Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be partly sunny, with a high of eighty-one.  Sunrise is 5:16 AM and sunset 8:31 PM, for 15h 14m 49s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 41.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission is scheduled to meet at 6 PM.

On this day in 1776, Richard Henry Lee (of Virgina) introduces a resolution to the Continental Congress:

Resolved, That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.

That it is expedient forthwith to take the most effectual measures for forming foreign Alliances.

That a plan of confederation be prepared and transmitted to the respective Colonies for their consideration and approbation.

Recommended for reading in full —

  David J. Lynch report This Ohio factory thought it could bring U.S. jobs back from China. Then Trump got involved:

CLEVELAND — Bill Adler was invited last year to bid on a contract to make commercial sausage stuffers for a company that wanted to replace its Chinese supplier. The customer had just one non­negotiable demand: Match China’s price.

Adler, owner of metal-parts maker Stripmatic Products, thought he could. But even as he readied his proposal, talk of President Trump’s steel tariffs sent the price of Stripmatic’s main raw material soaring.

In April, with prices up nearly 50 percent from October and the first wave of tariffs in place, Adler’s bid failed. His costs were too high.

Today, instead of taking business from China, Adler worries about hanging onto the work he has. He hopes that the president’s tariffs are just a negotiating tactic.

“It’s got to be short-term, or I’ve got to find another way to make a living,” Adler said, only half joking. “It’s going to be an ugly scenario if it doesn’t end quickly.”

(Trump’s trade policy flies in the face of centuries – literally – of economic understanding across the political spectrum.  It’s as though a man living in the fourteenth century, and knowing nothing of economy theory then or after, began to meddle with the trade structure of the most successful commercial republic in human history.)

Matt Apuzzo reports Trump Team Pushed False Story Line About Meeting With Kremlin-Tied Lawyer, Memo Shows:

For nearly a year, the denials from President Trump’s lawyers and spokeswoman were unequivocal. No, the president did not dictate a misleading statement released in his son’s name.

“He certainly didn’t dictate,” said the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

“The president was not involved in the drafting of that statement,” his lawyer Jay Sekulow told NBC News.

“That was written by Donald Trump Jr., and I’m sure in consultation with his lawyer,” Mr. Sekulow told CNN.

“The president didn’t sign off on anything,” he told ABC.

But in a confidential, hand-delivered memo to the special counsel, Mr. Trump’s lawyers acknowledged that, yes, Mr. Trump had dictated the statement, which attempted to deflect questions about a meeting with a Kremlin-tied lawyer at Trump Tower. Prosecutors are asking whether the statement was part of an effort by the president to obstruct a federal investigation.

(A year of lies.)

  Denise Clifton reports A Murder Plot, a Twitter Mob, and the Strange Unmasking of a Pro-Kremlin Troll:

For several days in March, British Prime Minister Theresa May was the focus of an all-out assault on Twitter after she blamed the Kremlin for the poisoning of a former Russian spy and his daughter on British soil. One account in the melee stood out, racking up hundreds of retweets and claiming May was lying about the nerve-agent attack on Sergei and Yulia Skripal:

“The #Skripal Case: It Looks Like Theresa May Has Some Explaining to Do!” declared one of many broadsides from @ian56789, who called the attempted murder a “#falseflag” operation.

To expert disinformation researchers, the troll appeared to be working on behalf of Vladimir Putin’s regime, part of a longer-term pro-Kremlin campaign. The British government reported that the “Ian” account—whose avatar featured the chiseled face of British male model David Gandy—sent 100 posts a day during a 12-day period in April, reaching 23 million users. Atlantic Council analyst Ben Nimmo examined tens of thousands of tweets around #Skripal and concluded Ian was likely part of a Kremlin troll operation, based on multiple characteristics seen across Ian’s posts going back six years. The account vigorously backed Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, and pushed Moscow spin regarding chemical weapon attacks in Syria and the shooting down of Malaysian flight MH-17 over Ukraine. The most important clue, according to Nimmo, was Ian’s extensive posting about the assassination of Boris Nemtsov in the 24 hours after the Russian opposition leader was murdered in Moscow on February 27, 2015. Ian let loose those tweets—including the suggestion that the CIA was involved—as a social media campaign about Nemtsov was launched by the Internet Research Agency, the infamous Kremlin troll farm in St. Petersburg that targeted the 2016 US elections.

But it turned out the Ian account was not necessarily what it seemed. In April, British media reports, citing UK government sources, misidentified Ian as a Russian “bot,” and the account was temporarily suspended by Twitter. Then, a retired British IT project manager named Ian Shilling came forward as its owner, defiantly stating he had no connection to the Russian government.

(Trolls and bots are different, but as bots become more sophisticated it’s hard to distinguish them from people who are trolling.)

The Committee to Investigate Russia writes Putin Says He and POTUS Speak Regularly:

Russian President Vladimir Putin told Austrian television channel ORF Monday night that he and President Trump “regularly talk over the phone.”

CNN:

Putin said that in a recent phone call, “Donald said he was worried about the possibility of a new arms race.”

“I fully agree with him — however, to prevent a possible arms [race], we should think about it, we should do something about it, give corresponding instructions to our Foreign Ministry and the US State Department,” Putin added.

When asked by journalist Armin Wolf why there had been no US-Russia bilateral summit since Trump became president, Putin said he had met Trump more than once at international events but signaled that there were no immediate plans for a formal meeting.

“I think that the possibility of these meetings depends to a large extent on the internal political situation in the United States,” Putin said. “The congressional election campaign is getting under way and then there will be the next presidential election, and the President of the United States is coming under attack over various matters. I think this is the main reason.”

(…)

Trump and Putin have spoken by phone eight times, according to readouts distributed by the White House. They have met in person twice — once at a formal bilateral meeting in Germany and once on the sidelines of a leaders’ summit in Vietnam.

