It seems conceivable, though highly unlikely, that there’s an innocent explanation for the National Parks Service decision to keep a small site tied to President Trump’s hotel open while everything else is closed or unstaffed. Assuming it is what it looks like, another example of the federal government being harnessed to the personal finances of the President, it will be just a more minor example of what we’ll learn far more about in the years to come. There is so little transparency in this administration, so much corruption that has become commonplace, that I don’t think we can really even imagine just how deep it all runs.

Of course, budgeting a few parks rangers to main this clock tower is more a symbol of the problem than the end of the world in itself. But there’s every reason to believe that the whole country’s foreign policy is being harnessed to the President’s personal financial interests as well.

It is telling and entirely predictable that the first time President Trump is seriously checked by another branch of government he threatens to declare a national emergency and essentially rule by decree. As history teachers us, while authoritarianism usually sells itself on efficiency and power, it is far more often paired with failure and incompetence. Read More

Late last night I saw this Twitter video clip of Gov. Jerry Brown (D-CA) leaving the governor’s office (presumably?) for the last time as Governor of California. It made me consider his remarkable and uncanny public career and my own memories of it, which now stretch over the course of a lifetime.

? @JerryBrownGov departs the Governor’s Office (with some help from Cali and @ColusaBrown) pic.twitter.com/Euoa7A17fM

— Gov. Brown Press Office (@GovPressOffice) January 7, 2019

Edmund Gerald “Jerry” Brown, Jr. was sworn in as Governor of California in January 1975, about six months before my family moved to California in the summer of that year. He managed this feat at the remarkably young age of 36, taking over from Ronald Reagan and doing so, in no small part because his father, Edmund G. “Pat” Brown had been Governor from 1959 to 1967. Brown then had the audacity to turn around and immediately run for President in 1976 and then again in 1980. Read More

Trump administration officials and President Trump especially lie all the time. But this is one of their most pernicious and recent lies. This segment on MSNBC from a few moments ago does a good job breaking down the lie.

A good breakdown of one of the President's and DHS Secretary's most recent and pernicious lies: suspected terrorists coming over the southern border. pic.twitter.com/dyVf9oNJWe

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) January 7, 2019

I’ve always resisted comparisons between Adolph Hitler and Donald Trump and between Trump’s election and the onset of fascism.  Trump is not plotting genocide. The geopolitics are entirely different.  But as I was recently reading Volker Ullrich’s terrific biography of Hitler (Hitler: The Ascent, 1889-1939), I was reminded of a certain similarity between the men, and it’s relevant to the current battle over the border wall. Read More

In his filing today Manafort’s lawyers said he met with Konstantin Kilimnik in Madrid “during a period when Mr. Manafort was managing a U.S. presidential campaign.” Depending on how one interprets those words, that would either be between March and August or June and August 2016. His spokesman just clarified that they misspoke. He now claims it was in January 2017.

The new Manafort filing refers to Manafort conceding that he had discussed a “peace plan” for Ukraine with Konstantin Kilimnik on “more than one occasion”. What peace plan? Felix Sater says it’s not the same one he and Michael Cohen met with that Ukrainian lawmaker about. But Josh Kovensky points out to me that it’s almost certainly this one, which was reported in January 2017 as Kilimnik’s plan. Read More

David Axelrod said a couple days ago that the the Oval Office format is the worst format for President Trump. Boy, is that right. It’s scripted. It plays to his woodenness reading a script. He doesn’t get the energy from a crowd. This was the same script he’s been reading from for months. If anything, it was more muddled because his speechwriters dropped a number of the more jarring lies. I think this meant basically nothing politically. At the same time, Pelosi and Schumer actually presented their case pretty clearly and well.

There’s your collusion. Manafort had Kilimnik pass the polling data to Oleg Deripaska.

From the Times …

Mr. Manafort asked Mr. Gates to tell Mr. Kilimnik to pass the data to Oleg V. Deripaska, a Russian oligarch who is close to the Kremlin and who has claimed that Mr. Manafort owed him money from a failed business venture, the person said. It is unclear whether Mr. Manafort was acting at the campaign’s behest or independently, trying to gain favor with someone to whom he was deeply in debt. Read More

I think the hoopla over President Trump’s Oval Office address tonight has temporarily blunted or distracted people from the full import of what the Times just reported about the Trump campaign polling data. They may even have missed some of it themselves since they buried that nugget well down into the piece. Paul Manafort was secretly sharing confidential campaign polling data with a top Russian oligarch who is closely tied to Vladimir Putin. To me this really ends the debate about ‘collusion’, to the extent there still was one. It seems bigger than the Trump Tower meeting. Read More