An election day update and a Kavanaugh bombshell
A coalition of groups have come together to call for a pardon or commutation for Reality Winner, who pled guilty recently to leaking classified material to The Intercept, laying out the NSA’s conclusion that Russia had attempted to penetrate U.S. voting system software. If you’d like to add your name to the petition, please do so, and you can do that here.
I think it’s unlikely that Trump would commute her sentence, but with enough pressure, a Democratic president could do it on Day One of his or her new administration. It’s a travesty that she’s been given a sentence of more than five years.
A Brett Kavanaugh bombshell: His claim that Roe v Wade is “settled law” is being called into question by new leaked emails in which he (correctly) notes that multiple Justices currently on the Court want to overturn it, and with enough voters, the settled becomes unsettled. This leaves Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski nowhere to hide on this vote.
The primary season is almost over. Today, Delaware voters go to the polls, and then next week it’s New Hampshire, New York and Rhode Island, and then it’s on to the general election, which means Trump’s first (and only?) term will be halfway over.
I’m in Wilmington today for the Kerri Harris-Tom Carper contest. Polls I’ve been briefed on have Carper winning in a landslide, but I’m here anyway, because it’s impossible to predict what could happen, and the debate between Harris and Carper is really a microcosm of the fight for the soul of the party. For Harris, the only way to defeat Trump is to attack the very conditions that led to his rise. She’s being outspent about 50 to one and Carper has near-universal name ID, which Harris is fairly unknown. A win under those conditions is extraordinarily difficult. But we’ll see: I’ll be going live for the Young Turks later tonight from the Harris campaign’s watch party. (If you miss it live, it’ll be archived at that link.
Last night, Harris hosted a rally with Our Revolution’s Nina Turner. Briahna Gray covered it for us and filed a great dispatch. I edited it and managed to work in a reference to tonight’s Eagles season opener, which could have an actual effect on turnout.
The New York attorney general race began as a contest between Zephyr Teachout and Tish James, two progressives, but as James has faded, thanks to her ties to Gov. Andrew Cuomo, it has shifted to one that pits Teachout against Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, who is heavily funded by Wall Street -- and the position is known as “the sheriff of Wall Street.” Now Teachout is suing Maloney, making the quite plausible argument that he is breaking the law while running to be the state’s top law enforcement officer.
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