Senate

Several hours after the AP reported that former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn would refuse to comply with a Senate subpoena, nor produce requested documents as he prepared to plead the Fifth, his lawyers explained that a daily "escalating public frenzy against him" and the Justice Department’s appointment of a special counsel "have created a legally dangerous environment for him to cooperate with a Senate investigation."

After giving hours of testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on May 8th (which we covered here), Sally Yates sat down for another round of interviews with CNN's Anderson Cooper to answer all the same questions about Michael Flynn's dismissal all over again.  The full interview is set to air tonight at 8pm EST on CNN but a teaser clip has been released for our early digestion.

Perhaps the most provocative part of the teaser comes at the 0:24 mark when Cooper asks whether Flynn's underlying conduct was "illegal."  To which Yates responded:

In JPM's initial market comment this morning, reacting to the news of Comey firing, the bank said that "as far as the market is concerned, Comey’s dismissal saps Trump’s political capital and weakens relations w/Congress at the time when he is trying to move an ambitious pro-growth agenda through the Senate and House." What JPM was referring to was the potential of substantial incremental delays now facing Trump's parallel reforms, healthcare on one hand and tax reform on the other.

On Friday morning, in the aftermath of Trump's surprising victory forcing the GOP Healthcare bill repealing Obamacare through the House, we noted that Goldman's DC analyst Alec Phillips responded that, somewhat paradoxically, the impact on Trump's broader economic agenda would actually be more adverse than most economist and pundits expected, stating that "the main effect of House passage is to delay the consideration of tax legislation, which looks even more likely than before to be delayed until 2018."

The Republican House spent Thursday afternoon celebrating the passage of a Healthcare bill that nobody has scored, let alone read, and already the Senate has poured cold water over the first and so far only achievement of the Trump administration.