Russia’s ambassador to the United States has told NBC News he can’t remember a period of worse relations between Washington and Moscow, after both countries expelled dozens of diplomats following the poisoning of a former Russian spy.
Said Anatoly Antonin: “It seems to me that atmosphere in Washington is poisoned — it’s a toxic atmosphere. It depends upon us to decide whether we are in Cold War or not. But … I don’t remember such a bad shape of our relations.”
Rep. Elizabeth Esty (D-CT) reportedly kept her chief of staff employed in her office for three months after she learned that he had allegedly threatened a former Esty staffer whom he had dated, the Washington Post reports.
Said Tony Baker, in a voicemail message to Anna Kain: “You better fucking reply to me or I wil fucking kill you.”
Bloomberg: “Administrator Scott Pruitt’s lease at a Washington apartment owned by a lobbyist friend allowed him to pay $50 a night for a single bedroom — but only on the nights when he actually slept there. White House officials are growing dismayed about the questions surrounding Pruitt’s living arrangement, including his initial inability to produce any documentation about his lease or his actual payments, according to three officials.”
“In all, Pruitt paid $6,100 to use the room for roughly six months.”
The BBC caught scam call center workers on hidden cameras as they laughed at the people they were tricking.
The BBC caught scam call center workers on hidden cameras as they laughed at the people they were tricking. One worker bragged about making $250k from victims. The disturbing truth? Scammers don’t pick phone numbers at random. They buy your data from brokers.
Once your data is out there, it’s not just calls. It’s phishing, impersonation, and identity theft. That’s why I recommend Incogni: They delete your info from the web, monitor and follow up automatically, and continue to erase data as new risks appear. Try Incogni here and get 55% off your subscription with code POLITICALWIRE.
Note to readers: I use Incogni myself and highly recommend it.
“Special counsel Robert Mueller’s team last year made clear it wanted former Trump campaign deputy Rick Gates’ help, not so much against his former business partner Paul Manafort, but with its central mission: investigating the Trump campaign’s contact with the Russians,” CNN reports.
“Mueller’s team alleges that Gates was in contact with a close colleague of Manafort’s who worked for a Russian intelligence agency — and that Gates knew of the spy service ties in September and October 2016, while he worked on the Trump campaign. Gates would have to talk about the communication with the man if prosecutors wanted.”
President Trump “repeated a lie that construction on his long-promised wall at the US-Mexico border had started,” BuzzFeed News reports.
Said Trump: “We started building our wall, I’m so proud of it. We started. We have $1.6 billion. You saw the pictures yesterday. I said what a thing of beauty.”
[alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]The pictures he tweeted were actually from work in 2009.[/alert]
President Trump’s national security advisers “spent months trying to convince him to sign off on a plan to supply new U.S. weapons to Ukraine to aid in the country’s fight against Russian-backed separatists,” NBC News reports.
“Yet when the president finally authorized the major policy shift, he told his aides not to publicly tout his decision, officials said. Doing so, Trump argued, might agitate Russian President Vladimir Putin.”
Said one White House official: “He doesn’t want us to bring it up. It is not something he wants to talk about.”
“Investigators probing whether Donald Trump’s presidential campaign colluded with Russia have been questioning witnesses about events at the 2016 Republican National Convention,” Reuters reports.
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s team “has been asking about a convention-related event attended by both Russia’s U.S. ambassador and Jeff Sessions, the first U.S. senator to support Trump and now his attorney general… Another issue Mueller’s team has been asking about is how and why Republican Party platform language hostile to Russia was deleted from a section of the document related to Ukraine.”
Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that Utah’s top federal prosecutor, John Huber, “has been examining a cluster of Republican-driven accusations against the FBI and has decided that no second special counsel is needed — at least for now,” CNN reports.
A grand jury indicted Bryon Hefner, the husband of Massachusetts state Sen. Stanley Rosenberg (D), on multiple charges of sexual assault, criminal lewdness, and distributing nude photographs without consent, the Boston Globe reports.
“After a three-month delay, a lightning-quick lawsuit and three orders from as many judges, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) called two special elections Thursday and GOP senators dropped legislation to block the contests,” the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports.
“Republican efforts collapsed following a Wednesday ruling by an appellate judge ordering the governor to call the May primary and June general elections. In less than a day, Walker abandoned a state Supreme Court appeal to overturn the ruling and lawmakers in both the Senate and Assembly canceled plans to vote to leave the seats vacant.”
President Trump said the United States would leave Syria “very soon” and “let the other people take care of it,” the Washington Examiner reports.
He added: “We’re going to be coming out of there real soon, going back to our country where we belong, where we want to be.”
A new Greenberg Quinlan Rosner poll suggests that Democratic candidates running in swing districts “must express a willingness to work with President Trump when his agenda might help the district.”
The survey also recommends that Democrats “not appear out of sync with what people believe about the economy.”
Axios: “President Trump’s election unleashed the far-left wing of the Democratic Party, but moderate Democrats are the party’s likely path to the majority. This new polling warns Democrats away from campaigning specifically against Trump and, instead, toward embracing the improving economy with a message focused on the middle class.”
“A federal judge on Thursday denied a request from Stormy Daniels, who says she was paid to remain silent about an affair with President Trump, to expedite a jury trial in her lawsuit against the president,” the Washington Post reports.
“The request for an expedited jury trial and limited discovery — including a deposition of Trump and his personal attorney, Michael Cohen — was deemed ‘premature and must be denied’ because some questions may wind up being answered by a future petition from Trump and Cohen… The ruling is a temporary setback for Daniels’s case and comes as it is unclear how the high-profile lawsuit will proceed.”
A new CNN poll finds that 54% of Americans think that President Trump will lose his re-election bid in 2020, the exact same number who said Barack Obama would lose the 2012 election at this point in his first term.
Only 40% of Americans think Trump will win in 2020, similar to the 44% who said the same for Obama.
“Be 91 and able to say whatever you want.”
— Former Rep. John Dingell (D-MI), quoted by the Detroit News, on how he gained his Twitter following.
Coming soon: Fascism: A Warning by Madeleine Albright.
Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball: “As of this writing, just 379 of 435 House districts will have incumbents running in them this November. That’s the second-lowest total of the post-World War II era.”
“The 56 total open districts include 37 open Republican-held seats and 19 open Democratic seats.”
“Since our last open seat update, the Democratic potential in these seats has grown: It’s possible the Democrats could get a third or more of the way toward flipping the House just through netting gains among the open seats.”
Former FBI director James Comey already has a best seller through preorders with his book A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership, the New York Post reports.
“Comey, who is also taping an audio version, will make promotional appearances on ABC and CBS and launch a 10-city tour. In five of those cities, Comey is giving lectures and commanding Broadway-like prices.”
“Tickets for Comey’s appearance at Town Hall on April 19 (two days after the book’s publication) are going for as much as $850 on StubHub — $95 is the top face value.”
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.