Michael Avenatti said that President Trump does not want to debate him because Trump is not “intelligent” enough, The Hill reports.
Said Avenatti: “He’s a bully and I think he doesn’t like people that punch back, and I think I would be incredibly effective against him. I don’t think he’s very quick on his feet, I don’t think he’s that intelligent and I think he’d be completely outclassed.”
CBS News: Avenatti visits New Hampshire.
First Read: “For all the attention to Rudy Giuliani’s ‘Truth isn’t truth’ comment… President Trump’s personal lawyer made an even more startling statement on the program. Giuliani declared that the Trump campaign representatives who met with Russians in that June 9, 2016 Trump Tower meeting (Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner) didn’t know they were representatives of the Russian government.”
“Let’s unpack Giuliani’s comments: One, he admits the purpose of that 2016 meeting was to get dirt on Hillary Clinton (when their original explanation was Russian adoptions). Two, he says any campaign would have taken such a meeting (when past Democratic and Republican campaigns have said they never did). And three, Giuliani declares they didn’t know Natalia Veselnitskaya was connected with the Russian government. But we know that isn’t true.”
“For Giuliani to claim that Donald Trump Jr. — or anyone else associated with the Trump campaign — didn’t know Veselnitskaya and others were connected to the Russian government doesn’t pass the smell test. The facts don’t back it up.”
President Trump stepped up his twitter attacks on special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.
Said Trump: “Disgraced and discredited Bob Mueller and his whole group of Angry Democrat Thugs spent over 30 hours with the White House Councel [sic], only with my approval, for purposes of transparency.”
He added: “Anybody needing that much time when they know there is no Russian Collusion is just someone … looking for trouble. They are enjoying ruining people’s lives and REFUSE to look at the real corruption on the Democrat side – the lies, the firings, the deleted Emails and soooo much more! Mueller’s Angry Dems are looking to impact the election. They are a National Disgrace!”
A New Hampshire Journal poll finds that 56% of all voters — and 40% of Republicans — believe a Republican primary challenge to President Trump in 2020 “would be a good thing.”
“President Trump’s overall approval in New Hampshire, 41% approving to 54% disapproving, mirrors findings from the national average of polls… But Trump’s approval among New Hampshire Republicans, 72%, was 10 points below his standing with the GOP nationwide.”
Rolling Stone: “As of this writing, Trump has put 26 new judges onto the appellate courts, more than any other chief executive at this point in the presidency. He has also nominated over 100 district-court judges and gotten 26 of those picks confirmed. These judges are overwhelmingly young, ideological and now set to serve lifetime appointments. And then, of course, there’s Justice Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s first pick for the Supreme Court, and Judge Brett Kavanaugh, the president’s second Supreme Court nominee, who stands a strong chance of confirmation.”
”What unites these judges is the radical legal doctrine of originalism — that the text of the Constitution should be understood only as it was intended when written more than 230 years ago. Originalism was long seen as a fringe philosophy; taken to its logical extreme, an originalist reading of the Constitution could mean a country without same-sex marriage, federal child-labor laws or the Americans With Disabilities Act. Today, however, originalism is the dominant legal philosophy on the right and the litmus test for any judge appointed by President Trump.”
Former CIA director John Brennan said “that he is willing to take President Trump to court to prevent other current and former officials from having their security clearances revoked, escalating a battle over whether the president is misusing the power of his office to retaliate against opponents,” the Washington Post reports.
Said Brennan: “I am going to do whatever I can personally to try to prevent these abuses in the future, and if it means going to court, I will do that.”0
CNN: “In his tweet, Trump again called the Times ‘failing,’ but the newspaper actually reported a healthy second-quarter profit. Two years ago today, he also called the Times ‘failing’ and ‘dying.’ The Times‘ stock is up nearly 77% since that tweet.”
Steve Bannon told the Associated Press that “he believes the GOP would lose 35 to 40 seats in the House if the election were held today, thereby ceding their majority to Democrats he’s convinced will pursue impeachment.”
Said Bannon: “You can’t look at this as a midterm and you can’t run it out of the traditional Republican playbook. If you do that, you’re going to get smoked.”
