“President Trump’s campaign manager didn’t vote for his boss in the last presidential election. He didn’t vote at all,” the Washington Post reports.
“The last time Bill Stepien voted, according to public records, was in 2015, when he lived in New Jersey and was registered there.”
“Stepien registered to vote in Washington, D.C., where he has been living since 2017, at the end of July — two weeks after he was tapped to take over Trump’s reelection bid.”
BuzzFeed News reports that during the summer of 2016, Trump backer and investor Peter Thiel “hosted a dinner with one of the most influential and vocal white nationalists in modern-day America — a man who has called for the creation of a white ethnostate and played a key role in an effort to mainstream white nationalism as the ‘alt-right.’ And then Thiel emailed the next day to say how much he’d enjoyed his company.”
“Among those on the racist right, Thiel’s outreach raised hopes that his financial bet on Trump would extend into the ascendant alt-right movement, which despite its prominence was a collection of small and often cash-strapped organizations. One avowed white nationalist privately speculated that Thiel’s money and influence could have made him ‘our George Soros.'”
A new ad released by President Trump’s reelection campaign that looked to capitalize on the August jobs report to portray the country as being in the middle of a “great American comeback” features foreign stock footage, ABC News reports.
Jerry Fallwell Jr. told Reuters he did not endorse President Trump in return for Michael Cohen keeping racy photos of his wife from being published.
Said Falwell: “Someone stole some pictures I took of my wife in the back yard. Topless. Big deal. OK?”
He added: “It was no quid pro quo. There was no me supporting Trump because of whatever Michael was doing.”
Michael Cohen writes in his new tell-all book that Donald Trump praised Russian President Vladimir Putin during the 2016 presidential campaign because he assumed he would lose the election and wanted to make sure he could borrow money from Russian sources for his real estate empire, NBC News reports.
Also interesting: “When a Russian oligarch bought Trump’s mansion in Palm Beach, Florida, in 2008 for nearly double what Trump paid for it — a $50 million profit — Trump believed Putin was secretly funding the deal.”
James Risen looks at the final Senate Intelligence Committee report that was dumped just before the conventions and hasn’t gotten enough media attention.
“When Donald Trump traveled to Moscow in November 1996, looking for real estate development opportunities, he didn’t get a hotel deal in Moscow, but he may have found a new woman, and the Russian government probably knew about it, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s remarkable new report on the committee’s three and a half year investigation into Trump and Russia.”
“Trump met the Russian woman through his business connections at a party at a luxury hotel in Moscow, and the two apparently had a brief affair, at a time when Trump was married to his second wife, Marla Maples. The Senate report has redacted the woman’s name and blacked out her face in photos taken of her with Trump at the time and provided to the committee. But the report explains in detail how Russian intelligence operatives keep track of the sexual activities of visiting foreign business executives, and notes that the Moscow-based U.S. businessman who introduced Trump to the woman probably told Russian government officials about it.”
“I think I did win the popular vote. There was tremendous cheating in California. There was tremendous cheating in New York and other places.”
— President Trump, in an interview on Fox News, falsely claiming he won the popular vote in 2016.
Amy Walter: “This week I dug into the most recent national poll from Pew Research and compared it with the results of their 2016 validated vote survey (basically, a post-election exit poll that uses official voting records). What you find is that Trump is hitting his 2016 share of the vote among most demographic groups. But, he’s not grown beyond those voters. Instead, it’s Biden who has improved markedly on Clinton’s 2016 performance.”
“Now, the all-important caveat. The voter validated survey is of people who actually voted in 2016, while the July-August survey is of registered voters. In other words, some of the people in the July-August survey may not vote, while everyone in the 2016 survey did. But, it does help give us some perspective on how Trump is performing with key demographic groups compared to how he did with them in 2016.”
The Independent has audio of Donald Trump meeting with Black leaders just days before his inauguration where he boasted of receiving more African-American votes than the two previous GOP presidential candidates — while also benefiting from some Black people not voting at all.
Said Trump: “I got many more votes than Romney, many more votes than McCain… we ended up with 11 per cent… and I’ll tell you, it’s much more if you add — many blacks didn’t go out to vote for Hillary because they liked me — that was almost as good as getting the vote.”
Phillip Bump notes Donald Trump’s first 2016 campaign manager was arrested for battery after grabbing a reporter in 2016.
His second campaign manager went to prison on a variety of federal charges stemming from the Mueller probe.
His third campaign manager was just indicted on federal fraud charges.
Axios: “Bannon’s indictment makes him the sixth person linked to the senior leadership of the 2016 Trump campaign to be hit with federal charges. The others are Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, Rick Gates, Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen — all of whom faced indictments under the Mueller investigation.”
The final Senate Intelligence Committee report finds Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort used ten different encrypted messaging apps, including WhatsApp, Wickr, Signal, Threema, Skype, Snapchat, Fiber, Hushmail, WeChat and Voxer.
The final Senate Intelligence Committee report on Russian interference in the 2016 election has some damning details about the day the infamous Access Hollywood tape was released, Politico reports.
The Trump campaign team knew about the tape an hour before its release. Roger Stone then told Jerome Corsi to get Julian Assange at Wikileaks to “drop the Podesta emails immediately.”
WikiLeaks did so about 30 minutes after the tape was published.
The Senate Intelligence Committee released its fifth and final report on Russia’s “aggressive, multifaceted effort” to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.
This seems particularly damning:
Manafort hired and worked increasingly closely with a Russian national, Konstantin Kilimnik. Kilimnik is a Russian intelligence officer. Kilimnik became an integral part of Manafort’s operations in Ukraine and Russia, serving as Manafort’s primary liaison to Deripaska and eventually managing Manafort’s office in Kyiv. Kilimnik and Manafort formed a close and lasting relationship that endured to the 2016 U.S. elections. and beyond.
Axios: “On numerous occasions, Manafort sought to pass sensitive internal polling data and campaign strategy to Kilimnik. The committee was unable to determine why or what Kilimnik did with that information. The committee did, however, obtain ‘some information’ suggesting Kilimnik ‘may have been connected’ to Russia’s hacking and leaking of Democratic emails.”
The bottom line:
Taken as a whole, Manafort’s high level access and willingness to share information with individuals closely affiliated with the Russian intelligence services, particularly Kilimnik and associates of Oleg Deripaska, represented a grave counterintelligence threat.
“A powerful Republican central to the president’s 2020 reelection bid was part of a more concerted effort than previously known to remove him from the ballot in 2016,” Business Insider reports.
“The maneuvers of Katie Walsh and, to a lesser degree, her husband, Mike Shields, have been discussed quietly among some of President Trump’s closest advisers for years. They have both served in powerful posts, including in the White House and the Republican National Committee. Some of those advisers have debated whether the two actually want to help the president or whether they simply want to cash in on their access to Trump.”
Out just before the election: Wicked Game: An Insider’s Story on How Trump Won, Mueller Failed, and America Lost by Rick Gates.
“Rick Gates, who served as Donald Trump’s deputy campaign chairman in 2016 and as a cooperating witness in the Mueller investigation, gives readers a rare, in-depth look at one of the most controversial elections—and presidents—in U.S. history.”
When the FBI gave candidate Donald Trump his first intelligence briefing in 2016 and warned that foreign agents might try to infiltrate his campaign, Trump asked, “Are the Russians bad?” according to an official summary of the meeting, the HuffPost reports.
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.