This is a big week for legal trouble for Trump‘s associates. Paul Manafort: convicted on eight counts. Michael Cohen: guilty plea on eight counts. Duncan Hunter: indicted on I-lost-count-of-how-many counts. Hunter was the second member of Congress to endorse Trump in 2016; Chris Collins, the first member of Congress to endorse Trump, suspended his campaign for Congress when he, too, was indicted. And even though legal minds think he inadvertently incriminated himself by admitting to campaign finance violations, Trump isn’t likely to be indicted and I don’t think he’ll be impeached. At least not in the Senate. Not unless it turns out he’s done something extremely egregious.

And so it goes on. Here’s what happened last week in politics…

Missed from Last Week:

1. Trump signed legislation updating rules for how the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. (CFIUS) vets investments from foreigners in U.S. assets. CFIUS specifically addresses national security issues around foreign investment, and this legislation gives them more specific control, especially in investments that involve critical technology, infrastructure, and personal data management.

Russia:

1. Russian hackers start to target conservative think tanks that have broken ranks with Trump. Microsoft announces that it discovered Russian hackers use imitation websites to attack groups that continue to push for sanctions against Russia or that push for examining human rights violations.
2. A jury convicts Paul Manafort on eight out of 18 counts, with one lone juror holding out on the remaining 10 counts. Those 10 counts result in a mistrial, so prosecution can bring them up again at a later date.
3. Manafort is convicted on counts of bank fraud, tax fraud, and concealing a foreign bank account. The maximum sentence for all this is around 80 years.

4. Manafort is the first person in the Mueller investigation to be tried, and he faces a second trial next month on a second set of charges. The second set of charges center more around his work with Ukraine instead of around his shady financial activity.
5. The reason there are two trials is that Manafort had the right to stand trial in the state where he lives for some of the charges. Mueller gave him the option of being tried just in Washington, or being tried in Virginia for some and in Washington for the rest.
6. For the record: Manafort’s charges aren’t related to the Trump campaign, but to his work with Ukrainian leaders. Also, Manafort really was Trump’s 2016 campaign chairman for about half of his campaign, despite claims that he was barely involved.
7. A juror in the Manafort trial (who identifies as a Trump supporter) says there was one lone juror holding out on convicting Manafort on all counts. The juror also said that she, herself, didn’t want Manafort to be guilty and that she thought prosecutor’s final aim was to get dirt on Trump.
8. The juror says the evidence against Manafort was overwhelming, but that she and her fellow jurors had to lay out the evidence trail over and over again for the lone holdout.
9. Rudy Giuliani tells reporters that Trump has asked him about pardoning Manafort.
10. A judge throws out a defamation suit brought by three Russian oligarchs against Christopher Steele (yes, of the infamous Steele dossier).
11. Mueller requests another delay in Michael Flynn’s sentencing, indicating that they are still in talks.
12. Many of our CIA informants close to the Kremlin have gone silent since the expulsion of American diplomats from Russia, the outing of an FBI informant, and the poisoning of Russian dissidents.
13. Reality Winner, who leaked a top-secret report on Russian hacking efforts to The Intercept, is sentenced to 63 months in prison.

Legal Fallout:

It’s getting a little hard to discern what’s related to Russia, what’s related to Trump’s campaign, and what’s just politicians being corrupt. So I created a new category for related legal mischief.

1. While I was making a note that Michael Cohen is in talks for a plea deal, but that it could fall apart, Cohen did indeed plead guilty on eight counts. The counts include:

• • Tax fraud
  • Bank fraud
  • Campaign contribution violations

2. Cohen says he took out a home equity loan, which he obtained fraudulently, to cover the payment. He then invoiced the Trump Organization for reimbursement.
3. Interestingly, his plea agreement doesn’t say he has to cooperate with federal prosecutors, but he could still cooperate with Mueller.
4. Cohen told the court that an unnamed candidate who is now president told him to pay $130,000 in hush money right before the election to keep Trump’s affairs out of the media. They both knew this wasn’t legal, as evidenced by the shell companies they set up to take care of the payment.
5. Also, as we’ve heard, Cohen has tapes to back up his statements.
6. After Cohen pleads guilty, Trump tweets that Obama’s campaign did the same thing. Only it wasn’t the same thing, and Trump’s campaign even had the same issues as Obama’s, just with the added fraud on top.
7. Cohen deletes this tweet from 2015: “@HillaryClinton when you go to prison for defrauding America and perjury, your room and board will be free!” Ironic, right?
8. Trump, who has denied paying any hush money, now says that he did it but it wasn’t wrong.
9. The publisher of the National Enquirer, David Pecker, gets immunity in exchange for his testimony about the hush money payments, among other things (including keeping negative stories about Trump out of the news).
10. Pecker and Cohen worked together to pay off Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal so they would keep quiet about their affairs with Trump. Pecker corroborates Cohen’s account.
11. It’s reported that the National Enquirer had a safe where they kept information about both the hush money and the stories it killed in the run up to the election that were damaging to Trump. They don’t know if those documents were destroyed or just moved. People who work for the company say they kept information like this on many celebrities to use it as leverage over them.
12. The CFO of the Trump Organization, Allen Weisselberg, gets immunity in exchange for his testimony about $420,000 in payments to Michael Cohen for him taking care of Stormy Daniels. Weisselberg has worked at the organization for decades.
13. Representative Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) and his wife are indicted on $250,000 in campaign finance violations. They used those campaign donations for personal use. Some of the things they spent the money on?

