Congressional intelligence people to Trump: we don’t believe you.

The Republican and Democrat leading the Senate investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election appeared on Thursday to counter White House claims that there may have been surveillance of some sort on Trump Tower around the campaign, even if there was not specific wiretapping as President Trump said in a tweet nearly two weeks ago.

“Based on the information available to us, we see no indications that Trump Tower was the subject of surveillance by any element of the United States government either before or after Election Day 2016,” Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., and Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., said in a joint statement on Thursday.

Spicey is trying … Read the rest

Chris Cillizza at the Post has the whole transcript of PP’s conversation with Tucker Carlson yesterday.

The Twitter section is worth reading carefully.

CARLSON: So on March 4, 6:35 in the morning, you’re down in Florida, and you tweet, the former administration wiretapped me, surveilled me, at Trump Tower during the last election. How did you find out? You said, I just found out. How did you learn that?

TRUMP: Well, I’ve been reading about things. I read in, I think it was January 20 a “New York Times” article where they were talking about wiretapping. There was an article, I think they used that exact term. I read other things. I watched your friend Bret Baier the day previous

Even Republicans in Congress, even Devin Nunes, don’t like it when Trump tells libelous lies on Twitter and then puts it all on Congress to deal with.

Late Monday, a spokesman for House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) threatened to subpoena the Trump administration to produce evidence of Trump’s claim that President Barack Obama wiretapped Trump Tower during the campaign. The White House has declined to produce this evidence publicly, offering various excuses, including the Constitution’s separation of powers and — most recently on Monday — arguing that Trump wasn’t speaking literally when he made the claim.

The Justice Department missed Nunes’s deadline to provide evidence Monday, which drew Nunes’s subpoena threat.

“If the committee does not receive

Poor Donnie. His malevolent racist hatemongering is what got him elected, but now it’s what’s preventing him from keeping the brown people out.

Rarely do a presidential candidate’s own words so dramatically haunt his presidency.

For the second time in two months, a federal judge on Wednesday refused to allow President Trump to impose a travel ban, citing his campaign rhetoric as evidence of an improper desire to prevent Muslims from entering the United States.

The judge’s stunning rebuke was a vivid example of how Mr. Trump’s angry, often xenophobic rallying cries during the 2016 campaign — which were so effective in helping to get him elected — have become legal and political liabilities now that he is

I think he might be getting even worse.

He was babbling on Fox News yesterday and it seems more empty and fatuous than ever. The Post has the few threadbare words:

“I’ve been reading about things,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News Channel. Trump said that after noticing an article in the New York Times and commentary by Fox anchor Bret Baier, Trump said he told himself, “Wait a minute, there’s a lot of wiretapping being talked about.’”

“I’ve been reading about things.” That was in response to Tucker Carlson’s question about where he was getting his fixed idea that Obama wiretapped him. “I’ve been reading about things.”

In the interview Wednesday with Fox host Tucker Carlson,

Trump’s rally in Nashville tonight – how I hope it’s ruined for him by the ruling on his travel ban – is a chance for him to learn a little about Andrew Jackson. One could wish he’d done some of that learning before he decided to run for president.

Trump is coming to town to celebrate the 250th birthday of Andrew Jackson, the controversial seventh president who embraced populism and has been compared to the current president.

The Hermitage — as Jackson’s mansion is called — has shut down for the day and canceled plans for an event that was expected to attract thousands of visitors. Trump plans to visit late in the afternoon, lay a wreath on Jackson’s

Meanwhile, Trump is busy being his usual vomitous racist self.

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/842154802058543105

Speak for yourself, Trump. We don’t thank Jackson for his service. We don’t honor his memory. We don’t build on his legacy. And we do not thank god for the US.… Read the rest

Breaking:

A federal judge in Hawaii issued a nationwide order Wednesday evening blocking President Trump’s ban on travel from parts of the Muslim world, dealing a political blow to the White House and signaling that proponents of the ban face a long and risky legal battle ahead.

