RUSSIAN KILLS IN THE U.K.

Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images

• Fourteen fixers, oligarchs, and other critics of Russian President Vladimir Putin have succumbed to mysterious deaths around the UK as the British government turns a blind eye, according to a bombshell BuzzFeed investigation. [BuzzFeed / Heidi Blake, Tom Warren, Richard Holmes, Jason Leopold, Jane Bradley, and Alex Campbell] 
• In a report that reads like a spy thriller, BuzzFeed has begun to release names of men whom intelligence officials say were killed by members of the Russian Mafia or security forces. Officially, British police have ruled that the 14 victims died of heart attacks or suicide, but the BuzzFeed investigation alleges the cause of death is something more sinister. [BuzzFeed / Heidi Blake, Tom Warren, Richard Holmes, Jason Leopold, Jane Bradley, and Alex Campbell] 

Alexander Perepilichnyy

• At least one of these assassinations — of Russian financier Alexander Perepilichnyy — came from direct orders from Putin, according to US intelligence officials. Before he died in 2012, Perepilichnyy helped expose massive tax fraud by Russian officials. [BuzzFeed / Heidi Blake, Jason Leopold, Jane Bradley, Richard Holmes, Tom Warren, and Alex Campbell] 
• Assassinations of journalists and Putin critics in Russia are nothing new, and are troubling in their own right. [Vo  x / Vladimir Milov] 
• But evidence that the Kremlin is going further afield to silence its critics — combined with the allegations that Britain is looking the other way — is noteworthy.
• The most well-known assassination of a former Russian is the 2006 poisoning of former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko. Litvinenko had recently gotten British citizenship and was living in London when he was poisoned via radioactive polonium in his tea. [BBC / Frank Gardner] 

Alexander Litvinenko on his deathbed

• The years following Litvinenko’s death saw outrage and a period of extremely tense relations between Britain and Russia. They also saw the Russian Parliament pass new laws allowing that country’s special services to target and kill “extremists” abroad — except their definition of extremists included people who slandered the president. [BBC / Steven Eke] 
• So what changed between Russian and the UK from then to now? Money, and fear.
• There’s billions of Russian money in British real estate, which made former Prime Minister David Cameron loath to impose tough sanctions on Russia when it invaded Crimea in 2014. [Reuters / Tom Bergin and Brenda Goh] 
• Now, with Russian hackers meddling in the US election and attempting to interfere in the French elections as well, intelligence officials say the British government is too afraid of retaliations to confront Putin about the assassinations taking place on its soil. [BuzzFeed / Heidi Blake, Tom Warren, Richard Holmes, Jason Leopold, Jane Bradley, and Alex Campbell​] 
• BuzzFeed says it plans to release more names of those killed in Britain in the coming days.

Beyond opposing Trump, Democrats keep searching for a message





WASHINGTON POST

AMERICAN CULTURE: AMAZON SWALLOWS WHOLE FOODS.

Joe Raedle/Getty Images

• Amazon is doubling down on its push into brick-and-mortar stores. And now they’re not just bookstores; they’re grocery stores.
• The world’s largest online retailer announced today it is buying the pricey organic supermarket chain Whole Foods for $13.7 billion, adding to the online grocery delivery service it already has. [CNN Money / Paul R. La Monica and Chris Isidore] 
• The news has already sent other grocery stocks into a tailspin. Kroger, Supervalu, and Costco shares all dropped, as did those of Target and Walmart. [CNBC / Katie Little] 
• So what’s in the details of biggest deal the internet giant has made to date? First of all, it’s great for Whole Foods, which has been struggling with falling sales recently. It gets a bunch of cash and the ability to keep operating under its name. [Business Insider / Bob Bryan] 

