Notable moment in President Trump’s remarks a few moments ago. If China enacts tariffs that harm US farmers, they’ll understand, he said. Because they’re “patriots.”
“When we do a deal with China – which probably we will, if we don’t they’ll have to pay pretty high taxes to do business with our country. That’s a possibility. But if we do a deal with China, if during the course of a negotiation they want to hit the farmers, because they think that hits me, I wouldn’t say that’s nice, but I tell you, our farmers are great patriots. These are great patriots. They understand that they’re doing this for the country. And we’ll make it up to them. In the end they’re going to be much stronger than they are right now.” Read More
Here’s your Weekly Primer on Voting Rights and Democracy (Prime access). Give us three minutes and we’ll make sure you’re totally up to date on every critical development over the last seven days.
FBI raids offices of Michael Cohen. This seems not to be directly tied to the Mueller probe but things Mueller’s team unearthed during their investigation. More to come.
First comments from President Trump on the Cohen raid (from the pool report) …
Quick comments: “it’s a disgraceful situation.”
“I have this witch hunt constantly going on.”
“It’s an attack on on our country…what we all stand for.”
Also called the special counsel “the most conflicted group of people I have ever seen.”
Trump went on to criticize AG Jeff Sessions for recusing himself and repeatedly said no one “is looking at the other side,” referring to Clinton’s 30k emails and “many many” other things.
Video after the jump … Read More
The New York Times is reporting this evening that Special Counsel Robert Mueller is investigating a $150,000 donation — in 2015, during the campaign — to Donald Trump’s foundation from Ukrainian billionaire Victor Pinchuk which was solicited by none other than Michael Cohen. In return, Trump made a 20-minute appearance via video link to a Kiev conference, the Times reports:
The President’s democracy-shaking comments late today — flanked by Vice President Mike Pence and National Security Adviser John Bolton, and in the presence of the nation’s military leaders — is deservedly overshadowing the underlying FBI raids on his attorney, Michael Cohen. But Tierney Sneed scrambled to get the immediate reaction of leading legal experts on the Justice Department’s big move against Cohen and what it means. Here’s her report.
Yesterday a reader asked me if we had a list of our key Michael Cohen articles and, if we didn’t, could I recommend a few key ones. First, I think this piece from 13 months ago remains the best look at Cohen’s backstory. To go deeper you can read this piece on Cohen, Sater and the Trump-Russia money channel, this piece on what the CIA and FBI knew about it before 2016, and the eye-popping details about Cohen’s childhood friend and later fellow Trump associate Felix Sater. If you missed it, I explained last night to subscribers why I don’t buy that yesterday’s events were about the Stormy Daniels case. Read More
It is normal that a new National Security Advisor would bring in his or her own team over time. But Tom Bossert, in the structure of the Trump White House, isn’t really even under Bolton’s purview. He plainly has no ‘team’ on hand to replace him with on day one. We have a new episode of the podcast that is coming up shortly where Steve Clemons and I discussed this and Bossert specifically over the weekend. This is what it looks like. Bolton will purge the people who may not be great in ideological terms but are still legitimate foreign policy hands. Bolton is a militaristic/nationalist. International agreements, diplomacy, alliances, let alone international institutions or international law are all so much drapery to him – frippery at best and tools to constrain U.S. power at worst. Relationships between nations are purely ones of force. He’ll act on that mindset. Expect many others to go.
Here’s a pointer to keep in mind on today’s Zuckerberg/Facebook testimony. Read More