A little premature (I suppose not if you’re actually planning a Summer Vacation to New Zealand, seasons reversed you know) but funny as hell.

The Nicest Christmas Ever

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

On this date in 1941, Japanese forces attack the home base of the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii – prompting America under President Franklin D. Roosevelt to enter World War II.

There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.

Willa Cather

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Time to catch up with Seth.

G20

Mr. T

Extreme Dog Shaming

Sentencing

A Closer Look

250 Yard Drive

Jokes Seth Can’t Tell

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

Jefferson Davis dies in New Orleans; Four people die at a free Rolling Stones concert at the Altamont Speedway in Livermore, California; America’s first attempt to put a satellite into orbit fails; Jazz pianist Dave Brubeck is born.

Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock.

Sigmund Freud

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It has become increasingly clear (except to Institutional Democrats) that the Republican base of Bigoted, Misogynous, Racist, Nazis can’t win elections anymore. The Republican Greed Head Elite agenda of looting the Treasury to give to their Billionaire donors can hardly squeeze more blood out of the Turnip and is vastly unpopular, whereas Left/Liberal ideas like universal Health Care are widely supported, even by registered Republicans.

The Republicans understand it all too well and for decades have papered over the failure of their policies by stoking “Culture War”- pandering to the Bigoted, Misogynous, Racist, and Nazi minority.

That is no longer possible.

So instead they have changed to wholesale cheating to salvage themselves from the ash heap of History and maintain their rapidly declining power and influence. Sure, Immigration is about a Racist prejudice against Brown people (I’ll point out again that Hispanics are Europeans, descended from the Goths and Celts), but it’s also because of the perception/reality that they’re more likely to vote Democratic than Republican.

Now it’s one thing to be a good sport and overlook a little rule shading when you have a winning position (though it can bite you in the ass too, sucker) but what’s occuring in North Carolina, Wisconsin, Michigan, and anyplace else Republicans can manage it, is profoundly anti-democratic in that slippery slope to Fascism kind of way and to the extent that Institutional Democrats are not fighting it tooth and nail they are betraying their constituents and signing their own death warrants, either in Primaries (the preferred way) or General Elections.

Looks like an actual case of election fraud has occurred. Guess who’s responsible.
By Paul Waldman, Washington Post
December 5, 2018

As you surely know, Republicans everywhere are deeply, deeply concerned about the possibility that fraud might taint elections. The integrity of the ballot is so important to them, in fact, that they will happily disenfranchise thousands of voters if that’s what it takes to make sure that not a single illegitimate vote is cast. They’ll purge voters from the rolls, impose onerous registration requirements, require picture IDs knowing that many voters don’t have them, all to make sure that every vote cast is pristine and pure.

Which is why Republicans everywhere are outraged about what seems to have happened in North Carolina’s 9th congressional district.

Oh wait. Actually, they’re not. You’d have a hard time finding a Republican who has spoken out about this case, and conservative media have been largely uninterested in what looks like one of the most blatant instances of election fraud in recent history. It’s almost as if — and you might want to sit down while I tell you this — all the talk about voter fraud from Republicans wasn’t actually sincere, but rather a cover for efforts to suppress the votes of Democrats. Imagine!

This is a fascinating case, however. When the election was completed, Republican Mark Harris led Democrat Dan McCready by 905 votes, yet the state’s bipartisan election commission refused to certify Harris as the winner, citing irregularities it had become aware of. The more we learned about what had happened — mostly from enterprising local reporters — the weirder the story got. And it tells us a lot about what election fraud actually is, and what it isn’t.

It started with unusual patterns among absentee voting in the district, going back to the primary in which Harris defeated incumbent Rep. Robert Pittenger by just 828 votes. It turns out that Harris won an implausible 96 percent of the absentee votes in Bladen County in the primary.

Absentee ballots are at the center of the general election controversy as well. Reports have been coming in of voters in heavily Democratic areas saying official-looking people had come to their door requesting their absentee ballots, saying they would turn them in on the voters’ behalf. And suspicious patterns emerged among ballots that weren’t returned. For instance, in Robeson County, 822 of the unreturned ballots had been sent to Democrats and only 78 to Republicans. In Bladen County, results suggest either that Mark Harris had a spectacular and highly localized cross-party appeal to Democrats casting ballots by absentee, or someone filled out a whole lot of ballots fraudulently.

