RUTHFULLY YOURS

How do you legally spy on your political opponents?

At some point in time that question was asked in the White House, at the DNC or in the hotel suites where Hillary and her staff were staying during her speaking tours. It wasn’t exactly asked that way.

But it was asked. And now we know more of the answer.

What Hillary and Obama did wasn’t Watergate. That was amateur hour. Its sophistication is a tribute to the left’s deep knowledge and control of the workings of Washington, D.C. The men and women who planned this and carried it out understood not only government, but had an intimate familiarity with the loopholes in the laws and the networks of contacts that could realize their highly illegal plans.

The eavesdropping on Trump officials carried the ‘fingerprints’ of an administration that bypassed Congress to fund left-wing groups by blackmailing banks into huge settlements paid out to political allies in a billion dollar slush fund and sent pallets of foreign currency to Iran on unmarked planes. A complete lack of ethical norms was combined with the careful use of legal loopholes to protect the actions of the perpetrators even while they were engaging in a criminal conspiracy.

The revolutionary cell is embedded into left-wing organizing. These cells combined into networks across government, the media and the non-profit sector to pursue a collective agenda. The latest revelations about the Trump dossier give us greater insight into how Obama and Hillary’s people conspired to legally eavesdrop on political opponents by breaking up that eavesdropping into a series of legal actions carried out across different cells.

The road that led to Susan Rice and Samantha Power ‘unmasking’ Trump officials began with the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee funding a dossier pushing Trump-Russia conspiracies. The dossier was sourced through Fusion GPS which is notorious for handfeeding material to reporters.

The Clinton campaign was seeing to it that whatever Fusion GPS produced would make its way into media stories without having Hillary’s fingerprints on it. Indeed the only reason we learned that Hillary and the DNC were ultimately behind the dossier was a congressional subpoena that risked exposing other Fusion GPS clients.

But the second reason was far more devious and devastating.

Fusion GPS’ man for the job was Christopher Steele. The former British intelligence figure had connections with FBI people. Hillary Clinton wasn’t just doing “opposition research” as her former press secretary has claimed. The best way to do opposition research in an American election doesn’t involve hiring a Brit in London with contacts in Russian intelligence and the FBI.

That is however the best way to independently produce information that can be injected into an intelligence investigation. (It’s also, perhaps not coincidentally, a great way for the Russians to inject their own material into a presidential election without getting their fingerprints on it.)

Remember that infamous Russian “dossier,” the unverified document that BuzzFeed unceremoniously dumped into the public square earlier this year? You might recall it as making a series of incredibly salacious and completely unproven accusations against the sitting president of the United States. Well, it turns out that it was a piece of partisan opposition research, bought and paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, both of which then denied having anything to do with it after the fact.

Last night the Washington Post reported that the Clinton campaign and the DNC used a lawyer named Marc Elias to retain the oppo-research firm Fusion GPS to conduct research on the Trump campaign (the firm had previously worked on behalf of a still-unidentified Republican to investigate Trump). Fusion GPS then hired a former intelligence officer named Christopher Steele, who conducted an investigation and authored the dossier. According to the Post, the Clinton campaign and the DNC used the law firm to pay Fusion GPS right until the end of October 2016.

As my colleague Andrew McCarthy notes, it’s a clever arrangement. The use of the law firm adds a layer of deniability, and when controversy arises, Fusion GPS is able to appeal to attorney-client privilege to shield itself from scrutiny.

It would be easy, at this point, to start to wander down the rabbit hole, to wonder how much of the so-called “Russia controversy” is based on the Clinton campaign’s opposition research, but let’s not speculate. The truth will emerge. Instead, let’s do something else: Let’s consider how the Russian-dossier story has thus far represented a perfect storm of classic Clintonism, media irresponsibility, and Democratic moral blindness.

First, the Clintonism. The New York Times’s Maggie Haberman responded to the Post story with a perfect tweet:

Folks involved in funding this lied about it, and with sanctimony, for a year https://t.co/vXKRV1wRJc
— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) October 24, 2017

“Sanctimonious lying” is Clintonworld’s M.O. From Bill to Hillary to key members of her team, they lie constantly, repetitively, and with style, and the lies often conceal no-holds-barred, bare-knuckle politics designed to win races and destroy political opponents.

The lies here are important. It’s one thing to review a dossier compiled by a “former intelligence agent” and consider its contents as the product of an objective process. It’s another thing entirely to review that same work as the direct product of an opposing campaign’s opposition research. The goal of an opposition researcher is to collect everything and share everything with the client. A proper intelligence analysis, however, involves separating truth from fiction and provable claims from unverifiable allegations.

Those who pitched the Russian dossier treated it not as opposition research but rather as a form of intelligence report. It had distinctive formatting. It used terms of art. It looked like a government document. How many people did it fool?

Bravo, Charles Grassley! The Iowa senator has turned into something of an aging Mr. Smith taking on corruption in the Obama administration (and its Justice Department) and calling for a special investigator for the metastasizing Uranium One Scandal. But is it enough?

As has been reported, this 2010 deal was made despite a hitherto unknown FBI investigation that exposed bribery, kickbacks, etc. on the part of the Russian company involved. The pact resulted in 20% of U.S. uranium in Putin’s hands (some of whic, in lethal yellow cake form, has already disappeared into the ether) and millions of dollars in the Clinton Foundation’s coffers, basically at the same time.

Or should we now call this the Podesta, Podesta & Manafort Scandal, because an ongoing and related report on Tucker Carlson’s cable show is unmasking a series of connections that make the most paranoid conspiracy theorist seem rational?

A thus-far-reliable source who used to be involved with Clinton allies John and Tony Podesta told Tucker Carlson that press reports appearing to implicate President Trump in Russian collusion are exaggerated.

The source, who Carlson said he would not yet name, said he worked for the brothers’ Podesta Group and was privy to some information from Robert Mueller’s special investigation.

While media reports describe former “Black, Manafort & Stone” principal Paul Manafort as Trump’s main tie to the investigation, the source said it is Manafort’s role as a liaison between Russia and the Podesta Group that is drawing the scrutiny….

Manafort was, at the time, representing Russian business and political interests during the Obama era.

The source said the Podesta Group was in regular contact with Manafort while Hillary Clinton was America’s chief diplomat….

According to Carlson, “Manafort was clear that Russia wanted to cultivate ties to Hillary” because she appeared to be the presumptive 45th president.

In other words, as the French say, it’s the world upside down. Russia? Trump? Oh, sorry, no, it’s the Brothers Podesta and, through them, Hillary. Meanwhile, over at the also related (phony) Trump Dossier Scandal:

In the midst of a court case that threatened to reveal the dossier’s funding, it emerged Tuesday night that political consulting firm Fusion GPS was retained last year by Marc E. Elias, an attorney representing the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign. The firm then hired former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele to write the dossier that contained unverified and lurid allegations about Trump and his team’s ties to Moscow.

In the latest news, it appears Elias’ firm was being used as a cut-out to avoid campaign disclosure laws in the promulgation of Fusion’s garbage. Possible criminal liability looms. It’s “unclear” whether Mrs. Clinton herself knew about this utterly disgusting behavior in her name, though loyalist Brian Fallon hinted as much on cable news Wednesday.

More disturbingly, indications are that the FBI itself relied on this execrable pack of nauseating lies to jump-start the Trump-Russia collusion investigation. They may even have made additional payments to Fusion GPS themselves. [bold decidedly mine]

Holy Toledo! Has the FBI turned into CNN? Or are they just dumber than the proverbial stones?

Speaking of which, we also have the unanswered questions about Deborah Wasserman Schultz and her Pakistani computer expert who had access to the data of dozens of congressional Democrats, not to mention the unsolved mystery of the murder of Seth Rich and the hacking of the DNC server. The FBI and the DOJ have told us next to nothing about either. In general, we learn more from Julian Assange, like him or not. CONTINUE AT SITE

As Rich noted last night, we have learned finally, courtesy of the Washington Post, that Fusion GPS, the research firm that produced the notorious “Trump Dossier,” was funded by the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Of course, the Clinton campaign and the DNC always want layers of deniability and obfuscation – and let’s note that it has served them well – so they hire lawyers to do the icky stuff rather than doing it directly. Then, when the you-know-what hits the fan, outfits like Fusion GPS try to claim that they can’t share critical information with investigators because of (among other things) attorney-client confidentiality concerns.

Here, the Clinton campaign and the DNC retained the law firm of Perkins Coie; in turn, one of its partners, Marc E. Elias, retained Fusion GPS. We don’t know how much Fusion GPS was paid, but the Clinton campaign and the DNC paid $9.1 million to Perkins Coie during the 2016 campaign (i.e., between mid-2015 and late 2016).

A friend draws my attention to an intriguing coincidence.

In its capacity as attorney for the DNC, Perkins Coie – through another of its partners, Michael Sussman – is also the law firm that retained CrowdStrike, the cyber security outfit, upon learning in April 2016 that the DNC’s servers had been hacked.

Interesting: Despite the patent importance of the physical server system to the FBI and Intelligence-Community investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 election, the Bureau never examined the DNC servers. Evidently, the DNC declined to cooperate to that degree, and the Obama Justice Department decided not to issue a subpoena to demand that the servers be turned over (just like the Obama Justice Department decided not to issue subpoenas to demand the surrender of critical physical evidence in the Clinton e-mails investigation).

Instead, the conclusion that Russia is responsible for the invasion of the DNC servers rests on the forensic analysis conducted by CrowdStrike. Rather than do its own investigation, the FBI relied on a contractor retained by the DNC’s lawyers.

The most significant pressing question about the so-called Trump Dossier is whether it was used by the FBI and the Obama Justice Department to get a warrant from the FISA court to conduct national-security surveillance on people connected to the Trump campaign. As I have previously pointed out, this would not be as scandalous as it sounds if (a) the Justice Department had a good faith basis to believe the people the Bureau wanted to surveil were acting as agents of Russia, and (b) the FBI first corroborated whatever information it took from the dossier before presenting it to the FISA court.

But it certainly is interesting that we are once again, in a case involving alleged Russian espionage, reviewing a situation in which the FBI relied on a contractor retained by the DNC’s and the Clinton campaign’s lawyers at Perkins Coie.

It turns out that Russia has sown distrust in the U.S. political system—aided and abetted by the Democratic Party, and perhaps the FBI. This is an about-face from the dominant media narrative of the last year, and it requires a full investigation.

The Washington Post revealed Tuesday that the Hillary Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee jointly paid for that infamous “dossier” full of Russian disinformation against Donald Trump. They filtered the payments through a U.S. law firm (Perkins Coie), which hired the opposition-research hit men at Fusion GPS. Fusion in turn tapped a former British spook, Christopher Steele, to compile the allegations, which are based largely on anonymous, Kremlin-connected sources.

Strip out the middlemen, and it appears that Democrats paid for Russians to compile wild allegations about a U.S. presidential candidate. Did someone say “collusion”?

This news is all the more explosive because the DNC and Clinton campaign hid their role, even amid the media furor after BuzzFeed published the Steele dossier in January. Reporters are now saying that Clinton campaign officials lied to them about their role in the dossier. Current DNC Chair Tom Perez and former Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz deny knowing about the dossier arrangement, but someone must have known.

Perhaps this explains why Congressional Democrats have been keen to protect Fusion from answering dossier questions—disrupting hearings, protesting subpoenas and deriding Republican investigators. Two of Fusion’s cofounders invoked their Fifth Amendment rights last week rather than answer House Intelligence Committee questions, and Fusion filed a federal lawsuit on Friday to block committee subpoenas of its bank records.

The more troubling question is whether the FBI played a role, even if inadvertently, in assisting a Russian disinformation campaign. We know the agency possessed the dossier in 2016, and according to media reports it debated paying Mr. Steele to continue his work in the runup to the election. This occurred while former FBI Director James Comey was ramping up his probe into supposed ties between the Trump campaign and Russians.

Investigators looking into the so-called “Trump dossier” were not surprised when news broke Tuesday night that the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC, working through the Democrats’ law firm, Perkins Coie, financed the “salacious and unverified” compilation of allegations of Trump collusion with Russia in the 2016 presidential campaign. (The “salacious and unverified” description comes from former FBI Director James Comey.)

There had been plenty of talk about the Democrats and Perkins Coie, so much that investigators almost assumed that was the case. But it wasn’t until the Washington Post broke the story that it was confirmed.

“I’m shocked,” one lawmaker joked Tuesday night. “Who could have ever guessed?”

And why did the story break when it did? Credit the much-maligned Rep. Devin Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. The California Republican has been pursuing the dossier more aggressively than anyone else, and it was his Oct. 4 subpoena for the bank records of Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm that handled the dossier, that finally shook loose the information.

But knowing that the Clinton campaign, the DNC, and Perkins Coie supported the dossier is not the end of the story. The most important next step is the FBI.

Sometime in October 2016 — that is, at the height of the presidential campaign — Christopher Steele, the foreign agent hired by Fusion GPS to compile the Trump dossier, approached the FBI with information he had gleaned during the project. According to a February report in the Washington Post, Steele “reached an agreement with the FBI a few weeks before the election for the bureau to pay him to continue his work.”

It was an astonishing turn: the nation’s top federal law enforcement agency agreeing to fund an ongoing opposition research project being conducted by one of the candidates in the midst of a presidential election. “The idea that the FBI and associates of the Clinton campaign would pay Mr. Steele to investigate the Republican nominee for president in the run-up to the election raises further questions about the FBI’s independence from politics, as well as the Obama administration’s use of law enforcement and intelligence agencies for political ends,” wrote Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa.

In the end, according to reports, the FBI did not pay Steele. But the dossier did not go away. Indeed, in January 2017, Comey briefed President-elect Trump (and President Obama) on the dossier’s contents.

In recent months, Nunes has been trying to force the FBI to reveal just what it did in the dossier matter. The intel chairman issued a subpoena to the FBI on Aug. 24, and in the time since, not a single document has been produced to the committee. The FBI and the Justice Department have spent most of that time talking about possibly complying with this or that part of the subpoena. But so far — nothing.

The same is true of Grassley’s inquiries.

And so the worm turns. Make that worms.http://nypost.com/2017/10/24/the-trump-dossier-was-clintons-dirtiest-political-trick/

Just as key congressional panels open new probes into the still-smoking debris of last year’s election, the revelation that Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee paid as much as $9 million for the discredited Russian dossier on Donald Trump flips the collusion script on its head.

Now it’s Democrats’ turn in the barrel.

The explosive report in the Washington Post goes a long way to explaining how the dossier was so widely spread among political reporters during the election. The Clinton camp must have passed it out like Halloween candy to its media handmaidens.

News organizations tried for months to confirm the salacious details, but couldn’t. The document became public when BuzzFeed, a loud Clinton booster, published it 10 days before the inauguration, while acknowledging it couldn’t verify the contents.

The Post report provides possible answers to other questions, too. Because Clinton’s team paid for the dossier, it’s likely that she gave it to the FBI, where James Comey planned to hire the former British agent who had compiled it to keep digging dirt on Trump.

The finding also raises the possibility that the dossier is what led the Obama White House to snoop on members of Trump’s team, and leak the “unmasked” names to the anti-Trump media in a bid to help Clinton.

In short, we now have compelling evidence that the dossier was the largest and dirtiest dirty trick of the 2016 campaign. And Clinton, who has played the victim card ever since her loss, was behind it the whole time.

Anybody surprised? Me neither.

Forget Gal Gadot. The real Wonder Woman is here. And she’s Hillary. Hillary Clinton is just like Wonder Woman. If Wonder Woman spent all her time giving six figure speeches before boarding a corporate jet and passing out with a glass of chardonay in one hand while the other claw grips the flight attendant’s throat.

Finally, the left’s two great un-American heroes can be together at last as the Women’s Media Center honors Hillary Clinton and Jane Fonda.

What is the Women’s Media Center?

The Women’s Media Center was co-founded by Jane Fonda, Robin Morgan, and Gloria Steinem

So Jane Fonda is honoring herself. It’s mighty big of her.

Also being honored is Ashley Judd for incoherently shrieking something to power.

The Women’s Media Center will honor Ashley Judd with the WMC Speaking Truth to Power Award at the Women’s Media Awards on October 26 at Capitale in New York City.

Because millionaire celebrities in no way represent power. And Hillary is just like Wonder Woman.

The Women’s Media Center is presenting its first—and only—WMC Wonder Woman Award to Clinton as she is a hero to millions in the United States and around the globe for her extraordinary accomplishments and public service. Like Wonder Woman, she seems to have superhuman strength, resilience, and courage. She also blazes new paths so that everyone has equal opportunity to pursue their dreams, and she has done much of it in the face of enemy fire.

“Hillary Clinton’s actions have inspired and protected women and men on every continent,” said Gloria Steinem, co-founder of The Women’s Media Center. “She has battled negative forces and helped to maintain a fragile peace with her negotiating skill on behalf of this country and peace-seekers everywhere. She has handled all this with grace, grit, determination, integrity, humor and fortitude while remaining a steadfast feminist, advocate, activist, sister and tireless leader in the revolution. With this award, the Women’s Media Center declares Hillary Clinton our Wonder Woman.”

Hillary Clinton does have superhuman strength. Who can forget the time she landed at that airport under fire or joined the Marine Corps and NASA? And who can forget the time Harvey Weinstein helped endow a chair for Gloria Steinem.

Oh wait, we’re supposed to forget that part.

Also who can forget the time Hillary blazed a trail by helping get a 12-year-old girl’s rapist off. And then laughed about it. On tape.

Maybe Hillary could get the Lex Luthor award instead.

Clinton is an advocate, attorney, author, First Lady, U.S. Senator, U.S. Secretary of State, and Democratic presidential candidate who has devoted her life to working on behalf of women, children and families.

When she wasn’t working on behalf of herself or their rapists.

“I’ve known Hillary for decades and I was proud to be at the historic UN Conference on Women in Beijing when she made her groundbreaking speech, ‘Human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights.’ ” said Jane Fonda, WMC co-founder. “Over the years I’ve watched her break glass ceilings, champion women and girls, and fight for human rights domestically and internationally. I celebrate her fierce passion, compassion and dedication.”

Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh,Hillary Clinton is gonna win!

Anyway, I’m sure it’ll be a great party. And maybe John Kerry can arrange to have some POW’s brought in and tortured for Jane and Hillary’s entertainment. It’ll be just like old times.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee bankrolled the explosive, far-fetched dossier that attempted to smear President Trump by falsely linking him to Russia, according to new reports.

The news came days after President Trump suggested Democrats, Russia, or the FBI may have helped fund research that Democrat communications firm Fusion GPS used to compile the infamous dossier.

“Workers of firm involved with the discredited and Fake Dossier take the 5th[,]” the president tweeted Oct. 19. “Who paid for it, Russia, the FBI or the Dems (or all)?” In Oct. 21, he followed up, tweeting “Justice Department and/or FBI should immediately release who paid for it.”

News of the dossier funding came as two congressional committees announced plans Tuesday to jointly investigate the 2010 sale of a U.S. uranium concern to a Russian company. As U.S. secretary of state, Hillary Clinton approved the transaction as millions of dollars poured in to her corrupt family foundation from Russian sources.

There are “very, very real concerns about why we would allow a Russian-owned company to get access to 20 percent of America’s uranium supply,” Rep. Peter T. King (R-N.Y.) said Monday. “It’s important we find out why that deal went through.”

The character-assassination dossier is the unvetted, salacious, 35-page report written by British former spy Christopher Steele and published by cat-video and gossip website BuzzFeed. The dubious package of documents dubbed the “piss-gate dossier” claimed, among other things, that Donald Trump hired prostitutes to urinate on a hotel room bed in Moscow in front of him.

The dossier put together by Democrat-aligned Fusion GPS was just one of many dirty tricks Hillary Clinton’s campaign used in an effort to undermine her opponent’s campaign during the 2016 election cycle. Clinton also personally authorized the illicit efforts of felon Bob Creamer and organizer Scott Foval who fomented violence at Trump campaign rallies, as James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas group revealed in undercover videos.

Although it was previously known that Democrat monies had flowed to Fusion GPS, the Washington Post provided more specific evidence Tuesday, reporting that Clinton campaign and DNC lawyer Marc Elias hired Fusion GPS in April 2016 to conduct opposition research against Trump. Funded at the time by a still-unidentified Republican donor, the firm had already begun investigating Trump’s background when Hillary began picking up the research tab.

“The Clinton campaign and the DNC funded the firm’s efforts through the end of October 2016, days before Election Day,” The Hill newspaper reports.

Employees of Fusion GPS have refused through their lawyers to testify before the House Intelligence Committee. “We cannot in good conscience do anything but advise our clients to stand on their constitutional privileges, the attorney work product doctrine and contractual obligations,” Fusion GPS attorney Josh Levy wrote earlier this month.

Meanwhile, the mainstream media’s efforts to cover for the Clintons is about to get harder.

That’s because the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Oversight and Government Reform will carry out a joint investigation of the 2010 sale of a U.S. company controlling one-fifth of the nation’s uranium supply to a Russian company.

Rep. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) says a confidential informant has come forward and that the two committees are trying to get the Department of Justice (DoJ) to release the person from a nondisclosure agreement, The Hill reports. House GOP leadership is fully committed to the Uranium One probe, DeSantis said Tuesday, of the investigation that is viewed as separate and distinct from broader investigations into election meddling by Russians.

New York seems to be following in the footsteps of Los Angeles, where municipal politics has long met with collective uninterest. Mayor Bill de Blasio, who enjoys a large polling lead in his November reelection bid, took a vacation prior to his late August debate with Sal Albanese, a former city councilman little known to most New Yorkers. Earlier this year, when de Blasio feared that his mishandling of the city’s homeless problems and the multiple city, state, and federal investigations into his ethics violations might pose a threat, he concocted a new slogan for his 2017 campaign: “One city for all New Yorkers,” a pointed contrast with his winning 2013 message decrying New York’s “Tale of Two Cities.” He also announced that he would pay for the legal costs involved in his numerous mayoral shenanigans. But after federal attorney Preet Bharara decided against prosecuting him for trading campaign money for influence, de Blasio dropped his contrived slogan about unity, while also announcing that he’d changed his mind—city funds would be used to cover his multimillion-dollar legal costs, after all. A man who often naps after his morning workouts, de Blasio has dropped the pretense of working hard as mayor. Instead, he works hard at opposing President Donald Trump, even journeying to Berlin to join street demonstrators against the G-20 summit—rather than sticking around to console the family of NYPD officer Miosotis Familia, assassinated in her squad car that same week.

A similar mayoral dynamic can be seen in Los Angeles, where Democrat Eric Garcetti, running for reelection this year on an anti-Trump, pro-sanctuary-cities platform, won with a record 81 percent of the vote. But running virtually unopposed against a slate of also-rans, Garcetti garnered barely 330,000 votes in a city of almost 4 million people. That amounts to just 20 percent of registered voters—though that didn’t “beat” the record-low of 17.9 percent achieved by previous L.A. mayor Antonio Villaraigosa in his 2009 reelection victory. Garcetti’s easy victory left him with a campaign war chest amounting to $3 million—money that will serve him well should he try, in 2018, to succeed 84-year-old Dianne Feinstein in the Senate. It’s not clear yet whether Feinstein will retire, but even if she does, L.A. mayors, no matter how popular, have never been able to win statewide office.

The civic indifference that makes such incumbent dominance possible in both cities is driven by the same source: the sharp decline of middle-class voters for whom the city is a matter of civic responsibility, on the one hand, and the mounting power of public-sector interest groups, for whom the city is a matter of financial interest, on the other. By de Blasio’s good fortune, these same public-sector interest groups, particularly the teachers’ unions, will play a major role at the 2020 Democratic convention.

In his first term, de Blasio invested his limited energies in styling himself as a leading light of the party’s progressive wing. He was slow to endorse the “insufficiently progressive” Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Iowa caucuses, though he’d served as her campaign manager in her successful 2000 Senate run. De Blasio tried to leverage the popularity of Thomas Piketty’s much-noted book on capitalism and income inequality, but he was humiliated when none of the Democratic Party presidential candidates showed up at his forum on the growing class divide.

Undeterred, de Blasio will likely spend much of his second term trying to fashion himself into a plausible presidential candidate. His campaign will be initially underwritten by several million dollars in public funds distributed by the city’s Campaign Finance Board (created to ensure that monied interests don’t dominate city politics). The 56-year-old de Blasio can argue that he’s a more attractive candidate for millennial voters than Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, who will be 71, or Bernie Sanders, who will be 78, come 2020. He can also tout his progressive bona fides by pointing to, among other policies, his institution of universal pre-K schooling in New York.

But before he can focus on events outside the five boroughs, de Blasio will turn his attention to undermining New York governor Andrew Cuomo, his rival for state and national power. De Blasio has been quietly backing Sex in the City star Cynthia Nixon, who seems to be preparing a challenge in 2018, when Cuomo will be seeking a third term. Nixon, who has lobbied for more education funding, is an identity-politics triple threat: a gay female with celebrity status who will run to Cuomo’s left. Even if she loses, she could tarnish the governor, thus enhancing de Blasio’s prospects.

What comes of de Blasio’s possible presidential run in 2020 is contingent, of course, on what happens over the next two years. Will his ethical failures come back to haunt him? “Emails, obtained through a records request, show [Jim] Capalino’s stable of lobbyists were so entrenched in the minutiae of de Blasio’s first term, they formed an unofficial, additional layer of government—sometimes instructing staffers how to do their jobs—all while advancing the interests of their paying clients,” Politico reported in August. The de Blasio ethics drama hasn’t seen its last act. Meantime, what becomes of President Trump? Will Hillary Clinton try to run again? Will any Democrat emerge from the heartland? How strong is California’s first-term senator, Kamala Harris? Harris, of Indian and Jamaican descent, is already looking to 2020. De Blasio has his own identity-politics card to play: his wife, Chirlane McCray, is African-American, allowing de Blasio to present himself as the candidate who closes the racial gap. Like Garcetti, de Blasio labors under a historical shadow: no New York mayor has moved on to higher office since the mid-nineteenth century. But no New York mayor has ever had a target quite like Donald Trump.