CreditChip Somodevilla/Getty Image

James Comey’s Fear of Everyone—Except Democrats—Helped Donald Trump Upset Hillary Clinton.

Comey thought a lot about the rabid Republican zealots he could offend by doing his job and enforcing the law, and not at all about the Democrats he trusted would be docile and play by the rules.

Everyone spent the weekend talking about the big New York Times James Comey piece, an informative (and infuriating) tick-tock about what was going through the FBI director’s head last year as he said what he said about Hillary Clinton—and didn’t say what he didn’t say about Donald Trump.

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HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE NY TIMES REPORT:

Mr. Comey made those decisions with the supreme self-confidence of a former prosecutor who, in a distinguished career, has cultivated a reputation for what supporters see as fierce independence, and detractors view as media-savvy arrogance.

The Times found that this go-it-alone strategy was shaped by his distrust of senior officials at the Justice Department, who he and other F.B.I. officials felt had provided Mrs. Clinton with political cover. The distrust extended to his boss, Loretta E. Lynch, the attorney general, who Mr. Comey believed had subtly helped play down the Clinton investigation.

CreditChip Somodevilla/Getty Images

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 Mr. Comey owes his job and his reputation to the night in 2004 when he rushed to the Washington hospital room of John Ashcroft, the attorney general, and prevented Bush administration officials from persuading him to reauthorize a classified program that had been ruled unconstitutional. At the time, Mr. Comey, a Republican, was the deputy attorney general.

Years later, when Mr. Obama was looking for a new F.B.I. director, Mr. Comey seemed an inspired bipartisan choice. But his style eventually grated on his bosses at the Justice Department.

In 2015, as prosecutors pushed for greater accountability for police misconduct, Mr. Comey embraced the controversial theory that scrutiny of police officers led to increases in crime — the so-called Ferguson effect. “We were really caught off guard,” said Vanita Gupta, the Justice Department’s top civil rights prosecutor at the time. “He lobbed a fairly inflammatory statement, without data to back it up, and walked away.”

Sam Hodgson for The New York Times

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Both [Ms. Lynch and Mr. Comey] had been federal prosecutors in New York — Mr. Comey in the Manhattan limelight, Ms. Lynch in the lower-wattage Brooklyn office. The 6-foot-8 Mr. Comey commanded a room and the spotlight. Ms. Lynch, 5 feet tall, was known for being cautious and relentlessly on message. In her five months as attorney general, she had shown no sign of changing her style.

Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix, where Ms. Lynch and former President Bill Clinton had an unscheduled meeting on the tarmac in June 2016. CreditSpencer Platt/Getty Images

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In late June, Ms. Lynch’s plane touched down at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport as part of her nationwide tour of police departments. Former President Bill Clinton was also in Phoenix that day, leaving from the same tarmac.

Ms. Lynch’s staff loaded into vans, leaving the attorney general and her husband on board. Mr. Clinton’s Secret Service agents mingled with her security team. When the former president learned who was on the plane, his aides say, he asked to say hello.

Mr. Clinton’s aides say he intended only to greet Ms. Lynch as she disembarked. But Ms. Lynch later told colleagues that the message she received — relayed from one security team to another — was that Mr. Clinton wanted to come aboard, and she agreed.

When Ms. Lynch’s staff members noticed Mr. Clinton boarding the plane, a press aide hurriedly called the Justice Department’s communications director, Melanie Newman, who said to break up the meeting immediately. A staff member rushed to stop it, but by the time the conversation ended, Mr. Clinton had been on the plane for about 20 minutes.

The meeting made the local news the next day and was soon the talk of Washington. Ms. Lynch said they had only exchanged pleasantries about golf and grandchildren, but Republicans called for her to recuse herself and appoint a special prosecutor.

Ms. Lynch said she would not step aside but would accept whatever career prosecutors and the F.B.I. recommended on the Clinton case — something she had planned to do all along.

