President Barack Obama called Donald Trump a “fascist” in a phone conversation with Sen. Tim Kaine during the 2016 presidential election, Kaine says in a video clip featured in an upcoming documentary about Hillary Clinton, NBC News reports.
Said Kaine: “President Obama called me last night and said: ‘Tim, remember, this is no time to be a purist. You’ve got to keep a fascist out of the White House.'”
A four-hour docuseries about Hillary Clinton will premiere in its entirety March 6 on Hulu, the Hollywood Reporter reports.
In it, Clinton slams Sen. Bernie Sanders: “He was in Congress for years. He had one senator support him. Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done. He was a career politician. It’s all just baloney and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it.”
She refused to say whether she would endorse him if he won the Democratic nomination.
“A spokeswoman and outreach staffer on Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential bid, A.J. Delgado, is suing Trump and his campaign for pregnancy and sex discrimination,” Politico reports.
“Delgado’s suit, filed Monday in federal court in Manhattan, claims she was sidelined by campaign officials about six weeks after the 2016 election — shortly after she told senior officials that she was pregnant.”
“The federal prosecutor scrutinizing the Russia investigation has begun examining the role of the former CIA director John Brennan in how the intelligence community assessed Russia’s 2016 election interference,” the New York Times reports.
“John Durham, the United States attorney leading the investigation, has requested Mr. Brennan’s emails, call logs and other documents from the CIA… He wants to learn what Mr. Brennan told other officials, including the former FBI director James Comey, about his and the CIA’s views of a notorious dossier of assertions about Russia and Trump associates.”
“Almost from the moment he took office, President Trump seized on a theory that troubled his senior aides: Ukraine, he told them on many occasions, had tried to stop him from winning the White House,” the Washington Post reports.
“After meeting privately in July 2017 with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Group of 20 summit in Hamburg, Trump grew more insistent that Ukraine worked to defeat him.”
“The president’s intense resistance to the assessment of U.S. intelligence agencies that Russia systematically interfered in the 2016 campaign — and the blame he cast instead on a rival country — led many of his advisers to think that Putin himself helped spur the idea of Ukraine’s culpability.”
Jonathan Bernstein: “Challenge the findings of an investigation? Absolutely legitimate. Spin the parts that are good for your side? Everyone in politics does that. But to say up is down, day is night, apples are vegetables and baseball is played by horses on a chessboard? No. That’s not part of a healthy democracy.”
“Trump, and Republicans in general, have been dead wrong about this investigation. And if they insist on claiming otherwise, it’s up to the media to make clear that they’re simply not telling the truth — and that none of the nefarious things they’ve been alleging actually happened.”
FBI Director Christopher Wray undercut a theory pushed by President Trump and some of his Republican allies that the government of Ukraine meddled in the 2016 election, ABC News reports.
Said Wray: “We have no information that indicates that Ukraine interfered with the 2016 presidential election.”
President Trump’s former deputy campaign chairman Rick Gates has asked for a sentence of just probation after extensive cooperation with prosecutors following a guilty plea to two federal crimes, CNN reports.
“The court filing highlights just how significant Gates had been in the Mueller investigation and to prosecutors as they went after other targets, including a former White House counsel, Roger Stone and Gates’ former boss, Paul Manafort. Some details about what Gates spoke to prosecutors about are still under seal.”
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) made the unfounded allegation that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 presidential election in a NBC News interview.
Said Cruz: “Of course Russia interfered in the election. But here’s the game the media is playing. Because Russia interfered, the media pretends nobody else did. Ukraine blatantly interfered in our election.”
Axios: “Cruz is one of several Republican senators who have refused to disavow the allegations that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election, despite receiving a briefing from intelligence officials that this is an alternative narrative being propagated by Russian security services.”
“He was so shocked he could barely talk… He was more shocked than me, I think.”
— Hillary Clinton, quoted by CNN, on when she called Donald Trump to concede the 2016 presidential election.
“The prosecutor handpicked by Attorney General William Barr to scrutinize how U.S. agencies investigated President Trump’s 2016 campaign said he could not offer evidence to the Justice Department’s inspector general to support the suspicions of some conservatives that the case was a setup by American intelligence,” the Washington Post reports.
“Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s office contacted U.S. Attorney John Durham, the prosecutor Barr personally tapped to lead a separate review of the 2016 probe into possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia… The inspector general also contacted several U.S. intelligence agencies.”
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) told CNN that he is “1,000% confident” that Russia, not Ukraine, meddled in the 2016 presidential election, breaking from President Trump and others in his party who have pushed the discredited conspiracy theory.
Said Graham: “It was the Russians. I’m 1,000% confident that the hack of the DNC was by Russian operatives, no one else.”
He added: “I’ve got no doubt that it was the Russians who stole the DNC emails. It wasn’t Ukraine. Russia was behind the stolen DNC emails and Podesta and all that good stuff.”
Today’s plea deal for Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA) means that the first two members of Congress to endorse Donald Trump for president in 2016 will be convicted criminals.
Hunter and Rep. Chris Collins (R-NY) both backed Trump in February of that year.
“With the impeachment inquiry charging forward, President Trump’s allies have defended his demand for political investigations from Ukraine by claiming that the government in Kyiv tried to sabotage his candidacy and boost Hillary Clinton in 2016,” Politico reports.
“But the Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee thoroughly investigated that theory and found no evidence that Ukraine waged a top-down interference campaign akin to the Kremlin’s efforts to help Trump win in 2016.”
Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) argued in a testy exchange on Meet the Press that he believes “both Russia and Ukraine meddled in the 2016 election,” claiming without evidence that former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko “actively worked” for Hillary Clinton.
A new study from the University of Michigan and Georgetown found that sustained negative media coverage of the Hillary Clinton email scandal drove voters’ open-ended responses about the 2016 presidential race and favorability toward the candidates.
“The fact that this one story dominated the narrative about Clinton seemed to have an effect on voters… On the other hand, people remembered many different news stories about Donald Trump over time. These stories appeared and disappeared quickly, and no one story made a big impression on respondents.”
“The Justice Department’s inspector general found no evidence that the FBI attempted to place undercover agents or informants inside Donald Trump’s campaign in 2016 as agents investigated whether his associates conspired with Russia’s election interference operation,” the New York Times reports.
“The determination by the inspector general, Michael Horowitz, is expected to be a key finding in his highly anticipated report due out on Dec. 9 examining aspects of the Russia investigation. The finding also contradicts some of the most inflammatory accusations hurled by Mr. Trump and his supporters, who alleged not only that F.B.I. officials spied on the Trump campaign but also at one point that former President Barack Obama had ordered Mr. Trump’s phones tapped.”
“He also found that FBI leaders did not take politically motivated actions in pursuing a secret wiretap on a former Trump campaign adviser, Carter Page — eavesdropping that Mr. Trump’s allies have long decried as politically motivated.”
Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) walked back comments supporting the debunked theory that Ukraine hacked the DNC server in 2016 in a CNN interview.
Said Kennedy: “I was wrong. The only evidence I have, and I think it’s overwhelming, is that it was Russia to tried to hack the DNC computer.”
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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