(There are Russian dissidents, and many ordinary Russians, who are great friends of America. Putin, however, has made himself an enemy of the United States and of a civilized internal order.  Americans sympathetic to Putin are fellow travelers, and those few actively working on behalf of his interests are fifth columnists. Either way, such people are rightly held as detestable.)

 Merrit Kennedy reports Great White Sharks Have A Secret ‘Cafe,’ And They Led Scientists Right To It:

Great white sharks have a “hidden life” that is becoming a lot less hidden thanks to a scientific expedition that has been years in the making.

Scientists used to think the apex predators moved up and down the western coast of North America, snacking in waters with lots of food close to shore. Almost 20 years ago, Stanford marine biologist Barbara Block started putting tags on the sharks that could track their movements.

…

A layer of nutrient-rich plant life exists deeper under the ocean than satellites could detect. Tiny creatures feed on it, and larger creatures feed on them. And up and up. It represents “a complete food chain, a ladder of consumption, that made us believe that there was an adequate food supply out here for big animals like tunas and the sharks,” Robison said.

…

The fact that scientists didn’t even know this area existed until sharks led them there speaks to how much we still don’t know about the ocean. In fact, according to NOAA’s National Ocean Service, humans have explored just 5 percent of it.

(Word has it that the sharks always get the café’s best seating.)

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will see a mixture of sunshine and clouds, with a high of seventy-five.  Sunrise is 5:16 AM and sunset 8:30 PM, for 15h 13m 56s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 51.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1944, the Normandy landings, and so the liberation of millions from Nazi tyranny, begin:

The Normandy landings were the largest seaborne invasion in history, with nearly 5,000 landing and assault craft, 289 escort vessels, and 277 minesweepers participating.[188] Nearly 160,000 troops crossed the English Channel on D-Day,[30] with 875,000 men disembarking by the end of June.[189] Allied casualties on the first day were at least 10,000, with 4,414 confirmed dead.[190] The Germans lost 1,000 men.[191] The Allied invasion plans had called for the capture of Carentan, St. Lô, Caen, and Bayeux on the first day, with all the beaches (other than Utah) linked with a front line 10 to 16 kilometres (6 to 10 mi) from the beaches; none of these objectives were achieved.[33] The five bridgeheads were not connected until 12 June, by which time the Allies held a front around 97 kilometres (60 mi) long and 24 kilometres (15 mi) deep.[192] Caen, a major objective, was still in German hands at the end of D-Day and would not be completely captured until 21 July.[193] The Germans had ordered French civilians other than those deemed essential to the war effort to leave potential combat zones in Normandy.[194] Civilian casualties on D-Day and D+1 are estimated at 3,000 people.[195]

Recommended for reading in full —

  Michael LaForgia and Gabriel J.X. Dance report Facebook Gave Data Access to Chinese Firm Flagged by U.S. Intelligence:

Facebook has data-sharing partnerships with at least four Chinese electronics companies, including a manufacturing giant that has a close relationship with China’s government, the social media company said on Tuesday.

The agreements, which date to at least 2010, gave private access to some user data to Huawei, a telecommunications equipment company that has been flagged by American intelligence officials as a national security threat, as well as to Lenovo, Oppo and TCL.

The four partnerships remain in effect, but Facebook officials said in an interview that the company would wind down the Huawei deal by the end of the week.

  The New York Times editorial board observes that Grifters Gonna Grift:

On Monday, Paul Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign chairman, splashed back into the news when members of the special counsel Robert Mueller’s team accused him in court papers of witness tampering. Swamp-watchers will recall that Mr. Manafort is facing a smorgasbord of charges related to tax, lobbying and money-laundering violations. Prosecutors now say that he has been using his free time while awaiting trial to try to contact some former European business associates in order to coach them into lying about his work on behalf of pro-Russia political interests in Ukraine. Mr. Manafort’s secret lobbying scheme is alleged to have been impressively elaborate — as, also, efforts to cover it up. But the straightforward phrase that leaps out from this latest court filing comes from a witness telling the F.B.I. that Mr. Manafort had tried to “suborn perjury.” Such an effort would qualify as a definite legal no-no.

Meanwhile, Scott Pruitt, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, has once again burnished his reputation as the Trump administration’s biggest grifter. On Monday, Democrats on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee asked the committee’s chairman, Representative Trey Gowdy, to subpoena the E.P.A. for documents relating to Mr. Pruitt’s “multiple abuses of authority in using agency staff for his own personal purposes.”

Specifically, Democrats want to know more about Mr. Pruitt’s reportedly asking his agency scheduler, Millan Hupp, to handle various tasks for him, including finding him a new place to live last summer — a monthslong, labor-intensive process — and trying to help him buy a used mattress from the Trump International Hotel in Washington.

The mattress caper was, at least, more exotic than Mr. Pruitt’s usual shopping misadventures — the nearly $10,000 to decorate his office, the dozen customized fountain pens for $1,560, the $43,000 soundproof phone booth. It even could be seen as a positive sign that he has abandoned his spendthrift ways. No matter: By Tuesday, Mr. Pruitt’s furnishing needs became old news when it was revealed that he had also asked an aide to help his wife, Marlyn, procure a Chick-fil-A franchise. Calls were arranged and the application process begun, but Mrs. Pruitt never did open a restaurant.

(Pruitt: Hard to grasp, really, an agency head searching Washington for a deal on a used Trump mattress.)

Bob Egelko reports Judge Aaron Persky, who ruled in sex assault case, recalled in Santa Clara County:

Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Aaron Persky was recalled from office by the voters Tuesday, two years after he set off national outrage by sentencing a Stanford athlete to six months in jail for sexually assaulting and attempting to rape an unconscious woman.

With 43 percent of precincts reporting, 59 percent of the county’s voters favored recalling Persky while 41 percent opposed the recall. On the same ballot, Assistant District Attorney Cindy Hendrickson led civil rights lawyer Angela Storey, 70 to 30 percent, in the election to serve the last four years of Persky’s term.

