I don’t know what Trump was thinking going in. He tweeted that “if I was given the great city of Moscow as retribution for all the sins and evils committed by Russia over the years, I would return to criticism that it wasn’t good enough,” which sounded like he thought he might be handed Moscow. This did not happen.

Instead, this did.

Putin: Thank you for being here. Although can we truly say that anyone is anywhere? I, personally, choose to believe that nothing exists, which means that I can regard all of this with an amused detachment. If any of this were real or had any meaning, you would be awash in despair, and I would not be able to answer for my crimes. But it is all an empty farce. Speaking of which, here is Donald Trump, the president of the United States.

Trump: You must understand that, like, a week ago, Russia and the United States had a worse relationship than they had ever had. I assume ever. If there is any history between these beautiful nations, do not tell me! I have not gotten to it yet, and I would hate to hear any spoilers. But this morning we fixed it. The next time we meet, maybe Vladimir Putin will give me Moscow.

Putin: Sure. Sure. Why not? Why should I not give him Moscow? What is Moscow? What is anything?

Question: If you were upset at Russia right now, President Trump, why would that be?

Trump: I’m not upset at Russia. Mostly, I am disappointed … in America. Most of the blame for our relationship with Russia is that America until now has acted as though we were some sort of special place with higher standards than the rest of the world, where we claimed to believe in democracy and the rule of law, which just means you cannot torture people or have a really good parade, and the media often says mean things about you based in fact. None of that is good.

Putin: Imagine if any of this were really happening!

As Democrats think and argue about how to win back power, and what policies to implement when they do, one crucial fact is missing from the conversation: it will take something very special—some very new thinking—to avoid the fate that always befalls Democrats, namely, losing control of government after two years*.
...

Does Policy Really Matter?

Are you not sold on [suggestions for various policies and policy themes]? That’s fine. My aim is not necessarily to convince you of the wisdom of this or that particular policy idea. It is to convince you of the necessity for the Democrats to have new policy ideas, and to base them at every step on the imperative of winning by margins big enough to ensure the continuation of American democracy. If you don’t like my policy ideas, I invite you to come up with your own.

The point of championing new policy ideas [such as Medicare-for-all] is not so much to persuade voters of any particular policy, but, rather, to remake the Democratic Party into one that is more in the interests of average Americans, that does truly put more power in voters’ hands. If the party does this, and gets the message out using the power of Congress, then it has a shot at convincing more Americans that Democratic candidates are on their side. Policy ideas are important not because most voters will learn the details and think through the implications, but because they can give a candidate and a party an identity that voters can, well, identify with.
...

Republicans, looking at their control of Washington and most state governments, and considering the rise of conservative regimes and ethno-nationalist parties in Europe and around the world, may see themselves as the new sun party. But changing demographics cut against that story.
...

Demography, however, isn’t destiny. And even if the decisive demographic shift in politics Democrats are hoping for comes, it is still several election cycles away. For now, Democrats are going to have to manufacture a majority under difficult conditions, and hold on to it, or America a decade from now might not have a democracy at all.


*[[Here's] a quiz for you: Since 1981, for how many years has the Democratic Party controlled the White House and both houses of Congress?

The answer is four: the first two years of Bill Clinton’s first term, and the first two years of Barack Obama’s first term. That’s it.]

Despite determined progressive activism, Charlotte’s City Council agreed to host the RNC.

it would be nice if more white people learned the skills of compartmentalizing righteous anger, not letting it show, and de-centering yourselves by (at first, before saying your piece) listening to / soothing the anger and anguish of people who don't listen to or respect you, because IF those people are reach-able, usually they have to feel that you've heard them first.

Those of us who are low in the social hierarchy on multiple axes, we do it all the time to survive. It's not fair. It's not fun. It's hit or miss. But it works often enough for me that I keep doing it. Again, it'd be helpful if more white people, especially white men, deployed these de-centering skills. Most white men can do it with their bosses. It doesn't seem to occur to them to do it with anybody else... because, I presume, people who would reciprocate are often lower in the hierarchy so why would it occur to you (general you, not directing this at anybody in-thread) to listen to or do emotional labor for them; and with people who don't reciprocate, it's unpleasant, so if you're lucky enough that you don't have to, then you choose to avoid it entirely.

John A. Stormer, a Cold War-era anti-communist author and pastor whose widely circulated book “None Dare Call It Treason” warned of Soviet subversion in America and helped catapult arch-conservative standardbearer Barry Goldwater to the Republican presidential nomination in 1964, died July 10 at a rehabilitation center in Troy, Mo. He was 90.

New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union; but no new State shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or Parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress.

MORE: Trump says he meant to say in Helsinki that he saw no reason why it would not be Russia that interfered in elections

MORE: Trump says his administration will move aggressively to repel any efforts to interfere in 2018 election

America’s child president had a play date with a KGB alumnus, who surely enjoyed providing day care. It was a useful, because illuminating, event: Now we shall see how many Republicans retain a capacity for embarrassment.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller asked a judge to give immunity to five people who may testify at next week’s bank-fraud trial of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.

Mueller didn’t identify the five witnesses in a court filing Tuesday in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia. He said the five are likely to invoke their right against self-incrimination if they don’t receive immunity. Their names will only be made public if they are called to testify, he said.

Precision is not part of Trump’s repertoire: He speaks English as though it is a second language that he learned from someone who learned English last week.

Every Bill which shall have passed the House of Representatives and the Senate, shall, before it become a Law, be presented to the President of the United States[.]

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will appear before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee next week to discuss a pair of controversial summits held by President Donald Trump, according to Republican aides.

Pompeo will appear before the committee in open session on the afternoon of July 25 to answer questions about Trump’s meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

The congressional bill to reinstate net neutrality rules has finally received support from a House Republican.

US Rep. Mike Coffman (R-Colo.) today announced his support for the bill. Coffman is signing a discharge petition that would force the House to vote on a Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolution; the resolution would reverse the Federal Communications Commission's repeal of its net neutrality rules.

The US Senate approved the CRA resolution in May, with votes from all members of the Democratic caucus and three Republican senators. While 176 House Democrats have signed the discharge petition, Coffman is the first House Republican to do so.

"I hope more Republicans will join this effort and stand on the side of American families who rely on and overwhelmingly support a free and open Internet," said Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass), who submitted the CRA resolution that passed in the Senate.

The petition needs 218 signatures, and Republicans hold a 236-193 majority in the House, so it's still a long shot. But advocacy groups that support net neutrality praised Coffman for becoming the first House Republican to sign the petition.

Donald just fixed everything by retroactively amending the transcript of his televised statement about election meddling to read, “I don’t see any reason why it WOULDN’T be Russia,” instead of "WOULD be Russia." He also clarified that he likes to grab women by their puppies.

Breaking: Russian MoD says in statement that it's ready to implement agreement on international security Putin and Trump reached in Helsinki.

Russian MoD says it's "ready to activate contacts with US colleagues via general staffs and other existing communication channels to discuss extending Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, cooperation in Syria, other current issues of ensuring military security."

