Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of seventy-six. Sunrise is 5:51 AM and sunset 8:09 PM, for 14h 18m 02s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 95.6% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred sixty-ninth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1884, workers placed the cornerstone for the pedestal on which the Statue of Liberty now stands: ” ‘the rain was pouring down in torrents’ which effectively kept away hundreds of ceremony invitees. Yet according to the New York Times, 1500 water-logged people still jammed onto the small island to be part of the historic event. About a third of the attendees were French. The steamship Bay Ridge was festooned with French and American flags and chosen to shuttle people from Manhattan to Bedloe Island. Because of the driving rain “its capacity was not tested.” Once the ceremony began the David Island Government Band played “Marseillaise” and “Hail Columbia” respectively while men lowered the six ton granite stone onto the northeast corner of Fort Wood’s foundation.”

Recommended for reading in full — 

Beth Schwartzapfel asks Guess Who’s Tracking Your Prescription Drugs? (your doctor, your pharmacist… and the police):

As drug overdose deaths continue their record climb, Missouri last month became the 50th state to launch a prescription drug monitoring program, or PDMP. These state-run databases, which track prescriptions of certain potentially addictive or dangerous medications, are widely regarded as an essential tool to stem the opioid epidemic. Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens last month announced he was creating one in what had been the lone holdout state; legislative efforts to establish a program there had repeatedly failed because of lawmakers’ concerns about privacy.

Their concerns were not unfounded.

Federal courts in Utah and Oregon recently ruled that the Drug Enforcement Administration, in its effort to investigate suspected drug abusers or pill mills, can access information in those states’ PDMPs without a warrant, even over the states’ objections. And last month in California, the state supreme court ruled that the state medical board could view hundreds of patients’ prescription drug records in the course of its investigation of a physician accused of misconduct. “Physicians and patients have no reasonable expectation of privacy in the highly regulated prescription drug industry,” District Judge David Nuffer wrote in the Utah case.

Rachel Harmon contends that Trump’s Remarks To Police Violate His Oath of Office:

Speaking in New York Friday [7.28.17], President Trump encouraged our nation’s police officers to rough up suspects in their custody. In the days since, many law enforcement leaders and groups have denounced Trump’s comments as damaging to police-community relations. Some have responded by publicly reaffirming their commitment to serve and protect the public, but what about the president’s own oath?

“When you see these thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon. You see them thrown in rough. I said, ‘Please don’t be too nice’,” Trump told the audience of officers, referring to the practice of shielding suspects’ heads when placing them in police vehicles. “Like, don’t hit their head and they’ve just killed somebody. I said, ‘You can take the hand away, okay?'”

President Trump’s remarks encouraged officers to violate the Fourth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution, which grant individuals the right to be free from excessive force while in official custody. They also require police officers to protect those under arrest from unnecessary harm. As the Supreme Court once put it, “when the State takes a person into its custody and holds him there against his will, the Constitution imposes upon it a corresponding duty to assume some responsibility for his safety and general well-being.” And since federal law makes it a crime to willfully depriving a person of a constitutional right, he asked them to violate federal criminal law as well.

Yashar Ali reports that Fox News Host Sent Unsolicited Lewd Text Messages To Colleagues, Sources Say:

Eric Bolling, a longtime Fox News host, sent an unsolicited photo of male genitalia via text message to at least two colleagues at Fox Business and one colleague at Fox News, a dozen sources told HuffPost.

Recipients of the photo confirmed its contents to HuffPost, which is not revealing their identities. The women, who are Bolling’s current and former Fox colleagues, concluded the message was from him because they recognized his number from previous work-related and informal interactions. The messages were sent several years ago, on separate occasions.

The women did not solicit the messages, which they told colleagues were deeply upsetting and offensive. One of the recipients said that when she replied to Bolling via text, telling him never to send her such photos again, he did not respond. Four people, outside of the recipients, confirmed to HuffPost they’d seen the photo, and eight others said the recipients had spoken to them about it.