Then we learned about a man named Leslie McCrae Dowless, a consultant hired by the Harris campaign (or more precisely, hired by a firm hired by the campaign) to work on absentee ballots. A notorious figure in North Carolina politics, he’s also a convicted felon who spent six months in jail for fraud in the 1990s. “Dowless and his wife were accused of taking out an insurance policy on a dead man and collecting nearly $165,000 from his death,” according to the Charlotte Observer. He also has a felony perjury conviction on his record. This BuzzFeed story by Brianna Sacks and Otillia Steadman contains some more incredible details about the operation he mounted on Harris’s behalf.
…
While there’s a lot of investigating still to be done, what may well have happened here is that Dowless’s operation collected absentee ballots from voters and either filled them out themselves or, failing that, turned in the ones from Republicans and tossed the ones from Democrats in the trash. To be clear, we don’t know for sure that’s what happened, but it’s what it looks like.
…
The point is that absentee ballots are one of the only areas of elections where it’s even possible to commit fraud on a scale significant enough to potentially swing an election, as may well have happened in North Carolina. But you don’t hear Republicans crying that we need to put new safeguards in place in the absentee ballot system.

Why not? Because doing so wouldn’t help Republicans. But things such as voter ID, which ostensibly safeguard against voter impersonation — where someone shows up at the polls pretending to be someone they aren’t — absolutely do. That’s despite the fact that voter impersonation is not only incredibly rare; even in theory it would be almost impossible to use it to swing an election. You can get a few workers to spend a few weeks going through neighborhoods telling people you’ll turn in their absentee votes for them, and you might be able to eliminate hundreds of votes for your opponent. But how many votes could you swing with an impersonation scam? Three? Five? Ten?

It would be useless, which is why nearly every one of the tiny number of impersonation cases that happens turns out to be some stupid but sort-of-well-intentioned scheme like someone impersonating their recently deceased relative to cast the vote they think they would have wanted.

But on the North Carolina case — finally, actual election fraud! — Republicans are silent. So I have a hope, perhaps a vain one. It’s that after this, they’ll just give up their repulsively disingenuous claim that their vote suppression measures are actually about “voter fraud” and “the integrity of the ballot” and just say forthrightly what everyone knows: They don’t actually care about voter fraud. They want to suppress the votes of Democrats, and they’ll use any tactic they can to do it.

Perhaps they could take a cue from Republicans in Wisconsin, who are moving to limit the power of the governor and attorney general now that Democrats just won those offices. They could have painted their actions as serving some high-minded, abstract principle about the balance of power between the branches of state government, but they haven’t really bothered. “Listen. I’m concerned,” said Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald. “I think that Governor-elect [Tony] Evers is going to bring a liberal agenda to Wisconsin.” His counterpart in the other chamber, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, agreed: “We are going to have a very liberal governor who is going to enact policies that are in direct contrast to what many of us believe in.”

In other words, as far as they’re concerned, even when voters choose a Democrat to be governor, he has no legitimate right to govern, because he’s a Democrat. Just like they think that Democratic voters don’t have any inherent right to cast their votes.

I must admit that I’m kind of disappointed in the public sentencing recommendation for Michael Flynn, because of the extensive redactions and overall caginess it was a bit like finding Coal in your stocking- fine if you need some Coal, a bunch of dirty rocks if you don’t.

Still, people more detail oriented than I, like emptywheel, have been scrivening the details and seem to find some consolation. emptywheel’s pieces (so far) are The Mueller Investigation Is the Second Most Important Investigation into Which Flynn Assisted, Flynn’s Category C (or B iii) Cooperation: Mueller’s Expanded Investigation, and Updating the Mueller Docket: What Has Zainab Ahmad Been Working On? all of which are a tad wonky for me but I invite your perusal.

The best general purpose analyses I’ve been able to find so far are from Greg Sargent and digby. Greg has kind of a general overview of the state of play and digby a piece on why this is good news.

