A purely political prosecution of Trump: Hillary underperformed Obama 2008 in 39 states in 2016 because she was a terrible candidate but what REALLY won it for Trump was paying Stormy Daniels $130,000 in hush money

 

 Prosecutors claim that Trump, by falsely recording the reimbursements to Cohen as legal expenses, had criminally covered up their true nature, which was to protect his then-reeling campaign from losing the 2016 election to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

CNBC here.

Matt Taibbi: The press has now handed Trump the mother of campaign issues heading into 2020

It's official: Russiagate is this generation's WMD:

Nothing Trump is accused of from now on by the press will be believed by huge chunks of the population, a group that (perhaps thanks to this story) is now larger than his original base. As [Peter] Baker notes [in the New York Times], a full 50.3% of respondents in a poll conducted this month said they agree with Trump the Mueller probe is a “witch hunt.” ...

The biggest thing this affair has uncovered so far is Donald Trump paying off a porn star. That’s a hell of a long way from what this business was supposedly about at the beginning, and shame on any reporter who tries to pretend this isn’t so. ...

CNN told us Trump officials had been in “constant contact” with “Russians known to U.S. intelligence,” and the former director of the CIA ["former" communist John Brennan], who’d helped kick-start the investigation that led to Mueller’s probe, said the President was guilty of “high crimes and misdemeanors,” committing acts “nothing short of treasonous.” ...

[N]ews outlets once again swallowed a massive disinformation campaign, only this error is many orders of magnitude more stupid than any in the recent past, WMD included. Honest reporters like ABC’s Terry Moran understand: Mueller coming back empty-handed on collusion means a “reckoning for the media.” Of course, there won’t be such a reckoning. (There never is). But there should be. We broke every written and unwritten rule in pursuit of this story, starting with the prohibition on reporting things we can’t confirm. ...

The Russiagate era has so degraded journalism that even once “reputable” outlets are now only about as right as politicians, which is to say barely ever, and then only by accident. Early on, I was so amazed by the sheer quantity of Russia “bombshells” being walked back, I started to keep a list. It’s well above 50 stories now. As has been noted by Glenn Greenwald of the Intercept and others, if the mistakes were random, you’d expect them in both directions, but Russiagate errors uniformly go the same way. ...

We’ve become sides-choosers, obliterating the concept of the press as an independent institution whose primary role is sorting fact and fiction.

Looks like Stormy Daniels was stalking Barack Obama long before Donald Trump came on the scene

Failure of nerve: America has basically ceded control of the South China Sea to China since the 1950s

China has been playing a long game while America has dithered year after year with changeable, irresolute leadership. This is one important reason China laughs at America's political system. It knows it can get away with this stuff as long as it waits us out. Right now it is howling with laughter as everyone is consumed with Donald Trump and Stormy Daniels while it installs offensive missiles with impunity. We are a joke! And one day this joke may mean many dead Americans and the loss of freedom for countless others.   

From the story here:

While the installation of missile platforms are [sic] new to the Spratlys, China has already deployed similar systems in the nearby Paracel Islands. Satellite images of Woody Island, Beijing's military headquarters in the South China Sea, show deployments of Y-8 transport aircraft as well as J-10 and J-11 fighter jets. China first took possession of Woody Island in 1955 and has since outfitted it with ports, aircraft hangars, communication facilities, helipads and a runway. [Gregory] Poling notes that this particular outpost serves as a blueprint for China's future developments on Fiery Cross Reef, Subi Reef and Mischief Reef in the Spratly Islands.

Fine, Mueller's had bupkis all along, but unscrupulously rummaging through information privileged between client and attorney might lead elsewhere

That's why someone has to stop Mueller.

Laugh of the Day, Stormy Daniels edition: If you want Trump to screw you repeatedly, you have to be one of his voters

In other words, Stormy Daniels on 60 Minutes was a giant nothing burger