POLITICO

Kirsten Gillibrand ended her campaign this week. There are now 20 Democratic candidates competing for the chance to take on Donald Trump in the general election.

After Washington’s residents became the first in the nation (together with Colorado’s) to vote to legalize recreational marijuana sales and possession in 2012, the state liquor board adopted exhaustive rules and regulations to govern the new trade.

New rules require cannabis producers to give the state detailed information each month about the plants they're growing (by specific batch and strain). And whenever they transport products, they have to file cargo manifests with vehicle information.

The state and state-licensed data firms post much of this info online.

And now growers fear the system, put in place to ensure transparency in the newly legalized industry, leaves a data trail thieves can use to find out where the pickings are the fattest.

House GOP leaders are reneging on a vow to hold an immigration vote before the August recess, a move that puts House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy in a particularly awkward spot as he seeks to become the next speaker.

In June, McCarthy (R-Calif.) personally promised several rank-and-file members a vote on a new guest-worker program for farmers, an offer backed by Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.). The assurance was critical at the time: It persuaded Reps. Dennis Ross (R-Fla.) and Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.) not to sign on to an effort — which Republican leaders were desperately trying to stop — to force a vote on legislation creating a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers, the immigrants brought to the country illegally as children. The so-called discharge petition ultimately fell two signatures short.

But now, Republican leaders have no plans to take up the guest-worker program before the summer break, according to four sources in leadership. Ryan does not want to hold a vote that’s certain to fail, they said —though proponents of the guest-worker bill said McCarthy’s original promise to hold a vote was unconditional.

“That was not the deal; the deal was that we’re taking it up regardless,” Ross said Monday afternoon, arguing that the lack of 218 votes shouldn’t preclude the promised vote. “There are those of us [who] need to go back [home] and show that we’re doing all we can to do what we said we would do."

President Donald Trump’s bailout for the ag industry is driving his many Republican trade critics to exasperation.

Pro-free trade Republicans were already furious with Trump's escalation of tariffs against U.S. allies and China — a multi-front trade war they say is hurting U.S. farmers and manufacturers. But the administration’s response Tuesday — sending $12 billion to farmers hurt by retaliatory tariffs to ease the pain — is the precise anathema of conservative, free-trade orthodoxy, they said.

“This is becoming more and more like a Soviet-type of economy here: Commissars deciding who’s going to be granted waivers, commissars in the administration figuring out how they’re going to sprinkle around benefits,” said Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.). “I’m very exasperated. This is serious.”

“Taxpayers are going to be asked to initial checks to farmers in lieu of having a trade policy that actually opens and expands more markets. There isn’t anything about this that anybody should like,” said Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, the No. 3 GOP leader. He suggested the new spending might need to be offset by cuts in other funding areas.

Even the Wall Street Journal described the president's appearance alongside his Russian counterpart as an 'embarrassment.'

By MATTHEW NUSSBAUM and NANCY COOK

President Donald Trump attempted on Tuesday to clean up his disastrous press conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin, saying that he had misspoken when he said that he saw “no reason” why Russia would have meddled in the 2016 election.

The attempted walk-back came after the White House endured 24 hours of criticism from all sides for Trump’s appearance beside his Russian counterpart, during which he appeared to reject U.S. intelligence conclusions about Kremlin interference in the American democratic process.

“I have full faith in our intelligence agencies,” Trump told reporters Tuesday, reading from a prepared statement. “There is a need for some clarification. It should have been obvious, it ought to have been obvious.”

He added: “In a key sentence in my remarks I said the word “would” instead of ‘wouldn’t.’ ...The sentence should've been, and I thought it would be maybe a little but unclear on the transcript … ‘I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be Russia.’ Sort of a double negative. You can put that in and I think that probably clarifies things by itself.”

Obama issues a new warning against 'strongman politics'

The remarks come one day after Trump was widely rebuked for publicly cozying up to Putin.

By LOUIS NELSON

Former President Barack Obama warned on Tuesday of “a politics of fear and resentment and retrenchment,” delivering a rebuke of the nationalist, right-wing brand of politics for which President Donald Trump has become the standard-bearer.

Obama, delivering remarks in South Africa to mark the 100th anniversary of Nelson Mandela’s birth, said he offered his perspective in light of “the strange and uncertain times we are in,” with “each day’s news cycle bringing more head-spinning and disturbing headlines.”

He made no direct mention of Trump but addressed head-on the type of politics that the current president has come to embody.

“A politics of fear and resentment and retrenchment began to appear and that kind of politics is now on the move,” Obama said Tuesday. He pointed to deteriorating democracies around the globe and the ascendance of “strongman politics” as well as assaults on freedom of the press and the use of social media to promote “hatred and paranoia and propaganda and conspiracy theories.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Monday that he wanted President Donald Trump to win the 2016 election because he believed Trump's policies would be more friendly to the Kremlin.

