With stocks at record highs and President Trump gloating at the “record strength” of the US economy, it appears confidence is coming back as sentiment among Republicans reached an all-time record high in the latest Bloomberg Consumer Comfort Index.
That’s quite a red wave…
The peak spread in confidence between Democrats and Republicans occurred in July 2004 (heading into George W Bush’s 2nd term election)… President Trump is currently very close to that peak…
Additionally, Gallup reports forty-five percent of Americans now have a favorable view of the Republican Party, a nine-point gain from last September’s 36%. It is the party’s most positive image since it registered 47% in January 2011, shortly after taking control of the House in the 2010 midterm elections. Forty-four percent give the Democratic Party a favorable rating.
The parity in Republicans’ and Democrats’ favorable ratings marks a change from what has generally been the case since Barack Obama’s election as president in November 2008.
Only one other time in the last decade has the Republican Party had a significantly higher score than the Democratic Party. That one exception came in November 2014, immediately after elections that saw Republicans capture control of the Senate and expand their majority in the House, when 42% rated the GOP favorably and 36% the Democrats.
Gallup concludes that for the Republican Party, less than two months away from an election that could see them lose control of both the House and the Senate, gains in public favorability are a welcome sign.
And finally, perhaps of most note as the media push the blue wave mania…
We note that Independents are well, independent, with sentiment soaring to its highest since Dec 2000…
As Bloomberg highlights, political independents have split from Democrats and grown more optimistic as the economy has forged ahead.
The question is – what happens if stocks crash between now and November?
Professors at Yale Law School canceled classes Monday to allow students to protest the Judge Brett Kavanaugh hearing, according to emails obtained exclusively by Campus Reform.
Dana Bolger, a Yale Law School student and senior editor at Feministing, posted a series of tweets regarding the cancellations. According to screenshots of emails she posted to Twitter, Professor James Forman Jr. and at least four other Yale Law School professors canceled classes on Monday.
Kavanaugh, President Donald Trump’s embattled Supreme Court justice nominee, is a Yale Law School alumnus.
Additional emails obtained exclusively by Campus Reform show that as many as 20 Yale Law School faculty members canceled or rescheduled up to 31 classes on Monday because of the Kavanaugh hearing.
Yale Law School spokeswoman Debra Kroszer told Campus Reform on Monday that “Yale Law School did not cancel all classes,” but, she added, “many faculty members chose to reschedule or cancel their own classes today. And some held classes as usual.”
“While I respect the right of the students protesting to make their voices heard, I disagree with professors’ decisions to cancel classes at the request of those protesters,” Emily Hall, a student at Yale Law school, told Campus Reform in a statement. “It effectively encourages students to participate in the protests and penalizes those who choose not to by disrupting the class schedule,” Hall added.
In another tweet, Bolger states that on September 21, “YLS faculty demanded fair process on Kavanaugh sexual assault allegations, [but the] @YaleLawSch dean chose to remind us that she ‘cannot take a position for or against a nominee.’” Bolger then added that the YLS dean, “didn’t bother her [a] few months ago when she issued [a] press release fawning over his nomination.”
Today, when YLS faculty demanded fair process on Kavanaugh sexual assault allegations, @YaleLawSch dean chose to remind us that she “cannot take a position for or against a nominee.”
Didn’t bother her few months ago when she issued press release fawning over his nomination.
In a September 21 open letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Yale Law School faculty stated in part that “the confirmation process must always be conducted, and appointments made, in a manner that gives Americans reason to trust the Supreme Court.”
“Some questions are so fundamental to judicial integrity that the Senate cannot rush past them without undermining the public’s confidence in the Court. This is particularly so for an appointment that will yield a deciding vote on women’s rights and myriad other questions of immense consequence in American lives.”
According to a tweet from Bolger, the “Yale Law School students and alums will be holding a press conference TODAY AT 3:15PM in the Kennedy Caucus Room in Russell [Senate Office Building]- where Anita Hill hearings were held.”
Students back on campus at Yale hosted a sit-in Monday morning to “protest both the nomination of Judge Kavanaugh, this school’s implicit endorsement of him, and our administration’s complicity in widespread sexual harassment in the legal profession,” according to an email obtained by Campus Reform.
Yale Law students are DONE with our institution’s complicity in pushing forward this nominee.