Drew Angerer / Getty Images

• For Amazon, it’s the latest sign of an internet giant moving to dominate the retail market in all areas, from books to clothes to electronics and now food. Amazon already makes movies and television shows, designs its own clothing lines, and manufactures home electronics, and is opening up more physical bookstores across the US.
• Its Prime service is transforming how Americans buy products (and has also come under fire for discriminatory delivery practices). [Bloomberg / David Ingold and Spencer Soper] 
• Amazon’s vast presence has important implications for US antitrust laws, which are supposed to guard against businesses becoming monopolies, incentivize competition, and protect consumers from high prices. [Yale Law Journal / Lina Khan] 
• In many ways, antitrust laws aren’t prepared to handle internet retail and the modern economy. Because those laws focus more on prices of the things we buy, they aren’t really equipped to deal with a business like Amazon, which underprices some of its goods to undercut the competition and grow even bigger. [The Yale Law Journal / Lina Khan] 
• What remains to be seen is how Amazon fares under Trump, who does not have the friendliest relationship with its CEO, Jeff Bezos (an outspoken critic of Trump policies and the owner of the Washington Post). [Recode / April Glaser] 

On voting rights, we’re becoming two separate and unequal countries

(Shutterstock)

WASHINGTON POST


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Despite a string of losses in the courts, Republicans are going to keep trying to make voting as difficult as possible, particularly for African Americans, for one reason: It works. There are active debates about exactly how many people were kept from the polls in 2016 — for instance, some contend that Wisconsin’s voter-ID law disenfranchised enough African Americans to swing the state to Donald Trump — but every young person, urban dweller or racial minority they can keep from the polls increases the odds that Republicans will win.
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Meanwhile, Democratic states are moving in the opposite direction, proposing measures such as automatic registration and same-day registration, in which you can register when you show up to the polls on election day (it’s in place in 13 mostly liberal states, plus D.C., while it’s been passed but not yet implemented in three more). But if they really wanted to make things easy, they’d be pushing for universal vote by mail (UVBM), which is used only in Washington state, Oregon and Colorado.

It’s something of a mystery why UVBM hasn’t been more of a priority for Democrats, because it couldn’t be easier. You get your ballot in the mail, you fill it out, you drop it in a mailbox. There’s no taking time off work, wondering where your polling place is or waiting in line. It’s particularly helpful for people who don’t have flexible schedules. While fraud is theoretically possible, in practice it’s a minuscule problem. Just ask someone from one of those three states what they think about it, and they’ll tell you how much they love it. That’s not to mention the fact that it makes elections cheaper and easier to hold, and provides a paper trail for any disputes.

Even as Republican and Democratic states move further apart, it seems clear that Republican legislators feel a good deal more urgency about this issue that Democratic ones do. You can bet that Republicans will do everything they can to make sure that changes they make this year are implemented in time for the 2018 election, in order to put a thumb on the scale in what could be a disastrous election for the GOP.

There’s one final piece to this puzzle, which is that it’s important to avoid the temptation to look at this conflict through a both-sides prism. You can argue that Democrats are making the same partisan calculation Republicans are, favoring the voting system that shapes the electorate in their favor. That may be true, but the fact is that Republicans are trying to make it hard for certain people to vote, while Democrats are trying to make it easy for everyone to vote. So both parties aren’t on equally firm moral ground.

Read more at WASHINGTON POST

Russian attempts to hack state voting systems ran far deeper than previously reported and could continue to affect future elections. 

Bloomberg’s Michael Riley and Jordan Robertson report: “In Illinois, investigators found evidence that cyber intruders tried to delete or alter voter data. The hackers accessed software designed to be used by poll workers on Election Day, and in at least one state accessed a campaign finance database … In all, the Russian hackers hit systems in a total of 39 states ... The new details … show the scope of alleged hacking that federal investigators are scrutinizing as they look into whether Trump campaign officials may have colluded in the efforts. But they also paint a worrisome picture for future elections: The newest portrayal of potentially deep vulnerabilities in the U.S.’s patchwork of voting technologies comes less than a week after former FBI Director James Comey warned Congress that Moscow isn’t done meddling.”

A Democratic Blind Spot On Culture

POLITICO

Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, hires his own lawyer in Russia probe



WASHINGTON POST

THE RURAL-URBAN DIVIDE

America’s cultural divide runs deep. While rural and urban Americans share some economic challenges, they frequently diverge on questions of culture and values. On few issues are they more at odds than immigration. 

A Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation survey found rural Americans are apprehensive about the nation’s rapidly changing demographics, fear that Christianity is under siege and believe that the government cares more about city dwellers. But the disagreements between rural and urban America ultimately center on fairness: Who wins and who loses in the new American economy?



WASHINGTON POST (1)

WASHINGTON POST (2)

Five myths about famine.


WASHINGTON POST

Strong approval of Trump is fading across a number of demographics. His Base Is Shrinking



WASHINGTON POST

Make no mistake. Republicans can still succeed in destroying Obamacare.






GREG SARGENT, WASHINGTON POST

Kansas’ collapsed tax-cut plan will provide political fodder for Democrats for decades.

WASHINGTON POST

MUELLER'S CIRCLING TRUMP

 Special counsel Robert Mueller has begun investigating whether President Trump obstructed justice in the Russia probe. 

Alex Wong/Getty Images

Devlin Barrett, Adam Entous, Ellen Nakashima and Sari Horwitz scoop: “The move ... to investigate Trump’s conduct marks a major turning point in the nearly year-old FBI investigation, which until recently focused on Russian meddling during the presidential campaign and on whether there was any coordination between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. 

Investigators have also been looking for any evidence of possible financial crimes among Trump associates ... Five people briefed on the interview requests ... said that Daniel Coats ... Mike Rogers ... and Rogers’s recentl departed deputy, Richard Ledgett, agreed to be interviewed by Mueller’s investigators as early as this week.”

-- Trump responded to The Post's story this morning:

Why Trump is scared: “Mueller is recruiting perhaps the most high-powered and experienced team of investigators ever assembled by the Justice Department," Garrett Graff, who wrote a book about the former FBI director, writes for Wired. "It’s a team that’s not just a paper office tiger but one with deep experience investigating crime around the world.” A renowned litigator, James Quarles also happens to be a former assistant prosecutor in the Watergate investigation, where he specialized in campaign finance research, according to Wired. With decades of experience representing the federal government before the Supreme Court, former Deputy Solicitor General Michael Dreeben has been touted by CNN as Mueller’s most important hire. One of Mueller’s first appointments, Andrew Weismann, is another heavy hitter. He has taken a leave of absence from working as the head of the Justice Department’s criminal fraud unit to join the special counsel, and has been described by Politico as Mueller’s most significant hire.That reflects the fact that Weissmann has a reputation as someone who has made a career out of taking on organized crime. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Obstruction of justice happens when someone tries to impede or stop a federal investigation by threatening or coercing investigators. If Mueller’s team decides there’s enough evidence to mount a case, they must demonstrate intent — that Trump knew full well what he was doing by telling Comey to stop investigating former NSA Director Michael Flynn. [Cornell Law School / Wex Legal Dictionary]

Congressman Among 4 Shot at Baseball Field; Suspect Is Dead

Just after 7am, in Alexandria Va., a man opened fire with his M-4 rifle and loosing off as many as 100 shots at Republicans practicing baseball. 

James Hodgkinson, 66, died from gun injuries on Wednesday hours after he opened fire on a group of Republican congressmen and their aides who were practicing for a congressional baseball game in the Washington, D.C. suburb. Steve Scalise, the third-most senior House Republican, and four others were injured. 

• Scalise is critically ill after surgery for a hip wound.
• 
  
• Two other Congressional staffers were wounded but are stable and the two hero Capitol Hill Police officers who stopped his spree were also hurt but will recover.

The shooter ... creeped out female bar staff at BBQ restaurant where he spent Happy Hours - after moving to D.C. to protest against the president he hated.

Creeped out: Female bar staff found Hodgkinson strange, workers at the Pork Barrel BBQ told DailyMail.com

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4604820/Congress-shooter-creeped-women.html#ixzz4k3pmO1S5
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• 
  
• He was apparently sleeping in his Ford E-series van and had told his wife on Tuesday that he was coming back to Belleville, Illinois, because he missed her and his dogs 
• 
  
• The man ... drank by himself watching golf, staffers at the restaurant told the DailyMail.com

Hodgkinson was a staunch Sanders supporter and campaigned for the senator to get the Democratic nomination for president last year. His family said he was distraught over Trump's November election win and revealed that he had been living in Alexandria out of a gym bag and sleeping in his car for the last two months,... spending time in the lobby of a YMCA, where he showered daily,  hunched over his laptop. 

