Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen's team has sent out three fake spearphishing email campaigns to staffers over the last 18 months to test whether they’d fall for real hacking, her chief of staff, Maura Keefe, tells Axios. The result? Several fell for it.
Why it matters: Every political operation in the country is grappling with the reality that hackers may target them — that is, if they haven’t been infiltrated already.
Federal investigators in New York are examining whether President Trump's former personal lawyer Michael Cohen committed over $20 million in bank and tax fraud by misrepresenting his assets when obtaining loans for his family taxi businesses, The New York Times reports.
The big picture: The NYT report notes that it is "still possible" that Cohen could plead guilty and decide to cooperate with federal prosectors and the Mueller investigation. The fraud inquiry is in conjunction with an ongoing federal investigation regarding Cohen's possible violation of campaign finance laws via the payment of multiple women who claim to have had extramarital affairs with Trump.
Dave Wasserman, the Cook Political Report's House analyst, says the most under-covered aspect of 2018 is that "a blue wave is obscuring a red exodus." Republican House members are retiring at a startling clip — a trend that senior White House adviser Kellyanne Conway told me earlier this year was worrying her more than any other trend affecting the midterms.
What's happening: There are 43 Republican seats now without an incumbent on the ballot. That's more than one out of every six Republicans in the House — a record in at least a century, Wasserman says.
President Trump’s staff has learned a hard lesson. If the president says something in private, no matter how geopolitically fraught, it's only a matter of time before he blurts it out in public.
Between the lines: Trump’s Wall Street Journal interview this week is just the latest example of this habit. In that interview, he contradicted the White House's official narrative by saying he had revoked John Brennan’s security clearance because of the Russia probe. It's far from the first time Trump has publicly blurted out something that his aides privately implored him to keep under wraps.
Hundreds of veiled demonstrators gathered in Copenhagen earlier this month to protest against Denmark's "burqa ban," a law enacted in May that allows police officers to fine women who wear the Muslim niqab or body-length burqa in public areas.
Between the lines: Denmark joined France, Belgium, Bulgaria, Austria and the Netherlands as European countries that have instituted some form of a nationwide ban on face veils, per the WashPost. Justifications for the burqa ban range from it being a matter of female dignity to a matter of public safety, as the wearer's identity would be concealed in the event of a security threat. But critics say the ban is being used as a pretext for discrimination against Muslims amid growing resistance to Europe's liberal immigration policies.
Changes to the seasonal H-2B visa program by the Trump administration have left crab houses in Maryland without seasonal crab pickers — a majority of whom are from Mexico — after few Americans responded to the unfilled openings, owners told The Washington Post.
The details: The administration's decision to change the H-2B system from first-come, first-served to a lottery forced many crab houses to lose out on their seasonal foreign workers, causing them to lose customers and profit as vendors turn to businesses with more reliable supply. A spokesman at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which administers the H-2B program, told the Post that the agency has been "focused on ensuring the integrity of the immigration system and protecting the interests of U.S. workers."
President Trump's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani said that the 2016 Trump Tower meeting was "originally for the purpose of getting information about ... [Hillary] Clinton" during an interview Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press."
Why it matters: Along with Trump's shocking tweet on the subject earlier this month, it marks a huge reversal in the Trump team's narrative about that meeting — as Trump's initial statement said it was primarily about the adoption of Russian children, rather than opposition dirt from a Kremlin-linked lawyer.
In an interview with CNN's Victor Blackwell, Michael Williams, a GOP state senator in Georgia, said he wouldn't have a problem with President Trump using the N-word "in the past, as my president," as Omorosa Manigault alleges Trump has.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller recommended 30 days to six months in prison for former Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos in a court filing announced Friday night.
The big picture: Papadopoulos was Mueller's first guilty plea in the probe into Russia interference in the 2016 presidential election. The prosecutors said Papadopoulos caused irreparable damage to the investigation because he lied repeatedly during a January 2017 interview.
President Trump attacked the social-media giants today for "totally discriminating against Republican/Conservative voices," fueling an issue that has been gaining traction among conservatives in the ramp-up to midterms. Trump tweeted after "Fox & Friends" hit the issue.
Be smart: Tech companies are now jammed between calls for bans on conspiracy/hate speech/fake news and a coordinated conservative uprising about being muzzled by liberal CEOs.
A new Pew Research survey found that U.S. citizens and people from eight Western European countries share similar views on some political and social issues.
The details: Matters like immigration, business regulations, LGBTQ rights, and opinions of elected officials are issues people can agree on across the Atlantic.
Following President Trump's revocation of former CIA Director John Brennan's security clearance, top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee Sen. Mark Warner tweeted that he plans to introduce legislation to keep Trump from "arbitrarily revoking security clearances."
The big picture: While Trump's move against Brennan received backlash from politicians and those in the intelligence community, the amendment is unlikely to pass, per CNN.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller recommended up to six months in prison for former Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos, reports Reuters.
His reasoning: Mueller called prison for Papadopoulos "appropriate and warranted" in a court filing after the former campaign aide lied to federal agents investigating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Papadopoulos is scheduled for sentencing on September 7.