Takeaway: Persky, a judge for 15 years, is the first California jurist to be recalled since 1932.

(Those who decide unjustly are unworthy of deciding.)

Bruce Jones contends Despite summit diplomacy, Korea war risks have risen:

No one likes to speak out against diplomacy and the pursuit of peace, especially when a real threat of military confrontation looms; but the long history of diplomacy and war tells us that ill-prepared summits readily break down, and when they do, those failures help pave the way to war.

Those risks grew on May 25 when Trump sent a letter to Kim. It was an astonishing text, unique in the annals of contemporary international politics; a letter-length tweet in the tone of voice of a petulant teenager who has been spurned by a girl, calling off their planned date but holding open hope of a new one: “please do not hesitate to call.”

The first phase of Trump’s efforts on North Korea were unusual for his presidency: They took place largely in private, involved in-depth briefings and a lot of listening, and largely avoided Tweets. Ever since his U.N. General Assembly speech last September, however, Trump’s mercurial personality has been more front and center in the drive to diplomacy. That led to an escalation of rhetoric, and of risks.

(We’ve enough risks, and it’s self-destructive to create yet more. It asks too much, both morally and practically, to expect even the most formidable military in all the world to execute an effectual policy of perpetual war.)

 Maddie for Science describes Matchmaking for Maned Wolves ?:

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of seventy-two.  Sunrise is 5:17 AM and sunset 8:29 PM, for 15h 12m 58s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 61.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Common Council meets this evening at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1884, war hero Gen. William T. Sherman declines a run for the presidency: “I will not accept if nominated and will not serve if elected.”

Recommended for reading in full —

Spencer S. Hsu, Rosalind S. Helderman, Matt Zapotosky and Devlin Barrett report Mueller accuses Paul Manafort of witness tampering:

In court documents, prosecutors with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III allege that Manafort and his associate — referred to only as Person A — tried to contact the two witnesses by phone and through encrypted messaging apps. The description of Person A matches his longtime business colleague in Ukraine, Konstantin Kilimnik.

Manafort, 69, has been on home confinement pending trial.

FBI agent Brock W. Domin said that one of the public relations firm’s executives identified as Person D1 told the government he “understood Manafort’s outreach to be an effort to ‘suborn perjury’?” by encouraging others to lie to federal investigators by concealing the firm’s work in the United States.

Spokesmen for Manafort and the special counsel’s office, who are under a court gag order in the case, declined to comment.

Charlie Savage reports Trump and His Lawyers Embrace a Vision of Vast Executive Power:

WASHINGTON — President Trump, ramping up his assertions of extraordinary powers, declared in a tweet on Monday that he had “the absolute right” to pardon himself for any crime.

While no president has ever purported to pardon himself, and it is not clear whether Mr. Trump could legitimately take such a step, the president’s claim was the latest in an aggressive series of moves to assert his control over federal law enforcement.

Last month, Mr. Trump crossed a traditional line by ordering an investigation into the Russia investigators. And late last year he boasted he has “an absolute right to do what I want to with the Justice Department.”

The president has had help in shaping his expansive view of his authority: For at least a year, his lawyers in the investigation into whether he tried to obstruct the Russia inquiry have been advising the president that he wields sweeping constitutional powers to impede investigations no matter his motive — and despite obstruction-of-justice laws that everyone else must obey.

Mark Osler observes With his pardons, Trump is turning tool of mercy into sword of retribution:

There is a deeper tragedy, too. While Trump grants pardons to people like D’Souza without going through the office of the Pardon Attorney, thousands of others wait for a decision after they followed the rules. Many of them are well-deserving of consideration, having been over-sentenced for relatively minor narcotics crimes.

Here’s an idea: If President Trump really wants to make a point about the failings of his opponents, he should go big and grant commutations to the thousands of deserving petitioners who were denied or not ruled upon during the Obama administration.

Even better, he can get around to fixing an outdated and bureaucratic clemency process that Obama never repaired — a tortuous and unnecessarily redundant system where seven levels of review occur sequentially. It’s time to take that process out of the Department of Justice, too. It is President Trump’s right to make clemency decisions himself and ignore the existing process, but to do that fairly, he has to scrap what supposedly exists and create something better.

(Osler knows, of course, how unlikely a through review from Trump would be.)

Michael Kruse reports ‘He Pretty Much Gave In to Whatever They Asked For’ (“Trump says he’s a master negotiator. Those who’ve actually dealt with him beg to differ”):

But these past 16 months of Trump’s presidency have shown that whatever skills Trump thinks he acquired over the course of his business career haven’t necessarily translated to his work in the White House. The failed repeal-and-replace health care negotiations, bungled efforts to get funding from Mexico for his promised border wall, the pulling out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Iran nuclear deal—Trump has proven to be more adept at breaking deals than making deals. And the sudden and bizarre scuttling of his meeting with murderous North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un that had been scheduled for June 12 in Singapore—and now might be back on again—is only the latest data point that suggests he’s either not as good at negotiating as he promised he was, or that negotiating with disparate factions of Congress or in geopolitically fraught international arenas is harder than he thought it would be and harder than anything he’s ever done. The truth, according to negotiation experts who have studied Trump’s track record, people who have negotiated for him and against him, associates, biographers and former employees, is that it’s all of that.