In a statement on the Senate floor, the Vermont senator said that he was aware the shooter 'apparently volunteered on my presidential campaign' - and condemned his actions.

He was seen there about 7am Wednesday morning, minutes before he opened fire at the neighboring Simpson Field. 

A married union tradesman with a home inspection business, Hodgkinson had threatened to 'destroy' the president and his administration on social media but was not known to Secret Service. 

Hodgkinson had a lengthy criminal record which includes charges, but no convictions, for DUI, domestic battery, pointing a gun at a relative.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4604820/Congress-shooter-creeped-women.html#ixzz4k3qSAp00
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His criminal record included a 2006 arrest for punching his female neighbor in the face as she tried to shield his underage daughter from him. 

'He definitely creeped out all our female bartenders,' said Jamie Craig, a bartender at the restaurant. 'I tried to shy away from him… just a feeling, he gave me a weird, odd vibe.' Craig said Hodgkinson would come to the bar alone, usually dressed in a collared shirt and jeans. He would order Budweiser, but usually only drank one or two.

Hodgkinson didn't talk about politics, said Craig, and he didn't mention his personal life. 

They would usually discuss the weather or different types of craft beer, but Hodgkinson usually kept to himself and seemed to be staring out the windows daydreaming.

'He would always have one or two and leave. He did seem to be staring a lot out the windows,' said Craig.

'He was quiet, definitely not a socialite,' she added. 'He was not the friendliest of people. I remember he was a bit of a rude person sometimes.'

She said Hodgkinson would often look angry and annoyed when he tried to get the bartenders attention during busy times at the bar.

Two Capitol Police officers who were accompanying Scalise were the only other armed people on the scene. They returned fire with their pistols but were shot themselves. 

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4604820/Congress-shooter-creeped-women.html#ixzz4k3r28sDG
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4604820/Congress-shooter-creeped-women.html#ixzz4k3ipKJ89
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Putin’s campaign of personal revenge against the United States



DAVID IGNATIUS, WASHINGTON POST

It’s time to bust the myth: Most Trump voters were not working class.

WASHINGTON POST


The importance of a cultural blue-collar identity in support for Donald Trump

WASHINGTON POST


The real reason working-class whites continue to support Trump.

WASHINGTON POST

While Trump Tweets, Assad and Putin Advance in Syria

STEVE COLL, NEW YORKER

AMERICAN TRIBALISM

The knee-jerk reaction to James Comey’s very credible and very serious allegations, which the former FBI director made under oath and has contemporaneous notes to back up, is the strongest proof point yet of the rising tribalism that has infected our politics.

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“It has been many years since a witness appeared on Capitol Hill and put a president in such potential jeopardy,” writes Dan Balz, The Post’s chief correspondent, in a smart take. “The investigation is far from its conclusion and, as with so much about the probe, the evidence is murky or disputable. But for the president and his White House … this was not a good day."

On the front page of the New York Times, Peter Baker calls it “the most damning j’accuse moment by a senior law enforcement official against a president in a generation.”

“Comey emerged as a superb institutionalist, a man who believes we are a nation of laws,” adds columnist David Brooks. “Trump emerged as a tribalist and a clannist, who simply cannot understand the way modern government works.”

 CreditDoug Mills/The New York Times

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We’ll know soon if the hearing moves the numbers, but don’t hold your breath. 
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Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

Trump has long been adept at muddying the waters by employing the crisis management playbook that he learned from Joseph McCarthy’s protégé Roy Cohn. The difference this time: He can count on the official Republican Party apparatus to do his bidding.

The Republican National Committee deployed a whopping 60 staff members as part of its rapid-response “war room” effort to counter-punch at Comey, according to the Wall Street Journal.

