Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will see a likelihood of afternoon thundershowers with a high of eighty-five. Sunrise is 6:47 AM and sunset 6:43 PM, for 11h 55m 54s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 35.6% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred twenty-first day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

Whitewater municipal government has scheduled a public information meeting today on Construction and Resurfacing of WIS 59/Reconstruction Newcomb Street Intersection from 4:30 PM – 6:00 PM.

On this day in 1937, Orson Welles’s The Shadow radio program begins on the Mutual Broadcasting System. On this day in 1864, the 11th Wisconsin Infantry participates in an expedition from Napoleonville to Grand River and Bayou Pigeon, Louisiana.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Ari Berman writes that A New Study Shows Just How Many Americans Were Blocked From Voting in Wisconsin Last Year:

A comprehensive study released today suggests how many missing votes can be attributed to the new law. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison surveyed registered voters who didn’t cast a 2016 ballot in the state’s two biggest counties—Milwaukee and Dane, which is home to Madison. More than 1 out of 10 nonvoters (11.2 percent) said they lacked acceptable voter ID and cited the law as a reason why they didn’t vote; 6.4 percent of respondents said the voter ID law was the “main reason” they didn’t vote.

The study’s lead author, University of Wisconsin political scientist Kenneth Mayer, says between roughly 9,000 and 23,000 registered voters in the reliably Democratic counties were deterred from voting by the ID law. Extrapolating statewide, he says the data suggests as many as 45,000 voters sat out the election. “We have hard evidence there were tens of thousands of people who were unable to vote because of the voter ID law,” Mayer told me.

The study, which was funded by Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell, provides some of the firmest evidence yet that new restrictions on voting lead to voter disenfranchisement. It’s a strong rebuke to supporters of voter ID laws like Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who has claimed that the notion the voter ID law reduced participation is a “load of crap.” (Wisconsin saw its lowest turnout since 2000, and there were 41,000 fewer voters in Milwaukee compared with 2012.)

After the study’s release, McDonell and Milwaukee County Clerk George Christenson joined together in calling for an immediate suspension of the law. “It is completely unacceptable that thousands of voters were deterred from exercising their sacred right to vote due to this law. Citizens’ basic belief in their democracy is seriously eroded when those in power target some for exclusion from self-government,” said McDonell….

Adam Entous, Craig Timberg and Elizabeth Dwoskin report Russian operatives used Facebook ads to exploit America’s racial and religious divisions:

The batch of more than 3,000 Russian-bought ads that Facebook is preparing to turn over to Congress shows a deep understanding of social divides in American society, with some ads promoting African American rights groups, including Black Lives Matter, and others suggesting that these same groups pose a rising political threat, say people familiar with the covert influence campaign.

The Russian campaign — taking advantage of Facebook’s ability to send contrary messages to different groups of users based on their political and demographic characteristics — also sought to sow discord among religious groups. Other ads highlighted support for Democrat Hillary Clinton among Muslim women.

These targeted messages, along with others that have surfaced in recent days, highlight the sophistication of an influence campaign slickly crafted to mimic and infiltrate U.S. political discourse while also seeking to heighten tensions between groups already wary of one another.

(Putin’s bots and trolls aim to divide Americans, turning members of our free society against each other; Trump tries the same each day, ceaselessly fomenting tension within our society.)

Matt Apuzzo and Maggie Haberman report that At Least 6 White House Advisers Used Private Email Accounts:

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of ninety. Sunrise is 6:46 AM and sunset 6:45 PM, for 11h 58m 48s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 26.7% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred twentieth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

Whitewater’s Urban Forestry Commission meets at 4:30 PM, and the School Board at 7:00 PM.

On this day in 1957, federal soldiers escort nine black students to assure the legally-required and morally-necessary beginning of integration at Central High in Little Rock, Arkansas: “Under escort from the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division, nine black students enter all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Three weeks earlier, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus had surrounded the school with National Guard troops to prevent its federal court-ordered racial integration. After a tense standoff, President Dwight D. Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard and sent 1,000 army paratroopers to Little Rock to enforce the court order.”

On this day in 1961, “Wisconsin Governor Gaylord Nelson signed into law a bill that required all 1962 cars sold in Wisconsin to be equipped with seat belts.”

Recommended for reading in full —

Robert Barnes writes that a Supreme Court case offers window into how representatives choose their constituents:

MADISON, Wis. — Behind the locked doors of a “map room,” in a politically connected law firm’s offices across from the historic Capitol, three men worked in secret to ensure the future of the state’s newly triumphant Republican Party.

They were drawing the legislative districts in which members of the Wisconsin Senate and State Assembly would be elected. When the men — two aides to legislative leaders and a lobbyist brought in to help — finished in the early summer of 2011, they headed across the street to present their work.