Trump was, and still is, they say, a confident, competitive, aggressive, impulsive, zero-sum, win-at-all-costs, transactional, unpredictable, often underinformed and ill-prepared, gut-following, ego-driven, want-it-and-want-it-now negotiator. His self-burnished image as a tip-top deal-maker long has obscured an actual record that is far more mixed, pocked with moves and acquisitions that scratched a passing itch but created massive financial problems later. His best work, too, was his earliest work. Trump was at his most patient, his most diligent, his most attentive and his most creative—his most effective—some 35 to 45 years ago, when he was intent on pile-driving into the cultural bedrock powerful storylines on which he would build his career as a celebrity business tycoon.At no point, though, in the past nearly half a century—from the shrewd, well-timed talks that led to the Grand Hyatt and Trump Tower in midtown Manhattan to the agreements behind The Art of the Deal and “The Apprentice”—did Trump’s negotiations in real estate and entertainment circles prepare him fully for the degree of nuance and complexity he now faces as president. And his abrupt cancellation last week of the North Korea summit, in the estimation of the negotiating experts I talked to, was a scramble to reclaim a modicum of the leverage he gave up when he too eagerly consented to the meeting in the first place. But Trump’s decision to leave open the possibility of rescheduling (“… please do not hesitate to call me or write”) as well as the ongoing back-and-forth between his administration and its North Korean counterparts signal that he still wants to meet because he still needs a negotiating win heading into November’s midterms.

This Conveyor Belt Can Move Packages In Any Direction:

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of seventy-eight.  Sunrise is 5:17 AM and sunset 8:29 PM, for 15h 11m 58s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 71% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1989, the Chinese communist government commits the Tiananmen Square massacre:

Declassified files
In British government files declassified and made public in December 2017, it was revealed that Alan Ewen Donald, who served as the UK’s ambassador to China from 1988 to 1991, had reported in 1989 that a member of the State Council of the People’s Republic of China had estimated the civilian death toll at 10,000.[2][160][161]

Other estimates
Other estimates of the death toll have been higher than the figures announced by the government. Nicholas D. Kristof, then Beijing bureau chief for The New York Times, wrote on June 21 that “it seems plausible that about a dozen soldiers and policemen were killed, along with 400 to 800 civilians.”[4] US ambassador James Lilley said that, based on visits to hospitals around Beijing, a minimum of several hundred had been killed.[162] In a 1990 article addressing the question, Time magazine said that the Chinese Red Cross had given a figure of 2,600 deaths on the morning of June 4, though later this figure was retracted.[163] A declassified US National Security Agency cable filed on the same day estimated 180–500 deaths up to the morning of June 4.[164] Amnesty International’s estimates puts the number of deaths at between several hundred and close to 1,000,[163][165] while a Western diplomat who compiled estimates put the number at 300 to 1,000.[4]

Recommended for reading in full —

Trump declares himself a king:

As has been stated by numerous legal scholars, I have the absolute right to PARDON myself, but why would I do that when I have done nothing wrong? In the meantime, the never ending Witch Hunt, led by 13 very Angry and Conflicted Democrats (& others) continues into the mid-terms!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 4, 2018

(Those ‘numerous scholars’ are merely Trump’s monarchical ambitions.)

Tamar Auber reports Rudy Giuliani: Even if He ‘Shot James Comey’ Trump Still Couldn’t Be Indicted:

President Donald Trump‘s personal lawyer made the bold claim that even if the president committed murder he still could not be indicted for his crime.

The comment was made in an interview to the Huffington Post on Sunday in which Giuliani argued that Trump’s constitutional powers were so broad he could do anything he wanted and still evade an indictment.

“In no case can he be subpoenaed or indicted,” Giuliani told HuffPost.“I don’t know how you can indict while he’s in office. No matter what it is.”

…

Former White House ethics lawyer Norm Eisen, however, told HuffPothat despite Trump’s campaign brags and his lawyer’s misguided claims, “A president could not be prosecuted for murder? Really?…It is one of many absurd positions that follow from their argument. It is self-evidently wrong.”

He added, “The foundation of America is that no person is above the law.”

Anticipating Trump’s undemocratic ambitions, Harry Littman yesterday wrote President Trump Thinks He Is a King:

The president believes he is above the law. That’s the takeaway from the confidential 20-page memo sent by President Trump’s lawyers to the special counsel, Robert Mueller, published over the weekend by The Times. And it’s the same sentiment that Rudy Giuliani expressed on Sunday when he suggested that Mr. Trump has the power to pardon himself.

The central claim of the legal memorandum is that it is impossible for the president to illegally obstruct any aspect of the investigation into Russia’s election meddling. That’s because, as president, Mr. Trump has the constitutional power to terminate the inquiry or pardon his way out of it. Therefore — and this is the key and indefensible point — he cannot obstruct justice by exercising this authority “no matter his motivation.”

This understanding of presidential power is radical and absolutist. It is also unsound and almost certain to be sharply rejected should it ever be proffered in court.

Even granting the contention that Mr. Trump could simply terminate the investigation, it is a non sequitur to argue, as the president’s lawyers do, that as a consequence he cannot obstruct it. Imagine, for example, that the worst version of facts proves true: that Trump fired the F.B.I. director, James Comey, tried to fire Mr. Mueller, constructed a false account of the June 2016 Russia meeting, and tried to force Attorney General Jeff Sessions to reverse his recusal decision that was driven by Justice Department policy, all to protect his own skin and his family’s fortune.

If this were the case, the elements of obstruction — in brief, the interference or attempted interference with an official proceeding, such as a grand jury investigation — would be plainly met. Most important, the president would have acted with corrupt intent as it is well understood under the law.

Jennifer Rubin observes Word salads, contradictions and hints of authoritarian delusion:

A pack of constitutional experts savaged the argument that Trump could never be prosecuted for obstruction. Daniel Hemel writes:

The Declaration of Independence charged King George III with “obstruct[ing] the administration of justice, by refusing his assent to the laws for establishing judiciary powers.” That alone is evidence that the founding generation did not believe that heads of state were immune from obstruction charges. And while Article II instructs the president to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” that does not give him carte blanche to wield his law enforcement powers any way he chooses.

Trump is not the first sitting president to face accusations of obstruction of justice. During the Watergate scandal, the first article of impeachment approved by the House Judiciary Committee charged Richard Nixon with obstructing justice by endeavoring to influence an FBI investigation into the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters. That article passed the committee by a 27-11 vote, with six Republicans joining all the committee’s Democrats in the majority. . . . a president commits criminal obstruction only when he abuses his power over law enforcement for personal, pecuniary, or purely partisan ends. But Dowd’s claim that the obstruction statutes never apply to the president is without merit.

Laurence Tribe likewise tweeted: “Trump’s lawyers’ sweepingly Nixonian claim of unbounded presidential power is inconsistent with the core American principle that no-one is above the law. It would mean that even pardoning someone in return for a bribe is just fine. That’s simply wrong.”

And last December, Lawfare blog’s Ben Wittes explained:

That is, as long as the President is operating plausibly within the boundaries of the Take Care Clause, which requires that he “Take Care that the laws be faithfully executed,” and within the parameters of his oath to “faithfully execute” the duties of President, he probably cannot be said to act with the requisite criminal intent to violate the obstruction statutes with an otherwise lawful act of managing the Executive Branch. But I do think it’s at least theoretically possible for the President to issue orders to the Executive Branch that are so outside of the bounds of those clauses that a reasonable jury could lawfully regard him as acting with the requisite mens rea for conviction under one or more of the statutes.

One of those instances would be falsifying explanations for a meeting involving his son and son-in-law, a meeting that concerned cooperation between Russian operatives and the president’s campaign.

Here are Seven Stories That’ll Leave You Craving Japanese Food:

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of sixty-nine.  Sunrise is 5:17 AM and sunset 8:28 PM, for 15h 10m 53s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 79.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1864, the Battle of Cold Harbor continues:

From May 31-June 12, 1864, more than 160,000 men clashed at Cold Harbor, Virginia, during the Wilderness Campaign. The 2nd, 5th, 6th, 7th and 36th Wisconsin Infantry regiments took part. June 3 saw some of the worst fighting. When the 36th Wisconsin Infantry moved to the front, its colonel, Frank Haskell of Madison, was shot dead while commanding his troops to take cover. Co.G of the 1st U.S. Sharpshooters, from Wisconsin, was placed in the front of the battle on this day as well.

Recommended for reading in full —

 Heather Long and Steven Mufson report Trump thinks he’s saving trade. The rest of the world thinks he’s blowing it up:

President Trump appears prepared to unravel 70 years of pain­staking effort that the United States has led to build an inter­national system of trade based on mutually accepted rules and principles.

Ever since an agreement on trade emerged in 1947 from the ashes of World War II, presidents of both parties have pushed this system as a way to strengthen alliances and promote the expansion of democracy and prosperity in Europe and Asia.

But with Trump’s decision last week to enact aluminum and steel tariffs against U.S. allies in Europe and North America, he is subverting previously agreed-­upon trade pacts. The result is a brewing trade war with Canada, Mexico and Europe, which are expressing shock and bitter frustration while enacting tariffs of their own on a bevy of American products.

Sam Bidle reports Here’s the Email Russian Hackers Used to Try to Break Into State Voting Systems:

JUST DAYS BEFORE the 2016 presidential election, hackers identified by the National Security Agency as working for Russia attempted to breach American voting systems. Among their specific targets were the computers of state voting officials, which they had hoped to compromise with malware-laden emails, according to an intelligence report published previously by The Intercept.

Now we know what those emails looked like.

An image of the malicious email, provided to The Intercept in response to a public records request in North Carolina, reveals precisely how hackers, who the NSA believed were working for Russian military intelligence, impersonated a Florida-based e-voting vendor and attempted to trick its customers into opening malware-packed Microsoft Word files.

The screenshot, shown below, confirms NSA reporting that the email purported to originate from the vendor, Tallahassee-based VR Systems, but was sent from a Gmail account, which could have easily tricked less scrupulous users. “Emails from VR Systems will never come from an  ‘@gmail.com’ email address” the company warned in a November 1, 2016 security alert, which included the reproduction of the GRU email.

The specific Gmail address shown in the message, vrelections@gmail.com, matches an address cited in the NSA report as having been created by Russian government hackers, although in the NSA report the address was rendered with a period, as “vr.elections@gmail.com.” The timing of VR Systems’ security alert is also in line with the NSA’s reporting, which indicated that the email attack occurred on either October 31 or November 1 of 2016. The original classified NSA document contained intelligence assessments, but omitted any raw signals intelligence used to form those assessments.

North Korea, caught in a deception (yet again):

BREAKING: What first appeared to be a gesture indicating North Korea might be willing to dismantle its nuclear weapons program, appears to have been little more than a propaganda effort for the world’s cameras, @barbarastarrcnn reports https://t.co/1sLegVPr4H pic.twitter.com/cQ6jq8cA7X

— The Situation Room (@CNNSitRoom) June 1, 2018

Geoffrey A. Fowler writes Hands off my data! 15 default privacy settings you should change right now:

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of seventy-three.  Sunrise is 5:18 AM and sunset 8:27 PM, for 15h 09m 45s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 85.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1966, NASA’s Surveyor 1 lands on the moon:

The Surveyor series of space probes was designed to carry out the first soft landings on the Moon by any American spacecraft. No instrumentation was carried specifically for scientific experiments by Surveyor 1, but considerable scientific data were collected by its television camera and then returned to Earth via the Deep Space Network from 1966 to 1967. These spacecraft carried two television cameras — one for its approach, which was not used in this case, and one for taking still pictures of the lunar surface. Over 100 engineering sensors were on board each Surveyor. Their television systems transmitted pictures of the spacecraft footpad and surrounding lunar terrain and surface materials. These spacecraft also acquired data on the radar reflectivity of the lunar surface, the load-bearing strength of the lunar surface, and the temperatures for use in the analysis of the lunar surface temperatures. (Later Surveyor space probes, beginning with Surveyor 3, carried scientific instruments to measure the composition and mechanical properties of the lunar “soil”.)

