.
@AndrewRestuccia
and I called many of Kavanaugh's 65 female HS acquittances who signed a letter supporting him. After his accuser came out on Sunday, only TWO said they still stood by him. More than two dozen didn't respond, and two declined to comment.
A source sends this video of a group of Trump supporters today harassing Sen. Lindsey Graham at Reagan airport and loudly calling him a “traitor” after he publicly broke with Trump earlier this week.
The mood at the White House these days — a former Trump WH official texts me: “I’ve been trying to find jobs for some people still inside and nobody wants to hire a White House person. It’s toxic ... Everyone inside is broken. ... Everyone is resigned to the worst.”
SCOOP: Army Lt. Col. Yevgeny Vindman is set to be promoted to full colonel, despite attempts by Trump loyalists to derail his career following his bit role in the former president's first impeachment, two people familiar with the matter told me.
SCOOP: American Media, Inc. and the National Enquirer shredded sensitive Trump-related documents that had been held in a top-secret safe right before Trump was elected in 2016, according to fresh allegations made in a new book by journalist
@RonanFarrow
.
NEW: Justice Brett Kavanaugh had to exit through the rear of Morton's on Wednesday night after DC protestors showed up out front. A Morton's rep told me: "Politics … should not trample the freedom at play of the right to congregate and eat dinner."
SCOOP: A new pro-Trump super PAC ad uses stock footage from Russia and Belarus in a major ad buy that’s airing in 3 swing states. It’s the fourth time in three months that an ad promoting President Donald Trump’s reelection has used footage from Russia.
SPOTTED: conservative media personality and former Fox News host Dan Bongino getting forcibly removed from Cucina Palm Beach by several restaurant employees close to midnight on Friday.
A new Anonymous! ... Two current senior Trump administration officials have anonymously signed on to a new anti-Trump group and one of them has preliminary plans to reveal their identity closer to the election, a person familiar with the group told me.
🚨 SCOOP: Madeleine Westerhout, Trump’s personal assistant, was fired after bragging to reporters that she had a better relationship w/ Trump than his own daughters and POTUS did not like being in pictures w/ Tiffany because he thought she was overweight.
“As a military officer, what I saw was more or less really fucked up,” one D.C. Guardsman who was deployed to Lafayette Square last Monday, told me. The official line from the White House that the protesters had turned violent, he said, is false.
SCOOP — The White House has hired a college senior to be one of the top officials in its powerful Presidential Personnel Office, three administration officials familiar with the matter told me. His name is James Bacon, 23, and is a GW senior.
SCOOP: David Hume Kennerly, the famed photog who served in the Ford WH, resigned Tuesday from the board of the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation, blasting it for cowardice in rejecting Trump critic Liz Cheney as the recipient of its top yearly award.
.
@NYPost
4 days ago: “A Hamptons insider was stunned to arrive at a house in Bridgehampton on Saturday night to find a packed party that looked ‘as if COVID had never happened’ — with Donald Trump Jr. and girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle among the revelers.”
NEW - Kim Guilfoyle, girlfriend of Donald Trump Jr. and a top campaign official, tested positive for coronavirus in SD ahead of attending Mt Rushmore event, according to a person familiar w what happened. She was never was with POTUS, and neither was Don Jr., who tested negative.
When I asked Krista Stotler from this CNN story if her family had received extended child tax credits over the last few months, she told me: "We only have three kids under the age of 18 and don't really have a comment on that. … We're just trying to raise our kiddos."
"A gallon of milk was $1.99. Now it's $2.79. When you buy 12 gallons a week times four weeks, that's a lot of money."
@EvanMcS
goes grocery shopping with the Stotlers and shows us how badly inflation is hitting the middle class.
NEW from me: Josh Venable, the former chief of staff to Education Secretary
@BetsyDeVosED
, has joined
@MilesTaylorUSA
’s group of Republicans opposing President Trump. Venable is now an advisor to the Republican Political Alliance for Integrity and Reform.
