Politics

It was exactly one week ago when just as Bloomberg reported that Yellen was most likely out of consideration as next Fed chair, and as the WSJ reported that Trump was meeting with Kevin Warsh, that Politico reported, for the first time, that discussions with people close to the Fed Chair selection process "confirmed Kevin Warsh and Jerome Powell as the current front-runners with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said to be favoring Powell. That’s something of a head scratcher to outside observers of the process who did not have Powell on short-lists before the process began.

With Spain’s prime minister having opened earlier in the day the path for Madrid to use a constitutional “nuclear option” to suspend Catalonia’s autonomy, demanding that the regional government makes clear whether it considers itself independent, moments ago Spain's Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy gave Catalan President Carles Puigdemont a five day ultimatum to clarify whether he actually declared the region's independence in his speech devoted to the highly controversial referendum, and another 3 to "rectify it."

http://www.youtube.com/embed/HNBiE142xqg

President Trump vehemently denied an NBC report that he called for a ten-fold increase in US nuclear weapons at a meeting this summer. Calling it “fake news,” the president reportedly threatened NBC’s broadcast license. Is this really “fake news”? Or is President Trump just continuing President Obama’s massive nuclear weapons “modernization” program?

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes has been repeatedly stymied in his efforts to compel the FBI to turn over documents that would help him ascertain how much of the Trump dossier has been verified by the intelligence community, and what role that information played in launching the DOJ’s investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.  

Update (10:10 am ET): Continuing the theme of attacking NBC for spreading "fake news" and hearsay, President Donald Trump in a tweet accused the network of making up yet another unflattering story about Trump and his relationships with his most senior advisers. He blasted NBC's report as a work of "pure fiction" invented "to demean."

And, ratcheting up his feud with the network, Trump questioned if it might be appropriate to revoke the network's broadcasting license, adding that the network's shoddy reporting is "bad for the country."