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The Trump dossier is one of the most important and least understood elements of the Trump-Russia affair. It is important not just because its allegations are, as former FBI director James Comey said, "salacious and unverified," but because it:

The story of the dossier, if it is ever learned, could greatly affect the way we think about the Trump-Russia matter.

One key talking point whenever the dossier is discussed is that it "started with Republicans," that is, it was originally commissioned in fall 2015 by a GOP donor who hired a dirt-digging firm called Fusion GPS to look into candidate Trump. The story, now widely told, appears to come from what a "person familiar" with the dossier told the New York Times in January of this year:

The story began in September 2015, when a wealthy Republican donor who strongly opposed Mr. Trump put up the money to hire a Washington research firm run by former journalists, Fusion GPS, to compile a dossier about the real estate magnate's past scandals and weaknesses, according to a person familiar with the effort. The person described the opposition research work on condition of anonymity, citing the volatile nature of the story and the likelihood of future legal disputes. The identity of the donor is unclear.

In this version of the story, the GOP-begun dossier originally was conventional opposition research involving Trump's business dealings it was not about Russia. The Republican donor, the story goes, lost interest as Trump wrapped up the GOP nomination. At that point, "Democratic supporters of Hillary Clinton," according to the Times, picked up the project. At about the same time, Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee was in the news, and Glenn Simpson, the former Wall Street Journal reporter who runs Fusion GPS, shifted the Trump dossier project to Russia, hiring former British spy Christopher Steele for the job. So the Democratic part of the dossier story was the attempt to dredge up information on Russia.

As far as the origin of the dossier is concerned, the idea that it all started with Republicans has become conventional wisdom.

But there are a lot of well-connected Republicans who are quite skeptical of the story. Specifically, the GOP strategists most involved in the competing campaigns that were trying to stop Trump Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, the campaigns that were closely linked to big Republican donors and were hungry for any negative information they could use against Trump say they knew nothing about the effort at the time and do not believe it was in fact begun by a Republican donor.

"I don't believe the mad Republican donor theory," said Mike Murphy, the veteran strategist who ran Jeb Bush's $118 million super PAC, noting he never used Fusion GPS and had no inkling that it was conducting oppo for a big GOP donor. "We had the biggest share of Republican major donors," Murphy continued. "They all gossip. One guy is for Christie, his partner is for Bush. They all talk to each other, and I think I would have heard about it. And I didn't."

Terry Sullivan, who ran Marco Rubio's campaign, told me he had never heard of Fusion GPS before the dossier became public in January of this year. And he doesn't buy the it-started-with-Republicans idea. "The reason it is not at all believable that a Republican was behind it is, nobody used [any information] from it," Sullivan said. "Everybody was pretty damn desperate at the end. If someone had a kitchen sink, they would have thrown it."

Jeff Roe, who ran the Ted Cruz campaign, also noted that Trump's opponents were increasingly desperate to stop him as the primary season wore on. If Fusion GPS were peddling sensational information about Trump, why wouldn't one of those campaigns have used it? Beyond that, the non-Trump Republican campaigns talked to each other; there was no wall of silence between them. "Nobody ever brought this up," Roe told me, saying he finds the idea that a Republican found dirt on Trump and never used it or offered it to the campaigns is "total BS."

John Weaver, the veteran Republican operative who ran the John Kasich campaign, told me he was not aware of Fusion GPS at the time. "No one ever approached us, no one offered to help us. No one associated with the Kasich campaign had anything to do with it," Weaver said. He learned about the dossier when it was reported in the press, Weaver added.

Another high-ranking campaign operative, who did not want to be identified, said, "I never heard anything about it. You'd occasionally hear whispers of another campaign looking at some particular [Trump] business deal, little nuggets here or there. But I never heard anything about this. Never."

Apart from the campaigns, there were Republican operatives who took part in an ad hoc anti-Trump effort that ramped up after the departures of Bush and Rubio left the race to Trump, Cruz and Kasich. One person deeply involved in the effort told me, "I don't believe the dossier had anything to do with the Republican world because I would have known about it. There's no way I would not have known. I just never heard boo about it."

But what if they are all wrong? What if a Republican was in fact involved in the start of the dossier but kept the information away from the GOP campaigns that might have stopped Trump? I found one GOP NeverTrump operative, who also did not want to be named, to whom Glenn Simpson offered a story in late March 2016. The story, the operative told me, was an entirely conventional bit of oppo about Trump's business dealings nothing at all about Russia or anything related to that. The GOP operative had, and has today, no idea of who might have commissioned the research Simpson offered. But he's not aware of any Republicans who were involved, and he was quite familiar with rich, anti-Trump Republicans.

The whole episode was unremarkable, the person said, because the remaining campaigns and the anti-Trump movement received over-the-transom tips all the time. Trump did this, Trump did that. Very little of it ever panned out, and they had no sense of a big-money GOP effort behind it.

