August 4, 2017

“President Trump has let almost six months pass without holding a solo press conference. Now he’s heading off on a two-week vacation with no immediate plans to meet the press,” CNN reports.

“So how does Trump’s presser record compare to his predecessors? At this point in 2009, President Obama had held 9 solo pressers, many of them about the country’s economic recovery.”

“At the same point in their respective presidencies, George W. Bush had held 3 solo pressers; Bill Clinton had held 8; George H.W. Bush had held 18; Ronald Reagan had held 3; and Jimmy Carter had held 12.”

Ryan Lizza: “Grand juries don’t investigate hoaxes, and there are rules against using them for anything resembling a political witch hunt. As several former federal prosecutors told me, the grand jury is significant because it means that Mueller is in the midst of a ‘predicated’ criminal investigation. That is, he has reached the point where he has evidence of criminal conduct.”

“At the same time, the fact that Mueller is using a grand jury does not mean indictments are imminent or even a certainty. In the Clinton e-mail case, a grand jury was impaneled to issue some subpoenas—a fact that was only recently discovered—but it was never used to issue any indictments.”

First Read: “Speaking of McMaster, he’s become the new Reince Priebus — the administration official that some Trump diehards love to hate. As we learned yesterday, for example, McMaster has concluded that Susan Rice did nothing wrong — a report that sparked outrage from those who have tried to place Rice at the center of anti-Trump conspiracy theories. And like Priebus, the folks who think McMaster is undermining the president will have plenty of motivation to make his life miserable to try to push him out.”

A new Greenberg Quinlan Rosner poll of the top 99 battleground congressional districts for 2018 shows voters in these swing districts strongly oppose any move by President Trump to fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller, 60% to 29%.

An overwhelming 86-10% majority says Trump should not be allowed to pardon himself from criminal prosecution – a possibility the President and his team reportedly examined.

First Read: “For presidents of the United States, August almost always stinks. Whether it’s because key allies are out of town and unplugged, because the White House support network is thinner or because the nation’s woes seem a little more acute in Washington’s swampy August weather, presidents often get mired in controversies or crises — and often mishandle them — in the dog days of August.”