December 6, 2017

Don Jr. Refuses to Disclose Russia Conversation With Father

This is all you're allowed to know about Don Jr's testimony today.Alex Edelman via ZUMA

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Donald Trump’s eldest son spent several hours under the klieg lights today testifying in front of the House Intelligence Committee. But he didn’t say much:

Donald Trump Jr. on Wednesday cited attorney-client privilege to avoid telling lawmakers about a conversation he had with his father, President Donald Trump, after news broke this summer that the younger Trump — and top campaign brass — had met with Russia-connected individuals in Trump Tower during the 2016 campaign. Though neither Trump Jr. nor the president is an attorney, Trump Jr. told the House Intelligence Committee that there was a lawyer in the room during the discussion, according to the committee’s top Democrat, Rep. Adam Schiff of California. Schiff said he didn’t think it was a legitimate invocation of attorney-client privilege.

I’m so tired these days. Unlike a lot of people, I recovered pretty quickly from Trump’s election. I didn’t binge eat or have trouble sleeping or find myself unable to concentrate on work. But over the past year he’s steadily worn me down. Every day we get more stuff like this. It’s completely insane, but there’s nothing much any of us can do except acknowledge it and move on. His cabinet won’t stop him. His family won’t stop him. The Republican Party won’t stop him as long as he keeps nominating judges they like. The Democratic Party has no power to stop anybody. And foreign leaders think he’s nuts.

Our country is being run as if the mafia won the presidency last year. There are still plenty of guardrails around to keep us from becoming, once and for all, a banana republic with nuclear weapons, but for how long? Do we really have to spend the next three years praying every day that the guardrails can hold up just a little bit longer?

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

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