“The maps we pass will determine who’s here 10 years from now,” read the notes for the meeting, which were made public as part of a lawsuit. “We have an opportunity and an obligation to draw these maps that Republicans haven’t had in decades.”

The maps are now at the center of a Supreme Court case to be argued next month that could change the dynamics of American politics — if the justices decide for the first time that a legislative map is so infected with political favoritism that it violates the Constitution….

Josh Dawsey reports that Kushner used private email to conduct White House business (“The senior adviser set up the account after the election. Other West Wing officials have also used private email accounts for official business”):

Presidential son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner has corresponded with other administration officials about White House matters through a private email account set up during the transition last December, part of a larger pattern of Trump administration aides using personal email accounts for government business.

Kushner uses his private account alongside his official White House email account, sometimes trading emails with senior White House officials, outside advisers and others about media coverage, event planning and other subjects, according to four people familiar with the correspondence. POLITICO has seen and verified about two dozen emails.

“Mr. Kushner uses his White House email address to conduct White House business,” Abbe Lowell, a lawyer for Kushner, said in a statement Sunday. “Fewer than 100 emails from January through August were either sent to or returned by Mr. Kushner to colleagues in the White House from his personal email account. These usually forwarded news articles or political commentary and most often occurred when someone initiated the exchange by sending an email to his personal rather than his White House address.”….

Adam Entous, Elizabeth Dwoskin and Craig Timberg report that Obama tried to give Zuckerberg a wake-up call over fake news on Facebook:

Nine days after Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg dismissed as “crazy” the idea that fake news on his company’s social network played a key role in the U.S. election, President Barack Obama pulled the youthful tech billionaire aside and delivered what he hoped would be a wake-up call.

For months leading up to the vote, Obama and his top aides quietly agonized over how to respond to Russia’s brazen intervention on behalf of the Donald Trump campaign without making matters worse. Weeks after Trump’s surprise victory, some of Obama’s aides looked back with regret and wished they had done more.

Now huddled in a private room on the sidelines of a meeting of world leaders in Lima, Peru, two months before Trump’s inauguration, Obama made a personal appeal to Zuckerberg to take the threat of fake news and political disinformation seriously. Unless Facebook and the government did more to address the threat, Obama warned, it would only get worse in the next presidential race….

Jennifer Agiesta reports that in a CNN poll: 54% say Russia-backed content on social media moved 2016 election:

Although President Donald Trump insists otherwise, most Americans say it’s likely that Russian-backed content on social media did affect the outcome of the 2016 election, according to a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS.

The poll result comes on the heels of Facebook’s announcement that it would turn over to Congressional investigators information related to more than 3,000 ads the company says were sold to accounts linked to a Russian troll farm between June 2015 and May 2017. And Senate Intelligence Chairman Richard Burr said he’s planning to hold a public hearing next month on Russian election interference through Facebook and other social media platforms.

Related: Full poll results

Overall, 54% say it’s very or somewhat likely that such Russian-backed content on Facebook or other social media affected the 2016 presidential vote, 43% say that’s not too or not at all likely. More appear to see this social media effort as having affected the outcome of the election than said so about information released due to Russian hacking. According to a CNN poll back in January, just 40% said that information was significant enough to change the outcome of the election….

If diets changed, then the climate might, too:

In America, beef accounts for 37 percent of all human-induced methane released into the air. Methane is 23 times as warming to the climate as carbon dioxide. In a recent article, The Atlantic writer James Hamblin shows how one dietary change—replacing beef with beans—could get the U.S. 74 percent of the way to meeting 2020 greenhouse-gas emission goals. As Hamblin notes, it’s worth being reminded that individual choices matter.

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of ninety. Sunrise is 6:45 AM and sunset 6:47 PM, for 12h 01m 40s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 19.1% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred nineteenth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1789, the first Congress under the Constitution adopts Judiciary Act of 1789. On this day in 1864, the 41st Wisconsin Infantry musters out.

Recommended for reading in full —

Callum Borchers writes What we know about the 21 states targeted by Russian hackers:

The Department of Homeland Security was short on details when it said Friday that it had notified 21 states of Russian efforts to hack their election systems in 2016. For one thing, the department didn’t publicly identify the states. For another, it didn’t say how many of the hacking attempts were successful — or to what degree.

Based on reporting by The Washington Post, Associated Press and other news outlets — plus statements issued by some state officials — we now have a complete list of the affected states. The Fix has mapped and categorized them, according to what we know about the success or failure of the cyberattacks.

[Russian hacking timeline]

One trend that emerges in officials’ remarks is a desire to strike a balance between projecting confidence in the integrity of vote tallies and concern about future threats.