• • Dental work
  • Private schools
  • Theater tickets
  • Trips to Hawaii and Italy
  • An airplane seat for a pet rabbit

14. But the most damning thing is the documentation of how they worked to conceal their expenditures.
15. New financial filings show that Eric Trump lied about how certain funds were spent by the Eric Trump Foundation. Specifically, he lied about payments to Trump Organization businesses for fundraising events.
16. The New York State Department of Taxation and Finance subpoenas Michael Cohen as part of their investigation into the Trump Foundation. Note that this is separate from the New York Attorney General’s lawsuit against the foundation, though if the tax department finds anything, they would refer it to the AG.
17. After all the convicting, pleading, indicting, and flipping by his associates, Trump does a one-on-one interview with Fox News host Ainsley Earhardt. Which showed us all why it’s really not in his best interest to sit down with Mueller.

Courts/Justice:

1. Amid all that came out this week around Russia and fraud investigations. Trump criticizes Jeff Session for never taking charge of the DOJ. Sessions, for once, fights back saying he did. Sessions also says he would never let the DOJ be improperly influenced by politics.
2. And just like that, the Twitter wars are on. Between a sitting president and his Attorney General. For real. Trump challenges Sessions to look into the “corruption on the other side” like the emails, and “Comey lies & leaks, Mueller conflicts, McCabe, Strzok, Page, Ohr…” and “FISA abuse, Christopher Steele & his phony and corrupt Dossier, the Clinton Foundation, illegal surveillance of Trump Campaign, Russian collusion by Dems.”
3. This leads Republican leadership in the Senate to signal their OK for Trump to fire Sessions, saying they could confirm a new attorney general after the midterms. A new AG opens the door to firing Mueller and ending the Russia investigation. Though I’m not sure it would since several state laws seem to have been broken as well.
4. A federal judge orders experts to review a private prison in Mississippi where inmates are claiming that their constitutional rights are being violated. There’s also a nationwide prison strike and rallies across the country to bring attention to justice system reform.
5. In a 1998 memo that Kavanaugh wrote during the Clinton investigation, we learn than Kavanaugh wanted to question Clinton on the seedy details of his sexual activities with Monica Lewinsky.
6. A federal judge turns down Trump’s request to dismiss a lawsuit filed against him by people who were attacked by Trump’s guards during a protest. The point of the lawsuit is to determine the extent to which Trump authorized or condoned the attacks.
7. Demonstrators hold marches and rallies across the country to protest the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

Healthcare:

1. Last week I mentioned a measles outbreak in the U.S. Across Europe, there have been more than 41,000 people infected, 37 of whom have died. That’s up from around 24,000 the year before and 5,237 the year before that. Health experts say it’s because fewer people are vaccinating their kids.
2. Nebraska is working to put Medicaid expansion on the November ballot.
3. Maine’s Supreme Judicial Court rules that the governor must expand Medicaid, which the state’s residents voted for in 2017. Governor LePage has sworn he’ll never do it.
4. Ohio releases a report of their first five years of having expanded Medicaid with no work requirement. Here are some findings:

• • The uninsured fell by more than half (from 32.4% to 12.8%).
  • Before the ACA 1 in 3 people at or near poverty were uninsured; after the ACA that dropped to 1 in 8.
  • Around 60% of people covered by the expansion transfer out, usually getting a job or a better paying job. Some were able to get coverage outside of Medicaid.
  • People said having Medicaid made it easier for them to either look for work or to keep working.
  • People with continuous Medicaid coverage had less medical debt (no brainer there).

International:

1. ICE deports Jakiw Palij, who we’ve been trying to deport for decades but no country would take him. He was a Nazi SS camp guard in Poland during WWII. He’s now 95.
2. Trump tweets about the non-existent seizing of land from and large-scale killing of white farmers in South Africa, prompting a bunch of confused responses from South African citizens who don’t know WTF he’s talking about.
3. South African officials say Trump is just trying to sow division in South Africa. There has been ongoing redistribution of land, because blacks weren’t allowed to own land under apartheid. Even though apartheid fell in the early 90s, black South Africans still only own 1% of the land. They make up more than 75% of the population.
4. Australia moves on to its fifth leader in five years. Malcom Turnball steps down despite winning a vote of confidence. Elections are coming up soon, though, so there will probably be a sixth leader soon.
5. Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee request the translator notes from Trump’s meeting with Putin in Helsinki.
6. Trump cancels Mike Pompeo’s trip to North Korea, saying they aren’t making any progress and blaming China for it.
7. We learn that Trump told Italy’s prime minister that we’d help fund Italy’s debt by buying up Italian government bonds.

