Daily Archives
32 posts · Thursday
Gabriel Sherman: “One of the baffling things about Trumpworld giving access to Wolff: all they needed to do was call Murdoch and he would have said don’t cooperate b/c Wolff had written nasty book on him. And Jared/Trump speak to Murdoch all the time!”
Michael Wolff: “I kept waiting for that call to be made.”
“President Trump gave firm instructions in March to the White House’s top lawyer: stop the attorney general, Jeff Sessions, from recusing himself in the Justice Department’s investigation into whether Mr. Trump’s associates had helped a Russian campaign to disrupt the 2016 election,” the New York Times reports.
“Public pressure was building for Mr. Sessions, who had been a senior member of the Trump campaign, to step aside. But the White House counsel, Donald McGahn, carried out the president’s orders… Mr. McGahn was unsuccessful, and the president erupted in anger in front of numerous White House officials, saying he needed his attorney general to protect him… Mr. Trump then asked, ‘Where’s my Roy Cohn?'”
Also: “The New York Times has also learned that four days before Mr. Comey was fired, one of Mr. Sessions’s aides asked a congressional staff member whether he had damaging information about Mr. Comey, part of an apparent effort to undermine the F.B.I. director.”
Martin Wishnatsky, who worked for failed Alabama U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore (R), tells the Birmingham News that his background “is 100 percent Jewish” but that “he accepted Christ in his thirties.”
Said Wishnatsky: “I’m a Messianic Jew. That’s the term they use for a Jewish person who has accepted Christ.”
President Trump’s growing feud with Steve Bannon is threatening the former White House strategist’s leadership of the conservative Breitbart News website and upending Bannon’s plans to wage “war” on party incumbents he deemed insufficiently loyal to the White House agenda, the Wall Street Journal reports.
“Mr. Bannon’s longtime benefactors, billionaires Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah Mercer, are actively distancing from him… They and other Breitbart News Network LLC board members on Thursday were debating whether to oust Mr. Bannon as chairman, with many supportive of the move.”
Meanwhile, the Washington Post notes Rebekah Mercer issued a rare public statement: “My family and I have not communicated with Steve Bannon in many months and have provided no financial support to his political agenda, nor do we support his recent actions and statements.”
Hollywood Reporter: “After the election, I proposed to him that I come to the White House and report an inside story for later publication — journalistically, as a fly on the wall — which he seemed to misconstrue as a request for a job. No, I said. I’d like to just watch and write a book. ‘A book?’ he responded, losing interest. ‘I hear a lot of people want to write books,’ he added, clearly not understanding why anybody would. ‘Do you know Ed Klein?’– author of several virulently anti-Hillary books. ‘Great guy. I think he should write a book about me.’ But sure, Trump seemed to say, knock yourself out.”
“Since the new White House was often uncertain about what the president meant or did not mean in any given utterance, his non-disapproval became a kind of passport for me to hang around — checking in each week at the Hay-Adams hotel, making appointments with various senior staffers who put my name in the ‘system,’ and then wandering across the street to the White House and plunking myself down, day after day, on a West Wing couch.”
Rep. Gregg Harper (R-MS), who chairs the Committee on House Administration, will not run for re-election in 2018, Roll Call reports.
“The Trump administration unveiled a controversial proposal to permit drilling in most U.S. continental-shelf waters, including protected areas of the Arctic and the Atlantic, where oil and gas exploration is opposed by governors from New Jersey to Florida, nearly a dozen attorneys general, more than 100 U.S. lawmakers and the Defense Department,” the Washington Post reports.
“Under the proposal, only one of 26 planning areas in the Arctic Ocean, Pacific Ocean, Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean would be off limits to oil and gas exploration.”
James Hamblin in The Atlantic:
After more than a year of talking to doctors and researchers about whether and how the cognitive sciences could offer a lens to explain Trump’s behavior, I’ve come to believe there should be a role for professional evaluation beyond speculating from afar.
The idea that the president should not be diagnosed from afar only underscores the point that the president needs to be evaluated up close. A presidential-fitness committee … could exist in a capacity similar to the Congressional Budget Office. It could regularly assess the president’s neurologic status and give a battery of cognitive tests to assess judgment, recall, decision-making, attention — the sorts of tests that might help a school system assess whether a child is suited to a particular grade level or classroom — and make the results available.
Coming soon: The Unmaking of the President 2016: How FBI Director James Comey Cost Hillary Clinton the Presidency by Lanny J. Davis.
“Lindsey used to be a great enemy of mine, now he’s a great friend of mine.”
— President Trump, quoted by CNN, about Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC).
In a random drawing to decide a tie race in the Virginia’s 94th district, incumbent David Yancey (R) won.
The decision gives Republicans a 51 to 49 edge in the House of Delegates.
“The portrait of an unfit president in a dysfunctional administration at a time the world is characterized by mounting disarray adds up to a truly dangerous moment in history. The best that can be hoped for is drift. The worst to be feared is a disaster of some magnitude somewhere.”
— Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haass, on Twitter.
“Justice Department officials are taking a fresh look at Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state,” the Daily Beast reports.
“An ally of Attorney General Jeff Sessions who is familiar with the thinking at the Justice Department’s Washington headquarters described it as an effort to gather new details on how Clinton and her aides handled classified material. Officials’ questions include how much classified information was sent over Clinton’s server; who put that information into an unclassified environment, and how; and which investigators knew about these matters and when. The Sessions ally also said officials have questions about immunity agreements that Clinton aides may have made.”
James Hohmann: “Try to picture Barack Obama declaring that David Axelrod had ‘lost his mind,’ George W. Bush saying that Karl Rove ‘is learning that winning isn’t as easy as I make it look,’ or Bill Clinton’s lawyers sending James Carville a cease-and-desist letter threatening ‘imminent’ legal action. Conversely, imagine Robby Mook saying that Chelsea Clinton is ‘dumb as a brick.'”
“You can’t. Because all those scenarios are inconceivable. But that’s just another Wednesday in this chaotic White House, which once again plunged into crisis mode after the publication of excerpts from a forthcoming book by Michael Wolff called Fire and Fury.“
Jon Favreau: “I wasn’t as surprised about how the Republican Party has behaved toward Trump because, though I badly missed the ultimate prediction of who was going to win in the general election, I believed Trump was going to win the primary.”
“Having watched it from my perch at the White House during the Obama administration, I thought the Republican Party had rotted. The party has a base that is constantly in a frenzy because of the right-wing media. That’s the real center of gravity in that party. It’s not the Republicans in Congress; it’s not even really Donald Trump. So to me, that partisanship is wholly due to the fact that the Republican Party has been rotten to its core for some time now.”
For members: Rupert Murdoch Controls What Trump Thinks
“It seems Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner are looking to put down roots in Washington — the couple has recently been touring homes for sale,” the Washington Post reports.
“Javanka, both White House advisers in addition to being the son-in-law and daughter of the president, respectively, rent a six-bedroom home in the swanky Kalorama neighborhood — a spot they settled into last year after leaving Manhattan for Washington following President Trump’s election. The location has its upside: loads of charm, plus it’s close to their synagogue, TheShul of the Nation’s Capital, meaning the couple and their three children have a short walk on Sabbath days, when the observant family eschews transportation.”
“Downsides? The house is very close to two streets, making it highly visible.”
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.