1.  Dan Balz: After two convictions, pressure mounts on Trump

No day during President Trump’s 19 months in office could prove as dangerous or debilitating as Tuesday. Everything that happened in a pair of courtrooms hundreds of miles apart strengthened the hand of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and weakened that of the president of the United States.

This was a day when truth overran tweets, when facts overwhelmed bald assertions. Presidential tweets, however provocative, eventually disappear into the ether. Tuesday’s convictions could send two people who have had close relationships with Trump to prison for several years, while one of them brought the investigation to the doorstep of the White House.

What took place Tuesday will ratchet up the pressure on the president, will embolden his critics, and will no doubt inflame and rally his supporters. If the past months have seemed increasingly hot, the coming months could be hotter still — there’s little doubt that the Trump presidency has now entered more treacherous territory, and no one can know where it will end. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/after-two-convictions-pressure-mounts-on-trump/2018/08/21/94e5dae0-a58a-11e8-97ce-cc9042272f07_story.html

2. Michael: Plea Agreement: Possible Meanings of the Campaign Finance Counts

What distinguishes this case and the decision to pursue the plea is that the candidate behind the subterfuge is the sitting president of the United States. Michael Cohen pleaded Tuesday to a charge that is compelling only because of the story he has to tell, along with other evidence, about the way that Donald Trump operates. And this is not so much about Trump’s clumsy steps, in violation of campaign finance law, to prevent exposure of philandering. This episode, assuming in the instance the form of campaign finance law violations, is about the most powerful man in the country—whom prosecutors have observed displaying contempt for legal considerations and constraints, and consistently lying about his actions.

While the Daniels matter is fairly straightforward—hush money to conceal an affair—the McDougal case is a still-more-elaborate subterfuge entailing a “catch and kill” arrangement by a friendly media company to buy McDougal’s public silence with cash and a disingenuous promise of space for her own writing. As the plea agreement makes clear, this is a count involving third-party corporate contributions, not just the candidate’s personal resources. Cohen may have much to say about how this scheme was hatched, but he stated that it took place at the president’s direction. The criminal information filed Tuesday in the Cohen matters lays out the steps the Trump Organization and Cohen took to falsify documentation to cover the reimbursements he received for his hush-money expenses. The degree to which Donald Trump also directed these activities, or took other actions behind the scenes to encourage Cohen and other witnesses in a course of dishonesty and fraudulent conduct, remains to be seen. 

How the case develops from here is not possible to judge at this time, but the Cohen campaign-finance plea resonates unmistakably with the special counsel investigation, which also concerns what a candidate is prepared to do to win an election and then cover his tracks. The criminal information cites the involvement of unnamed members of the Trump campaign; the campaign, like the candidate, is now clearly in separate legal jeopardy. The similarities between Trump’s problems and those of Richard Nixon continue to grow. https://www.lawfareblog.com/michael-cohen-plea-agreement-possible-meanings-campaign-finance-counts

3. Max Boot: Trump is an illegitimate president whose election is tainted by fraud

There is growing evidence that the president is, to use the word favored by Richard Nixon, “a crook.” Even buying the silence of his reputed playmates could by itself have been enough to swing an exceedingly close election decided by fewer than 80,000 votes in three states. Trump certainly would not have authorized the payments unless he thought it was politically imperative to do so. There is also considerable evidence, as I previously argued, that Russia’s intervention on Trump’s behalf affected the outcome. Even more than Nixon, Trump is now an illegitimate president whose election is tainted by fraud.

The inevitable question is: Now what? If Trump had an iota of decency, he would resign — but he doesn’t, and prevailing Justice Department guidelines hold that a president can’t be indicted while in office. So the onus is on Congress to act. A responsible Congress would have by now already convened an impeachment inquiry. But that is not the Congress we have. We have a Congress dominated by political hacks and moral invertebrates who are determined to act as the president’s enablers and legitimizers at all costs.

