes, “On Amazon, he’s indisputably right.” Read More

Your weekly Sum Up of the critical developments on voting rights and democracy over the last week.

President Trump has now officially joined Michael Cohen’s shell company in arguing that Stormy Daniels should have to hash out her disagreements with the President in secret arbitration. This is the agreement President Trump and his lawyers won’t say if he is even a party to.

Episode #7 of The Josh Marshall Podcast is out. I ask The New Yorker’s Jeff Toobin the big question: Is Paul Manafort more worried about a lifetime sentence or getting nerve gassed in Northern Virginia. Listen here. And remember: please subscribe on iTunes or Google Play if you haven’t already. It really helps a lot.

Here are key statements from the President just moments ago in the White House on Russia, the Border, Amazon and China (selections from White House pool report) … Read More

Trump: “Nobody’s been tougher on Russia than I have.”

Trump: No one is tougher on Russia than me. Everybody Agrees. pic.twitter.com/Q1zj4ANTg3

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) April 3, 2018

Trump says he’ll have the US military guard the Mexican border “until we can have a wall.”

A short time ago President Trump said he is ordering the US military to start guarding the US-Mexico border until his wall is built. Can he do that? The short answer is: no. The longer answer is basically no but I wanted to explain the details because it’s not 100% no. Read More

Our Tierney Sneed was in the courtroom today for the sentencing of Alex van der Zwaan. And one bizarre, somewhat (darkly) comical part of the discussion was about the logistics of sentencing because no one in the courtroom was totally sure whether or when ICE might swoop into deport the defendant. Here’s the story (Prime access).

Just out from the White House.

Note the reference to the protection of ‘national security’ which may be a predicate to ignoring the restrictions of the Posse Comitatus Act which prevents the military from carrying out police actions on American soil. Read More