De Blasio De Criminal?

NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio is now facing serious corruption allegations that came faster than, well, a New York minute.

A Long Island restaurateur testified under oath on Thursday that he steered tens of thousands of dollars to Mayor Bill de Blasio’s political campaigns in return for favorable treatment by the city. 

It was the first time that the restaurateur, Harendra Singh, has publicly detailed his efforts to use campaign contributions — as much as $80,000 raised from others, and much more personally by using “straw donors” to skirt contribution limits — to gain better terms during lease negotiations for one of his restaurants. 

Mr. Singh also suggested for the first time that Mr. de Blasio not only knew of the illegal arrangement, but that the mayor encouraged it and actively helped the restaurateur. 

“He made many phone calls,” Mr. Singh said of the mayor. “His office was working very hard, from his deputy mayor to his assistant to his intergovernmental affairs person. Everyone was working.”

Mr. Singh was testifying as a cooperating witness in the corruption trial of Edward Mangano, the former Nassau County executive, and John Venditto, the former Town of Oyster Bay supervisor, both of whom Mr. Singh has pleaded guilty to bribing.

Mr. Singh said that he and the mayor often discussed the lease and the donations in the same conversations. 

And on two occasions, the restaurateur testified, Mr. de Blasio requested contributions for himself or political allies and, when told that Mr. Singh had already met the limit, said: “Listen, I don’t want to know. Just do what you have to do.”

The Mangano/Venditto case has been a thorn in de Blasio's side for a while now.  But Singh's testimony makes things much harder for the mayor.  The issue now is that de Blasio may now be called to testify in the case, and if that happens, all bets are off.

We'll see, but if I were you I'd cross the guy off any 2020 short lists.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

In what should be the least surprising development in the ongoing investigation into Russian inference in the 2016 election, Spencer Ackerman and the Daily Beast are reporting that hacker Guccifer 2.0, the source behind the hacking of the DNC emails who gift-wrapped them for delivery to WikiLeaks, was an actual Russian GRU intelligence officer.

Guccifer 2.0, the “lone hacker” who took credit for providing WikiLeaks with stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee, was in fact an officer of Russia’s military intelligence directorate (GRU), The Daily Beast has learned. It’s an attribution that resulted from a fleeting but critical slip-up in GRU tradecraft. 

That forensic determination has substantial implications for the criminal probe into potential collusion between President Donald Trump and Russia. The Daily Beast has learned that the special counsel in that investigation, Robert Mueller, has taken over the probe into Guccifer and brought the FBI agents who worked to track the persona onto his team. 

While it’s unclear what Mueller plans to do with Guccifer, his last round of indictments charged 13 Russians tied to the Internet Research Agency troll farm with a conspiracy “for the purpose of interfering with the U.S. political and electoral processes, including the presidential election of 2016.” It was Mueller’s first move establishing Russian interference in the election within a criminal context, but it stopped short of directly implicating the Putin regime. 

Mueller’s office declined to comment for this story. But the attribution of Guccifer 2.0 as an officer of Russia’s largest foreign intelligence agency would cross the Kremlin threshold—and move the investigation closer to Trump himself.

There was zero doubt that Russia was behind the DNC hack, all of our intelligence agencies said so.  But now we know it was the GRU, Russia's equivalent of the CIA, that was running the show.  And that means there's no longer any question that the Trumpies were working with the Russians to go after Hillary.

Trump’s longtime political adviser Roger Stone admitted being in touch with Guccifer over Twitter’s direct messaging service. And in August 2016, Stone published an article on the pro-Trump-friendly Breitbart News calling on his political opponents to “Stop Blaming Russia” for the hack. “I have some news for Hillary and Democrats—I think I’ve got the real culprit,” he wrote. “It doesn’t seem to be the Russians that hacked the DNC, but instead a hacker who goes by the name of Guccifer 2.0.”

Roger Stone is in real trouble, guys.  And here's why:

“Almost immediately various cyber security companies and individuals were skeptical of Guccifer 2.0 and the backstory that he had generated for himself,” said Kyle Ehmke, an intelligence researcher at the cyber security firm ThreatConnect. “We started seeing these inconsistencies that led back to the idea that he was created hastily… by the individual or individuals that affected the DNC compromise.” 

Proving that link definitively was harder. Ehmke led an investigation at ThreatConnect that tried to track down Guccifer from the metadata in his emails. But the trail always ended at the same data center in France. Ehmke eventually uncovered that Guccifer was connecting through an anonymizing service called Elite VPN, a virtual private networking service that had an exit point in France but was headquartered in Russia. 

