“Former US Special Envoy for Ukraine Kurt Volker plans to appear at his deposition next Thursday in front of three congressional committees,” CNN reports.
“The source would not say if the White House is seeking to use executive privilege to constrict Volker in terms of what he can say or provide.”
Politico: “Conventional wisdom still says there has to be a Trump trial. McConnell, after all, said in March that the Senate would have ‘no choice’ but to hold one if the House voted for impeachment.”
“But political conditions can change quickly in the Trump era. And lawmakers from both parties say they wouldn’t be surprised if the Kentucky Republican ultimately made the same calculation he did in 2016 when President Barack Obama nominated Merrick Garland for the Supreme Court — only for the Democratic president to see his pick axed by McConnell under the auspices of letting voters decide who should fill the vacancy in the next election.”
Jeff Greenfield on the Reliable Sources podcast:
“If you go back to Watergate, once Walter Cronkite and co. signed off at 7:30 on the East Coast back then, the next news you got was when the morning paper hit your door. You could watch PBS’s replay of the Watergate hearings but basically that was it.”
“We would not immediately switch to five hours of frenetic analysis or opinion making. We did not have a bombardment of social media and tweets, so the whole process of unfolding the story, of finding out what happened, was in a much more deliberative phase…”
Dan Balz: “Democrats will have to make the case as to why they think the president should be impeached and removed from office and try to persuade the public why that step is necessary, if that is where their work leads. But Republicans cannot hide from this, even if they regard impeachment as unwarranted.”
“Right now, through their collective silence, Republicans are telling the American people they either tolerate or condone the president’s actions. The longer they remain silent, the more they contribute to normalizing behavior by the president that is far beyond past standards.”
Gabriel Debenedetti: “The big-picture strategic concern for every campaign now is that no one has any clue how long the impeachment process will take, what kind of attention it will command, or which way its politics will break…. But the more immediate problem for almost everyone in the still-massive field not named Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, or Pete Buttigieg is money. Specifically, having enough of it to maintain real campaigns for the next few months.”
“That’s because impeachment, for this crowd, couldn’t have come at a more delicate time: The end of the final quarter before most pols believe the race gets serious, and therefore the exact moment they were banking on generating as much coverage and attention as possible, to raise as much money as possible — to keep afloat for as long as possible, or to finally make much-needed campaign hires and investments just as voters start paying serious attention.”
David Von Drehle: “Ordinarily, I’m skeptical of the power of media organizations — even Fox News. Though it is the most-watched cable (shall we say) ‘news’ channel in the United States, its average primetime viewership of about 2.5 million people is less than 1 percent of the nation. The audiences for MSNBC and CNN are typically even smaller. Most Americans have better things to do with their evenings than to be harangued about politics.”
“However, those Fox News viewers punch far above their weight in one regard: They are the core of any hard-right primary challenge that might be waged against an incumbent Republican senator. I believe based on conversations with knowledgeable Republicans that Trump is neither popular nor admired among the Senate majority, but he is feared, therefore tolerated. The fear stems from his firm grip on that Fox News-viewing core and the belief that he could turn the core into an incumbent-crushing machine.”
“To the extent that Trump’s grip begins to loosen, the fear will begin to lift and the president’s Senate firewall will begin to crumble.”
New York Times: “In an unusual airing of intramural grievances, Fox News anchors and pundits have let loose at one another in full public view — lobbing attacks across time slots and offering a rare glimpse into tensions behind the scenes at the top-rated cable news network.”
Pew Research: “In the spring of 1974, despite the indictment of top former White House aides, and Nixon’s release of what were seen as ‘heavily edited’transcripts of tapes of his aides plotting to get White House enemies, the public was still divided over what to do about the president. For example, by June, 44% in the Gallup Poll thought he should be removed from office, while 41% disagreed.”
