It was week full of news and punctuated by Trump hugging the American flag and giving the longest speech ever at the Conservative Political Action Committee conference. It’s hard to fact-check a 20-minute Trump speech, much less one that lasts over two hours. So I’ll summarize. He lies about immigration, the VA, late-term abortions, tax reforms, the Green New Deal, Mueller’s investigative team, healthcare, solar power (actually what he says here is not so much a lie as it is just dumb), tariffs, Russia, crowd sizes, ISIS, and the economy. He brags about his 2016 election, brags about firing Comey, defends his declaration of national emergency, backtracks on his comments about Otto Warmbier, excuses poor cabinet choices, accuses Members of Congress of hating our country (wow), bags on Jim Mattis, claims he doesn’t have white hair (huh?), takes credit for the 2018 elections (Senate) but then says he’s not responsible for the 2018 elections (House), announces a “free speech” executive order for college campuses, and makes fun of a sitting Senator. And of course CPAC wouldn’t be complete if he didn’t berate Democrats as socialists.

Here’s what else happened last week in politics…

Missed from Last Week:

1. A county judge in North Carolina ruled that two amendments put forth to the voters last November by the state’s legislature are unconstitutional. The basis for his decision was that NC’s General Assembly was “illegally constituted” due to racial gerrymandering. NC’s government has been caught up in lawsuits for over two years. Dig deeper here.

Border Wall/Shutdown/National Emergency:

1. A bipartisan group of 58 former national security officials issue a statement saying there is no factual basis for the national emergency over the wall.
2. A Republican group of 24 former Members of Congress sign a letter urging Republicans in office to pass a joint resolution to end the national emergency.
3. Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers recalls Wisconsin’s National Guard troops from the southern border saying there’s no justification for it. New Mexico has already ordered all troops away from their border, and California has pulled their troops out as well.
4. Air Force Gen. Terrence O’Shaughnessy says there’s no military threat at our southern border and that we should be focused on risks from Russia and China. O’Shaughnessy is Commander, U.S. Northern Command and North American Aerospace Defense Command (USNORTHCOM).
5. The House passes a resolution to end Trump’s declaration of national emergency over the wall. This means the Senate must vote on it. Mitch McConnell says it‘ll pass, but Trump will veto it.
6. The House Judiciary Committee holds a hearing on the Trump administration’s policy of separating families seeking asylum at our southern border.

Russia:

1. Adam Schiff, the Chair of the House Intelligence Committee, says that if the final report on the Russia and obstruction investigations aren’t released to the public, he’ll subpoena the report and have Robert Mueller testify before the committee.
2. Paul Manafort’s lawyers argue that he should get a lenient sentence in the D.C. case, because it’s not like he’s a drug dealer or murderer, there’s no evidence of Russia collusion, and he’s only guilty of garden variety crimes. Or rich people‘s crimes, as I call them.

• • Manafort has another sentencing hearing for a separate case on March 8 in Virginia.
  • On top of these, he could get more years for breaking his plea agreement and get additional trials for crimes for which he hasn’t been tried yet.
  • Mueller did amend one of his court statements that supported his claims that Manafort lied about his contacts with Konstantin Kilimnik, but there’s still enough evidence to show Manafort lied.

3. A federal judge rejects Andrew Miller’s claim that Mueller’s appointment is unconstitutional. Now Miller has to testify to the grand jury or go to jail.
4. It doesn’t take Roger Stone long to violate his gag order and in multiple ways.

• • The day the judge issues the gag order, Stone violates the order with a tweet which he then deletes.
  • Next he responds to an email from VICE News saying that Cohen’s statement is entirely untrue.
  • Next he gets called back into court to explain the imminent release of a book that will likely violate the gag order and that neither he nor his defense team mentioned to the judge.
  • And THEN, Stone posts on Instagram that Mueller framed him. Seriously, this guy can’t help himself.

5. Some of Stone’s actions flat-out violate the gag order, but others are a little ambiguous. Here are the judge’s parameters:

• • Stone cannot speak publicly or to the media about the investigation, the case, or any of the participants.
  • Stone can speak publicly about raising funds for his defense.
  • Stone can say that he is innocent of charges against him.

6. Russia’s state-sponsored news announces that Russia is developing hypersonic missiles that can reach the U.S. targets, like the Pentagon and Camp David, in under five minutes.
7. U.S. Cyber Command says they blocked internet access for the Internet Research Agency (a Russian troll farm) during the 2018 elections.

