Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee spent the afternoon beating up on John Dean of Watergate fame. Tierney Sneed was there.
Steve Waldman looks at how “religious freedom” got turned on its head.
TPM Reader CR is baffled at what people’s problem is about Joe Biden’s comments on Republicans. I will say I both get why people are going bonkers and also don’t think it is a big deal – unless it’s actually Biden’s political take on the current situation.
What’s weird is that past comments suggest it’s not. Back under Obama he was saying over and over: this isn’t the old GOP we could negotiate with. The reality is it’s a solid general election message and my assumption/hope is that that’s why Biden’s saying it and that he wants (for good reasons) to shift now to a general election posture. My concern is that he might believe it.
Here’s CR’s take …
President Trump is being pressed to back up claims he has a secret agreement for Mexico to buy billions of additional American agricultural goods, a claim Mexico denies. Here he holds up a blank piece of paper to prove the secret agreement exists.
Trump holds up blank paper with claimed secret agreement with Mexico. pic.twitter.com/8RZMHjQKq9
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) June 11, 2019
Trump later explained that the secret deal “goes into effect when I want it to.”
Earlier this morning I published some reader emails and my own commentary about the electability issue. As I noted here, to me the other candidates besides Biden need to show over the remainder of 2019 that they’re strong candidates against Donald Trump. In an email I hadn’t published yet, TPM Reader MO wrote, “I’m happy to grab some popcorn and watch for the next six months for any of these candidates to prove themselves as Trump-beaters. So far only Biden is making the case.” That’s where I am. But a new Quinnipiac Poll just came out which may start to change the equation. Biden is still the strongest contender against Trump. But the others are beating him pretty handily too.
Here’s a fascinating and disturbing part of Trump’s impromptu presser early this afternoon. It got less play than the Biden trash talk or the Mexico “secret agreement.” You had to know the backstory, which I didn’t, to even understand what was being said. Yesterday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Kim Jong Un’s half-brother, Kim Jong Nam was a CIA source. This Kim was assassinated by poison in 2017 in Malaysia, by all accounts by the North Korean government. He had lived in exile for a number of years. Trump got asked about this and he responded by pledging to Kim Jong Un that he would not allow the CIA to spy in this way “under my auspices.”
In essence he was pledging not to spy on North Korea and arguably apologizing for whatever relationship the CIA had with Kim Jon Nam.
Video after the jump …
President Trump is still angry about the prospect of impeachment. But he’s apparently intrigued with the idea that the battle might actually help boost his approval numbers as it did President Clinton more than 20 years ago. As you know, I think impeaching the President now is unwise, but not because I think or fear that it will boost him politically. We can’t know the future. But the notion that getting impeached will somehow help Trump is mainly based on poor memories or in some cases no memories of just what happened back in 1998. More than poor memories, it’s tied to many people’s inability to grapple with how badly they got the Starr investigation wrong.
Let’s review some history.
Looks like Mike Flynn may be doubling down on a presidential pardon. He has hired a new lawyer not from the small circle of high-powered white-collar criminal defense attorneys in DC, but with pro-Trump/anti-Mueller bona fides.
Quinnipiac has new poll data about impeachment out today. It shows among other things the public has pretty different takes on the presidency than what is treated largely as a given within elite opinion.
One big takeaway is that the public does not support impeaching the President: 61% to 33% say Congress should not begin the process of impeaching the President. That obviously includes lots of Republicans who are firmly against it. Democrats support it, unsurprisingly, but there’s significant opposition even there. 62% of Democrats favor but 31% oppose. African-Americans are the only demographic group that supports impeachment, 63% to 31%.
But that’s not the whole story. American voters overwhelmingly believe a sitting President should be able to face criminal charges while he or she serves as President, just like every other American.
Looks like Mike Flynn may be going full Papadopoulos after all. Or maybe at least half Papadopoulos.