Also note the Russian MoD statement uses a word that can be translated as "agreements" or "understandings." So MoD could be jumping gun, especially as Russian diplomats were at summit, not Russian generals.

US federal government spending records seen by this newspaper show a series of payments worth a total of £52,477 were made by the State Department to SLC Turnberry Limited, the company behind the South Ayrshire hotel and golf course.

The five-figure windfall, which represents the first example of how Mr Trump’s firm was paid for his contentious working visit to the UK, has been condemned by ethics watchdogs, with one group accusing the 72-year-old of “using the power and authority of his office to profit personally”.

The US taxpayers’ money went towards hotel rooms used by Mr Trump and his staff during his two-night stay at Turnberry, which the president said would be dominated by meetings and calls. He ended up playing two rounds of golf at the historic course.

...Spoiler alert: Nearly all of these open avenues involve not only Americans, but sometimes even senior campaign, transition, and White House aides to Donald Trump.

While it’s entirely possible that some investigative avenues for Mueller’s team won’t pan out into criminal charges, we do know that he and the FBI have had sustained, sometimes even years-long interest in the following lines of inquiry—none of which have yet appeared publicly in court:

1. How do Erik Prince, the Seychelles, and the inauguration fit in?
2. How do the UAE, Qatar, and Jared Kushner fit in?
3. What role did Sergey Kislyak, the GOP convention, and the finances of the Russian Embassy play?
4. How do Roger Stone, WikiLeaks, and other Americans and Brits fit into the GRU indictment?
5. What did Mueller learn from George Papadopoulos, Rick Gates, and Michael Flynn?
6. What’s in those 291,000 Michael Cohen documents?
7. What’s up with that Trump Tower meeting?
8. How relevant is Cambridge Analytica and was there a coordinated effort by the Trump campaign or associates to gather intelligence or untoward opposition research on Hillary Clinton?
9. Do people like Carter Page and Felix Sater matter?

These nine distinct areas of open questions are hardly encyclopedic—this list doesn’t even count unanswered questions about, for instance, the role of the Russian intelligence service FSB in its own attacks on Democratic targets (an operation known as Cozy Bear) or loose ends from previous indictments, like the activities of DC superlobbyists Tony Podesta and Vin Weber. And it doesn’t count the numerous salacious questions still unproven in the Steele dossier, like what exactly happened at the Moscow Ritz.
...

Rep. Lamar Smith, R–Texas, accused Google of blocking searches to “Jesus, Chick-fil-A and the Catholic religion," none of which are blocked by Google. “Jesus” returns almost a billion results. In a since-deleted Facebook post circulated by several blogs, a Christian publisher accused Google of banning their advertisements because of the “faith we express.”

Google responded to the company, Concordia Publishing, by saying that the search giant does not allow specific users to be targeted with ads according to their faith, and that Google had not banned the content of the ad. It is unclear why Smith believed Google banned Chick-fil-A.

Rep. Steve King, R-Ia., asked why Gateway Pundit, which incorrectly implicated three different people for separate terror attacks last year, was losing traffic on Facebook. Gateway Pundit pushed a rumor that a Michigan man who was at a wedding 1,000 miles away was driving the car that slammed into a crowd at a protest in Charlottesville, Virginia, last year, killing one woman and injuring 19. The founder of the website was later sued for its coverage. Gateway Pundit also misidentified the gunman in the Las Vegas shooting rampage last October that left 58 dead, claiming he was a Democrat by a different name who was “associated with an anti-Trump army.” The post was later deleted.

Several Democratic lawmakers raised the question of why Congress was spending one of its final working days before a five-week August recess focusing on the “fantasy” that Facebook, YouTube and Twitter suppress conservative viewpoints.

Brezhnev: I wish to tell you confidentially and completely
frankly that we in the Soviet leadership are supporters of your election
as President to a new term as well. And we for our part will do
everything we can to make that happen.

Ford: I thank you for that. I expect to be elected and I think that
that meets the interests of the further development of Soviet-American
relations, and of the cause of strengthening detente.

Pro-Kremlin GOP Congressman Dana Rohrabacher met with a Putin ally in Russia in August 2015, The Daily Beast has confirmed, matching an account in Monday’s blockbuster FBI affidavit against accused Russian spy Maria Butina.

STAFF: (OFF-MIKE)

QUESTION: And did you direct any of your officials to help him do that?

PUTIN: (THROUGH TRANSLATOR) Yes, I did. Yes, I did. Because he talked about bringing the U.S.-Russia relationship back to normal.

President Donald Trump gave the go-ahead to announce new Russian election-hacking indictments before his meeting with Vladimir Putin rather than after -- in the hopes it would strengthen his hand in the talks, according to accounts from people familiar with the decision.

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein went to Trump last week and offered him the choice: before or after the Putin summit on Monday in Helsinki? Trump chose before, ultimately putting the issue into the spotlight just 72 hours before the high-stakes meeting, the people said.
...
The episode involved a rare move by Rosenstein, who invoked an exception on national security grounds that allowed him to brief Trump about ongoing grand jury proceedings -- even though Special Counsel Robert Mueller continues to investigate whether anyone close to Trump colluded with Russia and whether the president sought to obstruct the probe.

Rosenstein announced the indictments on Friday. He said then that he “briefed President Trump about these allegations earlier this week. The president is fully aware of the department’s actions.” He didn’t disclose that he’d given Trump a choice on the timing.

"I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."
Clarification by Donald J. Trump: Where he said "will" he meant "won't."

As he flew home from Helsinki on Air Force One following his disastrous press conference with Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump reacted with surprise at the horror and outrage that was being expressed by much of the American political world. By the time he landed, the surprise had turned to anger. “He was enraged there was a lack of people out there defending him,” one Republican close to the White House told me. The mood among West Wing advisers was downright funereal. “This was the nightmare scenario,” another Republican in frequent contact with the administration said.
...
While National Security Adviser John Bolton, according to a source, thought Trump’s remarks were ill-advised, he believed that walking them back would only add fuel to the outrage pyre and make the president look weak. But Chief of Staff John Kelly was irate. According to a source, he told Trump it would make things worse for him with Robert Mueller. He also exerted pressure to try to get the president to walk back his remarks. According to three sources familiar with the situation, Kelly called around to Republicans on Capitol Hill and gave them the go-ahead to speak out against Trump. (The White House did not respond to a request for comment.) Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan held televised press conferences to assert that Russia did meddle in the election.

• Donald Trump praised Iraq's Saddam Hussein
• He praised Turkey's Recep Erdoğan...
• ...whose thugs beat protestors on American soil
• He praised China's killing of students in Tiananmen Square
• He praised North Korea's murderous Kim Jong-Un
• And he's repeatedly praised Vladimir Putin

Ambassador Huntsman, you work for a pawn, not a president. It’s time to come home. There is no other reasonable course of action to take after Monday’s disgraceful joint news conference with President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

As Utahns, many of us were a bit stunned last year when you accepted the job as U.S. ambassador to Russia, but your explanation made sense: It was a role you took on, much like your tenure in China, out of a deep sense of duty.

