BY PRIYANKA ARIBINDI, BRIAN BEUTLER,
& CROOKED MEDIA

Thursday, July 12, 2018

—Paul Manafort describing how he was treated at his old jail

STRZOK A CHORD

House Republicans are as committed as ever to discrediting Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, but their efforts on Thursday made them look even more ridiculous than usual.

On Thursday, they welcomed Peter Strzok, an FBI counterintelligence agent who worked on the Russia investigation, to testify publicly before the House Oversight and Judiciary committees.

Strzok (pronounced “struck,” it’s not that hard) became a household name last winter when the Justice Department released text messages he exchanged with a colleague, Lisa Page, with whom he was having an extramarital affair.

Those text messages, spanning 2016 and 2017, contained a lot of unkind words about Donald Trump, but zero evidence that either Strzok or Page allowed their personal views to interfere with the FBI’s investigation.

Trump and Republicans, however, have pretended that the texts represent evidence of a “deep state” conspiracy against Trump.

On Thursday, Strzok proved how ridiculous that is. He:  

1. Explained that he texted mean things about Trump because Trump did terrible shit like mock the Pakistani-American family of a soldier who was killed in Iraq.

2. Reminded Republicans that if he had wanted to sabotage Trump, he could have. “I was one of a handful of people who knew the details of Russian election interference and its possible connections with members of the Trump campaign,” he said. “This information had the potential to derail, and quite possibly, defeat Mr. Trump. But the thought of exposing that information never crossed my mind.”

Republicans responded by:

1. Threatening to hold him in contempt of Congress for not divulging details about the ongoing Russia investigation.

2. Letting Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) diss him for being unfaithful to his wife.

From Brian: Republicans’ real goal was to continue to polarize public opinion around the Russia investigation, because they fear—for good reason—that Mueller has found evidence of a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russian government to subvert the 2016 election, and they want to help Trump get away with it. This is why Strzok rightly said the hearing was “another victory notch in Putin’s belt and another milestone in our enemies’ campaign to tear America apart.”

TORN NATO

President Trump barely managed to leave this week’s NATO summit without completely destroying the NATO alliance.

This morning he forced an emergency meeting where he reportedly suggested the U.S. would withdraw from NATO if other member nations don’t increase their defense spending commitments to two percent of their respective GDPs by January.

After doing this, he held an impromptu press conference where he claimed that his bullying worked, and everyone had agreed to “substantially [up] their commitments.”

The leaders of Italy and France, however, denied that this happened, or that there was any agreement to increase the defense-spending target.

From Brian: We can breathe a sigh of relief that NATO didn’t disintegrate this week, but that’s a pathetically low bar, and doesn’t mean we won’t be right back in the same predicament next year, when Trump tries to hold NATO allies to commitments they all deny making. Welcome to hell.

House Republicans will bring a Democratic Abolish ICE bill up for a vote, to show the idea has slim support in Congress, and put House Democrats at odds with progressive activists.

Trump apparently trashed British Prime Minister Theresa May in an exclusive interview with a British tabloid.

When the White House said that issues with Jared Kushner’s security clearance were resolved earlier this year, they were being intentionally misleading. He still lacks access to the government’s most sensitive secrets, which he’d need to help Trump understand the Presidential Daily Brief, or (lol) negotiate peace in the Middle East.

Trump’s senior adviser/son-in-law Jared Kushner reportedly lacks the security clearance that’s needed to review the most sensitive government documents, which has kept him from being able to see some parts of the President’s Daily Brief, and could limit his ability to complete his pet project of bringing peace to the Middle East. Earlier this year, he was granted a permanent security clearance, but that was only “top secret” status. Bummer.

White House legislative affairs director Marc Short will become the latest staffer to leave the White House, departing in the midst of a contentious Supreme Court confirmation fight.

Brett Kavanaugh claims he racked up tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt on baseball season tickets for friends, which they conveniently paid back shortly before Trump nominated him to the Supreme Court. Seems fishy!

The Justice Department has reopened the case of Emmett Till’s gruesome murder in 1955, nearly 63 years later, based on the discovery of new information.

“Papa” John Schnatter of Papa John’s pizza resigned as the company’s chairman after admitting that he said the n-word on a call with a marketing agency earlier this year. He had previously blamed poor Papa John’s sales on NFL players protesting police brutality during the national anthem, depressing viewership of his ads. Making pizza should be… easier?

It’s not really a fair contest, but Stormy Daniels looks way better in her mugshot than Paul Manafort does. (The charges against her—that she allegedly touched three undercover officers while performing at an Ohio strip club—were later dropped, but Paul Manafort is still under indictment for conspiring to defraud the U.S.)

On Hysteria: Erin, Blair, and Ziwe try to find kernels of good news among the bad as they grapple with the imminent presence of a guy named Brett on the Supreme Court. They also talk about a new movie that sounds hilarious, weak apologies, and the hot new trend that’s sweeping the nation: public shaming.

Listen →

On Crooked.com: Data for Progress crunches numbers to forecast how dramatically Brett Kavanaugh will move the court to the right, and the results are unsettling.

Read →

A federal court determined that TSA agents can’t be sued for abuse because they aren’t “investigative or law enforcement officers,” meaning that passengers who face misconduct at the hands of agents in screenings have very limited legal options.

Sandra Oh became the first woman of Asian descent to be nominated for an Emmy for lead actress in a drama for her performance in “Killing Eve.” Nominated. In 2018. Congrats to Sandra—the show’s supposed to be great—but the fact that it took this long is not.

Texas Democratic Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke raised $10.4 MILLION dollars in the second quarter of 2018 without taking money from a single PAC—breaking a Texas record for most funds raised by a Senate candidate in a single quarter and more than doubling the amount incumbent Sen. Ted Cruz raised in the same time frame.

I love nature.

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