The Trump Administration opened the US- Israeli embassy in Jerusalem on Monday. Gazan protests left scores dead.
The White House continues to develop their plants to separate children from adults at the boarder with a plan to house children on military bases. The new tactic of separation is a change because the US “historically treated immigration violations as civil, rather than criminal, offenses, and thus parents have not typically been separated from their children when they enter the legal system.”
The first warning signs that the Trump-Kim summit may not happen or happen smoothly came on Tuesday, as North Korea threatened to pull out.
On the Cohen matter, we learn that the person who leaked his financial reports that Avanati revealed last week did so because two suspicious activity reports (SARs) have gone missing from the Treasury Departments records. This person revealed to Farrow of the New Yorker his reasons for leaking. Many have pointed out that his concern may not be justified because Mueller or others in the DOJ may have classified the two reports.
From the New York Times: “President Trump’s financial disclosure, released on Wednesday, included for the first time repayment of more than $100,000 to his personal lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, in 2017, raising questions about whether Mr. Trump’s sworn filing from a year ago improperly omitted the debt.”
Tillerson spoke at the Virginia Military Institute graduation: “If our leaders seek to conceal the truth or we as people become accepting of alternative realities that are no longer grounded in facts, then we as American citizens are on a pathway to relinquishing our freedom.”
In Russia News:
Buzzfeed News published what it billed as the ultimate summative story of the deal for a Trump tower in Moscow, that was ongoing during the 2016 election. First, Trump public praise of Putin was used to curry favor among Putins business associates for the deal; Cohen was coordinating with a GRU spy to make the deal happen; Cohen claims the deal died in January 2016, but in early 2016 he started communicating about it with an encrypted messaging system that erases all messages. The journalist Anthony Cormier did a Lawfare podcast with Wittes in which they discussed how apparent it was that Russia was desperate to get Trump and Trump surrogates into Russia during the campaign.
The Senate Intelligence Committee released many documents in their second quarterly report, in which they agreed with the Intelligence Community report from 2016 that Russia interfered with the election to help Trump defeat Clinton. Here are seven main takeaways.
And here is David French arguing the fact that Trump’s team was so willing to accept Russian help it justifies the continued investigation.
The New York Times published an account of the early days of the Russia investigation, which was codenamed “Crossfire Hurricane.” We learn more about how unwilling the agents were to make it known before the 2016 election that four people of Trump’s campaign had Russia connections; and that the FBI used an informant to talk to Page and Popadopoulos.
That informant is the same that Nunes is trying to out, which the FBI says could endanger his life. Trump has used the story to continue his claim that the Obama Administration was spying on him.
Apparently the informant has been described enough by the media, particularly right wing websites, that he has been effectively outed. Wittes published a scathing rebuke of the White House and Congress for the role they played in this. The danger to the FBI is that it will lose credibility with future informants.
The Times reported on meetings between Don Jr and non-Russian foreign nationals who were seeking to help the Trump campaign, including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and an Israeli, Joel Zamel, who specialized in social media manipulation was was paid $2 million after the election: “The plan involved using thousands of fake social media accounts to promote Mr. Trump’s candidacy on platforms like Facebook.” Mueller has one of Zamel’s computers.
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Trump’s Job Approval: 42.4%