We’ve got a smattering of results in now out of Mississippi. Way to soon to know much. But it at least doesn’t seem like a Hyde-Smith blow-out. She clearly seems to be underperforming in some key counties. But remember, she has LOTS of room to underperform. For the best moment by moment analysis of the county breakdowns, I recommend the Twitter list of number crunchers I follow. You can see it here. Actual results data here.
9:04 PM: Later numbers are starting to look more solid for Hyde-Smith. But they still point to a pretty competitive race.
New York’s newly-reelected quasi-permanent governor Andrew Cuomo sits down for lunch with President Trump this afternoon. I’m not really a critic of Cuomo. I voted for him. But given that it’s President Trump, and given that New York State is the locus of Trump’s greatest legal jeopardy after the Special Counsel’s office, it’s almost certainly the case that Trump will ask Cuomo to intervene to protect him from New York-based investigations.
Those investigations aren’t really under the Governor’s control. But that hardly matters to President Trump. If you’re going sit down with President Trump, you need to expect this and you need to share that information with your constituents.
Five years ago today our top story at TPM was “A Realist’s Take on Obamacare” by … well, by me. Second was “Republicans More Offended By Vatican Embassy ‘Closure’ Than the Vatican” by Tom Kludt.
Manafort maintaining JDA with Trump while ostensibly cooperating with Mueller was “freakishly unusual,” Tierney Sneed reports for Prime subscribers.
It’s easy to lose track of President Trump’s various instances of criminal behavior. Because there’s so much of it. But when he says about a possible pardon for Paul Manafort “Why would I take it off table?” he says clearly that he sees it as a tool to defend himself against the Mueller probe. And that’s a high crime in and of itself. He doesn’t have to issue the pardon to use it as such a tool.
This is a fascinating dimension of the story of the 2016 campaign. How the right’s obsessions with Hillary’s emails led them to Wikileaks.
This goes way back into the archaic age of TPM, even one of the obsessions I brought from my pre-TPM days at The American Prospect. But look at this …
Corsi has hired Larry Klayman, an attorney known for taking on long-shot conservative causes, to assist in his defense. Klayman founded and later split with conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch and has more recently represented former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore.
Read the new Michael Cohen plea agreement and criminal information, which implicates both President Trump and his family.