monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

...broken down by party ID, it turns out Trump is more popular among Republicans than W. or Poppy Bush, Gerald Ford, or even the beloved Ike. At 7.20, he trails only the Gipper (8.03) in the esteem of his fellow partisans. To put that in context, Trump’s rating among Republicans is higher than JFK’s (7.09) among Democrats.

Within his own party, Trump’s actually up there in that territory where you’d expect people to start naming babies after him. You never know with a strange and erratic man like him what the future will hold; he seems entirely capable of the kind of self-destruction that brought down Nixon. But for now, the idea that he is going to be vulnerable to a primary challenge in 2020 or that the GOP will return to its pre-Trump legacy after he’s gone seems highly improbable. They love this guy.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller has charged Dutch lawyer Alex Van Der Zwaan with making false statements to FBI investigators. Van Der Zwaan, who was officially charged on Feb. 16 in a federal court in Washington, has a plea hearing scheduled for Tuesday at 2:30 p.m. EST.

The details: According to the indictment, the false statements came when Mueller's team probed Van Der Zwaan's work for the Ukraine Ministry of Justice, and include lying about his interactions with Rick Gates, the Paul Manafort associate and former Trump campaign adviser who was indicted by Mueller last fall.

Van Der Zwaan was charged with lying to investigators about conversations related to a report his law firm prepared on the trial of a Ukrainian politician, Yulia Tymoshenko.

The lawyer also reportedly lied about his talks with someone else, named "Person A” in the indictment.

Prosecutors said Van Der Zwaan also deleted and failed to turn over emails requested by the special counsel and a law firm.

Timing: Mueller indicted 13 Russian nationals and three Russian entities for violating criminal laws to interfere with the 2016 U.S. election on Friday. He also struck a plea deal that same day with Richard Pinedo, who was charged with identity fraud.

Why it matters: As Axios' Mike Allen wrote this morning, Mueller's moving fast. "The indictment is a sneak peek at the level of sweep and color we can expect in a final report, and is a mammoth accomplishment just nine months after Mueller was appointed."

@EdKrassen
1h1 hour ago
BREAKING: The NRA loses a Supreme Court case in California. The Court says that California may continue to use gun transfer fees to help fund efforts to track down people who acquire guns illegally.

Yes, the NRA was against California using money to stop illegal gun sales!

In 2011 California enacted a law that said the money could also be used for the state’s Armed Prohibited Persons System. That program targets an estimated 18,000 people who acquired their weapons legally but then became ineligible to own a gun because of a criminal conviction, domestic-violence order, or mental-health condition.

In 2013 the California legislature appropriated $24 million derived from transfer fees to pay for the APPS program.

A San Francisco-based federal appeals court upheld the funding system, saying the government was pursuing “an important public safety interest.”

“There is a reasonable fit between the government’s interest and the means it has chosen to achieve those ends,” Judge Sidney Thomas wrote for the three-judge panel.

The NRA and its allies said the state was putting an unconstitutional burden on Second Amendment rights.

“The government may not impose excessive monetary exactions on constitutionally protected activity and divert that money to fund other government operations,” the group argued in the appeal.

The case is Bauer v. Becerra, 17-719.

Brian Krassenstein 🐬‏
@krassenstein

Just thought I'd help you piece some of this together...

Alex Van Der Zwaan, the latest person to be indicted in Mueller's probe, worked for a large law firm called Skadden.

Do you know who else worked for that law firm?

Manafort's daughter, Andrea Manafort Shand,

I'm re-reading an older book on the rise of the new right, Thunder On The Right (highly recommended) and find that Roger Stone worked under Haldeman and Mitchell in Nixon's dirty tricks unit. Doesn't that just figure.

Among the government’s tools for imposing segregation, few were as powerful as public housing, which both reinforced color lines and drew them where they hadn’t existed. Public housing typically conjures high-rise black ghettos. But it started during the Depression mostly to help working-class whites. The first agency to build public housing was the Public Works Administration, which was launched in 1933. It happened to be run by a racial liberal, Harold Ickes, a former head of the Chicago NAACP. Yet Ickes created a “neighborhood composition rule”—projects in white areas could only house whites, and projects in black neighborhoods could only house blacks.

Perhaps he was trying to appease southerners in the New Deal coalition. Or perhaps segregation was the only way to get blacks housed at all. But across the country officials used the program to raze integrated neighborhoods and build projects that kept the races apart. The first project, Techwood Homes in Atlanta, destroyed a racially mixed neighborhood of 1,600 families and built 600 apartments for whites. A Miami civic leader said the city used public housing to “remove the entire colored population” from areas it wanted white. The same thing happened across the Northeast and Midwest.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller has charged Dutch lawyer Alex Van Der Zwaan with making false statements to FBI investigators.

Attorney pleads guilty in Mueller probe to lying to FBI over contacts with former Trump campaign official

Alex van der Zwaan admitted making false or misleading statements regarding email communications with Richard Gates.

His former employer, the renowned law firm Skadden, Arps, says they are cooperating with authorities.

Van der Zwaan is married to the daughter of German Khan, a Russian oligarch who is suing research firm Fusion GPS over a dossier alleging salacious and unverified ties between President Donald Trump and Russia.

Quote:

Alex Van Der Zwaan, the latest person to be indicted in Mueller's probe, worked for a large law firm called Skadden.

Do you know who else worked for that law firm?

Manafort's daughter, Andrea Manafort Shand,

Skadden, in a statement to CNBC, said, "The firm terminated its employment of Alex van der Zwaan in 2017 and has been cooperating with authorities in connection with this matter."

Sorry, my post wasn't clear. It is not my opinion that mental illness is causal here and even if it were, I see no way one would address it.

But I'm curious as to why you think we're in a mental health crisis (if you do).

Not even Israel wants to become that corrupt.

"Not even Israel?"
WTF?

Trump’s conduct is inexplicable, unless he’s in Putin’s pocket

After Donald Trump's election, U.S. allies and adversaries scrambled to evaluate whether his unorthodox rhetoric foreshadowed substantive shifts in U.S. foreign policy. The "America First" agenda raised questions about his administration's willingness to defend and promote the liberal world order that the U.S. had instrumentally shaped since 1945.

Reflecting this uncertainty, the median approval rating of U.S. leadership fell from 48% in 2016 to a record-low 30% in 2017. To understand where the sharpest declines occurred, we examined salient country-level attributes often associated with key U.S. strategic partners. The most significant declines in U.S. leadership approval occurred in freer nations connected to the U.S. through a dense network of political and economic ties.