Jack Goldsmith was kind enough to engage with my reply to his piece on potential criminal investigations of Donald Trump. Here’s his reply to mine. I’m going to take some time to work through the points Goldsmith makes. But I will try to address them in another post that I’ll publish soon. One immediate thought I had on a cursory read was that Goldsmith rightly makes a distinction between potential crimes committed while a person is president and things that come after. But it seems to me that one of the key complexities and unique dangers of Trump is that he is not allowing us that neat distinction. Much of his wrongdoing is continuous from one phase to the next. Indeed, in the last couple days he has grown increasingly explicit in threatening to retaliate against Garland, Biden, et al., in a hypothetical future term as President. In any case, more soon.

Former Vice President Mike Pence is walking a sort of unprecedented fine line — saying a bunch of stuff that’s just subtly enough at odds with Trump that he makes headlines, but not so harsh in breaking with Trump that he Cheneys himself.

At least two of his remarks today provided an excellent example of this.

We’ve known that Wisconsin would be a key Senate battleground this year. But until just recently we didn’t know who the Democratic nominee was. Now we know it’s Democrat Mandela Barnes, who had essentially cleared the field by the time of the primary vote. A new Marquette Law poll just came out — this is Charles Franklin’s poll, which is the premium in-state poll. It shows Barnes up by seven points over Johnson 51%-44%. In June the same poll found a 46%-44% race. That difference is likely a mix of shifting electoral landscape and Barnes consolidating potential supporters after the primary ended.

I do not count Johnson out. He’s won two straight elections he was not expected to win, both against former Sen. Russ Feingold. He’s a canny and able politician. But unless this poll is a significant outlier Wisconsin looks like the strong pick up opportunity Democrats were hoping for. For an incumbent to be running behind a challenger who has crossed the 50% threshold is a perilous place to be.