But on one occasion, The Daily Beast has learned, Guccifer failed to activate the VPN client before logging on. As a result, he left a real, Moscow-based Internet Protocol address in the server logs of an American social media company, according to a source familiar with the government’s Guccifer investigation. Twitter and WordPress were Guccifer 2.0’s favored outlets. Neither company would comment for this story, and Guccifer did not respond to a direct message on Twitter. 

Working off the IP address, U.S. investigators identified Guccifer 2.0 as a particular GRU officer working out of the agency’s headquarters on Grizodubovoy Street in Moscow. (The Daily Beast’s sources did not disclose which particular officer worked as Guccifer.)

This is as big as it gets, guys.  The Trumpies have been denying that the Russians were behind the DNC hack for 18 months now, and that's been a lie since the word go.  They worked to wreck Hillary's chances, and they worked with both Roger Stone and Julian Assange to do it.

But remember, the House Intelligence Committee closed their investigation because there was no evidence of Russian interference.

Mueller has all of this, guys.  It's going to be brutal.

The Blue Wave Rises

With the success of Conor Lamb in Pennsylvania, Democrats are now going for broke trying to put as many House districts in play, and that includes the one across the river here in Cincy as the race between Democrat Aftab Pureval and GOP Rep. Steve Chabot in OH-1 is now a prime pickup opportunity for Team Blue. The Enquirer's Jason Williams:

Washington Democrats have officially signaled they view Cincinnati's Aftab Pureval as a top-tier congressional candidate. 

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee announced Thursday it has made Pureval's battle against long-time incumbent Steve Chabot in Ohio's 1st Congressional District the organization's top targeted race in the Buckeye State – and one of its highest priorities nationally. 

The DCCC has decided to make 33 races nationwide its top priority, with Pureval's being the only one targeted in Ohio. 

“Aftab Pureval has already proven he can win tough races when he became the first Democratic Hamilton County Clerk of Courts in more than 100 years," DCCC Chairman Ben Ray Lujan, a Congressman from New Mexico, said in a statement. "With a strong base of local support, innovative ideas and a dedication to working for the people of Southwest Ohio, Aftab is poised to defeat yet another establishment Republican incumbent.” 

What it means: The DCCC will deploy resources to help Pureval, the former Procter & Gamble attorney running his first congressional campaign. That means Washington will provide fundraising support and assist the campaign in recruiting staff and volunteers. The DCCC will determine in the fall whether it will ratchet up its support for Pureval by pouring in its own money and deploying staffers to Ohio. 

Why this happened: Pureval had to raise a certain amount of money to trigger the DCCC's full involvement. His campaign has not disclosed what he's raised overall since jumping into the race in late January. But he quickly showed in his 2016 race against longtime Clerk of Courts Tracy Winkler that Pureval can raise big money.

In the first 24 hours after launching his congressional campaign, Pureval raised $130,000 – more than Chabot brought in during the entire fourth quarter of 2017.

And I know I trash the DCCC regularly because they have this terrible habit of picking garbage primary candidates to back and then leaving races entirely to the GOP when those garbage candidates can't even get past the primary. 

And yeah, eight years ago they left Democrat Steve Dreihaus out to dry in 2010 and surrendered the district to the GOP.  Now they come crawling back for the opportunity to knock off Chabot.  Ben Ray Lujan is even a bigger meathead than the previous DCCC chairs, Steve Israel and Chris Van Hollen.

But if the stars have aligned here for the DCCC to back Pureval against Chabot, then I'll take it.  Pureval, so far, seems like a pretty solid guy, certainly better than the anti-choice dipstick Chabot.

We'll see if the blue wave comes through Cincy or not, but the DCCC at least is putting down the money that it will.

Last Call For Our Little Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

The Cincinnati Enquirer's Hannah Sparling makes it very clear in her investigation that Cincinnati and the surrounding Tri-State area has a problem with Neo-Nazis.

A group of neo-Nazis here has a seemingly simple plan. 

They’re organizing in Ohio and the surrounding states, on a mission to win the hearts and minds of poor white people. 

They want a whites-only state. And to get it, members of a group called the Traditionalist Worker Party are preaching a time-tested strategy employed for decades by grassroots groups. Feed the hungry. Clothe the naked. It’s charity work, essentially. 

Until it turns into something else. 

That’s the plan, anyway. In reality, The Enquirer could find little evidence of the TWP’s charity work. And let’s be clear: While the party’s leadership says this is about white advocacy and helping the poor, it is also about a group of people who are anti-Semitic, anti-diversity and who do not want to live with anyone but white people. 