For this story, HuffPost spoke to 14 sources in and out of Fox News and Fox Business, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity either because they currently work at the networks and aren’t allowed to speak to members of the press without prior authorization or because they have confidentiality agreements with Fox News and its parent company 21st Century Fox.

Shawn Boburg and Emily Rauhala report that Stephen Bannon once guided a global firm that made millions helping gamers cheat:

Stephen K. Bannon had already been successful in Hollywood and on Wall Street when he flew to Hong Kong in mid-2005 to learn more about a promising new opportunity.

A start-up called Internet Gaming Entertainment, or IGE, had found a novel way to make millions of dollars each month in the exploding online video game industry. Working from the 19th floor of a skyscraper in Hong Kong, the company sold virtual goods for real money — magical swords and capes and other accoutrements that granted video game players power and access in more than a dozen popular online role-playing games.

There was one problem, though: The companies that owned and operated these fantasy games prohibited what IGE was doing, and even considered it illegal. Several IGE executives told The Washington Post that they thought Bannon could help change that. Bannon agreed to become the company’s vice chairman.

It’s an Elephant v. Goose battle at the zoo:

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of sixty-nine. Sunrise is 5:50 AM and sunset 8:11 PM, for 14h 20m 22s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 90.5% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred sixty-eighth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1862, an order for conscription meets with a riot in Port Washington.

Recommended for reading in full —

Zack Beauchamp and Andrew Prokop write of Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, and why Trump is so afraid of it, explained [with 9 points in full]:

So what follows is a clear guide to the biggest, most pressing issues about the investigation into Trump: how it works, what Mueller and his team are looking into, what we know about the Russia scandal so far, why it all matters, and what could happen next.

1) What is the Mueller investigation?

On May 17, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein announced that he was appointing Mueller as a special counsel charged with investigating connections between the Trump campaign and Russia’s effort to interfere in the 2016 election.

“The public interest requires me to place this investigation under the authority of a person who exercises a degree of independence from the normal chain of command,” Rosenstein said in the announcement.

Though various congressional committees are investigating Russian interference in the election and the Trump campaign’s potential collusion with Moscow, the Mueller investigation is where the real action is. It’s the one that can actually file federal charges. It’s also best positioned to get financial records, examine secret intelligence, and flip witnesses. When people talk about “the Russia investigation” these days, they’re usually talking about Mueller and his team.

The investigation actually started well before Mueller came on board — the FBI began it in the summer of 2016, prompted by the hacking and leaking of Democratic National Committee internal emails.

In the ensuing months, that investigation turned toward examining the broader topic of what intelligence officials identified as a Russian government campaign to interfere with the elections, and whether the Trump campaign or Trump associates were involved. Other agencies — including the CIA, the National Security Agency, and the Treasury Department’s financial crimes unit — also got involved, scrutinizing financial transactions and intercepting Russian communications.

Throughout all of that, the investigation followed the ordinary FBI chain of command. Then-FBI Director James Comey was the major figure overseeing the investigation, working with top Justice Department officials, who would in the end decide whether charges would be filed.

But on May 9, Trump fired Comey. Soon afterward, the president admitted that his unhappiness with Comey’s handling of the Russia investigation played a role in his firing. A series of leaks about troubling behavior by the president, including asking Comey to pledge his loyalty to Trump personally, made it into the press, raising serious questions about the investigation’s independence. Enter Bob Mueller….

Andy Kroll reports on New Fox Harassment Allegations: “A Contributorship…Was Contingent Upon” Sex:

A former frequent on-air guest at Fox News says that a Fox consultant and top lieutenant to Roger Ailes, the network’s late founder and longtime CEO, sexually harassed her repeatedly for more than a year, including dangling the possibility of a paid job at Fox if she would have sex with him.

The allegation appears in a written declaration by Caroline Heldman, an associate professor of politics at Occidental College who made numerous guest appearances on Fox starting in 2008. The Fox consultant, Woody Fraser, is a veteran television producer who helped create shows such as Good Morning America and Nightline and worked closely with Ailes at Fox for nearly a decade. Fraser’s relationship with Ailes dated back to the 1960s, when he hired a young Ailes to work on The Mike Douglas Show. “It was the best hire I’ve ever made,” Fraser told an Ailes biographer.

