Jeffrey Toobin/New Yorker:
Adam Schiff Hires a Former Prosecutor to Lead the Trump Investigation
Representative Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, has hired a veteran prosecutor with experience fighting Russian organized crime to lead his investigation of the Trump Administration. Last month, according to a committee source, Daniel Goldman, who served as an Assistant United States Attorney in the Southern District of New York from 2007 to 2017, joined the committee’s staff as a senior adviser and the director of investigations.
The hiring of Goldman, who will be joined by two other former federal prosecutors on Schiff’s staff, underlines Schiff’s decision to conduct an aggressive investigation of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia during the 2016 Presidential campaign. In the rough division of labor among the various committees in the House of Representatives, Schiff’s panel is tackling the most provocative and, so far, most elusive subject related to the President: whether so-called collusion occurred between the Trump campaign and Moscow. In public comments, Schiff has suggested that Trump’s interest as a private citizen in building a tower in Moscow led him to curry favor with Vladimir Putin, the Russian President. American intelligence agencies long ago concluded that the Russian government made significant efforts, through the hacking of e-mails and use of social media, to help elect Trump over Hillary Clinton. The question of whether the Trump campaign facilitated, assisted, or knew about these efforts has been at the heart of the investigation by the special counsel, Robert Mueller—and will also be central to Schiff’s inquiry.
“Strategists on both sides worry about Federal overreach on Chicago businessman Al Capone.” ~ said no one ever.
I have to admit "oh my god! what if they investigate Trump and find nothing whatsoever?" has never kept me awake at night.
Will Bunch/Philly.com:
Trump’s ‘shadow impeachment’ began Monday. Will the truth save America from itself?
And yet, the Judiciary panel’s push for information is very much focused on high crimes or misdemeanors that may have been committed by the president or his inner circle. In other words, it looks exactly what the beginning of an impeachment investigation of Donald Trump would look like. The lightning strike of an idea here is the knowledge that you can start the lengthy process of gathering information now and still introduce articles of impeachment at a later date...if necessary.
I’d call this a “shadow impeachment,” or maybe The Impeachment That Dare Not Speak Its Name. In 1973-74, it took about nine months for that House Judiciary Committee chaired by New Jersey Democrat Peter Rodino to go from a wave of impeachment bills — introduced after Nixon’s clear-cut abuse of power in "the Saturday Night Massacre — to public hearing to a vote to approve three articles. Nadler’s Monday maneuver creates a timetable when impeachment — if such a case is proven — could still happen in late 2019, before the first presidential primary and caucus votes are cast.
Tim Mak/NPR:
Elderly Trump Critics Await Mueller's Report — Sometimes Until Their Last Breath
Mitchell Tendler began to fade. He had outlived two implantable defibrillators and was on his third. The devices had kept him alive but now posed a problem for the medical imaging he needed in the hospital. Doctors gave him some painkillers, and then he had a final thought.
"It just was quiet for a little while," Walter Tendler recounted, "and then he just sits up in bed halfway and looks at me and he goes, 'S***, I'm not going to see the Mueller report, am I?' And that was really the last coherent thing that he said."
Zach Beauchamp/Vox:
A Clinton-era centrist Democrat explains why it’s time to give democratic socialists a chance
“The baton rightly passes to our colleagues on our left.”
The core reason, [Brad] DeLong argues, is political. The policies he supports depend on a responsible center-right partner to succeed. They’re premised on the understanding that at least a faction of the Republican Party would be willing to support market-friendly ideas like Obamacare or a cap-and-trade system for climate change. This is no longer the case, if it ever were.
“Barack Obama rolls into office with Mitt Romney’s health care policy, with John McCain’s climate policy, with Bill Clinton’s tax policy, and George H.W. Bush’s foreign policy,” DeLong notes. “And did George H.W. Bush, did Mitt Romney, did John McCain say a single good word about anything Barack Obama ever did over the course of eight solid years? No, they fucking did not.”
Political reality.
Helaine Olen/WaPo:
The Alabama tornadoes are another opportunity for Trump to reward supporters and punish opponents
On the face of it, there is nothing wrong with Trump demanding the Federal Emergency Management Agency bring “A Plus treatment” to any natural disaster. It’s exactly what we should expect from any president and our government agencies. One major function is to act as a safety net when hard times come. That’s not a controversial point.
This is not, however, why Trump cares so much about Alabama. He’s demonstrated repeatedly that he views the levers of government as something to be manipulated to benefit supporters and punish those who would like to see him gone from office or otherwise thwart his agenda.
This, from Morning Consult, highlights the issue of party asymmetry:
Democratic Voters Would Rather Have a Leader Who Heals Than Fights
Setting aside the process debate, the latest national online survey also reinforces that in terms of style and substance, Republican voters are significantly more likely than Democrats to embrace a zero-sum version of politics that could result in more national discord.
Eighty percent of Democrats in the survey, which has a margin of error of 2 percentage points, said they agree that the country has become so divided that “it’s more important that we have a leader who unites us instead of one who represents my preferred policy positions and values.”
And while 61 percent of GOP voters said they agreed with that statement, roughly the same share (60 percent) agreed that “because the stakes are so high” they’d rather have a leader whose policy positions and values exactly match their own — “even if that means the country is more divided.”