But that duty is to your country and the best way now to serve your country is not by holding on to some title and being the emissary of a president who doesn’t share your values, or American values, for that matter.

It’s by resigning immediately and speaking out against a president who attacks our allies, gives comfort to our adversaries and undermines our moral standing, our commitment to democratic ideals and our interest in human rights every time he opens his gaping mouth...

Texas Democrat Beto O'Rourke, who is challenging Sen. Ted Cruz, said Tuesday that President Donald Trump's performance at a summit with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin merits impeachment. And he blasted Cruz for failing to denounce Trump, who shocked U.S. intelligence and law enforcement by taking the former KGB spy chief's word that Russia did not meddle in the 2016 election.

The Cruz campaign shot back by asserting that O'Rourke's stance on impeachment makes him "so radical and reckless that he is unfit to serve in the U.S. Senate." [...]

"Standing on stage in another country with the leader of another country who wants to and has sought to undermine this country, and to side with him over the United States -- if I were asked to vote on this I would vote to impeach the president," O'Rourke, a three-term congressman from El Paso, said in response to a question from The Dallas Morning News. "Impeachment, much like an indictment, shows that there is enough there for the case to proceed and at this point there is certainly enough there for the case to proceed." [...]

Cruz later retweeted this story and used it to hit his rival. "This partisan extremism may resonate great in Hollywood, but it doesn't reflect the views of the majority of Texans," he wrote.

Whenever upon such roll call it shall be ascertained that a quorum is not present, a majority of the Senators present may direct the Sergeant at Arms to request, and, when necessary, to compel the attendance of the absent Senators, which order shall be determined without debate; [and they can’t do anything else without a quorum]

What he is trying to say is he meant to say something different, or rather, he wished he had said something different, because people are yelling at him now.

This happens to the best of us, he is sure you understand. This often happens. “Not” is such a small word. Who among us has not forgotten to use the word “no” or “not” at a critical time? Who among us has not shouted “I OBJECT!” at a wedding when they meant “I DON’T OBJECT!” or “Please murder my spouse” when you meant “Please do NOT murder my spouse!” or “Please, hack the DNC and see if you can leak Hillary Clinton’s emails, Russia!” which maybe should have included a “not”? It can be so easy to forget a “not” at a crucial time, for instance in the sentence “I love you” or “It is possible that there were very fine people on both sides here in Charlottesville.”

In Trump’s view, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” was missing a “not,” as of course was President Ronald Reagan’s description of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire.” The point is, these are subtle distinctions that are easy to get lost.

The good news is you can just stick it in later when you remember, and people will accept instantly that that is what you meant. I am not saying that sticking a belated “not” at the end is not a genius move, but this was literally suggested by a humor expert in the movie “Borat,” so.

[Jonathan Lemire from the AP:] Just now, President Putin denied having anything to do with the election interference in 2016. Every U.S. intelligence agency has concluded that Russia did.

What -- who -- my first question for you, sir, is who do you believe?
My second question is would you now, with the whole world watching, tell President Putin, would you denounce what happened in 2016 and would you warn him to never do it again?

[Four paragraphs about the DNC server]

TRUMP: With that being said, all I can do is ask the question. My people came to me, Dan Coats came to me and some others, they said they think it's Russia. I have President Putin; he just said it's not Russia.

I will say this: I don't see any reason why it would be. But I really do want to see the server.

But I have -- I have confidence in both parties. I -- I really believe that this will probably go on for a while, but I don't think it can go on without finding out what happened to the server. [More server stuff]

So I have great confidence in my intelligence people, but I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today.

The now infamous Facebook data set on tens of millions of Americans gathered by a Cambridge University scientist for a firm that went on to work for Donald Trump's 2016 campaign was accessed from Russia, a British member of parliament tells CNN.

Damian Collins, the Conservative MP leading a British parliamentary investigation into online disinformation, told CNN that a British investigation found evidence that the data, collected by Professor Aleksandr Kogan on behalf of Cambridge Analytica, had been accessed from Russia and other countries. The discovery was made by the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), Britain's data protection authority, Collins said.

But by August 2016, when she moved to the U.S. on a student visa, the FBI was watching, according to U.S. officials familiar with the matter.

Rather than question or confront her, they said, officials decided to track her movements to determine whom she was meeting and what she was doing in the U.S. — the kind of monitoring that is not uncommon when foreign nationals are suspected of working on behalf of a foreign government.

By then, Butina had already publicly quizzed Trump about his views on Russia and briefly met his eldest son at an NRA convention. After the FBI began monitoring her, Butina attended a ball at Trump’s inauguration and tried to arrange a meeting between him and a senior Russian government official at last year’s annual National Prayer Breakfast.

By 2017, after she had enrolled as a graduate student at American University in Washington, Butina began probing groups on the left as well, trying unsuccessfully to interview a D.C.-based civil rights group about its cyber-vulnerabilities for what she said was a school project, according to a person familiar with her outreach.

On Sunday, alerted that she was preparing to leave Washington for South Dakota, where monitoring her would be more difficult, federal authorities arrested Butina.
...
As scrutiny grew of Russian actions during the campaign, Butina’s work in her role as a graduate student at American University attracted notice as well. She sparked alarm at one Washington-area civil rights group in June 2017, when she asked to interview the group’s director about its vulnerability to cyberattacks for a school project.

“It was in­cred­ibly suspect activity,” said Jon Steinman, co-founder of CyberHill, a cybersecurity firm that consulted with the group. Steinman said he immediately contacted the FBI and was interviewed about the episode at length in January.

Driscoll, Butina’s attorney, said the inquiry was not surprising given that she was enrolled in a cybersecurity program. An American University spokesman confirmed that Butina graduated with a master’s degree in May but otherwise declined to comment.

Up to this point, the Republican scheme was going as planned. But in June, everything fell apart. Shortly before the registration deadline, a 32-year-old Raleigh attorney named Chris Anglin jumped into the state Supreme Court contest—as a Republican. Anglin was a registered Democrat until June 7, just before he entered the race. He insists that he is not a Democratic plant, instead declaring himself a “constitutional Republican” running to “stand up for the independence of the judiciary.” Anglin also implied that he was running to protest the GOP’s cancellation of judicial primaries, which he considered an assault on “the judiciary as a coequal branch of government.” He has hired a Democratic strategist, Perry Woods, to run his campaign.

North Carolina GOP executive director Dallas Woodhouse has already called Anglin “the enemy,” seemingly acknowledging that there is a very good chance he will siphon votes from Jackson, the Republican incumbent. (It certainly sounds like Anglin is, at the least, an irritated Democrat who decided to exploit Republicans’ manipulations for liberal gains.) If he does split the GOP vote, then Earls—an unapologetic progressive and civil rights attorney—will have an easier time winning the seat, giving Democrats a 5–2 majority on the state Supreme Court. And Republicans’ endless intrigue will have backfired.

