THIS WEEK IN POLITICAL NEWS -- 7/19/17

Eve of Vacation Edition

I leave for vacation first thing tomorrow morning, so there will be no TWIPN next week. But here’s a midweek review for you all, because I am simply that devoted to you, my dear readers. Am I spending the evening preparing for my trip, getting to bed early in advance of my 4:30am departure? No! I’m devoting myself to you all. (Also, because I am a crazy person, I packed my suitcase 48 hours in advance.) So enjoy! And also, someone should take notes for me about what happens over the next 10 days; I’ll be mostly without internet!

DING DONG THE WITCH IS ALMOST DEAD: Last week we were one vote away from the Senate healthcare bill collapsing. Then on Monday evening, without warning (and in a move that blindsided the White House), it happened: Mike Lee and Jerry Moran declared that they would not support the bill. Moran’s statement was particularly noteworthy, insisting that the Senate “start fresh with an open legislative process”-- exactly the opposite approach led by McConnell. McConnell acknowledged defeat but said that the Senate would take up a straight repeal bill instead, repealing all of Obamacare with a promise to replace it with something two years later. But Murkowski, Collins, and Capito swiftly killed that idea; Capito announced that she “did not come to Washington to hurt people.” Trump displayed his utter lack of knowledge or principle or understanding of the healthcare question through his wildly vacillating tweets, first declaring on Monday night that the Senate should do a straight Obamacare repeal before advancing the opposite approach just hours later: “As I have always said, let ObamaCare fail and then come together and do a great healthcare plan.” Then he lamented that the Senate has a 60-vote threshold (which it did not for this bill) and said that it should move to a 51-vote majority (again, the GOP could not get 51 votes on their plan). And then he declared that he wants to wipe his hands of the whole thing: “We're not going to own it. I'm not going to own it. I can tell you the Republicans are not going to own it.” (Psst: That’s not how this works.) On Wednesday, Trump had the Republican caucus to lunch at the White House, and publicly exhorted them to stay in DC through August to work on passing health care, “ignoring clear indications from Capitol Hill that not enough Republicans are willing to support the proposal.” But where can they go from here? This evening, the CBO released its score of a straight repeal, estimating that 32 million would lose coverage over a decade, with 17 million losing coverage next year; premiums would double by 2026; and a quarter of Americans would live in areas without a single health plan sold on the individual market. Regardless, don’t forget that Trump is already actively trying to make Obamacare fail.

Breaking News Update: Right as I finished this section, the Hill is reporting that McConnell plans to offer $200 billion in assistance to states that expanded Medicaid, in an effort to woo “moderates.” “The huge sum would be funded by leaving in place ObamaCare’s net investment income tax and its Medicare surtax on wealthy earners, according to the source briefed on the proposal.” This means that the next few days are CRUCIAL. We must kill this thing once and for call. CALL YOUR SENATORS EVERY DAY.

TRUMP RUNS HIS MOUTH: Honestly, I just don’t even know what to do or where to start with this interview Trump gave the Times, which was just published this past hour. You really should just read the entire article. The bottom line is that Trump is both a complete nutcase and also seemingly determined to sound as guilty as humanly possible at every turn. Here are the key points:

• The big news is that Trump declared he never would have hired Sessions if he knew Sessions would recuse himself from the Russia investigation: “Sessions should have never recused himself, and if he was going to recuse himself, he should have told me before he took the job and I would have picked somebody else.” Doesn’t this . . . seem like a pretty clear admission of guilt -- or at least of something he wants to hide?  “How do you take a job and then recuse yourself? If he would have recused himself before the job, I would have said, ‘Thanks, Jeff, but I’m not going to take you.’ It’s extremely unfair — and that’s a mild word — to the president.”
• He also slammed Sessions for his crap answers during his Senate confirmation. “Jeff Sessions gave some bad answers,” the president said. “He gave some answers that were simple questions and should have been simple answers, but they weren’t.” Ryan LIzza tweeted: “My takeaway from the NYT interview, in which he mows down Sessions--Sessions!--is that Putin remains the only ally Trump has never betrayed.”
• Trump once again attached James Comey. He said he did not even remember the conversation that Comey described in which Trump asked him to set aside the investigation into Flynn. “He said I asked people to go. Look, you look at his testimony. His testimony is loaded up with lies, O.K.?” This is a pretty sharp reversal from his previous comments on Comey’s testimony: Recall he said that his fib about having recordings of their White House convos had kept Comey honest and that the testimony provided him (Trump) with “total and complete vindication.”
• He insisted that his second, previously-undisclosed meeting with Putin was very short and about nothing: “Really, pleasantries more than anything else. It was not a long conversation, but it was, you know, could be 15 minutes. Just talked about things. Actually, it was very interesting, we talked about adoption.” But “adoption”, of course, means US sanctions, which is sort of the opposite of nothing and is, in fact, quite something. Too bad he seems to have no idea what the fuck he’s talking about.
• Trump went after Mueller, complaining that he was “conflicted” because he had interviewed for the FBI director job to replace Comey. And he included this classic Trump statement: “There were many other conflicts that I haven’t said, but I will at some point.” Trump seems to be laying the groundwork for firing Mueller: “Asked if Mr. Mueller’s investigation would cross a red line if it expanded to look at his family’s finances beyond any relationship to Russia, Mr. Trump said, ‘I would say yes.’ He would not say what he would do about it. ‘I think that’s a violation. Look, this is about Russia.’”
• Trump went after acting AG Rod Rosenstein, because he comes from a city with a lot of Democrats (or something?): “There are very few Republicans in Baltimore, if any.” He also claimed Rosenstein was conflicted because he recommended that Comey be fired (though he didn’t actually make that recommendation), and then hired Mueller who is investigating, in part, that firing. “Well, that’s a conflict of interest. Do you know how many conflicts of interests there are?”
• Trump went after acting FBI director Andrew McCabe, because his wife (a politician) had received campaign contributions from a PAC associated with VA’s Democratic governor.

So this was all bananas. The folks on Twitter think there is a chance Sessions resigns (he has until August to get back on the Senate ballot in ALabama, apparently), and that Trump makes whoever takes his spot promise that he will fire Mueller. Which -- aye yai yai, kids. Aye yai yai.

QUICK HITS: A few smaller stories from this week.

• This seems like a big deal: “Banking regulators are reviewing hundreds of millions of dollars in loans made to Mr. Trump’s businesses through Deutsche Bank’s private wealth management unit, which caters to an ultrarich clientele, according to three people briefed on the review who were not authorized to speak publicly. The regulators want to know if the loans might expose the bank to heightened risks. Separately, Deutsche Bank has been in contact with federal investigators about the Trump accounts, according to two people briefed on the matter. And the bank is expecting to eventually have to provide information to Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel overseeing the federal investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia.”
• The cop who killed a black unarmed 15-year-old outside of Dallas was indicted for murder and assault. This was the case where the 15-year-old was in a car leaving a party and the cops shot into the car and killed him, and then lied and said the car was advancing at them in a threatening way (only to be refuted by dashcam video). A grand jury indictment is more than many of these killers have received, so that’s a positive step in the right direction.
• When the White House organized a business roundtable of leading tech companies, wouldn’t you know it but a teensy little company no one’s ever heard of that just happens to be partially-owned by Jared Kushner’s brother got a seat at the table -- next to Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, and Larry Page. Nice to have friends in high places, eh?
• Tillerson is essentially shutting down the State Department’s office in charge of prosecuting war crimes, reports Foreign Policy. Because, really, how does prosecuting war criminals help Exxon’s bottom line? “The decision to close the office comes at a time when America’s top diplomat has been seeking to reorganize the State Department to concentrate on what he sees as key priorities: pursuing economic opportunities for American businesses and strengthening U.S. military prowess. Those changes are coming at the expense of programs that promote human rights and fight world poverty, which have been targeted for steep budget cuts.”
• “Rep. Greg Gianforte, the Montana Republican who pleaded guilty to assaulting a reporter the day before his election, does not want to be treated like a common criminal ― for more than a month, he has been quietly fighting a court order requiring him to get fingerprinted and photographed at a local jail. . . . When asked whether he believed other Montanans cited for misdemeanor assault also shouldn’t be fingerprinted and photographed, he walked into his office without comment.” (Ignore the egregious misuse of the dash here.)