Recommended for reading in full —

Steven Mufson and David J. Lynch report Breaking from GOP orthodoxy, Trump increasingly deciding winners and losers in the economy:

President Trump is increasingly intervening in the economy, making decisions about corporate winners and losers in ways that Republicans for decades have insisted should be left to free markets — not the government.

The shift amounts to a major change in the GOP’s approach to the management of the economy, and it promises to shape the success of everything from American agriculture and manufacturing to the companies that produce the nation’s electricity.

On Friday, citing national security, Trump ordered the Energy Department tocompel power-grid operators to buy from ailing coal and nuclear plants that otherwise would be forced to shut down because of competition from cheaper sources.

The order came one day after the president imposed historic metals tariffs on some of the country’s strongest allies and trading partners. Now the Commerce Department is further picking winners and losers as it weighs thousands of requests from companies for waivers from the import taxes.

“It replaces the invisible hand with the government hand,” said Mary Lovely, a Syracuse University economist. “You’re replacing the market with government fiat.”

(The point about intervention is correct, but the headline is misleading.  The GOP hasn’t routinely practiced sound free-market economics in years, and truly never sufficiently.  In Wisconsin, our state has seen eight years of WISGOP intervention in the marketplace on behalf of insiders and cronies, and even in a small town like Whitewater, there have been years of futile meddling in the local economy on behalf of outside business interests, to no value for overall household income in the community.  State & crony capitalism is sham capitalism, with many of the attributes of a long con, promising for many but delivering only for a few.  See Two Truths of Whitewater’s Economy.  Long before Trump, state and local flacks paved the way with this disordered approach.)

Steve Eder, Hiroko Tabuchi and Eric Lipton report A Courtside View of Scott Pruitt’s Cozy Ties With a Billionaire Coal Baron:

LEXINGTON, Ky. — It was one of the biggest games of the University of Kentucky basketball season, and Scott Pruitt had scored two of the best seats in the arena: a few feet from the action, in a section reserved for season-ticket holders who had donated at least $1 million to the university.

The special access for Mr. Pruitt, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, also included watching from the players’ entrance as the team streamed onto the court, and posing for a photo with a star player in the locker room area.

But there was more to the game last December than a superfan experience for Mr. Pruitt and his son, who joined him. They sat in seats belonging to Joseph W. Craft III, a billionaire coal executive who has engaged in an aggressive campaign to reverse the Obama administration’s environmental crackdown on the coal industry. Mr. Craft and his wife donated more than $2 million to support President Trump’s candidacy and inauguration.

Mitra Ebadolahi writes CBP Fails to Discredit Our Report on Abuse of Immigrant Kids:

Last week, the ACLU’s Border Litigation Project and University of Chicago Law’s International Human Rights Clinic published a reportdetailing child abuse by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. The report, based on a portion of the more than 30,000 pages of government records we obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, identifies numerous cases of serious alleged misconduct by CBP officials between 2009 and 2014, focusing on the agency’s verbal, physical, sexual, and emotional abuse of migrant children.

CBP responded by calling our report “unfounded.” Here, we address the false statements CBP made in its response.

“CBP . . . is greatly disappointed that [the report] doesn’t acknowledge that the [Office of Inspector General] conducted an investigation in 2014 that determined that prior claims made by the ACLU were completely unfounded.  The OIG conducted 57 unannounced visits to 41 different CBP facilities and “did not observe misconduct or inappropriate conduct by DHS employees during our unannounced visits.”  The full report is available here.”

Certain key facts are omitted here.

First, OIG conducted unannounced CBP site visits only afterimmigrants’ rights groups filed a complaint in June 2014 detailing 116 cases of child abuse or neglect. Second, the visits occurred in July and August 2014 — months after these abuses had been reported and after those children referenced in the complaint had been released. Third, in the fall of 2014, OIG announced that it would no longer conduct site inspections, without explaining why.

Perhaps most importantly, in June 2015 — almost a year after the visits touted in CBP’s response — a coalition of immigrants’ rights advocates filed a class action lawsuit challenging CBP detention conditions. The litigation, which continues today, documents former CBP detainees’ horrific experiences, including through photos showing just how bleak these facilities are. CBP fought to keep all of this information secret — and was sanctioned by a federal judge for willfully destroying video evidence about conditions in its detention. [Additional refutation of the CBP’s reply, and support for the ACLU’s contentions, follows in the full article.  Note: I am a member of the ACLU.]

Tim Johnson reports New internet accounts are Russian ops designed to sway U.S. voters, experts say:

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of seventy-five.  Sunrise is 5:18 AM and sunset 8:27 PM, for 15h 08m 35s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 91.8% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1864, the Battle of Cold Harbor begins its second day, of thirteen in full:

From May 31-June 12, 1864, more than 160,000 men clashed at Cold Harbor, Virginia, during the Wilderness Campaign. The 2nd, 5th, 6th, 7th and 36th Wisconsin Infantry regiments took part. On June 1, the 5th Wisconsin Infantry arrived after a long march, barefoot and exhausted. Nevertheless, they charged enemy lines and captured a number of prisoners. By the afternoon, the 36th Wisconsin Infantry lost 140 of  the 142 men who tried to take an enemy position.

Recommended for reading in full —

General Michael Hayden, Rob Reiner, Clint Watts, and John Sipher discuss the dangers and impact of Russian propaganda and how the White House seems to be using the same tactics:

The Committee to investigate Russia writes Trump Lies Again About Comey Firing:

resident Trump tweeted Thursday that the Russia investigation had nothing to do with why he fired FBI Director James Comey even though the president told the Russians and Lester Holt the exact opposite in the days following Comey’s dismissal on May 9, 2017.