The TWP is in turmoil after co-founder Matthew Heimbach was charged with battery on March 13. The party's website was disabled shortly after that happened, and it's unclear how the charges might affect the group's long-term goals. More on that later.

For now, here's what we know: The TWP is a political party and one of more than 100 neo-Nazi hate groups operating in the United States, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Party leaders reject such labels, saying they are about helping white people, not hate. They typically call themselves white nationalists instead of neo-Nazis. 

The TWP is a national group, but its members are concentrated in, and focused on, America’s middle, in states such as Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana and Tennessee. 

They are targeting young people – particularly young, white men. 

They are targeting the addicted and their families, bemoaning what they see as a piddly response to the opioid crisis. 

And they are targeting Appalachia, where, they say, poor, white people are losing hope. There is no future for white people in America, said Heimbach, 26, who lives in Paoli, Indiana. 

“We’ve been waiting for decades for the government, for companies, corporations, the Flying Spaghetti Monster to come and fix these things, but they’re not,” Heimbach said. “So the time is now for us to simply say, ‘We can’t count on anyone but ourselves.’”

This is what I'm up against every day here as a black man here in Northern Kentucky.  They were quiet before, but they were here.   If you're wondering how the terrorist suicide bomber in Austin was radicalized, it's because of groups like the Traditional Worker's Party.

I keep saying there are places in this state I won't go into for fear of my life, for fear of these asshole skinheads deciding a big black guy needs to get his ass kicked today by a group of white guys half my age.

They are flat out Neo-Nazi terrorists, period.  I'd say it's time we start treating them like it but the problem is the GOP is doing exactly that.

Clinton made them angry.

Dubya made them organize.

Obama made them furious.

Trump made them loyal.

Ohio GOP's War On Women Continues

Ohio Republicans are trying to outlaw abortion in the state again in a bill that has no chance of passage, let alone it standing up to Constitutional muster, but they're trying anyway because "Ohio Republicans".

Ohio's GOP lawmakers want to ban abortions – a likely violation of federal law.

A bill from two Republican lawmakers, introduced Monday, would ban all abortions in Ohio. Doctors could be charged with murder or sued for the wrongful deaths of aborted fetuses, according to the proposal. Kentucky lawmakers are considering a similar ban. 

In recent years, Ohio lawmakers have limited abortions by restricting them to earlier in a pregnancy or banning them after a diagnosis of Down syndrome. 

Most of these efforts took aim at Roe v. Wade, the U.S. Supreme Court decision that ensured access to most abortions. Some of the new Ohio laws have faced legal challenges. But none take on abortion as directly as the proposal introduced this week.
Opponents of the bill fear it could charge doctors with murder, punishable by life in prison or the death penalty. 

"Anti-choice extremists from the Ohio Statehouse to the White House are lining up their dominoes to topple Roe v. Wade and punish those who seek or provide abortion care," said Kellie Copeland, executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Ohio, in a statement.

So why do it?  Simple.

Rep. Ron Hood, R-Ashville, said he knows a federal court could find his bill unconstitutional. But that decision could be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court to reconsider abortion access. 

"Obviously, Roe v. Wade could be revisited," Hood said.

So many of these anti-choice zealots want to go down in history as passing the law that reaches the US Supreme Court becoming the basis for overturning Roe.   They want that place in history more than life itself, it seems.

This won't be that bill, but one of these days and soon it will happen.  We had the chance to stop this in 2016 but of course all the people who said "What difference would it make" or "There's no difference between Trump and Clinton" made that not happen.

The butcher's bill on that is coming sooner rather than later.

Cry Havok, And Let Slip The Mustache Of War

I've said time and again that John Bolton joining Trump's foreign policy team basically guaranteed war with Iran, North Korea, or both. That catastrophic scenario has now come to pass, as Bolton will be replacing National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster in a few weeks.

President Trump named John R. Bolton, a hard-line former American ambassador to the United Nations, as his third national security adviser on Thursday, continuing a shake-up that creates one of the most hawkish national security teams of any White House in recent history.

Mr. Bolton will replace Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, the battle-tested Army officer who was tapped last year to stabilize a turbulent foreign policy operation but who never developed a comfortable relationship with the president.

The move, which was sudden but not unexpected, signals a more confrontational approach in American foreign policy at a time when Mr. Trump faces mounting challenges, including from Iran and North Korea.

The president replaced Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson last week with the C.I.A. director, Mike Pompeo, a former Army officer and Tea Party congressman who has spoken about regime change in Pyongyang and about ripping up the Iran nuclear deal.