Endorsements:

• This song combines four of my all-time favorite things: Sara Bareilles (writer), Leslie Odom Jr. (performer), Barack Obama (subject), and This American Life (sponsor). It came out in October, just before the election, but continues to have powerful salience now. TAL asked my best friend Sara B to write a song about what Obama may be thinking as he sees Trump’s rise. It’s beautifully composed and vividly written (obvi, because my best friend is insanely talented), and incredibly powerfully sung by LOJ. So, yeah, listen to it.  (P.S. If you’re looking for a starter Sara B playlist, it’s your lucky day because I made one here!)
• Trump’s tweet on leadership (from 2013)
• This unbelievable clip of Trump frantically gesturing to get Putin’s attention at the spouses dinner at the G20 summit (at which, it was just revealed yesterday, Trump and Putin a second private meeting, with no other American present, that lasted either an hour or was very brief, depending on who you believe).
• Great visual chart in this NYT article comparing coverage rates between Obamacare, the first and second House bills, the Senate bill, and straight repeal.
• This Kevin Drum quote about the Cruz “Freedom” amendment: “The Cruz Amendment is sort of like chopping a baby in half: a solution that sounds appealing only to someone who doesn’t know what happens to babies who are chopped in half.”
• You should read this Josh Barro piece on the need for liberals to be less annoying. It’s interesting; I’m not sure I agree with a lot of it, but I think he raises some good points worth grappling with.

THIS WEEK IN POLITICAL NEWS -- 7/13/17

Epic Length Edition

I intentionally put the stuff about Trump after what I think is an important story about white cops killing black men. So please read that one! Also, it is super late and so my endorsements are really pathetic this week.

NEW TRUMPCARE IS JUST AS TERRIBLE AS OLD ONE, MAY DIE: Today, Mitch McConnell unleashed the new version of the Senate bill, after the version from a couple of weeks ago had no way of passing. The purported plan is to somehow get a CBO score in a matter of days and then vote on the bill starting a week from today. But that plan seems in jeopardy given that the bill is a complete shit sandwich that is hemorrhaging support.

The Policy: First, what’s in the bill, you ask? The bill does not improve subsidies for older or poorer people. And it changes nothing about the deep cuts to Medicaid, even though it was those cuts that made Collins, Heller, and Murkowski (among others) deeply skeptical of Version 1.0. The new version does keep in place two of Obamacare’s taxes on rich people -- a move Yglesias finds totally perplexing: “McConnell scales back the tax cuts just for the sake of reducing the deficit slightly more — eliminating a key donor priority in order to fix something nobody was complaining about, rather addressing concerns about the impact of the bill on coverage. . . . Instead of being an $888 billion tax cut overwhelmingly slanted toward the superrich, it’s now a $657 billion tax cut that’s mostly slanted toward the rich. Then despite having $231 billion in extra money to play with, McConnell only hands out $115 billion.”

It also includes the Cruz “Freedom” Amendment (by now, we should know to run and take cover whenever a Republican trots out a bill with the word “Freedom” in the title). So long as an insurer offers one Obamacare-compliant plan in a market, the Cruz amendment would revoke the Obamacare regulations on the insurer’s other plans, regulations that do these super terrible things that obviously should be eliminated immediately: limit out-of-pocket costs; ban insurers from charging women, sick people, and older people more; ban insurers from denying coverage to people with preexisting conditions; require coverage of preexisting conditions; ban insurers from discriminating against the sick and disabled; require insurance plans to cover essential health benefits; ban insurers from imposing excessive waiting periods; require coverage of free preventative care; and require insurers to spend at least 80-85% (depending on the type of insurance) of premiums on actual coverage (rather than, say, profits or administrative costs). (That last one is a really big deal; ask Drausin about it!)