The voters of the United States must now say to this Congress what Oliver Cromwell said to the Rump Parliament in 1653: “Ye are a factious crew, and enemies to all good government. . . . Ye are grown intolerably odious to the whole nation. You were deputed here by the people to get grievances redressed, are yourselves become the greatest grievance. . . . Go, get you out! Make haste! . . . In the name of God, go!” https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/trump-is-now-an-illegitimate-president/2018/08/22/d1c9271c-a613-11e8-97ce-cc9042272f07_story.html

4. Jonathan Chait: ‘Law and Order’ Candidate Donald Trump Is Surrounded By Criminals

Donald Trump ran for president as the professed candidate of “law and order,” a phrase he borrowed from Richard Nixon. He successfully portrayed his opponents — not only the Democratic presidential candidate, but the entire Establishment arrayed against him — as a corrupt oligarchy enriching itself at the public expense. By now, at this probably still-early point in the Mueller investigation, we know that Trump’s campaign manager, national security adviser, and personal attorney, along with two other campaign aides, are convicted and confessed felons.

It is common for Trump’s opponents to retreat into cynicism about the possibility for news events to damage Trump’s standing. It is certainly true that the president has tapped into a deep vein of cultural and racial revanchism, ensuring the irrevocable loyalty of a large segment of his base. But not every Trump voter was attracted to his gross bullying racism. Some simply overlooked or accepted it in the hopes that he would put his bullying to work for them, to “drain the swamp.” That criminality has proven to pervade his inner circle is visceral evidence of a broken faith with those voters who trusted this promise. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/08/trump-paul-manafort-michael-cohen-surrounded-by-criminals-reelection.html

5. E.J. Dionne Jr.: America is slouching toward autocracy

In their book, “How Democracies Die,” political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt write: “How do elected authoritarians shatter the democratic institutions that are supposed to constrain them? Some do it in one fell swoop. But more often the assault on democracy begins slowly. . . . The erosion of democracy takes place piecemeal, often in baby steps.”

Long before Trump ran for office, Republicans were eager to change the rules of the game when doing so served their purposes, as Michael Tomasky argued last week in the Daily Beast. Consider just their aggressive voter-suppression efforts and their willingness to block even a hearing for Merrick Garland, Obama’s nominee to replace Justice Antonin Scalia.

The of ominous signs goes on and on: Trump invoking Stalin’s phrase“enemies of the people” to describe a free press; the firing, one after another, of public servants who moved to expose potential wrongdoing, starting with then-FBI Director James B. Comey; Trump’s effusive praise of foreign despots; his extravagantly abusive (and often racially charged) language against opponents; and his refusal to abide by traditional practices about disclosing his own potential conflicts of interest and those of his family. Add to this the authoritarian’s habit of institutionalizing lying as a routine aspect of governing, compressed into the astonishing credo Rudolph W. Giulian iblurted out on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday: “Truth isn’t truth.”

This is not business as usual. Yet our politics proceeds as if it is. Slowly, Trump has accustomed us to behavior that, at any other recent time and with just about any other politician, would in all probability have been career-ending.

We know what a military coup looks like. But as Levitsky and Ziblatt note, a slow-motion dismantling of rules, norms and expectations can be more insidious because we don’t even notice what’s happening to us. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/america-is-slouching-toward-autocracy/2018/08/19/52e9b1aa-a244-11e8-8e87-c869fe70a721_story.html

6. Eugene Robinson: The Trump era’s epitaph

Whenever the Trump administration ends, we already have its shameful epitaph: “Truth isn’t truth.”

President Trump’s lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani made that unintentional confession of method and purpose Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” From the beginning of the campaign, this whole enterprise has been a lie, a fraud, a grift, a cruel deception — a sustained and increasingly frantic attempt to obscure inconvenient truth.

Earlier in the interview, as if to illustrate the point he was about to make, Giuliani told what can only be called a bald-faced lie. He claimed that when Trump’s son, son-in-law and campaign chairman met at Trump Tower in 2016 with a Russian lawyer offering dirt on Hillary Clinton, “all they knew is that a woman with a Russian name wanted to meet with them. They didn’t know she was a representative of the Russian government.” But in email traffic setting up the meeting, Donald Trump Jr. was told that the promised “information that would incriminate Hillary” constituted “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”

Giuliani claimed Monday that his declaration about the nature of veracity was just a clumsy way of describing “he said, she said” situations in which the facts cannot be ascertained. But he had tried to peddle what White House counselor Kellyanne Conway once called “alternative facts” about the Trump Tower meeting. “Truth isn’t truth” should be taken as a suspect’s blurted admission of guilt.

