Bernie Sanders has by far the best chance of any candidate to be the Democratic Party’s nominee for president, according to the Nate Silver model. Moreover, the odds that Sanders wins that prize outright are twice as good as the odds for a brokered convention in Milwaukee, in Silver’s view. Sanders has a better chance than anyone else to win the Nevada caucuses, according to Silver’s site, FiveThirtyEight, and a better chance than Joe Biden to win the South Carolina primary.California? Sanders. Texas? Sanders. North Carolina? Sanders. Virginia? Sanders. Massachusetts? Sanders. Minnesota? Sanders. Colorado, Tennessee, Alabama, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Utah, Maine, Vermont, Michigan, Washington, Missouri, Mississippi, Idaho, North Dakota, Florida, Illinois, Ohio, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Hawaii, Alaska, Wisconsin, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Connecticut, Rhode Island? Ibid.At the moment, Silver gives Sanders a 44 percent chance of winning Delaware, against 40 percent for Biden.Could Silver be wrong? Of course. Could Sanders slip? Certainly. Could Biden regain his momentum? It could happen. Could voters take a second look at Mike Bloomberg (whom Silver gives less than a 1 percent shot at winning the nomination)? Sure. But at the moment there is little doubt that Bernie Sanders is your Democratic Party frontrunner.When I wrote the words, “Joe Biden is done” last March, I was wrong. He wasn’t done. I badly misread the temperature of the media, which I thought was at a fever pitch for a far-left candidate. But what we’ve seen in the coverage is this: The media think like a standard Democratic Party voter, not like a clamorous activist. Despite their woke gesturing, the thing they really want is not to upend the health-insurance system, much less capitalism or white privilege. They simply want any Democrat who can defeat Donald Trump. Biden actually suits them fine. I thought the media would tear apart Biden, but they didn’t. You have to marvel at the delicacy with which they tiptoed around the fact that the influence-peddling actions of Biden’s own son in Ukraine provided the predicate for the phone call that led to the impeachment of Donald Trump.Alas, people noticed anyway that the Bidens as a family were the clear and obvious beneficiaries of corruption, because, folks, that’s what it is when a foreign company gives a large paycheck to the son of a sitting vice president for no other reason than that he is the son of a sitting vice president. The ex-veep implicitly acknowledged that it was wrong for him to allow Hunter to take the no-show job with Burisma when he promised he wouldn’t allow such a thing to happen should he regain a job in the White House. Yet Biden still has no satisfying response on the (exceedingly rare) occasions when a reporter gently inquires about the Burisma debacle, because how could he? For the same reason, Hillary Clinton had no satisfying response on the matter of having caused classified information to be removed from official channels and having deleted thousands of emails that might have been required to be produced to the public. Biden and Clinton both did wrong and everyone knows it.So I was wrong to say the media would destroy Biden; such destruction as has occurred was brought about by Biden himself, for allowing his son (and other family members) to cash in on his public-official status and also for coming across as a befuddled nincompoop in his increasingly dicey public appearances.Bernie Sanders, on the other hand, is not corrupt. (Writing a bestselling book, not influence peddling, is how Sanders got rich.) He’s not incoherent. His message is now and always has been perfectly clear and consistent. Sanders wants to turn the U.S. into 1970 Sweden. Thirty or so percent of Democratic primary voters agree. That could be enough to power him to the nomination.What does this mean for the rest of us? “Bernie could win,” say some of my colleagues, envisioning Sanders in the Oval Office. I disagree. Bernie cannot win. Bernie will not win. If Bernie Sanders is the choice of my country to be president, I do not know my country. The agitational wing of one party may want the things Bernie wants, but the country doesn’t. The country doesn’t want its private health insurance to be made illegal. The country doesn’t want rich kids to see their college debts canceled, or to pick up the tab for their four-year frolics on leafy campuses. The country likes capitalism, albeit in a grumbly sort of way, and mostly admires rather than despises our most successful citizens.Economic confidence hasn’t been this high in many years. Unemployment hasn’t been this low in many years. Large numbers of Americans may find Trump’s personality irritating, bordering on rebarbative, but the Democrats are mistaken if they think that means Americans want federal policy turned inside out. Moreover, when it comes to personality, Sanders is . . . irritating, bordering on rebarbative. Barack Obama was able to infuse his core followers with a near-religious level of devotion while striking moderates as a gentle incrementalist. Sanders can’t pull off the latter trick and based on his history to this point, he won’t even try. For the Democratic Party to pick him would be to load a revolver and aim it at its own head. I say fire away.

