The sitting president of the United States is under investigation for collusion with Russian interference in the 2016 elections. The president’s son-in-law, a top adviser, reportedly asked for a secure back channel to talk to Russia that would evade the notice of U.S. intelligence. His regime has sought to lift sanctions on Russia and is considering returning two compounds to Russia that then-President Obama closed because they were used for espionage. And Republican Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) is lathered up over how Obama was not aggressive enough against Russian espionage. 

Cotton has released a statement on “reports that the United States missed opportunities to crack down on Russian espionage during the Obama administration.” Specifically, “These revelations are another example of how the Obama administration coddled the Putin regime for eight years.” Cotton did not release statements on, for instance, the firing of James Comey, the appointment of Robert Mueller as special counsel to investigate Trump-Russia ties, Jeff Sessions’ failure during his confirmation process that he’d met with the Russian ambassador during the campaign, or a host of other issues relating to Trump-Russia. But a report that the Obama administration should have practiced more aggressive counterintelligence? Outrage!

Cotton’s statement ends by calling the report “yet another reminder of the need for the State Department to enforce these rules aggressively.” No doubt any minute now Cotton’s going to be out with a fiery denunciation of Trump’s desire to let Russia reopen those two compounds Obama closed.

Remember this: when Donald Trump and Department of Homeland Security Sec. John Kelly tell you that they are only targeting dangerous criminals and “bad hombres” for arrest and deportation, they are lying to you. USA Today shares one of the most egregious examples yet, that of an undocumented dad with no criminal record in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Despite living in the U.S. without permission, Felix Yulian "Julian" Motino tried to follow the rules by paying his taxes, working hard as a house painter, and taking care of his two U.S. citizen children. Motion and Alexis, his U.S. citizen wife of two years, had begun the process of trying to gain legal status for him during the Obama administration, but because of his undocumented status and a prior deportation order, were warned by friends the effort could be dangerous under Donald Trump.

Still, Julian was determined “to try to come out of the shadows” and the couple voluntarily scheduled an in-person appointment with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. It was there that their “worst nightmare came true”:

For 45 minutes, the couple provided documents that included their marriage certificate from May 15, 2015, utility bills bearing both of their names, her U.S. birth certificate and his Honduran passport. They thumbed through their wedding album and showed the agent photographs of themselves from the early years of their relationship.

The USCIS agent, named Carlos, said toward the end of the meeting that he had to make copies of their ID cards. The agent came back to his office and asked the couple to have a seat in the lobby, where his supervisor, Julie, would speak to them.

"Julie said, 'Felix, we need you to come outside into the hallway,' " said Alexis Motino, a 26-year-old Cincinnati native.

There, two officers from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement met him and said, "We need you to come with us."

The couple’s attorney, Matthew Benson, had gone with them to the USCIS appointment and immediately tried to intervene, arguing the Julian has been here for over a decade and has no criminal record. “Their marriage petition had just been approved minutes earlier.” But federal immigration officials refused to budge, and the father was in detention later that day.

"Our worst nightmare came true," said his wife Alexis. "After the interview went so well, we were elated. Then we got crushed."

From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE…

Late Night Snark: Evil Republicans Edition

"A [Montana] Republican congressional candidate named Greg Gianforte apparently body-slammed a reporter. Some Republicans are defending him, saying the body slam wasn't a big deal, which they might regret in three years when The Rock runs for president."

---Jimmy Fallon

"It's come out that the new Republican healthcare bill will hike premiums by 700 percent for the old and sick. It’s not a good sign that the title of the bill is: Walk It Off, Grandpa."

---Conan O'Brien

x

Ivanka’s next book is going to be “🔥". pic.twitter.com/GliOFTjLS7

— Full Frontal (@FullFrontalSamB) June 1, 2017

"On Twitter last night, [Trump] wrote: I will be announcing my decision on Paris accord Thursday at 3:00 P.M., the White House Rose Garden, make America great again.  It made sense that he did it from the Rose Garden, while we still have roses and gardens."

---Jimmy Kimmel

"The president’s budget hits his own voters the hardest, taking aim at the social safety net on which many of them rely. It’s all there on Trump’s new hat: Make the Poor Live on Squirrel Meat Again."

---Stephen Colbert

"What would a Trump impeachment look like? Ironically, I imagine at least part of it would involve thousands of Muslims celebrating in New Jersey."

---John Oliver

If you’re planning to take part in one of the nationwide #MarchforTruth events tomorrow (find one near you by clicking here), wear comfortable shoes, spellcheck those signs, and hydrate, hydrate, hydrate.

