Editor’s Blog
I wanted to share this moment from last night’s campaign launch speech. In terms of projection, fury and borderline eliminationist rhetoric it captured the entire performance …
welp "Our radical Democrat opponents are driven by hatred, prejudice and rage. They want to destroy you and they want to destroy our country as we know it." pic.twitter.com/zIc4qMZ8Wf
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) June 19, 2019
The New York Times has a rather lengthy and Timesian piece out this morning on the on-going mystery of Jerry Falwell Jr, his wife and family and this “pool boy” who they befriended and then put into the divey youth hostel business in South Florida. For those who’ve read the earlier reporting by Politico, Buzzfeed and Reuters, there’s no big new bombshell or piece of evidence in the new piece. (If anyone’s read it and thinks otherwise, let me know.) What there is is bits and pieces of more confirmation and nuggets of detail throughout. It’s a classic Timesian piece, the kind fellow journalists often grind their teeth over. The Times comes in late, largely with other people’s reporting and makes the whole thing official with splash of Times holy water. And yet, as usual, they’ve used their name and resources to unearth enough new details and additional confirmations to put the whole edifice on a rather firmer footing.
We still have a close to inexplicable chain of events in which Jerry Falwell Jr. and his wife befriended young Giancarlo Granda, a pool attendant they met at a luxe, high life hotel in Miami Beach. As the Times puts it: “The Falwells, according to the person close to them, were impressed with Mr. Granda’s ambition. Soon he was hiking and water skiing with them in Virginia. Within months, they were offering to help him get started in business in Florida.”
A new Quinnipiac poll has Joe Biden far out ahead of every other Democratic presidential candidate (41%), with Bernie Sanders (14%) and Elizabeth Warren (12%) in close to a tie. Notably, Biden and Sanders are in close to a tie among Democrats 18-49 (Biden 26%, Sanders 28%) while Democrats 50 and over are all but unanimous (Biden 52%, Sanders 5%).
Biden is beating Trump handily in a state match-up 50%-41%. And the rest are in the standard pattern. Sanders 48% v Trump 42%. Warren 47% v Trump 43%. Harris and Buttigieg both have a 1 point margin over Trump.
I want to share with you an offer we’re going to be making to existing Prime subscribers later this month and also a request, one that is very important to the future of TPM. I’d be greatly obliged if you’d give me just a few moments to explain what we’re doing and why it’s very important to the future of TPM.
Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA) announces she’s decided to support beginning an impeachment inquiry of President Trump. Here’s the video of her announcement. The Cook Report rates her district (CA-45) as a R+3 district.
Today I wanted to speak directly to the people of CA-45. There's been a lot of noise in D.C. and in the press about impeachment, so I wanted to share my thoughts with you. pic.twitter.com/ceri6lHwbY
— Rep. Katie Porter (@RepKatiePorter) June 18, 2019
President Trump’s instantly notorious interview with George Stephanopoulos in which he expressed openness to receiving foreign government assistance in the 2020 presidential election sparked a flurry of pushback and denunciations. The Chair of the FEC released a statement rebuking the President. Various lawyers noted laws prohibiting candidates from accepting things of value from foreign nationals. But many of the criticisms themselves illustrate more than anything the impact almost three years of Republican gaslighting, goal post moving and obfuscation has had on the public debate in this country. The fact that accepting assistance from a foreign government – which President Trump wants to establish as the new norm – might technically be construed as a campaign finance violation is close to the least relevant thing about what happened in the 2016 election. This should also remind us that most the scandal of the 2016 election and what amounts to the permanent scandal of the Trump presidency involves wrongdoing and misrule that is simply not captured by our statutory law. They are attacks on the nature of a civic republican government and principles embedded throughout the federal constitution.
According to the Times, the Pentagon’s cybercommand is taking newly aggressive steps to inject cyberweapons into Russian critical infrastructure. But they are withholding this information from the President because among other reasons they consider him a security threat and they fear he might countermand the orders or share the information with Russian officials.
Yet more evidence that (now deceased) GOP consultant specializing in increasing voting power of white Americans was behind Census Bureau decision to add citizenship question to the 2020 Census.
Someone asked me this morning how it is that Don McGahn still refuses to testify to Congress even after Donald Trump is literally accusing him of committing a felony by lying under oath in his testimony to the Special Counsel’s Office. One point to note here: no one thinks that the White House can bind McGahn. The White House can arguably give him a rationale, legal reason to refuse to testify. But he’s definitely free to do what he wants. So why is he still doing Trump’s bidding?
The answer is as clear as it is depressing.
Just so we’re clear on this. The President directly accused his former White House Counsel, Don McGahn, of lying under oath in his testimony to the Mueller investigators. His alleged lie was telling them about Trump’s demands to fire Robert Mueller. Why did he lie? “Because he wanted to make himself look like a good lawyer.”
Got any questions? Tomorrow at 12:30 PM Eastern I’m doing a Reddit AMA. If you’re not a Redditer that means Ask Me Anything. Open questions for me about anything and everything. I’ll be posting a link tomorrow morning.
Also, if you’re on Reddit, I wanted to let you know we have our own official TPM Reddit page right here. So it’s an easy way for you to find our stuff at Reddit.
I’ve been thinking about President Trump’s comments to George Stephanopoulos. Why did he say that? That he would do that doesn’t surprise me. But why would he say it?
One part of it is probably the most innocent explanation (everything is relative). For Trump to say he would not work with a foreign government against his domestic political enemies would suggest that he or his family members or staffers did something wrong in 2016. Maybe they didn’t commit a crime. Maybe they didn’t “collude”, whatever that means. But to say he wouldn’t do this in 2020 would be to concede what he has never conceded and cannot concede but which likely strikes most of us as obvious: he and his campaign did something deeply wrong by welcoming and making use of damaging information from a foreign adversary state.
Trump tells Poland’s rightist/authoritarian President: “Much of the media unfortunately in this country is corrupt. I have to tell you that, Mr. President.”
Trump tells Poland's Rightwing President: "Much of the media unfortunately in this country is corrupt. I have to tell you that, Mr. President." pic.twitter.com/3RUJwiDbCg
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) June 12, 2019
Earlier Trump commented on protests in Hong Kong: “I hope that it all works out for China and for Hong Kong … I hope that they can work it out with China.”
Looks like Mike Flynn may be going full Papadopoulos after all. Or maybe at least half Papadopoulos.
Quinnipiac has new poll data about impeachment out today. It shows among other things the public has pretty different takes on the presidency than what is treated largely as a given within elite opinion.
One big takeaway is that the public does not support impeaching the President: 61% to 33% say Congress should not begin the process of impeaching the President. That obviously includes lots of Republicans who are firmly against it. Democrats support it, unsurprisingly, but there’s significant opposition even there. 62% of Democrats favor but 31% oppose. African-Americans are the only demographic group that supports impeachment, 63% to 31%.
But that’s not the whole story. American voters overwhelmingly believe a sitting President should be able to face criminal charges while he or she serves as President, just like every other American.
Looks like Mike Flynn may be doubling down on a presidential pardon. He has hired a new lawyer not from the small circle of high-powered white-collar criminal defense attorneys in DC, but with pro-Trump/anti-Mueller bona fides.