Heldman wrote in her declaration—signed under penalty of perjury and prepared as part of a potential lawsuit involving separate Fraser accusers—that Fraser “used coded language (an ‘arrangement’) on three different occasions, once in New York and twice in Los Angeles, that he wanted to have a sexual relationship with me.” Heldman says she repeatedly rejected his advances. She goes on to note: “Mr. Fraser insinuated on several occasions that a contributorship at Fox was contingent upon me having a sexual relationship with him. Even though I was a popular guest with numerous appearances and high ratings (according to Mr. Fraser), I was not offered a contributorship because I rebuffed Mr. Fraser’s sexual advances.”

See Declaration of Caroline Heldman.

John Herrman observes that For the New Far Right, YouTube Has Become the New Talk Radio:

Like its fellow mega-platforms Twitter and Facebook, YouTube is an enormous engine of cultural production and a host for wildly diverse communities. But like the much smaller Tumblr (which has long been dominated by lively and combative left-wing politics) or 4chan (which has become a virulent and effective hard-right meme factory) YouTube is host to just one dominant native political community: the YouTube right. This community takes the form of a loosely associated group of channels and personalities, connected mostly by shared political instincts and aesthetic sensibilities. They are monologuists, essayists, performers and vloggers who publish frequent dispatches from their living rooms, their studios or the field, inveighing vigorously against the political left and mocking the “mainstream media,” against which they are defined and empowered. They deplore “social justice warriors,” whom they credit with ruining popular culture, conspiring against the populace and helping to undermine “the West.” They are fixated on the subjects of immigration, Islam and political correctness. They seem at times more animated by President Trump’s opponents than by the man himself, with whom they share many priorities, if not a style. Some of their leading figures are associated with larger media companies, like Alex Jones’s Infowars or Ezra Levant’s Rebel Media. Others are independent operators who found their voices in the medium.

(The answer is to fill YouTube and other media with a competing, but intellectually superior, opposing view.)

The Washington Post rightly excoriates The man who may disenfranchise millions:

The day after last fall’s presidential election, Kris Kobach got to work. In an email plotting action items for the new Trump administration, Mr. Kobach, the Republican secretary of state in Kansas and a champion of voter suppression campaigns there and nationally, said he had “already started” drafting a key legislative change that would enable states to impose rules complicating registration for millions of new voters — exactly the sort of rules he had advanced in Kansas, with mixed success.

Writing to a Trump transition official, Mr. Kobach said he was preparing an amendment to the National Voter Registration Act to allow states to demand documentary proof of citizenship for new registrants. Despite years of litigation and adverse rulings from courts, that same requirement in Kansas, in effect since 2013, had blocked more than 30,000 people at least temporarily from registering and, in thousands of cases, from voting, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, which studies voting issues and has contested Mr. Kobach’s moves in Kansas.

Nearly all of those blocked in Kansas were eligible U.S. citizens who simply lacked ready access to passports, birth certificates and other documents, as at least 5 percent of Americans do. Disproportionately, those lacking such documents are minorities and younger voters — groups that tend to back Democrats.

Mr. Kobach now leads a presidential commission on election integrity, established by President Trump after his groundless assertion that 3 million to 5?million people voted illegally last November. The commission, stacked with Kobach clones who have made voter suppression into a political cottage industry, could undertake various forms of mischief intended to impede voting. Few would be as effective, or as damaging to electoral participation, as fiddling with registration by changing the NVRA, known as the “motor voter” law.

Tech Insider’s time-lapses show how much America has changed:

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be cloudy, with a probability of afternoon thundershowers, and a high of seventy-eight. Sunrise is 5:49 AM and sunset 8:12 PM, for 14h 22m 42s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 84.1% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred sixty-seventh day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission meets at 6:30 PM.

Recommended for reading in full —

Denise Clifton offers A Chilling Theory on Trump’s Nonstop Lies:

“26 hours, 29 Trumpian False or Misleading Claims.”