And even after the primary campaign ended with the withdrawal of Cruz and Kasich after the May 3 Indiana primary, the NeverTrump movement marched on in hopes of somehow denying Trump the nomination at the Republican National Convention. And yet the alleged Republican-sponsored Trump oppo did not surface in the days before the GOP met in Cleveland. "They would have wanted to drop it before that to mess with the convention," the operative said. But that did not happen.

Talking to the campaign operatives who were trying to defeat Trump in the primaries, there is a lingering sense of frustration at their inability to stop the front-runner. But that frustration turns to disbelief at the notion that some Republican, somewhere, was running an expensive, high-end opposition research operation on Trump and never told the opposing candidates about it.

"I just can't fathom that I wouldn't have heard beforehand," Terry Sullivan told me. "Go back to where we were all at in March, April, May, as a party the one unifying factor of everybody I knew was, 'Dear God, how are we going to stop this guy?' It would have come out."

"Jeff Roe called me frequently between when Marco dropped out and Cruz dropped out," Sullivan continued. "If somebody had it, why wouldn't they have used it? Somebody had that information, but didn't want to give it to the last two people who had a chance to stop Trump? It would blow my mind that they had anything that they didn't use."

So what is the bottom line? It's possible the it-started-with-Republicans conventional wisdom is just wrong. Or it's possible there was a rogue Republican zillionaire who wanted to commission an extensive opposition research operation on Trump but not actually use the results of that research in the effort to stop Trump. Or it's possible there was a zillionaire who characterized himself as a Republican but had never been a part of any GOP circles that the veteran political operatives who ran the Cruz, Rubio, Bush, and other Republican campaigns would recognize. Whatever the case, the conventional wisdom about the origin of the Trump dossier does not tell the whole story.

See more here:
Byron York: Republicans skeptical about origin of Trump dossier - Washington Examiner

Kevin DrumAug. 23, 2017 6:46 PM

Republicans are in a bind. They want to pass a tax bill, but (a) they dont want to pay for it and (b) they want it to be permanent. Sadly, a combination of PAYGO and reconciliation rules prevent this. What to do? One option is to design a bill that would get some Democratic support, and then pass a deficit-busting bill with 60 votes in the Senate. However, Republicans have no interest in working with Democrats, especially since Democrats would insist on a bill that doesnt benefit the rich. Thats a nonstarter.

So theyre back to square one. Bloomberg reports on their latest brainstorm for sidestepping the rules:

Under the proposal, the GOP would not account for things like expiring tax breaks when gauging the budgetary impact of tax legislation giving tax writers more room for cuts. Senate budget and tax panels are discussing the move to a current policy baseline instead of the standard current law baseline said the people who asked not to be identified because the discussions are private. The chief House tax writer, Kevin Brady, also signaled openness to the approach last month, saying it would lead to deeper tax cuts.

If youre even close to normal, youre thinking, WTF does that mean? Thats what Im thinking anyway. But a couple of charts will help us work our way through this. Lets suppose we have a tax break of five quatloos that expires halfway through the next decade. Starting in 2023, instead of saving five quatloos, you have to pay five quatloos. It looks like this:

If Republicans decide to extend the tax break, it will increase the deficit by 50 quatloos (5 years x 10 quatloos) compared to current law. This is, quite sensibly, how CBO scores things.

But wait! Suppose Republicans declare that their intention has always been to extend the tax break. In other words, current policy is that the tax break goes on forever. Then it looks like this:

The cost of extending the tax break is zero! Republicans are basically saying that since they planned to do this all along, it shouldnt count against the baseline.

But heres what I dont get. This is obviously a fantasy, and its one that CBO will never go along with. In the real world, extending a tax break thats scheduled to expire does indeed increase the deficit. So to do this, Republicans would have to overrule the CBOs score of their bill.

But if theyre this determined to do what they want to do, why not cut the crap and simply instruct the Budget Committee to declare that their bill has no effect on the deficit? It doesnt really matter how. Just assume enormous economic growth or something. The Budget Committee has final say over the score, so they can ignore CBO if they want. Whats the point of all this absurd rigamarole?

More here from CBPP if youre interested.

Or, as Donald Trump put it last night, Its a trick.

Mother Jones is a nonprofit, and stories like this are made possible by readers like you. Donate or subscribe to help fund independent journalism.

Continued here:
Republicans Mulling Plan to Hide the Quatloos - Mother Jones

Margaret Cho slammed Arizona Republicans on Wednesday in response to the states GOP using a photo from her long-canceled ABC sitcom to denote support for Asian-Americans.