The Obama administration thought its warnings to Russia about ceasing its electoral interference in 2016 worked, according to the latest installment of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report into Russian election interference. “Senior administration officials told the Committee that they assessed that their warnings to Russia before the election had the desired effect, and that Russia undertook little to no additional action once the warnings were delivered,” the report found. It was a fateful miscalculation. Much of the damage had already been done, from the months-long data exfiltration from the Democratic National Committee server that became public in July 2016 to the social-media disinformation effort that persisted long after the election. Indeed Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation found that the genesis of the Russian disinformation campaign occurred in 2014—which is consistent with Obama officials telling the Senate committee that they worried a weaponized leak of a phone call involving top diplomat Victoria Nuland heralded a new era of Russian disinformation. Every additional congressional investigation and intelligence-official assessment, including FBI Director Christopher Wray’s last year, has concluded that Russian election-aimed efforts are expected in 2020. The majority of the administration’s domestic response was to warn state election officials to harden their election infrastructure, while its response to Russia was to verbally warn them in private, in the fall of 2016, to stop the attack. A lack of Russian manipulation of the election data itself became confidence that the strategy had worked. FBI Director Christopher Wray Says Russia Remains a Threat to 2020 Election“[W]e had reason to believe they were in a position to do more and decided not to, which would lead me to conclude, although one can’t be 100 percent sure of this, that our deterrence had some effect,” Obama national security adviser Susan Rice told the Senate. Rice did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Several committee Republicans—Jim Risch (ID), Tom Cotton (AR), Marco Rubio (FL), John Cornyn (TX), and Ben Sasse (NE)—assailed the “Obama administration’s inept response to Russia’s persistent and complex campaign to influence and interfere in the most recent U.S. presidential election.” They sidestepped highlighting an additional finding of the report: that fear of appearing partisan led the administration to inhibit its response.The heavily redacted Senate report found that although the FBI had warned the DNC about potential intrusions “numerous times throughout 2015 and 2016” from a “malicious cyber actor,” many Obama administration officials were unaware of the Russian effort until the DNC publicized the data breach in July 2016. That was two months after then Director of National Intelligence James Clapper warned obliquely that foreign intelligence agencies were out to penetrate campaign data networks. “The administration was not fully engaged until some key intelligence insights were provided by the IC [intelligence community], which shifted how the administration viewed the issue,” the report found. As has been widely reported over the past three years, part of that shift involved then CIA Director John Brennan, in August and September 2016, separately briefing the small group of bipartisan congressional leaders involved in intelligence affairs known as the Gang of Eight. What resulted from the Hill was nothing—something that the Senate report euphemistically attributes to partisanship, but which one of its members attributes to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden, in his additional statement on the report, criticized the Obama administration for restricting the summer 2016 briefings to the Gang of Eight, rather than the full congressional intelligence committees. But Wyden also criticized “the Republican refusal to publicly acknowledge Russian interference” as a substantial contribution to the failed 2016 response.“I believe that warning the public about a foreign influence campaign should not depend on the support of both parties, particularly when one of the parties stands to gain politically from that campaign,” Wyden said.Bureaucracy, fueled by the typical reluctance to expand intelligence access, inhibited much of the Obama administration’s response. It inhibited options for a response, the Senate report found. White House officials, including Rice, were concerned that a more assertive public response could prompt the Russians to escalate by manipulating the actual election infrastructure that the federal government does not control. Additionally, administration officials were highly concerned that the intelligence agencies achieve maximum confidence in their assessment of Russian intrusion before making any statement that they might have to recant. Not until October, a month before the election, did Clapper and the Department of Homeland Security publicly accuse Russia of election interference. Intel Chairman Adam Schiff Fans: Focus on Russia, Not 2020The previous month, then FBI Director Jim Comey, whose own high-profile interference in the election was another fateful move, wanted to write an op-ed about the Russian intrusion. But according to then-deputy Andrew McCabe, who would soon be in Trump’s crosshairs, “[b]y the time he kind of got around to thinking about it seriously, he felt like the opportunity had passed and we were too close [to the election] at that point to have the intended effect on the electorate.”There were other self-imposed “restrictions,” in the Senate report’s phrase. Among them, as has been widely reported, was the “highly politicized environment” that made the Obama team fear that their public warnings would themselves “undermine public confidence in the election”—by fueling Donald Trump’s frequent insistence that any loss he might suffer was the result of a rigged system. The Obama team, according to the Senate report, considered itself effectively checkmated, unable to come up with a compelling response and reluctant to risk making itself a spectacle distracting from Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Their response was to attempt to act nonpartisan in an information environment where such a posture was less and less viable. They didn’t try to get new Russia sanctions through a GOP-controlled Congress in 2016 out of fear of Republicans crying foul; they would only impose unilateral sanctions after Trump won the election. The White House chief of staff at the time, Denis McDonough, told the Senate inquiry that the National Security Council “went out of [its] way to ensure that there was not a partisan veneer to any of the work.” Once out of office, McDonough assailed McConnell for not operating similarly. McDonough, Rice, and Homeland Security chief Lisa Monaco worried that an increased public warning would amount to “doing the Russians' dirty work for them.” Monaco told the committee that McConnell reacted to a September briefing by the intelligence agencies on the election intrusion by stating “[y]ou security people should be careful that you’re not getting used.” The report says Monaco interpreted that “as suggestive that the intelligence regarding Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 elections was being inflated or used for partisan ends.” Only Democrats Sen. Dianne Feinstein (CA) and Rep. Adam Schiff (CA), members of the Gang of Eight, would warn publicly of the Russian election incursion that fall.In other words, while Russia may have hacked the election, Trump and GOP congressional leadership hacked the Obama administration’s brains. The committee released its report on Thursday, the day after the Senate acquitted Trump for attempting to coerce Ukraine into aiding his 2020 reelection. A Senate Intelligence Committee official said the committee leadership, which at the end of last week had not received the intelligence agencies’ proposed redactions despite delivering it to them months ago, opted to wait for release until after impeachment was finished. Representatives from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence did not immediately provide a response to an inquiry from The Daily Beast. Read more at The Daily Beast.Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast hereGet our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

