This is shocking and yet not at all surprising. Trump officials working with outside activists to purge undesirables from the State Department staff and foreign service. The activists in this case – David Wurmser, among others – are among the worst of the worst. We’ll be digging out of under this wreckage and corruption for years. Give this a read.

NYT reports that Special Counsel Robert Mueller has subpoenaed the Trump Organization. It was reportedly “delivered in recent weeks.” More soon …

Good morning. Here’s what our reporters and editors have their eyes on today.

Yesterday, after news broke that Rex Tillerson had been fired and replaced by Mike Pompeo, I heard some voices reassuring themselves that unlike many in the Trump world Pompeo is fairly hostile to Russia. At least, they say, he views Russia through a more traditional Republican prism. This raises a general point that is critical and we all must address. We don’t need more hostility toward Russia or more hawkishness. What we need is an un-compromised policy toward Russia. Most specifically, we need an uncompromised President, something we currently do not have.

TPM’s Tierney Sneed is now back in our Washington office after a week in Kansas to cover the trial in which Kris Kobach — one of our era’s great opponents of voting rights – defended another voter suppression law he helped spearhead. First, I want to thank Tierney as well as editors David Kurtz and Zack Roth, who together have many years of collective experience covering this critical issue. TPM was one of only a handful of non-local news organizations there to cover it in full. Thanks to you for the many kind emails we got over the last week for the coverage.

I wanted to take a moment to note that when you join TPM Prime this is where your subscription fees go. They go of course to paying almost half of all of our salaries and all the miscellaneous other expenses of running TPM. You get access to the Prime-only articles, fewer ads, the Hive, RSS feeds and all the rest. But your subscriptions especially make possible efforts like this — sending a reporter across the country for a week to cover a key trial, the output of which may not pay off in purely monetary terms but is critical to our mission as an organization. (You can see our live coverage here and Tierney’s recent feature stories here.) That shapes how we’re able to run the whole organization today — a freedom and ability to deliver which is scarce in this era in which ad-only publications find themselves in a tightening financial vise.

So if you’re a member, thank you! You make this possible. If you’re not yet a member, please consider clicking here and joining us today. It’s easy, quick, just 14 cents a day. If you’d like to do still more, you can purchase one or more subscription credits or FIN credits which we then provide at no cost to readers in financial need or to students, respectively. These help power TPM even further and make it possible to give the full TPM experience to still more readers. Join us!

Unsurprisingly, the President’s sham ‘voter fraud’ commission was in the process of getting used as a vehicle to gin up bogus voter fraud prosecutions. A replay of the crooked efforts that led to the US Attorney firing scandal back in 2006-2007.

This is paragraph four from Allegra’s latest report on the domestic violence arrest of white nationalist leader/idiot Matthew Heimbach. I knew it couldn’t be as simple as just abusing his wife. It seems like he was attacking both his wife and her father because he, Heimbach, was having an affair with her mother and his wife.

The white nationalist leader is married to the step-daughter of Matt Parrott, the Traditionalist Worker Party’s chief spokesman. Per the police report, Heimbach attacked both Parrott and Heimbach’s wife, Brooke Heimbach, after the pair confronted Matthew Heimbach about an affair he was carrying out with Matt Parrott’s wife, Jessica Parrott.

Here’s Allegra’s whole report.

Episode #4 of The Josh Marshall Podcast is out. TPMer Allegra Kirkland sits in for the vacationing David Taintor as my co-host and we talk to Joan Walsh about Michael Cohen, Stormy Daniels, the #metoo movement, 2016 and 2018 and a bunch more. I discuss my reporting about what Stormy Daniels told 60 Minutes and Allegra and I discuss an earlier Michael Cohen strong arm incident which sheds some light on the ‘intimidating’ behavior Daniels’ lawyers claim in her lawsuit. Listen to Episode #4 here or on iTunes or Google Play and please subscribe.

Good morning. Here’s what our team is watching the morning after a squeaker of a special election.

We have what is probably the final data for tonight. (Actually, see below. Maybe not.) Almost all the final election day votes were reported just a short time ago. Those ballots brought Connor Lamb’s lead to just under 100 votes. But then a short time later, Allegheny County reported its absentee ballots. Those came in overwhelmingly for Lamb, leaving him with an 847 vote lead. The remaining counties are all red counties and all plan to count their absentee votes tomorrow. It looks hard for Saccone to make up that margin. But it’s definitely possible.

The latest we heard is that one of those counties may count their absentee ballots tonight, just because it’s so close. If that happens, we might have a pretty clear sense tonight of who won. Stay tuned.

Late Update: Watching the number crunchers whose opinions I most respect, the consensus seems to be that Lamb wins, absent sole counting error as yet unknown.

10:52 PM: This sounds key.

Lamb (D) should expect a pretty healthy boost from uncounted absentees. Why? 1) They've historically skewed Dem 2) More than half of them are from Allegheny Co. (despite Allegheny only being ~43% of #PA18). pic.twitter.com/SAth8WtnY0

— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) March 14, 2018

10:39 PM: The final point seems to be this. There are estimated to be 6k or 7k absentee ballots that are being counted. Wasserman, who I flagged below, says these tend toward Democrats in this district. Those could be more decisive than the remaining outstanding election day votes. Also, two of the counties in the district won’t count their absentee votes until tomorrow. It sounds like there’s a decent chance we’ll *largely* know the outcome by about midnight eastern. But it’s possible we won’t really know until tomorrow. Sad.

10:31 PM: This is from Cook Report/538’s Dave Wasserman. Could be key. “It’s been reported that there were about 6-7k absentees cast in #PA18. In the past, absentees have run slightly more Dem than the overall vote and I don’t believe they’ve been counted yet. They may matter here.”

10:24 PM: Lamb is up by just 500 +/- votes with 97% precincts reporting.

10:14 PM: We are now at 96% of precincts reporting. Connor Lamb, the Democrat, has a lead of about 900 points. The remaining votes pretty clearly favor Saccone. But it’s not clear that it’s enough to put him into the lead. There just aren’t many votes left. I’m not sure there’s any way to get a clearer prediction than that. I will note a few key caveats about this entire race. This district won’t exist in November. It will be replaced by a more Democrat-friendly district. There’s already been a huge shift in the Democrats’ favor since 2016. For tonight, though, a win is a win is a win. But we don’t know who the winner is.

9:46 PM: Damn, this is close. And the late numbers are pushing Saccone toward a tie. Most number counters don’t seem to have the precinct granular data to know where we’re really at.

9:37 PM: We’re at just past 9:30. It’s exceedingly close with an ever so slight advantage – maybe – for Democrat Connor Lamb. The Times “needle”, which I mentioned below, is the night’s first casualty. It was struggling. Then one county stopped reporting precinct data. At that point the whole enterprise is flying blind. So they shut it down. Honestly, I feel their pain (in the web production/publishing sense). So where is this? Lamb seems to have the inside track. It’s very close but Saccone isn’t quite at the margins he needs to be. There are enough votes outstanding, though, that he can expand those margins. You’d rather be Lamb than Saccone. But it’s close. Real close.