Tuesday, March 28, 2017
By Amber Phillips
Every few days or so, there's a new layer of Russia intrigue added onto the Trump administration. Monday is one of those days.
Here's the latest:
1) The GOP-led Senate Intelligence Committee says that Jared Kushner, President Trump's son-in-law and a top adviser, has voluntarily agreed to testify about previously unknown meetings he had with the Russian ambassador during the campaign.
Jared Kushner, senior adviser to President Trump, listens to Trump during a listening session with cyber security experts at the White House in January. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
The Senate panel is one of two congressional committees investigating Russia's meddling in the U.S. election and any potential role Trump associates had in it. (We'll talk about the other committee in a second.)
The White House says Kushner was just doing his job helping the Trump campaign reach out to foreign officials. It's not uncommon for campaigns to do that. But it's notable a Republican Congress is asking a member of Trump's inner circle to come explain his conversations with Russia.
The GOP head of the House Intelligence Committee is in hot water. A top Senate Democrat is demanding Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) step down from his job leading the House's investigation into Russia after it was revealed he traveled to the White House to look at documents related to wiretapping,, then a day later announced to the world he has evidence Trump may have indeed been wiretapped. (Although not purposefully by President Obama, like Trump claimed.)
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) walks away after speaking with reporters outside the White House on March 22. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Ethics and security experts are flummoxed as to why Nunes briefed the White House when his committee is investigating any White House connections to Russia. “This is really unusual behavior of an oversight committee chairman,” Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow of governance studies at Brookings Institution told me. “And it's hard to understand what could possibly justify it.”
These are two big pieces of Russia news, neither particularly beneficial to the Trump administration.
How to impress your conservative friends
President Trump's nominee Judge Neil Gorsuch in his confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post)
Or, more accurately, how to get them riled up.
In the next week, Democrats will launch a rare filibuster of Trump's Supreme Court nominee, Judge Neil Gorsuch. That means they'll require Senate Republicans to scrape together 60 votes to move to approve his nomination. But Republicans only have 52 senators, so Democrats are really laying the tripwire for Republican leaders to blow up the filibuster for nominees entirely and potentially change the Senate forever.
Filibusters happen all the time on legislation. But how rare is a filibuster for a Supreme Court nominee?
Only three nominees have ever had to face a filibuster. The last successful filibuster of a nominee was in 1968 against Lyndon B. Johnson's nomination of Abe Fortas. But opposition to Fortas was a bipartisan mix of Republicans and conservative Democrats. And that makes Gorsuch in line to be the first partisan filibuster of modern times.
How to impress/rile up your liberal friends
WaPo's Philip Bump calculates that since Trump has become president, he's visited a Trump property nearly one out of every three days.
(Philip Bump / The Washington Post)
The man who never misses a branding opportunity has had some big ones: He's played golf with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at Trump National in Jupiter, Fla., in February, for example. And Trump announced he plans to host the Chinese president at Trump's Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Fla. soon.
President Trump (2nd L) and Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (center) at a Trump golf course in February. (AFP PHOTO / JIJI PRESS)
Speaking of Trump and liberals ...
For the first time ever, half of Americans now say they believe in climate change and that they are very concerned about it, according to Gallup.
The Kaiser Family Foundation recently found that 49 percent have a favorable opinion of the Affordable Care Act — its highest approval rating in years.
The Keystone XL pipeline is suddenly more polarizing, with a Pew Research poll finding 48 percent disapprove of it. Coincidence? Probably not.
“Thanks, President Trump,” says The Fix's Aaron Blake. “While it's difficult to ascribe any one of these shifts to Trump specifically, the pattern is becoming clearer. And there's growing evidence that Trump is unifying half (or more) of the country against things he has vocally supported — in ways they simply weren't unified before.”
Who's Melania Trump again?
Well, we know she's the first lady. But who is she, really? Her near invisibility — short speeches followed by long stretches of being nowhere to be found, not even by New York's paparazzi — only adds to her mystery.
Washington Post's Paul Schwartzman attempts to analyze her in a must-read profile:
“Melania Trump is a Rorschach test in Louboutins, inspiring praise from those who see in her inscrutable gaze an elegant, dutiful mother charting a new role for the first lady; compassion from those imagining her as the president’s unhappy captive, her penthouse-turned-prison costing taxpayers ungodly sums to secure; and contempt from those rendering her as her husband’s chief enabler, abiding his sexist and anti-immigrant bluster, and echoing at one time his baseless questioning of President Barack Obama’s citizenship.”
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