Campus Reform reached out to Bolger, Forman, and Wishnie for comment but did not hear back by publishing time. If and when a response is received the article will be updated.
As Iranians held funerals following the Saturday terror attack on a military parade in the southwestern city of Ahvaz, the acting commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard said that the Islamic Republic would “take revenge” against the United States and “some of its biggest regional allies,” according to CBS News.
25 people were killed and at least 60 more wounded in Iran’s largest terrorism incident in nearly a decade. Nearly half of the dead are members of the Revolutionary Guard.
Speaking at the funeral ceremony, acting commander Hossein Salami vowed to strike back against the “triangle” of Saudi Arabia, Israel and the United States.
Hossein Salami, acting commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps
“You are responsible for these actions; you will face the repercussions,” said Salami. “We warn all of those behind the story, we will take revenge.”
Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warned on Monday that the five attackers were paid by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – despite the Islamic State claiming responsibility for the violence – and that Iran would “severely punish” those behind the bloodshed, by which he meant the United States and Israel, who were accused by the deputy head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards as being involved in the attack and said they should expect a “devastating” response from Tehran.
“Based on reports, this cowardly act was done by people who the Americans come to help when they are trapped in Syria and Iraq, and are paid by Saudi Arabia and the UAE,” Khamenei said on his official website.
On Monday, thousands of mourners gathered at the Sarallah Mosque on Ahvaz’s Taleghani junction, carrying caskets in the sweltering heat.
Others, mainly young people wearing ethnic clothes of the region’s Arab minority, held large photographs of those slain in the attack. Of the 25 killed, 12 people were from Ahvaz and the rest from elsewhere in Khuzestan.
The procession walked down the Naderi and Zand Streets, many weeping and beating their chests, a traditional way of showing grief. Mourners played drums, cymbals and horns, according to local custom.
The crowd also chanted slogans of “Death to U.S.” and “Death to Israel” – chants staple at Iranian political rallies.
The attack has been claimed by Arab separatists as well as the Islamic State. Five assailants reportedly involved in the attack were all killed as Iranian troops returned fire in the attack and subsequent chase. Meanwhile, the Islamic State posted what they claim is three of its fighters preparing the attack, according to IRNA. Two of the men featured are speaking Arabic with an Iraqi accent according to the New York Times.
On Sunday, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani accused an unnamed US-allied regional country of supporting the attackers – thought likely to be either Saudi Arabia, the UAE or Bahrain – all close US military allies that view Iran as a regional threat for its support for militant groups.
Iran’s Foreign Ministry, meanwhile, has summoned Western diplomats and accused them of providing safe havens for the Arab separatists.
“All of those small mercenary countries that we see in this region are backed by America. It is Americans who instigate them and provide them with necessary means to commit these crimes,” Rouhani said in front of the UN General Assembly in New York.
In response, US ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, insisted that the Trump administration has no plans for regime change in Iran – telling CNN: “He can blame us all he wants. The thing he’s got to do is look in the mirror.”
During Monday’s funeral ceremonies in Ahvaz, Iranian Intelligence Minister Mahmoud Alavai said that several suspects in the attack have been identified and that “a majority of them were detained.”
“We will punish the terrorists, one by one,” he promised the mourning families.
Last year, Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, suggested that it was time to turn external pressure on Iran to internal pressure – and has in repeated interviews likened Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to Hitler. At one point Salman said “I believe the Iranian supreme leader makes Hitler look good.“
Some, such as the secretary of Iran’s National Security Council, tried to cool tempers and said Tehran needed to talk to its neighbours to avoid tensions. “It’s essential to be fully aware and increase our constructive dialogues to neutralise the plots of enemies who want to create suspicion and disagreement among regional countries,” Ali Shamkhani said.
And yet, even he criticized the United States, saying U.S. sanctions against Iran were illegal and that President Donald Trump was using them as a tool for “personal revenge”.
Meanwhile, the UAE – a close ally of Saudi Arabia and Washington – rejected Iran’s allegations alluding to its involvement in the violence. Commenting on the deadly attack, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, when asked by a Fox News interviewer if the United States played any role in the attack, said: “When you have a security incident at home, blaming others is an enormous mistake.” He did however say that the loss of innocent lives was tragic, Pompeo added. There has been no reaction yet from Saudi Arabia or Israel.