“Only in early August, following the House Judiciary Committee’s recommendation in July that Nixon be impeached and the Supreme Court’s decision that he surrender his audio tapes, did a clear majority – 57% – come to the view that the president should be removed from office.”
A new DCCC poll asked if the respondent would be more likely to vote for a candidate who “sided with Nancy Pelosi and supported an impeachment investigation into Donald Trump,” or someone who “sided with Mitch McConnell and opposed an impeachment investigation into Donald Trump.”
The result: 49% would vote for the candidate who sided with Pelosi, compared to 38% for the candidate who sided with McConnell.
Playbook: “That’s the mantra we keep hearing from many Democrats in D.C. So many members of the House majority are befuddled by the hyperventilating over messaging, confused at the pretzels some lawmakers twist themselves into as they pursue impeaching President Trump. They say that what Trump has said in the open is enough to charge him with high crimes and misdemeanors.”
These Democrats suggest this message: The president tried again to strong arm a sovereign European country into injecting itself into the United States’ electoral process. Don’t take my word for it — just listen to the president’s own words.”
Washington Post: “Giuliani, who confirmed to The Washington Post on Friday morning that he would attend the event, reversed himself that evening after The Post reported on his participation in the meeting, which Russian President Vladimir Putin and other top Russian officials are expected to attend. The two-day conference is sponsored by Russia and the Moscow-based Eurasian Economic Union, a trade alliance launched by Putin in 2014 as a counterweight to the European Union.”
“The looming battle over President Trump’s potential impeachment has sparked an online hunt in the far-right corners of the Web as self-styled Internet sleuths race to identify the anonymous person Trump has likened to a treasonous spy,” the Washington Post reports.
Sen. Lindsey Graham on Friday gave a commercial flight a private preview of his appearance on CBS’s Face the Nation, a source told Page Six, including calling the whistleblower controversy “Kavanaugh on steroids!”
“We’re told that the South Carolina pol was on a JetBlue flight from Washington, DC, to Charleston and was chatting loudly with ‘Jared’ — presumably White House adviser Jared Kushner — before takeoff.”
Said the source: “He was like, ‘We need to know why Hunter Biden was receiving $50K’ for being on the board of Ukrainian gas company Burisma. He then said, ‘You can’t impeach someone on hearsay.’ He was laying out his story for Sunday.”
But the eavesdropper said of the conversation: “It clearly was not classified info. He was literally yelling this shit. He also said, ‘Don’t release anything until Sunday.’”
Los Angeles Times: “By Friday, as the crisis metastasized with cascading disclosures about Trump’s requests for Ukrainian authorities to investigate his political foes, and allegations that the White House tried to “lock down” the evidence, the president was still grasping for a strategic response. Other than issuing a slew of angry tweets, he stayed out of the public eye until an evening event with Hispanic supporters in the East Room.”
“One administration official described the president as ‘shell shocked’ by the sudden political gut punch even as he insists the impeachment fight will help him win reelection next year by rallying his base and angering independents.”
Said a Trump campaign adviser: “I think he’s badly wounded right now. I’m suddenly very worried about 2020.”
“House Democrats are developing a new plan to deal with any White House stonewalling to their upcoming demands for records and testimony: They will use it as evidence for an article of impeachment against President Trump,” CNN reports.
“Democrats are hoping that the tactic will force White House officials to make a choice: They could provide records to bolster the Democratic investigation, or they can resist the House subpoenas and add to the Democrats’ case that Trump has sought to obstruct Congress.”
“British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has been referred to a police watchdog over his alleged relationship with an American businesswoman when he was mayor of London,” CNN reports.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) told the White House earlier this week that President Trump “needed to release the transcript of his call to bolster the claim that the conversation was not improper because the speculation about what happened was becoming politically untenable,” the Washington Post reports.
Miami Herald: “A U.S. Army official formerly in charge of all White House communications at Mar-a-Lago was sentenced to three years of probation on Friday after he made false statements to a federal agent during a child pornography investigation.”
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.