Category: Politics

As the week began, there was reporting about a “remain in Mexico” policy for asylum seekers being negotiated with Mexico. But the Trump Administration has not yet secured a formal agreement, and Mexico released a non-denial denial that the policy was in the works.

In Tijuana, Mexico is holding about 5,000 migrants, some from the caravan, in a tent city. On Sunday they rushed the border–some migrants said they were marching to the boarder to negotiate with US border agents. Mexican riot police pushed them back, and US agents fired tear gas canisters.

On Sunday Russian fighter jets fired on Ukrainian naval vessels.

Reporting this week tells us that the Trump Administration was too afraid of the political and legal blowback of suppressing or altering last week’s federal climate change report. Instead they released it on Black Friday to minimize public awareness. And they were not overly concerned with public awareness to begin with: “We don’t care. In our view, this is made-up hysteria anyway,” Said Steven J Milloy, a member of Trump’s EPA transition team.

Bolton said he has not listened to the audio of the Khashoggi murder.

Trump attended the G-20 Summit. He canceled his meeting with Putin. People speculate that he did so because of the Cohen plea deal and not for the stated reasons of Putin’s recent Ukraine aggression. At the G-20 Trump tried to declare a pause in the tariff war with China, and signed the new NAFTA deal, although Congress is suggesting they will not vote it into law.

Finally, George H.W. Bush died on Saturday.

In Russia News:

On Monday the Mueller team said that Manafort has lied repeatedly during his plea agreement, thus violating any obligations of leniency, and that he should be sentenced immediately.

The New York Times reports that Manfort’s lawyers shared information with Trump’s lawyers after Manafort agreed to cooperate with Mueller: “Some legal experts speculated that it was a bid by Mr. Manafort for a presidential pardon even as he worked with the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, in hopes of a lighter sentence.” And this: “Though it was unclear how frequently [Kevin Downing ] spoke to Mr. Trump’s lawyers or how much he revealed, his updates helped reassure Mr. Trump’s legal team that Mr. Manafort had not implicated the president in any possible wrongdoing.” If this is true, it is very irregular, and likely means Manafort’s lawyers will have a hard time finding clients in the future because no one will trust their ability to negotiate a plea agreement. 

Here is a good explainer of the implications of this: “It’s a blow to Mr. Mueller’s team, because their questions to Mr. Manafort — repeated to Mr. Trump’s lawyers — may be a road map to at least part of the special counsel investigation. … It’s a blow to Mr. Manafort, who will receive no sentencing credit for his brief cooperation. It’s a blow to Mr. Manafort’s lawyers; no federal prosecutor will ever trust them again. And it’s a blow to Mr. Trump, who has overplayed his hand, because Mr. Mueller may now be able to delve into the Trump lawyers’ conversations with Mr. Manafort’s lawyers.
They are consistent with only one conclusion: Mr. Manafort and his lawyers seek a presidential pardon, not a reduced sentence through sincere cooperation.”

NBC and CNN obtained documents from court filings about Jerome Corsi. There are emails between Corsi and Stone about the Wikileaks dumps of Clinton emails two months before those dumps began: “Word is friend in embassy plans 2 more dumps,” Corsi wrote on Aug. 2, 2016, referring to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, according to the draft court papers. “One shortly after I’m back. 2nd in Oct. Impact planned to be very damaging.” There was some talk even in conservative press about the fact that the Corsi/Assange/Stone nexus started the idea of talking about Clinton’s poor health, backed up by Wikileaks documents, and then Trump then started pushing that message on the stump.  

In a surprise legal move, Cohen plead guilty to lies that Mueller accused him of on Thursday morning. He admitted to lying to Congress about pursuing the Trump Tower Moscow deal during the 2016 election with Kremlin agents (first reported in Buzzfeed in May 2018). He also admitted to lying about the fact that the Russians actually responded to him (when this aspect was earlier reported, there was media snark about how Cohen used a generic Russian government email he found on the internet, and that no one replied–the fact that Putin’s press secretary called Cohen back was not in the Buzzfeed article). He also admitted to lying about how much conversation there was in the Trump organization and campaign about Cohen and Trump traveling to Russia to discuss the deal.

Lawfare wants us to pause on the Cohen revelations and consider that “this is all utterly unacceptable. That a large swath of the public, and the legislative branch, has chosen to accept it does not make it more reasonable that a man seeking to be president of the United States would at the same time publicly cozy up to a foreign dictator and negotiate with his regime over a potential business opportunity—and then cover it all up.” But they also point out that “contemplating a significant real estate deal in the capital of a hostile foreign power, that in and of itself does not constitute criminal behavior.” 

Also from Lawfare: “notwithstanding the omission of those few key details, the court documents released Thursday continue Mueller’s trend of using ‘speaking indictments.’ Although the document here is a criminal information, rather than an indictment, the filing is factually rich and tells a story in a fashion that seems designed to inform the public.”

This quote is the strongest condemnation Andrew McCarthy has bout the Cohen revelation: “Now, such a showing of collusion could be politically damaging. It might even be something on which the Democratic-controlled House could try to build an impeachment effort. But it is not a criminal conspiracy because it does not establish an agreement to commit a federal crime.” He is still arguing that Mueller will not find any actual crime on Trump’s part, and seems to be of a mind with Allan Dershowitz who says this week that Meuller is now “looking for political sin.”

On Friday morning Trump tweeted “Oh, I get it! I am a very good developer, happily living my life, when I see our Country going in the wrong direction (to put it mildly). Against all odds, I decide to run for President & continue to run my business-very legal & very cool, talked about it on the campaign trail….Lightly looked at doing a building somewhere in Russia. Put up zero money, zero guarantees and didn’t do the project. Witch Hunt!”

Later Friday morning a judge set a sentencing date for Manafort as March 5. Also the judge will “first be tasked with deciding whether Manafort did, in fact, breach his plea agreement with Mueller’s office. The government is due to submit papers about that allegation by Dec. 7, and Manafort’s lawyers will then propose a schedule for responding.” (Cohen’s sentencing is December 12, and Flynns is December 18.)