Mr. Bolton, an outspoken advocate of military action who served in the George W. Bush administration, has called for action against Iran and North Korea. In an interview on Thursday on Fox News, soon after his appointment was announced in a presidential tweet, he declined to say whether Mr. Trump should go through with a planned meeting with North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un.

General McMaster will retire from the military, ending a career that included senior commands in Iraq and Afghanistan. He had discussed his departure with Mr. Trump for several weeks, White House officials said, but decided to speed it up because questions about his status were casting a shadow over his exchanges with foreign officials.

Mr. Trump, the White House officials said, also wanted to fill out his national security team before his meeting with Mr. Kim, which is scheduled to occur by the end of May.

With Pompeo at State and now Bolton running the NSC, the odds that Trump is talked into direct military action against Pyongyang or Tehran is ludicrously high.  I know I make a lot of predictions, and use quote a bit of superlative hyperbole to get my points across, but guys?

I'm scared.

This is deadly, deadly serious, and I am 100% convinced the question now isn't whether we attack Iran and/or North Korea, but when, and in what order.  Voting for Democrats this fall and taking back the House and Senate as a check on Trump's military aspirations is now a moral imperative.  Fred Kaplan at Slate has the right of it despite his long history of being a smug asshole.

Bolton has repeatedly called for launching a first strike on North Korea, scuttling the nuclear arms deal with Iran, and then bombing that country too. He says and writes these things not as part of some clever “madman theory” to bring Kim Jong-un and the mullahs of Tehran to the bargaining table, but rather because he simply wants to destroy them and America’s other enemies too.

His agenda is not “peace through strength,” the motto of more conventional Republican hawks that Trump included in a tweet on Wednesday, but rather regime change through war. He is a neocon without the moral fervor of some who wear that label—i.e., he is keen to topple oppressive regimes not in order to spread democracy but rather to expand American power.

In the early days of the George W. Bush administration, Vice President Dick Cheney finagled Bolton a job as undersecretary of state for arms control—an inside joke, since Bolton has never read an arms-control treaty that he liked. But his real assignment was to serve as Cheney’s spy in Foggy Bottom, monitoring and, when possible, obstructing any attempts at peaceful diplomacy mounted by Secretary of State Colin Powell.

When Powell got the boot, Cheney wanted to make Bolton deputy secretary of state, replacing Richard Armitage, who resigned along with his best friend Powell. But Powell’s replacement, Condoleezza Rice, who had been Bush’s national security adviser, blocked the move, fully aware of Bolton’s obstructionist ideology.

As a compromise, Bush nominated Bolton to be United Nations ambassador, but that move proved unbearable to even the Republican-controlled Senate at the time. It was one thing to be critical of the U.N.—it’s a body deserving of criticism—but Bolton opposed its very existence. “There is no such thing as the United Nations,” he once said in a speech, adding, “If the U.N. Secretariat building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn’t make a lot of difference.”

More than that, he was hostile to the idea of international law, having once declared, “It is a big mistake for us to grant any validity to international law even when it may seem in our short-term interest to do so—because over the long term, the goal of those who think that international law really means anything are those who want to constrain the United States.”

We're going to another disastrous war.  Maybe two.  Hell, maybe more.  With Mueller closing in, there may not be a way to stop it.  Most of the groundwork for an attack has already been set.  When Trump's May meeting with Kim Jong-Un fails spectacularly or fails to even happen in the first place, the bombs will start falling later this year.

I almost guarantee it at this point.

StupidiNews!

• The Senate passed a $1.3 trillion House spending bill early this morning to keep the government funded for another six months, Donald Trump is expected to sign the bill today.
• More than 130 pilot whales beached themselves and died on Australia's southwestern coast on Friday as rescue workers tried in vain to herd the animals back to sea.
• Kentucky lawmakers are looking to pass one of the nation's most restrictive abortion bans, ending dilation and evacuation procedures after just 10 weeks of pregnancy.
• The Dow shed 700 points Thursday and Asian markets are roiling today after Trump's tariffs were announced, China is planning to retaliate with 25% tariffs on dozens of US imports.
• Hackers have hit the City of Atlanta's computer systems with a ransomware attack, demanding tens of thousands of dollars to restore the city government's affected PCs.

Last Call For Handle The Scandal

Over at Think Progress, Judd Legum argues that while Stormy Daniels is making headlines with her powerful accusations against Donald Trump involving a long-term affair, the real legal and political problem for Trump could be the lawsuit filed by former Playboy playmate Karen McDougal.