NEW: After months of silence, Lt. Col. Yevgeny Vindman has joined his twin brother Alexander in speaking out about how they were treated by President Trump. Yevgeny, who’s on active duty, also has shared criticism of his ultimate civilian boss, Mark Esper.
Rudy's new 20 year-old spokeswoman hasn't finished college, pretended to be related to George Allen, and has given herself many titles that are not accurate. “Nobody can figure out who the eff she is or how she got in there,” a friend of Giuliani told me.
A Senate GOP aide told me that many Senate Republicans now face a situation where the QAnon people threaten them for not reelecting Trump while some people on the opposite end of the political spectrum are also making threats saying they enabled him for four years.
SCOOP: Facebook and Instagram have permanently banned one of the top organizers of the “Stop the Steal” protest, far-right Republican operative Ali Alexander, that devolved into deadly riots on Capitol Hill last week.
Anthony Scaramucci on CNN today: "There are cabinet officials I'm close to who came to me in October in my office at Skybridge and said the guy can't manage anything. God forbid we go into a crisis...where the executive branch will be immobilized. ... It ended up being Covid-19."
Former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci says, "Mary Trump has done a service to the electorate by at least explaining, in a clinical way, the manifestation of the President's personality and why we're in such a bad state"
#CNNSOTU
SCOOP: The Republican Governors Association on Tuesday threw out Mike Lindell after he showed up to its spring conference. He had gone on Steve Bannon’s radio show and promised to confront Brian Kemp and Doug Ducey about the 2020 election at the event.
Wow, this stat ... The government has yet to curtail exports of PPE by U.S. companies—roughly 280 million masks in warehouses around the U.S. were purchased by foreign buyers on Monday alone, according to Forbes.
SCOOP with
@NatashaBertrand
: Democrats want to take a fresh look at whether the sale of anti-tank missiles to Kiev in 2018 was in any way connected to Ukraine’s decision to halt investigations into Paul Manafort. Dems say it was pretty suspicious timing.
SCOOP: As the presidential election fast approaches, HHS is bidding out a more than $250 million contract to a communications firm as it seeks to “defeat despair and inspire hope” about the pandemic, according to an internal HHS document I obtained.
Newly released satellite images show six commercial airplanes at Mazar-i-Sharif airport in northern Afghanistan that are not being allowed to depart by the Taliban. American citizens and Afghan interpreters are reportedly waiting to board the flights. 📸:
@Maxar
KELLYANNE CONWAY is defending Trump after his attacks on her husband -- she told me: “[Y]ou think he shouldn’t respond when somebody, a non-medical professional accuses him of having a mental disorder? You think he should just take that sitting down?”
SCOOP: At least 21 Black staffers have left the White House since late last year or are planning to leave soon, with some calling it "Blaxit." Staffers who remain describe a work culture with little support from superiors and fewer chances for promotion.
Sources said that Mark Milley did not go rogue in placing the call to his Chinese counterpart. In fact, Milley asked permission from acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller before making the call, one former senior defense official told
@laraseligman
.
SCOOP: President-elect Joe Biden should start receiving intelligence briefings, and the delay in allowing the transition to officially get started is damaging U.S. national security, Trump former chief of staff John Kelly told me in an exclusive interview.
SCOOP: The U.S. government concluded within the last two years that Israel was most likely behind cell-phone surveillance devices that were found operating near the WH and other sensitive parts of D.C., according to three former senior U.S. officials.
SCOOP: Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) is introducing legislation that would block the Pentagon and other federal agencies from hiring consulting firms like McKinsey that work for both the U.S. government and Chinese government-linked entities.
SCOOP: Former SNL cast member Rob Schneider delivered a comedy set so off-color and off-putting to a group of prominent Republicans late last year that the host, Senate Working Group, cut the performance short and later apologized to attendees.