Mr. Comey never suggested that she recuse herself. But at that moment, he knew for sure that when there was something to say about the case, he alone would say it.

Anthony D. Weiner, the former New York congressman, at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia in July. CreditStephen Crowley/The New York Times

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F.B.I. agents in New York seized Anthony Weiner’s laptop in early October. The investigation was just one of many in the New York office and was not treated with great urgency, officials said. ...

Eventually, investigators realized that they had hundreds of thousands of emails, many of which belonged to [Ms. Huma Abedin, Mr. Weiner's wife and one of Mrs. Clinton’s closest confidantes] and had been backed up to her husband’s computer.

Then, agents in New York ...made another surprising discovery: evidence that some of the emails had moved through Mrs. Clinton’s old BlackBerry server, the one she used before moving to her home server. If Mrs. Clinton had intended to conceal something, agents had always believed, the evidence might be in those emails. But reading them would require another search warrant, essentially reopening the Clinton investigation.

The election was two weeks away.

Huma Abedin has long been one of of Mrs. Clinton’s closest confidants and served as a top aide during the campaign. CreditDoug Mills/The New York Times

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“In my mind at the time, Clinton is likely to win,” Mr. Steinbach said. “It’s pretty apparent. So what happens after the election, in November or December? How do we say to the American public: ‘Hey, we found some things that might be problematic. But we didn’t tell you about it before you voted’? The damage to our organization would have been irreparable.”

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Congressional Republicans were preparing for years of hearings during a Clinton presidency. If Mr. Comey became the subject of those hearings, F.B.I. officials feared, it would hobble the agency and harm its reputation. “I don’t think the organization would have survived that,” Mr. Steinbach said.

 CreditZach Gibson/Getty Images

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 Mr. Comey’s chief of staff called the office of Ms. Yates, the deputy attorney general, and revealed the plan.

When Ms. Lynch was told, she was both stunned and confused. While the Justice Department’s rules on “election year sensitivities” do not expressly forbid making comments close to an election, administrations of both parties have interpreted them as a broad prohibition against anything that may influence a political outcome.

Ms. Lynch understood Mr. Comey’s predicament, but not his hurry. In a series of phone calls, her aides told Mr. Comey’s deputies that there was no need to tell Congress anything until agents knew what the emails contained.

Either Ms. Lynch or Ms. Yates could have ordered Mr. Comey not to send the letter, but their aides argued against it. If Ms. Lynch issued the order and Mr. Comey obeyed, she risked the same fate that Mr. Comey feared: accusations of political interference and favoritism by a Democratic attorney general.

If Mr. Comey disregarded her order and sent the letter — a real possibility, her aides thought — it would be an act of insubordination that would force her to consider firing him, aggravating the situation.

So the debate ended at the staff level, with the Justice Department imploring the F.B.I. to follow protocol and stay out of the campaign’s final days. Ms. Lynch never called Mr. Comey herself.

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Polls almost immediately showed Mrs. Clinton’s support declining. Presidential races nearly always tighten in the final days, but some political scientists reported a measurable “Comey effect.”

“This changes everything,” Mr. Trump said.

Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

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At the Justice Department, career prosecutors and political appointees privately criticized not only Mr. Comey for sending the letter but also Ms. Lynch and Ms. Yates for not stopping him. Many saw the letter as the logical result of years of not reining him in.

[NY Times ]

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The big takeaway may be that the reason everything happened the way it did is that everyone involved, from Comey up to President Obama, assumed Hillary Clinton was going to win. Their behavior was guided by that assumption.

In Comey’s case, he thought maybe he was establishing his independence toward the person who was going to be his next boss. In Obama’s case, it was maybe more that he didn’t want to be seen as interfering in an election and felt he didn’t need to because Hillary was going to win anyway.

All that strikes me as true. But here’s another takeaway for you, and I haven’t seen anyone make this point, and it’s an important one: If the Times is to be believed—and stories like this one, based on 30 interviews, might get some facts wrong but are generally accurate in the gist of what they convey—Comey was often motivated by fear. Fear of how a certain group would react.

