The House and Senate need to pass their massive 2018 spending bill before the government shuts down on Friday. Senior sources from both parties on Capitol Hill tell me they expect they'll get the deal done — though there's plenty of last minute haggling.
The big picture: This spending bill will cost more than $1 trillion and will further add to the deficit, which is likely to reach at least $800 billion for the 2018 fiscal year. Republican leaders and Trump will sell the spending package as a much-needed boost to military spending. House defense hawks, led by House Armed Services Chairman Mac Thornberry, campaigned aggressively for this boost. And Democrats will rightly be thrilled that they've forced Republicans to capitulate to fund so many of their domestic priorities.
Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) has offered fired FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe a temporary job working on election security in his office “so that he can reach the needed length of service” to retire and receive his government pension, according to the Washington Post. A spokeswoman for McCabe told the Post: "We are considering all options."
Would it work? It seems so. McCabe held a law enforcement position with the federal government for more than the required 20 years, meaning that he'd only need to work until his 50th birthday to receive his full retirement benefits. And, per the Post's conversations with a former federal official, "The job doesn't matter so much as the fact that he's working within the federal government with the same retirement benefits until or after his 50th birthday."
Michael Bromwich, the lawyer representing fired FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, responded to President Trump's morning tweets about his client and the FBI, insinuating that Trump's intervention had politicized the process behind McCabe's dismissal:
Democrats lead Republicans by 10 points in voter preference for the midterm elections, according to a new NBC/WSJ poll. Of registered voters, 50% prefer a Democratic-controlled Congress, while 40% want a Republican one. That's a wider margin that the 49-43 lead Democrats held in the same poll in January.
The state of play: These results come as President Trump's approval rating has ticked upward. The same poll found that 43% of voters approve of his job performance, which is four points higher than his approval rating earlier this year.
Andrew McCabe says President Trump asked him: “What was it like when your wife lost? ... So tell me, what was it like to lose?" McCabe — the former FBI deputy director who was fired Friday night, 26 hours short of being eligible for a full pension — says that in three or four interactions, President Trump was disparaging each time of his wife, Dr. Jill McCabe, a failed Virginia state Senate candidate in 2015. John Dowd, a Trump lawyer, told me: "I am told that the P never made that statement according to two others who were present."
The big picture: Axios has learnedthat McCabe has met with special counsel Robert Mueller, and has turned over Comey-style memos documenting his conversations with Trump. The memos include corroboration by McCabe of former FBI Director James Comey's account of his own firing by Trump.
Kicking off a series of morning tweets, President Trump accused former FBI Director James Comey of lying to the Senate Judiciary Committee during testimony last May. At that time, Comey stated that he had not authorized an FBI employee to be an anonymous source for a reporter in matters relating to the Trump-Russia investigation or the Clinton email investigation.
The inspiration: Trump saw a Fox & Friends segment this morning, which juxtaposed fired FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe's statement defending his actions at the bureau with Comey's testimony from last year.
Andrew McCabe, the former FBI deputy director who was fired Friday night, has met with special counsel Robert Mueller's team and has turned over memos detailing interactions with President Trump, according to a source familiar with the exchange.
McCabe's interview with Mueller's prosecutors apparently included what he knows about former FBI director James Comey's firing.
The bottom line: The memos include corroboration by McCabe of Comey's account of his own firing by Trump, according to the source.
Former FBI Director James Comey tweeted a pointed message to President Trump this afternoon after the firing of former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe:
