“Amid raids by the FBI and IRS and renewed calls for her to resign, Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh (D) remains in poor health and is not ‘lucid’ enough to decide whether to resign, her attorney said late Thursday afternoon,” the Baltimore Sun reports.
“She could, however, decide next week.”
“Senate Republicans see the special counsel’s report — with its stark evidence that President Trump repeatedly impeded the investigation into Russian election interference — as a summons for collective inaction.” the New York Times reports.
“Only Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, called out the president’s behavior as ‘sickening.’ … Yet no Republican, not even Mr. Romney, a political brand-name who does not face his state’s voters until 2022, has pressed for even a cursory inquiry into the findings by the special counsel, Robert Mueller.”
“A Texas mayor on the U.S.-Mexico border was charged Thursday with trying to cheat his way into office through an illegal voting scheme in a region long plagued by public corruption scandals,” the AP reports.
Edinburg Mayor Richard Molina “unseated the city’s longtime mayor by about 1,200 votes in 2017, and prosecutors say Molina tried to tip the scales by having voters change their addresses to places they didn’t live, including an apartment complex he owned.
“A controversial bill that has received national attention over criticism that it would criminalize voter registration efforts was approved in the state Senate on Thursday,” the Tennessean reports.
“If the bill is enacted, Tennessee would become the first state to threaten voter registration efforts with civil penalties for incomplete forms.”
“President Trump has ordered his administration to prepare a push for new arms-control agreements with Russia and China after bristling at the cost of a 21st-century nuclear arms race,” the Washington Post reports.
“The aim of the nascent effort… is to bring Russian nuclear weapons unregulated by treaties under new limits and persuade China to join an arms-control pact limiting or verifying its capabilities for the first time.”
“Top White House officials are imploring key Republicans to move quickly and raise the debt ceiling, concerned that a prolonged impasse could raise the chances of a misstep that damages the economy later this year,” the Washington Post reports.
“The requests have taken on new urgency because other budget discussions with Capitol Hill have broken down, leaving policymakers at a loss for ways to avoid a pileup of dangerous deadlines in September that could impact the stock market, labor market and economic growth.”
“But the effort appears to be getting little traction so far, in part because some Democrats are insisting that any debt ceiling deal come as part of a package of changes that raises spending levels after October.”
Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney told The Atlantic that he is confident that President Trump has a winning message ahead of the 2020 election.
Explained Mulvaney: “The economy is still really, really good, and I’ve told him many, many times that, you know, people vote their pocketbooks. What does Clinton say? ‘It’s the economy, stupid.’ I still think that’s the case.”
He added: “So I think that’s our A argument. And ‘We’re not socialists’ would be our B argument.”
In an interview with The Atlantic, acting White House chief of staff “cheerfully extolled his relationship with Trump, joking that he’d gained 10 pounds since becoming chief.”
Said Mulvaney: “I eat more with the president now. He eats hamburgers all the time.”
Former Vice President Joe Biden called Anita Hill earlier this month to express his regret over “what she endured” testifying against Justice Clarence Thomas at the 1991 Supreme Court hearings that put a spotlight on sexual harassment of women, the New York Times reports.
“But Ms. Hill, in an interview Wednesday, said she left the conversation feeling deeply unsatisfied and declined to characterize his words to her as an apology. She said she is not convinced that Mr. Biden truly accepts the harm he caused her and other women who suffered sexual harassment and gender violence.”
Said Hill: “I cannot be satisfied by simply saying I’m sorry for what happened to you. I will be satisfied when I know there is real change and real accountability and real purpose.”
Boston Globe: “A significant chunk of Rep. Seth Moulton’s (D-MA) presidential announcement video this week retold the story of his upset victory five years ago over an 18-year incumbent. He framed the moment as launching his political career by bucking the establishment.”
“Now, as Moulton travels the country, back home on the North Shore the man he defeated in that race is weighing a rematch. Friends and former aides to John Tierney have been trying to convince Tierney to run again for the seat that he won in 1996 and eight times thereafter.”
A three-judge panel ruled that Michigan must redraw legislative and congressional districts for the 2020 elections because Republican lawmakers unconstitutionally gerrymandered current maps, the Detroit News reports.
“The blockbuster ruling requires Michigan to conduct special state Senate elections for certain seats next year, cutting in half the four-year terms that current lawmakers are now serving.”
Rick Hasen has more on the ruling.
Judge Andrew Napolitano, a senior judicial analyst for Fox News, wrote an editorial arguing that President Trump has indeed obstructed justice.
“The president’s job is to enforce federal law. If he had ordered its violation to save innocent life or preserve human freedom, he would have a moral defense. But ordering obstruction to save himself from the consequences of his own behavior is unlawful, defenseless and condemnable.”
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D), “who has raised millions of dollars during his campaigns over the years, has indicated to associates in recent days that he will be opening his vast and powerful fundraising network exclusively to Joe Biden,” CNBC reports.
“Cuomo’s support could be a game-changer for Biden. While the former vice president has consistently led Democratic primary polls, he has been aggressively courting donors in a bid to catch up to an already crowded primary field that has a head start in the fundraising game. New York State Board of Elections data show Cuomo has raked in $100 million in campaign contributions since he first ran for governor in 2010. At least 80 percent of his backers have given him $10,000 or more.”
A source tells WJZ that Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh was at her home when the FBI raids began this morning, “but has since left the state.”
Former White House advisor Omarosa Manigault-Newman told MSBNC that White House officials told her and other Trump campaign officials not to share evidence with special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigators.
Said Manigault-Newman: “We should really not just focus on what he is telling people to do or say, but how he’s asked people to destroy documents, to destroy e-mails, in my case two boxes of campaign-related materials the White House still has in their possession that they claim they don’t have or don’t know what happened to it.”
Motherboard: “At a Twitter all-hands meeting on March 22, an employee asked a blunt question: Twitter has largely eradicated Islamic State propaganda off its platform. Why can’t it do the same for white supremacist content?”
“An executive responded by explaining that Twitter follows the law… With every sort of content filter, there is a tradeoff, he explained. When a platform aggressively enforces against ISIS content, for instance, it can also flag innocent accounts as well, such as Arabic language broadcasters. Society, in general, accepts the benefit of banning ISIS for inconveniencing some others, he said.”
“Twitter hasn’t taken the same aggressive approach to white supremacist content because the collateral accounts that are impacted can, in some instances, be Republican politicians… The employee argued that, on a technical level, content from Republican politicians could get swept up by algorithms aggressively removing white supremacist material. Banning politicians wouldn’t be accepted by society as a trade-off for flagging all of the white supremacist propaganda, he argued.”
Lara Trump, President Trump’s daughter-in-law and a campaign official, told Fox Business that “the downfall of Germany” was Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to allow refugees into the country.
Said Trump: “It was one of the worst things that ever happened to Germany.”
“North Korea issued a $2 million bill for the hospital care of comatose American Otto Warmbier, insisting that a U.S. official sign a pledge to pay it before being allowed to fly the University of Virginia student from Pyongyang in 2017,” the Washington Post reports.
“The presentation of the invoice — not previously disclosed by U.S. or North Korean officials — was extraordinarily brazen even for a regime known for its aggressive tactics… But the main U.S. envoy sent to retrieve Warmbier signed an agreement to pay the medical bill on instructions passed down from President Trump.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
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