Day 155: Choked

This opening item is a big one.

• "I feel like we sort of choked" - a senior aide to Obama, regarding their response to the unfolding calamity of Russian election hacking. I strongly encourage you to read the whole thing, and find out how the Obama administration stayed mum on the Russian threat so as to appear not to politicize the issue. Might as well have had them rooting for Republicans...
• Cracks are showing in the support of the Republican death bill. Keep up that pressure!
• The Trump administration is being particularly opaque in dealings with the media. Lately, they've been holding "off-camera" press conferences (if holding them at all). CNN's response was to send a sketch artist to the briefing. From the article: "The Trump White House has been cutting back on the frequency and the length of on-camera briefings" and "The White House has also prohibited live audio broadcasts of the briefing
  T. This is he White House has also prohibited live audio broadcasts of the briefing
  ". This is terrible for government transparency.
• What the fuck is the administration doing? "The Trump administration on Friday moved to eliminate the State Department unit responsible for dealing with Afghanistan and Pakistan — transferring its duties to a regional bureau whose leadership ranks have been decimated... The development came with less than a day's notice."
• Wow. I'll let this headline speak for itself: FBI official won't say that President Trump is not a Russian agent.
• Apparently Tillerson is frustrating the White House by caring more about setting the State Department up for solid functioning than appointing Republican political appointees. Huh.
• Trump signed a bill today "making it easier for the Department of Veterans Affairs to fire employees". Despite receiving Democrat support (an oddity), I'm still not sure that it's actually a good thing. 
• The NY Times crawled through Trump's public comments to construct a map of all of his lies during his time in office. It's really disturbing.

Here's an interesting read on our current state of affairs, from a bird's eye view. Good luck. Otherwise, have a great weekend and we'll be back on Monday.