“The RNC’s output was punchy, snarky and at times contradictory,” David Weigel reports. “It neatly captured the fog of confusion that the president’s defenders wanted to churn.”

Even Trump’s former political opponents, including Marco Rubio and John McCain, acted sort of like his political defense team, Paul Kane writes.



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Legal experts, meanwhile, said Comey’s testimony clarified and bolstered the case that the president obstructed justice, Matt Zapotosky reports.

-- But sitting presidents do not get indicted on obstruction-of-justice charges. It is Congress that must ultimately determine if his behavior deserves impeachment.

 There is a chicken-egg dynamic at play. Most rank-and-file Republicans look to their party leaders for cues about what to believe, but these same lawmakers are waiting on the base of the party to turn on Trump before they find the “courage” to say publicly what many of them already believe privately.

This window-dressing is unlikely to change until members of Congress conclude that the cost of standing with Trump exceeds the risk of defending him. Rep. Martha McSally (R-Ariz.) said during a private appearance last week that the president could cost her party the House. “Any Republican member of Congress, you are going down with the ship,” McSally warned, according to the Tucson Weekly. “And we're going to hand the gavel to (Nancy) Pelosi in 2018. They only need 28 seats...

Erick Erickson warns his fellow Republicans that their blind loyalty to Trump is going to damage the party bigly in the long-term. “If your goal is to stop the left, all Trump is doing is both emboldening them and driving independent voters to them,” he explains in a new piece for The Resurgent. “Soon he will be a catalyst for a leftwing resurgence if Republicans do not sort this out themselves.”

-- The challenge for the politicians who would like to make a break is that Trump supporters who dwell in the alternative-reality fever swamps of the Internet were thrilled by the hearing, which they believe somehow offered total vindication of their president. 

(Rachel Orr/Washington Post illustration; Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post; iStock

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And it has not stopped at the water’s edge. When Barack Obama was president, a Post-ABC poll found that only 22 percent of Republicans supported missile strikes against Syria in response to Bashar al-Assad using chemical weapons against civilians. After Trump did it, 86 percent of Republicans supported strikes for the exact same reason.

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Whether there are tapes has become more significant than ever. ... If it turns out there were tapes, and Trump destroyed them, that could constitute a smoking gun of obstruction. It would also represent a tacit confession that Comey’s testimony is accurate.

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After that meeting, Comey said he told Sessions that he did not want to be alone anymore with Trump and “it can’t happen that you get kicked out of the room and the president talks to me.” Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) asked Comey how the attorney general responded. “I have a recollection of him just kind of looking at me,” he replied. “I kind of got — his body language gave me the sense like, ‘What am I going to do?’ . . . He didn’t say anything.”...

 In case you missed it: Trump’s lawyer has clients with Kremlin ties. From Shawn Boburg: “Kasowitz’s clients include Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch who is close to President Vladimir Putin and has done business with Trump’s former campaign manager. Kasowitz also represents Sberbank, Russia’s largest state-owned bank … Kasowitz has represented one of Deripaska’s companies for years in a civil lawsuit in New York and was scheduled to argue on the company’s behalf May 25, two days after news broke that Trump had hired him. A different lawyer in Kasowitz’s firm showed up in court instead, avoiding a scenario that would have highlighted Kasowitz’s extensive work for high-profile Russian clients.”


-- Mueller has been stocking his own team with highly-experienced prosecutors. One of the federal government’s top criminal law specialists is going to work part-time on the project. Justice Department deputy solicitor general Michael Dreeben, who has argued more than 100 cases before the Supreme Court, is the department’s go-to lawyer on criminal justice cases, Sari Horwitz reports. “Former and current Justice Department officials say that Mueller’s recruitment of Dreeben shows how serious he is about the investigation and signals complexities in the probe. … Mueller’s team includes … Andrew Weissmann, the chief of the Justice Department’s fraud section who oversaw corruption investigations including the probe into cheating by Volkswagen on diesel emissions tests.”

With the Affordable Care Act, Democrats over-promised and under-delivered. 

WASHINGTON POST

Climate change as culture war: Trump’s Paris pullout is a giant middle finger to the left.

SALON