NY Times:
Trump Foundation to Close After Lawsuit by New York Attorney General
The attorney general, Barbara Underwood, accused the foundation of “a shocking pattern of illegality” that was “willful and repeated” and included unlawfully coordinating with Mr. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
“This amounted to the Trump Foundation functioning as little more than a checkbook to serve Mr. Trump’s business and political interests,” Ms. Underwood said.
Crime family entities are now down to five (Trump org, Trump campaign, Trump inauguration, Trump administration, Trump transition) with the defunct Trump U and the dissolution of the Foundation. Foundation and Empire next. Hopefully there will be no Second Foundation.
Mark A. Barreto/NY Times:
Trump Thinks He’s Still Winning on Immigration
Never mind what the election results say.
This was the second major defeat during the Trump presidency for a campaign strategy centered on racism and attacking immigrants, even after it helped propel Mr. Trump to victory in 2016. In the 2017 election for governor of Virginia, the Republican candidate, Ed Gillespie, tried this same playbook, and it resulted in backlash from Latino and black voters, and no net gain in turnout or Republican votes from whites….
Most political science research, including my own, concludes that in 2016, Mr. Trump did mobilize white voters who felt left behind and angry at immigrants, blacks and Muslims. But in 2018, voters had had enough: in the Election Eve poll, 57 percent of white voters in swing districts said Mr. Trump’s words and deeds made them angry. The net gain that Republicans thought they could count on from whites disappeared, with 50 percent now agreeing that Mr. Trump and the Republicans were using toxic rhetoric to divide Americans.
Pundits: But his base ...!!!
Voters: Meh, who cares what white evangelicals think? We’ll outvote them.
That’s a lot of investigations. And there is so much news, some of it will filter down to the “not paying attention” folks.
Timothy L. O’Brien/Bloomberg:
How Donald Trump Got Caught in a Legal Vise
The breadth of investigations is so sweeping that they may hang over the president and his entourage long after Robert Mueller’s probe is finished.
The Trump team’s possible collusion with Russia to sabotage and tilt the 2016 election, a probe spearheaded by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, pulls many strands of the investigations together. Trumplandia’s intersection with Russia may have started with business propositions more than a decade ago (such as the Trump SoHo hotel and condominium), and included more recent undertakings like a project in Moscow, before evolving into a political partnership during the 2016 campaign after Trump’s presidential prospects brightened.
But there are many other threads, some related to Russia and some not, that investigators are pulling on. The Trump inauguration raised $107 million, and $40 million of that amount remains unaccounted for; Ivanka Trump, according to a joint report from ProPublica and WNYC, refereed payments to Trump’s Washington hotel during the inauguration. The Wall Street Journal said last week that federal investigators are examining whether inauguration donors gave money in exchange for policy favors.
Seth Masket/Pacific Standard:
THE DEMISE OF 'THE WEEKLY STANDARD' IS A BLOW TO THE REPUBLICAN PARTY
The magazine's demise signals the further erosion of conservatism as a coherent ideology—and its replacement by a Trump personality cult
The map of the Republican coalition can be seen below. The network map suggests that the coalition was oriented around three publications: Human Events, National Review, and The Weekly Standard. Other organizations, such as the Republican National Committee and the Bush/Cheney presidential campaign (the experiment was partly conducted in 2004) were clearly important, but those magazines shared more information and had ties to more segments of the party than any other organizations included in the analysis.
Of these three publications, only National Review now remains as an influential conservative voice. The Weekly Standard is being shut down, and Human Events, once home to a number of prominent conservative voices, is now little more than a news aggregator reposting articles by—and only by—Ann Coulter and Paul Dykewicz.
Whereas the Republican Party network relied most heavily on just a few organizations, the Democratic Party network was far more crowded, meaning a single publication was more critical to the conservative network than to the liberal one. Here's our network graph for the Democrats, from that same paper:
Russian disinformation was vast (1) and prepared the ground for Clinton mistrust (2) and James Comey final blow. (3) was huge but hidden re election.
NBC:
Trump, GOP don't have a plan to avert a government shutdown — at least not yet
Also, here was Sen. John Kennedy, R-La.: “If the White House has a plan [to avoid a shutdown], they're keeping it to themselves… I don't want to have this fight and shut the government down unless we have a chance to win it.”
And then there’s this to chew on: The White House has very little leverage if there’s a shutdown fight. For one thing, as the New York Times writes, defeated House Republicans haven’t been showing up to cast votes — so that reduces the size of their soon-to-end majority.
Then there’s the incoming House Democratic majority come January 3: If there’s a shutdown, Nancy Pelosi and House Democrats can introduce a bill to keep the government open and dare the GOP-controlled Senate not to follow suit.
Next, there’s the lack of a Republican appetite to have a shutdown (just check out those Cornyn and Kennedy quotes above).
