“Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s reluctance to hold a vote on a popular criminal justice bill has angered top Republican senators and created an unusual rift with a longtime GOP ally, Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa,” the AP reports.

“Grassley has spent years working to build a coalition around the bill and is pushing for a year-end vote. Grassley says more than two-thirds of the Senate supports it. But McConnell is refusing to bring the legislation forward in a standoff that’s dividing the Republican majority and putting President Trump on the spot.”

“For the 85-year-old chairman of the Judiciary Committee, this is not the way Senate is supposed to operate. Grassley was expecting some deference from McConnell after delivering on Trump’s judicial nominees — including two now on the Supreme Court. Trump backs the criminal justice bill, too, but McConnell says it’s divisive.”

“Republican candidates appeared to hold onto two powerful Georgia offices in runoffs Tuesday, but ballots were still being counted for secretary of state and Public Service Commission,” the Atlanta Journal Constitution reports.

Politico: “The retiring Arizona senator is undermining the Senate GOP’s efforts to approve as many lifetime-appointed federal judges as possible in the lame duck. His vow to oppose all judges until he gets a vote shielding the special counsel from presidential interference has already frozen 21 judicial picks in committee and on Thursday helped derail a nominee on the Senate floor.”

“And GOP frustrations are boiling over at Flake, a Trump critic who is using the leverage possessed by an individual senator to advocate for his priorities. But so far McConnell has been unwilling to bend to Flake and give him a vote — which might not pass the Senate anyway, given the number of Republicans resistant to the Mueller bill or Flake’s hardball tactics.”

Nate Silver: “This year’s results do serve as a warning to Trump in one important sense, however: His base alone will not be enough to win a second term. Throughout the stretch run of the 2018 midterm campaign, Trump and Republicans highlighted highly charged partisan issues, from the Central American migrant caravan to Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court. And Republican voters did indeed turn out in very high numbers: GOP candidates for the House received more than 50 million votes, more than the roughly 45 million they got in 2010.”

“But it wasn’t enough, or even close to enough. Problem No. 1 is that Republicans lost among swing voters: Independent voters went for Democrats by a 12-point margin, and voters who voted for a third-party candidate in 2016 went to Democrats by 13 points.”

“Trump and Republicans also have Problem No. 2, however: Their base is smaller than the Democratic one.”

Coming in January: Team of Vipers: My 500 Extraordinary Days in the Trump White House by Cliff Sims.

New York Times: “As the title indicates, the book does not paint a rosy picture of the atmosphere in the White House. An author’s note describes a venomous den in which people are constantly at each other’s throats. But Mr. Sims’s goal, according to people familiar with the book, was not to damage Mr. Trump. And he is said to have at times painted an unflattering portrait of himself.”

Dan Balz: “All presidents suffer defeats and setbacks, whether through elections, legislative battles, international events or scandals. Most learn from them and adapt. Will President Trump be an exception?”

“That’s the question ahead for the president: Will the second two years of his first term be any different from the first two years? His actions and words in the days following the midterm elections indicate things actually could get worse rather than better. He has never been a gracious winner. In defeat, he has shown worse: ill-tempered, withdrawn, even more unpredictable.”

“It may be premature to draw a conclusion about what lessons he has learned, but rather than moving to mitigate the damage done to his party in the midterms or to assert international leadership, Trump has done the opposite in the days since the elections. He has reinforced what his presidency has wrought, domestically and internationally, and left others to worry about what comes next.”

“White House chief of staff John Kelly is fighting to save Kirstjen Nielsen, the Homeland Security chief whom the president has lashed out at for the rise in border apprehensions over the past several months,” Politico reports.

“Kelly, whose fate in the administration is also unclear, is working to convince the president that she is not to blame for a recent surge in arrests at the U.S.-Mexico border that has enraged him.”

“The CIA has concluded that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi… The CIA’s assessment is the most definitive to date linking Mohammed to the operation,” the Washington Post reports.

“The CIA’s conclusion about Mohammed’s role was based on multiple sources of intelligence as well as the agency’s assessment of the prince as the country’s de facto ruler who oversees even minor affairs in the kingdom.”

Politico: “Lawyers for President Donald Trump and his son Donald Trump Jr. insist they aren’t worried about special counsel Robert Mueller. But half a dozen people in contact with the White House and other Trump officials say a deep anxiety has started to set in that Mueller is about to pounce after his self-imposed quiet period, and that any number of Trump’s allies and family members may soon be staring down the barrel of an indictment.”

“Adding to the unease is a spate of anonymously sourced media reports suggesting Mueller’s self-imposed quiet period that started about two months before 2018 Election Day is about to transition into a Category 5 hurricane.”

“Education Secretary Betsy DeVos began receiving around-the-clock security from the U.S. Marshals Service days after being confirmed, an armed detail provided to no other cabinet member that could cost U.S. taxpayers $19.8 million through September of 2019,” NBC News reports.

“While it remains unclear who specifically made the request, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions granted the protection on February 13, 2017, a few days after DeVos was heckled and blocked by a handful of protesters from entering the Jefferson Academy, a public middle school in Washington.”

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange “has been charged under seal, prosecutors inadvertently revealed in a recently unsealed court filing — a development that could significantly advance the probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election and have major implications for those who publish government secrets,” the Washington Post reports.

“It was not immediately clear what charges Assange would face. In the past, prosecutors had contemplated pursuing a case involving conspiracy, theft of government property or violating the Espionage Act.“

President Trump admitted at a campaign rally that it’s possible that the Democrats win the House this midterm election, Axios reports.

Said Trump: “It’ll be bad for the country, the Democrats. And it could happen. Could happen.”