Today’s edition of quick hits:
* A scandal in Virginia takes a more serious turn: “A woman said Friday she was raped by Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax (D) in a ‘premeditated and aggressive’ assault in 2000, while they both were undergraduate students at Duke University.”
* In related news: “Last fall, after Vanessa C. Tyson began a prestigious fellowship at Stanford, she told a gathering of colleagues in a behavioral sciences program that she had been sexually assaulted years earlier, citing personal experience to illustrate a larger point involving sexual violence.”
* Also in Richmond: “Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, still facing calls to resign as governor a week after the revelation that his page in a medical school yearbook features a racist photograph, is now tightly focused on coming up with plans to survive.”
* Following up on a story we’ve reported on: “Federal prosecutors in New York are probing whether the National Enquirer’s parent company violated a cooperation agreement in its handling of the story regarding Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.”
* Donald Trump hired even more undocumented immigrants than we previously knew.
* A giant exits the stage: “Former Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., the longest-serving member of Congress who played a key role in many pieces of landmark legislation, has died. He was 92. He was diagnosed with prostate cancer last year.”
* On a related note, Dingell dictated one final op-ed shortly before his passing.
* The latest Manafort news: “A newly released transcript reveals that former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort continued working for a political client in Ukraine into 2018, after he had already been indicted in Robert Mueller’s probe — and that prosecutors think Manafort may have told one lie to up his chances of a pardon.”
* A new reason for Trump to disagree with his Fed chair: “Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome H. Powell said that the U.S. economy is in a ‘good place’ but warned that income inequality is the nation’s biggest economic challenge in the coming decade. ‘We want prosperity to be widely shared,’ Powell said Wednesday evening. ‘We need policies to make that happen.’” * MBS: “Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia told a top aide in a conversation in 2017 that he would use ‘a bullet’ on Jamal Khashoggi, the journalist killed in October, if Mr. Khashoggi did not return to the kingdom and end his criticism of the Saudi government, according to current and former American and foreign officials with direct knowledge of intelligence reports.” * A case worth watching: “Families of the Sandy Hook school shooting victims have won a series of victories in their defamation suits against the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones that would open Mr. Jones’s business records to them and compel him to speak under oath.” * Another case worth watching: “Jerome Corsi, who is listed as ‘Person 1’ in the indictment of Roger Stone, is suing Stone, accusing him of defamation for repeatedly saying that Corsi lied.” Anything to add? Consider this an open thread.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past." Recommended
