BY PRIYANKA ARIBINDI, BRIAN BEUTLER 

& CROOKED MEDIA

Friday, February 1, 2019

—Donald Trump as his brain slowly catches up to his mouth

SOFT TARGET

President Trump spoke to the New York Times on Thursday, in part to reassure the public that he isn’t in big legal trouble. What a relief! But his comments, along with other recent news developments, paint a very different picture.

In the interview, Trump denied telling his friend/adviser/fellow creep Roger Stone to serve as an intermediary between his campaign and Wikileaks. Stone was recently indicted for crimes he committed while trying to cover up the fact that he was Trump’s Wikileaks middleman, and that he allegedly did so on the orders of someone in the campaign.

Trump also claimed that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein “told [my] attorneys that I’m not…a target,” of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. Couple problems for Trump:

• Executive branch policy holds that the Justice Department can’t indict a sitting president, which likely means that Trump can’t become a “target” of Mueller’s investigation, because you target people… to indict them.

• Trump is clearly a subject (read: suspect) of Mueller’s investigation, because Mueller has questioned him in writing.

• Despite projecting confidence that he’s safe from Mueller, Trump admitted he “doesn’t know” how much legal exposure he has to federal prosecutors in New York, who allege that he participated in a criminal conspiracy to defraud the public by making illegal hush-money payments to former mistresses ahead of the 2016 election.

His projected confidence also clashes with more recent developments. Most importantly, Stone’s attorneys agreed to waive Stone’s right to a speedy trial, at Mueller’s request, because Mueller has seized “terabytes” of data from Stone that will take both legal teams many weeks to scrutinize.

We also learned that while arranging the infamous Trump Tower meeting, where he sought dirt on Hillary Clinton from Russian agents, Donald Trump, Jr. spoke to a man named Howard Lorber—a long-time Trump ally and campaign donor with ties to Russia who spent many years trying to help Trump build a tower in Moscow. Don Jr. claims he was barely aware that the Trump organization was pursuing a Trump Tower Moscow throughout the 2016 campaign.

Maybe Trump really will skate away from the indictment he deserves. But the one person whose word we shouldn’t take on the subject is Donald Trump. OBVIOUSLY.

A photograph on Virginia Democratic governor Ralph Northam’s 1984 medical school yearbook page depicts a man in blackface alongside a man in a Ku Klux Klan robe and hood, one of whom is Northam. It’s very bad.

Northam has since apologized, saying “I am deeply sorry for the decision I made to appear as I did in this photo and for the hurt that decision caused then and now.” Virginia’s Democratic Senate minority leader has defended Northam, but there are growing calls within the Democratic Party for him to resign, giving way to Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax (D-VA), who would be only the second black governor in the state’s history.

Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) formally launched his 2020 presidential campaign, while pledging to not accept donations from corporate PACs or lobbyists. In his announcement the former Newark mayor emphasized that he is the only senator who returns home to a low-income community and urged Americans to “channel our common pain back into our common purpose.”

Both McClatchy and Vice will lay off hundreds of staffers, following the loss of nearly a thousand jobs in newsrooms across the country last week at companies including BuzzFeed, Verizon (Huffpost), and Gannett. McClatchy, which owns a number of local outlets nationwide, offered voluntary buyouts to 450 employees, or 10 percent of staff, while Vice laid off 10 percent of its workforce—250 employees.

The Senate has passed a resolution on a bipartisan basis condemning President Trump’s decision to withdraw troops from Syria and Afghanistan.

Empire actor Jussie Smollett released his first statement since he alleged that he was attacked by two men yelling racist and homophobic epithets earlier this week, confirming that he is ok, and maintaining that he has been truthful in his accounts of the attack to authorities. He also expressed frustration about doubts his skeptics have raised about whether the attack happened the way he told investigators it did. According to reports, Smollett refused to give investigators his phone and phone records earlier this week to confirm that he was on a call with his manager at the time of the attack.

Zuckerberg General Hospital says it plans to change its policy of not accepting private insurance following reporting by Sarah Kliff of Vox detailing the San Francisco hospital’s aggressive billing practices for patients with private insurance. The hospital will temporarily suspend the practice of billing patients for the portion of bills insurers will not pay, but it will not be retroactive. Journalism!

Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren apologized to the Cherokee Nation for releasing the results of a DNA test to prove her Native American ancestry last year—a decision the tribe criticized then as “inappropriate and wrong.”

Comedians are using the hashtag #FuckFuckJerry to speak out against one of Instagram’s biggest meme accounts (and the media company that promoted the infamous Fyre Festival) for stealing and profiting off of the work of others. Click that unfollow button.

If you go vegan you could win free Beyoncé and/or Jay-Z tickets for the rest of your life. Pass the lettuce. From Brian: [mouth full of hamburger] what’s that?

The U.S. has suspended a nuclear arms control agreement with Russia that has been in force for three decades, on the grounds that Russia has repeatedly violated the agreement’s terms by growing its arsenal of intermediate-range missiles and launchers. Behind the scenes, the Trump administration also wanted to do away with the treaty’s constraints in order to counter China’s efforts to establish military dominance in the Western Pacific. The Chinese government is not bound by the treaty, and has thus been amassing missiles that the U.S. has been prohibited from building. The decision has raised concerns that the U.S. might end up in another arms race with Russia, and that our European allies, who are close enough to Russia to be affected by these missiles, will face new security risks.

Undercover Homeland Security agents enlisted people to recruit foreign citizens to enroll in a scam university so that they could claim to be students and fraudulently obtain student visas. Turns out this “university” wasn’t just engaged in fraud—it was fake, invented by the agents themselves, who turned around and arrested a bunch of the recruiters and “students.” No one comes out looking good.

Federal authorities have arrested 33 people on sex trafficking charges and rescued four victims ahead of the Super Bowl in Atlanta this weekend. According to the mayor of Atlanta, the city ranks third in the country for reports of human trafficking. Large sporting events that attract wealthy fans can also attract sex traffickers and sex buyers.

Did someone forward you this email? Sign up to get What A Day in your inbox!

Want to advertise with us? What are you waiting for?!