Legal Fallout:

1. During Sean Hannity’s interview with Trump, he claims to have information that contradicts Michael Cohen’s testimony about the Stormy Daniel’s hush money payments. If he does, Hannity could be called before Congress himself to testify.
2. Michael Cohen begins three days of Congressional hearings. Two are behind closed doors and one, before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, is public. Here are a few things Cohen alleges (remember these are allegations):

• • Trump knew in advance about WikiLeaks’ plans to release the DNC’s hacked emails, and he found out through Roger Stone. Roger Stone disputes this.
  • Trump was completely involved in the hush money payments to Stormy Daniels. Cohen provided Congress with a check signed by Trump and another signed by both Donald Trump, Jr., and Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg.
  • Eric Trump was also involved the hush money payments.
  • Ivanka and Don, Jr., were both involved in the Trump Tower Moscow negotiations, which continued throughout the campaign.
  • Cohen threatened Trump’s schools so they wouldn’t release his grades or SAT scores after Trump told him he didn’t want those records released. Fordham University confirms that they received a threatening letter.
  • Trump inflated his net worth in order to secure loans and to get on Forbes’ lists, but he deflated the worth of his assets for tax purposes.
  • Trump‘s taxes are likely not under audit.
  • Weisselberg knew about all the things—hush money, Trump Tower Moscow, bank fraud, insurance fraud, and tax fraud.
  • BuzzFeed’s reporting that Trump directly told Cohen to lie to Congress isn’t accurate. Cohen says Trump implied he should lie. BuzzFeed continues to stand by their story, so now I’m super curious about their source.
  • The rumors about mistreatment of Melania, a love child, and the existence of a sex tape are likely not true.
  • Cohen’s never been to Prague, disputing one point in the Steele Dossier.
  • Cohen and Corey Lewandowski discussed a Trump trip to Russia during the campaign.

• • There are other illegal acts and wrongdoing that weren’t discussed during his testimony. Some of those are currently under investigation in New York state.
  • Cohen didn’t want a White House position, so he’s not doing this out of vengeance for that. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) later files a complaint alleging that Cohen is lying about this.
  • Trump purchased a third portrait of himself through the Trump Foundation (we already knew about the first two).
  • Jay Sekulow, Trump’s lawyer, edited Cohen’s previous testimony to Congress, causing it to be false.
  • Trump doesn’t email or text. That’s so old-school, but could be his saving grace.

3. Cohen provides a list of Trump associates who can corroborate these allegations or who have additional information. The questioning also gave the committee the basis to subpoena Trump’s tax returns.
4. During Cohen’s testimony, Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) calls him a liar, Mark Meadows (R-NC) uses a black woman as a prop to prove Trump isn’t racist, and Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) puts up a poster that says, “Liar Liar Pants On Fire.”
5. During and after the hearing, committee chair Elijah Cummings worked hard to make sure both sides of the aisle felt heard and he concludes with a call for healing.
6. Describing the destruction of our civility toward each other, Cohen says, “I’m responsible for your silliness because I did the same things that you’re doing now. I protected Mr. Trump for 10 years.”
7. Just before Michael Cohen is to testify before Congress, Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL) tweets a thinly veiled threat. As a lawyer, he should know better. Here’s what he tweets:

“Do your wife & father-in-law know about your girlfriends? Maybe tonight would be a good time for that chat. I wonder if she’ll remain faithful when you’re in prison. She’s about to learn a lot…”

• • So then legal experts and fellow Representatives call this a violation of House ethics rules and potential witness tampering.
  • And then the Florida Bar opens an investigation into whether Gaetz violated their regulations.
  • And then, Gaetz apologizes for the tweet and deletes it.
  • But then Gaetz continues to tweet and retweet disparaging comments and articles about Cohen throughout the hearings.

8. The House Oversight Committee wants to interview Ivanka and Don, Jr. The House Intelligence Committee will interview Cohen, Weisselberg, and Felix Sater.
9. The House Judiciary Committee opens an inquiry into alleged abuses of power by Trump, based on his attacks against the press, the courts, the FBI, and the DOJ. Presidents actually have wide leeway here.
10. The House Ways and Means Committee announces they’ll demand Trump’s tax returns. Cohen’s testimony pretty much forced their hand on this.
11. D.C.’s attorney general subpoenas documents from the Trump inaugural committee. This is the third active investigation into the committee’s finances.
12. The House Financial Services Committee announces an investigation into Trump’s personal finances, specifically why Deutsche Bank was willing to loan him money at a time when nobody else would.

Courts/Justice:

1. A federal court upholds the Trump administration’s ban on bump stocks, but the plaintiffs in the case say they’ll appeal.
2. Former Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker abruptly leaves the DOJ.

