There are no April Fool’s items today, it’s not an internet tradition I much appreciate.
”Trump resigns, ha ha fooled you!”
Spare me, thanks.
NBC News:
Most Americans don't think Trump is in the clear yet on Russia, new poll finds
President Trump's approval remains stable and a third of voters say they don't know whether the summary of Mueller's findings clears him of wrongdoing in a new NBC News/WSJ poll
According to a new NBC News/ Wall Street Journal poll, 29 percent of Americans say they believe Trump has been cleared of wrongdoing, based on what they have heard about Mueller’s findings, while 40 percent say they do not believe he has been cleared.
But a third of Americans — 31 percent — say they’re not sure if Trump has been cleared. That includes nearly half of independents (45 percent) and about a quarter of both Democrats (27 percent) and Republicans (25 percent.)
So between the NBC and WaPo polls, less than a third think Trump has been exonerated. That’s the Fox watching segment, the rest know better.
Greg Sargent/WaPo:
Trump and Republicans ‘on offense’? Nah. It’s just the same old gaslighting.
It’s amazing this needs to be stated, but here goes. This “new offensive” from Trump and Republicans is saturated with nonsense from top to bottom, and it is designed to get the media to back off of its entirely legitimate scrutiny of Trump, and to get Democrats to retreat from their entirely legitimate efforts to impose oversight and accountability.
Trump has spent the past two years screaming “WITCH HUNT!” and “FAKE NEWS!,” even as he and his congressional allies have absurdly cast the investigations as corrupt based on one fake “scandal” after another. Throughout all this, what’s actually happened is that one revelation after another has emerged detailing startling criminality among those in Trump’s inner circle and extraordinary corruption and abuses of power by Trump himself.
Walter Dellinger/WaPo:
How the Mueller report can still threaten Trump’s legitimacy
The attorney general does have a role in determining what to show Congress. In particular, he should redact information drawn from grand jury testimony and anything that might give away the tools of American espionage. But why did Barr, in his own letter to Congress describing Mueller’s work, reach a definitive conclusion about the absence of criminal guilt? “The Special Counsel’s decision to describe the facts of his obstruction investigation without reaching any legal conclusions leaves it to the Attorney General to determine whether the conduct described in the report constitutes a crime,” Barr wrote. But “the Special Counsel’s decision” did not require this at all. Instead, Mueller may have intended for Congress or voters to reach their own conclusions about Trump’s wrongdoing. It was Barr, not Mueller, who decided that Barr should be the judge.
Harry Littman/WaPo:
A ‘road map’ for the coming fight over the Mueller report
Barr’s letters advance a strict view of Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 6(e)(3)(E), which limits disclosure of information from grand jury proceedings to five specific situations. The exceptions all relate roughly to a given, ongoing prosecution or related ones; none of them comfortably covers a disclosure to Congress for consideration in oversight or impeachment hearings, although there are a few scattered cases holding otherwise.
The coming legal battle will be waged over whether the exceptions in the rule are exclusive. Some courts have determined that the list is not strictly limited in that way, and in particular that district courts have inherent supervisory authority to order release in a case of “special circumstances” in which there is a significant public interest in the material. Plainly, that fits the Mueller report.
But the Justice Department has staunchly opposed that view. It has insisted, including in a pending case in the D.C. Circuit, that the only instances in which disclosure may occur are the ones set out in the text of Rule 6(e).
Anyone familiar with Barr’s jurisprudential views would safely guess that he is unlikely to reverse Justice Department policy and urge the courts to recognize an extra-textual “inherent authority” in the federal courts to order disclosure.
WaPo:
For Trump’s ‘Party of Healthcare,’ there is no health-care plan
Indeed, there is little indication any health-care plan will materialize — or advance in Congress.
A senior White House official directly involved in the discussions said there was no specific proposal. McConnell also has no plans to put together a working group of Republican lawmakers to draft a health-care blueprint as he did in 2017, according to one official familiar with party strategy.
Paul Krugman/NY Times:
The Incredible Shrinking Trump Boom
At least corporate accountants are having some fun.
So do the results so far look like the huge, sustained boom the Trump camp promised, or the brief sugar high predicted by the critics?
But Donald Trump is a special kind of leader. When things don’t go his way, when events fail to turn out as he planned and promised, he always knows exactly what to do: Blame someone else. Sure enough, he’s now asserting that we’d be having a yuge economic boom, 3 percent growth, all that, if only the Federal Reserve hadn’t raised interest rates.
O. K., this is where you need to be able to hold two ideas in your head at the same time. Was the Fed wrong to raise rates? Probably yes. Does this account for the failure of the Trump tax cut? No.
And finally, that this is happening is very good (NY Times):
“That’s Alex Jones’s M.O.,” Owens said of the deposition. “To flood any topic with confusion and doubt so no one can grab onto anything.”
But under oath, Mr. Jones’s tactics fizzle. And the deposition highlights a troubling reality: The legal system may be the only way to defang a well-known conspiracy theorist at the height of his powers. Not only does the parade of lawsuits related to the Sandy Hook shooting cast him as a villain, but they threaten to expose and, perhaps drain, the funding sources that keep Infowars running without advertisers. There’s plenty at stake; documents reviewed by The New York Times last September suggest the bulk of Mr. Jones’s money comes from his business selling supplement products, allegedly netting more than $20 million in revenue per year.
Near the end of the questioning, Mr. Jones suggested his claims about the Sandy Hook massacre were the result of a mental disorder. He said he “almost had like a form of psychosis back in the past where I basically thought everything was staged, even though I’m now learning a lot of times things aren’t staged.”