First Read: “Facing a challenging political environment, a Republican president whose approval rating is around 40 percent and an expanding battleground map for control of the House, Republicans are spending their resources — now — on trying to disqualify Democratic candidates.”

Just yesterday, the Congressional Leadership Fund released five different ads hitting Democrats:

• In CA-39 against Gil Cisneros (for investing in companies that do business with Iran)
• In IL-6 against Sean Casten (hitting his business record)
• In ME-2 against Jared Golden (on taxes)
• In NJ-3 against Andy Kim (tying him to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi)
• And in WI-1 against Randy Bryce (for being arrested nine times)

David Wasserman: “Only hope for House Republicans to save majority? Disqualify Democratic nominees with nuclear opposition and slug it out race-by-race starting in August and September. And so it begins.”

“Republicans unveiled an ad campaign this week that seemed to turn back the clock a few decades — by trying to turn the word ‘liberal’ into the kind of insult it was 25 years ago,” the Washington Post reports.

“This is a slight variation on what has been a steadily consistent theme from CLF: a steady attack on Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) as the potential next House speaker should Democrats win back the majority.”

“But the earlier ads focused almost exclusively on Pelosi, assuming the viewer already knew what she stood for and why they disliked her. In this week’s trio of ads, however, Pelosi is a bit character, appearing on screen for just four or five seconds in the 90 seconds of airtime.”

President Trump’s campaign team has run more than 4,400 ads on the president’s personal Facebook page since May 7, CNN reports.

The page has more than 24 million followers.

The data was obtained through Facebook’s new ad tracking tool, which allows users to see political ads run on the platform in the United States.

Washington Post: “Facebook plans to tell lawmakers on Tuesday that 126 million of its users may have seen content produced and circulated by Russian operatives, many times more than what the company previously disclosed about the reach of the disinformation campaign during the 2016 presidential election.”

“Previously, Facebook had focused its disclosures on Russian ads. The company has said that 470 accounts and pages run by a Russian troll farm had purchased roughly 3,000 ads, which the company said reached an estimated 10 million users. But the troll farm, known as the Internet Research Agency, also published free content. Researchers estimated that the spread of free content was far greater than that of ads and that Facebook has been under pressure to share more about those posts.”

“Facebook said it estimates 10 million people saw ads it has discovered on its platform paid for by Russian entities, but warned that it may not have uncovered all malicious activity that attempted to interfere in the American political process,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“The revelation from Facebook quantifies for the first time the spread of the known Russian activity since the social network said last month it had identified 470 ‘inauthentic’ Russian-backed accounts responsible for $100,000 in advertising spending. Facebook presented congressional investigators with data on 3,000 ads bought by the Russian actors before and after the U.S. presidential election.”