Today:

CNN:

… May 10 — Trump meets with Russian Defense Minister Sergey Lavrov and then-Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak. In that Oval Office huddle, Trump tells the two Russians this, according to The New York Times: “I just fired the head of the FBI. He was crazy, a real nut job,I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.”

May 11, 2017: (Russia explanation at 1:01)

In addition, Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, said on television on May 2, 2018 that the president fired Comey because the FBI Director would not say the president was not a target of the Russia investigation.

Donald Trump’s Russia claim contradicts, um, Donald Trump’s Russia claim (CNN)

Heather Long writes Trump has officially put more tariffs on U.S. allies than on China:

President Trump campaigned on going hard after China for ripping off the United States on trade. Yet a year and a half into his presidency, Trump has put more tariffs on longtime U.S. allies than he has on China, his supposed “bad guy” on trade. The Trump administration announced new tariffs Thursday on the European Union, Canada and Mexico.

Almost all of the reaction has been negative. Many are calling it a political and economic mistake.

America’s allies are stunned, stocks slid on Wall Street as trade-war fears returned, and economists are warning that Americans will soon face higher prices on a wide variety of products. A slew of Republican lawmakers immediately trashed the move as bad for the economy and foreign relations.

“Europe, Canada & Mexico aren’t China. You don’t treat allies the same way you treat opponents. Blanket protectionism is a big part of why we had a Great Depression. ‘Make America Great Again’ shouldn’t mean ‘Make America 1929 Again.’ ” tweeted Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), joining an opposition that included many Republican officials and business groups.

The New York Times editorial board observes America Declares War on Its Friends:

If the president’s intent is to establish a reputation as a champion of industry and workers, he is making a hash of it. His decision to impose tariffs on American allies will only weaken American leadership while doing nothing to address the underlying problems in the steel and aluminum industries.

Why is Humpty Dumpty Always Depicted as an Egg?

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with scattered showers and a high of eighty-five.  Sunrise is 5:18 AM and sunset 8:26 PM, for 15h 07m 20s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 96.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Fire Department has a scheduled business meeting at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1895, John Harvey Kellogg files a patent application:

A patent for “Flaked Cereals and Process of Preparing Same” was filed on May 31, 1895, and issued on April 14, 1896 to John Harvey Kellogg as Patent No. 558,393. Significantly, the patent applied to a variety of types of grains, not just to wheat. John Harvey Kellogg was the only person named on the patent.[56] Will later insisted that he, not Ella, had worked with John, and repeatedly asserted that he should have received more credit than he was given for the discovery of the flaked cereal.[55]

During their first year of production, the Kelloggs sold tens of thousands of pounds of flaked cereal, marketing it as “Granose”. They continued to experiment using rice and corn as well as wheat, and in 1898 released the first batch of Sanitas Toasted Corn Flakes. A modified version with a longer shelf life was released in 1902.[4] By that time, both “Granose Biscuits” and “Granose Flakes” were available.[57]

Recommended for reading in full —

Peter Certo observes Actually, Trump Loves Chinese Goods — So Long as they Make Him Richer (“Trump rallied to save a major Chinese firm right in the middle of a trade war of his own making. Why?”):

Just 72 hours prior to Trump’s reversal on ZTE, The Huffington Post reports, the Chinese government—which, recall, also owns entities controlling at least a third of ZTE—made a $500 million loan to some Trump-branded properties in Indonesia. And Chinese banks promised another $500 million to the same. The Trump Organization has acknowledged the deal but refused to comment, while a White House spokesman asked about the deal said simply, “I’ll have to refer you to the Trump Organization.”

It also probably didn’t hurt that during the very same week, China approved seven new trademarks for Ivanka Trump, Trump’s daughter and White House advisor.

Viewed in this light, Trump’s ZTE deal feels like far less of a reversal. It’s perfectly consistent for a president who’s praised President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines — whose drug war has killed over 20,000 people, yet whose capital also hosts an upcoming Trump Tower (the developer, in turn, is Duterte’s special envoy to Trump). Or for a president with extensive potential conflicts in the United Arab Emirates, which happens to be enjoying U.S. support as it conducts (with Saudi Arabia) a devastating U.S.-backed war in nearby Yemen.

Or, for that matter, a president who signed a tax plan seemingly tailor-made to save himself billions of dollars.

(There’s not a foreign corporation or oligarch on the planet that doesn’t know Trump can be bought.)

Charles Davis asks What Happened to Jill Stein’s Recount Millions? (“The Green Party candidate last filed a form with the FEC since September 2017. And it looks likely that there won’t be a vote on how to use the unspent recount funds.):

Shortly after the 2016 election, Jill Stein raised more than $7 million from shell-shocked liberals eager to pursue a swing-state recount. Nearly two years later, the U.S. Green Party’s last candidate for president is still spending that money.

Ongoing litigation, travel costs, and staff salaries are also likely to eat up whatever is left, meaning those who donated to Stein are unlikely to receive a once-promised chance to vote on how the post-recount money would be spent. Nor have donors been given much of a window into how Stein is actually spending their donations.

Nathan Schneider suggests How to survive Trump: End the cult of the presidency:

In retrospect, the U.S. president seems like a particularly strong executive, compared with other democratic systems established since then, but at the time the prevailing urge was to minimize the office. In the spring of 1789, Congress debated what title should be used to address the first president, George Washington. Legislators considered such familiar options as “His Majesty” and “Highness.” The eventual choice, “Mr. President,” was again an affront to the norms of the period and to any urge the chief executive might harbor for self-aggrandizement.

