Trump pretty much sums up the week by live-tweeting segments from Fox and Friends and then giving them an interview on the White House lawn where he says:

• The IG report exonerates him (it doesn’t).
• Comey is a criminal.
• The FBI is a “den of thieves.”
• Democrats are at fault for separating families at the border (they aren’t).
• It’s great that he gave Kim Jong-Un credibility because he deserves it.
• The reporter asking questions is obnoxious for pushing him on his about-face on Kim Jong-Un’s human rights record.
• He hates the “war games” with South Korea (“war games” is what North Korea calls our military exercises).
• Manafort had nothing to do with Trump’s campaign (except that he was the campaign manager, I guess).
• Obama is at fault for Russia having annexed Crimea.
• Oh yeah. And he wants his people to stand up at attention for him like Kim’s people do.

So yeah, it was that kind of week. Here’s what else happened…

Russia:

1. Russian intelligence agencies continue to attempt to meddle in our elections, this time in the 2018 midterms, according to a court filing by Robert Mueller. He’s using this as a reason to withhold certain evidence from Russians who have been charged.
2. Newly released memos in the Paul Manafort case describe his attempts to influence Congress and the media on behalf of the Ukrainian president.
3. Mueller requests 150 blank subpoenas in the Manafort case, which could mean up to 75 witnesses.
4. Court filings in the Mueller investigation reveal the names of members of the Hapsburg group, European politicians who participated in Manafort’s Ukraine lobbying efforts. They include former Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi, former Austrian Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer, former Spanish NATO head Javier Solana, Belgian Judge Jean-Paul Moerman, and the head of the German Federal Chancellory Bodo Hombach.
5. The same filings reveal some of the content of the texts Manafort sent in an alleged attempt to tamper with witness testimony.
6. In the context of alleged witness tampering, a judge revokes Manafort’s bail and sends him to jail until his trial starts.
7. Shortly after Manafort goes to jail, Giuliani dangles the possibility of a pardon, saying that when this is all over, things will get “cleaned up with a few presidential pardons.”
8. A network of companies related to Cambridge Analytica is being investigated in Canada and the UK. One of these companies, AggregateIQ, based in British Columbia, Canada, is a vendor that had an exclusive intellectual property license with a company that is part of the network funded by Robert Mercer and run by Steve Bannon (which also includes the now defunct Cambridge Analytica).
9. It turns out that Roger Stone did meet with at least one Russian national in 2016 despite testifying that he hadn’t. The Russian national offered Stone dirt on Hillary in return for $2 million dollars, but Stone didn’t rise to the bait.
10. A judge refuses to grant a restraining order for Michael Cohen against Michael Avenatti. The restraining order was to force Avenatti to stop talking about the Stormy Daniels case.
11. Cohen mentions to friends that he might be willing to cooperate with the prosecution. So the White House launches a campaign to discredit him before he does cooperate.
12. Cohen’s lawyers will all stop representing him in the coming weeks. Rumor has it that this is because of an issue with high fees.
13. We learn that White House counsel Don McGahn recused his entire staff from the Russia investigation because they were all involved in it at some level (mostly in the firings of White House officials).
14. DOJ officials say that Rod Rosenstein will ask the House general counsel to launch an investigation into the conduct of House Intelligence Committee staffers in their handling of the Russia investigation.
15. The DOJ inspector general releases his report on FBI and DOJ integrity in investigating Hillary Clinton’s emails. Just for reference, the IG is a Republican politician.

• • The IG did find evidence of anti-Trump sentiment among some of the investigators. However…
  • The IG also found that there was no impropriety in how the investigation was conducted, including no political bias.
  • Even though there was no bias, Comey’s actions were still damaging to America’s perception of the FBI, and he deviated from standard procedures to the point of insubordination in his public announcements around the Hillary Clinton email investigation.
  • The text messages between agents Strzok and Page, while biased, had no influence or effect on the integrity of the investigation.
  • And also, Comey was using personal email for government business while investigating Hillary for using personal email for government business.

16. Here are a few reactions to the IG report:

• • James Comey disagrees with parts but says the conclusions are reasonable (even though the report didn’t take it easy on him).
  • Republicans on the Hill say the report shows there are serious problems with the FBI and the DOJ and how they handled the email investigation.
  • Democrats on the Hill say the report shows the FBI didn’t follow the rules and that ended up hurting Clinton’s campaign and helping Trump’s.
  • Trump thinks the report exonerates him, even though it had nothing to do with him. It was solely about the investigation into Hillary’s emails, though there are a few mentions of the Russia investigation since they were concurrent.

