The Hill: A Tea Party group on Friday announced the launch of an attack ad against Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, urging him to “do his job, or resign” following the release of a controversial GOP memo alleging surveillance abuse at the Department of Justice. Tea Party Patriots Action uploaded the ad to YouTube hours after the House Intelligence Committee memo was released publicly, sparking speculation that President Trump may move to fire Rosenstein.  The ad’s narrator describes Rosenstein as “a weak careerist at the Justice Department protecting liberal Obama holdovers and the deep state instead of following the rule of law.” “His incompetence and abuse of power have undermined congressional investigations, led to stonewalling and tarnished the credibility of the Department of Justice,” the narrator continues. “Time for him to stand up for the rule of law and stand up for the American people. It’s time for Rod Rosenstein to do his job, or resign.” The controversial memo alleges that Rosenstein and other top Justice Department officials improperly used a piece of opposition research to obtain surveillance warrants against Trump campaign members. FBI officials strongly advised against publishing the memo, saying that it omits important context. After Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from the probe into Russia's election meddling, Rosenstein appointed special counsel Robert Mueller to lead the investigation. Rosenstein oversees the probe, and critics fear firing him would clear the path for Trump to target Mueller next. Trump on Friday indicated that he does not have confidence in Rosenstein, telling reporters, “you figure that one out,” when asked.

AL.com: The Doug Jones campaign is using U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby's, R-Ala., words against Roy Moore into digital advertisements after Alabama's senior senator gave an interview Sunday criticizing Moore. The Jones campaign cut two new digital ads hours after Shelby's appearance on CNN's "State of the Union," in which Shelby said he believed the women accusing Moore of sexual misconduct, couldn't vote for Moore and believed his party "could do better" than support Moore. "(W)e call it a tipping point," Shelby told CNN's Jake Tapper about the allegations against Moore. "I think, so many accusations, so many cuts, so many drip, drip, drip -- when it got to the 14-year-old's story, that was enough for me. I said I can't vote for Roy Moore." "I didn't vote for Roy Moore. I wouldn't vote for Roy Moore. I think the Republican Party can do better," Shelby added. Jones used footage of Shelby in television ads earlier this month after the senator announced he would not be voting for Moore and instead would be writing in a "distinguished Republican" on his ballot. The Jones campaign also quoted Shelby in an ad attacking Moore over the allegations.

The Hill: The Cook Political Report, a top nonpartisan election handicapper, changed its election rating for Tennessee's Senate race to a toss-up following former Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen (D) launching his bid for the seat. Bredesen, who served as the last Democratic governor of the state, was a top recruit for Democrats in the race to replace Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), a President Trumpsurrogate-turned-critic who won't seek reelection in 2018. Bredesen won his first term as governor in 2002 and handily won reelection in 2006 with 69 percent of the vote, winning every county in Tennessee. He officially jumped into the Senate race Thursday morning with an online video, arguing that he has the "actual track record that it will take to start working across party lines, to fix the mess in Washington and bring common sense back to our government." But Bredesen hasn't held office since he left the governor's mansion in 2010 due to term limits. He would turn 75 a few weeks after the 2018 elections. And any Democrat who wins the nomination would have an uphill climb against a Republican in Tennessee, which hasn't elected a Democrat to the upper chamber since 1990. Jennifer Duffy, a Cook Political Report analyst of Senate and gubernatorial races, argues that this ratings change also changes the calculus of the 2018 Senate map. Arizona and Nevada have been seen as the only two realistic Senate seats held by Republicans that Democrats have a shot at flipping. But moving Tennessee to the toss-up column gives them opportunities in three GOP-held seats, which is the number Democrats would need to take back the Senate. Still, capturing the majority will be a tough feat for Democrats, who will be defending 10 seats in states that Trump carried last year. "Until now, it has been mathematically impossible as only two GOP seats have been considered truly vulnerable," Duffy wrote. "This does not mean that Democrats will win the majority; only that it is now mathematically possible." "However, if another GOP-held seat or two come into play, it becomes a much more realistic possibility. In the current political environment and given former White House aide Steve Bannon's effort to blow up the party, Democrats appear to be preparing for exactly that scenario." Bredesen will face James Mackler, an attorney and Iraq War veteran, in the primary for the Democratic nomination. Chattanooga Mayor Andy Berke has also been considering a campaign. Republicans will also have a competitive primary, with GOP Reps. Marsha Blackburn and Stephen Fincher as the top two competitors.