He added: “This is not about persuasion. It’s too late to persuade anybody. We’re 90 days away from this election. This is all about turnout and what I call base-plus.”
The Cook Political Report‘s Dave Wasserman tells Axios that the most under-covered aspect of 2018 is that “a blue wave is obscuring a red exodus.”
“There are 43 Republican seats now without an incumbent on the ballot. That’s more than one out of every six Republicans in the House — a record in at least a century, Wasserman says.”
Said Wasserman: “There’s a bit of over-caution, perhaps, on the part of the punditocracy, after what happened in 2016. But if anything most media could be under-rating Democrats’ potential to gain a lot of seats. They could be caught being cautious in the wrong direction.”
Jonathan Swan: “The president’s contempt for mainstream polling and the media may come back to haunt him in November. Several top Republican operatives working on the midterm elections told me Trump’s fanciful “red wave” predictions could depress Republican turnout and, ironically, serve to make any blue wave even bigger.”
“One of those strategists told me he’s detecting something interesting — and concerning — from focus groups of Trump voters.”
Said the strategist: “We’ve seen it in focus groups, with Republican base voters, where you’ll come up with a hypothetical that the Democrats win, and people are like, ‘That’s not going to happen, that’s stupid.’ … They’re like, ‘Oh, to hell with this crap, we were told Trump wasn’t going to win. It’s bullshit.'”
He added: “I would rather Sean Hannity get on TV every night and go, ‘Oh my God, Nancy Pelosi could be Speaker and they’re going to impeach Trump. You better get out to vote.'”
“I am actually honored to be on his enemies list as I was on Nixon’s when I made it there. This is a president I hold in such low esteem I would be fretting if he said something nice.”
— Former Nixon White House counsel John Dean, quoted by Axios, on being called a “RAT” by President Trump.
“Lanny Davis, an attorney for former longtime Donald Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, said he has been reaching out regularly over the past few months to John Dean, the former White House counsel who helped bring down the presidency of Richard Nixon,” Politico reports.
“Cohen has sent signals that he might cooperate in the investigations surrounding his former boss. The fact that his lawyer is talking frequently to Dean — who was name-checked by Trump on Sunday in the context of recent reports that White House counsel Don McGahn is cooperating with investigators — adds new hints that Cohen could be open to being a potential witness in any case against Trump.”
“Federal authorities investigating whether President Trump’s former personal lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen, committed bank and tax fraud have zeroed in on well over $20 million in loans obtained by taxi businesses that he and his family own,” the New York Times reports.
“Investigators are also examining whether Mr. Cohen violated campaign finance or other laws by helping to arrange financial deals to secure the silence of women who said they had affairs with Mr. Trump. The inquiry has entered the final stage and prosecutors are considering filing charges by the end of August, two of the people said.”
“Any criminal charges against Mr. Cohen would deal a significant blow to the president.”
“President Trump’s lawyers do not know just how much the White House counsel, Donald McGahn, told the special counsel’s investigators during months of interviews, a lapse that has contributed to a growing recognition that an early strategy of full cooperation with the inquiry was a potentially damaging mistake,” the New York Times reports.
“The president’s lawyers said on Sunday that they were confident that Mr. McGahn had said nothing injurious to the president during the 30 hours of interviews. But Mr. McGahn’s lawyer has offered only a limited accounting of what Mr. McGahn told the investigators.”
”That has prompted concern among Mr. Trump’s advisers that Mr. McGahn’s statements could help serve as a key component for a damning report by the special counsel.”
President Trump claims a recent New York Times story about White House counsel Don McGahn cooperating with special counsel Robert Mueller is so “fake” other “members of the media” have called him to apologize for it.
Playbook: “Why would reporters be angry at the New York Times and call the White House?”
Former Gov. Chris Christie (R-N.J.) told ABC News that President Trump will regret not invoking executive or attorney-client privilege in special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe.
Said Christie: “You never waive that. Absolutely not. This shows what a C-level legal team the president had in Ty Cobb and John Dowd.”
He added: “This is not in the president’s interest. It wasn’t in the president’s interest. It’s bad legal advice. Bad lawyering.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Wonk Wire, Political Job Hunt 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.
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