The combination of deep, deep cuts to Medicaid -- cuts which, again, have nothing to do with Obamacare but instead simply slash the program far beyond how Obamacare expanded it -- and the Cruz Amendment make this pill deeply cruel for anyone who has been sick or poor, is sick or poor, may one day get sick or poor (i.e., everyone). Ezra Klein: “The plans that have to offer decent coverage to anyone who wants it, no matter their health care history, will become a magnet for the old and the sick or the soon-to-be-sick, as they can’t afford, or perhaps can’t even buy, the other plans. That will drive premiums in those plans up, pulling younger, healthier people into the non-compliant plans.” Trumpcare tries to solve this problem by offering some subsidies for these essentially high-risk pools; as a Kaiser VP put it to the Washington Post, “There are many provisions in this bill that destabilize the individual insurance. Then it attempts to restabilize it by funneling an enormous amount of money to insurers.”

These fixes will not solve the fundamental problem of creating what will essentially be high-risk pools for the sick, as Klein explains: “The GOP’s answer to this problem is to try to quarantine sicker people off to the side in subsidized plans. But sickness is not a binary state. . . . But what about young women who insurers consider demographically likely to be pregnant in a few years? They’re not sick enough to be willing to pay the exorbitant premiums of the high-risk plans, but they’re also going to be up-charged by insurers scared of their future costs. Or how about the 42-year-olds who aren’t sick now, but had health scares in the past? To insurers, they might be basically uninsurable outside a high-risk pool. But to the healthy-feeling 42-year-old, the cost of the high-risk pool may be exorbitant. And so they go uninsured, and then disaster hits.”

The Politics: Given that the Medicaid cuts are as deep and cruel as ever, the bill has already lost Senator Collins’ vote; she announced today she would not vote on the motion to proceed, and wants Democrats and Republicans to come together to fix the ACA. Rand Paul has also declared he’s a No vote, I guess because this is too much like Obamacare. Which means McConnell cannot lose a single other vote. And then you have wildcard John McCain come out as a No vote, seemingly opposed to the Medicaid cuts: “This is not what the American people expect of us, and it’s not what they deserve.” Then Senators Lindsey Graham and Bill Cassidy, in a surprise, announced their own “plan” (more of a free-floating idea) to essentially block-grant all of Obamacare: simply taking all the money from Obamacare taxes and giving it to the states to administer their own health plans. (It’s entirely unclear what would happen to Obamacare’s regulations under this idea.) Other senators (Portman, Hoeven) said they would need to see the CBO score before deciding. And Heller, of Nevada, has said he is undecided, but it’s unclear how he could possibly favor this bill after his outspoken, explicit opposition to the Medicaid cuts in Round 1 (his opposition was key to killing the whole thing at the time); JUST YESTERDAY he was sounding much firmer: “No breakthroughs. There’s been a lot of discussions. … We remain in the same camp. . . . Fundamentally, they haven’t changed the bill.” But the capacity of moderates to cave should never be underestimated, so we must keep the pressure on Heller, Capito, Murkowski, and Portman over the next few days. OHIO READERS, that means YOU.

Oh, and also, because these people are a combination of evil and stupid, we have this: “Senate Republicans included a provision that exempts members of Congress and their staff from part of their latest health care plan. This exemption could have the effect of ensuring that members of Congress have coverage for a wider array of benefits than other Americans who purchase their own coverage.”

ANOTHER WHITE COP GIVEN FREE PASS FOR MURDER: Of all the police shootings we’ve seen over the last few years, the 2014 murder of John Crawford III has always struck me as one of the very most galling and horrifying. John Crawford was in a Walmart in southern Ohio when he had the audacity to look at an air rifle that was for sale there. He took the rifle off the shelf and carried it, presumably to take it eventually to the counter to purchase. But he never made it there, because another store patron saw “black man with gun,” called the police, and the police literally sprinted full-speed into the store and shot him dead, without giving him a moment to drop the weapon or comply with commands. And again, it was a gun that was FOR SALE AT WALMART, where he was present as a normal, non-trespassing, regular customer. There was literally nothing Mr. Crawford could have done to prevent the police from shooting him except (a) not be black or (b) not have the temerity to shop like a regular customer at Walmart. Those were his only options; he was never given the option to simply drop the gun -- a product, once again, that was legally sold and stocked on the shelves of Walmart. So anyway. The cop shoots him. And then describes the incident this way: “Williams said in his official statement that he shot John Crawford III twice after he didn't respond to multiple commands to drop his weapon and turned toward police in an ‘aggressive manner.’” Well wouldn’t you know it but that was a big, fat, enormous, disgusting, defamatory lie. Surveillance video shows that police shot him before he could even see them. But of course, in that split second, the cop declared that he “feared for his life” -- the magic words that cleanse murder into justified shootings. The state pressed no criminal charges after an indictment found the shooting to be justified. And now a federal civil rights investigation has cleared the officer as well. The DOJ explained in its statement that, to prove a civil rights violation against Williams, “the government would be required both to disprove his stated reason for the shooting – that he was in fear of death or serious bodily injury – and to affirmatively establish that Officer Williams instead acted with the specific intent to violate Mr. Crawford’s rights. The evidence here simply cannot satisfy those burdens.  Accordingly, the review into this incident has been closed without prosecution.” Bull. Fucking. Shit. I cannot exaggerate the deep anger I feel when I think about this case, anger that is deepened when I think about the many, many officers who have either not been charged or have had juries nullify clearly criminal conduct and let them off. That includes FOUR such high-profile cases in the last month alone:

• First, on June 16, Philando Castile’s murderer was acquitted, despite the fact that the murder occurred on video. Like Crawford, Castile did nothing wrong except be black and have the temerity to legally possess a weapon. There was literally nothing he could have done to avoid getting killed short of changing his skin color or declining to exercise his right to own a licensed firearm.
• Then, on June 21, “a Milwaukee jury acquitted Dominique Heaggan-Brown in the shooting death of Sylville Smith, whom the officer suspected of being involved in a drug deal. Smith sprinted from the officer and ran into a fence before throwing his gun over the barrier. Heaggan-Brown fired at Smith, striking him in the arm. He then fired another shot into Smith's chest as he lay on the ground, killing him.”
• Then, on June 23, “a Cincinnati judge declared a mistrial in the murder case of former cop Raymond Tensing. It's the second time a jury found itself unable to come to a verdict regarding the death of Samuel DuBose, an unarmed black man who Tensing shot and killed in July 2015.”
• Finally, on July 8, a white cop got his third hung jury for fatally shooting his daughter’s black boyfriend when the boyfriend reached out to shake his hand. In that case, the jury deliberated a scant 2.5 hours (seriously, what the fuck, judge?).

I do not know what we do about this shit. I do not know how people are expected to get over this or just live their lives. Each of these instances makes it clear, yet again, that to the legal system, black lives simply do not matter. Period. Innocent black lives do not matter, and cops can freely and with impunity lie and lie and lie and lie and murder and maim and face no legal consequences. Read this column by Tonya Jameson, who was confronted at gunpoint by a police officer for changing the license plate on a car that she had just purchased from the officer’s own mother (in fact, she was in his mother’s driveway when the incident occurred). Jameson points out, rightfully, that “the legal system is really asking civilians to de-escalate adrenaline-fueled cops. We must remain calm while facing a loaded gun while the trained officers can panic and overreact.” Please read her story. The one thing we can do in the face of this rampant and ever-present injustice is to listen to these stories, to hear these people, to make sure they know they are seen and valued -- and that they matter.

RUSSIA -- THE SMOKING GUN: Obviously the giant story this week was revelation that Donald Trump, Jr., Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner met in June 2016 with a Putin-connected lawyer who was introduced to them as part of the “Russian government’s efforts to _” and who promised to provide dirt on Hillary Clinton. Let’s take this massive story step by step.

The story comes out, and Don starts lying: On Saturday, the New York Times reported that Don had met with a Russian lawyer with “ties” to the Kremlin. Don Jr., in a brief statement, said that the brief meeting was “primarily” about “a program about the adoption of Russian children,” which “was not a campaign issue at that time.” (In fact, the “adoption” issue is actually the entire issue of Obama’s sanctions against Russia, which so angered Putin that he barred all American adoptions of Russian children. So even taking Don’s statement at face value, it was a lie.)

