Become a member. Already a member? Log in.
A new HuffPost/YouGov poll finds that just 19% of Americans say they believe that President Trump personally opposes white nationalism.
Thirty-nine percent said he supports white nationalism, while 20% said he doesn’t have a strong opinion on the movement either way. The rest said they weren’t sure.
“Sen. Kamala Harris made the first major policy announcement of her campaign Saturday, promising to use federal dollars to boost teachers’ salaries as she spoke to a boisterous crowd at Texas Southern University,” the Washington Post reports.
“Harris didn’t reveal details of the plan, which her campaign says will come within days. But the crowd of 2,400 that gathered at the historically black school showed her ability to attract a diverse gathering, including older white voters from the Houston area, Latino students who drove from the University of Texas at Austin and a large contingent of African American voters.”
“Prosecutors suspect Paul Manafort might be trying to secretly claw back about a million dollars he agreed to hand over to the government for his financial crimes — and he could be using the same type of shell company at the core of his legal problems to fake a loan,” CNN reports.
“A mysterious shell company named Woodlawn LLC — which formed in the middle of special cousel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Manafort in August 2017 — claimed in court that it deserves $1 million from Manafort’s forfeiture proceeding. The company says Manafort, who was Donald Trump’s presidential campaign chairman, still owes that amount to pay back a 2017 mortgage loan.”
David Remnick: “The emergency that the Trump Presidency represents leaves the Democratic Party’s cast of candidates with a singular responsibility—to win the election—and two colossal reclamation projects. The first involves the environment. Presidential debates in past elections have largely ignored the costs of climate change. But public opinion on the topic is moving, and there is cause for at least some political optimism in the fact that many Democrats have gotten behind the idea of a New Deal-scale effort to address the issue. Candidates who can best give shape to that impulse and find a plausible way to make it a legislative reality deserve the most urgent attention.”
“The second reclamation concerns Trumpism. Somehow, sometime, Trump will leave the political stage; but the moral and material corruption he has inflicted will be with us for a long while. Who has the vision and the language to confront xenophobia and white-supremacist ideology? Who has the dexterity and the pragmatism to enact reforms on voting rights, health care, immigration, mass incarceration, and campaign finance, and so strengthen a stressed democracy? Who has the political acumen to argue for policies adequate to resolve our crises and, at the same time, to win back the millions of voters who cast a ballot for Barack Obama and then shifted to Trump?”
“Speaker Nancy Pelosi told Democrats on Saturday she’ll rebuff any efforts by the Justice Department to reveal details of special counsel Robert Mueller’s findings in a highly classified setting — a tactic she warned could be employed to shield the report’s conclusions from the public,” Politico reports.
Texas Tribune: “South Carolina may well have a reputation of fueling political grudges borne out of decades of dirty politics. But when former U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke traveled here on Friday and Saturday, the message from the locals could not have been more emphatic: They want to defeat Donald Trump in 2020, and they have no interest in sour grapes from also-rans.”
“It was a message the candidate was already selling.”
Greg Mankiw, an economics professor at Harvard who served as an adviser to both George W. Bush and Mitt Romney, writes that senators should “do their job” and ensure Stephen Moore is not confirmed as a Fed governor.
Said Mankiw: “Steve is a perfectly amiable guy, but he does not have the intellectual gravitas for this important job. It is time for Senators to do their job. Mr. Moore should not be confirmed.”
Matt Taibbi: “For years, every pundit and Democratic pol in Washington hyped every new Russia headline like the Watergate break-in… The story hyped from the start was espionage: a secret relationship between the Trump campaign and Russian spooks who’d helped him win the election…”
“There was never real gray area here. Either Trump is a compromised foreign agent, or he isn’t. If he isn’t, news outlets once again swallowed a massive disinformation campaign, only this error is many orders of magnitude more stupid than any in the recent past, WMD included. Honest reporters like ABC’s Terry Moran understand: Mueller coming back empty-handed on collusion means a ‘reckoning for the media.’”
“Of course, there won’t be such a reckoning. (There never is). But there should be. We broke every written and unwritten rule in pursuit of this story, starting with the prohibition on reporting things we can’t confirm.”
“For Democratic presidential candidates on Saturday, it wasn’t quite campaigning as usual after the delivery of a long-awaited report from the special counsel roiled Washington over the weekend. But it was pretty close,” the New York Times reports.
“At events across early primary states, voters asked about health care and school shootings and immigration… Democratic voters said they cared deeply about the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election but weren’t quite sure what to make of the latest twist, exactly.”
CBS News: 2020 candidates demand release of Mueller report.
“It looks like Washington will have to hold its breath a little longer. Atty. Gen. William Barr on Saturday apparently decided he was not ready to provide Congress with a summary of the “principal conclusions” from the Russia investigation,” the Los Angeles Times reports.
“Barr received a confidential report from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III on Friday, and he subsequently released a letter to senior members of Congress saying he might give them information about the report as early as this weekend. By Saturday afternoon, a senior Justice Department official and two congressional aides, who were not authorized to speak publicly, disclosed that Barr would not do so on that day.”
Attorney General William Barr is pushing to reveal the principal conclusions of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report as early as Saturday evening, an administration official familiar with the process tells Fox News.