17. After the IG releases his report, FBI agent Peter Strzok says he’s willing to testify in front of Congress without immunity and without invoking the 5th amendment.
18. Devin Nunes continues to push the DOJ and FBI to release classified documents relevant to their ongoing investigations.

Courts/Justice:

1. The Supreme Court avoids ruling on the legality of partisan gerrymandering by sending the Wisconsin case back to the lower courts and asking that the plaintiffs do more work to prove injury from the gerrymandering.
2. In a second gerrymandering case, the Supreme Court rules that the plaintiffs in Maryland waited too long to file a suit and that the gerrymandered districts will remain for the 2018 midterms. There is a third case, involving North Carolina, still to be heard.
3. My take on it: These cases involved both Republican and Democratic gerrymandering, both of which should be illegal. Repressing anybody’s vote is simply unAmerican.
4. The state of New York brings a lawsuit against Trump, Ivanka, Eric, and Don Jr. alleging illegal conduct by the Trump Foundation, including campaign fraud and self-dealing. The state request that the charity be dissolved and the family be prevented from running another charity in the state for 10 years. Trump says he won’t settle the suit. The New York’s AG refers some of their findings to the IRS, so keep an eye on this one.

Healthcare:

1. Joel McElvain, a senior DOJ official, resigns just one week after the Trump administration announced it would stop defending the ACA and would actually argue that parts of the ACA are unconstitutional. It hasn’t been confirmed whether there was cause and effect here.
2. Massachusetts sues Purdue Pharma, the company that makes OxyContin, saying the company purposefully misled both doctors and consumers about how dangerous Oxy really is.

International:

1. After a contentious weekend with the G7, where Trump pretty much isolated us from all our allies, Trump continues to push his idea of inviting Russia back to the G7, or G8 as it would then be. He feels Putin is a better friend to him than our allies.
2. Trump aides say that the reason Trump came across so tough at the G7 was to give him the upper hand in the North Korea negotiations.
3. A coalition of Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and the U.S. military bomb a Doctors Without Borders cholera facility in Yemen.
4. Trump meets with Kim Jung-Un in a historic summit. They sign a joint statement agreeing to work toward nuclear disarmament.
5. Trump does not bring up North Korea’s human rights violations during the summit.
6. Trump is open to having a U.S. embassy in North Korea.
7. Afterward, Trump says they have a special bond and a terrific relationship.
8. Trump announces that he agreed to suspend certain military exercises with South Korea, much to the surprise of South Korea and to the U.S. military.
9. Trump says people have it rough in North Korea, but there are other places where it’s just as rough. According to Human Rights Watch, North Korea is “one of the most repressive authoritarian states in the world.”
10. The White House produces and releases a bizarre short propaganda film about the summit that you have to see to believe.
11. Here are the key points of the joint statement:

• • It establishes U.S.-DPRK relations.
  • It affirms that the two countries will work together toward peace.
  • It reaffirms that North Korea will work toward denuclearization.
  • Both countries commit to recovering and repatriating missing POW remains.

12. Mike Pompeo says that the only outcome we’ll accept from the North Korea negotiations is “complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization” of the Korean peninsula.
13. Even though North Korea announced an incremental plan of give and take between the two countries, Mike Pompeo says that sanctions will remain in place until North Korea is completely denuclearized.
14. News agencies obtain a classified Israeli report casting doubt on the progress touted by the Trump administration in North Korea. But however this goes, the report says this process will not be quick.
15. Our unmanned drone policy is more unrestrained and less transparent than before, and Trump is on track to outpace Obama in drone strikes. We had plenty of complaints about Obama’s use of drones, but Trump has reversed measures intended to make the use of drones more transparent, to narrow the scope of the targets, and to reduce collateral damage.
16. Italy blocks a rescue boat with around 600 refugees on board from docking on their shores. Spain agrees to take in the migrants. And THEN, Italy blocks two more ships from docking.
17. The Korean peace talks have laid the groundwork for Russian energy company Gazprom to start planning an oil pipeline through North Korea to deliver fuel to South Korea.
18. The U.S. is expected to pull out of the UN’s human rights council because of what Trump sees as an anti-Israel bias. This will take away our leadership role in preventing human rights abuses around the world.
19. Trade advisor Peter Navarro apologizes for his comments about Justin Trudeau that “there’s a special place in hell” for leaders who cross Trump.