Mueller’s new Michael Flynn memo strengthens obstruction case against Trump
By Greg Sargent, Washington Post
December 5, 2018

The big takeaway from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s new sentencing memo for Michael Flynn is that it underscores how little we know about what Mueller has learned. It says President Trump’s former national security adviser has provided “substantial assistance” to Mueller, notes that he sat for 19 interviews and says he’s cooperating not just with the Russia probe but also with a separate criminal investigation that is not named.

But, by tantalizingly hinting at just how much help Flynn may have provided — and by sketching out the barest outline of the areas in which he offered this help — the memo also underscores the likelihood that Trump obstructed justice when he leaned on then-FBI Director James B. Comey to drop the investigation into Flynn.
…
Mueller’s memo contains a section claiming Flynn provided “firsthand information” about “interactions” between the Trump “transition team and Russian government officials.” It’s not clear who this refers to other than Flynn, but the memo does say Flynn provided information on his own contacts with Russia, noting, significantly, that Flynn represented the “transition team” at the time. The memo then claims Flynn provided “useful information.” But much of it is redacted, suggesting Flynn has told Mueller a lot about this chain of events.

It seems like ancient history now, but Comey’s claim that Trump pressured him over Flynn is worth revisiting in light of these new revelations.

As you’ll recall, Comey kept contemporaneous memos of his early conversations with Trump. One of those memos recounted that in February 2017, Comey met with Trump and others in the Oval Office. Trump asked everyone but Comey to leave, and then repeatedly told Comey that Flynn “hadn’t done anything wrong” in his phone call to the Russian ambassador.
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We have now learned that Flynn provided Mueller a great deal of information about this call and about the events surrounding it. This increases the likelihood that Trump leaned on Comey to drop the investigation into Flynn not because he thought Flynn was a “good guy” but because Trump knew Flynn had a lot to disclose on these matters. Which in turn provides a motive for Trump to try to derail the investigation into him, perhaps with “corrupt intent.”

“This memo suggests Flynn has provided a great deal of information about Russian contacts with members of Trump’s team,” Randall D. Eliason, who teaches white-collar crime at George Washington University Law School, told me. “The more Flynn knew about those contacts, the more motive the president would have had to try to keep that information under wraps by getting the Flynn investigation shut down.”

We don’t know what Flynn told Mueller, but let’s go over some unknowns here that Flynn might have addressed. As The Post notes, Flynn’s original guilty plea did not say whether Trump told Flynn to call the Russian ambassador (which Trump has denied) and did not explain why Flynn lied to the FBI to begin with.

Also, don’t forget that Trump buffoonishly tweeted that he “had to” fire Flynn because he lied to the FBI, which would suggest that Trump knew this at the time. (Flynn pleaded guilty to it months later.) Trump’s lawyer hastily walked that back, but what did Trump know at the time, both about Flynn’s contact with Russia and about Flynn’s lie to the FBI about it? What did he tell Flynn?

Recall that we already know that Mueller has been scrutinizing the period of 18 days that passed between Flynn’s lie and his firing over it — for answers to precisely these questions. Ya think Flynn might have some of those answers?

In a good opinion piece, Bloomberg Opinion executive editor Timothy L. O’Brien points to other big unknowns. Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner also had contacts with the Russian ambassador during the transition and also may have directed Flynn to communicate with him. (Note that Mueller’s memo does vaguely reference multiple transition team contacts with Russia.) As O’Brien points out, if Kushner offered a different account of these events than Flynn has, Kushner “may have to start scrambling.”

We don’t yet know what’s under those redactions. But it’s likely that they are concealing a lot of information — shared by Flynn — that Trump did not want the FBI to know about. Which might have given Trump good reason (in his mind, anyway) to try to get the FBI to stop looking into it.

Here’s the Bloomberg piece Sargent was just talking about.

Mueller’s Flynn Memo Should Worry Kushner and Trump
By Timothy L. O’Brien, Bloomberg News
December 5, 2018

Michael Flynn, President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser who pleaded guilty a year ago to lying to federal law enforcement officials, has participated in 19 interviews with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office since early last year. He’s also assisted with several ongoing investigations — including an undisclosed criminal one — that are part of a probe of possible collusion between Trump’s presidential campaign and the Kremlin.

