Coming in January: Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff.
Mike Allen: “My conversations with the West Wing show there’s already a frenzy inside to figure out who told Wolff what. Wolff tells me key players have been barraging him with calls, trying to figure out what his sources said about them: ‘It’s the fundamental dynamic of this White House — people divided against each other.'”
New York Times: “Publicly, Mr. McConnell, appearing at a news conference in Louisville, said he was ‘looking at’ drafting a write-in candidate for the Dec. 12 special election. Privately, Mr. McConnell was doing more than merely looking. One idea being discussed, first brought up by two different White House officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity, would be for Attorney General Jeff Sessions to run as either a write-in candidate or to be appointed to what was his seat should Mr. Moore win and be immediately removed from office.”
“Mr. McConnell is supportive of the idea and discussed it on Monday in a telephone call with Vice President Mike Pence that was chiefly about the Republican tax overhaul proposal… Mr. Sessions remains popular among Alabama Republicans, but his relationship with Mr. Trump has frayed since he recused himself from the investigation of the role that Russia played in last year’s presidential campaign.”
Playbook: “Expulsion takes a while. It’s tricky. The Senate hasn’t expelled a member in more than a century. But is there an argument to be made that Republicans would be better off electing Moore, expelling him and getting Alabama’s Republican governor to appoint another GOP senator? That way two Republicans don’t split the vote. And Republicans get to actually take action to expel someone whose behavior they say they find abhorrent.”
“If the Senate has to expel Moore, it could tear the party apart even further and embolden Steve Bannon in his war against incumbents. And it could look like the Senate is subverting the will of the voters.”
“By the way, remember: November was supposed to be all about tax reform. Republicans don’t want to be talking about whether their Senate candidate in Alabama had an unusual interest in high school girls.”
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Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) “has a well-documented history of showing little tolerance for sex scandals that he fears could tarnish the image of the Senate and his party,” the New York Times reports.
“He was a major force behind the effort to push out Larry E. Craig, the Idaho Republican arrested at the Minneapolis airport in 2007 in an undercover sex sting. And he was the chairman of the ethics committee when Senator Bob Packwood, the powerful Oregon Republican, resigned in 1995 under threat of expulsion after he was accused of sexual harassment.”
Attorney General Jeff Sessions “is entertaining the idea of appointing a second special counsel to investigate a host of Republican concerns — including alleged wrongdoing by the Clinton Foundation and the controversial sale of a uranium company to Russia — and has directed senior federal prosecutors to explore at least some of the matters and report back to him and his top deputy,” the Washington Post reports.
“The list of matters he wanted probed was wide ranging, but included the FBI’s handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state, various dealings of the Clinton Foundation and several matters connected to the purchase of the Canadian mining company Uranium One by Russia’s nuclear energy agency.”
New York Times: “The decision to examine those matters raises questions about whether Mr. Trump is trying to use the Justice Department to investigate his political rivals and distract from the special counsel’s investigation into his presidential campaign. It also comes at a tenuous time for Attorney General Jeff Sessions, whom Mr. Trump has hinted to advisers he may want to fire.”
“About a dozen national party staffers are on the ground in Alabama, handling field organizing duties for next month’s special election between Moore and Democratic nominee Doug Jones,” an RNC official told BuzzFeed News.
New Yorker: “This past weekend, I spoke or messaged with more than a dozen people—including a major political figure in the state—who told me that they had heard, over the years, that Moore had been banned from the mall because he repeatedly badgered teen-age girls. Some say that they heard this at the time, others in the years since. These people include five members of the local legal community, two cops who worked in the town, several people who hung out at the mall in the early eighties, and a number of former mall employees.”
Blake Usry is quoted by the Birmingham News: “He would go and flirt with all the young girls. It’d seem like every Friday or Saturday night you’d see him walking around the mall, like the kids did.”
NRSC Chairman Cory Gardner (R-CO) said that Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore (R) is “unfit to serve,” and he should be expelled from the Senate if he wins next month’s election, following allegations that he initiated a sexual encounter with a 14-year-old girl when he was 32, the Washington Post reports.
The urgent repudiation came just hours after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said Moore should end his Senate campaign in Alabama.
“Alabama Democrats have a message for out-of-state allies eager to help in the state’s Senate race: Thanks, but no thanks,” NBC News reports.
