Seems very clear that Jim Jordan pressured his his ex-boss, former head wrestling coach Russ Hellickson to get his accusers to recant. This is hardly surprising since Jordan is orchestrating a far-ranging cover up of his lies and role in the original case. He even has a website attacking his accusers and a full time conservative PR firm helping him manage the cover up. One of the accusers says Hellickson told him, “I will defend Jimmy until I have to put my hand on a Bible and be asked to tell the truth, then Jimmy will be on his own.” Read More
Do we remember that Mike Pence was Paul Manafort’s choice for Veep? Trump was set on Chris Christie and didn’t seem terribly comfortable with Pence. But Manafort was dead set on it and even resorted to tricking Trump about mechanical problems on his plane to keep Trump in Indianapolis to seal the deal with Pence.
From a former federal public corruption prosecutor …
I call BS on this [New York Times] story about Trump fighting against the advice of his lawyers to go ahead with an interview with the Special Counsel. It is truly laughable and I question the NYT’s judgment here in biting on this story hook, line and sinker. This is like the guy who picks a fight with the toughest kid on the playground, but tells his friends to make sure to act like they’re holding him back. Every criminal defense lawyer with a client that is going to assert the 5th and not agree to an interview says, “my client desperately wants to tell the government everything he knows, but I’m not going to let him go in.” Rudy is pretending to be the guy standing in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square trying to stop Trump from testifying. This is all a show. Rudy just doesn’t want to say that the President of the United States is going to invoke his 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination.
Head of all US intelligence says he’s not sure what happened in Helsinki.
Director of National Intelligence on what happened in Helsinki: "I'm not in a position to either understand fully or talk about what happened in Helsinki." pic.twitter.com/NVsMfEvKPZ
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) August 2, 2018
I struggle with how much we should delve into these rabbit holes. They are to a real extent simply conflagrations whipped up to serve the distraction interests of the White House. But this seems worth listening to and preserving. CNN’s Jim Acosta presses Sarah Sanders to agree that the press is not the “enemy of the people.” She responds with an anti-press tirade.
Video after the jump. Read More
Yesterday I got my first look at the new front page publishing system I mentioned in this post over the weekend. It’s an amazing feat of coding skill, both from a technical perspective as well from a journalistic and aesthetic one. That pride and excitement is mainly an internal matter for our team. Most of you are rightly concerned not with the inner workings of the machine but the final product. But what really excites me about bringing this online is that I believe it will greatly enhance our ability to bring you the news, to do what we do. Read More
The first immunized witness to testify against Paul Manafort has finished her direct examination. They don’t give out immunity for nothing.
With a rising challenge from Beto O’Rourke, Ted Cruz is focusing on constituent service and the personal touch to win a second term as Texas Senator.
Holy Crap, This Second Ted Cruz Ad Is Even More Absurd Than the One From this Afternoon. pic.twitter.com/2kBQp5vALD
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) August 4, 2018
TPM Reader JB makes a very good point in this email. It’s still generally assumed that even if the Trump Tower meeting shows intense desire to collude, it was a bust. Nothing actually came of it. They tried to collude. But they couldn’t make it happen. Literally everything else that the Trump Team has told us about this meeting – including that it happened – has been a lie. It seems almost absurd to assume this one critical claim is true.
As it becomes more and more obvious that Donald Trump knew about the 2016 meeting between Don, Jr., Kusher, Manafort, and Veselnitskaya, we keep hearing again even in the mainstream media that the meeting was a bust, because Veselnitskaya produced no dirt on Clinton, which somehow figures into the exoneration story. Maybe the Trump team was trying to collude, but they didn’t actually collude.
Prosecutorial strategy in a financial crime case is not something I know anything about. What’s more, I haven’t been following the minutiae of the trial as closely as the other members of our team who are devoted to it for the duration (mainly Tierney Sneed, Caitlin MacNeal and David Kurtz, though most of the team is involved at least in a support role). But last week, as there was more and more evidence of high living, I did have a few moments where I wondered: ‘God, I really hope they don’t blow this.’ Subsequent testimony at the end of the week I think clarified the point of that earlier testimony and got on to the more factual part of the case. (To be clear, I think this was probably clear all along to more knowledgable trial watchers.) But it wasn’t until I say this note from TPM Reader JW that I really grasped the high risk nature of Manafort’s defense strategy …
Even at the earliest stages of trial, we are seeing how incredibly risky is for Manafort to blame Gates for criminal wrongdoing. The “blame Gates” strategy means that Manafort is effectively admitting that criminal conduct occurred at his firm and in his own name. Tax evasion? Money laundering? Yes, taxes were evaded and money was laundered, but it was all Gates! Manafort knew nothing! This is a train wreck of an argument.