A separate source said that Barr is likely to report on Mueller’s primary conclusions between 3 p.m. and 5 p.m. ET.
Mike Allen says there are two forms of “collusion delusion” as President Trump’s legal team believes the immediate threat to the presidency has passed with the delivery of the Mueller report to Attorney General William Barr:
Key question: “Will Democrats demand the nation stick to historical norms of proper presidential behavior, or will Mueller’s revelations be the new standard?”
“Sounds like it’s over for us but of course it’s not over until it’s over.”
— Rudy Giuliani, quoted by Axios, on the release of the Mueller report.
“House Democrats are huddling Saturday to strategize how to force special counsel Robert Mueller’s potentially explosive findings into the open — a possible drag-out legal fight that could consume Washington for months,” Politico reports.
“As of Saturday morning, lawmakers of both parties were clueless about the contents of Mueller’s report on links between the Trump campaign and Russia. But Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Democrats will convene a conference call at 3 p.m. to discuss their latest thinking on the report’s arrival. House Judiciary Committee Democrats planned a separate call to dive into their options.”
“Even as the special counsel, Robert Mueller, submitted his confidential report to the Justice Department on Friday, federal and state prosecutors are pursuing about a dozen other investigations that largely grew out of his work, all but ensuring that a legal threat will continue to loom over the Trump presidency,” the New York Times reports.
“Most of the investigations focus on President Trump or his family business or a cadre of his advisers and associates, according to court records and interviews with people briefed on the investigations. They are being conducted by officials from Los Angeles to Brooklyn, with about half of them being run by the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan.”
“Unlike Mr. Mueller, whose mandate was largely focused on any links between the Trump campaign and the Russian government’s interference in the 2016 presidential election, the federal prosecutors in Manhattan take an expansive view of their jurisdiction. That authority has enabled them, along with F.B.I. agents, to scrutinize a broader orbit around the president, including his family business.”
“Senate Republicans are trying to elevate the ideas and personalities of House Democrats in a bid to divide the opposition into the rising liberal stars, the party’s presidential contenders and its more mainstream lawmakers,” the Washington Post reports.
“The effort begins with a midweek vote on the Green New Deal, a loosely defined effort to combat climate change by dramatically reducing greenhouse-gas emissions coupled with job creation… He has taken the original Green New Deal proposal, put it in his own resolution and scheduled what amounts to a show vote as the bill lacks the votes in the Republican-led Senate. But it’s doubtful the strategy will produce any immediate signs of division, as Democrats have largely rallied around the strategy from Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-NY) to vote present.”
Politico: “The recording gives a rare look behind the curtain of an influential oil industry lobbying group that spends more than $1 million per year to push its agenda in Congress and federal regulatory agencies. The previous eight years had been dispiriting for the industry: As IPAA vice president Jeff Eshelman told the group, it had seemed as though the Obama administration and environmental groups had put together ‘their target list of everything that they wanted done to shut down the oil and gas industry.’ But now, the oil executives were almost giddy at the prospect of high-level executive branch access of the sort they hadn’t enjoyed since Dick Cheney, a fellow oilman, was vice president.”
Benjamin Wittes: “The president should wait before popping the champagne corks over this and tweeting in triumph. Yes, in the best-case scenario for the president, Mueller is not proceeding further because he lacks the evidence to do so. But even this possibility contains multitudes: everything from what the president calls ‘NO COLLUSION!’ to evidence that falls just short of adequate to prove criminal conduct to a reasonable jury beyond a reasonable doubt—evidence that could still prove devastating if the conduct at issue becomes public.”
“There are other possibilities as well. It’s possible, for example, that Mueller is not proceeding against certain defendants other than the president because he has referred them to other prosecutorial offices; some of these referrals are already public, and it’s reasonable to expect there may be other referrals too. In this iteration, what is ending here is not the investigation, merely the portion of the investigation Mueller chose to retain for himself. It’s possible also that Mueller is finished because he has determined that while the evidence would support a prosecution of the president, he is bound by the Justice Department’s long-standing position that the president is not amenable to criminal process.”
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.
“There are a lot of blogs and news sites claiming to understand politics, but only a few actually do. Political Wire is one of them.”
— Chuck Todd, host of “Meet the Press”
“Concise. Relevant. To the point. Political Wire is the first site I check when I’m looking for the latest political nugget. That pretty much says it all.”
— Stuart Rothenberg, editor of the Rothenberg Political Report
“Political Wire is one of only four or five sites that I check every day and sometimes several times a day, for the latest political news and developments.”
— Charlie Cook, editor of the Cook Political Report
“The big news, delicious tidbits, pearls of wisdom — nicely packaged, constantly updated… What political junkie could ask for more?”
— Larry Sabato, Center for Politics, University of Virginia
“Political Wire is a great, great site.”
— Joe Scarborough, host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe”
“Taegan Goddard has a knack for digging out political gems that too often get passed over by the mainstream press, and for delivering the latest electoral developments in a sharp, no frills style that makes his Political Wire an addictive blog habit you don’t want to kick.”
— Arianna Huffington, founder of The Huffington Post
“Political Wire is one of the absolute must-read sites in the blogosphere.”
— Glenn Reynolds, founder of Instapundit
“I rely on Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire for straight, fair political news, he gets right to the point. It’s an eagerly anticipated part of my news reading.”
— Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist.