Susan Rice, who served as ambassador to the United Nations and national security adviser in the Obama administration, gave her first interview on Tuesday after it was reported that she requested that the names of Trump campaign officials swept up in intelligence surveillance be unmasked. She denied that the Obama White House “played politics” with the intelligence.

“The allegation is that somehow, Obama administration officials utilized intelligence for political purposes. That’s absolutely false,” Rice told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell. “The notion, which some people are trying to suggest, that by asking for the identity of the American person is the same is leaking it—that’s completely false. There is no equivalence between so-called unmasking and leaking.

“I leaked nothing to nobody,” she also told Mitchell emphatically. But when Rice was asked if she did, in fact, ask for Trump campaign officials’ names to be unmasked she admitted she had. “Absolutely not for any political purposes to spy, expose, anything,” she added.

Rice’s argument, in other words, is that she requested that Trump campaign officials be unmasked not for political reasons but because intelligence reports suggested they may have been doing something illegal. The Trump White House and the right have been giddy ever since it became clear that Rice was behind the unmasking—though there is nothing that ties her to the leaking of classified information. It increasingly looks like Trump campaign officials were unmasked not because of who they were but because of what they were suspected of doing.

The New York Times Magazine has a fascinating profile of Zucker and CNN under Trump. There are plenty of juicy details in it—including the fact that Trump considered giving exclusive rights to his inauguration to Fox News, suggesting he’s incapable of thinking about politics outside of his own base. But the biggest takeaway is that Zucker realized in 2016 that the network’s programming should revolve around Trump’s star. Here are two telling paragraphs:

It’s hard to imagine that either Trump or Zucker would be where he is today without the other. Trump’s foray into reality TV gave Zucker a prime-time hit when he badly needed one; now, Trump’s foray into politics has given Zucker a big story when he badly needed one. It’s a symbiotic relationship that could only thrive in the world of television, where the borders between news and entertainment, and even fantasy and reality, have grown increasingly murky....

As Zucker sees it, his pro-Trump panelists are not just spokespeople for a worldview; they are “characters in a drama,” members of CNN’s extended ensemble cast. “Everybody says, ‘Oh, I can’t believe you have Jeffery Lord or Kayleigh McEnany,’ but you know what?” Zucker told me with some satisfaction. “They know who Jeffrey Lord and Kayleigh McEnany are.”

CNN still does great reporting (particularly online) and it has more than its fair share of excellent journalists, many of whom—like Jim Acosta and Jake Tapper—have also become characters in the Trump pageant. But Zucker’s main realization was that putting Trump front-and-center—and allowing people like Lord and McEnany to provide a credible-seeming foundation for his lies, half-truths, and ravings—instead of, say, reporting or news, would let the network thrive. And the only cost was the destruction of the country.

As The New York Times reported on Saturday, Fox News and O’Reilly have paid a total of $13 million in settlements to five women who have accused him of a range of sexual harassment behavior. Two of the settlements happened after Roger Ailes was kicked out of the company for his own sexual harassment scandal, and one was secretly settled by O’Reilly himself in 2011. This might raise the question: Why let O’Reilly stay? But the answer has always been obvious: He is Fox News’s biggest draw.

That may begin to change: Advertisers like Mercedes-Benz, Hyundai, and BMW are beginning to pull their advertising dollars from the show. O’Reilly himself has denied any wrongdoing, releasing a statement suggesting that his prominence made him an easy target, and that he had agreed to the settlements in order to spare his children bad publicity. But these latest revelations, along with racial harassment lawsuits against Fox News, have begun to make the cable news giant as scandal-ridden as the president it is committed to.

Update: In a statement, Fox News said it was working with advertisers “to address their current concerns about the O’Reilly Factor.”

The administration is giddy at the reports that Susan Rice, who served as President Obama’s national security adviser, requested that names of Trump campaign officials caught up in surveillance be unmasked. (Currently, the names of Americans are concealed when the United States listens to the conversations of diplomats and other foreign officials, to protect their privacy.) On Tuesday, Trump tweeted out a Drudge Report link:

But there are a lot of unanswered questions about this story, and the answers may not be the ones that Trump wants. We don’t know why Susan Rice wanted the names of Trump team members unmasked, for instance. We also don’t know who she shared the information with, but this is probably classified information, and the leaking of it could be a scandal in and of itself.

The Trump White House is trying to make the case that it is the victim of a massive and unprecedented conspiracy—that the Obama White House ordered unmasking so it could damage Trump and his associates politically. But it is also possible that it was clear from surveillance transcripts that Trump officials were having conversations with Russian intelligence officials that were inappropriate or worse. If Rice was motivated by the discovery of inappropriate or illegal conversations between the Trump campaign and Russian officials, then the unmasking becomes yet another brick in the wall of a Russia investigation that is already obstructing the Trump administration from implementing its agenda.

And yet the White House is treating the Rice news as a slam dunk. It’s easy to forget, amidst the swirl of constant misdirection and insanity, that this is actually a continuation of the flimsy and paranoid claim that Obama “wiretapped” Trump Tower. Even before Susan Rice, the White House—with the help of village idiot Devin Nunes—had succeeded in nesting a second, administration-friendly investigation into the larger investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties with Russia. This secondary narrative has maybe—maybe—muddied the waters of the principal narrative, but it has undoubtedly also caused the Trump administration no end of self-inflicted wounds.

The Washington Post reported late Monday night that the attorney general “said agreements reached previously between the department’s civil rights division and local police departments—a key legacy of the Obama administration—will be subject to review by his two top deputies, throwing into question whether all of the agreements will stay in place.” Sessions’s Justice Department has also asked a federal judge to postpone a hearing on a major reform agreement that President Barack Obama’s Justice Department reached with the Baltimore Police Department in January.

“This is terrifying,” Jonathan Smith, executive director of the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs, told the Post. “This raises the question of whether, under the current attorney general, the Department of Justice is going to walk away from its obligation to ensure that law enforcement across the country is following the Constitution.” Other civil rights and police reform leaders were equally appalled:

Trump, who ran as “the law-and-order candidate,” has always turned a blind eye to the systemic racism of the criminal justice system, and he’s consistently peddled the falsehood that there’s a widespread war on police. Sessions’s civil rights record is famously troubled. That’s why many feared that black lives wouldn’t matter to this administration, and the early signs suggest those fears are coming true.

Obamacare repeal just won’t go away. Eleven days ago Paul Ryan stepped in front of the cameras to declare that, “Obamacare is the law of the land.” Then, like an exasperated vice principal, he demanded that House Republicans, particularly those in the far-right Freedom Caucus, grow up. But late Monday, reports began circulating that the Freedom Caucus and the White House had come up with a plan to restart Obamacare repeal—and that they may try to vote on it as soon as this week.

The new plan is—unsurprisingly, given the people involved—perhaps even more odious than the former. It fiddles (and effectively does away with) Obamacare’s extremely popular provision that prevents insurance companies from denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions. Donald Trump, Mike Pence, and Ryan had all previously promised that their Obamacare repeal not do this.

Under the plan being floated by the Freedom Caucus and the White House, however, states could opt out of essential health benefits and community rating, which prevents insurance companies from charging different rates to people of the same age, which is what prevents insurance companies from screwing over people with pre-existing conditions. This would mean that in some states you could be charged substantial amounts of money by insurance companies for being sick.

This would push sick people out of insurance pools because they wouldn’t be able to afford the insanely high prices. By kicking it to the states, it would , theoretically at least, absolve House Republicans of guilt. And, theoretically again, this would lower premiums and increase coverage, with the caveat that it would be totally useless if you were sick or had a pre-existing condition. It would also have the effect of creating a two-tier health care system. In some states, Obamacare’s mandates would be enforced, guaranteeing coverage for sick people, and in others, they wouldn’t—those with pre-existing conditions would be out of luck.

The new plan seems to misunderstand many of the biggest problems with the first draft of the American Health Care Act. This plan seems to be designed to create a better CBO score because it effectively creates a health insurance market for healthy people only. But it also takes a bill that had a 17 percent approval rating and removes one of the most popular provisions. The AHCA’s CBO score certainly didn’t help things for House Republicans, but it wasn’t the only problem: The biggest problem was that people recognized the bill for what it was, a windfall for insurance companies and a gutting of health care coverage. This new replacement is even worse on that score.

On Monday, Democrats in the Senate mustered enough support to filibuster Gorsuch’s Supreme Court nomination: 41 senators now oppose the Colorado judge’s nomination. This has made some Republicans very mad!

“How many [Democrats] are willing to oppose cloture on a partisan basis to kill a Supreme Court nominee, which has never happened before in history, the whole history of the country?” asked Mitch McConnell on Meet The Press on Sunday.

“This is unprecedented in American history, a partisan filibuster of a Supreme Court nominee,” Senator John Cornyn said on Face The Nation, proving that this was, in fact, a talking point.

And things only got more heated on Monday:

The argument that the Democrats are just up to some POLITICAL TRICKS and that this has NEVER HAPPENED BEFORE is very rich. The filibuster of Gorsuch is punishment for Republicans refusing to even meet with Merrick Garland, who was nominated for the Supreme Court by Barack Obama in March of 2016. They effectively filibustered his nomination to the court, violating a number of political norms in the process. The Democratic filibuster of Gorsuch is about the blatant stealing of a Supreme Court seat, not Gorsuch.

In an excerpt from her new book, The Destruction of Hillary Clinton, cultural historian Susan Bordo partly blames Clinton’s loss on her young, female detractors:

Many younger women, on the other hand—no less feminist, no less committed to gender equality—had formed their ideas about “the Clintons,” as Savannah Barker reminds us, in the shadow of 20 years of relentless personal and political attacks. Few of them—as I know from decades of teaching courses on feminism, gender issues, and the social movements of the 60s—were aware of the “living history” (to borrow Hillary’s phrase) that shaped the woman herself.

Bordo presents a number of false premises, including the familiar argument that young people failed to appreciate Clinton’s true radicalism. She creates an appealing narrative for anyone upset by Clinton’s loss and looking for someone to blame, omitting key facts that show the antipathy between Team Clinton and younger voters was not a one-way street.

“They [young women] didn’t want to be dealt any cards at a bridge game organized by Gloria Steinem or Madeleine Albright—or Hillary Clinton. They wanted Bernie Sanders,” Bordo complains.

But this aversion is actually easy to explain. Steinem suggested young women supported Sanders in order to meet boys: “When you’re young, you’re thinking: ‘Where are the boys? The boys are with Bernie.’” Albright suggested that women who voted for Sanders would go to hell. It’s not hard to see why these women are precluded from the halls of millennial adoration.

In the end, millennial voters, both male and female, were cool to Clinton for a host of reasons. If she was unable to muster their full-throated support, the blame lies with her, not them. Feminism rests on the basis that women should be judged for their worth, but Bordo instead assumes that Hillary Clinton, by virtue of her gender, should have been spared the critical gaze of young women. And that’s sexist.