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John Dowd was President Trump’s lawyer during a critical time in the Mueller probe. Boy, was there a lot going on behind the scenes. A peek inside the epic battle of the presidency with the president’s attorney.

Many Trump opponents were shocked and disappointed by Trump-Russia special counsel Robert Mueller's conclusion that "the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities." Some members of the "Resistance" and NeverTrump communities apparently had a deep emotional commitment to the idea of collusion. But there was no reason for surprise. For more than a year, Mueller sent sign after sign that he would not allege collusion. Those signs took the form of indictments and plea agreements against key Trump figures that did not allege any conspiracy...

Many Trump opponents were shocked and disappointed by Trump-Russia special counsel Robert Mueller's conclusion that "the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities." Some members of the Resistance and Never Trump communities apparently had a deep emotional commitment to the idea of collusion. But there was no reason for surprise. For more than a year, Mueller sent sign after sign that he would not allege collusion. Those signs took the form of indictments and plea agreements against key Trump figures that did not allege any...

Before you impeach somebody, you have to persuade the American public that it ought to happen. You have to persuade enough of the — of the opposition party voters, Trump voters, that you're not just trying to ... that you're not just trying to steal the last — to reverse the results of the last election." says Nadler

There are two sides to special counsel Robert Mueller's indictment of longtime Trump associate Roger Stone. On one side there are the under-oath statements Stone made to the House Intelligence Committee that Mueller says are false. On the other, there are the Stone statements Mueller did not challenge. The testimony for which Stone was indicted concerns his descriptions of dealings with two men — Jerome Corsi and Randy Credico — who Stone used to attempt to get in touch with WikiLeaks head Julian Assange in the summer and fall of 2016, at the height of the presidential campaign, when WikiLeaks...

Michael Avenatti, the lawyer for porn star Stormy Daniels and a 2020 Democratic presidential hopeful, jumped into the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation battle on the afternoon of Sept. 23. On that day, The New Yorker had published the allegations of a woman named Deborah Ramirez, who claimed that a drunken Kavanaugh exposed himself to her during a party at Yale sometime in 1983 or 1984. Almost immediately, Avenatti took to Twitter with an allegation of his own. Avenatti said he had a client, "a woman with credible information regarding Judge Kavanaugh and Mark Judge." He did not reveal her...

Republicans on Capitol Hill have added enormously to the public's understanding of what happened in the Trump-Russia investigation. They're still doing it. But it will come to a screeching halt if the GOP loses control of the House in next month's midterm elections. The driving force behind the revelations is House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Devin Nunes. But a number of other Republicans in the House, including Reps. Trey Gowdy, John Ratcliffe, Bob Goodlatte, Jim Jordan, Mark Meadows and others have also played critical roles. (In the Senate, Judiciary Committee chairman Sen. Charles Grassley has done key work, but the...

Ask any casual observer what the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation fight is about, and the answer will be the allegation that at a high-school party 36 years ago, when Kavanaugh was 17, he drunkenly forced then-15-year-old Christine Ford onto a bed, tried to undress her, and, when she tried to scream, covered her mouth with his hand. That is now old news. In the last 48 hours, immediately after Senate Republicans and President Trump agreed to Democratic demands that the FBI investigate the 1982 incident, the Kavanaugh goalposts have moved dramatically. Now, a key issue is Kavanaugh's teenage drinking,...

The New York Times' publication of an anonymously-authored article, "I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration," set the world of political commentary on fire Wednesday afternoon.... ) It concedes Trump's accomplishments are big. Early in the piece, the author admits that the Trump administration has had significant success on the issues most important to American voters... 2) Its complaints are small. Why does the author object to Trump? The president is not a true philosophical conservative,.... 3) It suggests there is a government conspiracy to thwart the president. The author writes that he and others inside the...

Emails in 2016 between former British spy Christopher Steele and Justice Department official Bruce Ohr suggest Steele was deeply concerned about the legal status of a Putin-linked Russian oligarch, and at times seemed to be advocating on the oligarch's behalf, in the same time period Steele worked on collecting the Russia-related allegations against Donald Trump that came to be known as the Trump dossier.... The emails, given to Congress by the Justice Department, began on Jan. 12, 2016, when Steele sent Ohr a New Year's greeting. Steele brought up the case of Russian aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska (referred to in...

