Editors’ Blog

Rich Lowry, Editor of The National Review, has a guest opinion piece in the Times today, the gist of which is that Republicans are right to be “paranoid” about the search of the President’s Florida estate. We hear about Democratic criticisms of the Whitewater investigation, James Comey’s mishandling of the Hillary’s emails affair, etc. etc. All par for the course. But what I wanted to note is the central role of the Russia probe. It now serves as the baseless investigation, the hoax, the prosecutorial abuse that justifies everything from the Trumpian right that comes later.

This is no surprise from Trump himself: If Trump doesn’t like something, it’s a hoax. But here we see Trump’s relative success defining it as such not only for almost everyone on the right side of the political spectrum but in much of the journalistic world and even among many Democrats.

It’s political canon that the president’s party does poorly in the Midterms — especially if it’s said president’s first term. But the Senate minority leader is tossing bits of that conventional wisdom out the window as we get closer to the general election. And it’s not even the first time Mitch McConnell has preemptively winked in the direction of things not going super well for Republicans this fall — at least when it comes to control of the Senate.

During an event in Kentucky on Thursday McConnell suggested that it was far more likely that Republicans are able to flip the House than take back the Senate. That’s because the Senate is “different.”

A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Josh and Kate discuss the primaries in Wyoming and Alaska, along with news that the Republican Senate campaign arm is redistributing money away from some key states.

You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.

TPM Reader BB has his own take on JD Vance’s struggles in Ohio …

I am not the long-time resident of Ohio that RJ is, but I live outside of Cincinnati, and one thing that has been striking to me (and might explain the Senate Leadership Fund ad buy) is the degree to which Vance just disappeared from the airwaves after the primary. I have seen constant ads from Tim Ryan, both talking about himself (working class Ohioan, agreed with Trump on trade, not about parties… basically what you would expect from a smart Democrat trying to win in Ohio) and bashing on Vance (elite snobbish fake from San Francisco, does not care about Ohioans just his political career, etc.). Only within the last couple of weeks have I seen a single TV ad from Vance, basically his wife talking about what a nice guy he is and how she hopes Ohio will give him a chance, which is invariably followed by several Ryan ads with cops and military vets talking about how much Vance sucks. It has just been a remarkably one-sided affair. I assume that at least part of the problem is a lack of money on Vance’s part, though it is odd that I have not seen ads from outside groups, either. Maybe overconfidence on their part?

TPM Reader RJ gives us some background to understand how the Ohio Senate race is unfolding. I don’t know if RJ was prompted by this news. But Republicans now seem to believe – rightly, I think – that they run a very real chance of losing that seat and have ordered in what amounts to TV carpet bombing of the race.

Jack Goldsmith was kind enough to engage with my reply to his piece on potential criminal investigations of Donald Trump. Here’s his reply to mine. I’m going to take some time to work through the points Goldsmith makes. But I will try to address them in another post that I’ll publish soon. One immediate thought I had on a cursory read was that Goldsmith rightly makes a distinction between potential crimes committed while a person is president and things that come after. But it seems to me that one of the key complexities and unique dangers of Trump is that he is not allowing us that neat distinction. Much of his wrongdoing is continuous from one phase to the next. Indeed, in the last couple days he has grown increasingly explicit in threatening to retaliate against Garland, Biden, et al., in a hypothetical future term as President. In any case, more soon.

Former Vice President Mike Pence is walking a sort of unprecedented fine line — saying a bunch of stuff that’s just subtly enough at odds with Trump that he makes headlines, but not so harsh in breaking with Trump that he Cheneys himself.

At least two of his remarks today provided an excellent example of this.

We’ve known that Wisconsin would be a key Senate battleground this year. But until just recently we didn’t know who the Democratic nominee was. Now we know it’s Democrat Mandela Barnes, who had essentially cleared the field by the time of the primary vote. A new Marquette Law poll just came out — this is Charles Franklin’s poll, which is the premium in-state poll. It shows Barnes up by seven points over Johnson 51%-44%. In June the same poll found a 46%-44% race. That difference is likely a mix of shifting electoral landscape and Barnes consolidating potential supporters after the primary ended.

I do not count Johnson out. He’s won two straight elections he was not expected to win, both against former Sen. Russ Feingold. He’s a canny and able politician. But unless this poll is a significant outlier Wisconsin looks like the strong pick up opportunity Democrats were hoping for. For an incumbent to be running behind a challenger who has crossed the 50% threshold is a perilous place to be.

Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) pulled a publicity stunt this afternoon by releasing an open letter addressed to the “American Job Seeker” warning anyone who might be considering applying for a gig at the Internal Revenue Service that they need not apply.

That’s because, in his telling, any new funding being funneled into the agency after the passage of Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act will be reversed if Republicans take back Congress after the Midterms. Vowing to gut the agency once Republicans are back in power, Scott referred to any new job openings at the IRS — after the Democratic bill allocated $80 billion in additional funding for the agency, in part to help with staffing shortages — as a “short-term gig.”

The Times has a story disclosing the fact that investigators have interviewed both Trump White House Counsel Pat Cipollone and his Deputy Patrick Philbin in their classified documents inquiry. That’s not surprising. The two were also originally tasked with liaising with the National Archives on Trump’s behalf. But it does clarify one thing. If Trump had really had the “standing order” about documents he took home automatically becoming declassified, such an order would certainly have gone through the Counsel’s office. Obviously that never happened and we can infer that investigators know that as a fact directly from these two men.