Healthcare:

1. The Senate votes against allowing the “Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act” to proceed. A few things:

• • This bill appears to be intended to protect babies born alive after a botched abortion (this is a rare and extreme circumstance).
  • Late-term abortions can only be performed when the mother’s health or life is threatened, or when the fetus has a fatal condition. Less than 1% of abortions occur after fetal viability.
  • Infanticide is already illegal in the U.S., plus the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act was already signed into law in 2002. The current bill mostly adds criminal penalties against doctors.
  • Typically the procedure in which the baby survives is not actually an abortion but natural or induced early labor.
  • All this is to say, doctors aren’t out there killing live babies willy-nilly.

International:

1. Mike Pence joins the self-proclaimed interim President of Venezuela Juan Guaido in Bogota, Colombia to express U.S. support for Venezuela and opposition to Nicolas Maduro.
2. At the same time, Trump travels to Vietnam for another summit with Kim Jong Un. Kim travels the 2,700 miles across China by private train, a 48-hour trip.

• • The summit is supposed to end with a signing ceremony, but Trump (probably rightly) walks out early when they can’t agree on demands.
  • Depending on the version you believe, one sticking point is that North Korea wants sanction relief for giving up just one of their nuclear facilities.
  • Ahead of the summit, the U.S. already dropped the requirement that North Korea disclose all of their nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs.
  • Trump ends our large-scale military drills with South Korea in the interest of diplomacy with North Korea. Small-scale drills will continue.
  • There are no current plans for continuing the conversation.

• • Trump says he believes Kim when he says he didn’t know about how Otto Warmbier was being treated. The next day, Warmbier’s parents clarify that they blame Kim for the death.
  • This is rich coming from a dictatorship. North Korea says the Trump administration is a billionaire’s club that holds policies of racism, exacerbates social inequality, suppresses freedom of the press, and denies health coverage to U.S. citizens.
  • Trump blames Michael Cohen’s testimony for the talks falling apart.
  • Throughout the summit, North Korean hackers continue to target the U.S.
  • While the GOP pushes the narrative that Democrats=Socialists, Trump says this about socialist dictator Kim Jong Un: He’s “very sharp” and “a real leader.” “I like him.”
  • The White House bans several reporters from a joint dinner likely based on shouted questions about denuclearization and Michael Cohen during an earlier press event.

3. Britain’s Labour Party supports another Brexit voter referendum in case voters have changed their minds. The deadline for Brexit is the end of March.
4. I don’t know if you can indict a president, but it looks like you can indict a prime minister. The Israeli Attorney General announces he’ll move forward on indicting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on corruption charges.

• • Netanyahu faces an election in April, and says he won’t step down if he is re-elected and also indicted.

5. Jared Kushner meets with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. They don’t talk about Khashoggi’s murder.
6. Pakistan shoots down an Indian fighter pilot, who then parachutes down and gets beaten by a mob before being rescued by the Pakistani military. Air fights and shelling along the border by Kashmir escalates as a result.

• • This all started with a suicide bombing of Indian troops a few weeks ago.
  • Pakistan releases the pilot by week’s end.
  • The last thing we need right now (or ever) is escalating tensions between two nuclear powers.

7. Justin Trudeau faces unrest in his government after former attorney general Jodi Wison-Raybould testifies that she was pressured to ignore bribery charges against a Canadian engineering company. Et tu, Justin? Say it isn’t so.
8. After negotiating with the Taliban, the Pentagon issues a proposal to withdraw our troops from Afghanistan within five years.
9. We learn that Saudi Arabia detained and then tortured a U.S. citizen with dual citizenship with Saudi Arabia.
10. An American who’d been held in Yemen for 18 months is finally freed.

Legislation/Congress:

1. The House passes two background check bills:

• • The first fixes a loophole that currently allows gun dealers to transfer some guns before a background check is complete. Dylan Roof obtained his gun through this loophole.
  • The second bill requires a background check on ALL firearm sales. This is the first major gun control bill to pass the House in nearly 25 years.

2. Republicans in the Senate say they don’t plan on dealing with any gun control bills, so these are both likely DOA.
3. Trump says he’ll veto both bills if they make it to his desk.

Family Separation:

1. Through a system of relief workers and immigration lawyers, 29 parents who were separated from the children last year make the trip back up to the border to demand asylum hearings and hopefully be reunited with their children. After 12 hours of negotiations, they’re all allowed into the U.S.
2. At least 200 children are still separated from their parents.
3. Because we’ve kept these children from their parents, those parents are now paying smugglers to come back to the U.S. illegally just to be with their kids. This isn’t working.

Travel Ban/Immigration/Discrimination:

1. West Virginia’s legislature got violent after the state Republican party set up a display in the statehouse linking Representative Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) to the 9/11 attacks.

