“Ex-Fox & Friends co-host Clayton Morris has left the country amid more than two dozen lawsuits from investors who say he defrauded them in real estate deals involving properties in Indianapolis,” the Indianapolis Star reports.
“Morris, who previously resided in a $1.4 million home in New Jersey, has moved with his family to a coastal resort town Portugal, according to his wife’s Facebook post.”
Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said in a letter to colleagues Monday that “the House cannot allow the President’s characterization of immigrants to our country to stand. Our Republican colleagues must join us in condemning the President’s xenophobic tweets.”
The timing of the vote is uncertain.
HuffPost: “No other U.S. president has lost so many Cabinet members in his first term to ethics issues. After Acosta, the total number of ethics-related Cabinet-level departures in the Trump administration has reached five.”
The others are Tom Price, Scott Pruitt, David Shulkin and Ryan Zinke.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), one of President Trump’s strongest allies on Capitol Hill, declined on Monday to condemn the President over his racist tweets against several minority members of Congress, instead calling them a “bunch of communists,” CNN reports.
Said Graham: “We all know that this crowd are a bunch of communists, they hate Israel, they hate our own country. They’re calling the guards along our border, the border patrol agents, ‘concentration camp guards.’ They accuse people who support Israel of doing it for the Benjamins. They’re anti-Semitic. They’re anti-America.”
Washington Post: “Of the 149 experts who signed at least one of the two letters warning that Trump was unfit for office… just one has been hired by the Trump administration. James Jeffrey, a Middle East expert who served under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, was named the State Department’s special representative for Syria last summer and in January was given the additional role of special envoy to counter the Islamic State. Neither of Jeffrey’s roles required Senate confirmation, which would have risked Democratic lawmakers reading from the never Trump letters at a public hearing.”
“Some of the never Trumpers expressed hope that the blacklist will erode around the edges; even if the White House refuses to hire them, they said, perhaps a determined Cabinet secretary can bring them on.”
Washington Post: “Mulvaney spends considerably less time with Trump than his two previous chiefs of staff, Reince Priebus and John F. Kelly. And the president has sometimes kept him out of the loop when making contentious foreign policy decisions, advisers say. At a recent donor retreat in Chicago, Mulvaney told attendees that he does not seek to control the president’s tweeting, time or family.”
“Instead, Mulvaney has focused much of his energy on creating a new White House power center revolving around the long-dormant Domestic Policy Council and encompassing broad swaths of the administration. One White House official described Mulvaney as ‘building an empire for the right wing.’ He has helped install more than a dozen ideologically aligned advisers in the West Wing since his December hiring. Cabinet members are pressed weekly on what regulations they can strip from the books and have been told their performance will be judged on how many they remove. Policy and spending decisions are now made by the White House and dictated to Cabinet agencies, instead of vice versa.”
Rep. Andy Harris (R-MD) defended President Trump‘s tweets calling on a group of House freshman to “go back” to their countries, telling WBAL that they were not racist.
Said Harris: “No they’re not, they’re obviously not racist. But again, when anyone disagrees with someone now the default is to call them a racist, and this no exception.”
“Nearly three years after he began serving one of the longest prison terms ever for a member of Congress, former Rep. Chaka Fattah (D-PA) returned to federal court in Philadelphia on Friday to push for a lighter sentence now that some of his convictions were overturned on appeal,” the Philadelphia Inquirer reports.
“He left disappointed.”
“Citing his still-standing convictions on 13 other counts, U.S. District Judge Harvey Bartle III ordered the West Philadelphia Democrat to serve the full 10-year sentence he got in 2016.”
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that Matt Lieberman, son of former Sen. Joseph Lieberman, is seriously considering a bid for U.S. Senate in Georgia, telling friends he’s “fed up” with Sen. David Perdue (R-GA).
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A new Gallup poll finds just 29% of American adults support statehood for Washington, DC, while 64% oppose it.
“The Trump administration is preparing a new rule for foreign nationals seeking asylum at the U.S. border with Mexico, in which immigrants seeking refugee status would have to do so in the first country they enter rather than at the U.S. border,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“The announcement comes as President Trump seeks to stem the flow of Central Americans arriving at the U.S. border. It would upend immigration law and likely be immediately challenged in court.”
Brian Stelter: “President Trump launched a bigoted attack against four minority congresswomen on Sunday morning. His tweets were straight up racist. Did the news media accurately describe it that way?”
“By and large, no, most major news outlets did not do that. Reporters and anchors took the story seriously but largely leaned on ‘critics,’ primarily Democrats, and cited their accusations of racism. The significance of Trump’s words risked being lost in a partisan fog.”
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Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) called President Trump “a racist ass” over a series of tweets attacking four non-white progressive female lawmakers, The Hill reports.
Said Lieu: “I never thought I’d see the day when a president was telling immigrants to go back to where we came from. Donald Trump is demonstrating he’s a racist ass. He’s not uniting us. I can’t wait until he leaves the office of the presidency.”
British Prime Minister Theresa May said President Trump used “completely unacceptable” language to describe four female Democratic lawmakers, potentially exacerbating the recent tensions with Washington, Bloomberg reports.
Former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) has accepted a full-time position running a national conservative youth organization based in northern Virginia, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports.
Said Walker: “This would preclude me from running for governor in this next cycle or running for the U.S. Senate if Ron Johnson’s seat is open.”
“Under fire for what many called racist tweets, President Trump said Monday that the minority Democratic congresswomen he said should ‘go back’ to other countries are the ones who should apologize,” USA Today reports.
Said Trump: “When will the Radical Left Congresswomen apologize to our Country, the people of Israel and even to the Office of the President, for the foul language they have used, and the terrible things they have said. So many people are angry at them & their horrible & disgusting actions!”
“He did not detail those alleged actions.”
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.
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