More From Chuck and Nancy

The Chuck and Nancy Show:  Trump invited his good friends Democratic leaders Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi to the White House again, this time for dinner with a side dish of tax reform and DACA.  Much to the horror of Senate Majority Leader McConnell and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan they weren’t invited.  When asked why Republican leadership was being left on the outside, Press Secretary Huckabee Sanders snidely responded that Ryan and McConnell’s presence wasn’t necessary because Trump is a Republican and the leader of the party.  Following dinner Nancy and Chuck released a joint statement about their meeting with Trump saying that “The discussion focused on DACA.  We agreed to enshrine the protections of DACA into law quickly, and to work out a package of border security, excluding the wall, that’s acceptable to both sides.”  They also reported that they pushed for Obamacare insurance payments but did not report any agreement there. They did not mention a discussion of tax reform.  After Nancy and Chuck released their statement, the anti-immigrant right wing got very testy and Iowa Congressman Steve King had an apoplectic attack about the DACA and wall comments so the White House backtracked, refuting the part about the wall and asserting that tax reform was discussed. Chuck then gave Trump some space by adding that Trump still wants his wall but won’t tie its funding to DACA.  Whatever was agreed, Nancy and Chuck can’t introduce DACA legislation by themselves so last night they starting searching for Mitch and Paul, who were last seen scaling the Washington Monument.  Before retiring for the night, Trump exorcised some of his demons by tweet attacking “crooked” Hillary Clinton who “blames everybody (and every thing) but herself for her election loss.   She lost the debates and lost her direction!”

Flynn and Son:  Troubles continue to mount for former security advisor Michael Flynn and his son, Mike Flynn Jr, who worked with him at his consulting firm Flynn Intel Group and accompanied him on his Russian TV funded trip to Moscow, the one where Flynn Sr sat next to Putin.  Together with former campaign manager Paul Manafort they are now officially subjects of Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation.  While he was already advising Trump and serving at the White House, Michael Flynn continued to accept payments and promote a controversial nuclear power plan that would have involved working with Russian companies on the building and operation of nuclear power facilities in Saudi Arabia and in other countries throughout the Middle East.  Flynn Jr who briefly worked with his father at the White House in the early days of the Trump administration, is now a subject of Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation possibly as part of an effort by Mueller to coerce his father to be more cooperative.  Flynn Jr exited the Trump administration even before his father was fired for “lying to VP Pence” after attracting attention for promoting conspiracy theories, including the one that claimed that Hillary Clinton and John Podesta were running a pedophile ring out of a Washington DC pizzaria.  The so called Pizzagate allegations almost resulted in a tragedy when a delusional man showed up with a gun to free the non existent children from the clutches of the non existent pedophiles at the bustling pizza parlor.  Yesterday Flynn Jr, who may be equally delusional about the trouble he and his father are facing, responded to news that he was a subject of Mueller’s investigation by tweet calling the Russia probe a “#nothing burger” and attacking the  “#fake news media” who were “done covering hurricanes so back to Russia.”   The White House had little to say about the Flynn news but continues to undermine former FBI Director Comey by attacking his veracity.  Yesterday, Huckabee Sanders again called him out for his “illegal leaking” of memos and legal spokeman Jay Sekulow hinted that if he wants to keep his job Attorney General Sessions should consider investigating Comey for “lying under oath.”     

Legitimate Unmasking:  Earlier in the year, Trump and his toady Representative Nunes, sometime Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, accused Obama’s national security advisor Susan Rice of “illegally” unmasking Trump team members who were incidentally caught up in surveillance of foreign officials.  It turns out that they were right about the unmasking but wrong about its illegality.  After receiving reports that a United Arab Emirates Crown Prince had travelled to the US on a private flight for a mysterious meeting without following the usual protocol of disclosing his visit to US officials, Rice legitimately arranged to have the attendees at the meeting unmasked.  Those attendees were Jared Kushner, Michael Flynn and Steve Bannon who were having one of their inappropriate back channel conversations with a foreign official before Trump’s inauguration in violation of the one president at a time principal.  Following their three hour tete-a-tete, the prince organized still another back channel meeting in the Seychelle Islands, this one between Education Secretary Betsy Devos’ brother Eric Prince of Blackwater fame, and Russian representatives.  The Seychelle meeting is another subject of investigation.  Nunes’ Intelligence Committee colleagues have concluded that Susan Rice was just doing her job when she unmasked the Trump trio.

Parting Shots:  Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin aka Mr. Louise Linton, is the perfect Trump compatriot.  Mnuchin who is so tone deaf and oblivious to his own ethnicity that he found nothing wrong with Trump’s Charlottesville equivalence of neo-Nazis and counterprotesters, requested a government plane for his European honeymoon purportedly to insure that he would have access to secure communication in the event of a Treasury emergency.   His request was dropped after some much saner and horrified government officials determined it wasn’t “necessary.”  Louise and Steve make such an adorable couple.  Though Mnuchin found nothing wrong with Trump’s failure to whole heartedly condemn White supremacists, both the House and Senate did.  They passed a joint resolution urging Trump to “speak out against hate groups that espouse racism, extremism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, and White supremacy.”  The resolution also calls on the administration to “use all resources available… to address the growing prevalence of those hate groups in the US.” That last part is notable since the Attorney General Sessions led Justice Department recently ended its program to fight domestic terrorism after concluding that White supremacists are “fine people.”

Bernie’s Back:  Actually Bernie Sanders has never gone away, but he is back garnering attention.  As expected, with the support of sixteen cosponsors, he announced his single payer “Leaving no one behind” Medicare for all insurance plan yesterday provoking a lot of press comments about disagreements in the Democratic party about whether Sanders is a Democrat and whether a fixed Obamacare or an all Medicare plan is the best approach to health care.  Like most Sanders ideas, his Medicare plan is big picture and doesn’t really address costs or funding which isn’t surprising since its just an opening salvo and isn’t going anywhere while Republicans are in control of Congress.  Still it may be a harbinger of the future.