Plans for a party celebrating the 25-year anniversary of Rudy Giuliani becoming the mayor of New York City are “fizzling out” because he is “too toxic,” the New York Daily News reports.
Said the source: “Rudy wanted it to appear to come together organically.”
Watch Russian President Vladimir Putin and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman greet each other at the G20 summit in Argentina.
Politico: “It was a striking display of locker-room camaraderie between the two vilified tough guys — Putin, the former KGB agent who has been Russia’s supreme leader for just shy of two decades, and the young monarch who, according to Western and Turkish intelligence, ordered the killing and dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.”
“A District of Columbia clerk and a supervisor refused to accept a New Mexico man’s state driver’s license as he sought a marriage license because she and her supervisor believed New Mexico was a foreign country,” the AP reports.
North Carolina’s state board of elections declined to certify Mark Harris’ (R) apparent victory over Dan McCready (D) in the state’s 9th congressional district again on Friday, instead calling for a hearing to discuss the matter on or before Dec. 21, the Charlotte Observer reports.
Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke issued a scathing statement against Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ), the incoming chair of the House Natural Resources Committee, accusing Grijalva of “drunken and hostile behavior” after the congressman called for Zinke’s resignation in a USA Today op-ed.
Said Zinke: “It’s hard for him to think straight from the bottom of the bottle.”
“It’s a loud message to everybody that is interviewed by our committee, regardless of where that prosecution comes from: If you lie to us, we’re going to go after you.”
— Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC), quoted by Roll Call, on Michael Cohen’s guilty plea for lying to Congress.
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel (D) dismissed the possibility of Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D) running for president in 2020 in an interview on MSNBC.
Said Emanuel: “If Beto O’Rourke wants to go and run for president, God bless him, he should put his hat in and make his case. But, he lost. You don’t usually promote a loser to the top of party.”
“Donald Trump Jr.’s testimony to Congress about his family’s real estate negotiations with powerful Russians does not comport with the new version laid out by Donald Trump’s ex-attorney Michael Cohen,” NPR reports.
“Trump Jr. told the Senate Judiciary Committee in September 2017 that although there had been negotiations surrounding a prospective Trump Tower in Moscow, they concluded without result ‘at the end’ of 2014.”
“Trump’s account contrasts with the new version of events given by Cohen on Thursday in a guilty plea in federal court. In that new version, Cohen says the discussions with at least one Russian government official and others in Moscow continued through June 2016, well into Trump’s presidential campaign.”
Update: This story has been amended by NPR.
“Months after joining the advisory board of a Miami-based patent company in 2014, Matthew Whitaker began fielding angry complaints from customers that they were being defrauded, including from a client who showed up at his Iowa office to appeal to him personally for help,” the Washington Post reports.
“Yet Whitaker, now the acting attorney general, remained an active champion of World Patent Marketing for three years — even expressing willingness to star in national television ads promoting the firm, the records show.”
Bloomberg: New documents released by the Federal Trade Commission suggest that Whitaker misled the agency’s investigators as he was stepping into his role last year as Justice Department chief of staff.
“White House press secretary Sarah Sanders insisted Friday that President Trump canceled a planned meeting here with Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin over Moscow’s aggression toward Ukraine rather than special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation,” NBC News reports.
Said Sanders in a statement: “The Russian Witch Hunt Hoax, which is hopefully now nearing an end, is doing very well. Unfortunately, it probably does undermine our relationship with Russia. However, the reason for our canceled meeting is Ukraine. Hopefully, that will be resolved soon so that productive conversations can begin.”
A Russian official disputed that explanation: “I think the true reason is rooted in the domestic political situation in the U.S.”
Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) “blamed her defeat not on her own campaign, but on the Democratic Party for abandoning its moderate constituents,” Roll Call reports.
Said McCaskill: “This demand for purity, this looking down your nose at people who want to compromise, is a recipe for disaster for the Democrats. Will we ever get to a majority in the Senate again, much less to 60, if we do not have some moderates in our party?”
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s office is considering retrying former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort on a slew of federal charges that resulted in a hung jury over the summer, Politico reports.
A federal judge set a March 5 sentencing date for Manafort.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) “is the only statewide Republican left standing in Wisconsin. And now, he’s ready to take on a new role to help the party get back on track,” the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports.
Johnson said former RNC chairman Reince Priebus has agreed “to participate in a thorough review of the 2018 election and the current party structure — similar to the process he led for the RNC following the 2012 presidential election.”
Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) won’t say if he is running for Louisiana governor “for a few more days, but he’s already being hit with negative campaign ads,” the Baton Rouge Advocate reports.
“American Bridge, a Democrat-backing political action committee that has been tracking Kennedy for opposition research for several months, has launched digital ads in Louisiana attacking Kennedy’s political ambitions and linking him to former Gov. Bobby Jindal (R).”
Kennedy says he will make an announcement “by Monday.”
The Atlantic: “The third remarkable thing about Cohen’s plea was its substance. The president of the United States’ personal lawyer admitted to lying to Congress about the president’s business activities with a hostile foreign power, in order to support the president’s story.”
“In any rational era, that would be earthshaking. Now it’s barely a blip. Over the past two years, we’ve become accustomed to headlines like ‘President’s Campaign Manager Convicted of Fraud’ and ‘President’s Personal Lawyer Paid for Adult Actress’s Silence.’ We’re numb to it all. But these are the sorts of developments that would, under normal circumstances, end a presidency.”
First Read: “Take away everything else we know about Russia’ interference in 2016 — the email hacks, the WikiLeaks disclosures, the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting. Isn’t the news that a presidential candidate’s business deals were shaping his views about a geopolitical adversary a humongous scandal by itself?”
Ken White: “The conclusion that the President of the United States knew that his personal counsel was repeatedly lying to the Congress of the United States about the President’s business is inescapable under these circumstances.”
David French: “This is a conclusion that’s directly relevant to the obstruction of justice inquiry. It does not mean that the president obstructed, but it’s important to remember that both the Clinton and Nixon articles of impeachment included charges related to the president’s efforts to get witnesses to lie under oath. We should now ask, did the president have any role in feeding this false information to Congress?”
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.