Rachel Maddow concluded her two part interview with Lev Parnas tonight. I will not be including it here. I need to get my notes (pages!) sorted out and will be making a separate entry solely on the interview and the last two Parnas data dumps.
- The president allegedly threatened Germany, France, and the UK with large auto tariffs if they did not publicly state Iran was in violation of the JPCOA. The first country to withdraw from the JPCOA was the United States.
- Per NBC, US intelligence officials are asking congress not to hold open hearings on threat assessments, as they normally do, to avoid undercutting incorrect statements by the president.
- 11 US troops were injured in the recent Iran missile attack. The government previously lied and said there were no injuries. This follows the lies about the justification for the attack.
- The Government Accountability Office released a finding today that withholding Ukraine’s aid package was illegal. The memo places the blame on the president. Their concluding paragraph stated alarm at the refusal of the White House to cooperate with their inquiry.
- I am normally skeptical of books with insider perspectives from the White House, but Philip Ruicker and Carol Leonnig are highly credible in my opinion. Their new book claims that Trump did not understand the significance of Pearl Harbor, that Trump interrupted an interview with a Secretary of State candidate to ask when he could meet Putin, that Trump wanted Tillerson to help him get rid of the law which prevents US businesses from bribing foreign governments (Trump has publicly said in the past that US businesses should be able to offer such bribes), that Trump suspected that Colbie Holderness (assaulted by White House staffer Rob Porter) may have “purposefully ran into a refrigerator to give herself bruises and try to get money out of Porter,” and that Trump told the Prime Minister of India that his country did not share a border with China. India’s border with China is 2,520 miles long, the 9th longest international border in the world.