Constant, relentless, shameless lying is not ancillary to the Trump administration. It is not a sideshow; it’s the main event. We have become inured to the fact that the president of the United States and his aides and associates simply cannot be relied upon to tell the truth.

How can this not have a corrosive effect on our democracy? We are accustomed to politicians who shade the truth and spin the facts, but now we have a president who ignores unpleasant truth and rejects unflattering facts. Whether this is a diabolical plan to delegitimize critics or a reflection of Trump’s narcissism, the damage is the same. As a society we become less able to believe, less able to trust. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/truth-isnt-truth-is-the-trump-eras-epitaph/2018/08/20/560b7b28-a4ad-11e8-8fac-12e98c13528d_story.html

7.  Jonathan Chait: Trump’s Craziest Climate Speech Ever Explains His New Dirty Energy Policy

On Monday night, the Trump administration unveiled its replacement for the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, which gave states targets to reduce the greenhouse-gas pollution emitted by their power plants. The Trump policy is designed to freeze in place the rapid changes in energy of the previous eight years. Trump is promoting his new policy in a speech in West Virginia today. But the most revealing explication of his policy came in little-publicized remarks to donors a few days earlier.

In his comments, which drew appreciative laughter and applause, Trump ranted bizarrely against wind energy, which he associates with his liberal elitist enemies, and in favor of coal, which he sees as infused with MAGA-ness. The short rant reveals more about the energy agenda of the new administration, and the diseased mind of its leader, than any other manifesto.

Coal, Trump told his audience, is “a tremendous form of energy in the sense that in a military way — think of it — coal is indestructible,” he declared. The president continued:

You can blow up a pipeline, you can blow up the windmills. You know, the wind wheels, [mimics windmill noise, mimes shooting gun] “Bing!” That’s the end of that one. If the birds don’t kill it first. The birds could kill it first. They kill so many birds. You look underneath some of those windmills, it’s like a killing field, the birds. But uh, you know, that’s what they were going to, they were going to windmills. And you know, don’t worry about wind, when the wind doesn’t blow, I said, “What happens when the wind doesn’t blow?” Well, then we have a problem. Okay good. They were putting him in areas where they didn’t have much wind, too. And it’s a subsidary [sic] — you need subsidy for windmills. You need subsidy. Who wants to have energy where you need subsidy? So, uh, the coal is doing great. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/08/trump-gives-his-craziest-climate-speech-ever.html

8. Susan B. Glasser: “Rigged Witch Hunt,” Meet Trump’s “Red Wave”

Donald Trump’s Presidency is often described as a reality-show version of the White House, with Trump himself as the producer, director, and main character. There’s something to the metaphor, of course; Trump is a showman, a veteran of the reality-TV genre who relishes the notion of himself as a master manipulator, able to dominate the news cycle at will by changing plotlines and introducing new controversies to distract us from the old. But the President’s volatile behavior and untethered public comments in recent days suggest that the analogy misses the mark: Trump’s act today is an unreality show. The President is not so much trying to shape our perception of events with his theatrics as he is trying to sell the American public, or at least his narrow slice of it, on an entirely opposite version of what is actually happening.

“Honesty wins!” the most dishonest President since Richard Nixon, and, arguably, ever, tweeted on Thursday morning. On Wednesday, he announced that he had revoked the security clearance of John Brennan, the former C.I.A. director, who has emerged as one of Trump’s fiercest public critics, citing as grounds Brennan’s supposed “erratic conduct and behavior” and “frenzied commentary,” an example if ever there was one of a President projecting onto his enemies his own attributes. To bolster his case, Trump paraphrased his friend Sean Hannity, the Fox TV host, accusing Brennan and an array of other former national-security officials of a grave crime, the very one that Trump and his advisers are being investigated for: “They tried to steal and influence an election in the United States.” https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/rigged-witch-hunt-meet-trumps-red-wave

9. John Brennan: Trump’s Claims of No Collusion Are Hogwash

The only questions that remain are whether the collusion that took place constituted criminally liable conspiracy, whether obstruction of justice occurred to cover up any collusion or conspiracy, and how many members of “Trump Incorporated” attempted to defraud the government by laundering and concealing the movement of money into their pockets. A jury is about to deliberate bank and tax fraud charges against one of those people, Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman. And the campaign’s former deputy chairman, Rick Gates, has pleaded guilty to financial fraud and lying to investigators.