I find this similar to when I was a kid someone told me that [Duran Duran frontman] Simon Le Bons name was Mike Hunt and so I went around school saying, I love Mike Hunt, and even wrote it on my locker, Cho said in a statement to EW. I didnt bother to research and paid the price of a dodgeball to the face. They got some bad information and ran with it. They deserve a dodgeball to the face.

As first captured by Vice News, the Arizona GOP website featured a still photo from Chos All-American Girl among other still photos of minority groups.

Torunn Sinclair, communications director for the Arizona Republican Party, told EW that as soon as this was brought to our attention, the page was taken down. This was obviously a mistake, and we apologize.

After the photo was captured by Vice News, it soon went viral, with All-American Girl costar B.D. Wong mocking the Arizona GOP for its mistake:

All-American Girl aired on ABC in 1994 and ran for a total of 19 episodes.

Go here to see the original:
Margaret Cho slams Arizona Republicans after photo fail - EW.com

These are tough times to be a Republican in California. Last year Donald Trump won the lowest percentage of the presidential vote any Republican has registered since 1912, when GOP nominee William Howard Taft was denied a ballot spot (Progressive candidate Theodore Roosevelt narrowly defeated Democrat Woodrow Wilson). Thats right: Famous Republican losers like Alf Landon and Barry Goldwater won a higher percentage of the vote than Trump did.

Democrats enjoy supermajorities in both chambers of the state legislature, and a 3914 margin in U.S. House seats. All statewide constitutional officers are Democrats. One U.S. Senate seat was last held by Republicans in 1992, and the other in 1968. In the most recent top two primary that promotes candidates to the general election regardless of party (an innovation, by the way, sponsored by the last GOP governor and lieutenant governor of the state), no Republican made the cut for the open U.S. Senate seat.The GOP percentage of registered voters has now sunk to a dismal 25.9 percent, nearly 20 percent below the Democratic share.

Youd think, given this environment, that California Republicans would be retooling their message in order to appeal to their state, and that, indeed, is what California Assembly GOP Leader Chad Mayes has been doing. Heres how he most recently described his partys challenge:

Republicans have a choice: We can remain in a state of denial and continue to lose elections, influence and relevance, or we can move forward boldly to articulate and apply our principles in a way that resonates with a changing California. To me, the choice is clear.

As Assembly Republican leader, I have built genuine relationships with groups that we have ignored for decades, championed policies that reach out to nontraditional Republican groups, and communicated more broadly than any Republican leader in the last generation.

But one of Mayess outreach efforts has spawned a conservative revolt, and demonstrated once again that Republicans in this and many other states would rather be right ideologically than take political risks. Taking the advice of most California business leaders not to mention big majorities in the polls Mayes led a small group of Assembly Republicans in July into a deal to support extension of the states landmark cap-and-trade system for addressing greenhouse-gas emissions.

Almost exactly a month later, the board of the state Republican Party took the unusual step of calling for Mayes to step down as Assembly leader.

Harmeet Dhillon, one of two of the states representatives to the Republican National Committee, said Mayes had failed to protect the integrity of the partys position on taxation and overregulation in California.

Thirteen members of the party board, including Chairman Jim Brulte, voted in favor of the motion calling on the Yucca Valley Republican to resign as caucus leader. Seven voted against, and there was one abstention.

Only the GOP Assembly Caucus has the power to remove Mayes as leader, and late yesterday he survived a no-confidence motion, which failed by three votes. But challenges to him will continue.

Why are California conservatives engaging in a purge effort when their party is so weak? Well, thats what ideologues do, of course; left or right (though especially the latter), they believe fidelity to the Cause is always the key to electoral success, and more valuable than electoral success in the final analysis. And there is, of course, a legacy of hard-core conservatism in the state that dates back at least to Barry Goldwaters nomination-clinching win over Nelson Rockefeller in the 1964 California primary. One of the key figures in that Goldwater campaign, Ronald Reagan, went on to serve two terms as governor and then to embody the culmination of the conservative movements long drive to power by becoming president. His many compromises with principle and with the hated Democratic opposition in both Sacramento and Washington have long been forgotten or ignored by those who burn candles to his memory.

More immediately, many California Republicans, like their counterparts in other states, fear the wrath of the base voters who have become fiercely loyal to the culture warrior and media basher in the White House.The leading GOP candidates for governor in 2018 who will be struggling to achieve a general-election spot in a field dominated by well-funded Democrats like Gavin Newsom, John Chiang, and Antonio Villaraigosa are lining up to pledge allegiance to Donald Trump, the least popular GOP presidential candidate in more than a century. Its not like Trump is getting some sort of strange second wind of popularity in the Golden State: According to Gallup, his most recent job-approval rating in California was at 30 percent, a bit below his 2016 electoral share.