In Cohen’s sentencing memo his lawyers make the case to the judge for leniency. It makes the following point: “In the context of this raw, full-bore attack by the most powerful person in the United States, Michael, formerly a confidante and adviser to Mr. Trump, resolved to cooperate, and voluntarily
took the first steps toward doing so even before he was charged in this District.” It also makes a point of saying Cohen is fully cooperating “despite regular public reports referring to the President’s consideration of pardons and pre-pardons in the SCO’s investigation.”

While all of this is going on, there is no word about Whitaker’s role or whether he has recused himself yet. But on Friday The Washington Post reported that Whitaker was notified about the Cohen guilty plea beforehand.

The same Buzzfeed reporters who broke the Moscow Project story back in May report this week that Trump offered to gift Putin a $50 million penthouse in the top of the tower.

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Trump’s Job Approval: 42.4%

Trump made a statement intended to end the debate of the Khashoggi murder: “We may never know all of the facts surrounding the murder of Mr. Jamal Khashoggi. In any case, our relationship is with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.” Here is how the New York Times described the official statement: “In 633 words, punctuated by eight exclamation points and written in an impolitic style that sounded like Mr. Trump’s off-the-cuff observations, the statement was a stark distillation of the Trump worldview: remorselessly transactional, heedless of the facts, determined to put America’s interests first, and founded on a theory of moral equivalence.”

Here is the full text of Trump’s statement, with key excerpts below:

• “After my heavily negotiated trip to Saudi Arabia last year, the Kingdom agreed to spend and invest $450 billion in the United States. This is a record amount of money. It will create hundreds of thousands of jobs, tremendous economic development, and much additional wealth for the United States. Of the $450 billion, $110 billion will be spent on the purchase of military equipment from Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and many other great U.S. defense contractors.”
• “Our intelligence agencies continue to assess all information, but it could very well be that the Crown Prince had knowledge of this tragic event – maybe he did and maybe he didn’t! That being said, we may never know all of the facts surrounding the murder of Mr. Jamal Khashoggi. In any case, our relationship is with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.”
• “Representatives of Saudi Arabia say that Jamal Khashoggi was an “enemy of the state” and a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, but my decision is in no way based on that.”
• “After the United States, Saudi Arabia is the largest oil producing nation in the world. They have worked closely with us and have been very responsive to my requests to keeping oil prices at reasonable levels – so important for the world. As President of the United States I intend to ensure that, in a very dangerous world, America is pursuing its national interests and vigorously contesting countries that wish to do us harm. Very simply it is called America First!”

Just Security blog writes that the Magnitsky act requires the president to determine if the murder took place, and give Congress a formal intention to levy sanctions or not. Trump has not yet publicly done these things, though he may do them in a classified manner.

Instead of visiting troops for Thanksgiving he teleconferenced with them from Mara-Lago. Here is what he talked about.

On Friday the federal government released its congressionally required report of 13 federal agencies assessment on climate change. The report paints a dire future with widespread national impacts that “could slash up to a tenth of gross domestic product by 2100, more than double the losses of the Great Recession a decade ago.” The report is sure to be used in the courts to support laws designed to combat climate change.

Now that most of the midterm votes have been tallied, news outlets are drawing up their conclusions. Turnout was historically high with 49.4% of eligible voters actually voting, and nearly 60 million of those votes went to the Democrats, which is another anomaly because thats about the same number of votes that Trump won in 2016. The Washington Post writes that turnout was high for both sides because Trump successfully made the midterms all about him this energizing his base as well as the Democratic base. But this was and will continue to be a liability because as Nate Silver writes, Trump’s base is much smaller and won’t be enough for him to win reelection unless he expands it.

Immigration News:

A federal judge has struck down Trump’s order to block asylum to people who cross the border between ports of entry.

After Trump criticized the Ninth Circuit judge as an “Obama Judge” the AP sought a comment from John Roberts. Breaking his previous silence about Trump’s attack on the judiciary, Roberts gave a response this time: “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges. What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them. That independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for.”

Trump signed an order allowing troops at the border to use lethal force to protect border patrol agents. Kelly and Nielsen were opposed, and a cabinet fight ensued until the two came around to supporting the order. Mattis seemed to be caught off guard by the order and did not immediately embrace it.

In Russia News:

The White House is saying they have submitted their answers to Mueller’s questions.

The Mueller team said in court this week that the Whitaker appointment cannot retroactively affect DOJ actions taken before Whitaker’s appointment; that Muller still has the power of a U.S. attorney. We also learned that any sealed indictments cannot be overturned by Whitaker.

In the Spring of 2018 Trump ordered McGahn to tell DOJ to investigate Hillary Clinton and Comey. McGahn in turn had a memo drafted that explained why the White House could not make such a request.

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Trump’s Job Approval: 42.9%

Sunday marked the centennial of the end of World War I. Macron hosted world leaders in France to commemorate the day, and use it as an opportunity to push back against growing nationalism. Macron hosted the Paris Pease Forum, a three day conferenced following the commemorations. Trump skipped most of the events, and left before the conference began.

Here is some of what Macron said in his speech: “Patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism: Nationalism is a betrayal of patriotism. In saying ‘our interests first, whatever happens to the others,’ you erase the most precious thing a nation can have, that which makes it lives, that which causes it to be great and that which is most important: Its moral values.”

Trump was in a foul mood during his France trip. He was angered that the late House and Senate races continued to be called for Democrats. He berated Theresa May when she called to congratulate him on the Republican wins. He was angry that Whitaker was getting negative news coverage. He was angry at Macron for his remarks on nationalism, which he considered a personal attack. He was angry at his staff for the negative coverage he got for skipping the ceremony at the American cemetery, blamed them privately for not telling him it would look bad, then publicly blamed the Secret Service for not letting him go (which was a lie).

Whitaker Appointment

Here is a survey of Whitaker’s resume, which includes some small businesses with legal problems. George W Bush plucked him from obscurity to be a US Attorney in 2004 after he worked on his local Iowa campaign: “James Eisenstein, a professor emeritus at Pennsylvania State University who has studied the federal court system, said he knows of no U.S. attorneys with résumés like Whitaker’s.”

