WaPo:
New report on Russian disinformation, prepared for the Senate, shows the operation’s scale and sweep
The data sets used by the researchers were provided by Facebook, Twitter and Google and covered several years up to mid-2017, when the social media companies cracked down on the known Russian accounts. The report, which also analyzed data separately provided to House intelligence committee members, contains no information on more recent political moments, such as November’s midterm election.
“What is clear is that all of the messaging clearly sought to benefit the Republican Party--and specifically Donald Trump,” the report says. “Trump is mentioned most in campaigns targeting conservatives and right-wing voters, where the messaging encouraged these groups to support his campaign. The main groups that could challenge Trump were then provided messaging that sought to confuse, distract and ultimately discourage members from voting.”
Michael Cohen (the columnist))/Boston Globe:
Why aren’t we talking about impeachment?
Ironically, it’s not just Republicans who are blocking such a step. Last weekend, Democratic Representative Jerry Nadler of New York, who will be the next chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, argued that if Trump did instruct his former lawyer, Michael Cohen (the other one), to make hush payments to women who alleged affairs with him, it would represent “impeachable offenses.” But “whether they’re important enough to justify an impeachment,” said Nadler, “is a different question.”
According to Nadler, several questions need to be asked. For example, “How important were they? Do they rise to the gravity where you should undertake an impeachment?”
In a vacuum, this argument might make sense, but it’s not as if we don’t have substantial evidence that Trump has committed multiple impeachable offenses. Indeed, the president’s involvement in a conspiracy to violate campaign finance laws might be the least of his criminal acts.
R’s are divided, Ds are united.
Can’t get re-elected with those numbers.
Kurt Bardella/USA Today:
I became a Democrat a year ago and found my own voice. It changed everything.
I’ll tell you, being a Democrat is a heck of a lot more emotionally exhausting than being a Republican was, because I care about a lot more things than I used to. There must be some wisdom in the old saying that “ignorance is bliss.” It’s funny, because I remember as a Republican, we would often mock “bleeding-heart liberals” who are always “caring” so much. I think to myself now, what the hell is wrong with these Republicans who don’t seem to care about anything at all?
Joseph Cranney with a great twitter thread, all 50 states:
Local journalism 2018 in review -- in every corner of the U.S. this year, local reporters went to work every day looking to expose wrongdoing in their communities. Here’s just some of what they found:
WaPo:
Mounting legal threats surround Trump as nearly every organization he has led is under investigation
The mounting inquiries are building into a cascade of legal challenges that threaten to dominate Trump’s third year in the White House. In a few weeks, Democrats will take over in the House and pursue their own investigations into all of the above — and more.
The ultimate consequences for Trump are still unclear. Past Justice Department opinions have held that a sitting president may not be charged with a federal crime.
House Democrats may eventually seek to impeach Trump. But, for now, removing him from office appears unlikely: It would require the support of two-thirds of the Senate, which is controlled by Republicans.
Jack Shafer/Politico:
Week 82: Far from Winding Down, Mueller’s Probe Feels Energized
A slew of plea deals, Trump pals turned witnesses, and new investigations seem to defy predictions the special counsel will wrap up soon.
The winding down of the Mueller machine doesn’t mean that his show might end soon. The much rumored—and predicted—indictments of Roger Stone and Jerome Corsi have yet to be handed down. With both Gates and Cohen still willing to sing, Mueller might convert some of their warblings into new or expanded charges. Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump have come under Mueller’s gaze, says Yahoo News, for their work on the Trump Tower project in Moscow, which we now know was pursued by the Trump Organization until June 2016, six months longer than Cohen had told federal investigators. John Dean and Fox News legal analyst Andrew Napolitano have speculated that Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner will be indicted, perhaps in connection with the back channel work he did with a foreign government during the Trump transition. And then there’s the mystery witness who has been fighting one of Mueller’s grand jury subpoenas under cloak of secrecy in the federal courthouse. Main event or sideshow? Nobody knows. The Watergate investigation lasted four years. The Iran-Contra investigation went on for more than six years, and Whitewater for more than seven. In fact, were Mueller to call it a day before New Year’s, as some suggest he will, it would make this one of the shorter probes ever.
Marjory Eagan/Boston Globe:
Race, not abortion, was the founding issue of the religious right
This raises unsettling questions: How much of antiabortion rhetoric is really about the unborn, and how much is a convenient and even cynical cover for white evangelicals to support, as they did, a white supremacist like Roy Moore, in Alabama, or Trump himself, leader of the American birther movement and defender of neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Va.?
Balmer’s scholarship on the racial underpinnings of the religious right — and the link between the antiabortion movement and a certain political agenda — is more than familiar to a group of Americans who overwhelmingly rejected both Moore and Trump. That would be black evangelicals.
And in yet a different direction;
NY Times:
The Hard Truths of Trying to ‘Save’ the Rural Economy
There are 60 million people, almost one in five Americans, living on farms, in hamlets and in small towns across the landscape. For the last quarter century the story of these places has been one of relentless economic decline.
This is, of course, not news to the people who live in rural and small-town America, who have been fighting for years to reverse this decline. But now, the nation’s political class is finally noticing. The election of Donald Trump, powered in no small degree by rural voters, has brought the troubles of small-town America to national attention, with an urgent question: What can be done to revive it?…
And if today’s polarized politics are noxious, what might they look like in a country perpetually divided between diverse, prosperous liberal cities and a largely white rural America in decline? As Mr. Galston warned: “Think through the political consequences of saying to a substantial portion of Americans, which is even more substantial in political terms, ‘We think you’re toast.’ ”
The distress of 50 million Americans should concern everyone. Powerful economic forces are arrayed against rural America and, so far, efforts to turn it around have failed. Not every small town can be a tech hub, nor should it be. But that can’t be the only answer.
Want some health care legal stories?
What the Lawless Obamacare Ruling Means — NYT
Health-care law ruling puts Republicans on the defensive after campaign promises — WaPo
Obamacare crusade grows more fraught for GOP after court ruling – LA times
Trump’s Sabotage of Obamacare Is Illegal – NYT
The two NYT pieces were written by lawyers on opposite sides of many ACA debates (Nicholas Bagley and Jonathan Adler) and a few lawsuits but united on this.