SCOOP: The Pentagon’s acting policy chief, James Anderson, resigned on Tuesday after falling out of favor with the White House. He pushed back on several Trump loyalists the White House tried to install at DoD. (w/
@laraseligman
)
This piece is a must-read tour de force. “At every turn the hearings made clear Trump was willing to see the legislative branch of government and democratic processes in state after state consumed in the bonfire of his vanities.”
SCOOP — Energy Secretary Rick Perry is wrapped up in the Ukraine scandal more than was previously thought — he urged Ukraine's president to root out corruption and pushed the new government for changes at a state-run energy company (w/
@bjlefebvre
)
… “Politics, regardless of your side or views, should not trample the freedom at play of the right to congregate and eat dinner. There is a time and place for everything. Disturbing the dinner of all of our customers was an act of selfishness and void of decency.”
SCOOP: According to a new Melania tell-all, Donald Trump wanted his inauguration to look like a North Korean military parade. When discussing the parade during the transition, Trump said: “I want tanks and choppers. Make it look like North Korea."
SCOOP: Kellyanne Conway, the former senior Trump aide, is being paid by the Club for Growth to advocate for TikTok in Congress and has had at least 10 meetings with lawmakers in recent months about the app, three people familiar with the meetings told me.
Only in DC! “Next-door neighbor George Conway, the husband of former President Donald Trump senior counselor Kellyanne Conway, walked over to the house Tuesday afternoon to snap a photo of the law enforcement activity. Conway said he has never seen Deripaska at the home.”
SCOOP: In the weeks after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) not only publicly cast doubt on reports that Israeli women were raped, but also called those accusations “propaganda,” according to a previously unreported post on TikTok.
At 1:25 pm on Jan. 6, Stephanie Grisham texted Melania “Do you want to tweet that peaceful protests are the right of every American, but there is no place for lawlessness and violence?” She wrote back “no” as she was prepping for a WH photo shoot of a rug.
SCOOP from me:
@SenSanders
repeatedly requested and received the use of a carbon-spewing private jet for himself and his traveling staff when he was a surrogate campaigner for Hillary Clinton in 2016 -- flights that cost the campaign at least $100K:
SCOOP: President Donald Trump is “very pissed off” and “really hopping mad” at former aide Cliff Sims’ new book that reveals firsthand the chaos and infighting that is ever present in his White House, according to current and former WH officials:
The statement from the Morton’s rep: “Honorable Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh and all of our other patrons at the restaurant were unduly harassed by unruly protestors while eating dinner at our Morton’s restaurant.” …
SCOOP -- WH officials have launched a mole hunt to find the leaker who revealed Trump's private schedules; one Trump official said the culprit is likely a career government employee who works in the White House, not a person appointed by Trump himself:
SCOOP: Wisconsin GOP Senate candidate Eric Hovde invested tens of millions of dollars in insurance companies operating in the U.S. but were based in Bermuda, and therefore benefited from not having to pay U.S. corporate taxes, per a review of SEC filings.
NEW: Russian Ambassador Anatoly Antonov had lunch on Thursday at Cafe Milano in Georgetown with former U.S. envoy for Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad. I was at a nearby table and overheard much of the conversation. What they said, via
@playbookdc
:
"’It was terrible, women were throwing their babies over the razor wire, asking the soldiers to take them, some got caught in the wire,’ he told me. ‘I'm worried for my men, I'm counselling some, everyone cried last night.’”
👀 Jared Kushner has a file called “Hoax II” in his West Wing office
Other file names: FIFA, AEI, To Do’s, Lebanon, Border Infrastructure, Central America Econ Plan, Encryption, POTUS Environment, Mexico Crisis, DJT
From
@Time
video w/ him:
NEW from me and
@tina_nguyen
: The co-founder of conservative student group Turning Point USA, Bill Montgomery, has died from complications of the coronavirus, according to two friends of his. (The other co-founder,
@CharlieKirk11
, has criticized masks.)