"Yes, I did. Yes, I did. Because he talked about bringing the U.S.-Russia relationship back to normal,” Putin said, standing alongside Trump at a joint news conference.

Putin was asked whether he directed any of his officials to help Trump’s presidential campaign, but Putin appeared to sidestep that part of the question.

The news conference — which came as the pair met at a much-anticipated summit in Helsinki — followed a closed-door meeting that lasted two hours, where they said they addressed issues including Syria, denuclearization and diplomatic relations.

Special counsel Robert Mueller indicted 12 Russian military officials on Friday and accused them of hacking into two Democratic Party computer systems to sabotage the 2016 presidential election.

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein announced the indictment, filed in federal district court in Washington, just days before a scheduled Monday summit in Helsinki between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. U.S. intelligence agencies have assessed that Putin ordered a Russian effort to manipulate the 2016 election in Trump’s favor.

Rosenstein said the Russians stole and released Democratic documents after planting malicious computer codes in the network of the Democratic National Committee as well as the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. The Russians also illegally downloaded data related to some 500,000 voters from a state database, he charged.

While many of the indictment's details confirmed previous news reports and other assessments, it dramatically shifts the context for Trump's upcoming meeting with Putin, whom U.S. intelligence services have concluded was behind the 2016 election interference scheme. Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer quickly called on Trump to cancel the planned meeting.

Speaking at a press conference at Justice Department headquarters in Washington, Rosenstein said he briefed Trump about the upcoming criminal charges earlier this week. He said the indictment’s timing was “a function of the collection of the facts, the evidence, and the law and a determination that it was sufficient to present the indictment at this time.”

“I'll let the president speak for himself,” Rosenstein told reporters when asked if Trump—who just this morning in Great Britain again blasted the Russia investigation as a “rigged witch hunt”—supported the latest step in the 15-month old Mueller probe.

Republicans exploded at FBI counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok on Thursday, berating his assertions that his anti-Donald Trump sentiment — captured in text messages exposed by an internal watchdog — never affected his work on the Russia probe.

But a defiant Strzok hit back at GOP lawmakers, defending his professionalism and slamming the hearing as a “victory notch in Putin’s belt.” And he got backup from Democrats who accused Republicans of harassing Strzok and running roughshod over the committees.

“Let me be clear, unequivocally and under oath: Not once in my 26 years of defending my nation did my personal opinions impact any official action I took,” Strzok said in his opening statement to the House Judiciary and Oversight committees, his first public remarks on the matter.

Strzok instead cast his decision to help launch and lead the FBI investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election as an act of patriotism in defense of American democracy. And he took a swing at congressional Republicans for targeting him as the bad guy.

“I have the utmost respect for Congress’s oversight role, but I truly believe that today’s hearing is just another victory notch in Putin’s belt and another milestone in our enemies’ campaign to tear America apart,” he said.

Soon after, the hearing degenerated into a partisan morass.

The stock market is looking past President Donald Trump’s trade war with China and racing higher because the economy and corporate profits are strong. But that could all change very quickly, according to one of Wall Street’s top strategists.

“I wouldn’t say that Wall Street doesn’t care, I think that’s a bit strong,” Richard Bernstein, the former chief investment strategist at Merrill Lynch who now runs Richard Bernstein Advisors, said on the latest edition of the POLITICO Money podcast. “I would say that for where they are right now, the trade wars are taking a back seat to the fundamentals of the U.S. economy. The U.S. is really hitting on all eight cylinders right now, and I think that’s the more important story for the stock market.”

But if tariffs between the U.S. and China run into the hundreds of billions of dollars with hotter rhetoric on each side, Wall Street could still be in a for a wild ride.

“Now of course if we start exacerbating the situation on trade, it could move to the front seat pretty quickly,” he said. “If there’s a rational approach, I think the markets can digest that. If it’s real scattershot and emotional, I think the stock market has a lot of trouble with that.”

A high-stakes plan to indict Afghan drug lords and insurgency leaders on criminal conspiracy charges ran afoul of the Obama team. Five years later, it remains buried under Trump.

By JOSH MEYER

As Afghanistan edged ever closer to becoming a narco-state five years ago, a team of veteran U.S. officials in Kabul presented the Obama administration with a detailed plan to use U.S. courts to prosecute the Taliban commanders and allied drug lords who supplied more than 90 percent of the world’s heroin — including a growing amount fueling the nascent opioid crisis in the United States.

The plan, according to its authors, was both a way of halting the ruinous spread of narcotics around the world and a new — and urgent — approach to confronting ongoing frustrations with the Taliban, whose drug profits were financing the growing insurgency and killing American troops. But the Obama administration’s deputy chief of mission in Kabul, citing political concerns, ordered the plan to be shelved, according to a POLITICO investigation.

