September 21, 2018

Morning Roundup

Jack Taylor/PA Wire via ZUMA

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  • British Prime Minister Theresa May says that Brexit talks may have reached an impasse. But both sides always say things like this when they’re under pressure from their local constituencies to look tough. Probably best not to take it too seriously.
  • Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein denies this, but the New York Times reports that last year he suggested making secret recordings of his conversations with President Trump after the White House was in chaos over the firing of FBI Director James Comey. Allegedly, he then tried to recruit cabinet members to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from office for being unfit. UPDATE: I initially misread the Times piece to say that Rosenstein had actually made recordings of Trump. He never did, and several sources now say his suggestion was only a sarcastic remark anyway.
  • In other Trump news, the declassifier-in-chief has backed down on his order to declassify a bunch of documents related to the Russia investigation. Why? “DOJ…agreed to release them but stated that so doing may have a perceived negative impact on the Russia probe. Also, key Allies’ called to ask not to release.” Uh huh.
  • And in yet other Trump news, a couple of days of being restrained and presidential regarding the Kavanaugh affair was all he could take.

In other words, Kavanaugh did nothing wrong; Dr. Ford is probably lying; and this is all a plot by the radical left-wingers in the Democratic Party to destroy Trump. The usual.

  • Southern California has suffered through 87 consecutive days of high smog. “Regulators blame the dip in air quality in recent years on hotter weather and stronger, more persistent inversion layers that trap smog near the ground. They’re also planning a study into whether climate change is contributing to the smog problem, as many scientists expect, due to higher temperatures that speed the photochemical reactions that form ozone.”
  • John Dowd, one of Donald Trump’s former personal lawyers, tried to use funds from the White House legal defense fund to help pay legal fees for Paul Manafort and Richard Gates. “In both cases, the president’s advisers objected to the lawyer’s actions over concerns it could appear aimed at stopping the two former aides from cooperating with investigators.” Ya think?
  • The Senate is still negotiating with Christine Blasey Ford’s attorney over the terms of her testimony. The Senate wanted Monday, Ford wanted Thusday, and apparently the Senate is now offering Wednesday. However:

The senator added that Republicans are not inclined to agree with Ford’s lawyers that she should only be questioned by lawmakers — not an outside counsel. “We’ll do it on Wednesday, we expect the accuser before the accused, and we do intend to have the counsel do the questioning,” the senator said, summing up the Republicans’ stance.

The party is assenting to two of the terms Ford’s lawyers laid out in a Thursday evening call with staff from both parties, the senator said: limiting the hearing to one camera and ensuring that Kavanaugh is not in the same room as her.

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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.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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