Iran’s accusations of its Gulf neighbors will antagonize Iran’s regional foe Saudi Arabia. The oil super-powers are waging a war for influence across the Middle East, backing opposite sides in Syria, Yemen, Iraq and Lebanon, while Saudi Arabia is eager to steal Iran’s oil market share as US sanctions force clients to seek oil from other suppliers.
There was a silver lining for the economically embattled ruling regime: analysts said the violence has led to a boost in domestic support for the Guards which they could use to silence their critics, who include pragmatic President Hassan Rouhani.
Rouhani engineered Iran’s 2015 nuclear deal with world powers that ushered in a cautious detente with Washington before tensions flared anew with Trump’s decision in May to pull out of the accord and reimpose sanctions on Tehran.
Ahvaz National Resistance, an Iranian ethnic Arab opposition movement which seeks a separate state in oil-rich Khuzestan province, and Islamic State have both claimed responsibility. Both were ignored.
The nation is failing as a direct consequence of these four catastrophic policies.
It’s admittedly a tough task to select the four most disastrous presidential policies of the past 60 years, given the great multitude to choose from. Here are my top choices and the reasons why I selected these from a wealth of policy disasters.
1. President Johnson’s expansion of the Vietnam War, which set the stage for President Nixon’s continuation of that disastrous war for an additional five years.
For those who missed the 30-minute lecture on the Vietnam War in history class, Johnson took a low-intensity guerrilla war in South Vietnam in which the U.S. was supporting a corrupt and venal South Vietnamese elite and expanded it into a full-blown war with over 500,000 troops on the ground and numerous other forces engaged in a vast regional conflict.
Johnson’s basic motivation was domestic politics: being a domestic political animal, Johnson was obsessed by the possibility that the Republicans could accuse the Democrats of being “soft on Communism” and win congressional seats in the next election if he declared victory and withdrew from Vietnam.
To insure this wouldn’t happen, Johnson relentlessly pursued a war in ways that guaranteed it couldn’t be won while killing and maiming millions of people, mostly civilians, and squandering the lives of U.S. servicemen and women.
Johnson did not follow the Constitutional requirement of declaring war with congressional approval. He opted to undermine the Constitution with an open-ended declaration of Imperial Presidential Powers (The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution) to wage unlimited war based on a “fake news” fictitious attack on U.S. ships in the Gulf of Tonkin.
But the war itself was only one disaster of many. To mask the complete and utter failure of his “limited” war, Johnson launched a massive, concerted “fake news” propaganda effort in support of the “we’re winning the war” narrative.
When Daniel Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers, the true story was revealed: thousands of Deep State insiders knew the war was unwinnable and was being lost, at great cost. But few dared challenge the disastrous policy or the lies and propaganda being distributed by the federal government in support of the war.
Meanwhile, the “law enforcement” efforts of the FBI were focused on draft evaders and other dissenters. Organized crime got a free pass as the FBI was politicized to fight domestic dissent–an institutionalized politicization that continues to this day.
Both the FBI and CIA engaged in concerted, covert and completely illegal campaigns to infiltrate, disrupt and destroy dissenters in the anti-war and civil rights movements. This was well-documented by the congressional Church investigations in the early 1970s.
Simply put, Johnson’s policy of pursuing an illegal full-scale war laid waste to the Constitution and launched an era of official “fake news” propaganda and the politicization of federal law enforcement. These disasters live on to this day, as official “fake news” propaganda and the politicization of federal law enforcement is the New Normal.
No wonder the Vietnam War remains a poorly understood taboo topic; understanding the destructive consequences of the war’s embedded policies is extremely dangerous to the status quo.
2. President Clinton’s deregulation of banking/finance in the early 1990s.Eliminating the common-sense and easily enforceable Glass-Steagall Act separating investment and commercial banking (and other limitations as well) opened the floodgates of financialization, i.e. institutionalized fraud and embezzlement which reached full flower in the 2008 Global Financial Meltdown triggered by U.S. banks and other financial institutions.
3. President G.W. Bush’s Invasion of Iraq and the launch of Endless War ™.President Bush followed Johnson’s playbook to a Tee: a “fake news” fictitious excuse for launching a full-blown war (weapons of mass destruction lurking in hidden bunkers, etc.), a wildly unrealistic understanding of the culture and politics on the ground (civilians would greet our conquering troops with flowers and smiles, etc.) and a propaganda machine spewing official fake news about our wonderful spreading of democracy via war.