A recent cover story in The Atlantic by John Dickerson chronicles our slippage. James Polk’s wife, Sarah, had to direct the Marine Band to play “Hail to the Chief” when he entered a room so that guests would know who the president was. Presidents as recent as Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy were not expected to rush to the site of every natural disaster for photo-ops with the victims. But all along, presidents from Andrew Jackson to Franklin D. Roosevelt developed techniques for cultivating personal followings through the mass media of their time. The Cold War, and particularly the nuclear codes, rendered the U.S. president the “Leader of the Free World” in the eyes of some; the mandate to fight terrorism means micromanaging an endless war on every front. Meanwhile, the 24-hour cable news industry discovered that obsessive monitoring of the president serves as a cheap, convenient, news-like substitute for actual reporting.

Conservative Catholic Ross Douthat describes The Baptist Apocalypse:

Among Trump-supporting religious believers, the long odds he overcame to win the presidency are often interpreted as a providential sign: Only God could have put Donald Trump in the White House, which means he must be there for some high and holy purpose.

The trouble with this theory is that it’s way too simplistic about what kind of surprises an interventionist deity might have in mind. Such a God might, for instance, offer political success as a temptation rather than a reward — or use an unexpected presidency not to save Americans but to chastise them.

We’re a long way from any final judgment on God’s purposes in the Trump era. But so far the Trump presidency has clearly been a kind of apocalypse — not (yet) in the “world-historical calamity” sense of the word, but in the original Greek meaning: an unveiling, an uncovering, an exposure of truths that had heretofore been hidden.

(Douthat observes that this “unveiling has not been confined, as Trump’s providentialist supporters might like to imagine, to institutions and individuals that have arrayed themselves against him. It has come as well for figures whose style anticipated him (Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly, that whole ménage) and for figures who have deliberately attached themselves to his populist revolt.”)

Tech Insider contends that these are the Best Dog Breeds For Apartment Living:

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be rainy with occasional thundershowers and a high of seventy-seven.  Sunrise is 5:19 AM and sunset 8:25 PM, for 15h 06m 02s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 99.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1911, the first Indianapolis 500 takes place:

The first “500” was held at the Speedway on Decoration Day (as Memorial Day was known from its inception in 1868 to 1967 when Federal Law made Memorial Day the official name), May 30, 1911,[9] run to a 600 cu in (9,800 cc) maximum engine size formula.[6] It saw a field of 40 starters,[6] with Harroun piloting a Marmon Model 32-based Wasp racer — outfitted with his invention, the rear view mirror.[10] Harroun (with relief from Cyrus Patschke)[11] was declared the winner, although Ralph Mulford protested the official result. 80,000 spectators were in attendance, and an annual tradition had been established. Many considered Harroun to be a hazard during the race, as he was the only driver in the race driving without a riding mechanic, who checked the oil pressure and let the driver know when traffic was coming.[12]

Recommended for reading in full —

Daniel Dale of the Toronto Star describes Trump’s serial lying:

Great point by @ddale8 on today’s show: “Incessant dishonesty” is “a central feature of his presidency,” yet it’s too often treated as “a side show rather than THE show, rather than the central story.” https://t.co/HyPITIYCrJ

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) May 27, 2018

(See also Dale’s running total of Trump’s lies – now numbering over 1,600 – since becoming president.)

 The Washington Post editorial board asks Does Maria count as a ‘real catastrophe’ now, Mr. President?:

A NEW report by independent public-health researchers estimates that at least 4,645 people died as a result of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. Consider that number. Contrast it with those who died from Katrina (almost 2,000) and those killed in the 9/11 attacks (almost 3,000). Remember President Trump’s visit to the stricken island in the storm’s aftermath, tossing out paper towelsand telling Puerto Rican officials they should be “very proud” that hundreds didn’t die from Maria as in a “real catastrophe like Katrina.”

Think how many lives might have been saved if Puerto Rico’s devastation had been handled with the seriousness and urgency it deserved. Ask yourself whether Mr. Trump would have thought — or acted — differently if the American citizens who were affected had lived not in Puerto Rico but in Texas or Tennessee.

A study published Tuesday in the New England Journal of Medicine by scientists from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and other institutions takes aim at the official government count of 64 dead. It suggests the actual number of deaths — many caused by interruption and delays in medical care — is more than 70 times higher than that reported by Puerto Rico officials. Researchers acknowledged their estimate, based on calculations from surveys of randomly chosen households, is imprecise and further study is needed. But the report, along with earlier reporting and analysis by the New York Times, paints a devastating picture of how people, particularly the elderly and infirm, were imperiled by long-standing losses of electricity, water and communications.

Philip Bump and Mark Berman report Federal prosecutors poised to get more than 1 million files seized from Michael Cohen’s phones:

NEW YORK — Federal prosecutors investigating President Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen are poised to receive on Wednesday 1 million files from three of his cellphones seized last month, according to a filing submitted to the court Tuesday night by special master Barbara Jones.

In her update to the court, Jones said investigators from the Office of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York have already been given access to nearly 300,000 pieces of potential evidence seized from Cohen’s office and residences in an April raid.

Jones was appointed by U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood late last month to review the material after attorneys for Cohen and President Trump said many seized documents and communications could be protected by attorney-client privilege.

David Frum describes The Measure of Trump’s Devotion (“On Memorial Day, as the nation turned to the president to lead its shared rituals of unity and common purpose, he revealed himself unequal to the office he holds”):

Donald Trump cares enormously about national symbols—the flag, the anthem—when he can use them to belittle, humiliate, and exclude.

Trump has called for revoking the citizenship of those who burn the flag. He has suggested that NFL players who do not rise for the Star-Spangled Banner should be deported. He scored one of the greatest victories of his presidency when the National Football League submitted to his demand to punish players who did not stand at attention for the anthem. Vice President Pence ran the victory lap for Trump on this one.

But when it comes time to lead the nation in its shared rituals of unity and common purpose, Donald Trump cannot do it. He is, at most, president of slightly more than half of white America, and often not even that.

Breathe Deep: How the Antarctic Sea Spider Gets Oxygen (“Antarctic sea spiders have no lungs or gills, so how do they get oxygen into their bodies? The answer is in their pores”):