So the big weekend stories: FBI McCabe firing, Cambridge Analytica/Facebook data breach (read this), and Trump takes aim at Mueller by name, lashing out on twitter.
Lawfare:
Anyone who is confidently pronouncing on the merits of Andrew McCabe’s firing Friday night is venturing well beyond the realm of known facts.
We certainly understand the instinct to rally to McCabe’s defense at a time when the president is issuing triumphant tweets and White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders is declaring him a “bad actor.” McCabe’s dismissal comes as part of a broader purge of the senior FBI leadership and specifically targets a man who behaved with extraordinary courage and dignity in the wake of James Comey’s firing last year. It is only natural for those repulsed by the president’s broader interactions with the FBI to assume the worst.
But on McCabe’s innocence or culpability for some infraction that might justify his dismissal, we will reserve judgment—and we caution others to as well. It is simply not clear at this stage whether or not the record will support his dismissal.
Saying it, of course, is not the same thing as doing anything about it.
Ronald A. Klain/WaPo:
Which brings us to Trump’s two advantages over his opponents. First, until the details of McCabe’s case are public, many Trump critics have been restrained in their reaction to McCabe’s firing. They want to reserve judgment until the facts are in; they want to assess McCabe’s actual culpability before taking up his case.
But Trump is not similarly constrained in smearing McCabe and regaling in his ouster. Trump called McCabe’s firing — executed by an attorney general under pressure to appease his boss — “a great day” and a reflection of the “lies and corruption going on at the highest levels of the FBI.” This was at least his sixth tweet about McCabe in recent months, leaving no doubt about Trump’s grudge against the career FBI agent whom Trump has maligned with a long list of false accusations.
WaPo:
Once-safe Republican districts suddenly in play as Democrats expand the map
The campaign for control of Congress is suddenly playing out across a far larger swath of the country than either party had previously expected, with Tuesday’s special House election in the Pittsburgh suburbs showing how President Trump’s unpopularity is turning many once-safe Republican districts into battlegrounds in this year’s midterm elections.
GOP incumbents who have rarely, if ever, faced a viable challenger are being forced to build campaign operations, raise money and make more frequent appearances across their districts.
And Democrats who have long intended to make their stand in a few dozen evenly divided districts now say the results in Pennsylvania’s 18th Congressional District, which Trump carried by nearly 20 points two years ago, suggest the battleground may expand to more than 100 districts where the president’s margin was smaller.
Millennials, women, whites with college degrees. Independents!!! And now, 65+. Men are coming around, slowly.
Pew:
What Google searches can tell us about Americans’ interest in guns
We analyzed long-term trends in U.S. Google keyword searches for 416 specific gun model names, compiled from two sources: GunBroker.com, an online gun auction website, and the American Firearms Institute, a gun rights advocacy website that provides information about firearms. While not exhaustive, the list includes many popular handguns and rifles.
By focusing on the models of guns Americans are searching for, we sought to learn more about the public’s interest in guns as potential consumer products, rather than as a subject of general interest. This analysis builds on a 2017 Pew Research Center survey that found that about four-in-ten Americans live in a gun-owning household.
Guardian:
‘I made Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare tool’: meet the data war whistleblower
For more than a year we’ve been investigating Cambridge Analytica and its links to the Brexit Leave campaign in the UK and Team Trump in the US presidential election. Now, 28-year-old Christopher Wylie goes on the record to discuss his role in hijacking the profiles of millions of Facebook users in order to target the US electorate
NY Times:
How Trump Consultants Exploited the Facebook Data of Millions
So the firm harvested private information from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their permission, according to former Cambridge employees, associates and documents, making it one of the largest data leaks in the social network’s history. The breach allowed the company to exploit the private social media activity of a huge swath of the American electorate, developing techniques that underpinned its work on President Trump’s campaign in 2016.
Quinta Jurecic and Benjamin Wittes/Atlantic:
Is America on the Verge of a Constitutional Crisis?
As the Trump presidency approaches a troubling tipping point, it’s time to find the right term for what’s happening to democracy.
Trump can whine and he can fire senior FBI officials, but he has been singularly ineffective either in getting the bureau to investigate his political opponents (they have not yet “locked her up”) or in dropping the Russia investigation, which continues to his apparent endless frustration. If this is constitutional rot, it's inspiring a surge of public commitment to underlying democratic ideals—including the independence of law enforcement.
What we are seeing, in other words, is a little more dynamic than rot, a phrase that assumes we know the outcome. It’s more like constitutional infection or injury. The wound may indeed lead to a crisis; it may become gangrenous. But to describe the United States today as facing a constitutional crisis misses the frenetic pre-crisis activity of the antibodies fighting the bacteria, alongside the antibiotics the patient is taking.
We are definitely in a period of sustained constitutional infection. The question is whether we can collectively bring that infection under control before we face an acute crisis.
Resiliency is the key word in and after a crisis.