Your west coast-friendly edition of Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]

At the liberal Economic Policy Institute, analysts Elise Gould and Teresa Kroeger report that significant gender gap above:

Right out of college, young men are paid more than their women peers—which is surprising given that these recent graduates have the same amount of education and a limited amount of time to gain differential experience. While young men (age 21–24) with a college degree are paid an average hourly wage of $20.87 early in their careers, their female counterparts are paid an average hourly wage of just $17.88, or $2.99 less than men. This gap of $2.99 per hour is particularly striking as young women have higher rates of bachelor’s degree attainment (20.4 percent) than young men (14.9 percent). This difference would translate to an annual wage gap of more than $6,000 for full-time workers.

While the gender wage gap for young college graduates has closed moderately over the last year, the gap has widened since 2000. In 2000, young female college graduates earned 92 cents for every dollar their male counterparts made. Yet as of February 2017, they earn just 86 cents on the male dollar.

It’s been argued that the gender wage gap is a product of women choosing to reduce their income by interrupting their careers by having children and going into lower-paying fields, choosing degrees in social sciences and education instead of engineering and computer sciences. Even when they get an engineering degree, they are less likely than men to take an engineering job. Women also typically work slightly fewer hours than men. But as reported here five years ago, a study commissioned for the American Association of University Women concluded:

Yet, when we control for each of these factors, women still tended to earn less than their male peers did. Within a number of occupations, women already earned less than men earned just one year out of college. Among teachers, for example, women earned 89 percent of what men earned. In business and management occupations, women earned 86 percent of what men earned; similarly, in sales occupations, women earned just 77 percent of what their male peers earned.

When we compare the earnings of men and women who reported working the same number of hours, men earned more than women did. For example, among those who reported working 40 hours per week, women earned 84 percent of what men earned. Among those who reported working 45 hours per week, women’s earnings were 82 percent of men’s.

Gould and Kroeger note that policies being pushed now that raise wages for all workers “will disproportionately benefit women.” This includes raising the statutory minimum wage, getting rid of the tipped minimum wage, preventing wage theft, and strengthening workers’ collective bargaining rights. As usual, the caveat is that all of those policies require electing the right representatives to get them enacted.

Conducting an independent investigation into clandestine links between a presidential candidate and a foreign government sounds like a recipe for spending a lot of time digging through obscure documents, piecing together chains of emails, and tracking down nervous witnesses. But Special Counsel Robert Mueller has one source of information that was missing in similar investigations of the past—and it’s not exactly hidden.

President Donald Trump’s Twitter feed – packed with more than 35,000 time-stamped missives dating to 2009 – offers a treasure trove of evidence for Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his growing team of investigators, according to lawyers and veterans of past White House scandals.

It’s clear that Trump’s Twitter account offers an unending bounty of irony and hypocrisy for anyone who takes a moment to compare his statements of the past with his actions of today. There are no topics on which Trump hasn’t reversed himself, blatantly lied, or blamed President Obama. Often all three.

But what can it offer the official investigation?

... the @realdonaldtrump account gives investigators a detailed timeline of Trump’s thoughts and opinions – including where they might differ from official accounts – and can also be used to establish intent, which can be critical in a criminal investigation.

It’s hard to argue that your Muslim Ban isn’t a Muslim Ban if you’re laying out your desire to ban Muslims 140 characters at a time. And it’s hard to ignore Trump’s attempts to stop the investigation into Russian interference in the election when he’s served it up on a tray.  

The Affordable Care Act is a vast improvement over what came before, but it’s just a step towards single-payer and ending the parasitic health insurance racket.

Follow me on Twitter @BrianMc_Fadden

The “deep state,” composed of government employees who wage a surreptitious campaign against Trump, is a fantasy of the alt right. But in the early days of the Trump regime, workers in the State Department did engage in a conflict to ward off a move so blatant it seems unreal.

Unknown to the public at the time, top Trump administration officials, almost as soon as they took office, tasked State Department staffers with developing proposals for the lifting of economic sanctions, the return of diplomatic compounds and other steps to relieve tensions with Moscow.

This was in the same period that Trump brought in James Comey to try and extract a pledge of loyalty, the same period Trump and Putin talked on the phone for the first time (so far as we know), the period that Trump dropped the Joint Chiefs from the National Security Council. With Rex Tillerson still waiting approval, Trump was already pressing for Russian sanctions to be lifted.

In exchange for lifting the sanction, Trump was to get … nothing.

“There was serious consideration by the White House to unilaterally rescind the sanctions,” said Dan Fried, a veteran State Department official who served as chief U.S. coordinator for sanctions policy until he retired in late February. He said in the first few weeks of the administration, he received several “panicky” calls from U.S. government officials who told him they had been directed to develop a sanctions-lifting package and imploring him, “Please, my God, can’t you stop this?”

Despite the knowledge that Russia has just directly interfered in the election, Trump was determined to hand Russia a big reward. Or maybe the word shouldn’t be “despite.” Maybe it should be “because.”

California Republican Rep. Steve Knight held his first town hall meeting since voting for Trumpcare, and he might be regretting it. While Knight and some other Republicans in districts that voted for Hillary Clinton are trying to pretend they’ll serve as a check to Donald Trump—Knight emphasized his opposition to some of the most outrageous cuts in Trump’s budget, for instance—reality is that as long as Republicans control Congress, Trump controls Congress.

One of the many constituents to blast Knight’s Trumpcare vote offered a reminder of what Republican control of Congress means:

“I am angry and disappointed that you voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act, then replace it with garbage,” said one constituent in the front-row of a high school auditorium — the first of at least 10 health policy questions of the evening.

The crowd whooped.

And then green signs that read “agree” flew up in the air as the constituent hammered on: “I feel that your vote to repeal Obamacare was a vote for political capital with [Speaker Paul] Ryan (R-Wis.) — not to help provide a good health care system for the citizens of this district. You represent the people of the 25th district of California; you do not represent the first district of Wisconsin!”

Rank-and-file House Republicans are led by Paul Ryan and Paul Ryan, as much as he tries to pretend otherwise, is led by Donald Trump. So a vote for Steve Knight is a vote for Trump’s agenda even if he didn’t go ahead and vote for Trumpcare. Which he did. Criticizing Trump’s budget in theory doesn’t make up for that vote in practice. Just like when Rep. Carlos Curbelo, whose Florida district went heavily for Clinton, goes on television to criticize Trump over pulling out of the Paris accord, it doesn’t make up for his vote for Trumpcare or for his vote for Paul Ryan as House speaker.

Republicans, even the ones who pretend to be moderate or independent when it’s politically expedient for them to do so, keep Republicans in power. Keeping Republicans in power empowers Donald Trump. It’s really that simple.

Can you give $1 to the Democratic nominee funds targeting vulnerable House Republicans who voted for Trumpcare?

On June 13, Newt Gingrich will release his new shit book about Donald Trump:

UNDERSTANDING TRUMP explains the president's actions so far and lays out a vision for what Americans can do to help make President Trump's agenda a success.

A week later on June 20, a better book will come out. Co-authored with Michael Huttner, founder of ProgressNow (which played a big part in Colorado’s big shift to Blue), The Resistance Handbook: 45 Ways to Fight Trump will come out. 

Guys, I’m super proud of this book. At a time when so many of us are desperate for new ways to resist the popular-vote loser’s regime, we provide hundreds of suggestions, grouped into 45 broad categories. We talk about ways to fight against Trump’s corrosive effect on our culture (bullying, sexism, racism, xenophobia), ways to fight his assault on the policies we care about (racial justice, women’s issues, worker’s rights, immigration, true religious liberties, and so on), and ways to build the electoral infrastructure we so desperately need, and should’ve already had built. We highlight good work being done by our best allies, and encourage people to lead the charge. 

Already, several thousand books have been pre-ordered, and adding to that tally will improve its chances of getting on bestseller lists. This isn’t important for financial reasons. The book is priced so low ($12.99 for paperback, and even cheaper on Amazon) that royalties will be negligible. It’s important because 1) we want this resource in the hands of as many activists around the country as possible, and 2) because I don’t want Gingrich’s stupid book on bestseller lists without there being a Resistance-themed book to counterbalance it. And the more people who see this book exists (and the bestseller lists do that), the more people will buy it and share it, and the more people will do great activism, and the closer we’ll be to our idealized liberal utopia. 

One more thing: The mother of all bestseller lists is the NY Times, and it’s not a real bestseller list. Someone could sell 1 million books, only on the Amazon, and it wouldn’t make the list. That’s why the Bible isn’t on the list. Or the dozens of high-selling religious books that flood the market. It’s “curated,” and largely based on sales at independent bookstores. 

