Mining 1: Fossils 0 

Monumental Shrinkage:  In an effort to distract Trump from the encroaching Mueller investigation his handlers scheduled a travel day.  He flew to Utah but instead of going for a hike and appreciating the beauty of red rocks and clear sky, with Utah’s Senator Hatch by his side, he slashed the size of the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante monuments by 85% and 50% respectively.  The two exquisitely beautiful national monuments are the home of significant mineral deposits so given the choice between nature and coal mining, for Trump the answer was easy, mining won out.  Besides Presidents Clinton and Obama had set the land aside in the first place and Trump lives to destroy their legacies.  The 83 year-old Senator Hatch is not much of a hiker either, he was thrilled to return the land to industry too.  Not so happy were most of the members of Navajo nation, they plan to sue and they will be joined by the Patagonia outdoor apparel company, who called the shrinking of the two Utah national monuments an “illegal” act that constituted the “largest elimination of protected land in American history.”  Trump’s trip had two purposes, he spent much of the flight to Utah trying to persuade Senator Hatch, who is thinking about retiring when his term ends in 2018, to run for reelection and also spent time trying to convince him to support Alabama molester Roy Moore.  Trump is very concerned that Mitt Romney, one of his most vocal critics will win the Utah Senate seat if Hatch decides to retire, and he may be thinking ahead about impeachment votes, anticipating that Romney would vote him out in a heartbeat.  Hatch still hasn’t announced his reelection plans but he did leave the plane convinced that the Moore accusations are “decades old” and that since “Moore is the only Republican we can get down there” he agrees with Trump, Moore is his man.  As to Moore, before leaving for Utah, Trump tweeted out a full throated Moore endorsement saying a vote for Moore was vote for the Trump agenda, again bashing Democrat Doug Jones as a liberal Pelosi-Schumer stooge.  He then doubled down, calling Moore from the plane to voice his support.  Later in the day, one of Moore’s accusers detailed the relationship they had when she was 17 and he was 32, a relationship that she thought was cool at the time but now, especially in light of all the other women who’ve come forward, realizes was exploitive.  Despite Moore’s claims that he doesn’t know her, she showed correspondence from him and detailed how they had kept in touch for years after they “dated.” Sadly, it’s not clear that any of Moore’s supporters care, given the choice between a serial child molester and a Democrat, they’ll choose the molester every time.  The Republican National Committee is back in Moore’s court.  Late yesterday, they reinstated the funding for his campaign that they had cut earlier back when they though that child molestation was a bad thing. The senatorial election is one week away and sadly things are looking up for Moore.

Obstructive Tweets:  Trump’s legal team and surrogates spent the day pushing back on his errant weekend tweet, the one where he acknowledged knowing about former national security advisor Flynn’s lies to the FBI before he asked former FBI Director Comey to back off on his investigation.  Surrogate and babysitter Kellyanne Conway asserted that she had spent all of Saturday with Trump and had never once seen him reach for his twitter device, one of her more fanciful “alternative facts.”  Trump’s lawyers took another tact, instead of dwelling too much on the content or source of the tweet, Dowd alleged that as nominal head of federal law enforcement Trump can’t be found guilty of obstructing justice because if he wants to obstruct justice, that’s his prerogative.  An odd claim that might well be an admission that Trump did in fact obstruct justice by trying to put a halt to the investigation into his campaign’s Russian meddling activities.  Two previous presidents both of whom faced impeachment over obstruction of justice might differ with Dowd’s conclusions.  The seriously dead Richard Nixon isn’t available but it’s likely that Bill Clinton would be happy to discuss his experience if it helped put Trump away. Trump’s legal team might also want to touch base with Attorney General Sessions, back when he was a Senator he laid out an “impassioned” case for President Clinton to be removed from office based on the argument that he had obstructed justice by hindering the investigation into his affair with Monica Lewinsky.  Sessions wasn’t alone, Senators Mitch McConnell, Chuck Grassley and Richard Burr, who was then a Congressman, all voted for Clinton’s removal based on those obstruction charges.

The FBI War: Because destroying national monuments wasn’t enough fun for one day, Trump continued bashing the “tattered” FBI, first throwing in another hit at his favorite target Hillary Clinton, the woman who is not president.  He said “I will say this:  Hillary Clinton lied many times to the FBI and nothing happened to her.  Flynn lied and they destroyed his life. I think it’s a shame.”  Hillary may be an expert parser of words, but she’s wasn’t indicted for lying because she knew better than to  lie to the FBI, nevertheless, it’s a bit of a push to say that she didn’t suffer at the hands of the FBI.  Wasn’t her “mistreatment” one of the reasons that Trump cited for firing Comey? Trump latched on to recent news that a senior FBI official who was removed last summer from special counsel Mueller’s investigation had exchanged personal text messages that could be interpreted as showing bias for Clinton against Trump, as a justification for his FBI attack.  There was nothing illegal about his texting, but in an abundance of caution Mueller had him removed from his team.  Trump’s all-out war with the FBI over the Russia investigation has finally provoked a response from his handpicked FBI Director Christopher Wray.  Yesterday, Wray who has been trying to maintain a low profile, sent a message to his staff saying that he “is inspired by example after example of professionalism and dedication to justice demonstrated around the bureau,” in other words, ignore the buffoon in the Oval Office, keep doing your job, I’ve got your back.   

Man oh Man: Don’t expect to see former campaign manager Paul Manfort walking the streets of your city any time soon. For some reason that only he understands, Manafort decided that a little good press in a local Ukrainian newspaper would help embellish his tattered reputation so he decided to produce it himself and got caught ghostwriting an editorial regarding his “great” political work for Ukraine, the work where he supported Putin’s oligarch friends in their efforts to disrupt Ukraine’s government.  Mueller was less than impressed by Manafort’s efforts or his collaborator so he had his team file papers informing the court that Manafort was working with a “long-time Russian colleague, who is currently based in Russia and assessed to have ties to a Russian intelligence service.” Manafort’s odd public relations efforts violate a gag order that the judge in his case had previously placed on any communication with the press. Though she’s not wearing one of those nifty ankle bracelets yet, KT McFarland will probably never get confirmed as Ambassador to Singapore.  Last summer, when asked by Senator Corey Booker, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee if she knew anything about Flynn’s interaction with Russian Ambassador Kislyak, she responded that she was not aware of any of those issues.  Based on the emails that were released this week, that was another one of those Trumpian lies.  She knew all about Flynn’s meetings and is probably the person who communicated their details to Trump while they were poolside drinking Virgin Mary’s at Mar a Lago.

Tax Tidbits:  The House voted to move the tax reform bill forward to a conference committee so that differences with the Senate version can be worked out. They’ve got a few big issues to resolve, like the elimination of the Obamacare individual mandate, treatment of the alternative minimum tax and the level and starting day for corporate tax cuts. They might also consider digging deep into the Senate version, looking at some of the “sweet heart” deals like the one for Senate Majority Leader McConnell’s home state of Kentucky that provides advantages to breweries.  They probably will opt to avoid spending too much time looking at the Goldman Sachs analysis that was released yesterday, it concludes that while the economy could grow about .3 percent more over the next two years, after that the impact of the tax reform legislation will be minimal and could in fact be negative.      

The Travel Ban is Back.  Yesterday the Supreme Court, with all the justices except for  Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonya Sotomayor concurring, said that Trump could implement the third version of his ban while the case percolates through the courts.  Score one for Trump.