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...The article doesn’t say this, but surely Comey also feared GOP wrath if he did confirm before the election that Donald Trump was under investigation too, which he finally confirmed last month.

We also see at least one instance in which he feared the anger of his own agents (again, with respect to speaking harshly of Clinton last summer. And we know thanks to the late Wayne Barrett’s work here at The Daily Beast that he had reason to fear them, as agents leaked freely to Rudy Giuliani, who then broadcast them on Fox News).

Read more at MICHAEL TOMASKY, DAILY BEAST

COMEY: THE MAN WHO SAID TOO MUCH.

Zach Gibson/Getty Images

On Wednesday, FBI Director James B. Comey testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on his announcement, days before the 2016 presidential election, that the FBI was reopening an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails. The investigation ultimately did not turn up anything of note — and many say it cost Clinton the election. [New York Times / Adam Goldman]  On Wednesday, Comey justified his decision: “Having repeatedly told this Congress we're done and there's nothing there, there's no case there, there's no case there, to restart in a hugely significant way, potentially finding the emails that would reflect on her intent from the beginning and not speak about it would require an act of concealment in my view.” [CNN / Tom LoBianco, Manu Raju, Mary Kay Mallonee]  The bottom line: Even if his decision swayed the election, he’d do it again. “It makes me mildly nauseous to think that we might have had some impact on the election. But honestly, it wouldn't change the decision.” [NPR / Brian Naylor]  Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images ---- Comey’s decision definitely impacted the election; the question is how much. One example: Looking at absentee votes versus Election Day votes for both Clinton and Obama suggest that leading up the election, Clinton was performing nearly as well as Obama did. Then on Election Day, following Comey’s actions, her support plummeted, a phenomenon that could help explain why she lost Florida, for instance, where she had won the early vote with 56.3 percent. [Vox / Sean McElwee, Matt McDermott, Will Jordan]  A scene from Hillary Clinton’s final campaign rally, in Philadelphia, November 7.  Brooks Kraft / Getty As absurd as it might seem to relitigate a past election, Democrats have to grapple with the question of Comey’s influence to decide how much responsibility they bear for their own defeat. As Democrats conduct an autopsy on the election and grasp for a way forward, they need to understand how they managed to lose so badly and so surprisingly — and what role years of party stagnation might have played in creating the circumstances that led to Clinton’s defeat. [Politico Magazine / Edward-Isaac Dovere]  Hillary Clinton, for her part, says she takes responsibility ... but seems to blame Comey more than anyone. Just yesterday, she spoke at a Women for Women International event in New York and told moderator Christiane Amanpour, “If the election had been on October 27, I would be your president.” [Washington Post / Philip Rucker]  Hillary Clinton’s face projected at Javits Center in New York City, where she was supposed to shatter the glass ceiling. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images) But as Vox’s Jeff Stein points out (in his review of Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed 2016 Campaign), there are two theories of how Clinton lost that aren’t so simple as “James B. Comey.” The first is that her campaign failed her; the second is that she failed as a candidate. Stein writes of the latter argument, “It is in uncovering proof of this second thesis where the book is both most persuasive and most arresting — and where its lessons for the Democratic Party are the most salient.” [Vox / Jeff Stein]  A fourth theory emerged this week after leading Democratic pollsters shared new post-election findings with the Washington Post. As Greg Sargent writes, “A shockingly large percentage of these Obama-Trump voters said Democrats’ economic policies will favor the wealthy — twice the percentage that said the same about Trump.” So a broader messaging failure on the part of Democrats does seem to be at play. [Washington Post / Greg Sargent]   CreditDoug Mills/The New York Times Realistically, the answer lies somewhere in the center of these poles. A stronger candidate who did a better job selling the Democratic Party’s vision might have weathered the last-minute Comey revelation better. We’ll never know definitively. To get a big-picture understanding of the election, you can’t dismiss any of these factors — including the role Comey played. [New York Times / Amy Chozick​]

GOP: If at first you don’t succeed, do exactly the same thing again. 