There is, alas, still time before the November election for Republican legislators to pass another law targeting Earls—a new rule that no one named “Anita” may appear on the ballot would not be surprising given the GOP’s increasing lack of subtlety. But for now, it appears that Earls has a better shot than ever at winning. If Republicans hadn’t intervened, Jackson might have coasted to reelection on incumbency advantage alone. Now her seat is in serious jeopardy. And if she loses to Earls, Republicans will have only their own buffoonery to blame.

-- CA-48: (mentioned earlier) Monmouth poll has Dem challenger Rouda leading GOP incumbent Rohrabacher in each of their three turnout models:

potential voters: Rouda up 46-43
midterm turnout: Rouda up 47-45
Dem surge: Rouda up 48-44

-- More on very impressive Dem fundraising in 2Q. Plus detailed roundup on race totals.

-- NY gov: Zogby poll has Cuomo leading Nixon 63-22 for the Dem nomination. [MOE +/- 3.7%]. Cuomo easily leads various general election configurations, including if Nixon runs on the WFP ticket.

-- New governor race ratings from Governing. NH/MD/AL move right, IA/OH/PA/AZ move left.

"I was promoted to be a major, and every Allied government gave me a decoration — even Montenegro, little Montenegro down on the Adriatic Sea!"

Little Montenegro! He lifted up the words and nodded at them — with his smile. The smile comprehended Montenegro’s troubled history and sympathized with the brave struggles of the Montenegrin people. It appreciated fully the chain of national circumstances which had elicited this tribute from Montenegro’s warm little heart.

Now, mindful of the party’s insurgency, and facing a vigorous primary challenge from Cynthia Nixon, Mr. Cuomo has raced to find small donors. He has offered a chance to win Billy Joel tickets. His daughters emailed supporters to ask for $5. And he has invested in a raft of digital ads and advertised an unlimited-drinks happy hour in Manhattan for only $5, though the format had to be scotched to avoid running afoul of state rules.

But campaign disclosures on Tuesday revealed the extent to which Mr. Cuomo remains dependent on big donors — and some of the maneuvers undertaken to obscure that fact.

One donor contributed 69 times to Mr. Cuomo in the final days before the deadline — 67 of them $1 donations, driving down his average donation size. The donor, Christopher Kim, shares the same address on his filing as one of Mr. Cuomo’s campaign aides, Julia Yang.

“We appreciate his enthusiasm,” said Abbey Collins, a spokeswoman for Mr. Cuomo’s campaign. “Going forward, we’ll put measures in place to count contributions like this differently.”

But Mr. Kim was just one in a line of aides, relatives, roommates, allies, appointees and lobbyists sprinkled through Mr. Cuomo’s filing, giving tiny sums like $1 and $5.
...
The cumulative effect of these donations was negligible: of the $6 million raised in the last six months, only 1 percent came from those donating $250 or less. All told, Mr. Cuomo earned more in interest payments on his campaign war chest (nearly $154,000) than he collected in total contributions from donors who gave less than $1,000 (just under $110,000).

The Perth parents of three children who died when Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 was shot down over Ukraine have condemned the US president Donald Trump for his refusal to hold the Russian president Vladimir Putin to account over the tragedy.
In a scathing post on his Facebook page on Tuesday, Anthony Maslin challenged Trump on the “irrefutable facts” surrounding the shooting down of the Malaysia Airlines plane by a Russian missile in 2014. His partner Rin Norris described both leaders as “bullies”.
...
“Mr Trump, you invented and speak a lot about ‘fake news’. But let’s try talking about something that’s not fake ... let’s call them irrefutable facts,” Maslin said in his post.

“You have no empathy for your fellow man, and you clearly have no idea what love is. So you have nothing.”

In late December, 2016, Isra Allison, one of B.N.C.’s lead organizers, called Ocasio-Cortez just as she was leaving an anti-pipeline demonstration in Standing Rock, North Dakota. “She told me what B.N.C. was about,” Ocasio-Cortez recalled. “I was just, like, ‘O.K., I’m listening.’ By that time, they had policy plans, and Sanders was the political shorthand.” Ocasio-Cortez e-mailed Allison a video of a speech she had made at Boston University on Martin Luther King, Jr., Day and a description of her work as a waitress: “Having that small business experience opened my eyes to tons of issues—from labor law, to immigration. . . .”

In her early conversations with Allison and others at B.N.C., Ocasio-Cortez was unnerved. “Where did I get off?” she said. “I mean, I’m going to tell people that I, as a waitress, should be their next congresswoman?”

[...]

When I asked her about her political heroes, though, there was no mention of anyone in the Marxist pantheon. She named Robert F. Kennedy. In college, reading his speeches—“that was my jam,” she said. R.F.K., at least in the last chapter of his life, his 1968 Presidential campaign, tried to forge a party coalition of workers, minorities, and the middle class.

The Democratic National Committee has been trying and failing for months to force documents into White House adviser Jared Kushner’s hands to let him know that he is being served with a lawsuit, according to a Tuesday Bloomberg report.

The DNC sued Kushner back in April for alleged collusion with the Russians to alter the 2016 election. Since then, they have come up against a ridiculous multitude of obstacles in trying to officially deliver the notice to him.

After being rejected from his Manhattan apartment three times and from his Washington residence by the Secret Service, they finally tried to just send the documents in the mail. No dice. No one would sign for them and they got returned.

The committee reportedly asked a judge Tuesday for permission to simply mail the summons and complaint to Kushner in ordinary first class, so the package does not require a signature.

Per Bloomberg, the DNC sued Kushner alongside Russia, the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks for interference in the 2016 election.

The White House OMB now projects the deficit will rocket to $890B this year and top $1T through 2021.
cc, uh, Larry Kudlow.

… 2017 … 2018 …… 2019 …… 2020 …… 2021
______________________________________
3,316 … 3,232 … 3,424 … 3,616 … 3,841
3,982 … 4,212 … 4,510 ...4,692 … 4,851
______________________________________
… 665 ……… 890 … 1,085 … 1,076 … 1,1011

Federal debt will hit $25 Trillion in fiscal 2021 - four full fiscal years after Trump took office - under his OMB's own estimates.
Rule of thumb: $1 trillion is about $3,000 more borrowed for every person in the United States. Every year.
These projections are about conscious choices, not a sudden turn in the economy like 2008. Trump signed laws passed by Congress lowering tax rates and increasing spending. The rest is math.
This is Larry Kudlow *3 weeks ago!* in his walkback of false claim the deficit is coming down rapidly telling @EamonJavers he still thought it would come down in *2018*:

Larry Kudlow just called me to say that his comment today that the deficit "is coming down rapidly" was misinterpreted. "I was referring to future deficits," he said. "I'll stand by that…because we believe there's going to be an investment boom going on."
Of the people who criticized him today, Kudlow says: "Ether they misunderstand or they are ideologically opposed to our program,"
On the deficit, he said: "I think it will come down in 2018, and the big reductions will come in future yuears."

Larry Kudlow used to work at OMB.
Don't think there's ever been a non-recession year when the deficit jumped by $225 billion - but that's what's happening this year.

"We met with the Queen, who is absolutely a terrific person, where she reviewed her honor guard for the first time in 70 years, they tell me," Trump said. "We walked in front of the honor guard and that was very inspiring to see and be with her. And I think the relationship, I can truly say is a good one. But she was very, very inspiring indeed."

