On Thursday evening, while the White House was scrambling to respond to Michael Wolff’s explosive Fire and Fury, The New York Times reported that Trump in March of last year ordered White House counsel Don McGahn to prevent Jeff Sessions from recusing himself from the FBI’s Russia probe. According to the Times’s Michael Schmidt, Trump was enraged because he believed that it was the attorney general’s duty to protect the president:

Mr. McGahn was unsuccessful, and the president erupted in anger in front of numerous White House officials, saying he needed his attorney general to protect him. Mr. Trump said he had expected his top law enforcement official to safeguard him the way he believed Robert F. Kennedy, as attorney general, had done for his brother John F. Kennedy and Eric H. Holder Jr. had for Barack Obama.

The report also details how one White House lawyer withheld from Trump the conclusions of a report that said the president could fire the FBI director, fearing that such an act would imperil the administration. Contemporaneous notes taken by former White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus also reportedly back up the account that former FBI Director James Comey gave to Congress, in which Comey claimed that Trump had called on him to publicly declare that the president was not personally under investigation. Trump has repeatedly implied that Comey was lying. Special counsel Robert Mueller has reportedly been examining these actions.

These revelations are important additions to the growing pile of evidence that Trump fired the FBI director with the intent of obstructing justice. They also suggest that the Mueller investigation is coalescing around an obstruction of justice charge, rather than the charge that Trump colluded with the Russians during the 2016 campaign, though as the Times notes, legal experts disagree on whether Mueller has enough to make the obstruction charge stick.

According to a report in The Omaha World-Herald, the FBI is investigating a Missouri man for stopping an Amtrak train in Nebraska with the intent of harming passengers. The man, Taylor Wilson, carried a business card belonging to the National Socialist Movement in Detroit, in addition to a .38 caliber handgun, several speedloaders, ammunition, a hammer, and a knife. Investigators later discovered that Wilson had attended August’s white supremacist protests in Charlottesville, Virginia:

In the affidavit, Czaplewski recounted statements from an acquaintance of Wilson’s who said Wilson had traveled with neo-Nazis to protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, which authorities believe was the Unite the Right rally in which a woman was killed in August.

The acquaintance also said Wilson “has expressed an interest in ‘killing black people’ ... especially during the protests in St. Louis.” The affidavit notes that Wilson is the chief suspect in a road rage incident on Interstate 70 in which a white man pointed a gun at a black female in another vehicle. The license plate of the man’s car tracked back to Wilson.

News of the investigation breaks weeks after a neo-Nazi teenager in Virginia murdered his girlfriend’s parents for trying to break the couple up. Had Wilson succeeded in killing the Amtrak passengers, he’d have added to a rising number of politically-motivated murders and terrorist attacks committed by white supremacists in the United States—an urgent problem, even if it is not reflected in U.S. policy. On its website, the Southern Poverty Law Center says the results of an August report produced by the Congressional Research Service highlighted “several gaps in U.S. policy related to identifying, analyzing, and assessing domestic terrorist threats. It notes that domestic terrorists ‘have not received as much attention from federal law enforcement as their violent jihadist counterparts,’ which has not always been the case.”

Also in August, Katharine Gorka, wife of Seb Gorka, successfully urged the Department of Homeland Security to pull anti-terrorism funding from Life After Hate, a non-profit that deradicalizes white supremacists. With Donald Trump in office, stopping would-be terrorists like Taylor Wilson has increasingly become a matter of luck.

On Wednesday, the Trump administration announced that it was ending its Kris Kobach-led investigation into voter fraud. “Despite substantial evidence of voter fraud, many states have refused to provide the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity with basic information relevant to its inquiry,” Trump said in a statement on Wednesday. “Rather than engage in endless legal battles at taxpayer expense, today I signed an executive order to dissolve the commission, and have asked the Department of Homeland Security to review these issues and determine next courses of action.” 

The commission began after Trump claimed that he lost the popular vote in the 2016 election because millions voted illegally, despite there being no evidence of widespread voter fraud (and little evidence of any voter fraud at all). The commission was undercut from the start because Kobach demanded that states, which administer elections, hand over reams of sensitive information, including social security numbers. The opposition to the panel was bipartisan: 44 states refused to hand over information to Kobach.  

This lack of cooperation essentially meant that the commission was doomed. Based on a conspiracy theory, it represented an expensive and unpopular investigation of a non-issue. But Trump has used the decision to disband the panel to bolster his argument that voter fraud is widespread. 

Again, 44 states, including Republican ones, refused to cooperate with the commission. The end of the commission is undoubtedly a victory, since Kobach would have used it to push for national laws designed to suppress voters. But it’s clear that Trump and other Republicans will continue to use voter fraud as an excuse to try to pass restrictive laws at the state level. 

A bill introduced Wednesday in the California State Assembly would require all new vehicles sold in 2040 to be zero emissions (with the exception of commercial trucks over 10,001 pounds). “More cars are sold each year in California than in any other state—and more than in some countries,” Bloomberg reports. “If adopted, the measure would eliminate a huge chunk of carbon emissions as part of the state’s quest to slash greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent from 1990 levels by 2050.”

As of 2015, the transportation sector was responsible for 39 percent of California’s greenhouse gas emissions. And last month, for the first time in 40 years, transportation surpassed power plants as the top greenhouse gas emitter in the United States. That’s mainly because the electricity sector has increasingly turned away from coal in favor of natural gas; transportation emissions have been relatively flat since 2000. “Cars are becoming more efficient under aggressive pollution rules passed under President Barack Obama,” Bloomberg reported, “but that’s so far been offset by an ever-rising American appetite for SUVs, crossovers and pickup trucks.”

A countrywide ban on gas vehicles, then, would drastically reduce America’s greenhouse gas emissions. It’s not a far-fetched idea. Norway, the Netherlands, France, the United Kingdom, India, and China all plan to phase out vehicles fully powered by fossil fuels. But the Trump administration is tacking in the other direction. In August, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Transportation Department began the process of rolling back fuel-efficiency standards that were approved under President Barack Obama and set to take effect in 2022. “Many analysts believe that rolling back fuel standards could jeopardize the near term future for electric vehicles,” NPR reported. The silver lining here: In passing their tax-cut bill, Republicans decided not to kill the electric vehicle tax credit after all.

The Associated Press reported on Thursday morning that Attorney General Jeff Sessions will rescind rules that facilitated the passage of legal marijuana laws at the state level. According to the report, state prosecutors will soon be able to decide how aggressively they will enforce federal laws on marijuana:

The move by President Donald Trump’s attorney general likely will add to confusion about whether it’s OK to grow, buy, or use marijuana in states where pot is legal, since long-standing federal law prohibits it. It comes days after pot shops opened in California, launching what is expected to become the world’s largest market for legal recreational marijuana and as polls show a solid majority of Americans believe the drug should be legal.

In October 2017, a Gallup poll found that fully 64 percent of Americans support legalizing marijuana. Republicans were divided on the issue, reporting a 51-49 split. Sessions’s long-running antipathy to legal marijuana—he once joked that he thought the KKK “were OK until I found out they smoked pot”—doesn’t really reflect the sentiments of his party’s base, or the American electorate at large. With California poised to become the world’s largest market for legal marijuana, it seems unlikely that a government-helmed war on pot will help the GOP’s chances.

It could, however, be an opportunity for Democrats. In California, the law that legalized pot drew most of its support from two factions of the party’s traditional base: Young voters and black voters. For a party whose midterm chances rest significantly on its ability to turn out voters in greater numbers than usual, pushing for legal marijuana could make a difference.

At The Intercept, former Times investigative reporter James Risen asserts that the paper’s editorial leadership had squashed stories critical of the Bush administration’s line on Iraq:

What angered me most was that while they were burying my skeptical stories, the editors were not only giving banner headlines to stories asserting that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, they were also demanding that I help match stories from other publications about Iraq’s purported WMD programs. I grew so sick of this that when The Washington Post reported that Iraq had turned over nerve gas to terrorists, I refused to try to match the story. One mid-level editor in the Washington bureau yelled at me for my refusal. He came to my desk carrying a golf club while berating me after I told him that the story was bullshit and I wasn’t going to make any calls on it.

Risen also claims that the administration exerted direct pressure on the Times to bury a major scoop on the NSA’s post-9/11 surveillance in the name of protecting national security. In Risen’s account, editor after editor accepted the Bush administration’s rationale almost entirely uncritically. But the problem wasn’t limited to the Times:

That fall, I became so concerned that the Times would not run the NSA story and that I would be fired that I secretly met with another national news organization about a job. I told a senior editor there that I had a major story that the Times had refused to run under pressure from the White House. I didn’t tell him anything about the story, but I said if they hired me, I would give the story to them. The senior editor replied that their publication would never run a piece if the White House raised objections on national security grounds. I left that meeting more depressed than ever.

The Times did eventually publish the story, a delayed decision that enraged the Bush White House and led to an investigation of Risen’s sources. Things didn’t improve under Bush’s successor. The Obama administration also pursued Risen’s sources for another story on the CIA’s Operation Merlin in Iran; Risen says they used the case to “destroy the legal underpinnings of the reporter’s privilege in the 4th Circuit.”

The Guardian reports that Michael Wolff’s new book, Fire and Fury, contains explosive comments from Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist, about contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia. “The three senior guys in the campaign thought it was a good idea to meet with a foreign government inside Trump Tower in the conference room on the 25th floor—with no lawyers,” Bannon told Wolff. “They didn’t have any lawyers. Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad shit, and I happen to think it’s all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately.”

This might seem like a damning admission on Bannon’s part, but is actually a part of the ongoing intramural battle in Trump world. Bannon, the CEO of Breitbart, has a longstanding hatred of Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, who is often blamed for derailing Trump’s nationalist and populist policies. In his comments to Wolff, Bannon isn’t expressing horror at treason, but suggesting that Kushner and company were too stupid to do it properly. Bannon even suggests that campaign collusion with Russia could have worked if there were proper cut-outs:

Bannon went on, Wolff writes, to say that if any such meeting had to take place, it should have been set up “in a Holiday Inn in Manchester, New Hampshire, with your lawyers who meet with these people”. Any information, he said, could then be “dump[ed] … down to Breitbart or something like that, or maybe some other more legitimate publication”.

Bannon added: “You never see it, you never know it, because you don’t need to … But that’s the brain trust that they had.”

Bannon is speaking as a disgruntled former employee, making the case that he would not have screwed up as much as the guys who still work in the White House have.