Win McNamee/Getty Images

• This will sound familiar, per Vox’s Sarah Kliff: “House Republicans are hurtling toward a vote on a bill that is disliked by most Americans, opposed by nearly every major health care group, and not yet scored by the Congressional Budget Office.” [Vox / Sarah Kliff] 
• No, that is not news from March, when House Republicans introduced a health care bill called the American Health Care Act, planned to vote on it under similar circumstances, but then pulled it from the floor without a vote less than three weeks later. [Vox / Sarah Kliff] 
• It’s news from today — Wednesday, May 3 — because House Republicans are hurriedly planning a vote on a revamped version of the AHCA for Thursday (that’s tomorrow).
• They can only afford to lose 23 Republican votes, and right now roughly 18 centrist Republicans are looking like a definite “no.” But House Republicans are finally within striking distance on their health care bill, flipping at least two members through a small amendment and shoring up support among some undecided members through good old-fashioned whipping. But GOP leadership faces the same problem they’ve had all along: They’re still short the votes, and putting the bill on the floor now and trying to eke out passage could be disastrous if the vote doesn’t go Speaker Paul Ryan’s (R-Wis.) way.  GOP whips ― most notably, Chief Deputy Whip Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) and Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) ― have been feverishly working the House floor this week, hearing out wavering members and working out deals where, if Republicans were just a couple votes short, lawmakers would vote yes.That means that if the bill passes, the margin may only be one or two votes. But if it fails, the total could look much worse.Republicans need 217 votes on the bill if all members vote, meaning they could lose 22 of their members and still pass the legislation. That 217 threshold could be lowered if some members are absent ― or if leadership could convince a fence-sitter to just not show up. But leadership believes they can’t go to the floor unless they’re within a few votes. Based on the HuffPost whip count, it looks like Republicans are right around the number they need.[Huffington Post / Matt Fuller] 



SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty 

• Why rush into a vote under such inauspicious circumstances? Budget reconciliation. Budget rules determine whether a vote needs a simple majority of 51 votes to pass the Senate, or whether it needs 60 votes. Republicans will never get 60 votes to repeal Obamacare as long as they have fewer than 60 Republican senators (they currently have 52), so the best they can hope for is to pass a bill through the Senate on only 51 votes. But certain interpretations of those rules suggest that if they want to qualify for a 51-vote health care bill, they have to pass it before moving on to tax reform and passing a new budget (both of which they’d like to do this year). [Vox / Andrew Prokop] 
• It’s clearly a ... risky ... strategy. Even last week, when Republicans considered bringing the bill to the floor to squeak through a vote within President Trump’s first 100 days, they abandoned the effort because they didn’t have the votes they’d need for it to pass. [New York Times / Thomas Kaplan, Robert Pear] 



Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI)     Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images

• So here we are, with Republican lawmakers attempting to make desperate last-minute concessions to win over undecided colleagues. The latest: throwing an additional $8 billion at a program to fund “high-risk pools” (bringing funding for that to almost $115 billion). The idea here is to (essentially) subsidize health insurance for the most expensive patients, while taking them out of the pools of healthy individuals — which would, in turn, bring down the cost of insurance for those healthy people in the low-risk pools. [Vox / Sarah Kliff] 
• As of Wednesday evening, Trump has reportedly been “furiously working the phones” to try to get Republicans to unite behind this new bill. And it appears to be working — whip counts suggest they’re closer than they were in the past. The question is whether they’re close enough. [Vox / Dylan Scott​] 

The Loneliness And Leakiness Of Trump's White House.