Natasha Bertrand/Atlantic:
A Surge in Foreign-Influence Prosecutions
Authorities indict two former associates of Michael Flynn for acting as illegal agents of the Turkish government in the United States.
All three men, Flynn, Bijan Kian, and Ekim Alptekin, have now been targeted by the Justice Department for running afoul of either the Foreign Agents Registration Act (fara) or 18 U.S.C. 951—laws that were once rarely prosecuted but have proved useful to prosecutors investigating the foreign-influence campaigns that permeated the United States in 2016 and beyond.
The uptick in charges related to violations of fara and 951, which criminalize acting in the United States as a foreign agent without notifying the government, reflects a surge in these prosecutions, legal experts told me. Russia’s interference in the election, combined with a Justice Department inspector-general report published in 2016 outlining how fara was being “underutilized” as a counterintelligence tool, has resulted in a strategic shift in how the department chooses to hold unregistered foreign agents accountable.
Paul Waldman/WaPo:
Yes, there was ‘collusion.’ Now what should we do about it?
So let’s stop beating around the bush. The Russian government tried to get Trump elected, and Trump, his campaign, his close associates and even members of his family tried to help them. For all practical purposes, Russia was part of the Trump campaign. That is no longer in doubt. All we’re doing now is filling in the details.
But those details are appalling. Let’s begin with the first report, created by Oxford University’s Computational Propaganda Project and Graphika, a network analysis firm, and obtained by The Post, examining efforts by the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) to use social media in the service of Trump’s campaign:
Nicholas Grossman/ARC:
If We Cared About the Constitution, We’d Impeach Trump for Bribery
But politics outweighs the Founders
These caveats aim to prevent manufactured accusations (two witnesses, overt act) as well as politicization (only war against the U.S. or aiding America’s enemies). Regular policy choices cannot constitute treason, no matter how passionately one disagrees with them.
There are no equivalent clarifications of bribery in the Constitution, indicating the Founders thought it was less ambiguous than treason, harder to issue false accusations, and arguably a more pressing concern.
As if this weren’t enough, there’s also the Emoluments Clause in Article I, Section 9, which declares that no officeholder may “accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.” And there’s also Article II, Section 1, which forbids the president from accepting any “Emolument” from the United States or any state within, meaning any payment beyond his legally designated salary.
Margaret Sulivan/WaPo:
It’s high time for media to enter the No Kellyanne Zone — and stay there
Lies are coming at the American public in torrents — raining down on them everywhere they turn.
A report prepared for the Senate Intelligence Committee, and obtained by The Washington Post, made that breathtakingly clear over the weekend. The intentional spreading of disinformation on every platform — from Facebook all the way to PayPal — should frighten everyone who cares about democracy.
One place that truth can prevail is in the reality-based news media, where editorial judgment comes into play.
That means it’s more important than ever not to give falsehoods a megaphone there.
Which brings us to Chris Cuomo’s 39-minute interview Thursday with Kellyanne Conway, President Trump’s top dissembler.
Dave Weigel/WaPo interviews Sherrod Brown on various topics, I picked this out on Medicare-for-all:
WP: A lot of the senators talking about running have endorsed Medicare-for-all legislation. You haven't, so explain what your current position is.
SB: I want to get to universal coverage. That’s been my commitment to taxpayers. I joined the exchange [got insurance through the ACA] in 2013. I worked for years on the Medicare buy-in at 55. I worked for years, on [former top Senate Democrat] Harry Reid’s behest, as the lead negotiator, with a group of six of us. We got that without any significant increase to premiums. We had that in the bill, and then Joe Lieberman changed his vote. That’s the way to get to Medicare-for-all. However we get to universal coverage, we’ve got to get there. I’ve introduced a bill to do a pilot for police and fire. The average police and firefighter retired at 53, and instead of paying their health insurance, state governments are block-granting their money. That’s why we should do a Medicare buy-in for police and fire, something this Congress actually might consider.
Let’s go local with 2 Michigan stories:
Susan Demas with a Rick Snyder profile:
Snyder’s next act hinges on his Lame Duck legacy
The million-dollar question is if Snyder will sign off on the Republicans’ reactionary agenda. The national media have certainly been mesmerized by this mystery, too.
If history is any guide, the answer is “yes” on almost everything. Snyder has endorsed anti-LGBTQ bills on adoptions, a GOP gerrymandering scheme in Oakland County, a hasty rewrite of the Emergency Manager law just weeks after voters dumped it in 2012 and, of course, Right to Work.
Detroit News:
GOP bid to strip power from Democratic secretary of state likely dead
While it’s possible the GOP-led House still could discharge the legislation from committee for floor action, a caucus source told The Detroit News that is not expected to happen.
Instead, the House is unlikely to act on the proposal, which prompted national media coverage as part of a Republican push to strip powers from incoming Democrats who swept the top of the ticket on Nov. 6.