That was the headline on a piece last week from the Washington Post, whose reporters continued the herculean task of debunking wave after wave of President Donald Trump’s lies. (It turned out there was a 30th Trump falsehood in that time frame, regarding the head of the Boy Scouts.) The New York Timeskeeps a running tally of the president’s lies since Inauguration Day, and PolitiFact has scrutinized and rated 69 percent of Trump’s statements as mostly false, false, or “pants on fire.”

Trump’s chronic duplicity may be pathological, as some experts have suggested. But what else might be going on here? In fact, the 45th president’s stream of lies echoes a contemporary form of Russian propaganda known as the “Firehose of Falsehood.”

In 2016, the nonpartisan research organization RAND released a study of messaging techniques seen in Kremlin-controlled media. The researchers described two key features: “high numbers of channels and messages” and “a shameless willingness to disseminate partial truths or outright fictions.”

The result of those tactics? “New Russian propaganda entertains, confuses and overwhelms the audience.”

(I’ve posted the RAND study previously; it bears repeating that Trump’s techniques are almost identical to Soviet and Russian ones.)

As a particular example of a Russian-style talking point, Hannah Levintova observes that The Trump Administration and Kremlin Responses to the New Russian Sanctions Are Very Similar:

In a statement last week, Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Congress’ nearly unanimous approval of the sanctions bill indicates that “in certain circles” of US politics “Russophobia and the course of open confrontation with our country have become entrenched.” The ministry added, “[T]he new law on sanctions clearly showed that relations with Russia have become hostage to the internal political struggle within the United States itself.”

Seva Gunitsky, a political-science professor at the University of Toronto and Russia commentator, notes that “by saying things like ‘certain circles’ in Congress are pushing for these sanctions, they are still trying to appeal to Trump. They are saying, ‘Look, these sanctions are not really Trump’s fault; they are the Congress’ fault or the deep state’s fault.’ They don’t say it in those words, but that’s sort of implicit.”

Writing on his Facebook page on Wednesday, Russian lawmaker Konstantin Kosachev also eased Trump’s responsibility for the bill he just signed: “The news is mainly that Trump has given up,” he wrote, noting that Trump’s other option was to go against Congress.

Daniel Fried describes Russia’s Back-to-the-80s Foreign Policy (“Moscow has reprised Cold War tactics against the United States. It’s worth remembering that they didn’t work out well for the Soviet Union last time.”):

“History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” The latest round of Russian-American embassy staff hits—Russia cut hundreds of U.S. Embassy employees in an escalatory response to U.S. expulsion of 35 Russian diplomats last December—recall the big Soviet-American embassy staff expulsions of 1986. Few recall the details of these Reagan-era fights. But many remember that the 1980s ended badly for the Soviet Union.

And that is the point: Moscow now, like then, has been going down a dark road of confrontation with the United States and aggression elsewhere. As with the Soviets and reactionary tsars, external confrontation coincides with, and may be compensation for, stagnation at home. Putin’s tactics, like the demonization of the United States in Russian official media, appear recycled from the Cold War. Russian cyber hacking and disinformation recall Soviet “active measures” of the 1980s. Russia’s low-grade war in Ukraine is different from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (for one thing, the Ukrainians are fighting for a European future), but both aggressions triggered resistance on the ground and from the West. Russia’s leaders can try to convince their people, and themselves, that their ability to bully neighbors, repress dissenters, and shake their fists at the United States, is a sign of strength. But, just like in the mid-1980s, this won’t work.

Despite the hopes of the Soviet regime then and Putin’s regime now, the West is not on its last legs. The anti-European, pro-Russian French nationalist whom Putin supported lost badly in France’s elections this spring. Whatever deal Putin sought or thought he had with President Trump, the power of American institutions and long-term American interests in the success of certain values—including the rule of law, human rights, democracy, and the prosperity these generate—is likely to prevail, which will not help Putin. Neither Putin’s aggression abroad nor his repression at home will fix a stalled Russian economy still dependent on oil, gas, and other raw material exports, or a political system rooted in staggering corruption organized from the top.