Mr. Trump clearly has become more desperate to protect himself and those close to him, which is why he made the politically motivated decision to revoke my security clearance in an attempt to scare into silence others who might dare to challenge him. Now more than ever, it is critically important that the special counsel, Robert Mueller, and his team of investigators be allowed to complete their work without interference — from Mr. Trump or anyone else — so that all Americans can get the answers they so rightly deserve. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/16/opinion/john-brennan-trump-russia-collusion-security-clearance.html

10. NY Times Editorial: Donald Trump, the Payback President

President Trump’s decision to strip the security clearance of John Brennan, a former director of the C.I.A., qualifies as one of the least surprising moves from the White House this year. Mr. Brennan has been an outspoken critic of Mr. Trump, and the president’s skin is as thin as his regard for democratic norms. And despite the laughable rationalizations now being peddled by administration apologists, Mr. Brennan’s spanking is just the latest display of what has become standard operating procedure for this president: using the official levers of government to punish critics and to encourage other detractors to sit down and shut up.

Mr. Trump’s act of spite against Mr. Brennan is less ambitious and, frankly, less imaginative, than some of the other avenues of retribution he has explored. Aggrieved over what he considers insufficiently obsequious coverage by The Washington Post, Mr. Trump has repeatedly threatened to punish the paper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, by raising the postal rates paid by the online retail giant Amazon, of which Mr. Bezos is the founder and chief executive. Similarly, in the midst of his snit over the protests by National Football League players who have taken a knee during the national anthem, Mr. Trump instructed aides to brainstorm ideas for going after the league in last year’s tax-reform package.

Is it Trump—or something larger than Trump? Possibly, it’s both. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/16/opinion/donald-trump-john-brennan-security-clearance.html

11. David Faris: The lessons of Omarosagate

Why would Chinese President Xi Jinping, the leader of one of the most powerful countries on Earth, fear Trump when some former White House aide clearly does not? Trump is supposed to intimidate Germany when he can't even push a minor functionary and C-list celebrity around?

The riddle here isn't hard to solve: Neither Omarosa nor anyone else is afraid of the petulant, insecure whirlwind of self-pity, paranoia, and hate in the Oval Office. Instead, she sees him just like other world leaders do — as a blithering idiot, a careless man who constantly makes himself vulnerable to blackmail with his corrupt behavior, slapdash management practices, and lack of baseline impulse control, an unpredictable buffoon who uses people and throws them away at the slightest provocation. The only fear that the president successfully instills in others is about the way his boorishness, bad decision-making, and stupidity might ruin their lives simply by virtue of being associated with him or made complicit in his misdeeds. http://theweek.com/articles/790236/lessons-omarosagate
 

12. Paul Wood: Did the Russian mafia help Trump along his way to the Oval Office?

Before he died last year, the New York muckraking reporter Wayne Barrett told me he had discovered ‘25 to 30’ connections between Donald Trump and the mob. He was talking about Italian-American organised crime but today another New York journalist, Craig Unger, says he has found ‘59’ links to the Russian mafia. He lists them all in his new book "House of Trump, House of Putin," which is damning in its accumulation of detail, terrifying in its depiction of the pure evil of those Trump chose to do business with, and enraging in that — if Unger is right — Trump acted with impunity for decades to get filthy rich laundering the mob’s blood money. This is the man who now sits in the Oval Office, Unger says. In fact, he argues, they put him there.

"House of Trump, House of Putin" starts with Trump’s early days in business, when his lawyer was Roy Cohn, who was also consigliere to two of the five New York Italian crime families and ‘the most evil, twisted, vicious bastard ever to snort coke at Studio 54’. There were mafia figures like ‘Sonny’ Franzese, a hitman who was recorded helpfully explaining how to get rid of the bodies: ‘Dismember victim in kiddie pool. Cook body parts in microwave. Stuff parts in garbage disposal. Be patient.’ When one of these Italian gangsters met Trump to buy an apartment ‘he opened his briefcase and $200,000 in cash spilled out on Trump’s table’.