From time to time I've been catching up with a Republican strategist who is trying to help the GOP keep control of the House in this November's midterm elections. It's been an up-and-down ride. "I would put the odds of keeping the House at exactly 50-50," he told me in January. "I get how bad things seemingly are," he said during a particularly tumultuous time in April. "But if the election were today, I'd bet my son's college tuition we'd keep the House." He was even more confident by June. "We keep the House," he told me. "I'd bet a...

Something has been going on with Robert Mueller's investigation of people thought to have played significant roles in the Trump-Russia affair. The special counsel, assigned to investigate "any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump," has been farming out seemingly important parts of the investigation to offices outside his own. In April, Mueller referred an investigation of close Trump associate Michael Cohen to federal prosecutors in New York. This month, the U.S. attorney in Washington -- not Mueller -- indicted Maria Butina on charges of being an unregistered Russian agent....

The weekend release of a highly-redacted version of the FBI's application for a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant to wiretap onetime Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page has renewed the argument over the Nunes memo — the brief report produced by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Devin Nunes detailing problems in the application. From the time of the memo's release in February, Democrats and some in the press have denounced it as a collection of lies and mischaracterizations. On Saturday night, the denouncing started again. "The only thing the newly released FISA documents show is that Republicans have been lying...

It's often been observed that special counsel Robert Mueller, assigned to investigate alleged Trump-Russia collusion in the 2016 presidential campaign, has yet to charge anyone with a crime involving Trump-Russia collusion in the 2016 presidential campaign. The biggest of Mueller's indictments, that of one-time Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, has no connection at all to collusion. And until a few days ago, it appeared to have no connection to Donald Trump, either. Now, though, Mueller has revealed why he believes the Manafort prosecution is related to the 2016 Trump campaign. It's a small part, a very small part, of the...

It was the most damaging of all the damaging texts exchanged between FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. On Aug. 8, 2016, in the second week of the Trump-Russia investigation on which both were working, Page texted Strzok to say, "[Trump's] not ever going to become president, right? Right?!" Strzok responded, "No. No he won't. We'll stop it." The Justice Department gave Congress Page's "not ever going to become president" text months ago, when it produced thousands of texts to Hill investigators. But lawmakers — and the public — did not learn of the explosive second part of the...

Donald Trump got bad reviews in the press — no surprise — when he announced that Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor and federal prosecutor, would join his legal team in the Trump-Russia special counsel investigation. The 74-year-old Giuliani is not as sharp as he was, some said, and isn’t really a practising lawyer any more. How can you effectively defend the President by slipping out of fatcat dinners at New York steakhouses for quick hits on Fox News? That was then. Now, it appears hiring Giuliani was a key part of a new and effective Trump strategy....

Sam Clovis, a former national co-chairman of the Trump campaign, is one of three Trump figures known to have been contacted by FBI informant Stefan Halper during the 2016 presidential campaign. Clovis received an email, out of the blue, from Halper, whom he did not know, on August 29, 2016 — after Halper had been in touch with Carter Page and just before he contacted George Papadopoulos. Page and Papadopoulos were peripheral, sometime volunteer Trump foreign policy advisers, but they are key figures in the investigation into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to rig the 2016 election. Clovis,...

Revelations that an FBI informant insinuated himself into the Trump campaign have led some congressional investigators to rethink their theories on how and why former President Barack Obama's Justice Department began investigating the 2016 Trump presidential effort. Most reporting has focused on the July 31, 2016, creation of a document formally marking the beginning of the FBI counterintelligence probe targeting the Trump campaign. The document, known as the electronic communication, or EC, is said to have focused on the case of George Papadopoulos, the peripheral Trump adviser who has pleaded guilty to lying to special counsel Robert Mueller about his...

When a political figure is accused of wrongdoing, a conversation begins among journalists, commentators and public officials. Are the charges true? Can the accusers prove it? That's the way it normally works. But now, in the case of the Trump dossier -- the allegations compiled by a former British spy hired by the Clinton campaign to gather dirt on presidential candidate Donald Trump -- the generally accepted standard of justice has been turned on its head. Now, the question is: Can the accused prove the charges false? Increasingly, the president's critics argue that the dossier is legitimate because it has...

Remember collusion? The allegation that Donald Trump and his aides coordinated or conspired with Russia to fix the 2016 presidential election is, and has always been, the heart of the Trump-Russia investigation. Yet Monday saw two developments in the Trump investigation — one discussed widely in the press, the other not as much — and neither pointed toward collusion.