Contrary to Trump's statement, however, the queen has reviewed her honor guard many times over the last 70 years. The tradition often takes place during visits from foreign officials, including during former President Obama's visit in 2011.

Migrants detained in recent months at the U.S.-Mexico border describe being held in Customs and Border Protection facilities that are unsanitary and overcrowded, receiving largely inedible food and being forced to drink foul-smelling drinking water.

In a lawsuit filed against Attorney General Jeff Sessions by the Los Angeles-based Center for Human Rights & Constitutional Law, some 200 individuals detained under the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" policy were interviewed, many of them relating poor conditions.

In the suit, filed Monday in U.S. District Court in California and viewed by NPR late Tuesday, the group is demanding that the government meet minimum standard conditions as laid out in the 1997 Flores Settlement Agreement (PDF). The Department of Justice could not immediately be reached for comment.

The filing contains the stories of migrants arriving mainly from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador who were detained at various locations at different times, including one facility referred to by several interviewees as the "Dog House" or "Dog Pound," and another as the "Ice House." Last names of detained interviewees have been redacted.

"Little Montenegro! He lifted up the words and nodded at them ...

Putin had mentioned the alleged crimes* of American-British financier Bill Browder when responding to questions about the 12 Russian military intelligence officers indicted in the U.S. in the hacking of Democratic emails during the 2016 election.

Browder, who became rich in Moscow during the relatively lawless days of the 1990s post-Soviet Union, is a common bête noire for the Putin government, though prosecutors claimed Wednesday that American intelligence services may have also been involved in an illegal scheme.

A list of U.S. officials announced by Russia’s Prosecutor General's office on Tuesday included members of the State Department, Department of Homeland Security and CIA, as well as McFaul.

Chyron: "Prof Cohen: Do you prefer impeaching Trump or nuclear war with Russia?"

Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office

As the GOP increasingly comes to resemble a personality cult, is there any red line—video tapes? DNA evidence? a war with Germany—President Trump could cross and lose party support? “Very doubtful,” say a dozen GOP members of Congress stuck hard behind the MAGA eight ball.
...
What is the red line for a contemporary GOP increasingly built around a personality cult? I put that question to a dozen Republicans in the House and Senate, a mix from across the ideological spectrum and from every region of the country. The conversations revealed a lot about the Trump GOP, but the red line, with respect to Trump’s behavior generally, or his conduct specific to the Mueller probe, was vanishingly thin and difficult to detect. And every time you think you see it—pee tape, porn-star liaison, erratic diplomacy, threats to fire Mueller—it keeps moving. As Republican senator Jeff Flake of Arizona put it, “I don’t know that there is one.”

Kavanaugh's numbers in this poll (+4) are the worst of any SCOTUS nominee that Gallup has tested. By comparison, Gorsuch was a +13.

Prior to Kavanaugh, the least popular nominees per Gallup were Bork (+6) and Miers (+8).

3. Butina Has Ties to the Russian Oligarchy
In addition to her ties to the Russian government, there is evidence that Butina is well- connected to wealthy businessmen in the Russian oligarchy. Her Twitter messages, chat logs, and emails refer to a known Russian businessman with deep ties to the Russian Presidential Administration. This person often travels to the United States and has also been referred to as her “funder” throughout her correspondence; he was listed in Forbes as having a real-time net worth of $1.2 billion as of 2018*. Immediately prior to her first trip to the United States in late 2014, Butina engaged in a series of text messages with a different wealthy Russian businessman regarding budgets for her trip to the United States and meetings with the aforementioned “funder.” Individuals such as these wealthy businessmen could, through their wealth and influence, be in a position to offer a safe harbor for Butina.

American Conservatives Played A Secret Role In The Macedonian Fake News Boom Ahead Of 2016
— Buzzfeed, July 18, 2018, at 12:24 p.m. ET

We're working really hard to make this sound reasonable.

I'm spit-balling here, so just work with me, I'm developing this thought ...

“Every Packers fan across our state should be able to watch Packers games,” said Senator Baldwin. “My Go Pack Go Act would give Packers fans in every Wisconsin county the opportunity to watch Packers games and cheer on our beloved green and gold.”

...In Wisconsin, nearly 400,000 people live in 13 counties that have been assigned to an out-of-state market, in either Minnesota or Michigan. Senator Baldwin’s Go Pack Go Act would require cable, satellite and other video providers to provide their Wisconsin subscribers with access to programming from the broadcast television stations in a Wisconsin media market.

Paris Wade, had founded Liberty Writers News, a hyperpartisan conservative site based in the United States. The pair would achieve a certain level of infamy after a late November 2016 profile by the Washington Post portrayed them as misinformation merchants who were getting rich by stoking fear and anger. Wade is now a Republican candidate for the Nevada State Assembly.

By next year, Democrats could see the number of caucus states cut in half.

Four states have already moved from a caucus system to a traditional primary: Maine, Minnesota, Colorado, and, as of last month, Idaho made the switch. Party officials say two more states — Nebraska and Washington — are now considering the same change. And as Democratic Party members prepare to adopt changes to the nominating process at their annual summer meeting next month — including a new rule to “encourage” the use of primaries over caucuses “whenever possible” — caucus states may face new outside pressure to embrace state-run primaries.

The shift could leave just seven caucus states on the nominating calendar. For more than 20 years, Democrats have held caucuses in no fewer than 14 states.
...
The [Unity Reform Comission] proposed a number of changes to the caucus system that would require states to offer same-day registration, to publicly report the results of caucus voting, to create a new mechanism for absentee voting, and to ensure that every caucus site is accessible to people with disabilities and English-language limitations.

The new data support perhaps the worst-case scenario offered by opponents of restrictive voting laws. Nine percent of black respondents and 9 percent of Hispanic respondents indicated that, in the last election, they (or someone in their household) were told that they lacked the proper identification to vote. Just 3 percent of whites said the same. Ten percent of black respondents and 11 percent of Hispanic respondents reported that they were incorrectly told that they weren’t listed on voter rolls, as opposed to 5 percent of white respondents. In all, across just about every issue identified as a common barrier to voting, black and Hispanic respondents were twice as likely, or more, to have experienced those barriers as white respondents.

The numbers not only suggest that policies such as voter-ID requirements and automatic voter purges do, indeed, have strong racial and ethnic biases, but also that there are more subtle barriers for people of color that compound the effects of these laws. Fifteen percent of black respondents and 14 percent of Hispanic respondents said that they had trouble finding polling places on Election Day, versus 5 percent of whites. This finding squares with research indicating that frequent changes to polling-site locations hurt minority voters more. Additionally, more than one in 10 blacks and Hispanics missed the registration deadline to vote in 2016, as opposed to just 3 percent of whites. And black and Hispanic respondents were twice as likely as white respondents to have been unable to get time off work for voting.
...
In the case of the country’s most marginalized voters, past and present conspire. It’s often been reported that cultural and economic anxieties drove white voters to Trump, and that their gravitation has also corresponded with a weakening of democratic norms. But black and Hispanic voters are even more anxious and desperate, and that’s at least in part because democratic norms—if this trial run of racially inclusive democracy can even be referred to as a “norm”—are crumbling in their hands. Blows to the hard-won victory of the franchise already helped turn the tables in one election. But black and Hispanic voters are worried just as much about the elections to come.