Here is the DOJ Office of Legal Council memo that explains why Whitaker’s appointment is legal. It says, “the President may designate an official to perform the duties of a vacant principal officer, including a Cabinet office, even when the acting official has not been confirmed by the senate.”

Experts agree this opinion is not the final word but will either be overturned or upheld in the courts. Just Security writes about how the Whitaker appointment is nearly unprecedented: “the vast majority of historical cases in which someone has stepped in to perform the functions of a ‘vacant’ office of the head of a department, that ‘acting’ official has been someone holding another office in that same department—usually a ‘deputy’ or ‘first assistant’—whom the Senate has already confirmed for that underlying office.” And this: “although the President reportedly planned to rid himself of Sessions many months ago, he did not announce a nomination of a replacement for the Senate’s consideration when he created the vacancy. We can’t say for certain that that’s never happened before with respect to the head of a department; but if has, it’s very rare. (We’re aware of one partial analogy, but presumably it’s not one Trump would eagerly cite as a precedent: After the Saturday Night Massacre in late October 1973, it took President Nixon 13 days to announce his intent to nominate William Saxbe to replace Elliot Richardson.”

The constitutional case is more interesting. The OLC memo cites the case of a non-senate-confirmed appointment to temporarily replace the ambassador to Siam in 1898. The officer served in Bangkok for 10 months, and the Supreme Court ruled that the appointment was valid because he was “charged with the performance of the duty of the superior for a limited time and under special and temporary conditions.” The case is referred to as Eaton. In its memo the OLC cited one of its own decisions from 1977 on this question: the appointment “may not continue indefinitely. Within a reasonable time after the occurrence of a vacancy in the office of Director, the President should submit a nomination to the Senate.” Just Security concludes that this “is best understood to mean that [the duration of the appointment] must be at least reasonably tailored to the exigency that required disregarding the Appointments Clause requirements… That means, at a minimum—and as the Thomas concurrence and 1977 OLC opinion suggest—that if the President assigns the functions to someone who does not satisfy the Appointments Clause, the President must make reasonable efforts to have the vacancy filled expeditiously, by nominating a new officer for the Senate’s consideration.” There is no indication that is about to happen. In fact Whitaker spoke with Lindsay Graham about his DOJ priorities for 2019. 

Lawyers in a court federal case have asked the Supreme Court to determine the legality of Whitaker’s appointment.

In other news: 

Mattis when to the boarder to inspect the troop deployment there. The migrant caravan is not crossing in droves. NBC news: “According to internal DHS reports and officials tracking the caravan, the first wave of approximately 3,500 migrants are expected to arrive in Tijuana in the coming days and attempt to cross into California. Even there, they won’t swarm the border crossing, but are instead expected to wait in a bottleneck for days before they can enter San Ysidro, California to make an asylum claim.”

Trump gave an interview with The Daily Caller. Here is what he said about the midterms and the new Democratic majority in the House: 

• “Look, we have a chance of, they can do presidential harassment, put very simply, and I’ll be very good at handling that and I think I’ll be better than anybody in the history of this office. And in a certain way I look forward to it because I actually think it’s good for me politically, because everyone knows it’s pure harassment. Just like the witch hunt, the Mueller witch hunt. It’s pure harassment. It’s horrible. It’s horrible that they’re allowed to get away with it.
• “Don’t forget, I didn’t really have a majority. I had one senator. And I had a few Republicans in the House. You know, a very small number. Um, and now the pressure’s on them because they’ve gotta come to me with things.” 

A recording of Khashoggi’s killers catch them saying “tell your boss” that their mission is completed, wherein the boss is believed by US intelligence to be the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. It was leaked that the CIA believes that the Saudi Crown Prince ordered Khashoggi’s murder. Trump is still trying to downplay the possibility.

The New York Times reports on new North Korea intelligence: “The satellite images suggest that the North has been engaged in a great deception: It has offered to dismantle a major launching site — a step it began, then halted — while continuing to make improvements at more than a dozen others that would bolster launches of conventional and nuclear warheads.”

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Trump’s Job Approval: 42.5%

With the 2018 midterm election behind us, and two years to go until Trump’s reelection or defeat, it is a good time to establish some parameters around what we can expect from the public’s support or disapproval of the president going forward. This will help us interpret changes in his approval rating, or lack thereof, as they are happening. There are five paths Trump’s popularity may take over the next two years.

Path 1: Same old-Same old 

This path assumes that Trump’s approval rating in the last half of his term will behave the same way it did during the first half. Here is what we can expect for the average approval dip:

• They will occur 3 weeks (and no more than 8 weeks) after the previous one
• They will last about 4 weeks
• They will have a decline of about 1.5 to 2 points
• On the severity scale, a little more than half will rank in the 6-10 range, and a little less than half rank in the 1-5 range
• Trump’s approval rating will stay between 38-42%, perhaps going lower or higher for brief periods

This path assumes that the four factors that have resulted in Trump’s approval decline-White House policy, White House chaos, Trump taboos, and the Russia investigation–will continue to affect public thinking in the same way they have up to now.

Path 2: Treading Water

An approval dip is characterized by a significant drop in approval, or incremental drops sustained over a number of weeks. When Trump is not in an approval dip, his rating bobs around, dropping half a point one week, gaining a point the next, dropping half a point again the week after that. For example, here are Trump’s approval ratings for each of the 8 weeks leading up to the midterms:

He gains ground then loses some, on repeat. For most of 2018 Trump’s approval has been bobbing between 40-42%. He has a ceiling somewhere between 42-43%. But he also has a floor of about 40%, having only dipped down to 39.9% for a few days this year (this happened last summer during Episode 12,  when Cohen and Manafort took plea deal and John McCain died).

So the Treading Water path assumes that Trump’s dips will happen mush less frequently and will represent shallower approval declines, but also that Trump will not break much above his 42% ceiling either. There is some evidence that it is getting easier for him to maintain this kind of approval. In 2017, dips were occurring about every 2.2 weeks, while this year they occur about ever 4.2 weeks. In 2017 the average decline was 2.5 points, while in 2018 the average decline was 1.1 points.

