THIS WEEK IN POLITICAL NEWS -- 8/10/17

Note: Next week’s TWIPN will come out on some day other than Thursday. Plan accordingly!

TRUMP NEWS CONFERENCE: At lunch today, I said to a colleague (hi Emma!), “Huh, I really don’t have that much to put in the newsletter this week.” Her response: “Ali, there are still six-plus hours left in the day.” Ah, wise, wise Emma. Wouldn’t you know it but sometime during my walk home, Trump put on a suit and appeared before reporters at his New Jersey golf club, where he took questions for about 20 minutes. And in that 20 minutes, he managed to squeeze in a LOT of alarming stupidity:

• Thank god, Trump continued to bring The Crazy re: North Korea. Because I had just started getting my breath back to normal -- and that’s just a boring way to live! He said that his completely improvised statement yesterday -- that any “threats” from North Korea would be met with “fire and fury” -- was perhaps “not tough enough.” !!! “With me, he’s not getting away with it. . . . It’s a whole new ballgame. And he’s not going to be saying those things and he’s certainly not going to be doing those things. . . . Let’s see what he does in Guam. If he does something in Guam, it will be an event the likes of which nobody’s seen before what will happen in North Korea.” But don’t worry, guys, there’s surely lots of checks and balances on a president’s power to launch nuclear weapons. Wait, what’s that now?
• Trump thanked Putin for expelling hundreds of United States embassy employees. This one is truly insane. On Saturday, in response to the latest American sanctions, Putin declared that the U.S.’s diplomatic mission must cut 755 employees, “an aggressive response to new American sanctions that seemed ripped right from the Cold War playbook and sure to increase tensions between the two capitals,” as the Times put it. Trump did not quite see it that way. “I want to thank him [Putin] because we’re trying to cut down our payroll, and as far as I’m concerned I’m very thankful that he let go of a large number of people because now we have a smaller payroll. . . . I greatly appreciate the fact that they’ve been able to cut our payroll of the United States. We’re going to save a lot of money.” State Department employees and diplomats are not happy with Trump’s flippant remarks.
• He declared the opioid crisis to be a national emergency, undercutting his own HHS Secretary Tom Price, who declared just two days ago that such a declaration was unnecessary.
• He said that he hadn’t “given it any thought” when asked if he was going to fire Robert Mueller, and then declared, “No, I’m not dismissing anybody.” But he continued to insist that the investigation centered on “something that never took place.”

A REALLY DESPICABLE NOMINEE: Today, CNN published a deep dive into Sam Clovis, Trump’s pick to be the Department of Agriculture’s chief scientist and a certified crazy and despicable person. Some highlights from the article: He suggested that Obama was not born in the U.S. and then insisted that the media was giving him a pass because he was black. “How incredibly racist is that?” he wrote in a blog post in 2012. “In a 2013 episode of [his radio show] ‘Impact with Sam Clovis,’ Clovis called [Eric] Holder ‘a racist black’ and [now-DNC Chair Tom] Perez ‘a racist Latino.’” Before the 2012 election, Clovis warned that Obama “wants to be a dictator and he wants to enslave all who are not part of his regime.” Clovis also (obviously) dismisses climate change. But this discussion of the issue, from 2013, is particularly bizarre given that he is being tapped to be the chief scientist of a Federal agency. Does a scientist talk this way?:

"What we have to examine is how the language changes, and when you start to go away from 'global warming' to 'climate change,' this goes right into the heart of progressive thinking because what it says, or what the implication is, is that somehow the progressives are going to figure out a way to create the ideal climate in all regions of the earth," he said. "And so how nonsensical is that? If you follow that logic to its logical conclusion, that's the conclusion in which you arrive -- is that there is some perfect weather or some perfect climate that we will have for everyone -- everyone will thrive."

Um...what??

UNDER THE RADAR: INDIANA VOTER SUPPRESSION: An investigation by the Indiana Star finds that the GOP-led Indiana government engaged in blatant voter suppression after Obama’s 2008 victory, by closing down early voting in Democratic areas and expanding early voting in Republican areas. “And the results were immediate. Most telling, Hamilton County [a GOP county] saw a 63 percent increase in absentee voting from 2008 to 2016, while Marion County [a Democratic county] saw a 26 percent decline. Absentee ballots are used at early voting stations.” From 2008-2016, while early voting locations were expanded in GOP areas, “the number of early voting stations declined from three to one in Marion County, as Republican officials blocked expansion.” The Republicans’ bad faith is indisputable, as Ed Kilgore pointed out: “State law requires a unanimous vote from county election boards to create more than one early voting site. The Democrats on the boards in both urban Marion and suburban Hamilton Counties voted for more sites. The Republicans in Hamilton did, too — but not the sole Republican in Marion.”

