General Michael Hayden, former CIA director and author of The Assault on Intelligence, joins Chris Riback for a conversation on U.S. national security in an age of lies. It’s a great, though unsettling, conversation.
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Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) told NPR that he continues to support the Mueller Russia investigation — and that nothing in Thursday’s hotly anticipated secret briefing on the Russia probe to congressional leaders changed his mind.
Said McConnell: “The two investigations going on that I think will give us the answers to the questions that you raise — the [inspector general] investigation in the Justice Department and the Mueller investigation. I support both of them, and I don’t really have anything to add to this subject based upon the Gang of Eight briefing that we had today, which was classified.”
Washington Post: “The president has chastised her on several occasions this spring, including a much-publicized meeting earlier this month when he attacked her in front of the entire Cabinet. He has grown furious because his administration has made little progress building the border wall, and his most ardent supporters have blamed Nielsen for not doing more to halt the caravan of Central American migrants whose advance Trump saw as a personal challenge.”
“He has also seen her as a proxy for Kelly, whose relationship with the president has frayed in recent months. Trump has decided, according to several aides, that Nielsen is a George W. Bush kind of Republican, the worst in his view.”
“Tensions between the two could soon flare again — the Border Patrol’s May arrest numbers are due to be released early next month, and immigration hawks, including the president, now treat them as a kind of barometer for Nielsen’s performance.”
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President Trump’s campaign team has run more than 4,400 ads on the president’s personal Facebook page since May 7, CNN reports.
The page has more than 24 million followers.
The data was obtained through Facebook’s new ad tracking tool, which allows users to see political ads run on the platform in the United States.
Charlie Cook: “The point of this exercise is to show that the House is likely to be very close no matter what, with neither party likely to have more than the 55 percent of seats the GOP has today, and we’ve seen how difficult it is for the majority to get much done even with that advantage. Only with the best-case scenario for the GOP does either party have anything like a working majority in the Senate, certainly not the 59-41 and 60-40 edges that Democrats had in the first two years of the Obama administration.”
“The bottom line is that with neither party able to act in a decisive or even deliberate manner, it is pretty unlikely that Congress will be in a position to get a heck of a lot done in 2019 and 2020 no matter what the midterm outcome is. We’re just waiting to see the degree of paralysis and which side will have the responsibility for it.”
[alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]Of course, paralysis would be a big victory for Democrats in the age of Trump.[/alert]
A must-read: Camelot’s End: Kennedy vs. Carter and the Fight that Broke the Democratic Party by Jon Ward.
Bloomberg: “Along with reshuffling its initials, he’s reviewing its enforcement, supervisory, and rule-making functions. He’s frozen data collection in the name of security, dropped enforcement cases, and directed staff to slash next year’s budget. He also wants to curb the agency’s independence by giving Congress—rather than the Federal Reserve—control of its spending, and replace the powerful director position he fills with a five-person commission.”
Politico: “As Americans head out for traditional Memorial Day weekend road trips, they’ll confront gas prices of nearly $3 a gallon, the highest since 2014 and a 25 percent spike since last year. The increased cost of fuel is already wiping out a big chunk of the benefit Americans received from the GOP tax cuts. And things could get worse as summer approaches following the administration’s standoff with Iran and a move by oil-producing nations to tighten supplies.”
“The result: The economic and political benefits Trump and the GOP hoped to reap from cutting tax rates could be swamped by higher pump prices that Americans face every time they hit the road.”
A new Fairleigh Dickinson poll in New Jersey finds Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) leading challenger Bob Hugin (R) by just four points, 28% to 24%, with 46% still undecided.
The new poll results are significantly worse for Menendez than two previous surveys, both of which had him up by double digits over Hugin.
“Special counsel Robert Mueller’s team has been probing Roger Stone’s finances as it summons a series of witnesses to gather more information about one of President Trump’s longtime advisers,” CNN reports.