In some respects, McDougal’s story is similar to Daniels’. Like Daniels, she met Trump at a 2006 golf tournament in Lake Tahoe. Trump later wined and dined both women at the Beverly Hills Hotel. He promised them both apartments. And then, as election day approached, both women were paid to keep quiet. They were both represented by the same lawyer, Keith Davidson. 

Now, Daniels and McDougal have sued, asking the court to formally invalidate their agreements and let them speak freely. 

But the nature of the agreements signed by Daniels and McDougal are quite different. From a legal perspective, the structure of McDougal’s contract appears to be worse for Trump and his associates. 

Daniels was paid by Trump’s lawyer, while McDougal was paid by a corporation
Daniels was paid $130,000 through a shell corporation set up by Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen. Cohen says he was not reimbursed by the campaign or the Trump Organization and it was something he decided to do on his own — and not to influence the election. Cohen’s story strains credulity, and he has not ruled out the possibility of being reimbursed by Trump personally. 

If it turns out Trump reimbursed Cohen for the payment in an effort to help his election campaign, it would violate election law because it was not reported. But the underlying contribution — $130,000 from Trump to his campaign — is not illegal. Trump is allowed to donate unlimited sums of money to his own campaign. In fact, Trump repeatedly promised to self-fund his entire campaign but ended up raising millions from other sources. 

Daniels argues, among other things, that the contract is invalid because Trump was named as a party and did not sign the agreement. 

McDougal, on the other hand, was paid by a corporation. She was paid $150,000 in August 2016 by American Media Inc., the parent company of the National Enquirer. Direct corporate donations to a campaign are illegal whether they are reported or not. McDougal argues that her contract was invaild for that reason — the purpose of the contract, a corporate donation to benefit the Trump campaign — was illegal.

Oh, but it gets worse for Trump besides the obvious campaign finance issues:

McDougal’s contract, however, was purportedly to give her a platform to speak. It grants the rights for her story about any affairs with married men to A.M.I. and contemplates a number of publicity opportunities for McDougal, including columns and magazine covers. Further, after the agreement was signed, a different attorney was able to negotiate an amendment to McDougal’s contract that allows her to respond to “legitimate press inquires regarding the facts of her relationship with Donald Trump.”

In other words, McDougal most likely can and probably will openly speak about what Donald Trump did to her, more than Daniels will be able to legally say.

If that happens, all bets are off.  Clinton got impeached over a blowjob for Christ's sake, and so help me God if there are pictures of Trump's penis out there that show up in the news, I think we'll get rid of him out of nausea.

Harvey's Revenge On Houston

The worst flooding disaster in modern US history last year when Hurricane Harvey deluged Houston last year also released millions upon millions of gallons of toxic chemicals into the city's water, land, and air.  It turns out the environmental disaster and the toxic health hazard to the people of Houston and the surrounding area is far, far worse than reported six months ago.

A toxic onslaught from the nation’s petrochemical hub was largely overshadowed by the record-shattering deluge of Hurricane Harvey as residents and first responders struggled to save lives and property.

More than a half-year after floodwaters swamped America’s fourth-largest city, the extent of this environmental assault is beginning to surface, while questions about the long-term consequences for human health remain unanswered.

County, state and federal records pieced together by The Associated Press and The Houston Chronicle reveal a far more widespread toxic impact than authorities publicly reported after the storm slammed into the Texas coast in late August and then stalled over the Houston area.

Some 500 chemical plants, 10 refineries and more than 6,670 miles of intertwined oil, gas and chemical pipelines line the nation’s largest energy corridor.

Nearly half a billion gallons of industrial wastewater mixed with storm water surged out of just one chemical plant in Baytown, east of Houston on the upper shores of Galveston Bay.

Benzene, vinyl chloride, butadiene and other known human carcinogens were among the dozens of tons of industrial toxins released into surrounding neighborhoods and waterways following Harvey’s torrential rains.

In all, reporters catalogued more than 100 Harvey-related toxic releases — on land, in water and in the air. Most were never publicized, and in the case of two of the biggest ones, the extent or potential toxicity of the releases was initially understated.

And if you think GOP Gov. Greg Abbott and Texas Republicans are going to lift a finger to hold these companies liable for the toxic waste dump that America's fourth-largest city was turned into, you've not been paying attention.

Only a handful of the industrial spills have been investigated by Texas and federal regulators, reporters found.

Texas regulators say they have investigated 89 incidents, but have yet to announce any enforcement actions.

