President Trump told reporters that Russia did not help him get elected in 2016, contradicting a tweet sent minutes earlier saying Moscow’s election interference helped him win, The Hill reports.
Said Trump: “No, Russia did not get me elected.”
A video shows Trump also called members of special counsel Robert Mueller’s team “some of the worst human beings on Earth.”
First Read: “As everyone continues to parse Robert Mueller’s words from Wednesday — ‘It’s time to impeach!’ ‘Trump is exonerated!’ ‘Congress needs to do its job!’ — most politicians and commentators are still missing his unequivocal message.”
“Russia clearly interfered in the 2016 presidential election.”
“The lack of urgency and attention to that interference remains, in many ways, the real scandal. That applies to a president who continues to describe that interference as a hoax… And it applies to a Congress that’s been unable to mount a united front to prevent future interference.”
Christopher Steele, the former British spy who produced a dossier describing alleged links between Donald Trump and Russia, “will not cooperate with a prosecutor assigned by Attorney General William Barr to review how the investigations of Trump and his 2016 election campaign began,” Reuters reports.
Stuart Stevens, chief strategist for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign in 2012, tweeted that President Trump won in 2016 for two reasons: African American turnout decreased for first time in 20 years and the third party vote increased.
Said Stevens: “That’s how he won with 46.1% vs Romney’s 47.2%. Seems logical he will try to recreate the same environment.”
President Trump tweeted that his 2016 presidential campaign had been “conclusively spied on” by the Obama administration and claimed it was akin to “treason” and demanded “long jail sentences” for those behind it.
Joshua Spivak: “Democrats have long complained — with good reason — about the role of the Green Party in depriving Al Gore of the White House in 2000. Nader received 2.74% of the vote (he did not appear in all states), including 1.63 percent in the critical state of Florida that Gore lost by 537 votes. That 2.74% was a strong showing for a third party, but in 2016, the Libertarian Party topped that total.”
“The Libertarian Party had never before received more than 1.1% of the vote in a presidential election. But with New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson and former Massachusetts Gov. William Weld serving as their ticket, the party rocketed to 3.24% of the vote. In two of the critical states that Trump flipped, Michigan and Wisconsin, Johnson topped 3.6%. In Pennsylvania, the third normally Democratic stronghold that voted GOP, Johnson received 2.4%.”
“It is not clear from the polling, but one of the reasons for Trump’s surprise victory was the cratering in support for Johnson in the waning months of the election. In September, he was polling at 9%, which fell off heavily by Election Day.”
Attorney General William Barr “has assigned the top federal prosecutor in Connecticut to examine the origins of the Russia investigation… a move that President Trump has long called for but that could anger law enforcement officials who insist that scrutiny of the Trump campaign was lawful,” the New York Times reports.
“John Durham, the United States attorney in Connecticut, has a history of serving as a special prosecutor investigating potential wrongdoing among national security officials, including the F.B.I.’s ties to a crime boss in Boston and accusations of C.I.A. abuses of detainees.”
FBI Director Chris Wray told senators that he would not describe the federal government’s surveillance — such as that conducted on President Trump’s 2016 campaign — as “spying,” as Attorney General William Barr has, NBC News reports.
Said Wray: “That’s not the term I would use. I mean, look, there are a lot of people that have different colloquial phrases. I believe that the FBI is engaged in investigative activity and part of that activity is surveillance activity of different shapes and sizes, and to me the key question is making sure that it’s done by the book, consistent with our lawful authorities. That’s the key question, different people use different colloquial phrases.”
New York Times: “The conversation at a London bar in September 2016 took a strange turn when the woman sitting across from George Papadopoulos, a Trump campaign adviser, asked a direct question: Was the Trump campaign working with Russia?
“The woman had set up the meeting to discuss foreign policy issues. But she was actually a government investigator posing as a research assistant, according to people familiar with the operation. The F.B.I. sent her to London as part of the counterintelligence inquiry opened that summer to better understand the Trump campaign’s links to Russia.”
The Mueller report identifies at least 77 times in which the Trump’s campaign staff, administration officials, family members and associates lied or made false statements to the public, CNN reports.
The Trump Tower in Moscow was the issue that involved the most false claims made by Trump and his team, with 31 of them recorded in the report. At least 13 false claims were made about the firing of former FBI director James Comey.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) asked Attorney General William Barr at this morning’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing if he had a problem with how FBI Director James Comey handled the Clinton email case during the 2016 presidential campaign.
Barr responded: “Yes, I said so at the time.”
However, just days before the 2016 presidential election, Barr actually defended Comey in a Washington Post op-ed saying the FBI Director “did the right thing.”
“Research on Iowa counties that swung from Obama to Trump indicates that GOP success was driven far more by sexism and racism than by economic anxiety,” the Pacific Standard reports.
From the study: “Economic distress is not a significant factor in explaining the shift in Iowa voters from Democrat to Republican between 2008 and 2016. The election outcomes do not signify [a revolt] among working-class voters left behind by globalization.”
Rather, in 2016, “the nativist narrative about ‘taking back America’ and anti-immigrant sentiment became stronger forces than economic issues.”
Ryan Goodman offers an excellent guide to the Mueller Report’s findings on whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia.
“The analysis discusses affirmative evidence and countervailing evidence in the Report, references the Special Counsel’s court filings and reliable news reports that help shed additional light on information in the Report, and identifies significant loose ends that the investigation was unable to answer.”
Former White House advisor Omarosa Manigault-Newman told MSBNC that White House officials told her and other Trump campaign officials not to share evidence with special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigators.
Said Manigault-Newman: “We should really not just focus on what he is telling people to do or say, but how he’s asked people to destroy documents, to destroy e-mails, in my case two boxes of campaign-related materials the White House still has in their possession that they claim they don’t have or don’t know what happened to it.”
NBC News: “The Mueller report’s narrative of secret meetings between members of Donald Trump’s orbit and Russian operatives — contacts that occurred both before and after the 2016 election — portrays a political campaign that left itself open to a covert Russian influence operation, former intelligence officials and other experts say.”
“While finding no criminal conspiracy, the report shows that Trump associates met with Russians after the intelligence community said in October 2016 that Russia was interfering in the presidential election, and even after the Obama administration announced a set of post-election sanctions to punish Russia for that behavior.”
Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) “suggested the federal government misused its power to spy on President Trump for political reasons as part of its investigation into Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 election,” the Des Moines Register reports.
Said Ernst: “It begs the question too, with the federal government spying on political opponents — what have we come to?”
She added: “And that seemed to generate out of the Obama administration. So I think that there are some things that need to be looked at. We need to understand, when is it appropriate to misuse power so that you’re using your federal assets to go after a political opponent? It sounds very much like something you find in Russia or someplace like that.”
Jared Kushner said that the Mueller probe was “more harmful” to the United States than Russian election interference Mueller was charged with investigating, Politico reports.
Said Kushner: “You look at what Russia did, buying some Facebook ads and trying to sow dissent. It’s a terrible thing. But I think the investigations and all of the speculation that’s happened for the last two years has a much harsher impact on our democracy than a couple Facebook ads.”
Taegan Goddard
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire -- which for more than two decades has been one of the nation's most influential political news sites.
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