AL.com/PolitiFact: In the Alabama Senate race, Democrat Doug Jones launched an ad to suggest Republican Roy Moore goes easy on sex offenders. Moore called on stations airing the ad to pull it, saying it "blatantly misrepresents the facts and my judicial record." The ad speaks of three cases from Moore's days on the Alabama State Supreme Court. Here's the full text from the ad, although this fact-check focuses only on the first case from 2014. "Alabama, there's a pattern. In a 2014 case involving a man convicted of abusing two underage girls, Judge Roy Moore disagreed and wrote the dissenting opinion. In a 2015 case involving a man who pleaded guilty to raping an underage girl, Roy Moore dissented again. And Roy Moore was the only Supreme Court justice who sided with a felon convicted of sexual abuse of a child at a daycare center. Roy Moore's disturbing conduct." On television, the visuals are important. Here's what viewers saw. In one of the most reliably Republican states, Moore has been fighting headwinds after multiple reports that he made sexual advances on young women under 18 when he was in his 30s. The Jones attack ad plays to that issue. In the 2014 case, Jones misappropriated technical elements of the legal saga to leave voters with the wrong idea. The 2014 case In 2010, Sherman Fitzgerald Tate, then in his mid 30s, worked as a mentor with the Youth Advocate Program at Pointe Academy in Mobile, Ala. The court-funded program aimed to help troubled teens. A security camera recorded Tate bringing two 15-year-old girls into a conference room. He was not their assigned mentor. There was no tape of what took place inside the room. The two girls accused him of coercing them to touch him and each other sexually. Tate was convicted on two counts of second-degree sodomy. His lawyer wanted to bring in testimony that the two girls had a romantic relationship with each other and that Tate had told one of the girls' mother about it. That information would, the lawyer said, give the girls a reason to invent a charge against Tate. But under Alabama law, victims of sexual assault are shielded from any exploration of their past sexual activity, because it could bias a jury against them. This is a fundamental principle that holds in many states. The trial judge blocked the testimony and an appeals court agreed. Tate's lawyer brought the issue to the state supreme court. The majority of the justices, five, declined to hear the case. Moore and two other justices disagreed. In his dissent, Moore basically argued that courts in Massachusetts, Mississippi, Colorado and elsewhere had allowed similar evidence in certain cases and there was a reasonable argument that the facts in Tate's case "would make the proposed cross-examination relevant to show that the victims had possibly fabricated the charges against Tate." The key line in Moore's dissent, however, is the last one: "I believe that we should resolve this material question of first impression." In other words, Moore's dissent was about resolving the legal question for future cases. A matter of law We reached several experts in appellate law and all of them agreed that Moore was only arguing that the court should hear the case. "He was saying there's a decent legal issue in the case that the court ought to resolve," David Moran at the University of Michigan Law School. "It read like a perfectly reasonable dissent, and it would be grossly unfair to attribute anything to him based on a dissent from a denial of review." Peter Smith at George Washington University Law School agreed, saying that at that point in the process, Moore was not challenging the case itself against Tate, but the legal issue of what testimony was admissible. "In theory, if the court had heard the case, he could have ruled against the guy," Smith said. Smith said Moore was telegraphing some sympathy for Tate's position, but again, this dissent alone did not amount to disagreeing with Tate's conviction. The other two cases The ad raises two other cases to show Moore's "disturbing conduct." The 2015 case involved second-degree rape and like the charges against Tate, the issue was whether the sexual activity of the victim should have been presented at the trial. Moore and two other justices joined in saying the court should decide the matter. In the ad's final example, Moore was the lone dissenter. The case involved a 17-year-old boy who performed a sexual act on a 4-year-old boy at a daycare center. The teen was convicted on two counts -- first-degree sodomy of a child under 12 and first-degree sodomy by forcible compulsion. Moore took issue with the second count, arguing that there was no evidence of an implied threat of serious physical injury or death in the case. The matter was made more complicated because the offender was under 18, which put him in a gray zone under state law. Moore argued that the court was going beyond what lawmakers had written.

AL.com: Democratic Senate candidate Doug Jones released a campaign ad Tuesday in response to the allegations against his Republican opponent, Roy Moore, that features seven Republican voters who say they will vote for Jones in the Dec. 12 special election. "You read the story and it just shakes you," says a woman in the ad, titled "Common Ground." She's referring to the Washington Post story from last week reporting four women who said Moore dated them when they were teenagers, including a then-14-year-old who said Moore initiated a sexual encounter with her. "Don't decency and integrity matter anymore." "I'm a life-long Republican, but I just can't do it," says a man in the ad. "I can't vote for Roy Moore," another woman says. "I'm a Republican but Roy Moore -- no way," says another man.

Fox News: Doug Jones, the Democratic nominee in Alabama’s heated Senate race, hammered Republican rival Roy Moore in a new web video that features the photos and names of the women who have accused him of sexual misconduct. In the 30-second “Immoral” video, released Wednesday, a narrator reads the names of the nine women accusing Roy Moore of inappropriate behavior. "Leigh Corfman, Beverly Young Nelson, Debbie Wesson Gibson, Gloria Thacker Deason, Gena Richardson, Wendy Miller, Kelly Harrison Thorp. And the list is growing," the narrator says, mentioning the two other accusers, Tina Johnson and Becky Gray, at the end of the video. “They were girls when Roy Moore immorally pursued them,” the narrator says. “Now they are women, witnesses to us all of his disturbing conduct.” The video ends with a somber statement: “Will we make their abuser a U.S. senator?” Corfman claims Moore initiated a sexual encounter when she was just 14 years old. Moore has denied all the allegations, and President Trump on Tuesday seemed to back him up -- saying "he totally denies it" and blasting Jones as a "liberal." Meanwhile, Moore’s communication director John Rogers has resigned. Rogers’ decision to leave the campaign comes less than a month before the Dec. 12 special election. "Unfortunately John just did not have the experience to deal with the press the last couple of weeks, and we’ve had to make a change," Brett Doster, an adviser with the Moore campaign, told Fox News. Doster will be taking on a larger role in communications going forward. In recent weeks, several Alabama newspapers as well as prominent Republicans including Sens. Mike Lee and Ted Cruz have withdrawn their endorsements of Moore. Trump, however, seemed to minimize the allegations of sexual misconduct on Tuesday, telling voters not to support Jones. When pressed on the allegations against Moore, some of which date back 40 years, Trump said, "Look, he denies it ... He says it didn't happen, and you know, you have to listen to him also." Trump did not rule out campaigning for Moore. "I'll be letting you know next week." Trump backed Moore's defeated opponent, Sen. Luther Strange, in September's primary runoff election.