All of that, plus Flynn’s “substantial assistance,” early cooperation, and acceptance of “responsibility for his unlawful conduct,” led Muller’s team to ask the court to grant Flynn a lenient sentence that doesn’t include prison time, according to a highly anticipated sentencing memo the special counsel’s office filed Tuesday night.

And there wasn’t much more than that in 13 concise and heavily redacted pages that let down anyone expecting the document to be another public narrative fleshing out lots of fresh detail about Mueller’s investigation. Still, the filing, and some new details in it, should give pause to members of Trump’s inner circle — especially the president’s son-in-law and senior White House adviser, Jared Kushner.

Mueller’s memo noted that federal investigators’ curiosity about Flynn’s role in the presidential transition seemed to have been sparked by a Washington Post account of a conversation he had with Russia’s ambassador to the U.S., Sergey Kislyak, in December 2016. The filing also detailed a series of lies Flynn told about his contacts with and work for the Turkish government while serving in the Trump campaign. (Given that Trump and a pair of his advisers had been pursuing a real estate deal in Moscow during the first half of 2016, Flynn might mistakenly have seen wearing two hats as noncontroversial.)

But the meat of what should worry Team Trump is in Mueller’s disclosure that Flynn has provided firsthand information about interactions between the transition team and Russian government officials — including, as was already known, several conversations with Kislyak in December 2016. Those included a discussion about lifting economic sanctions the Obama administration had imposed on Russia and about a separate matter involving a United Nations resolution on Israel.
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The timeline around Flynn’s conversations is crucial because it shows what’s still in play for the president and Kushner — and why Mueller may have been content to lock in a cooperation agreement that carried relatively light penalties, as well as why Flynn’s assistance seems to have subsequently pleased the veteran prosecutor so much.

Kushner’s actions are also interesting because the Federal Bureau of Investigation has examined his own communications with Kislyak — and Kushner reportedly encouraged Trump to fire his FBI director, James Comey, in the spring of 2017, when Comey was still in the early stages of digging into the Trump-Russia connection.

Comey, and his successor, Mueller, have been focused on possible favor-trading between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. We know that Russian hackers directed by Russian intelligence operatives penetrated Democrat computer servers in 2016 and gave that information and email haul to WikiLeaks to disseminate as part of an effort to undermine Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid. Trump was also pursuing that business deal in Moscow in 2016 and had other projects over the years with a Russian presence. What might the Kremlin have been expecting in return? A promise to lift U.S. economic sanctions?
…
After a meeting in Trump Tower with Kislyak on Dec. 1, 2016, which Flynn and Kushner attended together, the ambassador arranged another gathering on Dec. 13 for Kushner and a senior Russian banker with Kremlin ties, Sergei Gorkov. The White House has said that meeting was innocent and part of Kushner’s diplomatic duties. In a statement following his testimony before Congress in the summer of 2017, Kushner said that his interactions with Flynn and Kislyak on Dec. 1 only involved a discussion of Syria policy, not economic sanctions. He said that his discussion with Gorkov on Dec. 13 lasted less than 30 minutes and only involved an exchange of pleasantries and hopes for better U.S.-Russian relations — and didn’t include any discussion of recruiting Russians as lenders or investors in the Kushner family’s real estate business.

Kislyak enjoyed continued lobbying from the White House after his meetings with Kushner. On Dec. 22, Flynn asked Kislyak to delay a UN Security Council resolution condemning Israel for building settlements in Palestinian territory. Flynn later told the FBI that he didn’t ask Kislyak to do that, which wasn’t true. Court documents filed last year said that a “very senior member of the Presidential Transition Team” directed Flynn to make an overture to Kislyak about the sanctions vote. According to reporting from my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Eli Lake and NBC News, Kushner was that “senior member.” Bloomberg News reported that former Trump advisers Steve Bannon and Reince Priebus also pushed Flynn to lobby Kislyak on the U.N. vote. (Kushner didn’t discuss pressing Flynn to contact Kislyak in his statement last summer and instead noted how infrequent his direct interactions were.)