The complete and utter failure of the invasion policy ushered in the current era of Endless War(tm). $3 trillion squandered and countless lives lost, and all for what geopolitical gains?
4. Presidents G.W. Bush and Obama’s rescue of predatory parasitic banks in 2008-09. The nation had a once-in-a-century opportunity to eradicate the predatory parasite (the financial sector) that’s killing the economy and democracy of the host (the USA) and replace the “too big to fail” aristocracy with 1,000 local and regional financial institutions with severely limited powers to institutionalize fraud and embezzlement and leverage fictitious collateral into unprecedented wealth and political power.
Instead, both Bush and Obama obediently knelt down and served up $16 trillion in taxpayer-funded bailouts, backstops and loan guarantees to rescue the “too big to fail” aristocracy from their well-earned collapse.
The crippling inequality and dysfunction plaguing our economy can be traced back to this abject and needless surrender of sovereignty to the financial sector.
The nation is failing as a direct consequence of these four catastrophic policies, policies that undermined our economy and system of governance, that introduced the poisons of official fake news and propaganda, that institutionalized the suppression of dissent and institutionalized the fraud and embezzlement of “too big to fail” financialization.
* * *
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JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon has never been one to shy away from the press. But barely two weeks after he boasted that he could defeat President Trump in a presidential race – inspiring speculation that the CEO of America’s largest bank by assets is shadow-campaigning for the Democratic nomination – Dimon is once again making the media rounds, sitting for an interview with CNBC’s Jim Cramer before delivering a widely reported address at the World Affairs Council in Philadelphia.
It was at this latter event that Dimon offered what was probably the closest he’s ever come to a mea culpa for Wall Street’s recklessness in the run-up to the financial crisis. With the US economy finally booming again after a tepid, nearly decade-long recovery, Dimon predicted that the public will require 25 years to get over the financial crisis and finally forgive Wall Street.
Still, he believes the government “did the right thing” by casting moral hazard aside and immediately coming to the rescue of the struggling banks, leaving American consumers to shoulder most of the consequences for their reckless behavior.
“It’s going to be 25 years,” Dimon, the CEO at JPMorgan Chase & Co., said Monday at a event sponsored by the World Affairs Council in Philadelphia.
Still, the government “did the right thing” to avoid a disaster, Dimon said, adding that the economy was facing the risk of another Great Depression.
Of course, as we have written extensively, not everyone agrees with Dimon’s sanctimonious comments about how “right” the government was in bailing him out, and we suspect it will be a lot more than 25 years before he or the government is forgiven, as Michael Hudson recently noted:
Today’s financial malaise for pension funds, state and local budgets and underemployment is largely a result of the 2008 bailout, not the crash. What was saved was not only the banks – or more to the point, as Sheila Bair pointed out, their bondholders – but the financial overhead that continues to burden today’s economy.
Also saved was the idea that the economy needs to keep the financial sector solvent by an exponential growth of new debt – and, when that does not suffice, by government purchase of stocks and bonds to support the balance sheets of the wealthiest layer of society. The internal contradiction in this policy is that debt deflation has become so overbearing and dysfunctional that it prevents the economy from growing and carrying its debt burden.
Trying to save the financial overgrowth of debt service by borrowing one’s way out of debt, or by monetary Quantitative Easing re-inflating real estate, stock and bond prices, enables the creditor One Percent to gain, not the indebted 99 Percent in the economy at large. Therefore, from the economy’s vantage point, instead of asking how the banks are to be saved “next time,” the question should be, how should we best let them go under – along with their stockholders, bondholders and uninsured depositors whose hubris imagined that their loans (other peoples’ debts) could go on rising without impoverishing society and preventing creditors from collecting in any event – except from government by gaining control over it…
…
President Obama, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and their fellow financial lobbyists at the Federal Reserve and Justice Department are credited with saving “the economy,” as if their donor class on Wall Street was a good proxy for the economy at large. “Saving the economy from a meltdown” has become the euphemism for saving bondholders and other members of the One Percent from taking losses on their bad loans. The “rescue” is Orwellian doublespeak for expropriating over nine million indebted Americans from their homes, while leaving surviving homeowners saddled with enormous bubble-mortgage payments to the FIRE sector’s owners.
