Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of forty-seven. Sunrise is 7:26 AM and sunset 5:50 PM, for 10h 23m 39s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 65.4% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred fifty-fourth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
It’s a Black Tuesday on this day in 1929, on which the United States suffers the worst stock market crash in her history, with the twelve-year Great Depression following. On this day in 1864, the 38th Wisconsin Infantry participates in a reconnaissance mission to Harper’s Run, Virginia.
Recommended for reading in full —
Susan Hennessey, Benjamin Wittes ponder Seven Frequently Asked Mueller Indictment Questions for Which We Don’t Have the Answers:
Let’s start with what we know about the indictment in the Mueller investigation.
Late last night, CNN broke the bombshell story that Friday afternoon, the first charges in the Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation were filed:
A federal grand jury in Washington, DC, on Friday approved the first charges in the investigation led by special counsel Robert Mueller, according to sources briefed on the matter.
The charges are still sealed under orders from a federal judge. Plans were prepared Friday for anyone charged to be taken into custody as soon as Monday, the sources said. It is unclear what the charges are.
Reuters and the Wall Street Journal confirmed the report shortly thereafter.
In short, someone under investigation in the Mueller investigation appears to have been indicted for something and may be arrested at some point.
End of list.
And while that alone is a genuine bombshell, the much more important point at this stage here is how little we do know and, thus, how few conclusions we can reasonably draw at this point. Below is effort to walk through the many unanswered questions that are kicking around today. Our intention here to emphasize how little we can responsibly say about it and guide people away from getting too far ahead of the story.
Toward that end, here are seven frequently asked questions we don’t know the answer to [list follows]….
(Dine well: Hennessey and Wittes, and their colleagues at Lawfare offer a healthful meal; Trump and his ilk peddle & consume a foul analytical cusine, variously the worst of America or Russia.)
Paul Rosenzweig, also of Lawfare, offers Unpacking Uranium One: Hype and Law:
The latest instance of “what-aboutism” is the House Republican decision to open an investigation of the Uranium One transaction—the allegation that Hillary Clinton transferred control of 20% of America’s uranium mining output to a Russian company, in exchange for substantial contributions to the Clinton Foundation from the executives of that same Russian company. Perhaps fearing future revelations of Trump’s closeness to Russia, the evident purpose of the investigation is to establish a “Hillary too” counterpoint. Based on what is currently in the public record, little, if anything about the allegation is plausible. In this post, I want to summarize the legal context and known facts regarding the transfer and put the allegations of impropriety in context. (I focus exclusively on the transfer and the U.S. government’s approval of it. I am not, in this post, considering the evidence—such as it is—of donations to the Clinton Foundation. My reasoning is simple: if there is no “quo” to be given, the question of a “quid” is moot..)….
(Trumpism uses no rhetorical trick more often than whataboutism, the Soviet and Russian technique of diverting attention to one’s own wrongs by accusing another of misconduct rather than denying or refuting the original charges.)
Sharon LaFraniere and Andrew E. Kramer report Talking Points Brought to Trump Tower Meeting Were Shared With Kremlin:
Natalia V. Veselnitskaya arrived at a meeting at Trump Tower in June 2016 hoping to interest top Trump campaign officials in the contents of a memo she believed contained information damaging to the Democratic Party and, by extension, Hillary Clinton. The material was the fruit of her research as a private lawyer, she has repeatedly said, and any suggestion that she was acting at the Kremlin’s behest that day is anti-Russia “hysteria.”
But interviews and records show that in the months before the meeting, Ms. Veselnitskaya had discussed the allegations with one of Russia’s most powerful officials, the prosecutor general, Yuri Y. Chaika. And the memo she brought with her closely followed a document that Mr. Chaika’s office had given to an American congressman two months earlier, incorporating some paragraphs verbatim.
The coordination between the Trump Tower visitor and the Russian prosecutor general undercuts Ms. Veselnitskaya’s account that she was a purely independent actor when she sat down with Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, and Paul J. Manafort, then the Trump campaign chairman. It also suggests that emails from an intermediary to the younger Mr. Trump promising that Ms. Veselnitskaya would arrive with information from Russian prosecutors were rooted at least partly in fact — not mere “puffery,” as the president’s son later said….
(A connected lawyer in Putin’s Russia, wishing to remain a connected lawyer in Putin’s Russia, would not have met members of Trump’s family without prior Kremlin support.)
Russia’s had an easy time of polluting Twitter with bots filled with Putin’s lies:
As Twitter prepares to face Congress next week, see how easy it was for Russians to deploy bot armies in 2016 @MSNBC https://t.co/iiVHuDotmd
— Jo Ling Kent (@jolingkent) October 27, 2017
(Nota bene: Putin’s lies become Trump’s talking points, and indeed Trump knows Russian techniques so well they come reflexively to him.)
Consider How Da Vinci ‘Augmented Reality’ — More Than 500 Years Ago:
We may think of Leonardo Da Vinci as an artist, but he was also a scientist. By incorporating anatomy, chemistry, and optics into his artistic process, Da Vinci created an augmented reality experience centuries before the concept even existed. This video details how Da Vinci made the Mona Lisa interactive using innovative painting techniques and the physiology of the human eye.