Its a sad state of affairs for the party that won nine of ten presidential elections in California from 1952 through 1988. Obviously the states demographics have changed massively since those days, and the California GOPs reputation as a white and anti-immigrant party has been especially damaging in a state that now has (according to the 2016 exit polls) a nonwhite majority of voters. Rallying around Donald Trump seems an unlikely first step toward a GOP revival.

California Republicans arent alone in experiencing internecine warfare, however. The ClintonSanders primary fight was especially savage in the Golden State, and has spilled over into an endless battle over the state party chairmanship. The candidate of the Berniecrats, Kimberly Ellis, seems to have narrowly lost to a more conventional pol Clinton supporter, Eric Bauman. But having exhausted internal challenges based on allegations of a rigged process, Ellis is now threatening litigation. And there is a parallel fight among California Democrats over single-payer health-care legislation.

The 2018 midterms in California could be even wilder than usual. But make no mistake: The GOP is in the greatest peril of disaster.

Nobody was surprised the president cut loose at a rally in Phoenix. But he showed he cant drop his losing argument.

The vice-president has a different foreign-policy model: simpler, more rugged, with distinct homoerotic overtones.

At the worst possible time, relations between the president and the leader of his party in the Senate have become frosty, distant and even combative.

According to reports, the editor thought he was emailing with Steve Bannon.

Hawaii senator Brian Schatz is preparing a bill that would allow all Americans to buy into Medicaid, regardless of their income level.

Having fallen to a historic low point, California Republicans are still fighting over conservative purity and loyalty to an unpopular president.

Attorneys for Williams maintain his innocence.

GOP infighting on full display.

The New York staple will continue to publish online.

A total of 16 companies and people have been targeted in the U.S.s latest move to squeeze Pyongyang.

But the Executive branch is still doing damage.

The administration may be forced by the courts to cancel protection for Dreamers. So it could be time for a grand bargain to get border-wall funding.

A large swath of GOP voters now identify as Trump Republicans and see loyalty to the president as the one litmus test for true conservatism.

All ships will have a one-day operational pause this week after the U.S.S. John S. McCain collided with an oil tanker.

House Speaker lies his head off on national television, nobody says anything.

It would be natural for the president to follow up on controlled remarks about Afghanistan with an uninhibited base-feeding frenzy the next night.

A long-harbored conservative dream the dismantling of the administrative state is taking place under Secretary Carson.

A high-speed train hit another train parked at the station in Upper Darby.

He thinks asking lawmakers to hold Trump accountable would amount to a partisan hack-fest.

More here:
Endangered California Republicans Feuding Over Ideology - New York Magazine

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Congressional Republicans, seeking to address the complaints of small businesses, are floating changes to their controversial proposal to eliminate business tax deductions for debt interest payments, business lobbyists said on Tuesday.

A top U.S. Republican on tax policy acknowledged that modifications are in the works, but did not provide details.

The debt interest proposal, long seen by Republican policymakers as necessary to help drive economic growth, is backed by large companies with ready access to equity financing that they could substitute for debt if eliminating the interest deduction made issuing debt too costly. Debt-dependent small business owners, farmers and ranchers don't have that luxury.

As Republicans in Congress and the Trump administration slog ahead with a push to overhaul the U.S. tax code, a key task is figuring out how to resolve conflicting groups' priorities, with business debt interest a clear example.

The tax code has not been overhauled since 1986, partly because reconciling these conflicts can be so difficult.

"We've asked businesses large and small to look at that, test drive it and give us back their feedback," House of Representatives tax committee Chairman Kevin Brady said in remarks at an event in Louisville, Kentucky on Tuesday, without offering specifics about the modified proposal.

His staff at the committee had no comment.

Businesses lobbyists said the panel's lawmakers have quietly agreed to focus on exemptions for small businesses, including farmers and ranchers, and an exemption for land.

Lawmakers have also discussed a possible partial elimination of the interest deduction, with an exemption for existing debt, or eliminating the deduction only for businesses deemed to have an excessive amount of debt, according to lobbyists.

Brady is one of the "Big Six" negotiators from Congress and the Trump administration who are guiding the tax reform debate.

At the Louisville event, he described rolling back the business interest deduction as a "trade-off" for another proposal to accelerate expensing, which would allow businesses to write off investments in plants and equipment more quickly.

He said net interest deduction is one of a number of tax breaks that lawmakers are looking to eliminate to help pay for lower business tax rates. Republicans say tax cuts will help drive annual U.S. economic growth above the 3 percent mark.

Independent analysts say that eliminating the interest deduction would raise more than $1 trillion in federal revenues.

Republicans want to cut the corporate income tax rate to 20-25 percent from 35 percent. But they have been hard-pressed to pay for such a cut since jettisoning a border adjusted import tax that would have raised more than $1 trillion.

Editing by Kevin Drawbaugh and Cynthia Osterman

Read the original:
As tax debate heats up, Republicans tweak business interest plan - Reuters