Kushner’s role in these events isn’t discussed in Mueller’s sentencing memo for Flynn. The absence of greater detail might cause Kushner to worry: If Flynn offered federal authorities a different version of events than Kushner — and Flynn’s version is buttressed by documentation or federal electronic surveillance of the former general — then the president’s son-in-law may have to start scrambling (a possibility I flagged when Flynn pleaded guilty in 2017).

Michael Flynn comes clean — after betraying the country
by digby, Hullabaloo
Wednesday, December 05, 2018

The special counsel’s office finally submitted its sentencing memorandum to the court late yesterday and it turns out that while Flynn may not have been saying much to the public he was talking up a storm to prosecutors. The memorandum says he’s met with them 19 times, which most experts said was the number of meetings you’d typically only hold if you were preparing for a trial. It’s a lot.

Apparently, Flynn impressed Mueller’s office with the depth and breadth of his cooperation, particularly since he sang very early in the process and the information he provided was vital in convincing others to come clean as well. Mueller’s team is so happy with Flynn’s testimony that they are recommending he serve no jail time.

This is unlikely to be such a happy day for President Trump, however. One of the main reasons the special counsel asked for the most lenient sentence possible is because Flynn offered prosecutors “first hand” knowledge of events. According to former federal prosecutor Chuck Rosenberg on MSNBC, that means he “was in the room where it happened” (quoting “Hamilton”). Since Flynn was traveling with Donald Trump during the campaign and worked closely with him during the transition on issues of interest to the Mueller team, it stands to reason that Trump is likely to be one of the people who was also in that room. Rosenberg pointed out that the recommendation says Flynn provided “substantial” cooperation, a term of art among prosecutors used when a witness has provided extraordinarily useful information.

Unfortunately, and much to everyone’s disappointment, there isn’t a lot to go on to determine what Flynn actually told them. The sentencing document is more redacted than not, although it does provide a few tantalizing clues. First, it appears that aside from cooperating in the Russia investigation as we understand it, Flynn also gave evidence in an unknown criminal investigation, as well and a third investigation that as completely redacted so we literally have no clue what it might be. It could be criminal, civil or counter-espionage; there’s no telling. It’s totally blacked out. Whatever these investigations may be, they seem to be important enough that Mueller continues to pursue them.

National security reporter Marcy Wheeler speculates that the criminal case may be related to Flynn’s business connections to Turkey and that the third, completely redacted case might be a counter-espionage investigation. Recall that Flynn was also involved in a scheme to sell nuclear power plants to Saudi Arabia and was implicated in a weird plot with a now-deceased right-wing activist named Peter Smith to find Hillary Clinton’s emails. It’s also possible these investigations could be related to matters we haven’t yet heard about.

Most observers thought that Flynn being sentenced would signal that the Russia probe is coming to an end. His date has been postponed numerous times, so it seemed logical to assume that they were holding back until they were finished. But it now appears prosecutors believe he will be cooperative in the future, even without a jail sentence hanging over his head, which probably means Flynn has testified before a grand jury and they have his testimony locked in. They may have come to appreciate his candor, but I doubt any of this is based on trust. Flynn is smart enough to listen to his lawyer but he’s not smart enough to avoid Donald Trump. So it’s doubtful Mueller is letting him off the hook without guarantees of his future cooperation.

Are You Ready For Some Football?

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

Prohibition ends in the United States; Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart dies; Walt Disney and Little Richard are born.

I think it’s really important that we understand that we share this world and we’re connected to it.

Tim Hetherington

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The beginning of the end of Theresa May’s tenure as Prime Minister has begun, and with it the fall of the Tories and the end of Brexit.

Today Parliament found 311 to 293 that her government was in Contempt of Parliament and ordered Attorney General, Geoffrey Cox, to produce the full contents of his legal findings instead of the redacted digest already released.

This is kind of a big deal for the British who still feel betrayed by Tony Blair’s suppression of reports that the evidence of weapons of Mass Destruction was inconclusive at best and the Iraq War was illegal (both proven facts by the way).