So if you want to order it on Amazon, that’s great! But it would be extra helpful if you called your local bookstore and placed an order with them. 

Sound like a plan? So you can either:

• Pre-order on Amazon
• Pre-order at your favorite bookstore 

I’ll share more info on the book in the two weeks leading up to release. It’s good. Pre-order! And fuck Newt Gingrich. 

“Our lips are sealed!” is the new motto of White House staff when it comes to whether Donald Trump still believes climate change is a “hoax.” After Environmental Protection destroyer Scott Pruitt and Press Secretary Sean Spicer fielded at least eight direct questions on the matter at Friday's press briefing, we're no closer to getting an answer.

But Spicer was singularly pathetic, first claiming he hadn't "had an opportunity to have that discussion" with Trump and then this:

Looks like we can cross that one off the list.

Pruitt never directly responded to the handful of inquiries he got, instead advancing a "Pittsburgh First" rationale.

"All the discussions we had through the last several weeks have been focused on one singular issue: Is Paris good or not for this country."

Apparently, rising sea levels will be a real boon for the country.

But Spicey and Pruitt aren’t alone. An aversion to discussing Trump's climate views has swept the entire staff, and no one lies quite Kellyanne Conway.

“The president believes in a clean environment, clean air, clean water. He has received awards as a businessman, in that regard.” (The Washington Post's fact-checkers have yet to find any evidence of those awards.)

How crooked is the Trump White House? Crooked enough to apparently invent whole new ways to be crooked.

The Trump administration may have skirted federal ethics rules by retroactively granting a blanket exemption that allows Stephen K. Bannon, the senior White House strategist, to communicate with editors at Breitbart News, where he was recently an executive.

The key word there is "retroactively." As in, the ethics rules that Trump gaudily put in place to replace Obama-era rules would have disallowed such contact, such things being too ethically dubious even for Donald Freaking Trump. But Bannon was discovered to have done it anyway, because he is a human pile of garbage. And because Donald Trump is also a human pile of garbage, the reaction to Bannon getting caught violating one of the few ethical boundaries Team Tire Fire had sheepishly put in place was, apparently, for Trump to issue an undated exemption exempting him from following the ethics rules he already broke.

Yeah, that isn't going to fly.

The waiver, and the fact that it remains unclear when it was originally issued, seemed unusual to Walter M. Shaub Jr., the director of the Office of Government Ethics, who questioned its validity.

“There is no such thing as a retroactive waiver,” Mr. Shaub said in an interview. “If you need a retroactive waiver, you have violated a rule.”

Oh, Office of Government Ethics. Your quaint rules from the before-times entertain a weary world.

The father of a U.S. military veteran is facing possible deportation after he was arrested by ICE agents at home, according to a Spanish-language Univision 45 Houston report. Israel Solano, who served a tour in Afghanistan, said he was awakened by an early morning call from his father, Francisco, telling him to “take care of the family” and their small business installing floors.

“What are you talking about?” a confused Israel asked. Francisco responded that “immigration is outside my house, I love you,” and hung up. “I couldn’t say anything else,” Israel told Univision. “That’s the last time I heard from him.”

According to the family’s attorney, Francisco has a deportation order from ten years ago for using a fake Social Security number. This is oftentimes the only way undocumented immigrants are able to work and support their families. Payroll taxes deducted from these paychecks still go to the federal government, and because these workers are undocumented, they never get to access those Social Security dollars.

Because of an unshackled ICE and Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant policies making just about any immigrant here without permission a target for arrest, Francisco is now a priority for deportation, despite the fact that his son put his life on the line for his nation. “I was ready to die for this country, and this is how I’m repaid?” asked Israel. “This isn’t right.”

According to Univision, Francisco is currently detained in a Houston facility, and the Mexican consulate has received no word of his arrest or arrival. ICE told Univision that they’ll provide more information about Francisco’s case soon, and the family’s attorney hopes Israel’s military service can help convince federal immigration officials to let Francisco stay.

Israel used the Univision segment to send a tearful message to his father. “If I don’t get to see you again, I want to thank you so much for making me the man I am today,” he said. “Your family is here praying for you, trying to do the impossible so you can come back to us.”

This nation has a disturbing history of mistreating immigrant military service members and families. According to NBC News, some 230 veterans have been deported by both Democratic and Republican administrations after serving in the military. Helping military families, especially ones with immigration problems, should be a bipartisan issue. Instead, Israel’s father could be torn from his family. Is this how we’re prepared to thank Americans who were willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for their nation?