Eugene Rumer writes that We’ve Seen This Movie Before. In Russia:

Conventional wisdom holds that the present situation in Washington is unprecedented. The hyperpartisanship, the dysfunctional administration, the accusations of conflicts of interests, the embattled and erratic White House and the president’s reliance on a small circle of trusted insiders, first and foremost his family, have stunned Washington and much of the country and the world. But veteran Russia-watchers have seen this before. They remember Russia in the 1990s.

The president, Boris Yeltsin, a charismatic figure often unable to control his impulses, was a prisoner of the Kremlin, or his out-of-town residence near Moscow. A heavy drinker, he was frequently reported to be unable to perform the duties of his office. He ended up relying on a small group of advisers who became known in Moscow as the “family.” At the center of it was his immediate family, who controlled access to him and his flow of information. First daughter Tatyana was his chief adviser and gatekeeper. Yeltsin’s press spokesman, Valentin Yumashev, who later married Tatyana and became Yeltsin’s chief of staff, was another key figure in the “family.” At one time or another, members of the “family” were reported to be under investigation by various Russian law enforcement agencies on suspicion of corruption. None ever went to trial, but allegations of corruption and ethical violations by those closest to Yeltsin became virtually an everyday feature of Russian political life, and in 1999 Yeltsin sacked the man in charge of the investigation.

(It’s worth noting that Yeltsin, at the right moment, defied the Communist party; Trump has never defied authoritarianism, even for a moment. Indeed, he daydreams of it. Yeltsin was the better, and Trump is the worse, man.)

From NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, here’s What’s Up for August 2017:

Good morning.

Midweek in Whitewater will see a likelihood of afternoon thundershowers and a high of eighty-one. Sunrise is 5:48 AM and sunset 8:13 PM, for 14h 24m 59s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 76.6% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred sixty-sixth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1939, Leó Szilárd and Albert Einstein send a letter to Pres. Roosevelt urging Roosevelt to consider an atomic bomb project in response to possible Nazi work along those lines:

On July 12, 1939, Szilárd and [Hungarian physicist Eugene] Wigner drove in Wigner’s car to Cutchogue on New York’s Long Island, where Einstein was staying.^[9] When they explained about the possibility of atomic bombs, Einstein replied: Daran habe ich gar nicht gedacht (I did not even think about that).^[10] Szilárd dictated a letter in German to the Belgian Ambassador to the United States. Wigner wrote it down, and Einstein signed it. At Wigner’s suggestion, they also prepared a letter for the State Departmentexplaining what they were doing and why, giving it two weeks to respond if it had any objections.^[9]

This still left the problem of getting government support for uranium research. Another friend of Szilárd’s, the Austrian economist Gustav Stolper, suggested approaching Alexander Sachs, who had access to PresidentFranklin D. Roosevelt. Sachs told Szilárd that he had already spoken to the President about uranium, but that Fermi and Pegram had reported that the prospects for building an atomic bomb were remote. He told Szilárd that he would deliver the letter, but suggested that it come from someone more prestigious. For Szilárd, Einstein was again the obvious choice.^[6] Sachs and Szilárd drafted a letter riddled with spelling errors and mailed it to Einstein.^[11]

Szilárd set out for Long Island again on August 2. Wigner was unavailable, so this time Szilárd co-opted another Hungarian physicist, Edward Teller, to do the driving. Einstein dictated the letter in German. On returning to Columbia University, Szilárd dictated the letter in English to a young departmental stenographer, Janet Coatesworth. She later recalled that when Szilárd mentioned extremely powerful bombs, she “was sure she was working for a nut”.^[12] Ending the letter with “Yours truly, Albert Einstein” did nothing to alter this impression. Both the letter and a longer explanatory letter were then posted to Einstein.^[12]

Recommended for reading in full:

Yascha Mounk writes that The Past Week Proves That Trump Is Destroying Our Democracy:

Over just a few days last week, President Trump and his allies stepped up attacks on Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating the campaign’s connections to Russia. They tried to push Attorney General Jeff Sessions out of office. They thought out loud about whether the president can pardon himself.

This all points to the same conclusion: Mr. Trump is willing to deal a major blow to the rule of law — and the American Republic — in order to end an independent investigation into his Russia ties.