Republicans have been begging to end impeachment so they can "get back to work" and accomplish "the priorities that matter most to the American people."Apparently, those priorities involve whatever former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was doing in 2009. Because less than a day after voting for President Trump's acquittal, Republicans are turning to investigate Clinton's private email server, with Senate Homeland Security Chair Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) requesting more information on the subject from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in a Thursday letter.In the letter, Johnson discusses how he's spent the past five years "conduct[ing] oversight of Clinton's private email server" even though she hasn't worked in the federal government for that entire time. He then brings up a September 2019 State Department report that found security violations regarding "the handling of classified information" on that server, and asks Pompeo for a 14-point list of information that delves further into the report's findings.It's unclear just why Johnson would want to touch the Clinton email investigation now that Trump has finally escaped the impeachment cloud hanging over his head. After all, questions about the 2016 election and unfounded claims about where that server physically ended up are a big piece of what launched Trump into impeachment in the first place.More stories from theweek.com The real State of the Union Chinese doctor who warned others of Wuhan coronavirus dies How history will view Trump's impeachment

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Thursday defended her speech-ripping performance after President Donald Trump's State of the Union address and took fresh aim at his fitness for office even as he celebrated his impeachment acquittal. “That was not a State of the Union,” Pelosi said. “The conduct of Speaker Pelosi was a breach of decorum and degraded the proceedings of the joint session, to the discredit of the House,” the resolution read.