Legislation/Congress:

1. Democrats in Congress introduce a bill to stop Trump from separating families at the border.

Separating Families:

This issue hit a fever pitch this week, with congressional and press visits to the detention facilities. So I figure it deserves its own section.

1. The Trump administration continues its policy of separating families at the border, as announced by Jeff Sessions in April. As of this week, around 2,000 children have been separated from the parents at our southern border. They are being held in makeshift detention centers, including an old Walmart. The administration is also looking at tent cities.
2. Why is this happening? No, it’s not a Democratic law or policy. It’s the Trump administration’s decision to start treating border crossings as criminal cases rather than civil cases, which requires the separation of children from their parents who are charged. He could treat these as civil cases and send them to immigration courts instead. His administration brought this idea up in early 2017, so it’s something they’ve wanted for a while.
3. Workers at the detention centers are not allowed to hold and comfort the children, and some have even prevented the children from comforting each other.
4. Trump blames Democrats for this policy, even though they literally have nothing to do with it. Nearly every legal expert agrees that this is 100% a result of Trump’s policies and if he wanted to stop it, he just needs to make a phone call.
5. Trump himself says he’s using this as a negotiating tool (in other words, he’s treating people like animals for political gain).
6. Democrats and Republicans in Congress put forth a bipartisan plan (this is the third one since last fall) that would give Trump most of what he wants, including $25 billion toward his wall. But Trump says he won’t sign it. There’s another more conservative plan going around that is also likely to fail.
7. In response, the White House says that Trump misunderstood the question, but it could be too late because Republicans in the House are already saying they’ll stop supporting the bill if they can’t get it past Trump.
8. Lawmakers from both parties have denounced the policy of separating families, and every single Democratic Senator has signed on to a law preventing it. No Republicans have signed on yet.
9. Republicans say the bills they’re putting forth will help families; Democrats say those bills will make it worse for families. I haven’t read any of the bills yet to find out if either are right.
10. For more than a decade, the Office of Refugee Resettlement has funded organizations that represent unaccompanied minors in immigration court. Now that the new zero-tolerance policy is creating even more unaccompanied minors, the ORR has told these organizations to stop taking new cases because the program is being defunded.
11. The administration started separating families months before they officially announced it, and the ACLU brought a suit against them over family separation, saying the government isn’t doing this to protect the children. A judge rules that the case has merit and that it can go forward.
12. Members of the Bush and Obama families call on Trump to stop this heartless policy.
13. The UN commissioner on human rights calls for an immediate stop to this practice that he characterizes as abuse.
14. Jeff Sessions and Sarah Huckabee Sanders both quote passages from the Bible to justify the separation of families. Notably, the passage Sessions quoted is followed by “Love your neighbor as yourself. 10 Love does no harm to a neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.”
15. Ted Cruz defends the policy of separating families.
16. Anne Coulter accuses these children of being child actors. And exactly how would a child actor get themselves detained?
17. Don Jr. liked a tweet that accused the children of being coached by liberals and given scripts to read. This is either extremely disingenuous or extremely dumb.
18. In an informal poll, 56% of Americans oppose this policy and 27% approve of it. Which just goes to prove Trump’s point that he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and not lose his base.

Travel Ban/Immigration/Discrimination:

1. Jeff Sessions ends asylum protections for immigrants trying to escape domestic violence or gang violence.
2. As part of a lawsuit, the Commerce Department releases over 1,300 documents about the decision to add a citizenship question to the next census.

• • It will be a costly change.
  • The change was pushed by Steven Bannon and Kris Kobach, both of whom are explicitly anti-immigrant.
  • One of the reasons for the change seems to be concern over determining the number of congressional seats for each state.

3. The Trump administration is combing through decades of fingerprint records in order to find and deport immigrants who might have lied on their forms. This is a rare and drastic action usually only used for deporting people who commit egregious crimes. And yes, this is what they are spending our tax money on.
4. South Carolina’s governor Henry McMaster seeks an exemption for the Miracle Hill Ministries foster care agency to allow the agency to discriminate against non-Christians. I predicted that allowing foster agencies to discriminate based on closely held religious beliefs would not just hit the LGBTQ community but also communities of faiths other than Christian.

