Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA), the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, “plans to release transcripts of its interviews with President Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., and others who participated in a June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower with a Russian lawyer allegedly promising damaging information about Hillary Clinton,” the Washington Post reports.
In a recent Politico interview, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) predicted the Trump Jr. transcript would be “explosive” if released.
Timothy O’Brien writes about how he was sued by Donald Trump for libel in 2006 for a biography called TrumpNation and witnessed the future president testifying under oath:
Trump ultimately had to admit 30 times that he had lied over the years about all sorts of stuff: how much of a big Manhattan real estate project he owned; the price of one of his golf club memberships; the size of the Trump Organization; his wealth; his speaking fees; how many condos he had sold; his debts, and whether he borrowed money from his family to avoid going personally bankrupt. He also lied during the deposition about his business dealings with career criminals.
Trump’s poor performance stemmed in part from the fact that he was being interrogated by shrewd attorneys wielding his own business and financial records against him. But there were lots of other things that went wrong as well.
Trump is impatient and has never been an avid or dedicated reader. That’s OK if you’d rather play golf, but it’s not OK when you need to absorb abundant or complex details. Lawyers typically prepare binders full of documents for their clients to pore over prior to a deposition, hoping to steel them for an intense grilling. My lawyers did that prior to my own deposition in the Trump lawsuit. But Trump didn’t appear to be well prepared when we deposed him, a weakness that my lawyers exploited (and that Mueller surely would as well).
A new Quinnipiac poll finds that the vast majority of American voters do not think President Trump is a good role model for children, 67% to 29%.
“There is almost no gender gap in grading President Trump’s standing as a role model. Every party, gender, education, age and racial group, except Republicans, say the president falls short.”
Republicans say Trump is a good role model for children by 72% to 22%.
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Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) “convened his top political advisers in Washington on Saturday for a planning meeting that included a discussion of the feasibility and shape of a possible 2020 presidential campaign,” Politico reports.
“The Democratic socialist’s response to the series of presentations, according to multiple Democrats: I haven’t yet made a decision about 2020, but I still think beating Donald Trump is the most important thing for this country. And I want to be ready if I do decide to run.”
“Since the work is concealed, there’s no way to know for sure how many hedge funds are leveraging Washington to benefit their portfolios. But interviewing insiders and scouring public records, Bloomberg Businessweek identified six major influence campaigns waged on behalf of investors in a particular stock or bond since 2006. DCI, it turns out, coordinated all six.”
“The campaigns are remarkably similar. Behind the scenes of official Washington, the company repeatedly crafted narratives portraying investors as victims of corrupt governments… If all went well, the targets of these campaigns—administration officials, media ‘thought leaders,’ and lawmakers—didn’t know they were being lobbied, much less who paid for it.”
The Doomsday Clock is now two minutes to midnight, the closest it’s been to midnight since 1953.
“The Science and Security Board for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists assesses that the world is not only more dangerous now than it was a year ago; it is as threatening as it has been since World War II… To call the world nuclear situation dire is to understate the danger — and its immediacy.”
“It’s not something that interests me. I don’t have the DNA for it.”
— Oprah Winfrey, in an interview with InStyle, on running for president.
David Wasserman: “It’s easy for opponents of gerrymandering — the drawing of political boundaries for the benefit of one party or group over another — to argue what districts shouldn’t look like. All they have to do is ridicule the absurdity of the most bizarre patchworks ever woven to elect members of Congress.”
“But it’s much more difficult to say what districts should look like, because reformers can disagree on what priorities should govern our political cartography. Should districts be drawn to be more compact? More conducive to competitive elections? More inclusive of underrepresented racial groups? Should they yield a mix of Democratic and Republican representatives that better matches the political makeup of a state? Could they even be drawn at random? These concepts can be difficult to define and often stand in tension with one another.”
Wasserman hand-drew 2,568 new congressional districts for the entire country to illustrate the challenge.
“A ‘draft’ campaign aimed at encouraging former Vice President Joe Biden to run for president could soon open a field office in Iowa, almost two years in advance of the 2020 Iowa caucuses,” the Des Moines Register reports.
A new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll finds that 60% of Americans support allowing adults to buy marijuana for personal use.
“A broad majority of Democrats — 73% — supported legalization, as well as 64% of independents. By contrast, only 43% of Republican respondents said they supported legalization. Among voters who supported President Trump in 2016, the number was even lower, at 37%.”
Jonathan Chait: “Odds are, you don’t remember any of the particular revelations contained in the stolen emails from John Podesta and the Democratic National Committee. But when WikiLeaks published them two years ago, they created a furor. The snippets of conversation, wrenched out of context, seemed to supply hidden evidence of what Hillary Clinton’s critics on both the left and the right already suspected. Here was Clinton scheming, using crass political logic and language, deriding Bernie Sanders, and acknowledging her weaknesses.”
“The email hacks did not actually reveal anything nearly so incriminating. What the episode showed was that, if hostile actors are allowed to peek into a vast trove of their target’s private thoughts, they can usually find something that sounds shady. This is exactly the method Republicans are now using to discredit the FBI.”
Former Trump adviser Roger Stone told Fox News that if President Trump follows through with plans to talk to special counsel Robert Mueller it would be a “suicide mission.”
Stone added that a “first year law student” would advise the president that Mueller is setting “an obvious perjury trap” by “taking advantage of the president’s loquaciousness.”
Meanwhile, a person with knowledge of the Mueller investigation tells New York magazine that Trump is the kind of client who would “humiliate you and destroy you because he just can’t follow directions… The man’s uncontrollable. He’s a loose cannon.”
Special counsel Robert Mueller “is moving at a far faster pace than previously known and appears to be wrapping up at least one key part of his investigation — whether President Trump obstructed justice,” Bloomberg reports.
“Mueller has quietly moved closer to those around Trump by interviewing Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, National Security Agency Director Michael Rogers, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and former FBI Director James Comey in recent weeks, officials said. His team has also interviewed CIA Director Mike Pompeo, NBC News reported.”
“Those high-level officials all have some degree of knowledge about events surrounding Trump’s decisions to fire Comey and Michael Flynn, his first national security adviser.”
The publisher of Fire and Fury announced that it has sold “1.7 million copies across all formats including hardcover, digital and audio books,” CNN reports.
“That’s a phenomenal number for any book — and even more remarkable considering almost no one had heard of Fire and Fury until three weeks ago.”
California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) told the New York Times he was ready to leave political life, “but demurred when asked if he was confident he was leaving California in good hands.”
Said Brown: “Well, that’s a loaded question. What if I say I am not confident? That’s one damn headline. So I have to say I’m confident.”
“The fact is — you people won’t say this, but I’ll say it: I was a much better candidate than her. You always say she was a bad candidate. You never say I was a good candidate. I was one of the greatest candidates. Nobody else would have beaten the Clinton machine, as crooked as it was. But I was a great candidate. Someday you’re going to say that.”
— President Trump, quoted by the Washington Post.
Washington Post: “People who have appeared before Mueller’s team say prosecutors have detailed accounts of events, sometimes to the minute, and have surprised witnesses by showing them emails or documents they were unaware that the team had or that their colleagues had written. One person said Mueller’s team has asked about Trump’s private comments around key events and how he explained decisions.”
“Among Trump’s friends, there is a prevailing view that he could damage himself by testifying under oath because he often misrepresents events and that he is listening to lawyers who are not giving him good advice.”
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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