TERRY GROSS, FRESH AIR

How the Republican right found allies in Russia From gun rights to terrorism to same-sex marriage, many leading advocates on the right who grew frustrated with their country’s leftward tilt under President Barack Obama have forged ties with well-connected Russians and come to see Vladimir Putin as a potential ally. By Rosalind S. Helderman and Tom Hamburger  •  Read more »

Amid immigration setbacks, one Trump strategy seems to be working: Fear

A Border Patrol agent on duty at the fence between the United States and Mexico in San Ysidro, Calif., in mid-April. Apprehensions of people trying to enter the United States illegally along the southern border have plummeted, according to federal data. (Sandy Huffaker/Getty Images)

The number of migrants crossing into the United States has dropped markedly since he took office, and experts on both sides of the debate attribute at least part of this shift to the administration’s use of sharp, unwelcoming rhetoric, enforcement raids and public spotlighting of crimes committed by immigrants.

• By David Nakamura
 

 “In many ways, [Trump’s] attempts to implement his hard-line immigration policies have not gone very well in his first three months. His travel ban aimed at some Muslim-majority countries has been blocked by the courts, his U.S.-Mexico border wall has gone nowhere in Congress, and he has retreated, at least for now, on his vow to target illegal immigrants brought here as children. But one strategy that seems to be working well is fear. The number of migrants, legal and illegal, crossing into the U.S. has dropped markedly since Trump took office, while recent declines in the number of deportations have been reversed. Many experts … attribute at least part of this shift to the use of sharp, unwelcoming rhetoric by Trump and his aides, as well as the administration’s showy use of enforcement raids and public spotlighting of crimes committed by immigrants.” The most striking evidence that Trump’s tactics have had an effect has come at border with Mexico, where the number of apprehensions made by border control agents plummeted from more than 40,000 per month in 2016 to just 12,193 in March.

• “The bottom line is that they have entirely changed the narrative around immigration,” said Doris Meissner, who led the Clinton-era U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. “The result of that is that, yes, you can call it words and rhetoric, and it certainly is, but it is changing behavior. It is changing the way the United States is viewed around the world, as well as the way we’re talking about and reacting to immigration within the country.”

Read more at -- “Amid immigration setbacks, one Trump strategy seems to be working: Fear,”

This is where Obamacare takes a hit.

It will hit areas of the country that are rural and poor — and predominantly supported Trump — very hard.

The ‘forgotten’ Trump roast: The 2004 thrashing at the New York Friars Club. Trump 13 years later: Still the same.





WASHINGTON POST

Bannon Reasserts Influence in 100-Days Push  (Almost)           — The Hill

But it is also notable that Trump, until prevailed upon, was apparently perfectly willing to sign such an incendiary executive order, which was drafted by Bannon and Peter Navarro, the head of the new National Trade Council. This has encouraged the Bannonites, who had been written off in some quarters. “All of these people who say the president doesn’t have an ideology, they’re wrong,” a Bannon ally told The Hill. “He does have an ideology, and it’s Bannon’s ideology. They are just now figuring out how to implement it.”

To some extent, that quote may have been wishful thinking, but it illustrates something important as Trump moves into his second hundred days. The fight inside the Administration to win Trump’s favor, and help wield the authority that comes with his office, is far from over. With Trump being such a hollow, impatient, and peripatetic figure, there’s rarely any assurance that things are finally settled, whatever the issue. Every day is a new day, and you can never be sure what it will bring.

The national media really does work in a bubble, something that wasn’t true as recently as 2008. And the bubble is growing more extreme.

 The national media really does work in a bubble, something that wasn’t true as recently as 2008. And the bubble is growing more extreme. Concentrated heavily along the coasts, the bubble is both geographic and political. If you’re a working journalist, odds aren’t just that you work in a pro-Clinton county—odds are that you reside in one of the nation’s most pro-Clinton counties. And you’ve got company: If you’re a typical reader of Politico, chances are you’re a citizen of bubbleville, too.

The “media bubble” trope might feel overused by critics of journalism who want to sneer at reporters who live in Brooklyn or California and don’t get the “real America” of southern Ohio or rural Kansas. But these numbers suggest it’s no exaggeration: Not only is the bubble real, but it’s more extreme than you might realize. And it’s driven by deep industry trends.

