White House Chief of Staff John Kelly’s enemies are ready to use FBI Director Chris Wray’s testimony as a weapon, according to Jonathan Swan.
Said one White House official: “Wray’s FBI timeline makes one thing clear: the Kelly coverup is unraveling right before our eyes.”
Elle magazine profiles Louise Linton, the wife of Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin:
There are many other things Linton insists make her a regular person. She loves SoulCycle, for one. “That’s temple for me,” she says, dressed in a SoulCycle beanie and leggings. “This is my uniform. I wear SoulCycle stuff every single day of my life.” She’s fond of the expression super-duper. She is “super-duper” sorry for all of the missteps in her self-presentation. She finds the idea of doing a reality TV show, which many people have floated to her in recent months, to be “super-duper” scary.
Other ordinary-girl things: Linton loves calligraphy and big-band jazz. She enjoys taking cute selfies with Mnuchin using the Snapchat filters that make people look like puppies and piglets. Against her husband’s wishes, she shows them to me. (“I didn’t even know she had Snapchat,” her press rep says, faintly concerned.) She is obsessed with dogs, especially sick ones. So much so that she once made friends with a homeless man named Richard in a park in Los Angeles because she was concerned about the health of his dog. She wound up paying the vet bill.
As an immigration debate starts in the U.S. Senate, Roll Call notes that Slovenian-born Melania Trump’s own immigration history “has never been fully explained by the Trump camp.”
President Trump and his aides have “never thoroughly addressed the curious case of then-Melanija Knavs, who at 26 moved to New York City in the mid-1990s to pursue a professional modeling career. It would be two years before she met and began dating businessman Donald Trump. And still unresolved is whether she and her modeling agency properly handled her immigration status during that window.”
North Dakota U.S. Senate candidate Gary Emineth (R) says he’s quitting the race because he expects Rep. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) to challenge Democratic Sen. Heidi Heitkamp after all, the AP reports.
Emineth said he’s talked with Cramer several times in the past week and expects him to enter the race.
Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf (D) “is rejecting a Republican-drawn map of Pennsylvania’s congressional districts to replace the GOP-drawn map struck down in a gerrymandering case, leaving him to make a different recommendation to the state’s high court,” the AP reports.
“Wolf’s move Tuesday comes six days before the Democratic-majority state Supreme Court says it’ll impose new boundaries for Pennsylvania’s 18 congressional districts.”
FBI director Christopher Wray “contradicted the White House timeline about the domestic abuse scandal involving Rob Porter, the president’s former staff secretary,” the New York Times reports.
“Mr. Wray said that the bureau delivered to the White House a partial report on problems in Mr. Porter’s background in March, months earlier than the White House has admitted receiving the information.”
“A leading Democratic group — Priorities USA — is warning party leaders they could squander a strong political climate in 2018 if they don’t start to emphasize pocketbook issues over loose and unfocused critiques of Donald Trump,” McClatchy reports.
“According to internal polling by the super PAC, President Trump’s approval rating climbed to 44% in the first week of February, compared to 53% who disapprove… The memo says that a broad range of metrics show the political climate is still favorable for Democrats. But it also makes an unambiguous diagnosis for Trump’s recent rise: Democrats this year have stopped focusing on economic and health care issues, topics that demonstrably hurt his approval during his first year in office.”
The Kansas Secretary of State’s Office ruled that a dog cannot serve as the state’s governor despite the official filings by a dog’s owners, KWCH reports.
“While there is nothing specifically written that says a dog cannot run to lead the state, the secretary state’s office says man’s best friend is not capable of serving the responsibilities required of the governor.”
Ratings of U.S. leadership fell in nearly every part of the world in the first year of Donald Trump’s presidency, dragging median approval to a record-low 30%, according to Gallup.
A day after White House press secretary Sarah Sanders emphasized that “above all, the President supports victims of domestic violence,” dismissed aide Rob Porter’s two ex-wives tell CNN that they have not heard from or had any contact with a single person at the White House.
New York Times: “In a year of controlling power in Washington, President Trump and Republicans in Congress have run up federal spending, approved deficit-swelling tax cuts and presided over a marked increase in ‘policy uncertainty’ in the economy. They still talk about the importance of fiscal discipline, but they have yet to enforce it.”
“The $4.4 trillion budget Mr. Trump released on Monday spends as much over 10 years as any budget offered by President Obama, whose policies Republicans blamed for ballooning the size of the federal government and hobbling the economy. It does not attempt to achieve balance at the end of that time, despite optimistic economic growth projections that far exceed what most economists say is possible.”
“Instead, it projects that deficits will grow $7 trillion over the next decade as the United States continues borrowing huge sums of money — a number that could double if the administration turns out to be overestimating economic growth and if the $3 trillion in spending cuts the White House has floated do not materialize in Congress.”
Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats told Congress that this year’s midterm elections are a “potential target” for Russian influence operations, Bloomberg reports.
Said Coats: “We assess that the Russian intelligence services will continue their efforts to disseminate false information via Russian state-controlled media and covert online personas about U.S. activities to encourage anti-U.S. political views.”
[alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]Just days after President Trump signed a $300 billion budget hike, Coats also warned that the national debt is “unsustainable” and a “dire threat” to national security.[/alert]
Bloomberg: “Kagan and Roberts are part of a quartet of relatively centrist justices, along with Anthony Kennedy and Stephen Breyer, who at times can turn their chemistry into a consensus and avert a sharp divide.”
“The group will be tested during what could be a divisive stretch starting next week, when the court reconvenes after a month-long recess. Between now and the end of June, the court will rule on partisan gerrymandering, voter-database purges, mandatory union fees, Trump’s travel ban and possibly his effort to rescind a deferred-deportation program.”
“The four justices are hardly ideological soulmates… But as a group they stand in contrast to their five less compromising colleagues — Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor on the left and Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch on the right.”
A Vox analysis of hiring records for seasonal workers at three Trump properties in New York and Florida revealed that only one out of 144 jobs went to a US worker from 2016 to the end of 2017.
Foreign guest workers with H-2B visas got the rest.
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“I probably could’ve made it balance. But you all would’ve rightly absolutely excoriated us for using funny numbers to do it.”
— Budget director Mick Mulvaney, quoted by the Wall Street Journal, on the Trump administration’s budget proposal.
David Brooks: “All of this would be survivable if the mentality was going away in a few years. But it is not going away. The underlying conditions of scarcity are only going to get worse. Moreover, the warrior mentality builds on itself. As the right pulverizes the left, the left feels the need to pulverize back, and on and on. This is a generational challenge. Trump will be succeeded by some other warrior.”
“Eventually, conservatives will realize: If we want to preserve conservatism, we can’t be in the same party as the clan warriors. Liberals will realize: If we want to preserve liberalism, we can’t be in the same party as the clan warriors.”
“Eventually, those who cherish the democratic way of life will realize they have to make a much more radical break than any they ever imagined. When this realization dawns the realignment begins. Even with all the structural barriers, we could end up with a European-style multiparty system.”
Wall Street Journal: “After watching President Trump fire former FBI Director James Comey, belittle Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and pardon Sheriff Joe Arpaio, among other events, Chris Hunter said he decided to leave his job as a prosecutor in Tampa in December and run for Congress.”
“Mr. Hunter is now one of five former federal prosecutors who are running for House seats as Democrats this year, compared with zero in 2016. The Wall Street Journal couldn’t identify any similar Republican candidates.”
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.