U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan is not one to hide his displeasure with how one of his cases is proceeding.

TPM Reader AC shares his thoughts on Biden …

You know I love TPM. You know that I have a deep respect for the team you’ve put together and the work that they do. You know I love your writing and the amount of depth you provide in terms of thinking about contemporary politics through a historical lens. And you know that very little matters more than the words someone types or says after “But…”

If one’s only concern is defeating Trump and winning in November 2020, then Joe Biden is absolutely the strongest candidate. He has high name recognition. He has a close association with Barack Obama. He’s an establishment candidate with strong ties to the Democratic Party apparatus. He’s straight out of central casting when it comes to offering a sane, safe alternative to Donald Trump. BUT… Joe Biden is also one of the weakest candidates, and the hand-waving necessary to ignore what he would represent as the nominee of the Democratic Party is a different version of the same hand-waving that was being done on behalf of Hillary Clinton in the run up to 2016.

It seems like General Flynn may have gotten tired of cooperating with the Feds, for some reason.

In comments a earlier this hour, President Trump shifted his stance on Jeffrey Epstein, now claiming he “was not a fan” and “had a falling out with him” many years ago. Video after the jump.

I got a flood of responses to yesterday’s post on Joe Biden’s poll numbers. As always, I learn from all of them. I should say that I know these posts provoke people. But it’s not mischievous provocation. It’s with a purpose. To that end, most of the replies were some form of making two points. First, we’re 18 months from the election. Polls can and do change and they don’t mean that much now. (TPM Reader AG sent me the link and text to this CNN write-up of an April 2004 Gallup poll showing John Kerry beating George W. Bush.) Second, Joe Biden sucks! By which they mean, as they explain, Biden has any number of already apparent weaknesses and liabilities – he’s old; he’s got a history running failed presidential campaigns; he’s on the line for various policies of the past which Democrats now repudiate; he’s old school and establishment; he’s out of touch with the aspirations and beliefs of younger and more diverse Democrats, etc etc. The point being that both within the Democratic primaries and in a hypothetical general election these liabilities will inevitably weigh him down and sink him regardless of what polls today may say.

I actually agree with a lot of these criticisms and said as much a few months ago. More than that, I worry they will weigh him down over time.

Happy Tuesday, July 9. We’re following the administration’s ongoing efforts to get the citizenship question on the census and possible leaks from closed-door testimony from an ex-Trump business associate. Here’s more on those stories and others we have our eyes on.

Since some of you were probably fully checked out over the long holiday weekend (good for you!), I wanted to make sure you were up to date on the status of the census citizenship question.

To review, the Supreme Court with Chief Justice John Roberts in the majority blocked the Trump administration from putting a citizenship question on the 2020 census. But it did suggest a path by which they could eventually get it in. Basically, if you tell us what your real reason for doing this is, and it’s not clearly a made-up reason, we’d probably let you do it. The problem was that the administration had already given one “real reason” which the Court deemed false and they’re up against a pretty tight deadline for printing the census in time.

When we think about politics all of us are prone to meld together things we support with things that are viable, possible, popular. With this in mind I want to flag to your attention one part of the WaPo/ABC news poll that came out over the weekend. One headline out of this poll is that Trump’s approval rating is the highest ever recorded for this particular poll. We shouldn’t draw too much from that data point since it’s only slightly higher than the average for this poll and to date other polls show no significant strengthening.

But I want to draw your attention to this finding.

Happy Monday, July 8. We’re hoping to learn some details about the Trump administration’s ongoing effort to get the citizenship question included on the 2020 census, despite last month’s Supreme Court decision.