Testing by state and federal regulators of soil and water for contaminants was largely limited to Superfund toxic waste sites.

Based on widespread air monitoring, including flyovers, officials repeatedly assured the public that post-Harvey air pollution posed no health threat. But the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency official in charge now says these general assessments did not necessarily reflect local “hotspots” with potential risk to people.

Regulators alerted the public to dangers from just two, well-publicized toxic disasters: the Arkema chemical plant northeast of Houston that exploded and burned for days, and a nearby dioxin-laden federal Superfund site whose protective cap was damaged by the raging San Jacinto River.

Samuel Coleman, who was the EPA’s acting regional administrator during Harvey, said the priority in the immediate aftermath was “addressing any environmental harms as quickly as possible as opposed to making announcements about what the problem was.”

In hindsight, he said, it might not have been a bad idea to inform the public about the worst of “dozens of spills.”

Of course the state GOP was sitting on this information so that when the cancer and birth defect numbers started to pour in over the next several years they would shrug and blame residents (and cut public health programs some more, probably). 

It'll take years to rebuild, but the environmental damage to Houston and Texas's Gulf Coast will last for decades.

The Blue Wave Rises, Con't

The good thing about all these Senate GOP retirements is that it opens up opportunities for the Democrats because right now Republicans are going to run the craziest sunzabitches they can find and Democrats can win with candidates like Doug Jones in southern states.  I know I've been down on the Dems' chances to take back the Senate, but that's because it's a long shot.

However, beating that long shot means Dems have to capitalize on golden opportunities like (of in all the places to find a competitive Senate contest) Tennessee.

Former Gov. Phil Bredesen has a slight edge over U.S. Rep. Marsha Blackburn in a new poll on the U.S. Senate race from a Democratic-leaning firm. 

The poll, conducted by North Carolina-based Public Policy Polling, surveyed the views of Tennessee registered voters on the U.S. Senate race, approval of President Donald Trump and health care. 

Forty-six percent of the survey’s respondents said they would vote for Bredesen compared to 41 percent for Blackburn if the election were immediately held. 

Thirteen percent of respondents said they were not sure. 

The poll, which surveyed roughly 1,000 Tennesseans, had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.

Look, I know Marsha Blackburn is a bad candidate, but the GOP is going to run her anyway.  It's Roy Moore all over again for these guys.  Bredesen was a moderately popular governor and most importantly he's not Marsha Blackburn.

If this seat really does open up, it could really help the Dems take back the Senate.  They need to defend everything, a tough road, and still find a way to pick up Arizona and Nevada.  If Tennessee is now in play with Bob Corker retiring, then that takes a lot of pressure off the Dems, they don't have to run the table in order to get to 51.

Besides, resources that the GOP has to spend to defend Tennessee are resources that they won't have to spend elsewhere.

StupidiNews!

• With less than 48 hours until another government shutdown, a bipartisan $1.3 trillion spending bill that will fund the government through September is making its way through both chambers.
• Police say the 17-year-old Maryland student who shot his 16-year-old girlfriend in a school hallway before being shot and killed by a school resource officer on Tuesday used his father's pistol.
• Hamas security forces have a captured a suspect in last week's attempted assassination of Palestinian PM Rami Hamdallah after a gun battle left two security officers dead in Gaza.
• Donald Trump is expected to formally announce $50 billion in yearly targeted tariffs against Chinese imports today, the move is expected to trigger a global trade war.
• The Senate has passed a House bill to combat online sex trafficking, critics say the bill will censor free speech and put web hosting companies out of business.

Last Call For It's Mueller Time, Con't

And we finally get the other shoe to drop in the firing of Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe.

• Emai

Nearly a year before Attorney General Jeff Sessions fired senior FBIofficial Andrew McCabe for what Sessions called a "lack of candor," McCabe oversaw a federal criminal investigation into whether Sessions lacked candor when testifying before Congress about contacts with Russian operatives, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News. 

Democratic lawmakers have repeatedly accused Sessions of misleading them in congressional testimony and called on federal authorities to investigate, but McCabe's previously-unreported decision to actually put the attorney general in the crosshairs of an FBI probe was an exceptional move. 

One source told ABC News that Sessions was not aware of the investigation when he decided to fire McCabe last Friday less than 48 hours before McCabe, a former FBI deputy director, was due to retire from government and obtain a full pension, but an attorney representing Sessions declined to confirm that. 

Last year, several top Republican and Democratic lawmakers were informed of the probe during a closed-door briefing with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and McCabe, ABC News was told.

