“A senior military officer has accused the Air Force general tapped to be the next vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of sexual misconduct, potentially jeopardizing his nomination,” the AP reports.
“The officer told The Associated Press that Gen. John Hyten subjected her to a series of unwanted sexual advances by kissing, hugging and rubbing up against her in 2017 while she was one of his aides. She said that he tried to derail her military career after she rebuffed him.”
Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta “publicly defended his role in overseeing the prosecution of Jeffrey Epstein for sex crimes committed in Florida over a decade ago, bucking a growing chorus of Democratic calls for his resignation,” the New York Times reports.
“Mr. Acosta said he faced a tough choice between accepting a plea deal that was not as tough as he wished it would be and going to trial with witnesses who were scared to testify in what he described as ‘a roll of the dice’ that might not result in a conviction and prison term.”
Aaron Blake: The big question Acosta did not answer.
“Ask members of the Washington diplomatic corps about the cables that Sir Kim Darroch, the British ambassador who resigned Wednesday, wrote to London describing the dysfunction and chaos of the Trump administration, and their response is uniform: We wrote the same stuff,” the New York Times reports.
As one ambassador, who is still serving and therefore spoke on the condition of anonymity, said: “It could have been any of us.”
“A State Department intelligence analyst has resigned in protest after the White House blocked portions of his written testimony to a congressional panel to exclude data and evidence on climate change and its threat to national security,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“The analyst, Rod Schoonover, prepared a written report citing peer-reviewed scientific journal articles and intelligence reports which conclude that climate change could have wide-ranging national security impacts by contributing to increased humanitarian crises, competition for resources and risk of political instability.”
“Two leaders of an Alabama city have resigned after their mayor posted a comment on Facebook about ‘killing out’ socialists, ‘baby killers’ and gay and transgender people,” the Montgomery Advertiser reports.
“But mayor Mark Chambers refused to step down and told residents of Carbon Hill he plans to run for re-election.”
“Speaker Nancy Pelosi chided progressives in a closed-door meeting Wednesday, calling on them to address their intra-party grievances privately rather than blasting their centrist colleagues on Twitter,” Politico reports.
“Pelosi’s comments, which were described as stern, came during the first full caucus meeting since a major blow up over emergency border funding last month between progressive and moderate lawmakers as well as a recent spat with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and her freshman allies.”
Insider Louisville: “To win this race, McGrath will likely need a fairly large bloc of people who are voting for Trump for president to then cross party lines and vote for her in the Senate race.”
“Politics is dynamic. So it’s not that McGrath absolutely can’t win. But she probably needs at least one of three things to happen: 1. Trump to become much more unpopular than he is now so that he would be weaker in Kentucky, too. 2. Conservative-leaning voters to put aside their general partisan preferences because they are tired of McConnell, even as they remain aligned with Trump. 3. McGrath’s particular appeal as a former Marine to get conservative-leaning voters to support her, even as they remain aligned with Trump.”
Yahoo News: “Here’s something that should keep Democrats up at night. In 2020, the party’s presidential nominee could recapture the big, historically blue states of Pennsylvania and Michigan, but still lose the Electoral College, 270-268, if Donald Trump ekes out another narrow victory in Wisconsin — a state he won by just .7 percentage points in 2016.”
“This isn’t some far-fetched scenario. For Democrats, Pennsylvania and Michigan are riper demographic targets than the Badger State, where the electorate is heavier on (Trump-friendly) non-college-educated whites and lighter on (largely anti-Trump) African-Americans. In the ‘blue wave’ midterm elections of 2018, Dems swept the governorships of Pennsylvania and Michigan by double-digit margins. They flipped Wisconsin by a single percentage point. In Wisconsin’s only statewide contest since then, a conservative state Supreme Court candidate upset his liberal opponent. And when Priorities USA, America’s largest Democratic super-PAC, recently projected the 2020 results, it said that ‘if the election were held today,’ only one state was too close to call: Wisconsin.”
Test your own assumptions on the interactive Electoral Vote Map.
A new Economist/YouGov poll finds Joe Biden leading the Democratic field nationally with 22%, followed by Elizabeth Warren at 17%, Kamala Harris at 14%, Bernie Sanders at 11% and Pete Buttigieg at 5%.
“Labor Secretary Alex Acosta will hold a news conference Wednesday afternoon following renewed scrutiny over his role in cutting a plea deal more than a decade ago for Jeffrey Epstein,” NBC News reports.
“Acosta, who served as a U.S attorney in Florida, secured the federal non-prosecution agreement against Epstein in 2008, which critics have blasted as too lenient.”
“President Trump’s overhauled July Fourth celebration cost the D.C. government $1.7 million, an amount that — combined with police expenses for demonstrations through the weekend — has bankrupted a special fund used to protect the nation’s capital from terrorist threats and provide security at events such as rallies and state funerals,” the Washington Post reports.
The White House plans to send its replacement for the North American Free Trade Agreement to Congress after Sept. 1, setting up a vote by the end of the year, sources told CNBC.
The reason for the delay: “The White House and Office of the U.S. Trade Representative are split over how aggressively to push House Democrats to approve the deal.”
“A federal appeals court Wednesday sided with President Trump, dismissing a lawsuit claiming the president is illegally profiting from foreign and state government visitors at his luxury hotel in downtown Washington,” the Washington Post reports.
“The unanimous ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit is a victory for the president in a novel case brought by the attorneys general of Maryland and the District of Columbia involving anti-corruption provisions in the emoluments clauses of the U.S. Constitution.”
Jed Shugerman: “Robert Mueller made a significant legal error and, based on the facts he found, he should have identified Trump campaign felonies. Mueller’s errors meant that, first, he failed to conclude that the Trump campaign criminally coordinated with Russia; second, he failed to indict campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his deputy Rick Gates for felony campaign coordination; third, the 10 acts of felony obstruction in Volume II fell flat among the general public because it lacked compelling context of these underlying crimes between the campaign and Russia. On top of these errors, the former special counsel said he deliberately wrote the report to be unclear because it would be unfair to make clear criminal accusations against a president.”
“The bottom line is that the Mueller Report is a failure not because of Congress or because of public apathy, but because it failed to get the law, the facts, or even the basics of writing right.”
Harvard professor Tom Patterson has written a summary of the Mueller Report, for those too busy to read the nearly 500 pages of the full report.
Proceeds from book sales will be used to buy ads on social media to bring the abridged version to the attention of a wider audience.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel appeared to shake uncontrollably for the third time in a month during Finnish Prime Minister Antti Rinne’s visit to Berlin, Politico reports.
“Nobody owns me. I’m not afraid to speak my mind. I’m not beholden to them. I’m not beholden to the establishment.”
— Tom Steyer, in an interview with NBC News, on why he should be the Democratic presidential nominee.
In prepared remarks, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell is set to say that business investment has “slowed notably” and that trade tensions and weak global growth “continue to weigh” on the U.S. economy, a strong signal that the Fed is likely to lower the benchmark interest rate in July, the Washington Post reports.
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.