Then, on Sunday, the Times reported that this Russian lawyer had promised dirt on Hillary Clinton, and that’s what the meeting was for. So Don changed his story: In a much longer and more detailed statement, Don said that an acquaintance had asked him to take the meeting; that he didn’t know the lawyer’s name in advance; that he asked Manafort and Kushner to come but didn’t tell them anything “of substance”; that “it quickly became clear that [the lawyer] had no meaningful information” on Clinton, and she started talking about adoption (sanctions); that it “became clear” to him that this was her purpose all along, and the promise of damaging information on Clinton was just a “pretext”; and that there was no follow-up and nothing came of the meeting.

On Monday night, the Times reported that there had been an email exchange between Don and his “acquaintance” who set up the meeting in which the acquaintance said the Russian lawyer’s info on Clinton was part of the Russian government’s efforts to aid the Trump campaign. By Tuesday morning, the Time was about to publish the actual emails, when Don preempted them and posted them himself on Twitter.

The email chain: On Saturday, June 3, 2016, Rob Goldstone sent Don Jr. an email with the subject line “Russia - Clinton - private and confidential,” in which he declared that the “Crown prosecutor” in Russia “offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary . . . . This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” (emphasis added by me). Don responded seven minutes later, evincing no surprise at the notion that the Russian government was supporting Trump and jumping at the notion of “high level and sensitive information”: “[I]f it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.” He asks to set up a call first thing next week, when he’s back from traveling. Around 12:30pm Monday, Goldstone follows up, asking Don when he can talk by phone with Goldstone’s Russian client Emin “about this Hillary info.” Don responds 20 minutes later, asking to speak now. Goldstone says he needs to track Emin down in Moscow, and asks for Don’s cell, which Don provides. At 3:45 that afternoon, Goldstone says that Emin (a singer) is on stage but would be done in 20 minutes and would call. Then 90 minutes later, Don tells Goldstone, “Thanks for the help.” It’s almost certain that Don and Emin spoke by phone in that time period, something Don has not yet disclosed. Then the next day, Goldstone says that Emin aske dhim to schedule a meeting between Don and “The Russian government attorney who is flying over from Moscow for this Thursday. I believe you are aware of the meeting.” (emphasis mine). So yeah, Don and Emin definitely spoke. Anyway, Don immediately responds that they should meet at Trump’s offices, and later says that he will bring Manaford and Kushner. The day before the June 9 meeting, Don forwarded the entire chain, including the parts about the Russian government working to support Trump, to Kushner and Manafort.

Okay. So what? These emails are a really, really big deal. They show, in plain text, that the Trump campaign was eager to collude with Russian government efforts to interfere in the election to hurt Hillary and help Trump. As Lawfare put it (before the emails themselves were published): “If the Trump campaign didn’t collude with the Russians, it wasn’t for lack of trying.” There is a lot of distraction about whether taking a meeting is a crime, or even if “collusion” is a crime. That does not matter. The facts are that the Russian government actively and successfully interfered in our election to help ensure a specifc outcome, that that interference benefitted Trump, that the highest officials in Trumpland knew the Russian government was making efforts to secure the election for Trump, and that every Trump official for the last year has lied, over and over and over again, about it. Trump has refused to admit that Russia was behind the interference, lied about his and his team’s meetings with Russian officials, and denied over and over that he had nothing to do with it. Don Jr. went on TV JUST THREE WEEKS after this meeting to declare that Democrats’ concerns about Russian interference were “disgusting,” “so phony” and just a “lie after lie,” “I can’t think of bigger lies.” (Watch the clip here.) And the lies haven’t stopped, on stuff large and small. We saw Don lie repeatedly over the weekend, changing his story about this meeting as the reporting got ahead of him. Daddy Trump has been lying too, declaring that he just learned of these emails a “few days ago,” when in fact his lawyers learned of them at least three weeks ago, when Kushner amended his security clearance form to include this meeting (which he had, falsely, failed to disclose on either his original security form or his amended form submitted in May).

