The country’s ultra-orthodox power brokers are losing influence as more moderate forces push back. On Saturday, only days after the collapse of government coalition talks, tens of thousands of ordinary citizens boarded buses for what will go down in Israeli history as the first freedom rides. For generations, public transport …
It seems relevant that Trump’s preparation for the presidency has been years of straight up swindling. Donald Trump has famously refused to disclose his tax returns, and waged a series of implausible but dogged legal challenges to prevent those returns from being obtained by Congress and the New York attorney …
Trump’s top congressional defender continues his crazy lawsuit binge. Last week, two news reports connected Devin Nunes, ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee and a key Donald Trump defender, to the Ukraine scandal. Both stories report on explosive allegations by the lawyer for Lev Parnas, Rudy Giuliani’s now-arrested partner …
The ambassador’s definition of “acting on good faith” meant following orders, even orders he found morally troubling. When Gordon Sondland testified at the House impeachment hearings on November 20, having “refreshed” his memory and recalled several incriminating facts that had escaped him the first time around, the ambassador was at pains to explain that …
A top henchman turns on the president in explosive testimony. Gordon Sondland, the European Union ambassador, was a lynchpin of President Trump’s defense in the Ukraine scandal. Sondland had been a loyal functionary throughout, carrying out the president’s directives dutifully if reluctantly. Republicans publicly telegraphed their plan to pin the whole scheme …
Roger Stone is guilty, Trump’s goons shook down Ukraine, and Rudy Giuliani might be next. From the perspective of President Trump’s frustrated critics, the attempts to subject him to legal accountability have amounted to a long string of failures. Robert Mueller failed to produce a clear indictment of his dealings …
Republicans are pretending Trump’s agenda in Ukraine was opposing corruption, which is the literal opposite of reality. Louisiana senator John Kennedy offered one of the Republican Party’s emerging defenses of President Trump’s extortion scheme. “Here are the two possible scenarios,” he said on Face the Nation yesterday. “Number one, the president asked …
Memories of the shock of Election Night 2016 could become a strategic asset for Democrats, who sure won’t get over-confident in 2020. It’s a sore subject that many left-of-center folks would just as soon not hear about today, but it is the third anniversary of the extremely improbable election of …
Trump is on course to win reelection and Democrats are ceding the center to him. In 2018, Democratic candidates waded into hostile territory and flipped 40 House districts, many of them moderate or conservative in their makeup. In almost every instance, their formula centered on narrowing their target profile by …
The problem is that Trump claims an absolute right to trade foreign policy for campaign help, and plans to continue. Every day, the vast accumulated evidence that President Trump used American policy toward Ukraine to leverage investigations of his domestic rivals grows even more vast. Republicans are slowly working around …
The “rough transcript” is a cover-up, Vindman testifies to Congress. When he released a “transcript” of his July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, President Trump called it a “an exact word-for-word transcript of the conversation, taken by very talented stenographers.” Trump could not have been more explicit …
