We begin today’s roundup with Max Boot’s analysis of the Trump Team’s defense in the Mueller investigation:
What has been lacking so far is the “smoking gun.” Cohen may just supply it, if his purported testimony is credible and corroborated (admittedly big ifs). Indeed, Rudolph W. Giuliani, Trump’s lawyer, has gone from arguing that Trump didn’t know about the Trump Tower meeting to arguing that the then-candidate wasn’t present (which no one has alleged he was) — and from arguing that no collusion occurred to arguing that collusion, even if it occurred, is no big deal. This is his actual defense: “My client didn't do it, and even if he did it, it’s not a crime.” [...]
We are very, very close to the Putin Republicans arguing that they’re glad he worked with the Kremlin to beat “Crooked Hillary.” In fact, some MAGA-heads have already made this very case. It is, after all, the natural culmination of the hysteria of so many Trumpists. If you believe, as former White House aide Michael Anton argued, that the Democrats are the moral equivalent of the al-Qaeda terrorists who hijacked Flight 93, then anything is permissible to save the country. Even collusion with its enemies.
Reality check: It is not okay for the president and his minions to work with a foreign power to influence a U.S. election. It is shocking that this argument even has to be made.
Abigail Tracey at Vanity Fair:
“[C]ollusion is not a crime” is hardly a bulletproof defense. As former White House general counsel Robert Bauer told me last week, “collusion” is really shorthand for variety of activities, some legal and some illegal. “It definitely covers technical offenses,” he explained. “It includes U.S. citizen aid and support to a foreign national trying to influence a federal election, which is illegal.” To wit, Trump wouldn’t have had to personally hack into the Democratic National Committee server or conduct the phishing attack on John Podesta to be guilty of a crime. Why Trump continues to allow Giuliani to do on-camera interviews, or to keep him as an attorney at all, is something of a mystery. Nevertheless, his sudden reappearance on the media circuit—in nervy, pugnacious form—suggests the president, too, is on edge
John Cassidy at The New Yorker emphasis the key point that yes, collusion is a crime:
Strictly speaking, Giuliani was correct: the phrase “colluding with foreign governments” doesn’t appear in the U.S. criminal code. But conspiring with foreign nationals to interfere with an election is a felony offense, and “collusion” is usually used as shorthand for that crime. [...] Giuliani’s statements about Trump and Russia were convoluted and confusing, and they raised more questions than they answered—if they answered any questions at all.
Switching topics to SCOTUS, Paul Krugman says we should be looking at Kavanaugh’s anti-worker agenda as well as his take on executive power:
I think we should be seeing more attention devoted to the way Trump’s nomination of Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court fits into this picture. The Times had a good editorial on Kavanaugh’s anti-worker agenda, but by and large the news analyses I’ve seen focus on his apparently expansive views of presidential authority and privilege.
I agree that these are important in the face of a lawless president with authoritarian instincts. But the business and labor issues shouldn’t be neglected. Kavanaugh is, to put it bluntly, an anti-worker radical, opposed to every effort to protect working families from fraud and mistreatment.
On a final note, Catherine Rampell suggests Democrats embrace the messaging as the party of family values:
Democrats have been casting about for a winning theme this November. Here’s one suggestion: Kids.
After all, despite once declaring themselves the party of family values, Republican politicians have more recently ceded this territory. The GOP is now the party of state-sanctioned child abuse, of taking health care away from poor children, of leaving young immigrant “dreamers” in legal limbo.
It is GOP policy, and GOP policy alone, that has ripped thousands of immigrant children from their parents and locked them in cages, where they cannot be held or comforted when they cry.