So we know that this entire thing has been shrouded in a web of deceit. And yet, as Chait says, “The position of Trump’s conservative apologists is that this time they are probably telling the truth” (that the meeting was brief and that nothing came of it). But there is simply no reason to believe this. Josh Barro points out that Don’s story about why he took the meeting -- as a favor -- makes no sense: “Was Trump Jr. routinely pulling Paul Manafort (the campaign chairman at the time) and Jared Kushner (Trump's son-in-law, whose time is actually valuable) into meetings with unknown people with information of unknown value to provide courtesies to acquaintances? If so, he must have been extremely annoying to work with.” And why did Don show exactly zero surprise (let alone alarm) to hear that the Russian government was supporting Trump’s campaign? Chris Hayes has a great rundown on the many ways Trumpland’s story on this is so wildly implausible. They are asking us to believe, he says, that Putin-aligned Russians spent 2+ years cultivating a relationship with the Trumps (this is true); that they used an emissary to tell Trump, once he was the presidential nominee, that the Russian government was backing him (true); that they set up a meeting to discuss the damaging info they have on Clinton (true); but that the meeting was a total dud, nothing came of it, there were no follow-ups on either side -- even as it becomes clear very quickly that Russia actually was involved in an active effort to leak damaging information about Clinton and help get Trump elected! And yet no one in Trumpworld thinks to put these things together. “If you ignore the central revelation of the emails,” Chait writes, “which is that they reveal Trump being receptive to Russian efforts to help his father’s campaign, and further ignore his pattern of omissions and lies before being cornered with the truth, and then further assume both that Trump is now telling the truth and that no other harmful news will emerge, then yes, he might be innocent.”

Another interesting piece: Mike Pence, the person with the most to gain from the Trump downfall, immediately issued a statement on Tuesday pointing out that all this shit went down before he was part of the ticket. But then on Wednesday, his spokesman went on TV and was asked three times whether Pence ever met with any Russian official, and three times refused to simply say No. Weird.

And another one: “Investigators at the House and Senate Intelligence committees and the Justice Department are examining whether the Trump campaign’s digital operation – overseen by Jared Kushner – helped guide Russia’s sophisticated voter targeting and fake news attacks on Hillary Clinton in 2016.”

Forest, Trees: On Tuesday when we knew the facts of the emails but had not seen the emails themselves, Lawfare published a really good analysis of this whole thing, which included a reminder that the focus on secretive collusion (of which we now have a smoking gun) may distract us from the neon-light-flashing collusion that Trump has been publicly performing for a year:

The “no collusion” defense, in other words, was always a modest one that did not really deny that the Trump campaign gleefully accepted Russian aid during the campaign and promised a different relationship with Russia in a hundred public statements; it denied only that the campaign did these things in secret collaboration with Russian state actors. [...]

The problem with dwelling too much on the covert forms of collaboration, which we have come to call “collusion,” is that doing so risks letting Trump at least a little bit off the hook for what is not meaningfully disputed: that the president publicly, knowingly, and repeatedly (if only tacitly) collaborated with a foreign power’s intelligence effort to interfere in the presidential election of the country he now leads. Focusing on covert collusion risks putting the lines of propriety, acceptable candidate behavior, and even (let’s be frank) patriotism in such a place where openly encouraging foreign dictators to hack your domestic opponent’s emails falls on the tolerable side. It risks accepting that all is okay with the Trump-Russia relationship unless some secret or illegal additional element actually involves illicit contacts between the campaign and Russian operatives. Yet it’s hard to imagine how any scandal of illegality could eclipse the scandal of legality which requires no investigation and has lain bare before our eyes for months.

This Is Lovely: “After months of receiving requests for meetings from advocates for sexual assault survivors, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has finally decided to sit down with them. But she’s also meeting with groups that are critical of Title IX guidance on campus rape, some of which have histories of intimidating rape survivors and dismissing domestic abuse against women.”

Endorsements:

• This is a very good tweet by NPR’s Sam Sanders.
• Trump meets the First Lady of France. (And by “endorse,” in this case, I mean, you have to watch in open-mouthed horror and disgust (13 seconds long).)
• The FCC is about to gut net neutrality. (For the best explanation of what this is, watch this Jon Oliver clip. If you don’t have patience for that, read this helpful summary from TeenVogue!) This issue is very important, so my endorsement is that you take LITERALLY 2 MINUTES and submit this form comment (and write a few personalized sentences about what the internet means to you) to the FCC about net neutrality. Spend 90 seconds waxing eloquent on how important the internet it, hit send, and join 1.6 million of your fellow Americans who have submitted these comments!
• This powerful essay by Bryan Stevenson.