NEW from
@NatashaBertrand
+ me: Marina Gross, who interpreted many of Trump’s calls and meetings w/ Putin, told associates that listening to their conversations often felt like eavesdropping on two friends chatting in a bar, a former official told us.
SCOOPLET: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is one of the most prominent anti-vaxxers in the country. But an invite to a party last week at his house in California urged people to be tested or get vaccinated beforehand (!).
One former senior Trump administration official told me: “Pompeo has long dreaded having a Benghazi-type event on his watch and would be horrified if Americans died in a similar event, in part because of his criticism of Hillary Clinton during Benghazi."
SCOOP: The Presidential Personnel Office recently brought on a fourth (!) college senior to be a Trump admin. official: Jordan Hayley, a Liberty University senior majoring in history and international relations, is now PPO’s external relations director.
SCOOP: Speaker Mike Johnson sits on the board of a Christian publisher that suggested getting “monkeypox” was “an inevitable and appropriate penalty” for being gay and that Barack Obama was rumored to be the Antichrist because of “leanings toward Islam.”
SCOOP: DHS has been briefed that New York City’s morgues are nearing capacity because of the # of coronavirus victims, a DHS official and a second person familiar w/ the situation told us. (w/
@woodruffbets
and
@aeis17
)
BREAKING — John Allen has resigned as CEO of the Brookings Institution after the think tank placed him on leave amid an FBI probe into his involvement in an illegal lobbying campaign for Qatar.
Wake up Wilbur! "Because he tends to fall asleep in meetings, they try not to put him in a position where that could happen," a former adviser to Commerce told me. "There's a small window where he's able to focus and pay attention and not fall asleep."
SCOOP -- The EPA's inspector general is investigating whether chief of staff Ryan Jackson was involved in destroying internal documents that should have been retained, such as schedules and letters, according to two people familiar with the matter.
SCOOP: Mina Chang, that State Dept. staffer who NBC reported had inflated her resume, has resigned. She decries “the worst and most profound moral[e] crisis confronting career professionals and political appointees in the Department’s history."
SCOOPLET: Robby Mook, Hillary's 2016 campaign manager, was part of the contingent of several thousand service members who worked at the Kabul airport helping evacuate Americans and Afghan allies, 2 sources told me. Mook is a lieutenant in the Navy Reserve.
Some personal news: After five and a half years co-writing
@POLITICO
Playbook, today I’m very excited to start a new adventure: covering the White House and Washington full-time as a reporter at POLITICO!
Is anyone proofreading White House statements these days? It’s “Operation Warp Speed”, not “Project Warp Speed”, as President Trump just stated in a press release.
SCOOP -- As Covid-19 keeps most federal employees at home, Congressional Dems say that the Office of Personnel Management is refusing to brief the Hill on the status of the agency and federal employees’ teleworking arrangements, a number of Dems told me.
“Anybody of substance is voting for Biden,” Anthony
@Scaramucci
told me. “Anybody who has an IQ of over 100 and has worked for Donald Trump, with the exception of Steve Bannon, is not voting for him.”
SCOOP: J.R. Majewski, who's running again for the House, became emotional during a meeting w/ the NRCC last year, crying for “an uncomfortable period of time," as AP was about to report that he fabricated serving in Afghanistan, 3 fmr. NRCC aides told me.
SCOOP -- The Office of the Special Counsel has started investigating Education Sec'y
@BetsyDeVosED
for potentially violating the Hatch Act, after she slammed Joe Biden in a Fox interview and her agency promoted it through official channels. W/
@mstratford
Ahead of Indian PM Modi’s June 2017 WH visit, Trump asked aides whether the Indian leader would be bringing along his wife. Staffers explained that Modi has long been estranged from his wife. “Ah, I think I can set him up with somebody,” Trump joked.
SCOOP: The Trump team was warned during an inauguration briefing that a massive pandemic could hit the U.S. “Health officials warn that this could become the worst influenza pandemic since 1918,” Trump’s aides were told.