Climate/EPA:

1. Several House Republicans send Trump a letter urging him to forward the (Obama-era) Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol to the Senate for approval. This amendment phases down refrigerant in appliances, and would help U.S. manufactures secure a lead in the global market. The letter makes no mention of climate change, though that is the point of the amendment.
2. Republicans in Congress finally start deserting scandal-ridden Scott Pruitt after we learn that he used his influence to get his wife a job. It’s interesting that his efforts at undoing what the military considers our national security (climate change mitigation) aren’t what upset legislators. Also interesting that his previous scandals didn’t make them blink.
3. An exhaustive study of Antarctica’s ice sheet shows that it’s losing ice faster than originally thought, and that there were sharp increases in ice loss in 2010 and 2012. The sheet lost over 3 trillion tons of ice over the last 25 years. Much of this loss comes from ice that is below sea level, a result of warming oceans.

Budget/Economy:

1. May numbers show that inflation increased at its highest pace in 6 years while wages remained flat.
2. The courts allow the merger between AT&T and Time-Warner and just like that, the deal is done.
3. The Fed raises interest rates and predicts two more raises by year end.
4. The Senate blocks Trump’s efforts to save Chinese company ZTE from the sanctions we placed on them.
5. The U.S. and China have been playing at trade wars since March, but now Trump announces a 25% tariff on $50 billion in Chinese imports. China retaliates with its own announcements of equivalent tariffs on U.S. imports.

Elections:

1. The courts uphold Ohio’s voter roll purge. The rule is if you don’t vote for two years, you’re sent a notice. If you don’t return the notice and you don’t vote in the next four years, they remove you from the voter rolls. Records show that this affects Democratic districts twice as much as Republican districts, and really hits poor black neighborhoods.
2. Maine tries out ranked-choice voting for the first time, and ranked-choice voting itself is on the ballot. They vote to keep it. Keep an eye on how it worked out for them.
3. Because lesson not learned, Trump’s 2020 campaign hires Data Propria for voter targeting similar to what Cambridge Analytica did in 2016. But of course they did. The company is run by former Cambridge Analytica officials.

Miscellaneous:

1. After criticizing Prime Minister Trudeau for his words about trade with the U.S., economic advisor Larry Kudlow suffers a heart attack, landing himself in the hospital. Kudlow says Trudeau was trying to make Trump look weak on his way into his summit with North Korea.
2. Mari Stull, who was hired by the White House two months ago, makes lists of government officials and employees of international organizations who are loyal to Trump. Any support of any of Obama’s policies is considered disloyal. He was appointed two months ago. Stull is a former food lobbyist and a wine blogger.
3. Financial disclosures show that Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump made at least $82 million last year, including income from Trump businesses and properties.
4. Chief of Staff John Kelly calls the White House a miserable place to work.
5. Apparently Trump has long had a habit of tearing up papers during meetings, and his staff is having a hard time training him that any document he touches cannot be destroyed and must go to the national archives. So the White House has a group of staffers whose job is to tape back together the pieces of paper that he tears apart before they get forwarded to the national archives.
6. New Jersey signs six new gun bills that include improvements to background checks, limits on magazine sizes, and the ability to remove guns from people considered an extreme danger.
7. The White House is holding a job fair to get staffed up.
8. Trump orders Giuliani’s son Andrew to be personal assistant to the president, but John Kelly revokes Andrew’s access to the West Wing.
9. Andrew McCabe sues the FBI and the DOJ for additional information around his firing.

Polls:

1. 54% of Americans don’t think the Korean summit will lead to denuclearization.
2. 42% of Americans do think the summit reduced the chance of war.
3. 57% of Americans approve of Trudeau’s handling of the trade dispute. 37% approve of how Trump is handling it.

Stupid Things Politicians Say:

If you don’t think Trump lies, he tells you all the time that he does. On whether Kim Jong Un will follow through with agreement, here’s what he says:

“I may be wrong, I mean I may stand before you in 6 months and say, ‘Hey, I was wrong.’ I don’t know that I’ll ever admit that, but I’ll find some kind of an excuse.”