Now, its authors — Drug Enforcement Administration agents and Justice Department legal advisers at the time — are expressing anger over the decision, and hope that the Trump administration, which has followed a path similar to former President Barack Obama’s in Afghanistan, will eventually adopt the plan as part of its evolving strategy.

“This was the most effective and sustainable tool we had for disrupting and dismantling Afghan drug trafficking organizations and separating them from the Taliban,” said Michael Marsac, the main architect of the plan as the DEA’s regional director for South West Asia at the time. “But it lies dormant, buried in an obscure file room, all but forgotten.”

In the end, President Donald Trump made the expected choice: Brett Kavanaugh, a conservative jurist who has served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit since 2006. Kavanaugh, a former clerk to the retiring Anthony Kennedy, has a sterling reputation in conservative legal circles, and a record to match.

In his remarks announcing his pick, Trump suggested he had chosen Kavanaugh for his originalist conception of the law -- a philosophy more in keeping with the late Antonin Scalia than with the more activist Kennedy. “What matters is not a judge’s political views but whether they can set aside those views to do what the law and the Constitution require,” the president said. Kavanaugh reinforced that idea in his own comments, remarking, “A judge must be independent and must interpret the law, not make the law.”

But how will Kavanaugh rule once he’s actually on the bench? We asked top legal thinkers to evaluate his record -- and tell us how he might change America’s highest court.

The week before Thanksgiving in 1985, a 39-year-old Donald Trump announced his plan to make sure nobody would ever forget him.

At a showy news conference at his sleek, glass-wrapped Grand Hyatt in midtown Manhattan, and later that evening at a cramped, tense community meeting in the cafeteria of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice on the Upper West Side, Trump unveiled drawings and models of his vision for the old Penn Central rail yards on the bank of the Hudson River. It wasn’t just the largest undeveloped tract of land in Manhattan; it was “the greatest piece of land in urban America,” he crowed. And on those 76 acres, he intended to build nearly 8,000 apartments and condominiums for up to 20,000 people, almost 10,000 parking spots, some 3.6 million square feet of television and movie studio space, and some 2 million square feet of “prestigious” stores. There would be no fewer than six 76-story towers, and looming atop it all one unprecedented skyscraper twice that height. It was a behemoth endeavor meant to go, his promotional materials proclaimed, “beyond the grandeur and excellence that has become synonymous with projects bearing the Trump name.”

This was supposed to be his legacy. Not Trump Tower. Not a clutch of casinos. Certainly not a political office of any kind.

In a metropolis of superlatives, he was striving to be New York’s biggest builder, a cocksure maker of tangible, unmissable things—and here, now, he wanted to build a city within the city, a conspicuously separate entity, of a style and scale no one had accomplished, not even the man who had shaped modern New York, Robert Moses. It was, in the words of the New York Times, his “bid for immortality.” First, he called it Television City; then, simply and unsurprisingly, Trump City. That centerpiece skyscraper would be the world’s tallest building, and he was going to live at the top.

And he failed.

Sen. Susan Collins took a notable phone call Thursday as she enters the eye of the Supreme Court confirmation storm: It was White House counsel Don McGahn, sounding out the moderate Maine Republican in what she called a “preliminary discussion” of the high court vacancy.

Republicans control the Senate by a single seat and Arizona Sen. John McCain has been absent for months. That means any single GOP senator has enormous sway over President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court pick.

None matter more than Collins and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), who also received her own call from McGahn on Thursday.

A year ago, the two moderate Republicans, along with McCain, stopped Obamacare repeal in its tracks while helping to confirm Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. Now, as they weigh how to replace the retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy, the two are about to be squeezed more than ever — by liberals seeking a Republican to stop the court from outlawing abortion rights, among other potential conservative rulings, and by their fellow Republicans looking for a show of party unity on a hugely consequential vote.

But the two senators said Thursday they won’t simply fall in line behind whomever Trump nominates.

Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy announced on Wednesday that he will retire, unleashing an epic political battle to replace him that could allow President Donald Trump to shift the court to the right for a generation to come.

Rep. Joe Crowley’s stunning loss has left House Democratic leadership scrambling for answers — and has left-wing, Bernie Sanders-aligned activists feeling emboldened.

Fewer than 30,000 votes were cast in the Democratic primary in New York’s 14th District, but the race has already rocked the political world from Queens to Capitol Hill. Crowley, the fourth-ranking Democrat in the House, was defeated Tuesday by a 28-year-old, first-time candidate and member of the Democratic Socialists of America. The future of the House Democratic conference is suddenly jumbled, and potential 2020 candidates are already linking themselves with giant-slayer Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her liberal platform.

That contest may have been the marquee race of the night but there were several other races with national implications. President Donald Trump risked significant political capital to take sides in two internecine primary fights, and Utah answered whether a former major-party presidential nominee could have a third act in politics — in a new state.