Donald Trump has called his impeachment and the Russia investigation "bulls***" as he gave a televised speech to supporters in the White House, a day after his Republican allies in the Senate acquitted him on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of justice.The president walked into the East Room to a standing ovation from members of his legal team, staff and GOP politicians to gloat about his acquittal and attack his enemies.

The House Intel chairman and lead impeachment manager has received several threats in recent months.

President Trump brought on a combative team of experienced lawyers who relentlessly shielded him from Democratic attacks. Without admitting anything or yielding much, they pushed toward the goal they achieved Wednesday night. 

Meghan McCain is less than impressed with Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) bucking the rest of the Republican Party and voting to convict President Donald Trump on the abuse of power article of impeachment. And she especially doesn’t want anyone comparing him to her late “maverick” father, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ).During Thursday’s broadcast of popular ABC talk-show The View, the majority of the table gushed over Romney making his largely symbolic impeachment vote.“You know, people call him the flip-flopper,” co-host Whoopi Goldberg said. “You know, he’s standing for the country and not for the party. I have to say, you know, he and I are probably never ever going to agree and every time I say something nice about him, it freaks him out. I’m just saying, I’m, you know, I’m glad someone from that side stood up and said, you know, this is not right. I don’t think this is right. So thank you!”Liberal host Joy Behar, meanwhile, added that she may “have to take back” every joke she’s ever made about Romney while taking shots at Trump for attacking Romney and his faith at the National Prayer Breakfast. After co-host Sunny Hostin celebrated the fact that Romney became the first senator in history to vote to remove a president of his own party, McCain jumped in to announce that she was “conflicted” over Romney’s actions.Noting that she knows the former GOP presidential nominee is a person of faith and conscience, she also wanted to point out that it wasn’t that long ago when Romney was angling to join the Trump administration.“I like when anyone bucks a party,” she stated. “I will always respect it and I think it took big cojones to do that yesterday but it doesn’t take much courage right now to do anything that’s not going to have any impact. President Trump was acquitted yesterday. I just think Mitt Romney, I want to trust him but would he still feel that way if Trump gave him his Secretary of State position?”The conservative host went on to say she’s not sure she can “100 percent trust him” because of his history as a “flip-flopper,” prompting Goldberg to exclaim that she’s just “glad somebody stood up and said no.” “But that’s what he wants!” McCain shot back.“That’s OK. You know what, I’m going to give faith in him like I gave to your dad,” Goldberg replied, causing McCain to sneer, “Mitt Romney is nothing like my dad!”This resulted in a somewhat tense back-and-forth between McCain and Goldberg—something that has occurred between the pair with increasing frequency—with McCain lecturing the Oscar-winning actress that Romney “will break your heart like he always does” and Goldberg pushing back.“I’m 63 years old,” Goldberg said. “I have been going through this with these people for years.”“Well, I’m 35 years old,” McCain fired back, causing Goldberg to note that McCain is only half her age and McCain should “hear what I know.”“That’s very dismissive,” McCain, taken aback, complained. “That’s very dismissive.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast hereGet our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

