How the 25th Amendment works:

1. Pence and a Cabinet majority send a letter to the President pro tempore of the Senate (Grassley) and the Speaker of the House (Pelosi) stating Trump is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. Pence becomes Acting POTUS. 2. BUT Trump become POTUS again if he sends Grassley and Pelosi a letter stating no such inability exists.

3. UNLESS Pence and a Cabinet majority send Grassley and Pelosi a second letter stating Trump isn't able to do his job.

@DLNewRoc @adamdavidson @susannecraig @russbuettner @mmcintire We need to stop saying Trump’s businesses are failures. They are wildly successful at their intended purpose of laundering money. @DLNewRoc @adamdavidson @susannecraig @russbuettner @mmcintire It takes a special kind of idiot to go bankrupt running a casino. But we need to consider the possibility Trump wasn’t in business to make money. More precisely, that he wasn’t in business for his businesses to make money.

This was the real GOP position in 2016: No Supreme Court seats for Democrats! npr.org/2016/11/03/500… politico.com/story/2016/10/…

There either is or isn’t an active FBI counterintelligence investigation into risks to U.S. national security resulting from Trump’s personal and financial ties to Russia. It either was or wasn’t shutdown or blocked by Rosenstein. These aren’t impossible questions to answer. The FBI either did or didn’t know Rosenstein ordered Mueller not to investigate Trump’s personal and financial ties to Russia. It either knew or didn’t know that if it didn’t investigate those ties no one would. These aren’t impossible questions to answer either.

When Mueller was appointed Special Counsel in May '17 he inherited the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into Russia's attacks on democracy before and after 2016. And into Putin’s influence over Trump -- including his financial and personal ties to Russia.

https://twitter.com/stevel3000/status/1300092063078182921

It had been assumed by law enforcement and national security experts that Mueller was overseeing both a counterintelligence and a criminal probe. But when Mueller's report was finally released in Spring 2019 we learned that wasn't so.

This is a huge story. Mueller writes in his report that he sent any such information his investigators uncovered back to the FBI to pursue.

@RepAdamSchiff, get @RodRosenstein in front of your committee yesterday.

https://twitter.com/nytmike/status/1300085848596262912

Mueller’s revelation he had been doing that all along — and not himself conducting a counter-intelligence investigation into Trump’s personal and financial ties to Russia — was one of the major surprises of his report.

That *no one* was doing it is a shocker.

We need answers.

I'm not a big fan of "Trump is doing X to distract from Y" takes. He's not that disciplined a thinker or strategic an actor. But a tactic he does use often--and used with the Russian bounty story--is "Talk about the process surrounding X to distract from the substance of X." 1/5

https://twitter.com/SenDuckworth/status/1280940497725513728

The substance here is that Putin put a bounty on the heads of U.S. soldiers, Trump knew about it, and did nothing--other than grant Putin various long-sought gifts like pulling American troops out of Germany and inviting him back to the G7 summit. 2/5

Big Toobin piece on Mueller's excessive caution and tragic, unnecessary failure. His two biggest failures: not issuing a grand-jury subpoena for Trump’s testimony, and not stating clearly in his report that Trump committed crimes (even if he couldn't indict him for them as Pres).

https://twitter.com/JeffreyToobin/status/1277583099329724417

Toobin reports Rosenstein directed Mueller to run a narrow fact-based criminal investigation, not a more sweeping counter-intelligence investigation into Trump's history & finances/taxes to understand his relationship with Putin's Russia. And that Mueller was inclined to follow.

Key differences between Trump ‘20 and Nixon ‘68 are Nixon:

—Wasn’t the incumbent presiding over lawlessness and disorder (or pandemic)

—Won a 3-man race with 43% of the vote

—By triangulating between the conventional Democrat Humphrey and the openly racist Wallace Strange as it may seem now Nixon ‘68 was the candidate of calm and reassurance. A return to normalcy after years of chaos. So the question now is whether Trump ‘20 is more Nixon ‘68 or Wallace ‘68—in both cases with a twist of LBJ ‘68.

My answer: Wallace + LBJ.

@speechboy71

Now’s a good time to read about “accelerationists”: “Fueled by the perception that the future of the white race is bleak, these white supremacists believe they must employ any means necessary to expedite the collapse of the current system.“ adl.org/blog/white-sup… “Accelerationists believe that a race war is not only inevitable, but desirable, as it is the only path to achieving white power by bringing about the downfall of current systems of government.”

fpri.org/article/2020/0…

State of play according to internal GOP polling. Biden will win every Hillary state, plus PA and MI. Take it to the bank. Then he only needs any one of WI, AZ, NC, or FL— — all of which he’ll win, plus Iowa.

Meanwhile Ohio and Texas are toss-ups.