What has been put in place is not a restoration of traditional status quo, but a reversal of over a century of central bank policy. Failed banks have not been taken into the public domain. They have been enriched far beyond their former levels.
Additionally, in what appeared to be another gesture of deference to Trump, Dimon said he agrees with the president that the US needs proper border security and immigration reforms.
He added that Trump is right about trade issues he has been raising with China, but wrong in using tariffs to address the problem.
Just in case you got the wrong idea, Dimon clarified to CNBC that, though he has no plans to run, he believes a CEO could make a good president, adding that Trump “was a CEO.”
“I would not say a CEO can not be a good president,” Dimon said in an interview with CNBC’s Jim Cramer on “Squawk Alley.” President Donald Trump “was a CEO,” he added.
“Jamie, you know what you sound like when you say these things, right? You sound like a politician,” Jim Cramer said.
China was closed overnight, but China stocks ETF in US shows weakness after China cancels trade talks…
European stocks sank – led by Spain and Italy – extending losses after Draghi discussed pulling away the punchbowl…
US futures show the initial reaction was lower on Sunday night, then as the US cash markets opened, S&P and Dow were dumped but Nasdaq was panic-bid (underperformer last week). S&P/Dow legged lower again on Rosenstein headlines then rebounded after headlines that Trump will meet him on Thursday…
Nasdaq managed to get green on the day as Trannies lagged – The Dow ended near the LoD…
Lots of M&A today but Sirius and Pandora ended the day red…
But both Randgold and Barrick ended the day green…
For a sense of today’s manic algo-buying, here are FANG stocks…opened gap down to last week’s lows then ramping almost 4% off those lows to erase all of last week’s losses…
Among the biggest losers were GE – which fell to 9-year lows on turbine woes and Iraq contract threats… (trading at the same price it traded at in Nov 1995)…
Despite the equity selling, Treasury yields rose marginally on the day (not helped by a weak 2Y auction – lowest BtC since 2008)…
The 10Y Yield rose on the day to a new cycle closing high, but as the chart below shows, the last few days’ ranges have been de minimus (as stocks have pumped and dumped)… (3.055%, 3.063%, 3.063%, 3.063%, 3.081%)
The Dollar Index had quite a day, sliding lower as Europe opened (China closed), spiked lower on EUR gains after Draghi inflation comments, only to surge higher for rest of day on safety concerns following Rosenstein resignation headlines…
The Dollar extended gains into the close to end at the high of the day…
Offshore Yuan slipped lower for the 2nd day in a row (even with China closed)…
While HKD was relatively flat after Friday’s short-cover-carnage, Hong Kong money-market rates went a little turbo…
The Turkish Lira surged today (best performing currency of the day), extending gains on Pompeo comments…
But the Brazilian Real slumped (worst performer of the day) as the left-wing Workers’ Party is said likely to reach the runoff vote in Brazil’s election…
And the Argentine Peso was pummeled after returning to Lagarde to ask The IMF for more…
Cryptocurrencies are lower from Friday’s close…Ripple dumped…
WTI Crude managed gains on the day (OPEC headlines) as copper and PMs slipped lower as the dollar rebounded…
Brent Crude topped $81 for the first time since Nov 2014…
Finally, we note that Money Market Funds have dramatically shifted their allocations from Q1 (record buying in US Treasuries) to Q2 (record selling in US Treasuries)…
However, as Bloomberg points out, The Federal Reserve’s latest reading on America’s finances showed that money-market mutual funds were the biggest buyers of Treasuries in the first half of 2018, according to Jay Barry, a fixed-income strategist at JPMorgan Chase & Co. The central bank’s quarterly financial accounts data showed the funds, which favor Treasury bills, purchased a net $118 billion of the government’s debt in the period. That’s a swing from 2017, when they sold $95 billion. The buying dovetailed with the government’s bias toward bill sales in the first half as it boosted borrowing to finance a widening deficit, Barry said.
After a spectacular Q1, and a Q2 earnings season that blew away expectations, corporations are turning decidedly sour on their own prospects, and according to FactSet data, as companies head into the end of the third quarter 98 S&P 500 companies have issued EPS guidance for the quarter. Of these 98 companies, 74 have issued negative EPS guidance and 24 companies have issued positive EPS guidance.
The percentage of companies issuing negative EPS guidance is 76% (74 out of 98), which is not only above the five-year average of 71%, but if 76% is the final percentage for the quarter, it will mark the highest percentage of S&P 500 companies issuing negative EPS guidance for a quarter since Q1 2016 (79%).
What is behind this shift in sentiment? As pessimism is rising, optimism is fast fading: while the number of companies issuing negative EPS for Q3 (74) is just 3% below the five-year average (76), the number of companies issuing positive EPS guidance for Q3 (24) is 23% below the five-year average (31).
Thus, according to Factset, the low number of S&P 500 companies issuing positive EPS guidance is the main contributor to the above-average percentage of negative EPS guidance for the quarter. And similar to the above, if 24 is the final number for the quarter, it will mark the lowest number of S&P 500 companies issuing positive EPS guidance for a quarter since Q1 2016 (also 24).
So which industries are at the forefront of this sharp reversal in sentiment?
At the sector level, the Consumer Discretionary sector has seen the largest drop in the number of companies issuing positive EPS guidance for the third quarter (2) relative to the five-year average for the sector (5.6). However, several other sectors have seen fewer companies issue positive EPS guidance for Q3 relative to their five-year averages, including healthcare, materials and financials. Only Info Tech and Real Estate have managed to keep their cheerful disposition.
The politics of division imposes an invisible cost to the Nation. Divisive politics inherently mean that almost no common ground exists for action on issues of great importance, and falling into the chasm between the two parties are calamitous dangers to national security that make our actual headlines today pale in comparison. One such danger in the political no-man’s-land is not even being discussed, and so no one is working on a solution: the national debt.
Lots of numbers, right? So it is helpful to find a way to put the debt into perspective. Since World War II until 2017, the government debt, compared to Gross Domestic Product (GDP), averaged just over 60 percent. During the Great Recession, the debt climbed to over 100 percent of America’s GDP as the government spent to stimulate growth. Now the Great Recession is over, but the national debt will top 105 percent of GDP this year. Politicians talk about reducing the deficit, but each deficit increasesthe debt.
And no one believes that economic growth will continue every year for the next ten years; another down turn will be consequential. When that next big recession comes, the economic and fiscal tools to handle it will not be there. The financial capacity of the nation will have been tapped, used up. The same is true of a war or large military conflict. FDR jacked military and government spending to around 100 percent of GDP to address World War II only because we had the capacity: the debt was only 45 percent of GDP in 1941 when Pearl Harbor was attacked.
As America is saddled with more and more debt, it becomes more and more vulnerable, less ready to act and certainly looks weaker.
Not better infrastructure. Debt is a useful tool for improving public infrastructure upon which the economy depends, but we don’t have the capacity for infrastructure debt. Trillions will be needed just to get back to even.
Not a solution to stressed retirement and health systems. The can just keeps getting kicked down the road. But all of these will need to be solved even as the national debt looms over us.
The bitter medicine for addressing the national debt is the politically untenable combination of increasing taxes and decreasing expenditures. No other avenue exists. But the first deficit that must be addressed is one of leadership. Until our political leaders move the national debt to a central focus, view it as a threat to national security, and work for immediate and yet long-term non-partisan solutions, the U.S. is at risk. That risk may not be existential, but it is a deadly risk to American prosperity, our way of life, our leadership in the world and perhaps to our system of government.
Following Monday’s rollercoaster over whether Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had resigned, drama has broken out between Axios‘ Jonathan Swann – who broke the story, and Vanity Fair’s Gabe Sherman – thanks to pot-stirrer in Chief, NBC political reporter Mike Memoli – who tweeted an article by Sherman suggesting Swan got played by White House insiders to distract from the Kavanaugh accusations.
“According to a source briefed on Trump’s thinking, Trump decided that firing Rosenstein would knock Kavanaugh out of the news, potentially saving his nomination and Republicans’ chances for keeping the Senate,” wrote Sherman, citing “a source briefed on Trump’s thinking.”
Enter NBC’s Mike Memoli, who tweeted: “So for those keeping score at home: Gabe Sherman’s “source briefed on Trump’s thinking” says that Jonathan Swan’s “source with direct knowledge” was just trying to kick Kavanaugh out of the news cycle for a few hours.”
So for those keeping score at home: Gabe Sherman’s “source briefed on Trump’s thinking” says that Jonathan Swan’s “source with direct knowledge” was just trying to kick Kavanaugh out of the news cycle for a few hours. https://t.co/RPq7y9y2ig
Swan swiftly responded: “This is such disgraceful bullshit. @gabrielsherman should be ashamed of himself and should stop doing stenography for Steve Bannon. Rosenstein offered his resignation to Kelly. We wrote “verbally resigned.” Justice Dept isn’t denying he offered his resignation.”
This is such disgraceful bullshit. @gabrielsherman should be ashamed of himself and should stop doing stenography for Steve Bannon. Rosenstein offered his resignation to Kelly. We wrote “verbally resigned.” Justice Dept isn’t denying he offered his resignation. https://t.co/RHsNKuS0bH
After several hours of mixed messages and rapidly changing headlines, the White House finally weighed in on the Rosenstein “is he in or out” controversy, with Sarah Huckabee Sanders stating that Rosenstein will meet with Trump on Thursday.
***
A source told Reuters that Rosenstein had spent the weekend contemplating whether he should resign after a shocking New York Times report last week said he had suggested secretly recording Trump in 2017 and invoking a constitutional amendment to remove him from office.
The White House announced the meeting on Monday after a flurry of conflicting reports about whether Rosenstein, a frequent target of Trump’s anger, would be leaving the post.
“At the request of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, he and President Trump had an extended conversation to discuss the recent news stories,” White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said on Twitter. “Because the President is at the United Nations General Assembly and has a full schedule with leaders from around the world, they will meet on Thursday when the President returns to Washington, DC.”
She said the meeting will be on Thursday because Trump was at the U.N. General Assembly on Monday and has meetings with world leaders later in the week.
Hinting at his next steps, shortly after the Times story, Trump told supporters at a rally in Missouri that there is “a lingering stench” at the Justice Department and that “we’re going to get rid of that, too.”
Rosenstein’s departure would prompt questions about the future of Mueller’s investigation and whether Trump, who has called the probe a “witch hunt,” would seek to remove Mueller.
If Rosenstein does resign, Trump has more leeway on replacing him while firing him would make it harder for Trump to designate a successor, as Bloomberg explained here.
Rosenstein’s future ignited a series of conflicting reports on Monday, with the Axios news website cited an unidentified source with knowledge of the matter as saying he had verbally resigned to White House Chief of Staff John Kelly. Other reports said Rosenstein expected to be fired while NBC News reported Rosenstein said he would not resign and the White House would have to fire him.
Doubling down on her comments over the weekend, Senator Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) on Monday implied she does not think Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh deserves a presumption of innocence in the assessment of the sexual assault allegations against him because of his “ideological agenda.”
As The Hill reports, on Sunday, when asked if Kavanaugh deserved a presumption of innocence,Hirono told CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday, “I put his denial in the context of everything that I know about him in terms of how he approaches his cases. His credibility is already very questionable in my mind and in the mind of a lot of my fellow Judiciary Committee members, the Democrats.”
CNN’s Jake Tapper: “Doesn’t Kavanaugh have the same presumption of innocence as anyone else in America?”
Hirono also alleged that Kavanaugh misapplies precedent to fit “an ideological agenda,” specifically his opposition to “women’s reproductive choice.”
And today, she doubled-down, saying during an appearance on MSNBC, when asked to clarify if she thought Kavanaugh deserved a presumption of innocence.
“Look, we’re not in a court of law… We’re actually in a court of credibility at this point and without having the FBI report or some semblance of trying to get corroboration we are left with the credibility of the two witnesses.”
She added that Kavanaugh’s credibility was “already questionable in her mind” because of how he rules on cases as a judge, an accusation she also made in her comments Sunday.
Sometimes life imitates art…
As one might expect, conservatives were quick to respond to Hirono’s comments. RNC chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel said:
“A Democrat on the Judiciary Committee (who graduated from law school) doesn’t believe in the presumption of innocence for conservatives… that’s terrifying and goes against the bedrock of our entire justice system.”
A Democrat on the Judiciary Committee (who graduated from law school) doesn’t believe in the presumption of innocence for conservatives.