The Washington Post: One looming challenge Democrats face is to close what you might call the “pluto-populist gap” — the vast disconnect between how working-class whites perceive President Trump’s instincts and intentions on the one hand, and his full-on embrace of the congressional GOP’s plutocratic agenda on the other. Democrats believe the massive tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations that Trump and Republicans are now pushing gives them a way of doing just that — just in time for the 2018 midterms. Democrats are set to go up on the air with a seven-figure TV ad buy targeting House Republicans in multiple districts with a lot of working-class whites — as well as in districts with more college-educated whites, I’ve learned. The animating idea is that the GOP tax proposals — which will be featured in the ads — are likely to prove toxic among both those constituencies, and particularly among those working-class whites who switched from Barack Obama to Trump. The template for the new ads is this spot that is going up this week in the district of Rep. Bruce Poliquin (R-Maine): The ads are paid for by Not One Penny, a campaign launched by progressive groups to oppose all tax cuts for millionaires, billionaires and big corporations. Tim Hogan, a spokesman for the group, confirmed to me that it would soon announce an ad buy of more than $1 million, targeting 25 House GOP districts, with around a dozen of them heavy on working-class white voters. The goal of the ads will be to hit two messages. The first is that the GOP changes to the tax code themselves would be enormously regressive, showering most of their benefits on the wealthy while giving crumbs to working- and middle-class Americans or even raising their taxes. The second is that these tax cuts would necessitate big cuts to the safety net later — the ad references $25 billion in Medicare cuts that could be triggered by the GOP plan’s deficit busting — further compounding the GOP agenda’s regressiveness down the line. Geoff Garin, a pollster for the Democratic super PAC Priorities USA, tells me that his polling shows that this combination alienates working-class whites, particularly Obama-Trump voters. “They are fundamentally populist in their economic views, and they find big breaks to corporations and the wealthy especially heinous when the flip side of that means cutting Medicare and Medicaid,” Garin said. Garin said recent polling by two Democratic firms — Hart Research and Global Strategy Group — had found that when the GOP tax plan is described to non-college-educated white men — Trump’s base — they oppose it by 58-34. Non-college-educated white women oppose it by 61-24. Garin said he’d advise Democratic candidates to campaign heavily against the tax plan among these voters. “The tax bill is in some respects the ultimate betrayal of the Trump promise to working-class voters — that he would be on their side,” Garin said. “It’s a huge vulnerability for Republicans in those kinds of districts with working-class whites.” This polling is helping to shape Not One Penny’s coming ad blitz, and Hogan, the group’s spokesman, confirms that around a dozen districts (the exact list is being finalized) will be heavy on working-class whites, ones that are also gettable for Democrats, such as Poliquin’s in Maine; Iowa’s 1st and 3rd; and Illinois’ 12th. But these ads will also target multiple House GOP districts with a lot of college-educated whites, ones that went for Hillary Clinton in 2016. In this sense, the GOP tax bill may help resolve an argument among Democrats over whether they should focus primarily on well-educated low-hanging-fruit districts carried by Clinton, or whether they should expand aggressively into working-class white territory. The GOP tax plan — which will likely be widely opposed by both college-educated and non-college whites — can help bridge this divide. As Hogan put it to me: “The GOP tax plan has something for everyone to hate.” To be sure, Democrats themselves have acknowledged that getting working-class whites to turn on Trump still poses a major challenge. Indeed, a pro-Trump group is launching its own ad campaign that frames the tax plan as integral to Trump’s “America First” agenda — which is to say, as something that Trump says is good for the working class.

NTKNetwork.com: Republican Ed Gillespie released his final campaign ad asking voters to support his bid to be Virginia’s next governor on Tuesday. The 30-second ad titled, “Let’s Make Life Better for All Virginians,” features Gillespie looking directly into the camera to make his case for why Virginians should vote for him. “Virginia is 39th out of 50 states in economic growth and 44th in wage growth. Virginia, for the first time ever more people are moving out of our Commonwealth than into it, but Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam thinks we’re doing great,” Gillespie says. “I think we should be first in the nation in economic growth and job creation, and my plan will get us there.” Recent polls show Gillespie and Democrat Northam locked in a tight race ahead of next Tuesday’s election.