The day after her 2016 presidential opponent was acquitted by the Senate in his impeachment trial, Hillary Clinton went on The Ellen DeGeneres Show and began by explaining why she was “disappointed” but not “surprised” by the outcome.“The evidence was really clear,” the former secretary of state said. “There was no doubt by the time it was all presented that actually the president had done what he was accused of. In fact, he admitted that he’d done what he was accused of. He just didn’t think anybody would hold him accountable.”Clinton said it was now up to voters to hold President Donald Trump “accountable” in the 2020 election. And she had some advice for those who are yet to make up their mind about who to nominate against him.“I say two things,” she said. “I say, vote for the person who you believe can actually win in November. And the person who you think can govern our country. Because somebody has to get in there and try to bring our country together and put us on the right track into the future and restore our democracy and our standing in the world.” Clinton urged voters to ask themselves, “Who do you think can win? Because if you don’t win, you can’t govern. And who can best govern at a very difficult time in American history.” If this sounded like an implicit critique of her other big 2016 rival, Bernie Sanders, that notion was enforced when DeGeneres added, “It seems to me, more than ever, that we need somebody who’s going to go in and be able to steer this ship in the right direction instead of going to the extreme.” Asked directly who she wanted to be the Democratic nominee, Clinton declined to name names and returned to the issue of electability against Trump, stressing from personal experience the importance of winning the Electoral College and not just the popular vote. “You’ve got to be very clear-minded about who can win,” she said, without offering any specifics about what that often nebulous notion means or acknowledging the fact that she was considered by many to be the more “electable” candidate over Sanders in 2016. Jane Lynch: Ellen DeGeneres Coming Out Meant I Could Just ‘Show Up’Later in the interview, DeGeneres pressed Clinton to explain the controversial criticism she expressed about Sanders in and around the upcoming Hulu documentary about her life and career. “Nobody likes him,” Clinton infamously says in the film, “nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done. He was a career politician.” “Well, it’s from the film, which was probably filmed about a year-and-a-half ago or so,” Clinton said in her defense. “So it wasn’t in the midst of the election.” But at the same time, she doubled down by saying she has a “clear perspective about what it’s going to take to win.” “People can have their own opinions about anybody in public life, that’s a free country, you get to do that,” Clinton added, before continuing the critique. “You’ve got to be responsible for what you say and what you say you’re going to do,” she said. “And if you promise the moon and you can’t deliver the moon, then that’s going to be one more indicator of how we just can’t trust each other.” “I just want everybody to understand how high the stakes are and to hold every candidate and every public office holder accountable for what they do or don’t do,” Clinton said.DeGeneres ended the interview by asking Clinton if she would accept the vice presidential role if the eventual Democratic nominee asked her to.Laughing, she replied, “Well, that’s not going to happen.” But after explaining that she turned down President Barack Obama’s secretary of state offer twice before she ultimately said yes, Clinton added, “I never say never, because I do believe in serving my country. But it’s not going to happen.”  Bernie Sanders on ‘The View’: ‘Not’ Interested in Any 2020 Advice from Hillary ClintonRead more at The Daily Beast.Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast hereGet our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

President Trump singled out Senator Mitt Romney (R., Utah) during a speech at the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday, saying “I don’t like people who use their faith as justification for doing what they know is wrong.”Romney, the only Republican from either chamber of Congress to support Trump’s impeachment, voted Wednesday to convict Trump on the first “abuse of power” article.Explaining the decision in an interview with The Atlantic, Romney called his vote “the most difficult decision I have ever had to make in my life,” but said his Senate oath, taken before God to uphold and defend the Constitution, drove his conviction.“I have gone through a process of very thorough analysis and searching, and I have prayed through this process,” Romney explained. “But I don’t pretend that God told me what to do . . . I’m subject to my own conscience.”Trump took to Twitter after midnight Wednesday to slam Romney for the move. “Had failed presidential candidate @MittRomney devoted the same energy and anger to defeating a faltering Barack Obama as he sanctimoniously does to me, he could have won the election,” Trump, who endorsed Romney’s Utah Senate run in 2018, tweeted.Romney’s fellow Republicans also criticized the decision, with some taking aim at the Senator himself, while others took a more conciliatory tone.Speaking at the prayer breakfast, Trump also took an apparent shot at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who was in attendance.“Nor do I like people who say ‘I pray for you’ when you know that is not so,” Trump said, in reference to Pelosi’s comment to a reporter in December.> House Speaker Nancy Pelosi rebukes a reporter who asked if she "hates" Trump: "I don't hate anyone. I was raised in a way that is a heart full of love and always pray for the President. … So don't mess with me when it comes to words like that" https://t.co/yWJRPBQJN2 pic.twitter.com/0tIphvrYYB> > -- CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) December 5, 2019“When they impeach you for nothing, you're supposed to like them? It's not easy folks, but I'm doing my best,” Trump concluded.