It is tempting to picture the demise of democracy as a Manichaean drama in which the stakes are clear from the start and the main actors fully understand their roles: Would-be dictators rail against democracy, hire violent thugs to do their bidding and vow to destroy the opposition. When they demand expanded powers or attack independent institutions, their supporters and opponents alike realize that authoritarianism has arrived.

There have, in fact, been a few times and places when the villains were quite as villainous, and the heroes quite as heroic. (Think Germany in the 1930s.) But in most cases, the demise of democracy has been far more gradual and far easier to overlook….

(Dark those these times are, yet one can still reasonably believe that there are in America enough who see this, and from among them enough who will resist.)

Philip Bump has for readers A timeline of the explosive lawsuit alleging a White House link in the Seth Rich conspiracy:

NPR’s David Folkenflik reported Tuesday morning on a lawsuit filed by a man named Rod Wheeler that makes a remarkable claim: The Trump White House — or President Trump personally — may have been aware of or involved in a discredited Fox News story about the killing of a Democratic National Committee staffer last July.

It’s a complicated story that, we hasten to add, is based on allegations in a lawsuit filed by a person whose quotes in that discredited story were themselves discredited. But the lawsuit includes documentary evidence (like text messages), and Folkenflik was given access to recorded calls that bolster the story as presented. What’s more, the lawsuit is predicated on Wheeler’s assertion that he never said the quotes attributed to him.

Given the complexity of the story, we’ve taken the details in the lawsuit and arranged them as a timeline. First, though, it’s important to understand the cast of characters [charcaters and timeline follow]…

Margaret Sullivan observes that You don’t have to believe everything in that Seth Rich lawsuit. What’s been confirmed is bad enough:

Now, though, we know that Spicer [despite his denial on 5.16.17] was indeed aware that Fox News was cooking up a story that would eventually be amplified and twisted into a huge, baseless conspiracy theory.

And — if you choose to believe everything in the lawsuit by former police investigator and Fox contributor Rod Wheeler — President Trump himself encouraged the bogus story in advance. (Wheeler’s suit claims he was misquoted by the network.)

At its most outrageous, the conspiracy theory that grew out of that initial Fox story suggested that Hillary Clinton arranged to have Rich assassinated after he betrayed the DNC by sending internal information to WikiLeaks during the campaign. All of this was based on the idea that an internal mole betrayed the DNC and that Russian hackers had nothing to do with it.

Let’s be clear: There’s no basis for that craziness and never has been. Although the killing remains unsolved, D.C. police continue to view the shooting of 27-year-old Rich as part of a botched robbery attempt.

Garrison Keillor reassuringly believes that We will survive this:

So. We have a vulgar, unstable yo-yo with a toxic ego and an attention-deficit problem in the White House, and now we can see that government by Twitter is like trying to steer a ship by firing a pistol at the waves — not really useful — but what does it all add up to? Not that much, if you ask me, which you didn’t, but I’ll say it anyway.

 We will survive this. He will do what damage he can, like a man burning books out of anger that he can’t read, but there will still be plenty of books left….

Good morning.

A new month in Whitewater begins with partly cloudy skies and a high of eighty-one. Sunrise is 5:47 AM and sunset 8:14 PM, for 14h 27m 14s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 68.2% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred sixty-fifth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

The Whitewater Common Council meets at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1790, the first United States Census finds just under four million people in the country. On this day in 1832, the steamboat Warrior blocks Black Hawk’s escape across the Mississippi.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Ashley Parker, Carol D. Leonnig, Philip Rucker and Tom Hamburger report that Trump dictated son’s misleading statement on meeting with Russian lawyer:

Flying home from Germany on July 8 aboard Air Force One, Trump personally dictated a statement in which Trump Jr. said that he and the Russian lawyer had “primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children” when they met in June 2016, according to multiple people with knowledge of the deliberations. The statement, issued to the New York Times as it prepared an article, emphasized that the subject of the meeting was “not a campaign issue at the time.”

