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Rudy Giuliani says collusion is not a crime and in any case the collusion ended before the election.
Rudes: "Collusion is not a crime. It was over with before the election." pic.twitter.com/YHAj8SyZK1
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) December 16, 2018
TPM Reader PB has this idea about what is behind Rudy Giuliani’s big revelation yesterday about the Trump Tower Moscow deal that apparently remained live through the 2016 election.
The last time Giuliani admitted a fact that was not publicly known, it was to get ahead of the Stormy Daniels story before it was disclosed in a likely indictment of Cohen. It seems safe to assume that he is revealing the fact that Trump was negotiating the Trump Tower Moscow deal/bribe in the closing days of the election for the same reason.
Over the last week I’ve seen a handful of those ‘predictions for 2019’ articles by people who write about journalism and the journalism business. So I thought I’d add my own take, with a special emphasis on our own plans for 2019 and how the two things relate to each other. Read More
The Flynn sentencing hearing is underway. TPM’s Tierney Sneed is in the courtroom. We’ll bring you the details as they develop.
Late Update: 11:40 PM: Judge Sullivan was not impressed by Flynn’s sentencing memo, made him question whether he was actually accepting responsibility or indeed thought he was guilty. The Judge put the question to him and he said that he knew he couldn’t lie and was in fact guilty.
White House suggesting Trump may be going low energy on his Wall government shutdown threat.
We still don’t know what the sentence is. But Judge Emmet Sullivan is positively roasting General Flynn in court right now, all but calling him a traitor and goading prosecutors to say Flynn should lose credit for cooperation for trying to evade responsibility for his crimes in his sentencing memo. This raises a basic question. Why did Flynn try to claim he was set up by the FBI in his sentencing memo? Flynn himself could be naive or impulsive. But Flynn has top flight legal representation. Why would they do that? Read More
For all the fireworks and all the details about the Turkish lobbying, the big issue here remains why Flynn was lying in the first place. He lied for a reason. It went to the heart of the pay offs to Russia after the election and indeed backchannel communications prior to the election.
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If you’ve been in the news business long enough, either as a producer or a consumer, you know that it doesn’t always – maybe doesn’t mainly – work in logical or linear ways. Last night CNN’s Chris Cuomo went live with a copy of the letter of intent President Trump signed to build a Trump Moscow development project in October 2015. Read More