The ruling was the second frustrating defeat for Mr. Trump’s travel ban, after a federal court in Seattle halted an earlier version of the executive order last month. Mr. Trump responded to that setback with fury, lashing out at the judiciary before ultimately abandoning the order.

Well, frustrating for Trump and his poisonous cronies, but not for anyone else.

The new improved ban was supposed to avoid legal challenges, but oops no … Read the rest

George Packer in the New Yorker a couple of weeks ago:

Section 4 of the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the Constitution allows for the removal of a President who can no longer discharge his duties but is unable or unwilling to say so. It empowers the Vice-President, along with “a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide,” to declare the President unfit and to install the Vice-President as Acting President. Section 4 has never been invoked. In 1987, when Ronald Reagan appointed Howard Baker to be his new chief of staff, the members of the outgoing chief’s team warned their replacements that Reagan’s mental ineptitude might require

One of the things Rachel Maddow talked about in the segment leading up to the 1040 reveal was the fact that Trump sold a house to a Russian oligarch for way more than it was worth, so what’s that about.

So today I googled for more, and got a Washington Post piece from five days ago.

The front-page centerpiece of Friday’s Palm Beach Post, billed as an “exclusive,” begins with a provocative question: “Why did a Russian oligarch pay now-President Donald Trump $95 million for his Palm Beach mansion?”

The piece offers no clear answer and, despite being a captivating read filled with several new details, it revisits a curious real estate transaction that has previously been probed by

Today in TwitterDonnie:

Does anybody really believe that a reporter, who nobody ever heard of, "went to his mailbox" and found my tax returns? @NBCNews FAKE NEWS!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 15, 2017

Can you imagine what the outcry would be if @SnoopDogg, failing career and all, had aimed and fired the gun at President Obama? Jail time!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 15, 2017

Wut?

Looking forward to a big rally in Nashville, Tennessee, tonight. Big crowd of great people expected. Will be fun!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 15, 2017

Ah yes, his favorite thing: adoring attention from a visible crowd of people. He misses the campaign. He would do that all … Read the rest

Someone leaked Trump’s 2005 tax return, minus all the informative attachments, yesterday. I think it was Trump who leaked it, since a hostile party would have included the informative attachments.

President Trump paid $38 million in federal taxes in 2005 on income of $153 million and reported a $105 million write-down in business losses, according to a copy of his tax return first revealed Tuesday night.

Trump paid an effective tax rate of 24 percent and saved millions of dollars in additional taxes by claiming the losses, according to the document, the first two pages of which were obtained by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston and first reported by DC Report, a nonprofit news site he runs,

China has cleared the way for Trump to provide pimping services there.

China has granted preliminary approval for 38 new Trump trademarks, paving the way for President Donald Trump and his family to develop a host of branded businesses from hotels to insurance to bodyguard and concierge services, public documents show.

Trump’s lawyers in China applied for the marks in April 2016, as Trump railed against China at campaign rallies, accusing it of currency manipulation and stealing US jobs. Critics maintain that Trump’s swelling portfolio of China trademarks raises serious conflict of interest questions.

Oh, sure, but nobody who can do anything about them will do anything about them.

If President Trump receives any special treatment in securing

The Times reports from the hall of mirrors where it gets to correct the lies of Trump and Trump’s people about what the Times has reported in the past that Trump and Trump’s people are citing as justification for Trump’s lies about Obama’s dastardly wire tapps [sic] of Trump Tower.

Two senior White House officials suggested on Monday that President Trump’s unsubstantiated claim that President Barack Obama had tapped his telephone was not meant to be taken literally, arguing that Mr. Trump had been referring more broadly to a variety of surveillance efforts during the 2016 campaign when he made the incendiary accusation.

“He doesn’t really think that President Obama went up and tapped his phone personally,” said Sean Spicer,