The US president might be regretting his partial climbdown on his drawing a moral equivalence between the Kremlin and American intelligence and law enforcement agencies, which triggered accusations of treason.

“Some people HATE the fact that I got along well with President Putin of Russia,” Trump tweeted on Wednesday. “They would rather go to war than see this. It’s called Trump Derangement Syndrome!”

Ahead of Robert Wilkie’s likely confirmation to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs, Trump loyalists at the agency are taking aggressive steps to purge or reassign staff perceived to be disloyal to President Trump and his agenda for veterans, according to multiple people familiar with the moves.

The transfers include more than a dozen career civil servants who have been moved from the leadership suite at VA headquarters and reassigned, to lower-visibility roles. The employees served agency leaders, some dating back more than two decades, in crucial support roles that help a new secretary.

None say they were given reasons for their reassignments.

The moves are being carried out by a small cadre of political appointees led by Acting Secretary Peter O’Rourke who have consolidated power in the four months since they helped oust former Secretary David Shulkin.

Press briefing is happening now:

this is incredible - they cant come up with a story. SHS just said that the "no" in the cabinet meeting was about more questions not about russian meddling, then she says there is no election today so they cant be targeting it, then pivots to defending our election systems and reading a list of things theyve done.

Meanwhile, tech giants have begun taking some responsibility for the mess they made. Facebook and other tech companies have started making major changes to their ad platforms, their data-sharing policies, and their approaches to content moderation.

On Tuesday, Trump read from a printed statement, and said he had misspoken. "The sentence should have been, 'I don't see any reason why it wouldn't be Russia,' sort of a double negative," Trump said. "So you can put that in, and I think that probably clarifies things pretty good."

The list of names also includes Homeland Security Department official Todd Hyman (who testified in a deposition against Prevezon, a Russian company accused of laundering proceeds from the fraud uncovered by Sergey Magnitsky), Svetlana Engert (who supposedly stole criminal case materials from Russia), Alexander Shvartsman (who supposedly oversaw Browder's stay in the U.S.), Jim Rote (a supposed CIA agent acting as Browder's “financial manager”), Robert Otto (who supposedly served as deputy director of a U.S. intelligence agency until January 2017), David Kramer (who recently served as an adviser to the U.S. State Department), Jonathan Wiener (a long-time aide to John Kerry and an adviser on national security), and Kyle Parker (a recent U.S. State Department official), according to [Russian Attorney General’s Office spokesman, Alexander] Kurennoi.

Under U.S. DOT Commissioner Elaine Chao, the Federal Transit Administration is dragging out the disbursement of expansion grants and threatening to stop releasing capital funds to transit agencies altogether.
...
Fiscal Year 2018 ends on September 30. But so far, the FTA has only released $1.3 billion of the $2.6 billion that was appropriated. Transit agencies now perceive a risk that the funds will be left unspent by the FTA and never reach them.

During this fiscal year, the FTA has approved only three transit projects for construction grants. And two of those — Caltrain Electrification and Maryland’s Purple Line — only advanced after concerted public pressure campaigns. Another eight projects have received approvals for earlier stages of the funding process.

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

The Trump administration has summoned at least 70 infants to immigration court for their own deportation proceedings since Oct. 1, according to Justice Department data provided to Kaiser Health News.
...
The number of unaccompanied children called in to court since Oct. 1, 2015, swells to 2,900 if kids up to 5 are included. The total will rise between now and Sept. 30, when the fiscal year ends, noted Susan Long, a statistician at Syracuse University and director of TRAC, a repository of immigration and federal court data. There’s also an ongoing backlog in entering the data.
...
In the removal cases, children have no right to an appointed lawyer, but rather to a list of legal aid attorneys that the child’s current caregiver can contact.

And young children rarely know the details of why they fled their home country, especially without a parent present, noted Eileen Blessinger, a Virginia-based immigration lawyer who has been aiding parents she was connected with through advocates on the Texas-Mexico border.

“Think about it as a parent. You’re not going to tell your child they might be killed, right?” she said. “A lot of the kids don’t know.”
...
Benson recounted being in immigration court in 2014 when a judge asked for a crying baby to be removed from the courtroom. She said she paused to inform the judge that the baby was the next respondent on the docket — and asked that the child’s grandmother stand in.

Meeks told The Daily Beast that Rohrabacher set up the August 2015 trip and that he went along as a Democratic “counterbalance” to Rohrabacher’s pro-Russian politics.
[…]
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington named Meeks, a Queens Democrat, “one of the most ethically challenged members of Congress.” He had been under an Ethics Committee investigation in 2012 after Meeks received a $40,000 loan from someone who pleaded guilty to unrelated mortgage fraud; the committee cleared Meeks of wrongdoing.

Boy, it is really awful what the president has said, and I could not denounce it more. I mean, I could denounce it more. I will denounce it more. I wish that there were something else I could do, but I am only a senator.

A senator, as you know, is someone empowered by the Constitution to go on cable news and state opinions. A senator can do nothing to restrain the executive branch. In the system of checks and balances designed by the Founding Fathers, the Senate is neither.

The Senate is an appendix, a vestigial organ whose function no one can determine, so it just sits there and sometimes rumbles ominously after meals. Aside from its traditional role of acting as a rubber-stamp for judicial appointees, it is a kind of cheery bobblehead designed by the Constitution to stare at what the Executive is doing and offer tacit approval. It is decorative, not functional — like a pocket square, or a succulent in a dentist’s waiting room, or the “Share On Facebook” button at the bottom of an article.

It is sort of a VIP box, from which you can view your democracy careening helplessly like a malfunctioning Roomba, screaming but powerless to help. (Not to be confused with a VP box, where you have to sit with an expression of beatific tranquility and see only the good in whatever the president has most recently done, and blink maybe less than the average person should blink?)

A prominent example of this happened when NPR put out a hit piece about Anoa Changa because she went on Sputnik once and got 3 retweets from Russian bots.

Current and former American diplomats are expressing disgust and horror over the White House’s willingness to entertain permitting Russian officials to question a prominent former U.S. ambassador.

One serving diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said he was “at a fucking loss” over comments that can be expected to chill American diplomacy in hostile or authoritarian countries – a comment echoed by former State Department officials as well.

“It’s beyond disgraceful. It’s fundamentally ignorant with regard to how we conduct diplomacy or what that means. It really puts in jeopardy the professional independence of diplomats anywhere in the world, if the consequence of their actions is going to be potentially being turned over to a foreign government,” the U.S. diplomat told The Daily Beast.
...
The current U.S. diplomat said the openness to turning over McFaul capped off a shocking week for U.S. geopolitics.