Family Separation:

1. Nearly 700 children who were separated from their parents at the border have still not been reunited with their families. 40 of them are less than five years old.The ACLU continues to work for their reunification, since the government is failing at it.

Travel Ban/Immigration/Discrimination:

1. Los Angeles sues the administration again to stop them from forcing immigration conditions on the city as a condition for receiving $1 million for fighting gang activity.
2. A White House speech writer was fired when it was revealed that he joined white nationalist Peter Brimelow in a 2016 panel. The day after that firing, Peter Brimelow attended a birthday party for Trump’s economic advisor, Larry Kudlow at Kudlow’s house.

Climate/EPA:

1. A U.S. district court in South Carolina reinstates WOTUS, Obama’s Waters of the United States expansion of the Clean Water Act, which defines environmental protection regulations for our waterways. Two courts have already blocked WOTUS in 24 states, leaving 26 states where it now must be implemented.
2. The Trump administration announces its Affordable Clean Energy rule, which is intended to replace Obama’s Clean Power Plan. This is despite the administration’s own findings that the new plan would result in 1,400 premature deaths each year.
3. Let the water wars begin. Chinatown anyone? The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation notifies officials in California that they want to renegotiate the statewide water agreements, specifically the ones governing how water moves through the Delta to Southern California. The federal bureau wants to save more water for farmers, meaning there would be less water for state projects. Maybe that’s why Nunes is buddying up to Trump.
4. The Trump administration is reversing course on their plans to sell off federal land that fell within the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument before Trump reduced the size of the monument. They’ve scrapped the plans to sell 1,600 acres of that land for now.

Budget/Economy:

1. Additional tariffs on $16 billion in Chinese goods kick in, and China responds by instituting their own tariffs of 25% on the same amount of American goods. So far, both sides have implemented tariffs on $50 billion worth of goods.
2. A federal judges strikes down several parts of three of Trump’s executive orders that were designed to curtail the power of unions for government workers.
3. Mick Mulvaney is trying to get protection from Trump’s tariffs for Element Electronics, which I mentioned a few weeks ago. It’s a South Carolina company that plans to close its doors due to tariffs. Mulvaney used to be a congressman in SC.

Elections:

1. Trump plans on having 40 days of campaign-related travel between now and the midterms, which are around 70 days away. So it looks like he’ll be spending most of the next 2 1/2 months focused on winning elections and not so much on presidenting. He’s starting with Senate races.
2. The Senate has bipartisan agreement on a bill to help protect our upcoming elections from cyber threats, but Trump says he won’t sign it so they tabled the bill. The bill would’ve given state election officials security clearance so that states and the DHS could all share information with each other. The bill also would’ve created a standard auditing system.
3. Last week I reported on a proposal to shut down 7 out of 9 polling places in a largely black district in Georgia. It took the elections board less than a minute to vote that proposal down at their last meeting. The guy who proposed the closure had been recommended to the board by current Secretary of State Brian Kemp, who is running for governor against a black female candidate.
4. After McCain’s family announces that he was ending his treatment, Arizona Senatorial candidate Kelli Ward accuses them of using the timing to derail her campaign. Please do not vote for this loon in the upcoming elections.
5. Now Texas thinks they should close 87 driver’s license offices, largely in rural and poor areas. Why is this in the Elections category? Because Texas has voter ID laws, and closing these offices could prevent some people from getting the IDs they need to vote in time for the midterms.
6. The DNC alerts the FBI of a hacking attempt, but it turns out to be an unauthorized test from a third party.
7. The DNC votes to limit the powers of the superdelegates in presidential primaries.

Miscellaneous:

1. After reports came out that H.R. McMaster had talked Trump out of restricting Obama’s access to intelligence briefings, Trump denies that he had even considered it.
2. Trump holds another election rally, this one in West Virginia. I’m not sure if it’s worth it to debunk his rally lies, because he just keeps repeating them rally after rally.
3. Ahead of Hurricane Lane in Hawaii, Trump declares a state of emergency so FEMA can prepare and plan.
4. The family of Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) announces he’ll end his treatment for cancer, and then within a day of that announcement he passes away after a long fight against glioblastoma.
5. Trump declines to release the White House statement honoring John McCain and instead issues a short tweet. He flies the flags at half mast over the weekend.
6. McCain‘s body will lie in state at both the U.S. and Arizona Sate Capitols, and he’ll be buried at the U.S. Naval Academy Cemetery in Annapolis.
7. George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Senator Jeff Flake will deliver eulogies. AFAIK, Trump won’t attend. There are several reports that McCain’s family asked that Trump not attend.
8. Senator Chuck Schumer proposes that the Russell Senate building be renamed in honor of McCain.
9. After losing at a Madden gaming tournament in Jacksonville, FL, a gamer opens fire on his fellow gamers and then shoots himself. Two people are dead and 11 are injured.

Polls:

1. Now 59% of registered voters approve of Mueller’s investigation; an increase of 11 percentage points from last month.