“Since Donald Trump began dominating American politics more than two years ago, Democrats concerned about his policies and behavior have taken solace in a group of influential Republicans who have consistently assailed the president as anathema to the values of their party, and the country more broadly,” the New York Times reports.
“In the past year, however, influential liberal donors and operatives have gone from cheering these so-called Never Trump Republicans to quietly working with — and even funding — them. Through invitation-only emails and private, off-the-record meetings, they have formed a loose network of cross-partisan alliances aimed at helping neutralize President Trump, and preventing others from capitalizing on weaknesses in the political system that they say he has exploited.”
“Julian Assange’s nearly six-year refuge at the Ecuadorian embassy in London is in danger, opening the WikiLeaks founder to arrest by British authorities and potential extradition to the US,” CNN reports.
“While Assange has in the past claimed his position in the embassy was under threat, sources say his current situation is ‘unusually bad’ and that he could leave the embassy ‘any day now,’ either because he will be forced out or made to feel so restricted that he might choose to leave on his own.”
“Truth is relative. They may have a different version of the truth than we do.”
— Rudy Giuliani, quoted by the Washington Post, saying special counsel Robert Mueller may be setting a “perjury trap” for President Trump.
“Early Thursday morning, after a flurry of calls with a handful of senior advisers, an angry President Donald Trump personally dictated the three-paragraph letter to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un that cancelled the scheduled summit between their two nations,” NBC News reports.
“It had been less than 12 hours since Trump and his team began grappling intensely with the prospects for shelving what would have been an historic meeting between the two heads of state.”
“But the president, fearing the North Koreans might beat him to the punch, wanted to be the one to cancel first.”
Washington Post: The inside story into how Trump’s summit fell apart.
Iowa state Sen. Nate Boulton (D) announced he “is suspending his campaign for governor just weeks before the Democratic primary, following allegations of sexual misconduct from multiple women,” Politico reports.
“Boulton, one of the top tier candidates in the Democratic primary competing to face Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds, was accused by three women of sexual misconduct in a report published by the Des Moines Register on Wednesday. Boulton did not deny the allegations, initially telling the paper that he did “not have the same recollection.”
First Read: “Why did Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein – who will brief the members of Congress on this confidential source along with FBI Director Christopher Wray and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats – allow these meetings in the first place? Remember, this is an ongoing investigation that involves the president of the United States.”
“As was discussed on MTP Daily yesterday, there are two theories what Rosenstein is doing here: One, he’s caving to Nunes and the White House. Or two, he’s just trying to buy time for the Mueller investigation, given that he knows more about Mueller’s findings (and timetable) than anyone else.”
Vanity Fair: “The Trump camp’s witch-hunt talking points are now dominating the news—but the media battle may be the wrong way to beat Mueller.”
Said a former FBI official: “This investigation is classic Mueller: he is doing a classic, organized crime case. This is RICO 101, working your way up and sideways. You pop a few guys for gambling, and no one is going to do a million years for gambling, but you’re gonna get their scratch pads, then you move on to their associates. You flip one guy who you arrest with no fanfare. It’s exactly what Mueller has been doing his whole goddamn life. It’s just that this time the boss of the family happens to be the leader of the free world. Mueller doesn’t care if he gets Trump. He doesn’t care if he doesn’t get Trump. He has no political agenda. He is digging through the layers and bringing back the truth, and the truth is going to be whatever it is going to be.”
Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told PBS Newhour that, in his judgment, Russia’s subversion of the 2016 presidential election did prove decisive in tipping it to Donald Trump.
Said Clapper: “As a private citizen, it’s what I would call my informed opinion that, given the massive effort the Russians made, and the number of citizens that they touched, and the variety and multi-dimensional aspects of what they did to influence opinion … and given the fact that it turned on less than 80,000 votes in three states, to me it exceeds logic and credulity that they didn’t affect the election. And it’s my belief they actually turned it.”
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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