“The Trump administration has released records of the FBI’s surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr., despite opposition from the slain Nobel laureate’s family and the civil rights group that he led until his 1968 assassination,” the AP reports.
“The release involves an estimated 200,000 pages of records that had been under a court-imposed seal since 1977, when the FBI first gathered the records and turned them over to the National Archives and Records Administration.”
“Dogged for weeks over his administration’s refusal to release the Epstein files, President Trump spent the weekend posting on social media about, well, anything else,” the New York Times reports.
“On Sunday, the president railed against Senator Adam Schiff, Democrat of California, long a prime target. He attacked Samantha Power, the former administrator of USAID. He posted a fake video of former President Barack Obama being arrested and a fake photo of Mr. Obama and members of his administration in prison garb. He threatened to derail a deal for a new football stadium for the Washington Commanders if the team did not take back its old name, the Redskins.”
“Mr. Trump even at one point posted a video compilation of 25 wacky and incredible stunts, such as a fake video of a woman catching a cobra midstrike with her bare hand.”
“I know exactly what happened in that debate. He’s 81 years old. He’s tired as shit. They give him Ambien to be able to sleep, and he gets up on the stage and looks like a deer in the headlights.”
— Hunter Biden, quoted by New York Magazine, explaining his father’s disastrous performance in his debate with Donald Trump.
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“Democrats will force another vote on releasing Jeffrey Epstein-related documents during a Rules Committee meeting Monday afternoon, pressing Republicans yet again on the matter before lawmakers leave this week for August recess,” Politico reports.
Said Rules Committee ranking member Jim McGovern (D-MA): “We’re going to give them one last chance to do the right thing before their August recess break.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told Politico she is removing the Wall Street Journal from the pool of reporters covering the president’s weekend trip to Scotland.
The move follows the Journal’s report alleging that President Donald Trump sent a sexually suggestive message to Jeffrey Epstein in 2003.
Hunter Biden went off on actor George Clooney and other high-profile Democrats in an expletive-filled response to their calls for his father, former President Biden, to drop out of the 2024 election, The Hill reports.
Said Biden: “Fuck him, fuck him, fuck him and everybody around him. I don’t have to be fucking nice. No.1, I agree with Quentin Tarantino… George Clooney is not a fucking actor. He is a fuck, like… I don’t know what he is. He is a brand.”
The full interview is extraordinary and worth watching.
“Congress’ nonpartisan scorekeeper released its final prediction Monday for how President Donald Trump’s signature legislative achievement will grow the national debt and affect U.S. households,” Politico reports.
“Over the next decade, the megabill Trump signed on July 4 would increase the federal deficit by $3.4 trillion and cause 10 million people to lose health insurance, the Congressional Budget Office forecasts. While the newly enacted legislation would save more than $1 trillion by cutting federal spending on health care — with the majority coming from Medicaid — CBO predicts that the package’s costs will far outweigh its savings.”
As they gear up for special elections next fall, appointed Sens. Jon Husted (R-OH) and Ashley Moody (R-FL) are facing easier paths than some had initially expected, NBC News reports.
Crowded primaries haven’t materialized, both have proven strong fundraisers and their states are trending redder.
New York Times: “For decades, the prices Medicare pays doctors for different medical services have been largely decided not by Medicare itself, but by a powerful industry group, the American Medical Association…”
“And for decades, critics have complained that this process unfairly rewards surgeons and other specialists, at the expense of primary care physicians and other generalists…”
“But a change buried inside a 1,803-page proposed regulation published last Monday suggests the Trump administration would like to move away from this longstanding system.”
The New Yorker profiles Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick who speaks with President Trump “on the phone most nights, at around one in the morning, just after Lutnick gets in bed.”
They talk about “real stuff,” like Canadian steel tariffs, and also about “nothing,” which he summarized as “sporting events, people, who’d you have dinner with, what was this guy like, can you believe what this guy did, what’s the TV like, I saw this on TV, what’d you think of what this guy said on TV, what did you think about my press conference, how about this Truth?”
“If they want war, they will get war.”
— A German official quoted by the Wall Street Journal, on a possible trade war between the EU and the United States.
Punchbowl News: “Trump’s frustration seems to stem from the Senate’s rules, which allow the minority party to drag out debate time on individual nominees and force two roll-call votes on each — one on cloture and another on confirmation.”
“Democrats haven’t allowed a single Trump nominee to be confirmed via unanimous consent this year, a process that doesn’t require a formal roll-call vote. Republicans occasionally did the same to former President Joe Biden, yet not on the scale that Trump faces.”
“Firebrand Texas Republican Ken Paxton’s long record of political resilience in the face of scandal faces a new test after his wife filed for divorce and accused him of adultery, jolting a contentious primary for U.S. Senate,” the Washington Post reports.
“The race, seen as one of the biggest GOP primaries of the midterms, was already dramatic, with a longtime incumbent, John Cornyn, fighting for his political life against Paxton, the state attorney general styling himself as more loyal to President Donald Trump. Now, Cornyn and his allies are bringing up the filing as they run against Paxton, and some Paxton backers are rethinking their support.”
The Hill: “The House GOP campaign arm brought in $32.3 million in the second quarter of the year, while the House Democratic campaign arm raised $29.1 million in the same period.”
“President Donald Trump’s bid to take down the Wall Street Journal over its coverage of his connection to Jeffrey Epstein has landed in the courtroom of Darrin Gayles, who is likely experiencing deja vu,” Politico reports.
“That’s because Gayles, a 2014 appointee of Barack Obama, had another brush with a litigious Trump in 2023, when the then-former president sought to punish his onetime lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen.”
“Trump sued Cohen in April 2023 seeking a $500 million payout for claims that Cohen violated his attorney-client relationship with Trump and enriched himself off their relationship. Six months later, Trump abandoned the lawsuit, just before Cohen’s lawyers were set to question him under oath.”
The Democratic National Committee is mostly avoiding a formal autopsy of the 2024 election, steering clear of examining the pivotal decisions that shaped the Biden-turned-Harris campaign.
But a new presentation from Lake Research offers an early glimpse into what went wrong.
The Democratic polling firm identified so-called “drop-off voters,” specifically those who backed Joe Biden in 2020 but failed to turn out to vote for Kamala Harris four years later.
Using a combination of survey data and voter files, the research paints a picture of voters who are still broadly progressive — but increasingly disconnected from the Democratic Party.
Among the key takeaways:
Leave your own reactions in the comments.
Iran’s generals have tightened their grip on the country in the weeks after the Israeli air strikes, The Telegraph reports.
“Speaker Mike Johnson doesn’t have any plans to put a non-binding resolution on the floor this week before the August recess — or possibly ever — that would call for the administration to release Jeffrey Epstein-related documents,” Politico reports.
“The current plan for dealing with the politically explosive matter on Capitol Hill, detailed Monday by people granted anonymity to share private party strategy, comes as the controversy continues to encircle the House GOP in chaos.”
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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