• • Omar has been criticized repeatedly for what some call anti-Israel statements and what others call anti-Semitic statements.
  • Allegedly, the sergeant-at-arms for the state House said, “All Muslims are terrorists.”

2. The Trump administration wants to expand their program to send Central American asylum seekers back to Mexico. Currently, this is only done at the Tijuana-San Diego ports of entry; the administration wants to do it in more border cities.

• • This is already endangering refugees in Tijuana, which doesn’t have the resources to handle the influx. Relief agencies are taking the brunt of this.

3. Because of the barriers to legal immigration put in place by the Trump administration, more people are crossing the border illegally. Again, this isn’t working.
4. Relief agencies claim that nine infants under one-year-old are being held in migrant detention centers without the required level of care.
5. The U.S. government has received nearly 6,000 complaints of sexual abuse of detained migrant minors over the past four years.
6. All four anti-transgender bills introduced in the South Dakota state legislature this year are now dead with the failure to pass the fourth one this week.

Climate/EPA:

1. Following on the Senate’s passage of the bill last week, the House passes a public lands conservation bill that protects over a million acres of wilderness and reauthorizes conservation funding.
2. A group of youth climate activists protest at Mitch McConnell’s Senate office to demand he take the Green New Deal seriously. Police arrest 42 of them.
3. The Senate confirms fossil-fuel lobbyist Andrew Wheeler to run the EPA, and immediately Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) files an ethics complaint against him. Apparently he’s been participating in meetings on issues he previously lobbied for and he’s been holding meetings with his lobbying clients, both in violation of his signed ethics pledge.
4. A court rules that Trump has to pay the legal costs for the Scottish government in a case where Trump tried to get them to halt a wind turbine project in Scotland.

Budget/Economy:

1. The White House trade negotiator, Robert Lighthizer, corrects Trump about memorandums of understanding (MOUs) in the middle of a trade talk. Trump says they don’t mean anything, but Lighthizer explains to the press that an MOU is actually a binding contract. Trump says he doesn’t agree, at which point Chinese vice premier Liu He cracks up.
2. It’s the retail apocalypse. So far, companies have announced 4,300 retail store closings slated for this year.
3. Even though we’ve implemented steep tariffs, the U.S. trade deficit is now 16% larger than when Trump took office, with imports exceeding exports by a record high of $914 billion in 2018.

• • Part of the problem is that countries retaliated with their own tariffs, which caused U.S. exports decline starting in May of 2018.
  • According to economists, macroeconomic factors, like tax cuts and increased federal spending, overwhelmed Trump’s attempts to target specific trade deficits.
  • This all pretty much supports Janet Yellen’s statement earlier this week that Trump doesn’t understand macroeconomic policies (which would explain the scattershot combination of tax, trade, healthcare, immigration, spending, and foreign policies).

4. A report shows that the caps on state and local tax deductions will hit around 11 million people this year. What was redacted from the report, though, was a description of the efforts by the Treasury to block state workarounds for the cap.
5. Over 1,000 TSA employees still haven’t received back pay from the shutdown. I guess they better hold more bake sales.

Elections:

1. Mitch McConnell blames Democrats for the election fraud in North Carolina that likely threw the election to the Republican candidate.

• • He conflates election fraud (where a third party tries to interfere in the votes of legitimate voters) with voter fraud (where someone tries to vote illegally). Republican voter policies, which Democrats tend to disagree with, target voter fraud not election fraud.
  • For comparison, this single case of election fraud in NC affected more ballots than did all of the proven cases of voter fraud over the past 70 years (even according to the Heritage Foundation’s inflated numbers which also include cases of election fraud).

2. Mark Harris, the Republican at the heart of the fraud case, will not run again for health reasons. He suffered a stroke earlier this year.
3. A grand jury charges Leslie Dowless with seven felonies in connection with election fraud. More charges could follow.
4. And speaking of voter fraud, remember how Trump pointed to the attempted Texas voter role purge as evidence of voter fraud? Well, a judge just blocked that effort calling it ham-handed and threatening.

• • Just an FYI, this purging effort is a direct result of the gutting of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, where the Supreme Court decided we are a post-discrimination society so we no longer need to monitor those states with a history of voter discrimination.

Miscellaneous:

1. We learn that Trump ordered John Kelly to grant top-secret clearance to Jared Kushner, overruling the red flags brought up by security staff and officials. Kelly documented the request at the time.
2. New defense rules change the way troops are reported on the census. Now they’ll be counted where they’re usually stationed instead of where they typically live, which could cut funding to their local communities.
3. Wynn Resorts gets hit with a record $20 million fine for failing to investigate claims of sexual misconduct against Steve Wynn. Wynn left the company last year.

Polls:

1. 68% of Americans want Mueller’s report to be released to the public.