WaPo reporter says Mueller team is planning on releasing a report on the obstruction part of the investigation in June or July.

More info: Mueller team wants to release report on Obstruction investigation, incidents during President's time in office this June or July. AND THEN they continue with collusion probe. Hot Summer. pic.twitter.com/tFQHd9yZ4y

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) April 4, 2018

Note that technically, Rod Rosenstein appears to have authorized Mueller to write such a report. In theory, he could decide to keep it confidential. In practice, that seems highly unlikely.

Here’s Alice Ollstein’s look at a critical issue we’re going to be closely focused on in the months and (unfortunately) years to come: the effort to purge the federal bureaucracy of experts, non-Conservative loyalists and, today, those who are not personally loyal to Donald Trump. The story has taken on a distinct coloration today under Donald Trump since his war against the ‘deep state’ is so tightly focused on protecting himself from personal prosecution. But it has decades’ old roots. And a central player is Newt Gingrich, who was at this thirty-plus years ago and now is closely advising and egging on Donald Trump to force or in many cases simply allow purges across the board. Trump isn’t an ideologue like Gingrich. But he only understands loyalism and he will do anything to protect himself from the law. So he’s a perfect partner for Gingrich’s quest to make the federal government more corrupt, ideological, ineffectual and stupid. Give this a read; and if you’re part of the federal workforce and you see things we want to hear.

Yesterday afternoon Nasim Aghdam, 39, walked onto the YouTube campus in San Bruno, California, fired dozens of shots, injured four people and then killed herself. Initial reports suggested the shooter might be a disgruntled former employee or friend. Aghdam’s name already has led some to jump to the conclusion that the attack is tied to Islamic fundamentalism. But that seems pretty clearly not to be the case. Aghdam’s activism was tied to animal rights and veganism. Her extensive online trail shows that she was intensely angry at YouTube itself for “demonetizing” her YouTube channels and in other ways purportedly discriminating against her. This seems clear to have been the motive behind her rampage. In other words, she was a disgruntled YouTube user.

All of Aghdam’s social media platform accounts have already been suspended. They were down shortly after her name became public last night. But her site remains on line. Here are a couple screen grabs of the site, both to give you some flavor of her world and to let you read some of her grudge. Read More

Facebook says Cambridge Analytica may have gotten 87 million user files not 50 million.

It sounds like some of Bill O’Reilly’s forest of NDAs may not be long for this world.

We just released a new “Extra” edition of The Josh Marshall Podcast where I talk to comedy writer Nell Scovell about #MeToo, equality in Hollywood, her new book Just the Funny Parts and what it’s like being a female comedy writer in the all dudes writers room in Late Night or Hollwood. Listen and please subscribe on iTunes or Google Play.

For more than a year, Facebook has faced a rolling public relations debacle. Part of this is the American public’s shifting attitudes toward Big Tech and platforms in general. But the driving problem has been the way the platform was tied up with and perhaps implicated in Russia’s attempt to influence the 2016 presidential election. Users’ trust in the platform has been shaken, politicians are threatening scrutiny and possible regulation, and there’s even a campaign to get people to delete their Facebook accounts. All of this is widely known and we hear more about it every day. But most users, most people in tech and also Wall Street (which is the source of Facebook’s gargantuan valuation) don’t yet get the full picture. We know about Facebook’s reputational crisis. But people aren’t fully internalizing that the current crisis poses a potentially dire threat to Facebook’s core business model, its core advertising business.

Facebook is fundamentally an advertising business. Almost all of the company’s revenue comes from advertising that it targets with unparalleled efficiency to its billions of users. In a media world in which advertising rates face almost universal downward pressure, Facebook’s rates have consistently risen. Monopoly power may drive some of that growth. But the key driver is efficiency. If old-fashioned advertising shows my advertisement to 100 people for every actual buyer and other digital platforms show it to 30 people and Facebook shows it to 5 people, Facebook’s ads are just worth a lot more.

As long as the rates bear some relationship to that efficiency (those numbers above are just for illustration), I’ll be happy to pay it. Because it’s objectively worth more. Indeed, as the prices have gone up, Facebook has actually gotten more efficient. As one digital ad agency executive recently told me, even if Facebook jacked up the prices a lot more, his firm would likely keep using them just as much because on this cost to efficiency basis it’s still cheap. This is the basis of Facebook’s astronomical market capitalization which today rates at over $450 billion, even after some recent reverses. Read More

Trump claims that Central American immigration ‘caravan’ is marauding band of rapists.

Trump claims immigration ‘caravan’ is lumbering group of rapists. “Yesterday it came out where this journey coming up, women are raped at levels that nobody has ever seen before. They don’t want to mention that.” pic.twitter.com/MU7wEZMvAP

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) April 5, 2018

In fact in many cases, they’re traveling in groups because immigrants and asylum seekers are often victims of rape and theft.

InsideEPA, an EPA trade sheet, reports that Scott Pruitt’s downfall is the work of disgraced former White House aide Rob Porter, who leaked damaging information about Pruitt to retaliate against a former girlfriend who told White House officials about Porter’s history of domestic violence. Read More

The audio is poor. But here’s President Trump with what I believe are his first public comments on the Stormy Daniels story. Key thing: he says he didn’t know anything about the payment and didn’t know where the money came from.

Audio is pretty poor. But here's Trump saying he didn't know anything about the $130k to Stormy Daniels. pic.twitter.com/QBBaugUTTO

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) April 5, 2018

Stormy Daniels’ lawyer makes the obvious point. This would seem to strengthen Daniels’ case since it makes it even harder to see how President Trump was a party to the agreement. More significantly, there’s a non-trivial chance that President Trump will eventually have to answer this question under oath.