The Chris Collins Scandal Could Get Much Bigger, And Other News: Your Prime Week In Review
Hello Prime subscribers. Happy Saturday.
August is usually when political news slows down. The House is out, the Senate is out, sometimes the President takes a vacation. Not this August. Alas, another norm broken.
Here’s what happened this week in Prime.
- The Manafort trial is providing documents that back up some of what we already knew from reporting, Josh Marshall writes: That, at the time he joined the Trump campaign, Manafort was out of money and desperate.
- Who will be the next member of the Trump administration to wash out in a flood of scandal? Matt Shuham offers three candidates.
- Caitlin MacNeal gave us two behind-the-scenes looks at the Manafort trial this week. In one, she describes the tense atmosphere in the courtroom as Manafort’s former deputy Rick Gates took the stand. In another, she takes a look at Manafort and his wife’s surprisingly lighthearted demeanor.
- Rep. Chris Collins was indicted this week for insider trading. But he wasn’t the only member of Congress who bought the stock. Was there some kind of pump and dump scheme going on? Josh asks. Rep. John Culberson has a particular problem, he notes.
- Four states held primaries this week. In Kansas, Cameron Joseph writes, the memory of the very unpopular, tax-slashing and government-service-cutting former governor Sam Brownback hung over the race.
- North Carolina politics are, once again, getting crazy, Tierney Sneed writes.
- The Trump administration is shrinking the Office of Financial Research, created after the financial crisis as an independent watchdog within the Treasury Department tasked with identifying risky financial behavior.
- Obamacare is becoming a rallying cry in the fight to oppose Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination.
- An email in the Manafort trial suggested, but certainly didn’t confirm, that Manafort may have had a closer relationship with Trump that was known in 2013
- Omarosa Manigault Newman’s likely to dominate the news with her new book in the upcoming week. Buckle up.