“President Trump’s highly anticipated meeting with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein could be delayed again,” the Washington Post reports.
“White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Sunday that Trump and Rosenstein could meet this week — a date hasn’t been set — but she added that the meeting could be delayed again given the continued focus on Kavanaugh’s nomination.”
In light of Sen. Lindsey Graham’s (R-SC) defense of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh last week, it’s interesting to watch how he questioned Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor over her “temperament” back in 2009.
First Read: “One finding from this month’s NBC/WSJ poll that didn’t get as much attention as it deserved was this number: 59% of voters said they wanted to see a ‘great deal’ or ‘quite a bit’ of change from the way President Trump has been leading the country. By contrast, 40% said they wanted no change/not that much change/just some change.”
“That 59% wanting change was almost identical to the 62% who said this on the same question in November 1994 (when Republicans won control of Congress), and the 63% who said this in October 2010 (when the GOP won the House and picked up six Senate seats).”
“What’s more, those who said they wanted change in our September 2018 poll included 61 percent of independents, 65% of voters living in competitive House districts, 59% of suburban residents and even 32% of Republican voters (!!!).”
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The National Republican Congressional Committee has pulled more than $1 million in advertising support from Rep. Kevin Yoder’s (R-KS) re-election campaign in the Kansas 3rd District, according to The Hill.
A new CBS News poll finds 37% of Americans do not think the Senate should confirm Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh (up from 30% opposed last week) and 35% think the Senate should confirm (up from 32% last week) as partisan sentiments have hardened.
Democratic opposition has gone from 60% to 68%, and Republican support has gone from 69% to 75%. Independents are more closely divided and slightly more in favor of confirmation than opposed.
Stan Collender: “I have been involved with the federal budget in some capacity for over 40 years and, based on that experience, it’s actually quite easy for me to conclude that 2018 has been the worst year in U.S. history for anything and everything related to the federal budget.”
Reuters: “Democratic Party sources and strategists say they know that if Trump fires Rosenstein, he will ignite a firestorm of accusations that the president is attempting to shut down the investigation into Russia’s role in the 2016 election he won.”
“That will likely bolster their argument that Democrats should gain power to serve as a check on the presidency.”
“This week, Trump is due to hold his first meeting with Rosenstein since a Sept. 21 New York Times report said he considered secretly recording the president as part of a possible effort to remove him from office.”
“The United States and Canada reached a last-minute deal to salvage the North American Free Trade Agreement on Sunday, overcoming deep divisions to keep the 25-year-old trilateral pact intact,” the New York Times reports.
“The deal came after a weekend of frantic talks to try and preserve a trade agreement that has stitched together the economies of Mexico, Canada and the United States but that was on the verge of collapsing. After more than a year of tense talks and strained relations between President Trump and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada, negotiators from both sides came to a resolution just ahead of a midnight deadline set by the White House.”
“The 11th-hour agreement was punctuated by a frenetic Sunday, with Canada’s leaders teleconferencing throughout the day with top American officials in Washington.”
Bloomberg: “Some people familiar with the talks credited Trump senior adviser Jared Kushner for helping smooth the path toward a deal.”
“Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao’s day-to-day calendars are filled with large swaths of time blocked out as “private,” according to Politico‘s analysis of newly released records — a pattern that several former DOT officials called unusual.”
“In total, Chao clocked more than 290 hours of appointments labeled private — the equivalent of about seven weeks’ vacation — during her first 14 months in President Donald Trump’s Cabinet, based on a review of documents provided under the Freedom of Information Act. That total does not include any private hours that occurred on nights, weekends, days marked as vacation or federal holidays.”
Washington Post: “White House counsel Donald McGahn is most directly involved in guiding the investigation and has been in frequent touch with Republican senators about its scope, the administration official said, adding that the administration is hoping a report could be filed even sooner than the Friday deadline.”
Playbook: “If Brett Kavanaugh is confirmed to the Supreme Court, won’t he have to recuse himself from a whole broad swath of cases, based on what he said at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing? Kavanaugh believes he was the subject of a campaign by the Clintons to discredit him, and he criticized the media and the Senate. Won’t he have to bow out of any case that has to do with partisan politics, or the press?“
Washington Post: “The outside prosecutor Senate Republicans hired to lead the questioning in last week’s hearing about the sexual assault allegations against Brett M. Kavanaugh is arguing in a new memo why she would not bring criminal charges against the Supreme Court nominee.”
“In the five-page memo… Rachel Mitchell outlines more than half a dozen reasons why she thinks the testimony of Christine Blasey Ford — who has accused Kavanaugh of assaulting her at a house in suburban Maryland when they were teenagers in the early 1980s — has some key inconsistencies.”
Charles Ludington, a college friend of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, told the Washington Post that he will deliver a statement to the FBI on Monday detailing Kavanaugh’s “belligerent and aggressive” drunken conduct while the two were at Yale.
Said Ludington: “When Brett got drunk, he was often belligerent and aggressive. On one of the last occasions I purposely socialized with Brett, I witnessed him respond to a semi-hostile remark, not by defusing the situation, but by throwing his beer in the man’s face and starting a fight that ended with one of our mutual friends in jail.”
Ludington says he was deeply troubled by Kavanaugh appearing to blatantly mischaracterize his drinking in Senate testimony.
Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford may not be interviewed in the FBI’s week-long probe into the allegations of sexual misconduct against the Supreme Court nominee, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Ford claims that she has not been contacted by the FBI since the week-long ceasefire was announced, suggesting that she and Kavanaugh may fall outside the scope of the probe.
Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) admitted that there’s “not a chance” he would have called for an FBI investigation into the allegations of sexual misconduct against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh if he were running for reelection, The Hill reports.
Said Flake: “Not a chance. There’s no value to reaching across the aisle. There’s no currency for that anymore. There’s no incentive.”
Jonathan Swan: “For the White House, it’s Brett Kavanaugh or bust. They have no Plan B and there’s not even discussion of one.”
Said one senior source: “He’s too big to fail now. Our base, our voters, our side, people are so mad. There’s nowhere to go. We’re gonna make them fucking vote. Manchin in West Virginia, in those red states. Joe Donnelly? He said he’s a no? Fine, we’ll see how that goes. There will be a vote on him… It will be a slugfest of a week.”
Said a White House source: “There’s no time before the election to put up a new person.”
“That’s just as well, because the small team working to confirm Kavanaugh has not been looking for a backup candidate, let alone vetting one.”
Ryan Lizza: “The Nunes family dairy of political lore—the one where his brother and parents work—isn’t in California. It’s in Iowa. Devin; his brother, Anthony III; and his parents, Anthony Jr. and Toni Dian, sold their California farmland in 2006. Anthony Jr. and Toni Dian, who has also been the treasurer of every one of Devin’s campaigns since 2001, used their cash from the sale to buy a dairy eighteen hundred miles away in Sibley, a small town in northwest Iowa where they—as well as Anthony III, Devin’s only sibling, and his wife, Lori—have lived since 2007.”
“There’s nothing particularly strange about a congressman’s family moving. But what is strange is that the family has apparently tried to conceal the move from the public—for more than a decade. As far as I could tell, as of late August, neither Nunes nor the local California press that covers him had ever publicly mentioned that his family dairy is no longer in Tulare.”
“Prime Minister Justin Trudeau worked the phones, officials gathered at his office and Canadian stakeholders were called to Ottawa as negotiators came within striking distance of reaching a three-country NAFTA deal on Sunday,” Politico reports.
“These late-stage negotiations are taking place primarily by phone. A public announcement of any new deal would occur late Sunday night, or possibly Monday.”
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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