To the Russians, this was small time. Unger retells a story of Barrett’s that when a Red mafiya boss, David Bogatin, came to Trump Tower, he met Trump himself and immediately bought five apartments for $6 million in cash (about $14.5 million today). Trump didn’t seem to wonder where this money might have come from. He was one of the first developers to discover that you could sell condos to shell companies that concealed the owners’ identities, Unger says. This allowed Russian criminals ‘to launder vast amounts of money’. Trump’s willingness to sell ‘no questions asked’ was so important, Unger believes, that he gave the Russian mafia a foothold in the United States.

Unger has done an impressive job of putting some of the many allegations about Trump’s dealings with the mafia together in one place. "House of Trump, House of Putin" is like a pointillist work of art. It might be hard to see the significance of any one fact or any one story about Trump knowing this or that gangster. But step back, take it all in, and you see the whole, ugly picture Unger has painted. https://spectator.us/2018/08/did-the-mafia-help-trump-along-his-way-to-the-oval-office/

13.  Colbert I. King: So much for the presidency

The quest to find evidence of Trump’s use of the n-word expends energy that could be put to better use. In my view, the only way Trump would not have used the word is if he never knew of its existence.

Yes, we have a racist and intolerant bigot in the White House. But the country has a much more serious problem on its hands. Trump is a president with delusions of grandeur, a bully who revels in being feared, a man with a past that is catching up to him. But he has power at his disposal to do harm to anyone he sees as a threat.

Consider his retaliation against public officials who launched the probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 campaign — he threatened their security clearances, and this week he actually revoked one, using a flimsy rationalization. Consider his targeting of Canada and his launching of trade wars. Consider his alleged purge of civil servants deemed disloyal to his agenda. Consider the lengths to which he is going to discredit a free press and undermine the legitimacy of the special counsel’s investigation into Russian interference in our presidential election.

Trump and the n-word? Disgusting as the thought is, that could be the least of our worries. Think about it: a duly authorized federal investigation involving a presidential campaign and possible foreign interference, and the president wants to shut it down. So much for accountability, justice and the rule of law. So much for the presidency. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/so-much-for-the-presidency/2018/08/17/c3ac008c-a177-11e8-83d2-70203b8d7b44_story.html

14. Paul Krugman: The Slippery Slope of Complicity

Is Trumpocracy what Republicans always wanted?

Well, it’s probably what some of them always wanted. And some of them are making a coldblooded calculation that the demise of democracy is worth it if it means lower taxes on the rich and freedom to pollute.

Modern Republican politicians are, with few exceptions, apparatchiks: they are creatures of a monolithic movement that doesn’t allow dissent but protects the loyal from risk. Even if they should happen to lose a race in their gerrymandered districts, as long as they toed the line they can count on “wing nut welfare” — commentator slots on Fox News, appointments at think tanks, and so on.

Even now, I don’t think most political commentators have grasped how deep the rot goes. I don’t think they understand, or at any rate admit to themselves, that democracy really could die just a few months from now.

And if it doesn’t, if Republicans lose Congress and Trump leaves office on or before January 2021, the same people who kept declaring that Trump just became president will try to go back to pretending that Republican politicians are serious, honorable people who care about policy. But they aren’t. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/18/opinion/the-slippery-slope-of-complicity.html

15. Jonathan Chait: Trump Is Making the Department of Justice Into His Own Private Goon Squad

One morning earlier this week during executive time, President Trump tweeted out his assessment of the Russia investigation. “The Rigged Russian Witch Hunt goes on and on as the ‘originators and founders’ of this scam continue to be fired and demoted for their corrupt and illegal activity,” he raged. “All credibility is gone from this terrible Hoax, and much more will be lost as it proceeds. No Collusion!”