For example: Wisconsin Secretary of State Doug La Follette (D) told me on Saturday that although a cyberattack on his state was unsuccessful, hacking is “for sure” a greater concern than voter fraud, which President Trump has called a “big problem.”

“We need Congress and the president to help states with their security systems for elections and ensure funding for more secure equipment where needed, and we need it to happen now,” Connecticut Secretary of State Denise Merrill (D) said. “Rather than investigating this attack on our democracy from a hostile foreign power, the Trump administration has formed a commission to prove that he won the popular vote, an idea that has been entirely discredited by numerous studies.

“Meanwhile, the cyber threat to our election systems remains and state election officials needed to know what was really going on so that we could respond and put in place any possible additional security measures.”

Asha Rangappa considers What the FISA Warrants Against Paul Manafort Tell Us About Mueller’s Investigation:

….According to reporting, the initial FISA surveillance ceased after a court found that the FBI was no longer collecting foreign intelligence based on that order. This likely would have occurred at one of the 90-day renewal points after the surveillance began. Now, one conclusion might be that there was no foreign intelligence activity actually happening – or perhaps that the basis for this order itself was somewhat flimsy. However, if the order had been renewed at least once since it commenced, which would be likely even if it began in late 2014 or early 2015, that was probably not the case: After all, in order to renew the order at any point prior to it ceasing, the FBI would have had to produce ongoing foreign intelligence collection.

I invite you to consider another possibility. If Manafort was already being developed by Russian intelligence since 2014, and was approached in a more concrete, operational way around summer 2016, then they would likely want him to begin communicating with them through other means than he was already using. If this happened, collection on the lines, accounts, or facilities targeted by the initial FISA order would go dry, and would explain why the surveillance ceased. In other words, there was no longer any foreign intelligence activity happening on the first FISA – but that’s because it was happening somewhere else….

That the first FISA order ceased because Manafort became “operational” is admittedly purely speculative.  But based on my experience working against foreign intelligence targets, this would be consistent with the timeline in several respects.  First, the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting has been characterized by many intelligence experts as a “test run” – an experiment to see how open members of the Trump campaign might be to engaging in some potentially illegal behavior in order to benefit the campaign. Having Manafort already on board would make sense in this scenario: Even if this might have been only an initial approach to Donald Trump, Jr. and Jared Kushner, the Russians would know they had at least one person in the campaign – Manafort – at that point who was “all in,” and could make the meeting less threatening for the newbies….

(Rangappa offers more reasons in support of her theory; it’s a compelling analysis.)

Kenneth Vogel and Andrew Kramer report that Law Firm Faces Questions for Ukraine Work With Manafort:

WASHINGTON — Five years ago, Paul Manafort arranged for a prominent New York-based law firm to draft a report that was used by allies of his client, Viktor Yanukovych, the Russia-aligned president of Ukraine, to justify the jailing of a political rival. And now the report is coming back to haunt it.

The Justice Department, according to two people with direct knowledge of the situation, recently asked the firm, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, for information and documents related to its work on behalf of Mr. Yanukovych’s government, which crumbled after he fled to Russia under pressure.

The request comes at a time when Mr. Manafort, his work for Mr. Yanukovych’s party and for Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs as well as the handling of payments for that work have become focal points in the investigation of the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, and connections between Russia, Mr. Trump and his associates….

From the Alliance for Securing Democracy’s Hamilton 68 project, here are the top domains tweeted from 600 monitored Twitter accounts linked to Russian influence operations (last 48 hours):

Great Big Story goes Inside the Hypnotic Art of Card Juggling:

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of ninety-two. Sunrise is 6:44 AM and sunset 6:49 PM, for 12h 04m 33s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 11.2% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred eighteenth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1846, Johann Gottfried Galle identifies Neptune as a planet: “…a German astronomer from Radis, Germany, at the Berlin Observatory who, on 23 September 1846, with the assistance of student Heinrich Louis d’Arrest, was the first person to view the planet Neptune and know what he was looking at. Urbain Le Verrier had predicted the existence and position of Neptune, and sent the coordinates to Galle, asking him to verify. Galle found Neptune in the same night he received Le Verrier’s letter, within 1° of the predicted position. The discovery of Neptune is widely regarded as a dramatic validation of celestial mechanics, and is one of the most remarkable moments of 19th-century science.”

Recommended for reading in full — 

Patrick Marley and Jason Stein report that Russians tried to hack election systems of 21 states in 2016, officials say:

MADISON, Wis. — Russians attempted to hack elections systems in 21 states in the run-up to last year’s presidential election, officials said Friday.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security notified states of the attempted breaches on Friday, said Michael Haas, director of the Wisconsin Elections Commission. The attempt in Wisconsin was unsuccessful, he said.