It is hard to say what accounts for this because the negative news cycles that drive the approval dips have been just as dire in 2018 as they were in 2017. Other than the incidents mentioned above, they include: Stormy Daniels payments; multiple Mueller indictments; bipartisan condemnation of the child-separation policy; the Putin summit in Helsinki; White House chaos stories from Omarosa and Woodward. It is possible that the public has grown so numb to Trump antics that breaking news coverage about those antics have had less power to shock than it did during Trump’s first year in office. The result is that people are paying less attention, or they are less likely to voice disapproval because a certain level of dislike for Trump’s antics are now baked into the public’s conception of how they think about Trump’s performance. If this is the case, it will make it easier for Trump to tread water at 42% in his third year.

Path 3: Normalization

Below are the average approval ratings for the previous four presidents during their third year in office.

• Obama: 44%
• Bush (43): 60.5%
• Clinton: 47.5%
• Bush (41): 73%

The average of these is 56.3%, which is close to the average (57.5%) for all presidential first terms going back to Truman. But sticking with these four recent presidents, let’s subtract the Bushes who’s approval was inflated due to popular wars that happened in their respective third years. This leaves a non-war third year approval rating of 45.75%.

Trump has never achieved a 45% approval rating. The only time he was at 44% was during the first four weeks of his term. So if Trump’s approval goes above 45% we will know that the public writ large is giving its approval to his presidency in the same measure as other presidents, hence they will be treating Trump as a normal president. What might cause this?

The first possibility is that Trump begins to behave more like a normal president, or he at least tones it down enough that the public begins to accept him as normal.

Another possibility is that Trump will not change but will successfully cast the events of the next two years as normal partisan politics. One advantage he will gain is a clear political opponent: the Democratic-controlled House. Before now, by any reasonable and traditional understanding of our political system, Trump was responsible for just about everything because he and his party controlled the entire federal government. When things went wrong there was nowhere else to look for blame but Trump. He often tried to deflect that blame onto the Democrats (for Obamacare repeal failure, immigration laws, wall funding, even his own child-separation policy), but this was not taken seriously by the media because the Democrats had no power in Congress. In almost all cases, Trump had failed to lead his own party and in many cases is own administration. That changes starting in 2019. The media will not be able to cast its critical eye exclusively on Trump and his “lackeys” in Congress, but reporters and pundits will be able to pick apart the decisions, statements and gaffs of Nancy Pelosi and her committee chairmen like Adam Schiff, Elijah Cummings and Jerry Nadler, not to mention lower ranking rabble rousers like Maxine Waters. Trump will not be able to saddle them with all the blame for negative events, but the media and the public will hold Democrats at least partly to account for the power that they do wield. The public will perceive the partisan back-and-forth as normal politics, thus elevating Trump to the same plane as “normal” presidents who battled with Congress like Clinton or Obama.

Having a live opponent will also recast the approval-disapproval question. With Trump on stage all by himself, it is a straightforward answer. But when he is standing beside empowered Democrats, personified by Pelosi or whoever the Speaker will be, some percentage of the public who may disapprove of Trump in a given week will instead tell pollsters they approve because they do not want their disapproval to be construed as support for Democrats.

Path 4: Cratering

Trump’s lowest approval rating is around 36%, which he reached twice: after Charlottesville, and after the Flynn guilty plea and Roy Moore campaign. Dropping into the mid-to-low 30s, or even dropping his baseline from the low 40s to the mid 30s would constitute a cratering approval rating. For most of 2017, he was between 37-38%, so being lower than that for a sustained period would be unprecedented for him and suggest something has shifted in how the public perceives his job performance.

This may result from the normal things that have caused presidential approval to drop, such as a national disaster of his own making or not. Or it could be the reverse of the numbing effect described in Path 2. Trump’s attempts to make excuses for or divert attention from his problems may stop working. Instead of accepting that “Trump is gonna Trump” a chunk of the population that has so far given him the benefit of the doubt may decide they have had enough and move into the permanently disapprove camp.

Path 5: Bottom Falls Out

In the last 12 months of Nixon’s presidency his approval rating averaged out to 26.8%. The year before, his average was 51.7%. Over an eight month period in 1973 he dropped from 65% to 29%. So Nixon went from having the support of well over half of the country to losing a full half of his support.

If Trump lost half of his support he would be in the low 20s, which is unlikely given the strength of his base support and the partisan divide in the country, which did not exist in the Nixon era. My hunch is that Trump and Congressional Republicans could pretend their situation was manageable if Trump were in the mid-to-low 30s (hence the Cratering path), but if he dropped to 30% or lower they would be unable to govern. Losing 12-15% of previous support would mean about a third of his supporters had abandoned him. This is when Republicans start talking about their options: resignation, a primary challenge, or impeachment.

Some potential causes: a devastating Mueller report; a national disaster decidedly of Trump’s own making.

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Which path is most likely?  My hunch is that we will see some combination of treading water and normalization, where Trump’s dips are less frequent and his overall approval inches up a bit. The factors that would drive these two paths–numbing and having an opposition–will be strong in the coming year. Also, this seems to be the path he has already been on in 2018. His approval has basically stabilized between 40-42%. As I write this, Trump’s approval average is 41.8% which is about what it has been since mid-September. Unless a dip begins soon, he will have gone nine weeks without one, which would be a record stretch for him. I would not be surprised if his approval cratered, but that would require the public to change how they have been behaving toward Trump these past two years. As for the Mueller report, and how the public will react, only a fool would make a prediction. All I know for sure is that in six months the data will point to one of these five paths.

Three days before Election Day in Georgia the GOP candidate for governor, who is also Secretary of State, without any evidence opened an investigation into the Democrats for trying to hack the state’s voter rolls. The statement from his spokesman: “This was a 4th quarter Hail Mary pass that was intercepted in the end zone. Thanks to the systems and protocols established by Secretary of State Brian Kemp, no personal information was breached. These power-hungry radicals should be held accountable for their criminal behavior.” Kemp has done this before, in 2016: “An independent investigation by the department’s inspector general, which operates independently from the department’s chain of command, found that the activity Mr. Kemp believed was suspicious was, in fact, normal behavior between computer systems.”