Said former party executive director Giles Perkins: “I tell them to stay home. This is an Alabama race, and we will decide it here.”
In his first interview since being sucker-attacked 10 days ago while doing yard work in Kentucky, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) told the Washington Examiner that there was “no justification” for what happened.
Said Paul: “From my perspective, I’m not really too concerned about what someone’s motive is. I’m just concerned that I was attacked from the back and somebody broke six of my ribs and gave me a damaged lung where at least for now I have trouble speaking and breathing and now I’ve hurt for 10 days.”
“A full analysis of the economic effects of the House tax bill isn’t available yet, according to a Congressional Budget Office document released on Monday. It’s not clear if such an estimate will be ready before the House votes later this week,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
New York Times: Haste on tax measures may leave a trail of loopholes.
The Atlantic has private messages between Donald Trump Jr. and Wikileaks.
“The messages… were also turned over by Trump Jr.’s lawyers to congressional investigators. They are part of a long—and largely one-sided—correspondence between Wikileaks and the president’s son that continued until at least July 2017. The messages show Wikileaks, a radical transparency organization that the American intelligence community believes was chosen by the Russian government to disseminate the information it had hacked, actively soliciting Trump Jr.’s cooperation. Wikileaks made a series of increasingly bold requests, including asking for Trump’s tax returns, urging the Trump campaign on Election Day to reject the results of the election as rigged, and requesting that the president-elect tell Australia to appoint Julian Assange ambassador to the United States…”
“Though Trump Jr. mostly ignored the frequent messages from Wikileaks, he at times appears to have acted on its requests.”
The Daily Beast reports that no one seems to know what Omarosa Manigault does in the White House.
After the abrupt end to our day in March, I called a Republican source in constant contact with the White House and asked what they thought Omarosa’s job entailed. “No clue,” the source said. I told the source about our whirlwind of a morning.
“Wait, Hope [Hicks] let you follow [Omarosa] around?” the source asked. No, I hadn’t spoken with Hope, who now serves formally as the White House communications director. “So Sean [Spicer] let you?” Ditto. “Christ,” the source said. “No one in the comms department knew a random reporter was walking around the West Wing. This is why people think we’re a shit show.”
Former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, who was fired by President Trump earlier this year, joins Chris Riback to discuss the unfolding Russia investigation and how special counsel Robert Muller might try to flip a witness.
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A fifth woman accused Alabama U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore (R) of making sexual or romantic advances toward her when she was 16 years old, the New York Times reports.
Said Beverly Young Nelson: “I tried fighting him off, while yelling at him to stop, but instead of stopping, he began squeezing my neck attempting to force my head onto his crotch.”
She added: “I continued to struggle. I was determined that I was not going to allow him to force me to have sex with him. I was terrified. He was also trying to pull my shirt off. I thought that he was going to rape me. I was twisting and struggling and begging him to stop. I had tears running down my face.”
Nelson said that Moore warned her that “no one will believe you” if she told anyone about the encounter.
“Seven of the 16 jurors and alternates in the trial of Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) raised their hands when U.S. District Judge William Walls on Monday morning asked whether they’d heard or read anything about the case, prompting the judge to take them into his chambers individually to get more details,” the Newark Star Ledger reports.
“The inquiry came after defense attorneys in the trial noted that widespread news coverage of an excused juror’s public statements may have tainted the remaining members of the panel.”
Update: Jurors told the judge that they “are unable to reach a unanimous decision in the case and asked for guidance,” according to the Newark Star Ledger.
Alabama Republican Party Chairman Terry Lathan told the Alabama Political Reporter “that she has not even heard of any GOP elected official or candidate that is even considering running as a write-in candidate against U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore (R), and Lathan warned GOP officials and candidates not to endorse Doug Jones (D) or a write-in campaign.”
Said Latham: “It would be a serious error for any current elected GOP official or candidate to publicly endorse another party’s candidate, an independent, a third party or a write in candidate in a general election as well. I have heard of no GOP elected official or candidate that is even considering this option.”
“One of President Trump’s most controversial judicial nominees did not disclose on publicly available congressional documents that he is married to a senior lawyer in the White House Counsel’s Office,” the New York Times reports.
“The nominee, Brett Talley, is awaiting a Senate confirmation vote that could come as early as Monday to become a federal district judge in Alabama. He is married to Ann Donaldson, the chief of staff to the White House counsel, Donald McGahn.”
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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