Six opposition Parties voted unanimously to censure the Government, including, notably, the Democratic Unionist Party, the keystone of May’s coalition. They also indicated they were going to withdraw from that arrangement. The Scottish National Party is once again threatening to leave the United Kingdom which, if it happens, will leave Northern Ireland, England, Wales, The Channel Islands, and Gibraltar as the remnants of the Empire on which the sun never set (ok, Falklands and some other scraps here and there).

And so it unfolds exactly as I predicted. By the end of the Month May will either lose a vote of confidence or otherwise be forced to resign and General Elections will be called. The Brexit deal will be defeated by at least as great a margin (maybe twice, for May is stubborn) and Jeremy Corbyn will be left to pick up the pieces.

Brexit will not survive a second referendum. In possibly related news Nigel Farange has left the United Kingdom Independence Party which has declined into irrelevancy anyway.

Full Brexit legal advice to be published after government loses vot
by Jessica Elgot, Rajeev Syal and Heather Stewart, The Guardian
Tue 4 Dec 2018

Theresa May’s parliamentary authority has been thrown into further doubt after MPs passed a historic motion to hold the government in contempt over its failure to release the cabinet legal advice on the Brexit deal.

The Commons leader, Andrea Leadsom, said the government would comply and publish the advice in full on Wednesday. The vote is an unprecedented move in recent political history and comes at the start of five days of debate leading up to the final vote on May’s Brexit deal next week.

The shadow Brexit secretary, Keir Starmer, called the defeat “a badge of shame” and said the government “has lost its majority and the respect of the house”.

The DUP, which the government relies on for a majority, had voted with Labour to hold the government in contempt, raising questions over whether May could still be said to command a majority.

In the knife-edge vote, MPs decided by 311 votes to 293 to find the government in contempt of parliament, for failure to comply with a Commons motion in November that ordered it to release the advice in full.

As Labour MPs heard they had defeated the government, a loud cheer went up, with one opposition backbencher shouting: “Beginning of the end!”

The attorney general, Geoffrey Cox, had argued that the public interest did not permit the publication of the advice and instead published a summary of the advice and took questions in the House of Commons on Monday.

During the debate, Starmer said the government was “wilfully refusing” to comply with a binding order to release the legal advice on its Brexit deal, putting it in contempt of parliament.

The government had tried to dodge the contempt motion by putting down an amendment seeking to refer the matter to the Commons privileges committee, an attempt to kick it into the long grass. That was defeated by just four votes.

Several rebellious Conservative MPs including the Eurosceptic Jacob Rees-Mogg and the former attorney general Dominic Grieve expressed some discomfort with the government’s position, but said they would vote for Leadsom’s amendment. However, it was not enough to save the government from defeat by opposition parties and the DUP.

During the debate, Starmer said Cox had “as good as admitted” he was ignoring a parliamentary vote to release the document, because he believed it was not in the national interest.

“I’m sorry, that’s a plea of mitigation and not a defence,” Starmer said. “For the attorney general to say in his view that it is not in the national interest is not good enough,” he said.

He quoted Rees-Mogg, who previously said it was “no longer a matter for this government to judge, it has been decided by this house, which is a higher authority”.

Starmer said the government had decided not to oppose the original motion on releasing the advice in order to avoid the “short-term humiliation” of a defeat.

“The decision taken not to oppose was a political decision because it feared it would lose the vote,” he said. “The price of that was higher than voting against the order … for months the government has ignored opposition day debates and now it has got them into very deep water indeed.”

Earlier, Cox insisted he could not comply with MPs’ demand to release the full Brexit legal advice.
…
Starmer said it was of huge constitutional and political significance. “Never before has the House of Commons found ministers in contempt of parliament,” he said.

“It is highly regrettable that the government has let it come to this, but ministers left the opposition with no option but to bring forward these proceedings.”

Earlier, Theresa May had told cabinet it was a longstanding convention that “neither the fact nor the content of law officers’ advice is shared outside government without their consent”.

Such is the government’s frustration at Tuesday’s wrangle, that Leadsom has written to the chair of the privileges committee, Kate Green, calling for an inquiry.

Leadsom’s letter said that the government feared Labour’s recent approach – which was used to force the government to publish economic assessments of Brexit, as well as in the current row – would “impact the ability of current and future governments to request and receive the best advice”.