 Jack Shafer in Politico:

 Read more »

 pro-life Democrats 

“For the sake of winning elections, there should thus be a general rule of thumb that says pro-life Democrats should be tolerated so long as they do not meaningfully impede access to abortion.”

Ryan Cooper untangles the thorny question faced by some in the Democratic Party of whether to embrace or reject Democrats who hold anti-abortion views. His recommendation is a nuanced look at political coalition-building and pragmatism in country where “both hard-core pro-lifers and pro-choicers” are “relatively rare.” Read more »

• Ryan Cooper in The Week:

LOCKING UP OUR OWN: CRIME AND PUNISHMENT IN BLACK AMERICA

NY TIMES



WASHINGTON POST


ATLANTIC

‘Everyone tunes in’: Inside Trump’s obsession with cable TV For the president — a reality TV star who parlayed his blustery-yet-knowing on-air persona into a winning political brand — television is often the guiding force of his day, both weapon and scalpel, megaphone and news feed. And his obsession with the tube has upended the traditional rhythms of the White House. By Ashley Parker and Robert Costa  •  Read more »

The attorney general has issued a series of orders wrecking efforts to reform police practices, cutting back on voting rights and more.

Read more »

It’s not just Fox: What every working woman knows about sexual harassment.

Mary Shannon Little

Consumer backlash was the only force strong enough to get Bill O’Reilly off the air.

Read more »

Sorry, Republicans, but most people support single-payer health care.

As government-provided health insurance expands, more Americans want in.

WASHINGTON POST

As a country, we’ve long since acquiesced to the idea that Uncle Sam should give insurance to the elderly, veterans, people with disabilities, poor adults, poor kids, pregnant women and the lower middle class.

Many Americans are asking: Why not the rest of us, too?

 A recent survey from the Economist/YouGov found that a majority of Americans support “expanding Medicare to provide health insurance to every American.” Similarly, a poll from Morning Consult/Politico showed that a plurality of voters support “a single payer health care system, where all Americans would get their health insurance from one government plan.”

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Many of those not among the growing pool of public-insurance beneficiaries, on the other hand, have become resentful of the fact that everyone else seems to be getting a big fat government handout. Or so they perceive.... often what these Trump voters say they want is not a return to pre-Obamacare days; rather, they want in on the great insurance deal that they think their lazy, less-deserving neighbors are getting.

GOP backs off a health-care push that threatened deal to avert shutdown Under pressure from the White House, House Republican leaders appeared to be gauging support for a vote on health care as early as Friday but ultimately determined they didn’t have enough support. The move had alarmed key Democrats, who said they would pull their support from an agreement to keep the government open past midnight Friday if Republicans brought the health-care bill to a vote. By Kelsey Snell and Paul Kane  •  Read more » -- House Republicans delayed a vote to rewrite parts of the Affordable Care Act, denying the Trump administration a critical victory after a late push to act on health care threatened the bipartisan deal to fund the government. Kelsey Snell and Paul Kane report: “The failure of Republicans to unite behind the new health-care measure was a blow to White House officials, who were eager to see a vote ahead of [Trump’s] 100-day mark. Congressional leaders were more focused this week on securing a spending agreement … It was also evidence of just how divided Republicans are about how to overhaul Obamacare, despite seven years of GOP promises to repeal and replace the 2010 law. Conservatives and moderates have repeatedly clashed over the contours of such a revamp, most sharply over bringing down insurance premiums in exchange for limiting the kind of coverage that is required to be offered.” As many as 15 or so House Republicans publicly said they will not support the latest proposal; crafted among the White House, the House Freedom Caucus, and a leading moderate lawmaker. That leaves Paul Ryan and the Trump administration with an incredibly narrow path for passage. Ryan is only able to lose 22 Republicans on the vote.