The question in the coverage just before Election Day focuses on whether Trump-style politics can help the party win as a whole without Trump on the ballot, and what it will mean for American politics if the answer is yes. This Washington Post article lists some of examples of race-bating campaign tactics GOP candidates have used, and then states: “By running so overtly on racially tinged messages, the GOP is putting that explosive form of politics on the ballot. If Republicans maintain control of the House, the notion of running a campaign built on blunt, race-based attacks on immigrants and minorities will have been validated. A loss, on the other hand, might prompt a number of Republicans to call for a rethinking of the party’s direction — but that would collide with a sitting president who, if anything, relishes over-the-edge rhetoric.”

On Election Day, the Democrats won control of the House, while Republicans maintained control of the Senate. Democrats flipped seven governor seats, six state legislatures, and over 300 state-level seats. (By the end of the week, several races had yet to be called. Florida and Arizona senate races are going into a recount. The Florida governor’s race is also going into a recount, and the Georgia governor’s race is uncalled.)

On the day after, Sessions was asked by John Kelly to submit his resignation. He did so, and was replaced by his chief of staff Mathew Whitaker, who has expressed criticism of the Muller investigation repeatedly over the past year.

The first sentence of Session’s letter proves he was forced out, which is not much of a surprise: “As your request, I am submitting my resignation.”

There are potentially grave consequences for the Russia investigation. Whitaker will take over supervision of Mueller, will get the final decision on indictments, or what is in the final report, and the investigation’s budget. However, if he overrules Mueller, Whitaker must notify Congress that he has done so, but not until the conclusion of the entire investigation.

According to Marty Ederman of Just Security, Whitaker can control Mueller’s budget, however his budget may be locked in through the fiscal year until October 2019. Whitaker will have the final say on Mueller’s final report, and whether it can be made public or sent to Congress. The regulations say that Whitaker must be consulted by Muller about next steps in the investigation, and he may “conclude that the [planned] action is so inappropriate or unwarranted under established Departmental practices that it should not be pursued.”

This Lawfare post contains a list of all the evidence Whitaker is not a fan of the Mueller investigation based on his public comments over the last year. They also write that Whitaker is obligated to request DOJ ethics lawyers to determine if he should recuse: “If Whitaker either does not obtain an ethics opinion from career officials or if he departs from that guidance, that would be a serious red flag.” Lawfare submitted and FOIA request to prove whether or not the ethics request have been made. 

The Lawfare writers are clear on this point: “The president fired the attorney general, as he once fired the FBI director, for plainly illegitimate reasons: because the attorney general acted appropriately on an investigative matter in which Trump himself has the deepest of personal interests. Trump does not even pretend there are other reasons. He removed the attorney general because the attorney general did not protect him from investigation. Yes, the president has the raw power to do this. But as was the case with the firing of James Comey, it is an abuse of the power he wields.”

George Conway argues that Whitaker’s appointment is invalid because the Attorney General must be senate-confirmed: “President Trump’s installation of Matthew Whitaker as acting attorney general of the United States after forcing the resignation of Jeff Sessions is unconstitutional. It’s illegal. And it means that anything Mr. Whitaker does, or tries to do, in that position is invalid.”

The Wall Street Journal reports: “The Federal Bureau of Investigation is conducting a criminal investigation of a Florida company accused of scamming millions from customers during the period that Matthew Whitaker, the acting U.S. attorney general, served as a paid advisory-board member.”

Adam Schiff, the incoming chair of the House Intelligence Committee, is giving multiple interviews the day after the election in which he is talking about how the House will pursue the Russia investigation. In these interviews he mentions Russia money laundering through Trump business deals, and the suspicion that Don Jr. was calling Trump’s blocked number while he was talking to Russian businessmen about the upcoming Trump Tower meeting. Crafting a political argument for his work he says, “we need to be able to look into it and be able to tell the country, ‘Yes, this is true,’ or ‘No, this is not.’ But I think it would be negligent not to find out.””

Trump gave an East Room press conference the day after the election. Here are the highlights. He says Republicans won an “almost complete victory.” Of note is how he deflects the House losses by arguing that the candidates who asked him to stay away are the ones who lost: “On the other hand, you had some that decided to stay away. “Let’s stay away.” They did very poorly. I’m not sure that I should be happy or sad, but I feel just fine about it.”

Trump explained how he is thinking the dynamic will be between his administration and the Democratic House should it choose to aggressively investigate: “They can play that game, but we can play it better, because we have a thing called the United States Senate. They can look at us, then we can look at them and it’ll go back and forth. And it’ll probably be very good for me politically . . . because I think I’m better at that game than they are, actually.” McConnell is not publicly agreeing with Trump to use the Senate to counter-investigate Democrats, but he is repeating the talking point that the Democrats would be unwise to engage in “presidential harassment.”

In Immigration News:

The day after the election the DOD dropped the name of the 5,000 active duty troop border operation. Instead of call it Operation Faithful Patriot they will “merely referring to it as border support.”

The Trump Administration rushed through a new regulation this week that will not allow anyone who crosses the US-Mexico border between ports of entry–ie, illegally–to apply for asylum.

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Trump’s Job Approval: 42.2%

Sunday afternoon after the Synagogue massacre, Trump tweeted: “The Fake News is doing everything in their power to blame Republicans, Conservatives and me for the division and hatred that has been going on for so long in our Country. Actually, it is their Fake & Dishonest reporting which is causing problems far greater than they understand!”

The President and the the First Lady were met with protests and the welcome of no public officials when they visited the Pittsburgh Synagogue. The mayor and the top four Republican and Democratic congressional leaders who were invited to join him all declined.

The migrant caravan has shrunk by over half to around 3,000 people. Yet Trump ordered 5,200 troops to the border by the end of the week. The move is being criticized for using active duty military as a prop in a midterm election stunt.

Conspiracies about the caravan are widespread among people who consume right-leaning media. Several people in the Trump Administration, including Trump himself, are pushing out the idea that the caravan includes “criminals and Middle Easterners.” Both the pipe bomber and the Synagogue shooter were bothered by the caravan.

