Daily Archives
36 posts · Wednesday
White House staffers have been told they can no longer use personal cell phones anymore, according to the New York Times.
Axios: “Leaks were likely a motivating factor, particularly as the announcement comes after today’s chaos over a forthcoming book.”
“Lawyers for President Trump sent a cease-and-desist letter to Trump’s former senior strategist Stephen Bannon, arguing he had violated a non-disclosure agreement in speaking about his time on the campaign and in Trump’s most trusted inner circle,” the Washington Post reports.
ABC News: “During the campaign, then-candidate Trump had all campaign staff sign a non-disclosure agreement which required all staff, according to campaign sources, to refrain from any disparaging comments against the candidate, his family or the Trump campaign and organization.”
“Lawmakers concerned about President Trump’s mental state summoned Yale University psychiatry professor Dr. Bandy X. Lee to Capitol Hill last month for two days of briefings about his recent behavior,” Politico reports.
“In private meetings with more than a dozen members of Congress held on Dec. 5 and 6, Lee briefed lawmakers — all Democrats except for one Republican senator, whom Lee declined to identify.”
Lee’s professional warning: “He’s going to unravel, and we are seeing the signs.”
President Trump “started 2018 in a fury partly fueled by anger at his legal team for offering shifting timelines about when the Russia investigation would end,” CNN reports.
“Trump’s lawyers held talks with members of Mueller’s team a few days before Christmas… and are no longer putting specific dates on when they expect the investigation to end.”
President Trump “is dissolving a controversial commission that was charged with investigating his unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud during the 2016 election,” Politico reports.
Washington Post: “The commission met only twice amid a series of lawsuits seeking to curb its authority and claims by Democrats that it was stacked to recommend voting restrictions favorable to the president’s party.”
Rick Hasen: “The Commission was poorly organized and conceived. It tried to operate to a large extent in secrecy, without recognition that doing so would violate the federal laws that govern presidential commissions and that protect privacy. It made rookie, boneheaded mistakes about handling documents used by the Commission, again in violation of federal law. It did not seem to have an end-game.”
“Billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel wants to create a new conservative cable news network and his representatives have engaged the powerful Mercer family to help with funding,” BuzzFeed News reports.
“Thiel, a Facebook board member who secretly funded lawsuits to bring down Gawker Media, had originally explored a plan to create the network along with Roger Ailes, the late founder of Fox News, according to a soon-to-be published book by journalist Michael Wolff. But BuzzFeed News has learned that Thiel has continued looking into fashioning a Fox News competitor even after May 2017 death of Ailes.”
The Associated Press reports Steve Bannon “was not surprised or particularly bothered by the blowback” from Michael Wolff’s new book.
“Bannon vowed on Wednesday to continue his ‘war’ on the Republican establishment and also predicted that, after a cooling-off period, he’d continue to speak with Trump, who likes to maintain contact with former advisers even after he fires and sometimes disparages them.””
The Atlantic: “There are sounds, for those who can hear them, of the preliminary and muffled drumbeats of war. The Chinese are reported to be preparing refugee camps along North Korean border. Resources are being shifted to observe and analyze the North Korean military. Mundane logistical processes of moving, stockpiling and updating critical items and preparing military personnel are under way. Only the biggest indicator—the evacuation of American dependents from South Korea—has yet to flash red, but, in the interest of surprise, that may not happen.”
“America’s circumspect and statesmanlike Secretary of Defense, James Mattis, talks ominously of storm clouds gathering over Korea, while the commandant of the Marine Corps simply says ‘I hope I’m wrong, but there’s a war coming.'”
“Trump liked to say that one of the things that made life worth living was getting your friends’ wives into bed.”
— From Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, page 23.
The book, due out next week, just hit #1 on Amazon’s bestseller list.
“Steve Bannon privately expressed ambivalence about Donald Trump as a presidential candidate before taking over his campaign, calling Trump a ‘narcissist’ and stating that he didn’t care if Trump won,” according to emails obtained by BuzzFeed News.
“The email exchange, during Bannon’s first run as executive chairman of Breitbart News, is of fresh relevance after President Trump lambasted his former chief strategist.”
Rep. Blake Farenthold (R-TX) “has not yet repaid $84,000 in taxpayer money for a settlement reached with a former aide who accused him of sexual harassment and other improper conduct, despite the Texas Republican’s statement late last year saying he would do so,” CNN reports.
Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort has filed a lawsuit challenging the authority of special counsel Robert Mueller, The Hill reports.
Axios: “Manafort wants a judge to rule that Mueller can’t bring charges on any matters unrelated to Russian election meddling, an outcome that could be of significant importance to other’s in Trump’s orbit.”
Gallup announced it is discontinuing its daily tracking poll of presidential approval, the latest cutback of the company’s public polling.
The poll will now be done weekly.
Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) told a Utah radio station that he would support Mitt Romney if he decides to enter the race to replace him when he retires at the end of his term.
Said Hatch: “I didn’t call him before I made this announcement, but I did call him a while back and explored with him what he had on his mind, and I won’t discuss what we discussed. But there’s no question that he loves Utah and wants to support Utah anyway he can. And I’m hopeful he’ll run, because he would be just fine. And he would certainly be somebody who I think could succeed me into the job.”
He added: “If Mitt decides to run, he knows he’ll have my support.”
President Trump released a blistering statement on former adviser Stephen Bannon’s comments in Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House:
Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my Presidency. When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind. Steve was a staffer who worked for me after I had already won the nomination by defeating seventeen candidates, often described as the most talented field ever assembled in the Republican party.
Now that he is on his own, Steve is learning that winning isn’t as easy as I make it look. Steve had very little to do with our historic victory, which was delivered by the forgotten men and women of this country. Yet Steve had everything to do with the loss of a Senate seat in Alabama held for more than thirty years by Republicans. Steve doesn’t represent my base—he’s only in it for himself.
Steve pretends to be at war with the media, which he calls the opposition party, yet he spent his time at the White House leaking false information to the media to make himself seem far more important than he was. It is the only thing he does well. Steve was rarely in a one-on-one meeting with me and only pretends to have had influence to fool a few people with no access and no clue, whom he helped write phony books.
John Cassidy: “This is yet another argument for engaging in the political process in 2018. But staying engaged isn’t the same thing as being permanently addled, obsessing over every offensive Trump tweet, or lumping everyone who voted for him in with alt-right activists and neo-Nazis.”
“It means exercising patience, ignoring some of his verbal provocations (many of which are attempts at distraction), pointing out that his policies are hurting the very people he is claiming to represent, and, above all, committing to beating him and his allies politically. As the recent elections in Alabama and Virginia demonstrated, Trump and the Republicans can be defeated at the ballot box. Surely, the best way to survive the second year of the Trump era is to work calmly and deliberately toward that objective.”
“The chance that Don Jr. did not walk these Jumos up to his father’s office of the 26th floor is zero.”
— Steve Bannon, quoted in Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House:, about the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer.
Trump has denied ever meeting the Russian participants.
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.