UNDER THE RADAR -- NEEDLESS CRUELTY ALERT: This summer, HHS announced that it was doing away with an Obama-era rule that barred arbitration clauses in nursing home contracts that accepted Medicaid and Medicare. What had been happening is that nursing homes were routinely abusing their residents; when family members discovered the abuse and tried to sue, they were told that the contract they had signed to place their loved one in the home contained a mandatory arbitration clause, stripping them of their right to a full court process. The Obama Administration didn’t like that, and passed a rule barring any facility accepting Medicaid/Medicare payments from enforcing mandatory arbitration clauses. Now Trump’s administration wants to eliminate the rule -- because, as Charles Pierce puts it, they are doing the bidding of those “who have prospered from an arbitration system that they could rig to their advantage, those profits coming at the expense of considerable human misery.”

A SOBERING LOOK AT HOW SCREWED DEMS ARE: This week, 538 published an incredibly dispiriting analysis of the congressional map’s bias against Democrats, and warned that it would not get much better in 2020. Not only do we have gerrymandered House districts that favor the GOP (after the GOP seized control of so many state legislatures in 2010), but, according to 538, “The Senate hasn’t had such a strong pro-GOP bias since the ratification of direct Senate elections in 1913.” Here’s the scariest sentence: “Even if Democrats were to win every single 2018 House and Senate race for seats representing places that Hillary Clinton won or that Trump won by less than 3 percentage points — a pretty good midterm by historical standards — they could still fall short of the House majority and lose five Senate seats.” There’s lots of interesting (and very, very depressing) stats in this piece, which I recommend to you (I don’t really feel like copying and pasting the entire thing here). The bottom line, I guess, is that we need to work super hard and also have realistic expectations. I guess? Ugh.

Endorsements:

• This fabulous, dispiriting, well-paced, enraging article about prosecutorial misconduct by Emily Bazelon.
• Al Franken’s memoir, Giant of the Senate, ON AUDIO. I honestly cannot recommend this book highly enough. I listened to it during my vacation (I was so annoyed at myself for forgetting to include it in last week’s Endorsements, given that I spent all 10 days of vacation extolling its virtues to every family member around me, over and over) and it is a SHEER DELIGHT. Franken narrates the audio, and his reading is dry, conversational, and peppered with impersonations (come for his Tom Coburn, stay for his Dana-Carvey-Doing-George-HW-Bush). And not only is the book hilarious, it provides a truly insightful and fascinating insider’s account of political campaigning and governing. I honestly learned a lot about the Senate, about health care policy, and (of course) about Franken. GET THEE TO AN AUDIOBOOK PROVIDER NOW. Seriously. Right now.
• The Week’s Best Use of a GIF.
• Taylor Swift’s refuse-to-be-victimized (or played by opposing counsel) courtroom testimony. (Sample: “Mueller’s [not that Mueller] attorney Gabe McFarland asked Swift why the photo shows the front of her skirt in place, not lifted up, if Mueller was reaching underneath to grab her butt. ‘Because my ass is located in the back of my body,’ Swift replied.”)

THIS WEEK IN POLITICAL NEWS -- 8/3/17

So it seems like last week was a great week to be away, as nothing major happened in the news. It really was the perfect time to be in Ontario, Canada without cell service and away from Twitter and regular access to NPR, since it was just a super normal slow summer news week. What a relief!

SCHEDULING NOTE: Today at 7pm, the Senate closed for the August recess, to resume business on September 5. That means that we get AN ENTIRE MONTH where nothing incredibly terrible could possibly happen in Congress. No more attempts to pass health care, at least for the next 4 weeks. So take this moment to breath a bit more freely, and to give yourselves, your friends, and your fellow activists around the country an enormous pat on the bag and congratulations for the unprecedented fight that has been waged to protect this country over the last six months. (Chait: “The movement to save Obamacare takes its place among the great social causes in American history.”)

WHITE HOUSE CONVERGES WITH CONSPIRACY THEORY: In 2016, a young DNC staffer, Seth Rich, was murdered in D.C. His killing remains unsolved, like many murders in DC, but his name became famous this spring in the fever swamps of the right wing -- and among all Fox News viewers. That is because a conspiracy theory arose in which Rich -- not Russia -- was thought to be the person who leaked DNC emails to Wikileaks. The Right liked this story because (i) it exonerated Trump from allegations of colluding with the Russians; (ii) it supported their fevered insistence that Democrats (and Hillary Clinton in particular) are murderous fiends who shot this guy in cold blood out of retribution; and (iii) the Right loooooooves conspiracy theories. In fact, the Right is nothing but conspiracy theories at this point. Fox News threw gasoline on the fire in May when it published a story saying that “federal investigators” had confirmed that Rich was in contact with Wikileaks. This claim was soon debunked, and after a week, Fox was forced to retract the story. (However, no one has been disciplined or punished in any way for the story.) On Tuesday, NPR reported that a lawsuit by the private investigator involved in the case alleges that the White House itself was involved in the perpetuation of this conspiracy theory. The lawsuit was filed by Rod Wheeler, a Fox contributor who was hired by a wealthy Trump supporter, a man named Ed Butowsky, to investigate the murder. Wheeler claims that a month before the false Fox story ran, he and Butowsky met with Sean Spicer at the White House to discuss the Rich murder. (This meeting happened on April 20. On May 16, Spicer falsely claimed that he was not aware of the Rich story at all.) “The first page of the lawsuit quotes a voicemail and text from Butowsky boasting that Trump himself had reviewed drafts of the Fox News story just before it went to air and was published.” The eventual story that was posted by Fox relied significantly on Wheeler, but soon after it was published, Wheeler claimed that Fox had put words in his mouth and invented quotations attributed to him; Wheeler’s suit claims that the whole story was manipulated and pushed by Butowsky. He quotes a voicemail Butowsky left him just days before the Fox story was published, in which Butowsky tells Wheeler, “We have the full, uh, attention of the White House on this. And tomorrow, let's close this deal, whatever we've got to do." Butowsky also texted Wheeler: "Not to add any more pressure but the president just read the article. He wants the article out immediately. It's now all up to you." Coaching Fox on how to frame the story, Butowsky sent an email to Fox producers explaining, “One of the big conclusions we need to draw from this is that the Russians did not hack our computer systems and ste[a]l emails and there was no collusion" between "Trump and the Russians." The Washington Post has a good timeline on all of this.

So why does this matter? According to Chait, the most disturbing part of this story is the “seamless integration of the White House with the fever swamp. This represents a historical milestone of sorts. Trump’s administration has fully erased the boundary between legitimate conservatism and the most disreputable paranoid discourse on the far right.”

P.S. Tonight it was revealed that Mueller has convened a federal grand jury -- a second one, in addition to the one in Virginia looking into Flynn -- and has issued subpoenas specifically about the Don Jr. meeting. The news was reported by the WSJ but it is behind a paywall so I haven’t really learned more than the sentence above. Here’s a good Twitter thread by a UNH professor explaining what a federal grand jury does and the pitfalls that Trump associates could fall into, and precisely why this is such a big deal. Seems like a pretty good analysis, but at this point that’s all I can really say. (I don’t understand why this guy says that Mueller could issue indictments “at any time”; a federal grand jury moves slowly.) But other than cautioning that the opening of a GJ does not at all mean that charges are inevitable, I don’t have much more to add at this point.

TRUMP PERSONALLY LIED TO THE PUBLIC ABOUT DON JR’S MEETING: On Monday night, the Washington Post reported that “Trump personally dictated a statement in which Trump Jr. said that he and the Russian lawyer had ‘primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children’ when they met in June 2016, according to multiple people with knowledge of the deliberations.” This was, of course, a lie: The meeting had been set up under the promise that the Russians would reveal “dirt” on Hillary Clinton as part of the Russian government’s efforts to support Trump. AND, what’s more, Trump dictated this statement on his way home from the G-8 meeting, where he and Putin had discussed the issue of Russian adoptions (ie, sanctions) -- meaning that even Trump had to know that adoptions were linked to sanctions and that this was very much a pressing political issue for the Russians. Josh Marshall has many interesting thoughts on this story that you should read. His main takeaway is that this is more proof that there really is a there there: that Trump was involved in criminal or criminal-adjacent conduct, and that he knows it: “Trump intervened and overruled his advisors and lawyers who wanted a more candid and complete statement because ‘transparency’ is only an effective strategy if the drip drip drip of revelations is more damaging than the story itself. The bank robber has no interest in transparency. . . . The truth is bad. That’s why President Trump leaned on James Comey to drop the investigation into Mike Flynn. That’s why President Trump fired James Comey. That’s why President Trump has tried to bully Attorney General Jeff Sessions into resigning. That’s why President Trump continues to threaten to fire Robert Mueller. That’s why he overruled his advisors and issued a false statement in his son’s name.” Marshall also wonders if the idea to say that Don Jr’s meeting was about adoptions came straight from Putin (and whether Trump and Putin actually discussed what they should say about the meeting), a somewhat plausible theory given the timing.

DON’T PIN YOUR HOPES ON JOHN KELLY: As of last week, Reince Preibus is out and John Kelly is in, and he is already receiving high marks: Kelly “has the rare ability to rein in Trump” (Ryan Lizza); firing Scaramucci “signals that Kelly is moving quickly to assert control over the West Wing” (Washington Post); “Kelly has the skills to impose needed discipline in the White House” (USA Today). But over the last 6 months as head of the Department of Homeland Security, Kelly has revealed a sinister side that we should not forget. As Dara Lind explains, Kelly “is perfectly in line with the brand that first brought Trump to campaign success: the idea that the world is a terrifying place full of people (mostly foreigners) who want to undermine social order and the American way of life, and that the tough American men who stand up to them shouldn’t be too closely questioned about how they keep those threats at bay.” She recalls a speech he delivered in May that she calls “shockingly martial,” in which he said: “Make no mistake — we are a nation under attack. We are under attack from criminals who think their greed justifies raping young girls at knifepoint, dealing poison to our youth, or killing just for fun.” His tenure at DHS was marked not just by rhetorical extremism but by actual, on-the-ground consequential cruelty, as the New Yorker’s Jonathan Blitzer explains: “In six months, Kelly eliminated guidelines that governed federal immigration agents’ work; vastly expanded the categories of immigrants being targeted for deportation; threatened to abandon the Obama-era program that grants legal status to undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children; and has even broached the idea of splitting up mothers and children at the border to “deter” people from coming to the U.S. Under Kelly, immigration arrests in the U.S. increased by forty per cent and D.H.S became one of the few branches of the federal government that has been both willing and able to execute Trump’s policy priorities.” This is a man who, like Trump, views the world in xenophobic, near-apocalyptic terms and will act (and has acted) according to those beliefs. If we’re looking for someone to keep Bannon’s darkest instincts at bay, I don’t think this is the guy.

#HEADDESK x1000: You may have seen that the transcripts from Trump’s calls with Mexico President Enrique Pena Nieto and Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, from the first weeks of his presidency, were leaked to the Washington Post. They are as bananas as one would expect. But really, please read Jon Chait’s parsing of the Australia call, titled “Australian Prime MInister Slowly Realizes Trump Is a Complete Idiot.” You won’t regret it.

Good News of the Week: On Monday, 9 of the 11 judges on the DC Court of Appeals ruled against EPA Destroyer Administrator Scott Pruitt, ordering that the EPA must enforce an Obama-era rule limiting methane pollution. Pruitt had wanted a 2-year pause “so the agency could ‘look broadly’ at regulations and review their impact.”

Low-Profile Outrage of the Week: Radley Balko at the Washington Post brings our attention to this horrific injustice in Alabama, where the state is refusing to pay compensation to a man who was wrongfully convicted and spent THIRTY YEARS on death row before being released two years ago. In Alabama, a wrongfully convicted person has to apply to a committee for compensation, but even if the committee grants it (which it did in this case), the state legislature has to specifically authorize money to pay (which, obviously, it simply doesn’t do). “Meanwhile, since Hinton’s release the Alabama legislature has passed a different bill related to capital punishment — the Orwellian-named ‘Fair Justice Act,’ which aims to limit the appeals of death row inmates and speed up executions. As Hinton himself wrote in an op-ed, had the Fair Justice Act been in place at the time of his conviction, he’d almost certainly be dead.”

Also This: “By our count, by the end of August, Trump will have spent all or part of 53 days in office at leisure, compared with 15 days for Obama through August 2009. What’s more, Trump will have played at least 33 rounds of golf, nearly double Obama’s 17 rounds — and that’s even before Trump gets to his vacation spot, an actual golf course.”

Endorsements:

• This kick-ass campaign video for Amy McGrath, a retired Marine veteran and the first woman marine to fly an F-18 in combat. She’s running for Congress in Kentucky.
• This short video summarizing one of my law firm’s biggest and most consequential cases (and that I had nothing to do with, to be clear). A true story of good against evil. Check it out!
• Must Read of the Week: Radley Balko on Trump, the teen boy brain, and policing.
• Another Must Read: Jon Chait goes deep on Obama’s enduring legacy.
• Fun video of the week: White House is really, really good at stepping on its own message.
• This op-ed by Lindy West, arguing that abortion cannot be a “compromise” area for Democrats. I am not sure I agree with her bottom line, but it is a very well-written piece that raises a lot of tough questions in my own head, and I’d encourage you to read it and grapple with it. This paragraph is particularly poignant:

But there is no model of economic equality that does not reckon with “identity politics.” There is no economic equality without the ability to terminate a pregnancy. There is no economic equality without the overthrow of white supremacy. What good is an economic opportunity if large swaths of the population can’t access it? Telling minority groups that it’s their responsibility to sit back and wait, to subordinate their needs for the good of the party — that implies that “the party” is not theirs as much as everyone else’s. And it sounds a lot like the people we’re trying to defeat.

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.