Raining Women

Moore Women:  While Alabama Senatorial candidate Roy Moore was denying knowing any of the women accusing him of molestation, a fifth woman, Beverly Young Nelson, came forward.  She doesn’t plan to sue Moore but she has hired Gloria Allred, the go to attorney for women who want to get their stories told and her story is very compelling.  Sitting beside Allred, Nelson, a Republican who voted for Trump, tearfully revealed that as a teenager she worked as a waitress in a diner frequented by Moore and that one day after work he grabbed her in the parking lot, forcing her into his car and accosted her before she managed to escape his grip. This is a bigly problem for Moore because though he claims that he doesn’t know her, he did sign her yearbook with a loving note, including his full Assistant DA title in his flowery signature.  The Nelson accusation was the tipping point for his probably never to be Senator colleagues.  Leading the way, finally, Majority Leader McConnell said “I believe the women, I think he should step aside.”  With the exception of Rand Paul, who made his first appearance back in Washington after being attacked by his neighbor, all of the Republicans have withdrawn their support for Moore, even Senator Cruz who had been one of his strongest supporters. Senator Flake said that if he lived in Alabama there would be “no doubt that he would vote for the Democrat.” Moore who still has status quo disruptor Steve Bannon’s full support, is hanging firm, still running for the Senate, leaving Republican leadership in a quandary trying to figure out how to extricate themselves from this mess.  Leadership is trying to persuade Alabama’s reluctant governor to postpone the election and is also considering launching a write-in campaign for someone else like current Senator Lucas Strange, the man who was trounced by Moore in the Alabama primary.  To the extent that Moore beats his moderate Democratic opponent Doug Jones, Republicans, with the support of their Democratic colleagues, are likely to refuse to seat him through whatever means are available.  One proposal floated yesterday would be to replace him with Attorney General Sessions, who previously held the Alabama seat before joining the cabinet.  That suggestion could work for Trump, who’s been largely quiet about the Moore problem, hiding behind the demands of his busy Asia trip.  Trump has been toying with dumping Sessions for a while and this could provide him with the excuse he needs.  Trump is due back today from Asia, a trip that he reports went very well because all his hosts loved him and greeted him with receptions bigger than those provided to any other president in history, or so he says.  He especially loved being serenaded by Philippine strongman Duterte, so much so that he decided not to press Duterte on his human rights abuses or murderous tendencies.  For his part, it doesn’t look like Sessions wants to leave the cabinet anytime soon. In a nod to Trump’s calls for an investigation into Clinton, yesterday it was reported that the Session’s led Justice Department is considering hiring another special prosecutor, this one would look into Comey’s investigation into the Hillary emails and Hillary and the Clinton Foundation’s involvement in that uranium deal, the one that Trump likes to talk about whenever the Russian collusion investigation hits a little too close to home.              

WikiLeaks and Don Jr:  The Russia collusion investigation is hitting close to home.  Yesterday, The Atlantic reported that in September of 2016 WikiLeaks reached out to Don Trump Jr, exchanging emails with him about a range of subjects that mostly focused on their then upcoming release of the Podesta emails but also at one point asked about the possibility of a future Trump administration requesting Australia to appoint its disgraced founder, Julian Assange, as Ambassador to the US. Their email chain about the leaks of the Podesta emails fits in too well with the actual leaking timetable and all the statements that Don Sr made on the campaign trail providing a neat trail for anyone investigating allegations of Trump team collusion.  Donny Jr didn’t keep his communication with WikiLeaks a secret, he shared this information with campaign officials including Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, Trump data guru Brad Parscale, and Jared Kushner who forwarded at least one of the messages to Hope Hicks, which was probably the equivalent of emailing Donald Sr who famously doesn’t use email. They’ve also been provided to the congressional committees and Special Counsel Mueller. Not to be outdone by The Atlantic bombshell, Donny Jr confirmed the story by releasing the applicable email chain to the press last night, the same strategy that worked so well for him when he got caught lying about his meeting with the Russian lawyer and her cronies.  For the record VP Pence wants everyone to know that even though he was on the Trump ticket and regularly touted information provided by WikiLeaks while on the campaign trail, neither he or any of his campaign aides knew about Donny Jr’s WikiLeaks communications.  Pence will go down in history as the most sincere sounding liar ever, the only Vice President proud to be kept out of the loop on critical matters and/or a total jerk.  While Pence may or may not have been out of the loop, speech writer and anti-immigrant strategist Steve Miller is now ensnared in the Russia investigation.  It turns out that he was one of the people that George Papadopoulos, the former campaign aide who was either responsible for foreign relations or a really inept coffee server, told him that he had received “interesting messages” from Moscow shortly after he learned that his Russian friends had “dirt” on Clinton. Miller has spent some time on the Mueller hot seat, it’s likely that in addition to his role in writing the letter used to fire former FBI Director Comey, this was one of the things that he was asked about.

Human Resources:  Trump announced that he is nominating Alex Azar a former Bush appointee and pharmaceutical company executive to succeed Tom Price as Secretary of Health and Human Services and  tweeted “He will be a star for better healthcare and lower drug prices.”  Azar actually has relevant health care experience but as to drug prices, his track record of raising drug prices when he was an Eli Lily executive and his time at the Biotechnology Industry Organization, a drug lobbying group, makes that last assertion a little suspect.  Also suspect, Trump has been doing his best to fill vacant court seats with as many uber-conservatives as possible.  One of those nominees, Brett Talley, up for the position of federal judge for Alabama, who received a rare not-qualified rating from the American Bar Association, made it through the Senate Judiciary Committee last week despite his lack of any relevant experience.  Not only isn’t he all that qualified but it turns out that like many members of the Trump inner circle, he isn’t all that good at filling out disclosure forms either.  He forgot to mention that his wife, Ann Donaldson, is chief of staff to White House Counsel Don McGahn.  Donaldson has been interviewed by Mueller as part of the investigation into the Comey firing, so the conflict of interest is real.  The full Senate is expected to vote on Talley’s lifetime appointment shortly and absent any Republican dissenters he’s a shoe-in.