“The president has first and foremost his interests at the top of his mind, as opposed to the government’s. That’s very clear over the past week and a half, between shitting on our NATO allies and kissing Putin’s ass,” the diplomat said. “He cares more about himself than the nation and any of us who serve it.”

The diplomat continued: “Either he’s compromised by Putin or he’s a pussy, in which case he should grab himself.”

THE RUSSIAN PRESIDENT, Vladimir Putin, dashed the hopes of conspiracy theorists across America on Tuesday by withdrawing the startling claim he made the day before in Helsinki, that Hillary Clinton’s campaign had received $400 million in donations from investors accused of tax evasion in Russia.

What he had intended to say, according to a Russian government spokesperson, was that business associates of the U.S.-born investor William Browder had donated $400,000 to Clinton’s campaign. (According to public campaign finance records, that figure also appears to be inflated.)

Alexander Kurennoi, a spokesperson for Russia’s prosecutor general, told reporters that Putin stood by his demand that the United States should make Browder, and a number of former American diplomats and intelligence officers described as his accomplices in a criminal plot, available for questioning.

Trump’s press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, acknowledged on Wednesday that Putin had directly requested the American president’s help in interrogating former American officials, including Michael McFaul, the United States Ambassador to Russia during the Obama administration.

A Republican congressman from Minnesota has a long history of making deeply misogynistic comments on the radio, including lamenting that women can no longer be called "sluts."

CNN's KFile reviewed several months of audio from Rep. Jason Lewis on the "Jason Lewis Show," a syndicated radio program Lewis hosted from 2009 until 2014 with the tagline "America's Mr. Right." In one instance, while arguing that "young single women" vote based on coverage of birth control pills, Lewis said those women were not human beings and were without brains.

“it was an unusual time for prominent American legislators to visit Russia. Bilateral relations had turned acrimonious after Russia invaded Ukraine, annexed the Crimean Peninsula, and shot down the civilian passenger plane Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. While Rohrabacher and Meeks were in Russia, House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi and other colleagues met with pro-American political figures in Ukraine …”

Paul Erickson, Activist - Paul Erickson is a traitor to the American people who has been involved in several Republican presidential campaigns.

I see a ton of spin, promoted by conservative groups like FAIR

Is there something I don't know about FAIR?

GLOR: "You say you agree with U.S. intelligence that Russia meddled in the election in 2016."

TRUMP: "Yeah and I've said that before, Jeff. I have said that numerous times before, and I would say that is true, yeah."

GLOR: "So if you believe U.S. intelligence agencies, is Putin lying to you?"

TRUMP: "I don't want to get into whether or not he's lying. I can only say that I do have confidence in our intel agencies as currently constituted. I think that Dan Coats is excellent, I think that Gina is excellent, I think that we have excellent people in the agencies, and when they tell me something it means a lot."

Glor: "You said you'll sit with the Special Counsel before. Has anything changed in the past six months that has made you more or less likely to [interview with special counsel Robert Mueller]?"

President Trump: "My lawyers are working on it. There's no collusion. I didn't deal with Russia. I have nothing do with Russia with respect to my race. I won that race rather easily and I can tell you that I think frankly 2020 is going to be even better than we did in 16."

Glor: "Saturday, you told us your doctrine is strength and achieving peace through strength. After Helsinki, Lindsey Graham said you showed weakness."
{crosstalk}
Trump: "I totally disagree. I think I did great at the news conference. I think it was a strong news conference."

The Interior Department’s internal watchdog has launched a full investigation into a real estate deal involving a foundation established by Ryan Zinke and developers including Halliburton Chairman David Lesar, which was first reported by POLITICO last month, according to a letter the office sent to House Democrats on Wednesday.

The inspector general’s probe will focus on whether Zinke violated conflict of interest laws, the latest official inquiry of Zinke’s activities in his 16 months helming the department.

The president’s effort to clean up his disastrous Monday news conference is falling flat on Capitol Hill — and White House aides are doing little to assuage an increasingly frustrated GOP. The reason: Threats from Republican lawmakers about confronting the president or pushing bills to punish Russia for further election interference are ringing hollow inside the White House, which has grown accustomed to panic, followed by inaction, on Capitol Hill.

A number of hawkish senators alarmed by the president’s remarks have yet to hear from chief of staff John Kelly, who frequently reassures nervous Republicans, and some senators are barreling forward with efforts to combat Russian interference in the fall elections. Increasingly, they view their own efforts to blunt Russia as distinctly separate from whatever Trump or his administration is doing or saying at any given time.

“In the end, we can present people with information. But you can’t force anyone to say what you want them to say, especially the president of the United States,” said Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.). “Our job is to pass laws and do things that are for the good of the country … and one of those things should be [imposing] strong deterrence measures with pre-positioned penalties should [Russian meddling] ever happen again.”

"I'm not going to try to excuse what the White House is doing. What we need to do is focus action here in Congress," added Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.).
...
Trump’s Tuesday remarks, when he said he misspoke Monday while standing beside Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, are “probably the best we’re going to be able to get, right?” said Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, the No. 3 GOP leader.

“He attempted to clarify it, but ineffectively,” Thune said. “The last couple days certainly haven’t been an example of a willingness to express support for what the intelligence community is clearly telling us.”

This is truly an American crisis moment.

Trump’s base of supporters have an undying loyalty to him because he has the same for them. He still has high approval among Republican voters because he has executed an unprecedented policy of defending only their concerns, which at their root are about racial insecurity and hostility, no matter how they try to dress it up.

Trump has no desire or intention to reach out to the rest of America or try to be the president of all of America. His mission is to lift this hostile minority over the horrified majority.

Trump’s supporters love this. Finally, someone is unapologetically fighting for white supremacy, white culture and white identity, for protectionism, xenophobia and Christian supremacy. No matter how much he lies, no matter how much he fumbles, no matter how much he betrays the greater America, Trump will remain the hero of white, Republican, racist America.

And, because these people were such a large portion of the Republican Party even before Trump emerged as their champion, traditional Republicans who at least talked the game of inclusion, of principles and of Christian, family values, are now tucking their tails to save their behinds.

America is a very legalistic society, in which public discussion often deteriorates into lawyers arguing about whether any statutes have been violated. But confronting the country in the wake of Helsinki is this question: Can it afford to wait to ascertain why Trump has subordinated himself to Putin after the president has so abjectly demonstrated that he has subordinated himself? Robert Mueller is leading a legal process. The United States faces a national-security emergency.

Prosecutors revealed Wednesday that after executing several search warrants, they learned Butina “was in contact with officials believed to be Russian intelligence operatives.”

A memo written by Kenerson states that Butina maintained contact information for employees of the Russian FSB, the successor agency to the Soviet Union’s KGB, and was “likely in contact with the FSB throughout her stay in the United States.”

Among the documents seized by the FBI from Erickson’s residence was a handwritten memo titled “Notes on Maria’s ‘Russian Patriots In-Waiting’ Organization,” according to an exhibit submitted by prosecutors. The memo included the question, “How to respond to FSB offer of employment?”
...
To buttress the government’s claim that Butina was a Russian government agent and a possible flight risk, Kenerson entered three photos into evidence. One of them was a surveillance photo of Butina and a Russian diplomat having dinner in a Washington restaurant in March. A menu board in the photo matches one featured in a photo of La Piquette, a French restaurant in Cleveland Park.