SCOOOP: Merritt Corrigan, the deputy White House liaison at
@USAID
, is leaving the agency after a short and tumultuous tenure marred by calls for her removal over controversial comments she had made on LGBT rights, three sources told me.
SCOOP: Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has agreed to House Democrats’ request for him to testify next week about his controversial Postal Service changes that have raised hackles around the nation, two people familiar with the matter told me.
SCOOP: Lanny Davis, an attorney for Michael Cohen, has been talking regularly over the last few months with John Dean, the former WH counsel who helped bring down Richard Nixon:
SCOOP: Huawei is hiring Democratic lobbyist Tony Podesta as a consultant, two people familiar with the matter told me and
@woodruffbets
. Podesta will aim to help the controversial Chinese telecom giant warm relations with the Biden administration.
Even as President Trump hasn’t conceded yet to President-Elect Biden, people at the Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Va. tell me they are expecting him AGAIN to play golf later today, just as he did yesterday.
SCOOP: The WH Presidential Personnel Office is considering asking nearly every political appointee in the Trump administration to write and tender provisional letters of resignation right before the election, two senior administration officials told me.
Scooplet:
@MichaelCohen21
, President Trump's former longtime fixer who recently launched a weekly podcast called “Mea Culpa,” is interviewing fellow Trump exile Anthony
@Scaramucci
for the second episode which will be released Monday. His podcast is
#24
on Apple Podcasts.
I asked a former senior Trump official about the deafening silence: “All of us conniving careerists are desperate not to abjure the chance of a job in another DT admin. Honestly it’s one of those things that makes me bottomlessly cynical about this place.”
SCOOP -- Steve Bannon, the ex-Trump campaign adviser and later a top White House aide, has been subpoenaed to testify in the Roger Stone trial. While he initially fought a subpoena for his testimony, he recently relented and will appear.
SCOOP: A collection of more than three dozen Ohio county GOP chairs and state party central cmte. members have banded together to sign a letter urging Trump not to endorse JD Vance for Senate, noting that he “referred to your supporters as ‘racists.’”
SCOOP: 9/11 Families United National Chair Terry Strada has sent a letter to the Justice Department requesting an investigation into Saudi Arabian foreign agents for alleged violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act given work for golf league LIV.
“I got completely screwed,” former Trump official Vanessa Ambrosini told me. “There were no caveats in that language saying anything about if the administration turns, you get nothing and of course, that happened and so I got nothing.”
SCOOP: The Biden administration has fired 32 members of the Homeland Security Advisory Council, according to a letter to members of the council I obtained. Members of the committee removed include Keith Alexander, Ken Cuccinelli, Tom Homan and Ali Soufan.
SCOOP: A top Georgia GOP operative, Brandon Phillips, who is slated to be chief of staff for Rep.-elect Mike Collins was arrested last month for allegedly kicking a dog. He resigned as Trump’s 2016 GA director after earlier criminal history was revealed.
SCOOP:
@VivekGRamaswamy
, a leading intellectual godfather of the anti-woke movement, is planning to run for president. I recently went to Iowa with the former biotech entrepreneur, who’s worth hundreds of millions of dollars, as he tested out his message.
SCOOP: A group of House Dems in the Problem Solvers Caucus, which has ties to No Labels, is turning on the centrist group after it attacked one of their founding members, Rep. Brad Schneider for opposing No Labels’ idea for a unity presidential ticket.
NEW: Former Attorney General Bill Bar on Friday distanced himself from reports that the Trump DOJ seized communications records belonging to two prominent Dem lawmakers. In a phone interview with me, Barr said he didn’t recall getting briefed on the moves.
SCOOP from me and
@elianayjohnson
: Trump's FEMA administrator Brock Long (
@fema_brock
) is under investigation over whether he misused government resources and personnel on trips back home to N.C., on the weekends: