Politico: “White House officials have homed in on President Donald Trump’s Washington transition headquarters as a likely location where chief of staff John Kelly’s personal cellphone could have been compromised in late 2016.”
Bannon’s Next Victims
Jonathan Swan: “Steve Bannon and his allies are planning a hostile takeover of the Republican Party. And only one Senator running in 2018 will get a free pass: Ted Cruz.”
“Breitbart’s Washington Editor Matt Boyle writes today that conservatives are ‘running or actively seeking out’ serious primary challengers for every incumbent Republican senator running in 2018 except the Texan.”
White House Ties New Demands to Dreamers Deal
“The White House demanded that lawmakers harden the border against thousands of children fleeing violence in Central America before President Trump will agree to any deal with Democrats that allows the young undocumented immigrants known as Dreamers to stay in the United States legally,” the New York Times reports.
“Administration officials said that Mr. Trump would seek to slam shut what they described as loopholes that encouraged parents from Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras to send their children illegally into the United States, where many of them melt into American communities and become undocumented immigrants.”
Pence Walks Out of Game Over Anthem Protest
Vice President Mike Pence left the Indianapolis Colts game at which Peyton Manning’s number is to be retired after the San Francisco 49ers’ decided to kneel in protest before the game, the Washington Post reports.
Estimates of the numbers of players who took a knee ranged from 15 to 23.
What Steve Bannon Was Thinking One Year Ago
From Devil’s Bargain by Joshua Green:
Privately, even Bannon had moments of doubt. In the depths of Trump’s worst scandal, after the Washington Post broke news of an Access Hollywood tape that captured his lewd comments about women and how he liked to “grab them by the pussy,” Bannon admitted to an associate that Trump might be done for. Yet he wasn’t despondent, not did he seem to view the possibility as a fatal setback to the broader movement. “Our back up strategy,” he said of Clinton, “is to fuck her up so bad she can’t govern.” Psyching himself up to the task, he added, “My goal is that by November eighth, when you hear her name, you’re going to throw up.”
Trump Rips Corker
President Trump attacked Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) in a Twitter tirade, alleging that the Tennessee Republican “begged” him for an endorsement, did not receive it and “didn’t have the guts” to run for reelection, the Washington Post reports.
“Trump’s public lashing of a fellow Republican comes after Corker made headlines last week when he starkly suggested that the national security team provides the president with needed adult supervision.”
Corker responded to Trump’s attacks by tweeting, “It’s a shame the White House has become an adult day care center. Someone obviously missed their shift this morning.”
[alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]Preet Bharara: “An adult day care center whose chief resident can’t count to 51…” [/alert]
Feinstein Looks Likely to Run Again
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) says she is “close” to announcing a reelection campaign — the 84-year-old’s firmest suggestion yet that she will seek a fifth full term in the Senate, Politico reports.
Said Feinstein: “I’m ready for a good fight.”
The Trump-Russia Dossier Grows In Significance
The Guardian: “Nine months after its first appearance, the set of intelligence reports known as the Steele dossier, one of the most explosive documents in modern political history, is still hanging over Washington, casting a shadow over the Trump administration that has only grown darker as time has gone by.”
“The fact that Steele’s reports are being taken seriously after lengthy scrutiny by federal and congressional investigators has far-reaching implications.”
Quote of the Day
“You know in theory, I want to focus on North Korea, I want to focus on Iran, I want to focus on other things. I don’t want to focus on fixing somebody’s back or their knee or something. Let the states do that.”
— President Trump, quoted by The Hill, saying the states should be responsible for health care.
Trump Supported the Right to Bribe Foreign Officials
New Yorker: “In February, a few weeks after Tillerson was confirmed by the Senate, he visited the Oval Office to introduce the President to a potential deputy, but Trump had something else on his mind. He began fulminating about federal laws that prohibit American businesses from bribing officials overseas; the businesses, he said, were being unfairly penalized.”
“Tillerson disagreed… Tillerson told Trump that America didn’t need to pay bribes—that we could bring the world up to our own standards.”
The Republican Party Is A Deficit Fraud
Stan Collender: “The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines committing fraud as the ‘intentional perversion of truth in order to induce another to part with something of value,’ and a fraud as ‘a person who is not what he or she pretends to be.'”
“When it comes to the federal budget, both of these definitions fit the GOP perfectly.”
“Contrary to what it still wants you to believe, the GOP — the political party that once supported “pay-as-you” go rules and balanced budget amendments to the U.S. Constitution and still routinely excoriates Democrats for what it says is their profligate ways — today is not the political party of fiscal responsibility and reduced deficits.”
“Actually, it’s not at all clear this is anything new.”
Blackwater Founder Mulls Senate Run In Wyoming
“Erik Prince, the founder of the security contractor Blackwater, is seriously considering a Republican primary challenge for a Senate seat in Wyoming, potentially adding a high-profile contender to a fledgling drive to oust establishment lawmakers with insurgents in the mold of President Trump,” the New York Times reports.
“Mr. Prince appears increasingly likely to challenge John Barrasso, a senior member of the Senate Republican leadership, according to people who have spoken to him in recent days. He has been urged to run next year by Stephen K. Bannon, who is leading the effort to shake up the Republican leadership with financial backing from the New York hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah.”
GOP Leaders Look to Avoid Fight with Base Over Guns
“Republican leaders on Capitol Hill are signaling that they want the Trump administration to write new regulations for a gun accessory that may have allowed the Las Vegas shooter to fire hundreds of rounds per minute,” The Hill reports.
“While not explicitly ruling out legislation to outlaw bump stocks, the GOP leaders’ words and actions suggest they’d rather avoid a head-on fight with the National Rifle Association — which prefers a regulatory approach to passing a new law.”
GOP Abandons Any Pretense of Fiscal Responsibility
“The Republican Party has largely abandoned its platform of fiscal restraint, pivoting sharply in a way that could add trillions of dollars in federal debt over the next decade,” the Washington Post reports.
“Cutting spending to balance the budget was almost religion to the Republican Party for much of the past eight years. But all year long, despite their control of the White House and Congress, Republicans have not taken steps to balance the budget, to overhaul entitlement programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, or to arrest the growth of the country’s $20 trillion in debt.”
Trump Legal Team Eases Resistance to Inquiry
New York Times: “White House officials once debated a scorched-earth strategy of publicly criticizing and undercutting Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Russian efforts to disrupt last year’s election. Now, President Trump’s lawyers are pursuing a different course: cooperating with the special counsel in the hope that Mr. Mueller will declare in the coming months that Mr. Trump is not a target of the Russia inquiry.”
“The president’s legal team is working swiftly to respond to requests from Mr. Mueller for emails, documents and memos, and will make White House officials available for interviews. Once Mr. Mueller has combed through the evidence, Mr. Trump’s lawyers plan to ask him to affirm that Mr. Trump is not under investigation, either for colluding with Russian operatives or for trying to obstruct justice.”
Kelly Hasn’t Returned Ex-Chiefs of Staff’s Messages
Politico: “In his first two frenetic months on the job, the retired four-star Marine general and former homeland security secretary has had minimal contact with the small club of people who have served as gatekeepers to a president before him.”
“That’s somewhat unusual. Most chiefs of staff — a position that has been described by people who have survived it as daily exercise in mimicking Edvard Munch’s painting ‘The Scream’ — have generally looked to others who have been through the fire as a resource.”
‘The Resistance’ Upends Democratic Politics
New York Times: “It started as a scrappy grass-roots protest movement against President Trump, but now the so-called resistance is attracting six- and seven-figure checks from major liberal donors, posing an insurgent challenge to some of the left’s most venerable institutions — and the Democratic Party itself.”
“The jockeying between groups, donors and operatives for cash and turf is occurring mostly behind the scenes. But it has grown acrimonious at times, with upstarts complaining they are being boxed out by a liberal establishment that they say enables the sort of Democratic timidity that paved the way for the Trump presidency.”
“The tug of war — more than the lingering squabbles between supporters of Hillary Clinton and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont — foreshadows a once-in-a-generation reorganization of the American left that could dictate the tactics and ideology of the Democratic Party for years to come.”
How to Win Justice Kennedy’s Vote
Jeffrey Toobin: “The secret to advocacy before the contemporary Supreme Court is no secret: it’s all about pandering to Justice Anthony Kennedy. With the other eight Justices evenly split between liberals and conservatives, lawyers in controversial cases spend most of their energy indulging the idiosyncratic passions of the rangy Californian who sits beside the Chief Justice.”
“That means, for the most part, talking about the First Amendment. In his thirty years on the bench, Kennedy has displayed an almost Pavlovian receptivity to claims of infringement on the freedom of speech.”