- During a presser today with French President Emmanuel Macron, Donald Trump defended his eldest son’s meeting with a Russian lawyer. “From a practical standpoint, most people would have taken that meeting,” Trump said. “It’s called opposition research” he added as though he had just learned the marvelous term. “Politics is not the nicest business in the world...but it’s very standard in politics,” Trump said. How wonderful that, after months of insisting that he simply doesn’t know how either politics or the law work, he’s finally become so savvy. [MSNBC]
- Trump calls his grown children “baby.” In his defense, he might not know their names or their ages. [New York Times]
- Meanwhile, Mike Pence is distancing himself from Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with a Russian lawyer. [CNN]
- The Trump administration will recertify former President Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran despite Trump’s campaign promise to end the agreement. [Washington Post]
- Mitch McConnell still might not be able to muster up enough votes to pass the revised Republican health care bill. [Politico]
- Here’s an email Trump’s lawyer Marc Kasowitz sent: “I’m on you now. You are fucking with me now Let’s see who you are Watch your back, bitch.” In another email, he used the word “bro.” Kasowitz seems as pleasant as the many men who email Jezebel writers. [ProPublica]
- Kasowitz said he sent the emails “at the end of a very long day.” [Buzzfeed]
- Candice Jackson, the assistant secretary for civil rights at the Department of Education, is very sorry for her “flippant” comments about campus sexual assault. On Wednesday, Jackson told the New York Times that “90 percent” of sexual assaults on college campuses were the result of “We were both drunk, we broke up, and six months later I found myself under a Title IX investigation because she just decided that our last sleeping together was not quite right.” Okay! [Associated Press]
- The Food and Drug Administration is preparing to loosen the reporting requirements on the medical device industry. In addition, new legislation will require the FDA to get medical devices like implants and cardiac defibrillators, approved at a more rapid rate. This is potentially very dangerous and this story is worth reading. [New York Times]
- Middle-aged wannabe rocker Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski are getting married in Nantucket this spring. That gives everyone plenty of time to find words that rhyme with Nantucket and Brzezinski. [The Cut]
- Former President Jimmy Carter was hospitalized after becoming dehydrated while working with Habitat for Humanity. Carter said he was “okay” and encouraged everyone to “keep building.” [ABC]
Here are some tweets the president was allowed to publish:
This has been Barf Bag.