Earlier this year, the FBI warned then-Trump advisor Hope Hicks that Russian officials were attempting to contact her via email during the presidential transition, the New York Times reports. The FBI met with Hicks twice after Trump took office to specifically warn her about Russian efforts to reach her.
What matters: Hope Hicks didn't do anything wrong. She met with investigators from Robert Mueller's probe on Thursday and Friday this week, according to NYT, but it is unknown if the emails were discussed.
A former aide to Rep. Trent Franks told the AP that Franks offered her $5 million to carry his child. Aides told Politico that Franks approached two female staffers about surrogacy, but aides were concerned "it was not clear to the women whether he was asking about impregnating the women through sexual intercourse or in vitro fertilization."
Politico also reported that "a former staffer also alleged that Franks tried to persuade a female aide that they were in love by having her read an article that described how a person knows they’re in love with someone."
A majority of President Trump's supporters (62%) can't think of anything Trump has done that they're unhappy with, according to a Pew Research poll.
Of the supporters who have been disappointed in the president 26% are unhappy with his style and 14% disapprove of his social media use and "unprofessional behavior."
The other side: Of the majority of Americans who disapprove of the president's job performance, 84% say they can't think of anything Trump has done that they're happy with.
Rep. Trent Franks announced his immediate resignation on Friday, after saying Thursday he would be resigning effective January 31st after admitting he'd raised the topic of surrogacy with several of his staffers.
"Last night, my wife was admitted to the hospital in Washington, D.C. due to an ongoing ailment. After discussing options with my family, we came to the conclusion that the best thing for our family now would be for me to tender my previous resignation effective today,December 8th, 2017."
Dr. Nadia Schadlow, who currently works on strategy on the staff of National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, is the likely successor to Dina Powell, deputy national security adviser for strategy. Powell announced Friday that she will leave the White House early next year — the first in an expected wave of senior West Wing departures.
Why it matters: Powell was one of the few senior West Wing officials with previous White House experience, and the coming brain drain could leave President Trump with key holes. The administration has always been thinly staffed, and bringing top people in will be hard, in part because of uncertainty surrounding the Mueller investigation.
A September 2016 email sent to senior Trump campaign officials directed them to documents that had already been publicly released by WikiLeaks, per The Washington Post. Initial reporting on the email this morning from CNN said the email was sent on September 4 — WaPo reports that it was actually September 14 — and left it an open question whether the documents had been previously released.
Why it matters: WaPo's reporting massively changes the significance of this story, indicating that the sender — a still unknown "Michael J. Erickson" — might have just been trying to alert Trump campaign officials to the publicly available WikiLeaks cache. It caps off a week of huge reporting blunders on the Russia probe after ABC News mischaracterized Michael Flynn's planned testimony and Reuters and Bloomberg misreported the target of a Mueller subpoena of Deutsche Bank.
Democrats might reduce the influence of so-called superdelegates in the next presidential election, the AP reports, citing a draft proposal. Superdelegates are party leaders who get a say in picking the presidential nominee separate from primary and caucus results.
Why it matters: Bernie Sanders supporters criticized the superdelegate process in 2016 for unfairly aiding Hillary Clinton, though the proposed changes wouldn't have made a difference in that election.
.@POTUS just signed H.J. Res 123 - the short term CR that provides FY18 appropriations to fund the fed govt thru Friday Dec. 22.— Sarah Sanders (@PressSec) December 8, 2017
Why it matters: Congress now has until right before Christmas to work out a deal to keep the government funded into 2018. Efforts to keep the government open could still be derailed by fights over immigration.
Lindsay Menz, who accused Sen. Al Franken of sexual harassment, said that she "wanted more answers" from Franken's farewell address on Thursday, according to the Washington Examiner. Menz said she expected Franken to either apologize for his actions or fully renounce the accusations — neither of which he did.
“I expected for him to come and share the truth, share what he had experienced, you know, give us some sort of resolve to the situation, and I don’t feel like there was resolve to the situation today.”
Nine women, on the record, have accused Alabama Republican Roy Moore of sexual misconduct, most when they were teenagers and he was a grown man. Moore's spokesman says the women, who Mitch McConnell unambiguously believes, are criminals.
At a rally in September, one of the few African Americans in the audience asked Moore when America was last "great." He responded: "I think it was great at the time when families were united — even though we had slavery — they cared for one another. ... Our families were strong, our country had a direction."
We have finally found something Republicans and Democrats have in common. Sadly, it's their shared culture of sexual harassment — and the worst form of abuse of power by old, perverted men:
From the Eurasia Group's Leon Levy, here's a list of world leaders who have had the some of the biggest swings in sentiment from the start of their current terms until now.
Reproduced from the Eurasia Group's Dec. 5 Signal newsletter; Chart: Axios Visuals
The Department of Justice has asked the Senate Judiciary Committee for materials concerning research into fetal tissue, in an indication the department is moving to investigate Planned Parenthood, according to the Daily Beast. Republicans on the Judiciary Committee released a report in 2016 about Planned Parenthood's contracts with biomedical research corporations, and questioned if the corporations "profited from their disbursement of fetal tissue."
Why it matters: Pro-life activists have long pushed for an investigation into Planned Parenthood. Planned Parenthood said in a statement, "These accusations are baseless, and a part of a widely discredited attempt to end access to reproductive health care at Planned Parenthood. Planned Parenthood has never, and would never, profit while facilitating its patients' choice to donate fetal tissue for use in important medical research."
The House Ethics Committee on Thursday said it has launched an investigation into Rep. Blake Farenthold amid allegations that he sexually harassed a former aide and then retaliated when she complained about it.
Why it matters: Politico reported last week that a $84,000 sexual harassment settlement was paid by the Office of Compliance in 2014, using tax-payer funds, following allegations against Farenthold. Farenthold said this week he will repay the money, adding "I want to be clear that I didn't do anything wrong, but I also don't want taxpayers to be on the hook for this."
President Donald Trump's popularity has fallen or remained the same since February with every demographic group surveyed by Pew, according to a newly released poll.