Over the next three days, multiple accounts of the meeting were provided to the news media as public pressure mounted, with Trump Jr. ultimately acknowledging that he had accepted the meeting after receiving an emailpromising damaging information about Hillary Clinton as part of a Russian government effort to help his father’s campaign.

The extent of the president’s personal intervention in his son’s response, the details of which have not previously been reported, adds to a series of actions that Trump has taken that some advisers fear could place him and some members of his inner circle in legal jeopardy.

David Folkenflik reports from Behind Fox News’ Baseless Seth Rich Story: The Untold Tale:

The Fox News Channel and a wealthy supporter of President Trump worked in concert under the watchful eye of the White House to concoct a story about the murder of a young Democratic National Committee aide, according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday.

The explosive claim is part of the lawsuit filed against Fox News by Rod Wheeler, a longtime paid commentator for the news network. The suit was obtained exclusively by NPR.

Wheeler alleges Fox News and the Trump supporter intended to deflect public attention from growing concern about the administration’s ties to the Russian government. His suit charges that a Fox News reporter created quotations out of thin air and attributed them to him to propel her story.

Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) writes My Party Is in Denial About Donald Trump:

Who could blame the people who felt abandoned and ignored by the major parties for reaching in despair for a candidate who offered oversimplified answers to infinitely complex questions and managed to entertain them in the process? With hindsight, it is clear that we all but ensured the rise of Donald Trump.

I will let the liberals answer for their own sins in this regard. (There are many.) But we conservatives mocked Barack Obama’s failure to deliver on his pledge to change the tone in Washington even as we worked to assist with that failure. It was we conservatives who, upon Obama’s election, stated that our No. 1 priority was not advancing a conservative policy agenda but making Obama a one-term president—the corollary to this binary thinking being that his failure would be our success and the fortunes of the citizenry would presumably be sorted out in the meantime. It was we conservatives who were largely silent when the most egregious and sustained attacks on Obama’s legitimacy were leveled by marginal figures who would later be embraced and legitimized by far too many of us. It was we conservatives who rightly and robustly asserted our constitutional prerogatives as a co-equal branch of government when a Democrat was in the White House but who, despite solemn vows to do the same in the event of a Trump presidency, have maintained an unnerving silence as instability has ensued. To carry on in the spring of 2017 as if what was happening was anything approaching normalcy required a determined suspension of critical faculties. And tremendous powers of denial.

I’ve been sympathetic to this impulse to denial, as one doesn’t ever want to believe that the government of the United States has been made dysfunctional at the highest levels, especially by the actions of one’s own party. Michael Gerson, a con­servative columnist and former senior adviser to President George W. Bush, wrote, four months into the new presidency, “The conservative mind, in some very visible cases, has become diseased,” and conservative institutions “with the blessings of a president … have abandoned the normal constraints of reason and compassion”….

(I’ll assume that Flake is sincere in his views, but much more will have to be done than for a conservative senator to write remorsefully about Trumpism. Flake’s party nominated Trump, and attended his inauguration; by contrast, many millions of us have opposed and resisted him all the while.)

Bret Stephens writes of The ‘No Guardrails’ Presidency:

Trumpism wasn’t just some bottom-up movement. It, too, had its professors, politicians and journalistic commentators — the theoreticians, enablers, sanctifiers, excuse makers and Never Never-Trumpers — who gave the movement a patina of intellectual respectability and moral seriousness that Trump himself had done nothing to earn.

They are our new Antinomians, who believe the president and his administration are bound by no law, even the Mosaic one, because they have already been saved by a new version of grace — in this case, the grace of defeating Hillary Clinton. Thought exercise for Trump’s media defenders: If the president were to sexually assault a woman in the Oval Office tomorrow, would you still justify your vote on the view that Neil Gorsuch’s elevation to the Supreme Court made it all worthwhile?

“The first duty of a revolutionist is to get away with it,” Abbie Hoffman said in Chicago in 1968. This might as well be the slogan of this administration and its supporters, too.

In the meantime, we have a “No Guardrails” presidency, in which Trump’s contempt for law, procedure and decorum are a license for the behavior of his minions and a model for future American demagogues and their apologists.

Man meets bears, narrates: