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President Trump offered a fulsome defense of Russian President Vladimir Putin over the weekend, leaving Republican lawmakers frustrated and flummoxed yet again by the presidents warm feelings toward the rival nation.

In a Fox News interview, Trump, who during the campaign repeatedly praised Putin, again said that he respected the Russian leader and hoped to get along with Moscow, and he seemed to equate the United States with its adversary when pressed by host Bill OReilly, who said:But hes a killer, though. Putins a killer.

There are a lot of killers, Trump said in the interview, which aired Sunday before the Super Bowl. Weve got a lot of killers. What do you think? Our countrys so innocent?

Trumps comments came even as his U.N. envoy, Nikki Haley, on Thursday condemned Russias aggressive actions in eastern Ukraine and as both the Senate and House intelligence committees launched investigations into alleged hacking by Russia of the U.S. election that the intelligence community believes was intended to benefit Trump.

The issue of Russia dogged Trumps presidential campaign including after a news conference at which he suggested that Russia hack Hillary Clintons emails and his latest comments left Capitol Hill Republicans scrambling to distance themselves from the president and his unusually friendly stance toward Putin, who has praised the president as asmart man.

In an interview with CNNs State of the Union on Sunday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), called Putin a former KGB agent and a thug, and he rejected any comparison between the two nations, citing Russias annexation of Crimea, its incursions into Ukraine and its interference in the U.S. presidential election.

I dont think theres any equivalency between the way that the Russians conduct themselves and the way the United States does, McConnell said.

The senator added that while he hoped not tocritique the presidents every utterance, he found significant differences between the two nations. I do think America is exceptional. America is different, McConnell said. We dont operate in any way the way the Russians do. I think theres a clear distinction here that all Americans understand, and no, I would not have characterized it that way.

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) was similarly wary. Speaker Ryan has consistently and frequently spoken out on Russia and Putin and made his opinions well known, including the need for continued sanctions, spokeswoman AshLee Strong said Sunday.

She pointed to Ryans comments last month at a CNN town hall broadcast, during which he called Russia a global menace and said that Putin does not share our interests; he frustrates our interests.

Let me put it this way: The Russians are up to no good. We all know that, Ryan said, responding to a question about Russias election meddling. Weve got to make sure going forward that we do everything we can on cyber, on all of the other things to make sure that they cant do this again.

Congressional Republicans have broken with Trump over dozens of controversial statements he has made during his campaign, his transition and now his presidency. But few issues appear to have confounded lawmakers as much as his consistent defense of Putin. Trumps coziness is at odds with years of Republican foreign policy orthodoxy calling for a more aggressive stance toward Putins regime.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) weighed in on Twitter with two missives that he personally penned.When has a Democratic political activists ever been poisoned by the GOP or vice versa? We are not the same as #Putin, he wrote. In a second tweet, he said that the United States should lift sanctions on Russia only if it ends its violations in Ukraine.

And Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), the daughter of former vice president Richard B. Cheney, also took to Twitter to say that Trumps statement suggesting moral equivalence between Putins Russia and the United States of America is deeply troubling and wrong.

Appearing on four Sunday news shows, Vice President Pencerejected the notion that Trump had equated Russia to the United States.

I simply dont accept that there was any moral equivalency in the presidents comments, Pence said on CBSs Face the Nation. There was no moral equivalency. What you heard there was a determination to attempt to deal with the world as it is to start afresh with Putin and to start afresh with Russia.

Pressed by John Dickerson, the shows host, on whether he believed the United States was morally superior to Russia, Pence repeatedly dodged the question, instead finally saying,American ideals are superior to countries all across the world.

Pence, who would not commit to maintaining sanctions against Russia if it continues to violate a cease-fire agreement in Ukraine, nonetheless took a slightly harder line than the president on Russia.

Asked on ABCs This Week whether the White House planned to put Russia on notice, as it had Iran, over violating the cease-fire, Pence said, Were watching, and very troubled by the increased hostilities over the past week in eastern Ukraine.

But healso broadly defended his boss, saying, Theres a new style of leadership, not just a new leader in the White House.

President Trump is bringing a very candid and direct type of leadership to the White House, Pence said. And in conversations with leaders around the world, frankly, I think they all find it very refreshing.

Not everyone seemed to agree. Gov. John Kasich of Ohio, who ran against Trump during the 2016 Republican primaries, issued a sharp rebuke on Twitter.America has been a beacon of light and freedom, he wrote.There is no equivalence with the brutal regime of Vladimir Putin.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) called for an investigation by the FBI into Trumps financial, personal and political connections to Russia.

I want to know what the Russians have on Donald Trump, she said on NBCs Meet the Press. We want to see his tax returns so we can have truth in the relationship between Putin, whom he admires, and Donald Trump.

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Trump's continued defense of Putin confounds Republicans - Washington Post

Congress, as you know, is unpopular.

The countrys legislative body has done a lot to foster that attitude, of course, with cynical hypocrisies and partisan nonsense. Some of our attitudes toward Congress are steeped in tradition; like airline food, Congress is something that were just supposed to dislike.

But something interesting happened recently, according to new polling from CNN and its pollster, ORC. Congressional leaders the faces of Congress that people are more likely to know beyond their own senators and representative are slightly more popular than they used to be. Or, at least, Republican ones are.

Job-approval ratings for Democratic congressional leaders have generally been higher than Republican ones since the dawn of the Obama era. This is in part simply because Democrats generally have a more positive inclination toward government, certainly, but its also because having a Democratic president offered them a boost.

Notice what happened to opinions of Democratic leaders as Barack Obama campaigned for and won the presidency. The approval honeymoon didnt last for Obama or his colleagues on Capitol Hill but it helped.

More recently, opinions of Democratic leaders have been fairly flat at least during the points at which CNN-ORC polled.

Compare that with attitudes on Republican leaders.

The new number is fascinating in part because of how dramatically the Republicans fortunes shifted over the past year or so. Twelve months ago, the party appeared to be on the verge of splintering, forced apart by the apparently doomed candidacy of Donald Trump, whose nomination might rend the GOP into two dissimilar factions. Republican leaders who opposed Trump appeared to be poised to be at distance from the partys Trump-enthusiastic base.

But winning is a wonderful political salve. The sudden uptick in approval for Republican leaders on the Hill is strongly linked to improved opinions from within the Republican Party. In fact, since 2008, attitudes about Republican leaders from Republicans have never been anywhere near where they were in CNN-ORCs new poll.

Opinions of Democratic leaders among Democrats, meanwhile, are at a low.

Notice in that second graph that Republican leaders, too, benefited from the onset of the Obama era, which appeared to be poised to bring about a new comity in politics for about a day. This is the lesson that Republican leaders should probably heed. Approval of the job theyre doing is at a new high. It very well could be at a high-water mark, and they may have nowhere to go but down.

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Republicans have finally fallen in love with their leaders in Congress - Washington Post

Much of the country has been watching in horror as Donald Trump has made good on his promises to eviscerate the Environmental Protection Agency delaying30 regulations, severely limiting the information staffers can release, and installing Scott Pruitt as the agencys administrator to destroy the agency from within. But even those keeping their eyes on the EPAmay have missed aquieter attack on environmental protections now being launched in Congress.

On Tuesday, theHouse Committee on Science, Space, and Technology is expected to hold a hearing on a bill to undermine health regulations that is based on a strategy cooked up by tobacco industry strategists more than two decades ago. At what Republicans on the committee have dubbed the Making EPA Great Again hearing, lawmakers are likelyto discuss The Secret Science Reform Act, a bill that would limit the EPA to using only data that can be replicated or made available for independent analysis.

The proposal may sound reasonable enough at first. But because health research often contains confidential personalinformation that is illegal to share, the bill would prevent the EPA from using many of the best scientific studies. It would also prohibit usingstudies of one-time events, such as the Gulf oil spill or the effect of a partial ban ofchlorpyrifoson children, which fueled the EPAs decision to eliminate all agricultural uses of the pesticide, because these events and thus the studies of them cant be repeated. Although it is nominally about transparency, the bill leaves intactprotectionsthat allow industry to keep much of its own inner workings and skewed research secret from the public, while delegitimizing studies done by researchers with no vested interest in their outcome.

The top-billed witness scheduled to provide testimony at the House hearing on Tuesday is a lawyer named Jeffrey Holmstead, who has has worked to block the EPAs efforts to limit mercury pollution while representing coal companies including Duke Energy, Progress Energy, and Southern Company. Meanwhile, Lamar Smith, the Texas Republican chair of the House Science Committee who has been zealously promoting the secret science bill, is also in the pocket of the energy companies. Though hes also received funding from Koch Industries andiHeartMedia(formerly Clear Channel Communications), Smiths biggest contributors areoil and gascompanies, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Also testifying on Tuesday will be Kimberly Smith of the American Chemistry Council, the chemical industry trade group.

This bald industry bid to subvert public health-based regulations that can cut into profit isnt new. Whats new is that this upside-down environmental attack, in which those who benefit directly from polluting industries are policing the independent scientists who can show the harms of their products, could now succeed. Although the House passed the secret science bill in 2014 and 2015, it never made it to the Senate floor. After it passed the House in 2015, Barbara Boxer called the bill insane, Bernie Sanders called it laughable, and President Obama promised to veto it. This time, its not a joke. With a Republican majority in both houses and Trump in the White House, the Secret Science act could easily become law.

Graphic: The Intercept

E&E senior policy fellow Steve Milloy, a former tobacco industry attorney, has perhaps written the most at least publicly about the secret science strategy, both in anebookand for Steve BannonsBreitbart News. Milloy calls Myron Ebell, who oversaw Trumps EPA transition team, his friend and hero. In the late 1990s, Milloy and Ebellwere both members of the American Petroleum Institutes Global Climate Science Communications Team, which laid out oil industrys strategy to undermine the science of global warming. Meanwhile, three of Milloys colleagues from E&E are also members of the EPA landing team. Among them are David Schnare, E&Es general counsel, who is perhaps best known for harassing Michael Mann and other environmental scientists with FOIA requests, and Amy Oliver Cooke, an energy industry think tanker who created MILF,Mothers In Love with Fracking.

Amy Oliver Cooke describes her love for fracking.

Two other E&E associates have been wrapped up in the secret science strategy for years. The first is Christopher Horner, a senior fellow at both E&E and the Competitive Enterprise Institute who is also a member of Trumps EPA landing team. Back in the 1990s, Horner worked for Bracewell LLP, the law firm (formerly known as Bracewell &Giuliani) supplying the top witness at Tuesdayshearing. The dawning awareness of the dangers of second-hand smoke was putting tobacco companies on the defensive, including Horners client, the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company. In a 1996memo,which seems to be the earliest known reference to the secret science strategy, Horner laid out a plan to fight back.

We propose creating, beginning with congressional oversight and a goal of enacting legislation, required review procedures which EPA and other federal agencies must follow, Horner wrotein his memo. This is important to your organization because, at some point in the near future, EPA will most likely be ordered to re-examine ETS [environmental tobacco smoke]. Horners plan? To construct explicit procedural hurdles the Agency must follow in issuing scientific reports. Because there is virtually no chance of affecting change on this issue if the focus is ETS.

Horner already saw that the secret science approach could subvert far more than the imminent regulations based on the science about second-hand smoke. Our approach is one of addressing process as opposed to scientific substance, and global applicability to industry rather than focusing on any single industrial sector, he wrote, going on to explain how the strategy could be used to interfere with the EPAs efforts to address mercury emissions, hazardous waste, and dioxins as well as air restrictions on air pollution.

By 1998, Powell Tate, a lobbying firm that represented R.J. Reynolds, had helped organize a secret science working group to look at questions of data access, according toone internal memo. The memo clarified that its intention was to focus public opinion on the importance of requiring the disclosure of tax-payer funded analytical data.

Though it was the brainchild of tobacco strategists, the energy industry soon followed Horners advice and adopted the secret science approach as a way to hamper air quality improvement efforts. In the 1990s, the EPA began efforts to reduce the amount of tiny particles in the air, a kind of pollution known as PM 2.5, that are produced by combustion from power plants, cars, and manufacturing. The clearest evidence of the need to limit such particlescame from the Six Citiesstudy, in which a team of Harvard researchers clearly tied higher levels of PM 2.5 particles to increased mortality, as well as lung cancer, asthma, and sudden infant death syndrome.

While the new limitswere designed to save lives preventing 15,000 premature deaths annually, according to EPA projections therules would also increase costs in some sectors by, for instance, making energy companies install pollution equipment. In response, a group funded by the Koch brothers rose up to challenge the EPA and the scientists on the grounds that scientists were hiding their data from the public.Citizens for a Sound Economy, a forerunner of the Koch brothers currentFreedom Works, demanded that the Harvard researchers provide their original data so an independent scientist could analyze it.

At first the researchers refused to share the data, which they had collected from individuals with the promise that their health information would remain confidential. Eventually, after an elaborate and expensive pressure campaign, the Six Cities researchers agreed to allow their data to be reanalyzed by two separate teams of researchers. Both confirmed the groups findings that rates of PM 2.5 were correlated with increased mortality.

The EPA went on to institute the changes. And scientists throughout the world have since come to recognize the dangers posed by small particle air pollution, which accounted for over 2.1 million premature deaths and 52 million years of healthy life lost in 2010, according to the 2010Global Burden of Diseasereport. The report drew on research by more than 450 experts from around the world and was led by the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington; the World Health Organization; the University of Queensland, Australia; Johns Hopkins University; and Harvard University.

Despite the scientific consensus, a small group of extremists has continued to fixate on the idea that the science on the dangers of air pollution is somehow a sham. Even more disturbingly, this small extreme group now holds sway in key parts of the U.S. government. Not least among them is Rep. Lamar Smith, who in 2013subpoenaedthe EPA in yet another effort to obtain the data from the Six Cities study.

In anop-edthat ran in the Wall Street Journal shortly afterward, Smith noted that the data in question have not been subjected to scrutiny and analysis by independent scientists. Smith pressed his point in a House Science Committee hearing a few days later, insisting that independent scientists were being denied access to the air pollution data. When Democrat Donna Edwards pressed Smith about who these scientists were, he mentioned the name Jim Enstrom.

Enstrom, you may not be surprised to learn, has been a research fellow at E&E and hasreceived moneyfrom the Council for Tobacco Research, the Tobacco Institute, Philip Morris, and R.J. Reynolds. In part because he didnt disclose his tobacco industry ties in a study he did on the connection between second-hand smoke and mortality (which hefoundto be inconclusive), he was widely criticized by the scientific community, including the American Cancer Society, and was subsequently dismissedfrom UCLA.

Top photo: Water vapor rises from the smoke stack of a petrochemical refinery located along the Houston ship channel in Houston, Texas, U.S., on Monday, Jan. 3, 2011.

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Republicans Are Using Big Tobacco's Secret Science Playbook to Gut Health Rules - The Intercept

Once again, President Trumps professed admiration for his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin is causing headaches for fellow Republicans and drawing fire from Democrats but this time, with a twist.

When Fox News Bill OReilly observed while interviewing Trump that Putin is a killer, the president retorted: You think our country is so innocent?

Vice President Mike Pence, asked in several talk-show appearances about the presidents seeming comparison of officially sanctioned extrajudicial killings in Russia with unspecified U.S. actions, said Trump had merely intended to stress his own desire to re-engage the Kremlin.

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I simply dont accept that there was any moral equivalency in the presidents comments, Pence said on CBS Face the Nation, casting the remarks instead as an attempt to deal with the world as it isto start afresh with Russia.

Some congressional Republicans, though, sought to distance themselves from Trumps apparent comparison or attack it outright. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, a onetime rival for the Republican presidential nomination, tweeted: We are not the same as Putin.

Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska, speaking on ABCs This Week, also said he saw no equivalency between the U.S. and murderous thugs acting at Putins behest, but said there might be additional context in the Trump-OReilly interview, which had not aired in full at the time he spoke. Excerpts had been released in advance.

Democrats were harsher in their response. I really do resent that he would say something like that, said Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, also interviewed on ABC. She said she did not think there was any comparison to be made.

From his campaign days forward, Trump has spoken repeatedly of his hopes for a friendly relationship with Putin, prompting expressions of concern from some lawmakers and from European leaders who fear he is not sufficiently mindful of Russias bellicose moves in Ukraine and elsewhere.

Trump also spent the early days of his presidency feuding with the U.S. intelligence agencies over their assessment that Russian cyber-attacks were intended to sway the American presidential election in his favor.

The U.S. president has made similar remarks in the past about Putins reputation for violent retribution against perceived political enemies. He told interviewer Joe Scarborough in 2015 when the talk-show host pointed out that Putin kills journalists who oppose him that our country has done plenty of killing , too.

This was the first time since taking office, though, that Trump has used such language in defending Putin, whom he says he hopes to enlist as an ally in the fight against the jihadists of Islamic State.

There are a lot of killers. We have a lot of killers, Trump said in the Fox interview.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, in an interview on CNN, said he wasnt going to critique every utterance of Trumps, but didnt defend him either.

I obviously dont see this issue the same way he does, he said. America is different we dont operate in any way the way the Russians do.

Pence, speaking on NBCs Meet the Press, avoided directly answering the question of whether he thought Trump had misspoken. He said it was important not to let semantics get in the way of exploring ways to work together with Russia.

Russias harsh dealings with dissenters came under renewed scrutiny this week when a prominent Putin critic U.S. green card holder Vladimir Kara-Murza, who lives in Virginia -- showed symptoms of poisoning for the second time in two years during a visit to Moscow.

Rubio appeared to allude to that case in his tweet, asking when was the last time a Democratic political activist had been poisoned by the GOP, or vice versa. The Florida Republican said separately on Twitter that sanctions on Russia should be lifted only if Putin halted aggressive actions in Ukraine.

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Ninth Circuit turns down Trump's request to immediately reinstate his travel ban - Los Angeles Times

Wall Street Journal

Republicans Get Ready to Roll Back Dodd-Frank Law - WSJ Wall Street Journal WASHINGTONRepublicans in Congress are preparing to release plans to roll back the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial overhaul as early as this week, following an ... and more »

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Republicans Get Ready to Roll Back Dodd-Frank Law - WSJ - Wall Street Journal