Daily Archives
26 posts · Monday
“A self-described ’email prankster’ in the UK fooled a number of White House officials into thinking he was other officials, including an episode where he convinced the White House official tasked with cyber security that he was Jared Kushner and received that official’s private email address unsolicited,” CNN reports.
“White House officials acknowledged the incidents and said they were taking the matter seriously.”
“Three sources with knowledge of the situation tell the Daily Beast that the former Trump campaign manager and current informal adviser to the president has been let go from One America News Network, a pro-Trump cable channel pitching itself as an aspiring Fox News.”
“Lewandowski angered OANN leadership with his frequent appearances on Fox and other competitors, which one former OANN employee described as ‘a big no-no’ with the channel’s leadership. Senior staff at the network knew it was likely that Lewandowski would do other network appearances, but things came to a head when it began to appear that Lewandowski was giving more attention to competitors than his employer.”
“Senate Republicans have no plans to revive their party-line attempts to repeal Obamacare this summer, despite President Trump’s increasing frustration over the chamber’s failed attempts last week to gut the law,” Politico reports.
Said Sen. John Thune (R-SD): “Until somebody shows us a way to get that elusive 50th vote, I think it’s over. Maybe lightning will strike and something will come together but I’m not holding my breath.”
“On the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit in Germany last month, President Trump’s advisers discussed how to respond to a new revelation that Trump’s oldest son had met with a Russian lawyer during the 2016 campaign — a disclosure the advisers knew carried political and potentially legal peril,” the Washington Post reports.
“The strategy, the advisers agreed, should be for Donald Trump Jr. to release a statement to get ahead of the story. They wanted to be truthful, so their account couldn’t be repudiated later if the full details emerged.”
“But within hours, at the president’s direction, the plan changed. Flying home from Germany on July 8 aboard Air Force One, Trump personally dictated a statement in which Trump Jr. said he and the Russian lawyer had ‘primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children’ when they met in June 2016… The claims were later shown to be misleading.”
Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke said it is “laughable” to suggest he threatened Alaska’s U.S. senators over a vote by one of them involving health care, the AP reports.
Said Zinke: “Ah, you know, the moon has been characterized as other things, too. So, I think it’s laughable.”
“We’ll handle North Korea. We’re going to be able to handle them. It will be handled. We handle everything. Thank you very much.”
— President Trump, quoted by Politico.
“What I’m going to do is I’m going to eliminate everyone on the comms team and we’ll start over.”
— White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci, in an interview with the New Yorker last week, perhaps foreshadowing his own demise.
Jared Kushner told a group of interns that Donald Trump’s presidential campaign “could not have colluded with Russia because they were barely talking to each other,” Foreign Policy reports.
Said Kushner: “They thought we colluded, but we couldn’t even collude with our local offices.”
“For investigators attempting to determine whether Trump’s associates knowingly worked with Russia to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election, a defense claiming chaos and confusion might be the key difference between criminal behavior and incompetence.”
“New White House chief of staff John Kelly was so upset with how President Donald Trump handled the firing of FBI Director James Comey that Kelly called Comey afterward and said he was considering resigning,” CNN reports.
“Comey, who took Kelly’s call while traveling back from Los Angeles to Washington, responded to Kelly by telling him not to resign… The sources said Comey and Kelly are not close friends but that they had a professional relationship and a deep mutual respect for each other.”
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-UT) told Reuters “that senators for now are too divided to keep working on healthcare overhaul legislation and that he and other senior Republicans will take that message to the White House.”
President Donald Trump has been urging lawmakers not to drop the matter, despite a series of failed votes last week.
Said Hatch: “There’s just too much animosity and we’re too divided on healthcare.”
Rep. Jimmy Duncan (R-TN) announced that he would not be seeking re-election for his office next year, WVLT reports.
“Pity poor Anthony Scaramucci: reportedly getting divorced, sacked from his job after a mere 10 days — and now there’s an erroneous report that he’s dead,” the Washington Post reports.
“The blink-and-you-missed-him former White House communications director is listed as deceased in the new Harvard Law School alumni directory, which arrived in alums’ mailboxes the very week that “The Mooch” became the most talked-about guy in politics. An asterisk by the 1989 graduate’s name indicates that he was reported dead since the last directory, which was published in 2011.”
President Trump has decided to remove Anthony Scaramucci from his position as communications director, Relieving him just days after Mr. Scaramucci unloaded a crude verbal tirade against other senior members of the president’s senior staff.
This looks interesting: We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy by Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Out this fall: The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President by Bandy X. Lee.
“Since the start of Donald Trump’s presidential run, one question has quietly but urgently permeated the observations of concerned citizens: What is wrong with him?”
John Oliver can say things that network news anchors cannot.
Al Hunt: “He thinks House Speaker Paul Ryan, whom he views as weak, will voice disapproval if Mueller is removed, but then say, ‘Let’s move on to the business of the nation and tax reform.’ Trump regards Senator Lindsey Graham as a showboat who will go on a Sunday talk show and decry a ‘lawless presidency,’ then turn his attention to the need for stronger action on Syria. As for the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, Charles Grassley, who has a reputation as a curmudgeonly but straight-shooting conservative, Trump sees him as holding hearings on a constitutional crisis — and then pivoting to focus on an overview of antitrust laws.”
“Let’s hope Trump is wrong. If he takes the radical step of using an executive order to remove Mueller, there is a compelling case for an independent counsel, one who does not report to the Justice Department. Currently Mueller reports to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. Restoring the independent-counsel statute would relieve the special prosecutor from the risk of political interference.”
Politico reports that one of Rep. Seth Moulton’s (D-MA) top advisers is urging him to run for president in 2020.
“This conversation—reported here for the first time—is precisely the type of talk that’s currently causing disgusted eye-rolling among significantly more tenured Democrats in Massachusetts and Washington. They dismiss Moulton, albeit never for attribution, as gratingly ambitious, a grandstanding backbencher who has advocated for the ouster of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to make way for new, younger standard-bearers—like himself. They see Moulton’s message of country over party as not so much admirable as annoying.”
“Every politician, of course, has enemies. But it’s Moulton’s allies who make him atypical—military leaders like David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal, experienced political minds like David Gergen. These people look at Moulton and see the face of the future of the Democratic Party, a social progressive who’s fiscally more moderate. They see somebody who could chip away at the intractable ideological conflict that is crippling this country and appeal to the sorts of voters who have turned away from the party.”
First Read: “Members of the House don’t exactly have a great track record on presidential runs (No congressman has been elected president straight from the House since James Garfield in 1880), but the level of uncertainty in the Era of Trump makes it easy for an ambitious pol to say ‘why not me?’ Add that to the business and celebrity types who’ve now seen that political experience is no prerequisite for winning a national election, and you’ve got a recipe for a big and unruly presidential field. And, while united opposition to Trump is somewhat obscuring the big divides within the Democratic Party for now, a big and unruly presidential field is one surefire way to bring them to the forefront.”
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.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.
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— Glenn Reynolds, founder of Instapundit
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