Friday Night Recap

So much to report.  First, all the high-level departures didn’t happen, yet.

• White House chief of staff Kelly admitted Donald Trump is most likely feeding the rumor mill by speculating about job changes to people on the outside who are then feeding it to the press.
• Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe was fired, hours before he was to retire and become eligible for his pension.
• Donald Trump sent a scathing midnight tweet:

The timing of the termination seems suspicious at best.  Remember this from December?

Reaction to McCabe’s firing has been fierce.  John Brennan, the former director of the CIA, blasted Trump:

Then there’s Cambridge Analytica.  The data firm used by the Trump campaign in 2016 has been suspended from Facebook.  This is a big deal.  From The Washington Post:

• “Cambridge Analytica, a firm that specializes in using online data to create voter personality profiles in order to target users with political messages, ran data operations for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. The company was funded by Trump supporter and hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, and the president’s former senior adviser Stephen K. Bannon once sat on its board. The company, which began working for the Trump campaign in June 2016, promised that its so-called “psychographic” profiles could predict the personality and political leanings of every adult in the United States.”
• And now we’re learning the number of profiles harvested is much larger than previously thought.  From The New York Times:
• “So the firm harvested private information from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their permission, according to former Cambridge employees, associates and documents, making it one of the largest data leaks in the social network’s history. The breach allowed the company to exploit the private social media activity of a huge swath of the American electorate, developing techniques that underpinned its work on President Trump’s campaign in 2016.”

https://twitter.com/SarahLerner/status/975001087504613377

But wait, there’s more.  Also last night, more on the Stormy front.  Donald Trump has now added his name to the legal action against the porn star Jessica Clifford, aka Stormy Daniels.  From The New York Times:

• President Trump, weighing in directly on the Stephanie Clifford case for the first time, claimed in court papers filed by his lawyers on Friday that the porn actress who alleges she had an affair with him violated a confidentiality agreement at least 20 times, exposing her to damages of at least $20 million.
• Until now, Mr. Trump had kept his distance from the legal wrangling, leaving it to his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, to take the lead in refuting Ms. Clifford’s claims. And the White House has refused to say how involved Mr. Trump had even been in the initial agreement with Ms. Clifford, signed in October 2016.