Amid this torrent of lies, the president had identified one important truth. There has in fact been a series of firings and demotions of law-enforcement officials. The casualties include FBI director James Comey, deputy director Andrew McCabe, general counsel James Baker, and, most recently, agent Peter Strzok. Robert Mueller is probing the circumstances surrounding Trump’s firing of Comey for a possible obstruction-of-justice charge. But for Trump, obstruction of justice is not so much a discrete act as a way of life.

The slowly unfolding purge, one of the most vivid expressions of Trump’s governing ethos, has served several purposes for the president. First, it has removed from direct authority a number of figures Trump suspects would fail to provide him the personal loyalty he demanded from Comey and expects from all officials in the federal government. Second, it supplies evidence for Trump’s claim that he is being hounded by trumped-up charges — just look at all the crooked officials who have been fired! Third, it intimidates remaining officials with the threat of firing and public humiliation if they take any actions contrary to Trump’s interests. Simply carrying out the law now requires a measure of personal bravery.

Republicans in Congress, for all their private misgivings, see crossing him as an act of career suicide. Shame has no more power over this administration than does Santa Claus. The remaining factor, control of Congress, hangs in the balance with the midterm elections. As does much else. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/08/trump-is-making-the-doj-into-his-own-private-goon-squad.html

16.  Eric Levitz: Trump’s Base Has Become Too Delusional for the GOP’s Own Good

Now, Republican consultants are concerned that the combination of their voters’ insulation from reality — and Donald Trump’s fragile ego — could cost the party control of the House.

And their fear is quite rational. The party that controls the White House almost always has a tough time mobilizing its base in midterm elections. When voters see their team in power everyday, they feel secure; and thus, complacent; and thus, less obligated to drive to their polling places after work. GOP strategists hope to combat this perennial problem by turning their party’s weakness into a strength: With polls predicting a “blue wave” this November, Republicans hope to instill an energizing panic in their base over the terrifying prospect of Speaker Pelosi.

But the president’s narcissism compels him to undermine this gambit. To acknowledge that Democrats are poised for a landslide would be to acknowledge that the American people do not overwhelmingly approve of his job performance. Therefore, Trump has assured his voters that all those reports about a “blue wave” are fake news, and that Republicans are certain to keep Congress in November. Fox News has dutifully echoed this message, and the GOP base has fully absorbed it.

If Democrats do retake the House (as probabilistic forecasts currently predict), perhaps the GOP base will finally realize that their movement’s “fair and balanced” media outlets aren’t actually interested in keeping them well-informed. But it seems much more likely that they’ll follow their leader’s guidance — and conclude that Democrats are busing more “illegals” to the polls than they’d ever imagined. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/08/2018-midterms-trump-red-wave-gop-base-delusional-fake-news.html

17. Glenn Kessler: Not just misleading. Not merely false. A lie

The first denial that Donald Trump knew about hush-money payments to silence women came four days before he was elected president, when his spokeswoman Hope Hicks said, without hedging, “we have no knowledge of any of this.”

The second came in January of this year, when his attorney Michael Cohen said the allegations were “outlandish.” By March, two of the president’s spokesmen — Raj Shah and Sarah Huckabee Sanders — said publicly that Trump denied all the allegations and any payments. Even Cohen’s attorney, David Schwartz, got in on the action, saying the president “was not aware of any of it.”

In April, Trump finally weighed in, answering a question about whether he knew about a payment to porn star Stephanie Clifford, who uses the stage name Stormy Daniels, with a flat “no.”

It’s now clear that the president’s statement was a lie — and that the people speaking for him repeated it.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of Donald Trump’s presidency has been his loose relationship with facts. As of the beginning of this month, The Washington Post’s Fact Checker had documented 4,229 false or misleading claims from the president — an average of nearly 7.6 a day.

How to characterize Trump’s statements has become its own pitched political battle, with many of the president’s critics demanding that they be called “lies.” The Fact Checker has been hesitant to go that far, as it is difficult to document whether the president knows he is not telling the truth.

On Wednesday, Sanders said during a White House briefing that it was “a ridiculous accusation” to say the president has lied to the American people.

But this week’s guilty plea by Cohen, offers indisputable evidence that Trump and his allies have been deliberately dishonest at every turn in their statements regarding payments to Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/08/23/not-just-misleading-not-merely-false-lie/