Adam Sewer makes an explicit case that Trump’s caravan rhetoric was in part responsible for the shooting: “Before committing the Tree of Life massacre, the shooter, who blamed Jews for the caravan of “invaders” and who raged about it on social media, made it clear that he was furious at HIAS, founded as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, a Jewish group that helps resettle refugees in the United States. He shared posts on Gab, a social-media site popular with the alt-right, expressing alarm at the sight of “massive human caravans of young men from Honduras and El Salvador invading America thru our unsecured southern border.” And then he wrote, “HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.””

Here is a survey of Trump’s closing campaign arguments, a replay of his 2016 greatest hits: economic populism, xenophobia, and tough-guy rhetoric. We will know next week how successful it is.

As the week ended, Trump doubled down on fear of immigration as his closing election argument, making speeches that stoke fear of the migrant caravan, and releasing an internet campaign video of an illegal Mexican immigrant cop-killer. He claims–contrary to law–that the military will be able to shoot migrants and arrest them.

As for the troops Trump has ordered to the border: “Officials said that forces are staging at military installations for now because it is unclear precisely where on the border their main object of concern — several caravans of Central American migrants, the first of which is now in central Mexico — will head.”

As some predicted over the summer, the tax law failed to work as a campaign issue for Republicans, and so immigration fear mongering filled the void. This week Republicans announced that they would not tackle additional tax cuts until 2019. 

Turkey revealed that Khashoggi was strangled upon entrance in the consulate, and then his body was dismembered and destroyed.

The Trump administration reimposed oil sanctions on Iran that were in place before the nuclear pact, however they gave wavers to eight mostly Asian countries. Europe was not granted any waivers.

Congressional democrats released more evidence this week that the Trump Administration is trying to keep the FBI headquarters from being moved to outside Washington. They want the current J. Edgar Hoover building to be demolished and replaced in the same site. The suspicion is that Trump does not want commercial buildings build on the current site because that might lead to competition with his hotel.

In Russia News:

This week, Muller’s team interviewed people, including Bannon, about Roger Stone’s connection to Wikileaks and the release of the Podesta emails.

Roger Stone is in the news a lot this week. He has released some emails with Bannon where they are discussing the Wikileaks dump. Text messages with a friend who is being interviewed by Muller have also been released. This indicates that in this campaign season lull, Mueller and the grand jury have been busy talking to people about Stone, who are in turn talking to the press. It may indicate that charges will be brought against Stone after the election.

The Jaworski “Road Map,” a Special Prosecutor’s report to congress about impeaching Nixon was unsealed this week. It had never been made public and several groups, including Lawfare.org pushed for its release in part to reveal a possible precedent for Mueller to follow regarding the Russia investigation and Trump.

Here is Wittes and Goldsmith’s analysis. They note that the Jaworski Road Map did not accuse Nixon of crimes, just laid out the evidence of the crimes; it did not recommend impeachment but said “that the evidence referred to above [should] be transmitted forthwith to the House Judiciary Committee for such use as it considers appropriate.” In other words, less it more. They close with one important lesson of the Trump era: “There is a tendency in the age of Donald Trump to assume that excess is needed to combat excess, that the proper response to gross norm violations involve the scrapping of other norms. Yet faced with Richard Nixon, Leon Jaworski wrote a meticulous 55-page document that contains not a word of excess. He transmitted it to Congress, where it did not leak. It is powerful partly because it is so by-the-book. Kind of like Bob Mueller.”

Then there was this strange story: “A company that appears to be run by a pro-Trump conspiracy theorist offered to pay women to make false claims against Special Counsel Robert Mueller in the days leading up to the midterm elections—and the special counsel’s office has asked the FBI to weigh in. ‘When we learned last week of allegations that women were offered money to make false claims about the Special Counsel, we immediately referred the matter to the FBI for investigation,’ the Mueller spokesman Peter Carr told me in an email on Tuesday.”

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Trump’s Job Approval Rating: 42.1%

Erdogan gave the most detailed account of the timeline surrounding Khashoggi’s murder, including how Saudi’s scouted the city and countryside the day before, and how they sent a body double walking around town after the murder.

On Wednesday pipe bombs were sent to Obama, the Clintons and CNN’s New York studios. This follows similar bombs sent to George Soros on Monday.

In tweets and public statements, one at a rally and another at the White House, Trump has all but blamed the pipe bomb delivery–up to 10 by the end of the week–on the mainstream media’s negative reporting on his administration: “A very big part of the Anger we see today in our society is caused by the purposely false and inaccurate reporting of the Mainstream Media that I refer to as Fake News.”

He also fed into the false flag conspiracy theory that is percolating in right wing circles by tweeting the word “bomb” in quotes: “Republicans are doing so well in early voting, and at the polls, and now this “Bomb” stuff happens and the momentum greatly slows – news not talking politics. Very unfortunate, what is going on. Republicans, go out and vote!” This was tweeted just hours before the bomber, an outspoken Trump supporter, was captured. Here is a list of all the people who were the target of the bomber, and they are all Trump critics or people Trump has called out for criticism. 

Trump is clearly frustrated that the bombing attempts have moved the news cycle away from the midterm, and potentially created a negative narrative for himself and Republicans. In a public statement after the suspect was captured he said of the Republicans running for Congress: “They were also competing with this story,” he said with palpable frustration. “Now our law enforcement’s done such a good job,” he added, “maybe that can start to disappear rapidly because we don’t like those stories.”

On Saturday a virulent anti-Semite shot up a Pittsburgh Synagogue, killing 11 people at a baby-naming ceremony.

Immigration News:

According to new government numbers:

• 47 separated kids still in custody.
• Parents of 33 already deported.
• Lawyers for families say “government has not yet provided… a timeline” for 258 reunited but still-detained families.

We also learned that the government revised its number of children separated to 2,668, having discovered 14 previously unaccounted for separated children.

According to a new government report, the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Health and Human Services were in the dark about the child-separation policy until Sessions publicly declared the Zero-Tolerance policy, thus they were unprepared to carry it out. Also: “Data released on Tuesday by Customs and Border Protection, the parent agency of the Border Patrol, showed that the agency apprehended 16,658 people in families in September, a record. Such arrests reached 107,212 for the 2018 fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30, exceeding the previous high of 77,857 in the 2016 fiscal year. In total, nearly 400,000 people were apprehended by border agents in the 2018 fiscal year.”

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Trump’s Job Approval: 42.4%

On Monday the Saudi’s floated the idea that Kashoggi was accidentally killed during an interrogation, after two weeks of denying that he was even dead. Trump spoke to reporters and floated the idea that “rogue killers” may be responsible.

In an interview with the AP, Trump said about Khashoggi’s death and Saudi Arabia: “Here we go again with, you know, you’re guilty until proven innocent. I don’t like that. We just went through that with Justice Kavanaugh. And he was innocent all the way.” On his conversation with the Saudi king: “Yesterday, when I spoke with the father, not so much today, but when I spoke to the father, it just sounded to me like he felt like he did not do it. He did not know about it and it sounded like, you know, the concept of rogue killers.”

The Saudi released $100 million to the U.S. on Tuesday. The payment was promised in August for stabilization in Syria, but there was always a question to whether it would be paid in full and by what date. The fact that it was paid during the Khashoggi controversy, when Trump is currently giving rhetorical cover to the Saudi, leads experts to believe the “Saudis want Trump to know that his cooperation in covering for the Khashoggi affair is important to the Saudi monarch,” and that “Much of its financial promises to the U.S. will be contingent on this cooperation.”

On Wednesday Turkey leaked details of the audio recording of Khashoggi’s murder by Saudi agents.

“The New York Times has confirmed independently that at least nine of 15 suspects identified by Turkish authorities worked for the Saudi security services, military or other government ministries. One of them, Maher Abdulaziz Mutreb, was a diplomat assigned to the Saudi Embassy in London in 2007, according to a British diplomatic roster. He traveled extensively with the crown prince, perhaps as a bodyguard.”

By the end of the week Saudi Arabia changed their story and admitted that Khashoggi was killed by accident in a fistfight with his interrogators. They claim security guards places him in a chokehold and he died as a result. This story was not widely believed. Except by Trump, who says he believes the Saudi explanation is plausible. He is breaking with U.S intelligence, who believe “he was assassinated on high-level orders from the Saudi royal court.”

Trump boosters in the far right and in Congress, including Don Jr, are beginning to circulate and spread negative stories about Khashoggi in the hopes of protecting Trump from a political backlash for supporting Saudi Arabia.

The Washington Post published Khashoggi’s last column, which was submitted before he disappeared. In it he Arab states where people “are either uninformed or misinformed. They are unable to adequately address, much less publicly discuss, matters that affect the region and their day-to-day lives. A state-run narrative dominates the public psyche, and while many do not believe it, a large majority of the population falls victim to this false narrative.”

ProPublica released an investigative report about the Trump organization during the early 2000s that documents how “post-millennium comeback and global expansion rested on the brilliant purity of a licensing strategy that paid him millions simply for the use of his name” is another Trump-crafted lie.

Immigration News:

In that same AP interview, Trump spoke an a range of subjects, including his child-separation policy, where he denied it ever happened:  “As I just said, we’ve taken children who have no parents with them standing on the border. We’ve taken many children, and I’m not talking about a small percentage, I’m talking about a very large percentage where they have no people, no parents. In addition to that, we’re separating children who are just met by people that are using them coming into the border, not their parents. They are using them coming into the border. … The parents would sometimes come up with their kids, leave them at the border and go back. So we’re in this position where we have an innocent young child at the border; there are no parents. We take them in, we care for the child and then we get horrible publicity.”

Sara Sanders added: “I’ll send you guys the DHS report that has the numbers that show that, like, 75 percent of the kids were actually self-separated. Their parents chose to go back and signed the paperwork to leave their kids behind.”

After a record number of migrants arrived at the border in September–over 16,000–I.C.E is now putting families in budget motels in the Tuscan area because there is no where else to keep them.

In Russia News:

While the Muller team has been quiet this election season, they have been busy, still interviewing witnesses, convening the grand jury, and meeting with Manafort nine times in four weeks.

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Trump’s Job Approval: 42.3%

On October 2, The New York Times published its year and a half investigation of how Trump inherited his wealth from his father, and the 13 page story was reprinted in the Sunday print edition on October 7. It details how Fred Trump used numerous tax dodges to pass his wealth to his children while paying very little tax. It also proves that Trump has continuously lied about the fact that he inherited very little money from his father. Fred Trump started giving him millions when he was just a boy and it continued into the late 1990s. The story did not break through as a major scandal in part because it there are no direct legal implications on the president, and it was released the week of the Kavanaugh confirmation debate. However, it is an important historical record, and it will provide leads to other journalists or investigators about where to look for the next story about Trump’s finances.

At a ceremony at the White House Monday, before the other members of the Supreme Court, Kavanaugh sounded conciliatory: “With gratitude and no bitterness,” he would be “a force for stability and unity.” But Trump said “I want to apologize to Brett and the entire Kavanaugh family for the terrible pain you have been forced to endure… a campaign of political and personal destruction based on lies and deception.” He and other Republicans hope to use this issue to continue to motivate GOP voters for the election four weeks away.

Nikki Haley unexpectedly resigned on Tuesday. White House aids were unclear about why she chose to do it now, four weeks before the midterms. She claimed it was fatigue of six years as governor and 2 at the UN, and said she has no plans to run for president in 2020 but will instead be supporting Trump.

A UN report on climate change was released this week. It said that by 2040 the world will warm 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, and the consequences of that are more sever than previously known. Recommendations include steeper taxes on carbon than any nation is currently considering, and to stop burning coal. The Trump Administration ignored the report.

It is believed that a Saudi journalist living in Virginia, Jamal Khashoggi, was lured to his death in Turkey by the Saudi royal family. It is causing a rift between the Trump and Congress over the administration’s uncritical support for Saudi Arabia. Politico reports that the White House is hoping this “will blow over the same way other thorny dilemmas involving Saudi Arabia have in recent years.”

In Russia News:

Peter W. Smith, who was trying to purchase Clinton emails in 2016, and who died 10 days after talking about this to a reporter, is of increasing interest to the Muller team. Smith raised “at least” $100,000 in secret for the project.

The New York Times reports that Rick Gates worked with an Israeli company staffed by former intelligence operatives to create a social media strategy that would: 1) use “authentic looking fake online identities” to sway support against Cruz during the nomination fight; 2) use “clandestine means to build intelligence dossiers” on Clinton; 3) “to help Mr. Trump by using social media to help expose or amplify division among rival campaigns and factions… [such as] minority, suburban female and undecided voters in battleground states.” No work was done beyond the proposal, and this appears to be separate from the Russian influence campaign. It shows how these tools were viewed at least by the Trump campaign, as a natural outgrowth of traditional campaigning.

In Immigration News:

The Trump Administration, and Stephen Miller in particular, are pushing a way to still separate families at the border. They are looking into invalidating the Flores Decree which limits family detention to 20 days. Or applying “binary choice” where they detain a family for 20 days, then make the following offer to the parents: either stay in the shelter with your child for months or years until your court hearing, or give up your child to be placed with relatives or foster parents living in the US. August saw a large increase in families arriving at the border.

Here is Dara Lind on binary choice: “And it’s not clear where it would put the families who make either choice. Because the Trump administration doesn’t yet have the capacity to detain thousands of families for months or years, it’s not clear what it would do if most families chose detention. Meanwhile, HHS’s Office of Refugee Resettlement is currently looking after record numbers of unaccompanied children, partly due to the fact that some relatives eligible to sponsor their children are (justifiably) afraid they’ll risk deportation if they step forward. So if most parents chose separation, that agency would be overwhelmed.”

There is a growing danger that some of the children separated from their parents will be given up for adoption to their U.S. foster parents, according to this AP investigation.

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Trump’s Job Approval: 41.8%

One consistent feature of Trump’s job approval rating is that it ping pongs up and down over the course of several weeks. When the approval rating increases, as a result of positive news or simply reversion to the norm, a series of events invariably occur to bring about a dip. When the rating drops, the negative news cycle inevitably burns out and the rating begins to tick back up, usually regaining whatever approval was lost during the dip.

The chart below measures the approval rating at the bottom of each dip to the highest point of the recovery. For most of 2018, Trump’s approval has ping ponged between 40% and 42%.

Now that we are less than one month from the election, the question is whether Trump will be in a dip or a recovery on election day. The difference of even a couple points may make a difference in how many seats Democrats can pick up in the House (An approval rating of 36% vs. 41% is worth ~20 seats). Even though 42% is low, it is Trump’s happy place, where half the country is not actively angry or concerned about his performance and the people in the middle (whoever is represented in that 2-4% of the country whose opinions keep ping ponging) are inclined to tell pollsters they approve of him. But when the rating is closer to 40% (and it dipped to 39% for a hand full of days last month) something has happened to put the country in a bad mood about Trump, and that mood could make the difference in close Mid-Term races.

Let’s look at the data.

The average duration of a Trump approval increase is 2.6 weeks after a dip has ended. The longest sustained increase was 8 weeks, from March to June, 2018, but most all of the others have only lasted 1-4 weeks. Trump’s previous dip (his 12th) ended on September 15. For the current rebound to last through the election it would have to last 8 weeks.

It’s not unreasonable to expect the quiet spell to last that long. Republicans and Trump have powerful motivation to keep things calm until Election Day. On September 2 Chuck Grassley tweeted: “My prayer is that our President can be as disciplined in his discourse and speeches like last two wks b4 his election/Then we will be successful in next two months like he was successful.”

But what might cause an approval dip to begin, and can Trump control those events? Here are the four categories of political events that correspond to these dips, with the percent of the 12 dips that each helped to drive. Note that 10 of the 12 dips were driven by 2-4 factors occurring simultaneously.

• Policy actions (either from the White House or the GOP congress)–67%
• Big events in the Russia investigation–67%
• Broken cultural or political taboos–50%
• White House chaos stories–33%

Let’s look at the likelihood of each of these factors flaring up in the next month.

White House Chaos

These stories usually stem from high profile firings, staff misbehavior, or very visible SNAFUs due to Trump’s unorthodox management style–all things that the White House can try to keep a lid on for at least a few weeks. Olivia Nuzzis’ wild story in New York Magazine published Monday is evidence the White House is sensitive to this. Staff believed she was going to write an article about how Trump was going to soon fire John Kelly, and Trump invited her into the Oval Office, and lined up Sara Sanders, Kelly, Pence, Pence’s chief of staff, and the Secretary of State, all to convince her: “We have a very smooth-running organization even though it’s never reported that way. So the real story is that. It’s really the real story. When you walk in here, you don’t see chaos. There is no chaos. The media likes to portray chaos. There’s no chaos.”

Taboos

For these to affect approval rating, there has to be an large national event–a White Power protest, a press conference with Putin, the death of a war hero–upon which Trump then immolates himself with a response that is completely at odds with the public sentiment. These are infrequent enough that we can assume it won’t happen before the election, especially since Congressional Republicans are begging Trump to behave.

Policy

This is not the season for Congress or the White House to push a policy agenda. Barring any unexpected situation that requires a policy response, and there is no guarantee that response would be perceived negatively, it is unlikely there will be many news cycles driven by policy details. One exception may be the Texas judge who is set to rule on Obamacare, invalidating all or parts of the law that protect people with preexisting conditions. One of Trump’s largest dips was in 2017 and resulted in part from Paul Ryan’s attempt to repeal Obamacare. If the judge rules before Election Day, it will cause a decline that will hurt many GOP candidates.

Russia Investigation

Trump has good reason to complain about the Russia Investigation because big breaks in the case have been major factors in 8 of his 12 approval dips. Mueller’s operation will run silent until after the midterms, but news could come from other sources. For example, someone in the intelligence community with a juicy piece of evidence could leak it to the press this month. On Twitter there are rumors (but aren’t there always?) that evidence may soon come out that proves Michael Cohen actually did go to Prague in 2016 to meet with Russian spies. Something like that, which would blow massive hole in the No Collusion narrative, would definitely start an approval dip. I find this the most likely scenario of the ones listed above.

But more likely than not, restrain and political survival instincts will make this a pretty quiet month in Trump world.