Kenerson said the man was “suspected of being a Russian intelligence operative” and the photo was taken shortly before he was ordered to leave the country as part of U.S. sanctions. Driscoll said the photo was simply two Russians having dinner together in America and proved nothing.
...
In direct messages exchanged through Twitter, prosecutors said, she and Torshin agreed that she could operate only in secret.

“Only incognito!” she wrote in one message in October 2016. In a note in March 2017, Torshin wrote, “You have upstaged Anna Chapman,” a reference to a Russian spy who had lived freely in the United States for years before her 2010 arrest.

Ominously, the handwritten memo has a redaction: "meet w/ [REDACTED]?" Can't wait to find out who that is.

GLOR: But would you, are you more likely to sit an interview now?

TRUMP: My lawyers are working on that. I've always wanted to do an interview, because look, there's been no collusion. There's been no talk of Russia. There's been no phone call. There's been nothing. And it's I call it a witch hunt. That's exactly what it is. It's a it's a vicious witch hunt. And you know what? It's very bad for our country. Very, very bad for our country.

-- NC-13: SurveyUSA poll has incumbent GOPer Budd up 40-35 on Dem Manning [MOE: +/- 4.7%]. The district went Trump 53-44.

-- Polling of GOP-held districts finds that a majority of voters think the GOP is more corrupt than the Democrats, including self-identified independents.

-- Wasserman: GOP fundraising numbers are putting them at serious risk.

-- NY gov: Quinnipiac poll has Cuomo up 59-23 on Nixon in the Dem primary [MOE: +/- 6.2%]. Cuomo also easily wins the general, even with Nixon and indy Miner running.

-- NY AG: Same Quinnipiac poll has this race much closer. NYC Public Advocate James is at 26; Rep Maloney at 15, law prof Teachout at 12, and former Cuomo admin official Eve at 3.

-- California Supreme Court has ordered Proposition 9, the one to split the state into three states, removed from the fall ballot.

And ultimately, several human sources had confirmed Mr. Putin’s own role.

That included one particularly valuable source, who was considered so sensitive that Mr. Brennan had declined to refer to it in any way in the Presidential Daily Brief during the final months of the Obama administration, as the Russia investigation intensified.

Instead, to keep the information from being shared widely, Mr. Brennan sent reports from the source to Mr. Obama and a small group of top national security aides in a separate, white envelope to assure its security.

Two days after President Trump’s summit with Russian President Vladi­mir Putin, Russian officials offered a string of assertions about what the two leaders had achieved.

“Important verbal agreements” were reached at the Helsinki meeting, Russia’s ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Antonov, told reporters in Moscow Wednesday, including preservation of the New Start and INF agreements, major bilateral arms control treaties whose futures have been in question. Antonov also said that Putin had made “specific and interesting proposals to Washington” on how the two countries could cooperate on Syria.

But officials at the most senior levels across the U.S. military, scrambling since Monday to determine what Trump may have agreed to on national security issues in Helsinki, had little to no information Wednesday.

At the Pentagon, as press officers remained unable to answer media questions about how the summit might impact the military, the paucity of information exposed an awkward gap in internal administration communications. The uncertainty surrounding Moscow’s suggestion of some sort of new arrangement or proposal regarding Syria, in particular, was striking because Gen. Joseph Votel, who heads U.S. Central Command, is scheduled to brief reporters on Syria and other matters Thursday.
...
Putin is expected to speak about the summit in a speech Thursday.

> This is truly an American crisis moment.
>
> Trump’s base of supporters have an undying
> loyalty to him because he has the same
> for them.

Two sentences in and only half right. Keep doing you, NYT.

T.D. Strange: "Im pretty amazed that the FSB operates more or less openly on Twitter DM."

I had a conversation a few months ago with a former Russian official that made it clear to me they have no idea of the significance of what they did. They are celebrating now but in the long this is really going to hurt them. Here’s how the conversation went:

Me: you guys should not have actively been playing in our politics and media. It’s a dangerous game.

Him: come on you guys have CNN & BBC playing in your hotel room upstairs (we were in Moscow). It’s the same thing

Me: there is a difference between state run media & free media. But beyond that you guys were on social media pretending to be Americans while also stealing emails from US citizens.

Him: and what does the CIA do? You interfere in other countries’ elections all the time

Me: but you don’t understand how central democratic elections are to who America is as a country. Our government system and pride in it is essential to our national character & a core element of American nationalism & identity

Him: you guys are just oversensitive

This conversation captures something important. The Russians don’t understand why what they did has sparked such outrage in the US. For them free elections just aren’t that big of a deal. And of course Trump is making all this much much worse by validating Russia’s actions.

They are convinced that what they did worked. And they are right in the short term it has. They couldn’t have a better POTUS. But in the long-term they may come to regret this. Eventually (hopefully in 2021) Trump goes. When he does it will be a generation before the US & Russia can have any kind of functional relationship. US politics won’t allow it after what the Russians did. They’ve touched 3rd rail. And objectively Russia is still a second rate economic and military power that can’t truly compete on a global level with the US.

In the long run they will come to regret having turned themselves into public enemy number 1 in the eyes of the US public & sabotaging the possibility of a functional US-Russia relationship.

"I think there were so many Russian influence operations going on at once that Butina was maybe the sloppiest one that got caught by not even Mueller, just regular FBI in the course of business because she was so blatant … But the FSB isn't nearly the same monolithic force as we'd probably picture from the KGB cold war days"

Current and former American diplomats are expressing disgust and horror over the White House’s willingness to entertain permitting Russian officials to question a prominent former U.S. ambassador.

One serving diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said he was “at a fucking loss” over comments that can be expected to chill American diplomacy in hostile or authoritarian countries – a comment echoed by former State Department officials as well.

“It’s beyond disgraceful. It’s fundamentally ignorant with regard to how we conduct diplomacy or what that means. It really puts in jeopardy the professional independence of diplomats anywhere in the world, if the consequence of their actions is going to be potentially being turned over to a foreign government,” the U.S. diplomat told The Daily Beast.

Let’s recall why Putin began making outrageous, false accusations against @McFaul: Mike stood up for human rights and against Russian oppression. That terrified Putin. The fact that @realDonaldTrump won’t stand up for an American patriot is a travesty

Beyond outrageous. Amb. McFaul served our country honorably and with full diplomatic immunity. If the White House cannot defend and protect our diplomats, like our service members, they are serving a hostile foreign power not the American people.

I hope the White House corrects the record and denounces in categorical terms this ridiculous request from Putin. Not doing so creates moral equivalency between a legitimacy US indictment of Russian intelligence officers and a crazy, completely fabricated story invented by Putin.

Mark Hosenball, Warren Strobel

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and close adviser, Jared Kushner, has lost access to the most valued U.S. intelligence report, the President’s Daily Brief, as the White House imposes greater discipline on access to secrets, two U.S. officials familiar with the matter said on Tuesday.

...