By contrast, 29 percent of Democrats said they’d prefer a leader who embodies their values but proves divisive to the country.
With the Iowa caucuses less than a year away, the findings suggest that Democratic activists’ energy and support for a no-holds-barred approach to politics may face an uphill climb to resonate with rank-and-file Democrats across the country.
To highlight the above, read the below:
AJ Nolte/Bulwark:
Why Did Evangelicals Flock to Trump? Existential Fear.
However, there may be scattered signs of cautious optimism
Bad as these developments look, there may be scattered signs of cautious optimism. First, the conservative age gap vis-a-vis Trump is, if anything, more pronounced among conservative evangelicals. Unsurprisingly, younger evangelicals were caught less off guard by Obergefell. Whatever their religious beliefs on traditional marriage, they were more realistic about the likely inevitability of same-sex marriage at some point in some form. So fear never set in as strongly, and even those who support Trump tend to be a good bit more transactional.
Indeed, strong anecdotal evidence suggests that conservative evangelical women under the age of 45 really don’t like him, even if most of them will never take that dislike far enough to vote for a pro-choice Democrat. (To my knowledge, no pollster has really tried to quantify the degree and intensity of this dislike, but it’s a project in which Trump-skeptical conservatives ought to have some interest.) My personal belief is that this demographic, what I’d broadly describe as socially conservative millennial moms, are ready to jump ship to just about any pro-life Republican at the first opportunity. If that’s true, it’s good news for those interested in a primary challenge to Trump. In and of themselves, they probably aren’t a big enough demographic to swing a primary, but as just about any pastor could tell you, don’t estimate the passion, organization, and grassroots influence that constituency could bring to such a primary challenge.
Nolte, himself an evangelical, puts this in the best possible light for them but there’s truth in this.
Lisa Beutler/Crooked:
A BETTER WAY FOR DEMOCRATS TO RUN ON MEDICARE FOR ALL
I come at this problem from two perspectives: First, I am a doctor. As a physician I have always supported Medicare for all, mostly because I’ve always viewed accessible health care for all as a moral imperative that all doctors should fight for—particularly ones in the richest nation on the planet. The private health insurance industry is daunting and inaccessible even for people with relatively excellent plans, experience navigating the system, and an inordinate amount of time to make phone calls. True universal health care cannot grow out of this system.
I spend approximately 10 percent of my clinical time filling out forms or making phone calls to insurance companies to justify tests or medications. This number would be much higher if I did not work in a clinic with an outstanding and large support staff, which not all physicians have access to. And yet, as nearly all doctors can attest, virtually none of this time is spent on patients who have Medicare—the best and most reliable payer in nearly all practices. Perversely, I make up some of the time I waste on administrative tasks when patients have to cancel their visits with me because they’ve changed employers or lost jobs. My clinic is no longer in their network or they simply are “between insurance plans.” Not once have I lost a patient because he or she turned 65 and enrolled in Medicare. In fact, multiple patients have shared with me what a relief it has been to become Medicare eligible.
Insurance companies carefully maintain this impenetrable layer of bullshit in the interest of saving money. It delays care for patients resulting in disease progression, complications and unnecessary suffering. Ironically, in many cases, if the patient is fortunate enough to get care eventually, it is more costly because of the delays. These delays also lead to frustration and burnout among physicians, patients, and caregivers. The burnout is palpable in large clinical practices and it places an incalculable burden on an already cracking system.
I am also a patient.
Matthew Yglesias/Vox:
Fox News’s propaganda isn’t just unethical — research shows it’s enormously influential
Without the “Fox effect,” neither Bush nor Trump could have won.
Specifically, by exploiting semi-random variation in Fox viewership driven by changes in the assignment of channel numbers, they find that if Fox News hadn’t existed, the Republican presidential candidate’s share of the two-party vote would have been 3.59 points lower in 2004 and 6.34 points lower in 2008. Without Fox, in other words, the GOP’s only popular vote win since the 1980s would have been reversed and the 2008 election would have been an extinction-level landslide.
And Fox is not the only thing out there.
Bonnie Goldstein/USA today:
I vetted judges and senior Justice officials and never came across anyone like Jared Kushner
While I had access to power, I had none of my own. I had an edgy past that included dropping out of college and living in Mexico among hippies and drug dealers. I knew for sure I would never be confirmable. I sat on the bench behind my senator boss during Anita Hill’s devastating testimony, but watched Clarence Thomas survive the vote. I saw Zoe Baird’s attorney general bid go down in flames over a nanny. I eventually left government for journalism.
On paper, Kushner is even less fit for high-level access than I am. He omitted potentially disqualifying details from his background questionnaire, suggested setting up a back channel to a hostile foreign government during the transition, and has been discussed as a weak link by foreign powers, according to a Washington Post report sourced to "current and former U.S. officials familiar with intelligence reports on the matter."
But, while he may not be qualified, Kushner is deeply persistent and impeccably connected. He was a key player in his father-in-law’s election and was responsible for bringing (later disgraced) Cambridge Analytica into the digital campaign. When they arrived in Washington, among other chores, Trump tasked Kushner with brokering Middle East peace.