Jeff Sessions was under investigation, guys.  "Was" being the operative word, however...

By then, Sessions had recused himself from the FBI’s probe of Russia’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election, giving Rosenstein oversight of the growing effort. 

Within weeks, Rosenstein appointed special counsel Robert Mueller to take over the investigation and related inquiries, including the Sessions matter. 

Two months ago, Sessions was interviewed by Mueller's team, and the federal inquiry related to his candor during his confirmation process has since been shuttered, according to a lawyer representing Sessions. 

"The Special Counsel's office has informed me that after interviewing the attorney general and conducting additional investigation, the attorney general is not under investigation for false statements or perjury in his confirmation hearing testimony and related written submissions to Congress," attorney Chuck Cooper told ABC News on Wednesday. 

According to the sources, McCabe authorized the criminal inquiry after a top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont, and then-Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., wrote a letter in March 2017 to the FBI urging agents to investigate "all contacts" Sessions may have had with Russians, and "whether any laws were broken in the course of those contacts or in any subsequent discussion of whether they occurred." 

It's unclear how actively federal authorities pursued the matter in the months before Sessions' interview with Mueller’s investigators. It's also unclear whether the special counsel may still be pursuing other matters related to Sessions and statements he has made to Congress – or others – since his confirmation.

Sessions is no longer being investigated for statements to Congress.  That's what we do know.  Whether or not he's being investigated for other matters since becoming AG, well...

Only Mueller knows.  But Andrew McCabe was fired.  That's a fact too.  And less than a week after that happened, we have our first major leak involving McCabe where we only find out now that the FBI was investigating Trump's AG from the word go.

Stay tuned.

The Flake Out Fake Out Continues

Retiring Arizona GOP Sen. Jeff Flake appears to be unfettered by the party of Trump and is saying whatever appears to be on his mind these days in his self-serving exit from the Senate, but at least we have a Republican threatening to take action in case Trump cans Robert Mueller.

Sen. Jeff Flake, one of President Trump’s most prominent Senate critics, told The Washington Post in an interview Tuesday that he would support impeachment proceedings against Trump if the president ends special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election “without cause.”

“We’re begging him: ‘Don’t go down this road. Don’t create a constitutional crisis. Don’t force the Congress to take the only remedy that Congress can take,’ ” said Flake (R-Ariz.). “To remind the president of that is the best way to keep him from going down that road. To fire Mueller without cause, I don’t know if there is any other remedy left to the legislative branch.” 

Flake compared any possible effort by Trump in the coming weeks to end the Mueller probe to President Richard Nixon’s infamous 1973 firing of the special prosecutor during the Watergate scandal.

“If [Trump] fires [Mueller] without cause, how different is that from what Nixon did with the ‘Saturday Night Massacre’?” Flake asked. “He left before impeachment came, but that was the remedy then, and that would be the remedy now.”

It would be.  But Flake isn't actually going to do anything about that knowing full well that impeachment will never get past Paul Ryan in the House this year regardless of what Trump does, and that Flake will already be gone when Democrats most likely take over the House in 2019.

What Flake is actually doing is testing the waters in 2020 to primary Trump, because being in the Beltway for years has somehow convinced him that Never Trump Moderate Republicans still exist.

Flake — who recently traveled to New Hampshire and is considered a potential Trump challenger in the race for the 2020 Republican presidential nomination — said he was speaking up Tuesday about the prospect of impeachment because Republican warnings have been unsuccessful in holding back Trump’s criticism of Mueller’s probe. Flake expressed alarm over how the president’s attacks on the investigation have seemed to escalate over the past week as the president faces mounting legal and political challenges. 

Flake also credited Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) for taking the lead in talking about the possibility of impeachment proceedings — a topic most Republicans are eager to avoid. 

Earlier Tuesday, Graham told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt that firing Mueller, “if he did it without cause,” would “probably” be an impeachable offense.

Flake said in the interview: “Nobody wants to talk about it. I don’t want to talk about it. As soon as you mention the i-word, that’s all people want to talk about.”

Flake is about as useful as Graham is too.  Both Senators are supposedly critics of Trump, but Graham supports the Trump position on votes 88% of the time, Flake 86%.  I don't buy Flake's fake out and neither should you.

The Blue Wave Rises, Con't

Primary day in Illinois yesterday means that we now know who will be competing in November's races in the Land of Lincoln, and the race for governor will come down to a pair of billionaires.

The race for Illinois governor will be a battle between two deep-pocketed candidates who've already sunk more than $120 million of their own money into the contest, putting it on pace to become the costliest such campaign in U.S. history.

Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner, a wealthy former private equity investor, defeated conservative state Rep. Jeanne Ives on Tuesday for the GOP nomination.

"We are in a critical time, a critical turning point in Illinois," Rauner told supporters. "I am humbled by this victory. You have given me a chance to win the battle against corruption that plagues Illinois."

He will face Democratic billionaire J.B. Pritzker, an investor and heir to the Hyatt hotel fortune. Pritzker easily won the primary over Chris Kennedy, the son of the late Sen. Robert F. Kennedy; and Daniel Biss, 40, a state senator who campaigned as the "middle-class candidate."

Pritzker, 53, already has spent more than $70 million to bankroll his campaign, while Rauner has put in about $50 million and has received millions more from his wealthy friends in the business community. Combined they're expected to top California in 2010 as the nation's most expensive governor's race.

Pritzker is problematic at best, but he's a better choice than Rauner, one of most disliked sitting governors in the nation right now.  Much like Chris Christie's wrecked legacy in New Jersey, this blue-state Republican is leaving a massive fiscal mess behind and he very nearly lost his own primary bid.

In House races, Democratic Rep. Dan Lipinski, arguably the bluest of the remaining Blue Dogs, survived his primary against Marie Newman.

Rep. Dan Lipinski, an avid foe of abortion rights and one of the most conservative Democrats in the House, fended off a fierce challenge from the left on Tuesday night in Illinois, all but assuring an eighth term in Congress.

Lipinski narrowly prevailed over businesswoman Marie Newman, 51 to 49, after a bitter campaign battle that pitted the party’s ideological poles against one another. Lipinski was backed heavily by anti-abortion rights groups and by some unions, while Newman boasted endorsements from a host of outside groups on the left in the 3rd District contest.

"I would like to make Mr. Lipinski to have a very painful evening, so we‘re going to wait," Newman told her supporters shortly before midnight, according to news reports, as she declined to concede before the race was called by The Associated Press.

Lipinski's Trump Score, according to FiveThirtyEight, finds him voting along with Donald Trump and the GOP about a third of the time, which for a blue district like his was definitely worth a primary challenge.  It failed this time, but I imagine he's pretty rattled.

And before the "But there's no difference between the parties" idiocy in the cheap seats begins, Illinois Republicans will be running an actual Nazi and Holocaust denier in IL-3.

Arthur Jones, a Holocaust denier described as a Nazi by the Illinois Republican Party, won the Republican primary on Tuesday in the state’s Third Congressional District, a heavily Democratic district that includes part of Chicago and its suburbs, according to The Associated Press.

Mr. Jones, 70, unsuccessfully sought the nomination five times before, and his victory on Tuesday was a foregone conclusion after the Republican Party failed to draft another candidate to enter the race against him.

“Even if only myself and my wife voted for me, I’d win the primary because the Republican Party screwed up big time,” Mr. Jones said in an interview.

The Illinois Republican Party has sought to distance itself from Mr. Jones in recent weeks, blanketing the district with campaign fliers and robocalls urging voters to “stop Illinois Nazis,” according to a robocall script provided by the party. Mr. Jones said he had received three robocalls himself.

“Arthur Jones is not a real Republican — he is a Nazi whose disgusting, bigoted views have no place in our nation’s discourse,” Tim Schneider, the Illinois Republican Party chairman, said in a statement. He said the party had urged voters “to skip over his name when they go to the polls” and moving forward planned on “vehemently opposing Jones with real campaign dollars.”

A spokesman for the Illinois Republican Party said those dollars would be used to support an independent candidate in the November general election. Party leaders are in talks with several potential candidates, the spokesman said, but have not yet decided which one to endorse.

Republicans couldn't find a candidate who wasn't a Nazi by the deadline.  That's who we're up against in November, so keep that in mind.

StupidiNews!

• Austin, Texas police say a suspect in this month's serial bombings of Austin residents of color is dead after being tracked to a hotel north of the city where police say he detonated a device in his car.
• Canada has unveiled stricter gun laws including more thorough background checks and restrictions on convicted violent criminals being able to own a firearm.
• For the first time Israel has admitted to a 2007 airstrike on a suspected Syrian nuclear reactor and warned Iran that Israel will never allow Tehran to develop nuclear weapons.
• Donald Trump may be deposed in a sexual harassment trial after a NY judge refused to dismiss the suit brought by a former contestant on "The Apprentice".
• 2017 saw a slight decrease in US electricity use as Americans are conserving power and the country is getting more electricity from solar, wind, and water.