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“Emoluments” isn’t a word that typically comes up in everyday conversations in the United States, but it’s a word that President Donald Trump and his attorneys could be thinking about a lot if a lawsuit involving the president and emoluments continues to progress.

Around 200 members of the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives have filed a lawsuit against Trump for allegedly violating the U.S. Constitution’s Emoluments Clause, which states that a president is not allowed to receive gifts from foreign powers without Congress’ permission. And U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan addressed the lawsuit on April 30, when he wrote a 48-page opinion that rejected Trump’s efforts to have it thrown out. The lawsuit, Sullivan ruled, should go forward.

Stephen Rohde, discussing the lawsuit in a May 13 article for the American Prospect, stresses that the Emoluments Clause goes back to the Founding Fathers and that blatantly violating it is an impeachable offense. Trump, Rohde points out, “is the only president for at least 40 years who has not liquidated his business assets or put them in a blind trust” — and the lawsuit from members of Congress alleges that the president “has a financial interest in vast business holdings around the world that engage in dealings with foreign governments and receive benefits from those governments.”

View the complete May 14 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet website here.

Here he goes again …

Trump on Monday praised yet another authoritarian leader who has cracked down on democratic values in his home country.

“You’re respected all over Europe,” Trump told Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban during a photo-op in the Oval Office. “Probably like me a little bit controversial, but that’s OK, that’s OK. You’ve done a good job and you’ve kept your country safe.”

Let’s break down what “a little bit controversial” means.

View the complete May 13 article by Emily Singer on the National Memo website here.

Rick Gates, President Donald Trump’s former deputy campaign chair, is still cooperating with federal investigators after playing a key role in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.

Mueller managed to flip Gates, who pleaded guilty to making false statements to the FBI and conspiracy against the United States. He, in turn, testified against his longtime associate Paul Manafort, who was the chair of Trump’s campaign. Manafort eventually found guilty and then pleaded guilty for a slew of charges, including false statements, failing to register as a foreign agent, and various financial and tax crimes.

Gates also told Mueller about his and Manafort’s interactions with Russian political operative Konstantin Kilimnik, who Gates thought was a spy, during the 2016 campaign, but the special counsel was unable to get to the bottom of this bizarre connection.

View the complete May 13 article by Cody Fenwick of AlterNet on the National Memo website here.

Democrats are fighting for access to the president’s financial records.

A federal judge raised pointed doubts Tuesday about arguments by President Donald Trump’s legal team that a Democratic effort to subpoena Trump’s financial records was an invalid exercise of congressional power.

Amit Mehta, a U.S. District Court judge in Washington, indicated that he would have trouble ruling that Congress’ goal in accessing the president’s records was unconstitutional — as Trump’s lawyers have argued — and he underscored that he believes Congress has a significant “informing function” that doesn’t necessarily require an explicit legislative purpose to justify an investigation involving the president.

“Does Congress have to do that — do they have to identify a bill in advance? The Supreme Court has said the opposite,” Mehta said during a round of questioning with Trump’s attorney William Consovoy during a hearing.

View the complete May 14 Andrew Desiderio and Kyle Cheney on the Politico website here.

Former top FBI lawyer James Baker offered a robust defense Friday of the bureau’s investigation into President Trump and his 2016 campaign, taking aim at Trump’s allegation that the inquiry was tantamount to a coup and describing how he sought to ensure agents’ work was on solid legal footing.

“There was no attempted coup,” Baker said bluntly. “There was no way in hell that I was going to allow some coup or coup attempt to take place on my watch.”

The comments, which came at a taping of the Lawfare podcast in front of a live audience at the Brookings Institution, were Baker’s first public remarks on the investigation that would eventually be taken over by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. Baker had addressed questions about the probe previously only in private sessions with congressional committees, though transcripts of those comments were later released.

View the complete May 10 article by Matt Zapotosky on The Washington Post website here.

Punishing tariffs ordered by President Trump are set to go into place Friday on Chinese goods, escalating a high-stakes battle with major risks for the economy and his reelection.

GOP lawmakers have been pressuring Trump to get a deal with China that would lower tariffs hurting U.S. farmers and manufacturers, but their complaints have failed to move the president or yield progress in talks with Beijing.

After months of touting progress toward a final deal, Trump is set to take a different tack on Friday, when tariffs on $200 billion in Chinese imports will rise from 10 percent to 25 percent, a move Trump said is necessary to hold China to previous commitments.

View the complete May 9 article by Sylvan Lane on The Hill website here.

“Last month alone, 100,000 illegal immigrants arrived at our borders, placing a massive strain on communities and schools and hospitals and public resources like nobody’s ever seen before. Now we’re sending many of them to sanctuary cities, thank you very much. They’re not too happy about it. I’m proud to tell you that was actually my sick idea, by the way. No. Hey, hey, what did they say? ‘We want them.’ I said: ‘We’ll give them to you. Thank you.’ They said, ‘We don’t want them.’ ”

— President Trump, at a campaign rally in Green Bay, Wis., April 27, 2019

“We’re releasing them into sanctuary cities almost exclusively. You know, sanctuary cities want them. But once we started releasing them, they didn’t want them. So, you know, they want them, they talk — they talk a good game. But once you start saying: ‘Okay. Congratulations. Here are some.’ And they don’t want them. And they fight very hard. So, the whole sanctuary city thing is a big scam.”

— Trump, in an interview with Fox Business Network’s “Mornings With Maria,” April 29, 2019

First at a campaign rally and then in an interview, Trump claimed twice over the past week that undocumented immigrants were being released into sanctuary cities (and that the cities weren’t taking them).

If that rings a bell, it’s because the White House recently floated this proposal to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Four Pinocchios

View the complete April 30 article by Salvador Rizzo on The Washington Post website here.