BY PRIYANKA ARIBINDI, BRIAN BEUTLER
& CROOKED MEDIA

Wednesday, March 7, 2018

(Source: The Hill)

NOTHING COMES CLOSE TO THE GOLDEN COAST

The Justice Department is suing California over policies that protect immigrants. They’re targeting three laws that they say hinder immigration enforcement agents (ICE) by: 

• Limiting how much state and local officials have to cooperate with ICE agents who want to detain, arrest, and/or deport immigrants

• Limiting how much employers have to cooperate when ICE carries out workplace raids

• Allowing the California Attorney General to review the facilities where ICE agents detain immigrants before court proceedings

Attorney General Jeff Sessions said he wants to use California as a battleground in the fight over Trump’s hard-line immigration stance. Governor Jerry Brown responded by pointing out that these laws don’t prevent ICE from carrying out raids and arrests and then said this: “Look, we know the Trump administration is full of liars. They’ve pled guilty already to the special counsel.” 

Scandal-plagued-Attorney-General-says-what? 

DON N' STORMY

Donald Trump may have broken the law when he failed to mention in his campaign’s financial disclosures that he paid hush money to a porn star with whom he had an affair. Remember a time when politics wasn’t about this?!

Anyway, there’s so much more:

Stormy Daniels, the porn star in question, filed a lawsuit against Trump alleging that the non-disclosure agreement she signed is void because it was not signed by Trump himself. This is after Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, initiated a legal proceeding against Daniels a few weeks ago to keep her quiet, without telling her.

What’s in the non-disclosure agreement, you ask? All kinds of good stuff: 

• Trump and Daniels went by the pseudonyms David Dennison and Peggy Peterson

• A requirement that Daniels turn over any video, images, email, and text messages between her and Trump (all good without seeing those, thank you!)

• A statement that admits the following: “substantial effort and expense have been dedicated to limit the efforts of the press...and the public to learn of personal and business affairs involving [Donald Trump].” Quite an admission about what the Trump campaign was up to in 2016! Cool operation.

White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders indicated that as far as she knows, Trump was not aware that Daniels was paid by Cohen, and said “I can share that the arbitration was won in the President’s favor.” To which Daniels' lawyer responded, “yeah, and he also won the popular vote.” Lots of solid burns today. 

Mueller moves:

• Trump asked both White House Counsel Don McGahn and former Chief of Staff Reince Priebus what they discussed with Special Counsel Mueller, ignoring legal advice to avoid conduct that might look like (or actually be) interference with the investigation. He reportedly asked McGahn to issue a statement denying that Trump had ever asked him to fire Mueller, to which McGahn responded by reminding Trump...that he asked him to fire Mueller. 

• Mueller has also gathered evidence that the secret Seychelles meeting between Trump’s informal adviser Erik Prince and a Putin associate was an effort to establish a backchannel to the Kremlin before Trump’s inauguration, despite Prince’s claims to the contrary. 

Sinclair Broadcasting is making local anchors deliver a new “journalistic responsibility message” bashing the media for “fake stories”—echoing Donald Trump’s “fake news” complaints. The conservative media company currently owns the most local TV stations nationwide, and is trying to acquire even more. Not good.

Hope Hicks told the House Intelligence Committee that one of her email accounts was hacked. We don’t know who hacked it or which email account it was, but if you read between the lines, the story suggests lawmakers believe she may be trying to conceal emails. And we know Hope would never try to conceal emails! 

A former Russian spy and his daughter were the targets of an attempted murder with a nerve agent, according to British police. There have been 14 other deaths in Britain linked to Russia. 

Amazon Alexas are creepily laughing and no one, including Amazon, knows why. We don’t like this Black Mirror episode.

On Pod Save the World: Tommy unpacks new reports that North Korea is willing to start negotiations with the U.S. about abandoning its nuclear weapons.  

Listen→

A new Quinnipiac poll shows Democrats regaining their generic ballot lead over Republicans in the battle for control of the House by a 48-38 margin. Republicans had narrowed the gap for a few weeks, but according to FiveThirtyEight, that gap has reopened, and the polling average now stands at 47.7-38.8.

One interesting thing about the new numbers is that they show Democrats trouncing Republicans, despite the fact that both parties remain almost equally disliked among voters. Dems “enjoy” a 31 percent favorable rating, against 30 percent for Republicans. Nobody’s happy, people.

This is generally consistent with the promising night Democrats had in the Texas primary on Tuesday: Nearly 1.04 million Democrats voted in the midterm primary—up 84% from the last midterm primary in 2014. However, Dems were still outnumbered at the polls by Republicans. 1.54 million Republicans voted in the primary.

At the same time, the DCCC gambit to push Laura Moser out of the race failed miserably, and in TX-21, the least well-funded candidate defeated the favored candidates of both the Sanders and establishment wings of the party. 

Upshot is, Democrats should be pleased but not cocky! Beto O’Rourke will face Ted Cruz in the general election and he seems to be making Cruz nervous. But Beto only got 62% of the vote against two fairly unknown candidates. And altogether, Republicans won 500,000 more votes than Democrats. 

Bottom line: GET TO WORK. On the House, and the Senate.

Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson had anti-discrimination language removed from the mission statement of his agency. The change was explained as “an effort to align HUD’s mission with the Secretary’s priorities and that of the Administration,” which, when you put it like that, makes complete sense. 

“He’s pulling out jazz hands and shiny stuff up front and will screw us on the back end.”

—Brian Barkalow, a worker at Requarth Lumber in Dayton, Ohio. Barkalow echoes much of the working class response to Trump’s tax cuts, which has resulted in an additional $2 to $40 per paycheck every two weeks.

Crooked HQ spent way too much time analyzing our results from the “Which Ex-Trump Official Are You” BuzzFeed quiz today.