Imagine that!
BY PRIYANKA ARIBINDI, BRIAN BEUTLER
& CROOKED MEDIA
Friday, April 27, 2018 | Sixty-five years after hostilities ceased, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and South Korean President Moon Jae-In pledged to end the Korean War Friday morning at a historic summit. The two leaders also agreed to work toward the goal of a nuclear-free Korean peninsula. The denuclearization question will turn on the success or failure of an anticipated Kim-Trump summit, and the months of diplomacy that will likely have to follow it. Absent President Trump’s willingness to meet with Kim, the North-South summit may never have happened. But it will be difficult for the president to preserve his credibility as a good-faith nuclear-diplomacy negotiator with North Korea if he decides to withdraw from the nuclear deal with Iran. In Brussels on Friday, newly confirmed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said, "Absent a substantial fix, absent overcoming the shortcomings, the flaws of the deal, [Trump] is unlikely to stay in that deal past this May." European signatories to the Iran deal like French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel are hoping that by appealing to Trump’s ego, they can convince him to preserve the Iran deal. It’s nice that we all just casually accept how much Trump’s ego figures into the fate of nations. COOL ERA.
Here’s Brian’s somewhat petty prediction: Democratic senators won’t organize an open letter (like this one) to Kim Jong Un warning that a future Congress will renege on any nuclear deal, nor will they do anything to sabotage Trump’s negotiations, like Republicans tried to do to President Obama during the Iran deal negotiations. Both sides really don’t do it.
| DISINFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY | Devin Nunes and other House Republicans on the intelligence committee released their Russia “investigation” “report,” which actually amounts to 250 pages of propaganda meant to sow doubt that Trump and his associates conspired with Russia to subvert the 2016 election. (Spoiler alert: They totally did.) To “prove” that there was no “collusion,” Republicans asked each witness whether they had evidence of collusion, and they apparently said no. Imagine that! And yet! The report found lots of evidence of collusion, plus many unexplored avenues by which collusion could have happened: • Russia proposed using the NRA to set up a backchannel. • As he was setting up the Trump Tower meeting to get “dirt” on Hillary Clinton from agents of the Russian government, Donald Trump, Jr. had a call with a blocked number which very likely belonged to his father. • Michael Flynn had a previously undisclosed December 2015 meeting with Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak, just as he was linking up with the Trump campaign. Republicans refused to allow the committee to pursue any of these leads. Oh, and they also concluded against the consensus of the intelligence community that Russia wasn’t even trying to help Trump win at all. Glad that’s settled. Not in the report: In an exclusive investigation of Natalia Veselnistkaya, the Russian lawyer from the Trump Tower meeting, NBC News found compelling evidence that Veselnitskaya was much closer to the Kremlin than the parties originally suggested. Devin Nunes is a disgrace and Paul Ryan is a disgrace for empowering him. | | |
As OMB Director, Mick Mulvaney has taken meetings with at least eight lobbyists and six executives who donated to his congressional campaigns. This advances an explosive New York Times report about Mulvaney boasting to a bunch of lobbyists that his congressional office was a pay-for-play operation. Paul Ryan’s decision to push out the House chaplain a month after he made a mildly critical statement about the GOP tax plan is turning into an unusually bitter controversy. Republicans voted down a Democratic resolution to establish a select committee to investigate the firing. And House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said “the Speaker did this knowing that he had no power to fire Father Conroy and instead chose to force him out by demanding his resignation.” A judge has stayed Stormy Daniels’ suit against Donald Trump and Michael Cohen for 90 days citing Michael Cohen’s assertion of his fifth amendment rights, stemming from his criminal jeopardy. Daniels’ lawyer, Michael Avenatti, plans to appeal. Video has surfaced of police physically assaulting former NFL player Desmond Marrow in December, after an incident in which the athlete said a white man threw a cup of coffee at his car. From Pod Save the People co-host Clint Smith III: Something I’ve been thinking a lot about since I watched the video of the police assaulting Chikesia Clemons is how many times in college I was at a late night diner and there were drunk white frat bros who would break plates and throw fits and who never had the police called on them. Rep Patrick Meehan (R-PA) resigned today and promised to reimburse taxpayers for the $39,000 he used to settle a sexual harassment claim. A new report on NBC News reveals many more claims of sexual harassment against disgraced former anchor Matt Lauer, and one against Tom Brokaw. Brokaw issued a lengthy statement denying the claims, which he compared to a "drive by shooting." Trump tweeted about the the American bid to host the 2026 World Cup yesterday night. However, FIFA, famously a bastion of ethical conduct, noted that his tweet violates an ethics rule that expressly prohibits anyone affiliated with a bid from making public statements about other nations’ bids, which Trump of course did. So that’s almost a year of work by the committee that drafted the bid down the drain. Chance the Rapper weighed in on Kanye West’s behalf in the controversy over West’s support for Donald Trump, and then just as quickly weighed out.
The Royal Baby officially has a name! But it’s not “Paul Revere” so we don’t care.
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On Pod Save the World: Tommy talks with the political director of the ACLU, Faiz Shakir, about Gina Haspel’s nomination to lead the CIA, and the controversy surrounding her involvement in Bush-era torture. Listen → | | |
Seen a lot of hand wringing over left-wing political correctness on college campuses? New data shows that the most penalized campus political speech is liberal speech. Imagine that. | American automakers are getting out of the car business to focus on gas guzzling SUVs. Good thing they didn’t wreck their whole industry trying this very same thing just a few years ago. | | |
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