Homeland Security officials said the effort was conducted by “Russian government cyber actors,” according to Haas. He said he did not know which states other than Wisconsin were part of the hacking attempt.

According to the Associated Press, states that were targeted included some key political battlegrounds, such as Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin.

The AP contacted every state election office to determine which ones had been informed that their election systems had been targeted. The others confirming were Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Iowa, Maryland, Minnesota, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas and Washington….

Kevin Collier reports that States Outraged DHS Waited A Year To Tell Them Russians Tried To Hack Their Computers:

State election officials are demanding to know why it took the Department of Homeland Security a year to inform them that their state’s voter registration systems had been probed by Russian hackers ahead of the 2016 election.

On Friday, DHS notified the chief election officer or secretary of state of 21 states that Russian hackers had tried to probe their voter registration systems. That was nearly a full year after ABC News first reported that “more than 20” states’ systems had been targeted….

The late notification angered state officials.

“My boss, Michael Haas, testified on June 21 at that Senate Intelligence Committee hearing. At that hearing, somebody from DHS went before him and mentioned 21 states,” Wisconsin Election Commission Public Information Officer Reid Magney told BuzzFeed News, referring to Manfra’s June testimony. Yet neither Manfra nor anyone else told anyone at the Wisconsin Election Commission the department was aware the state had been targeted until Friday….

Bethania Palma reports that Trolls, Bots, ‘Useful Idiots’ Attack New Committee Aimed at Exposing Russian Propaganda Campaigns (“The newly-formed Committee to Investigate Russia quickly came under the exact type of propaganda attack it is trying to expose”):

On 20 September 2017, just hours after a consortium of high-profile figures from the American entertainment industry, news media and intelligence community formally announced the formation of the Committee to Investigate Russia (CIR), social media bots, paid trolls, and “useful idiots” kicked into high gear.

The newly-formed organization was launched by director and actor Rob Reiner, with aims to “help Americans recognize and understand the gravity of Russia’s continuing attacks on our democracy”. The web site aggregates relevant information about the Russian active measures, hacking and collusion investigations into one place and offers links to relevant news stories, timelines, and a list of key players.

Its inaugural video features Academy Award-winning actor Morgan Freeman cautioning Americans in his famous baritone about Russian influence operations and saying in regards to Russian interference in the 2016 election, “We were attacked. We are at war.” But even as the organization aims to point the spotlight on the Kremlin’s attempts to influence Americans’ political and social behavior, predictably, Russia-linked bots and trolls retaliated with social media-driven attacks that followed now-familiar patterns.

Andrew Weisburd, non-resident fellow at Alliance for Securing Democracy (a bipartisan, transatlantic initiative housed at The German Marshall Fund of the United States) and one of the researchers behind Hamilton68, a real-time tool that tracks Russian influence operations on Twitter, told us that the reaction seems driven in part by the success of countermeasures like CIR, which are elevating the American public’s awareness of a hostile world power’s efforts to influence them:

“It is certainly *a* type of attack, not the only one, but one that to me suggests it they are increasingly sensitive to being held accountable for their own actions.

Keeping in mind that I’m not privy to Kremlin discussions of the matter, it seems clear to me that repeated public exposure of active measures campaigns, continually driving home the same basic point, that the Kremlin has harmed the United States and is continuing to do so, is very effective. I also suspect that Russians may put more stock in what celebrities say than many Americans do. If Steven Seagal’s opinion matters, so does Morgan Freeman’s. Certainly, as dedicated propagandists, they would see the value in Freeman delivering the CIR message.”

(Seagal, while perhaps most famous for starring in 1992’s Under Siege, has in recent years occupied himself with making a string of low-budget, direct-to-video action movies — and with building a friendship with President Vladimir Putin, who offered him Russian citizenship in November 2016.)

In a rambling speech last night, from the three-million-vote-lagging, second-place candidate in the last election, now holding federal power:

As the crowd laughed, the president asked: “Any Russians in the audience? Are there any Russians in the audience, please? I don’t see too many Russians. I didn’t see too many Russians in Pennsylvania. I didn’t see too many Russians.”

(A simple test of a remark like this: if it seems persuasive, then the person persuaded is either ignorant or a dolt. Most people are very sharp, but it’s not most people one finds at a Trump rally. Trump dishes slop for those who find slop tasty.)

Florian Ledoux recently recorded humpback whales by drone:

Good morning.

Fall begins in Whitewater with sunny skies and a high of ninety-two. Sunrise is 6:43 AM and sunset 6:50 PM, for 12h 07m 27s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 5.9% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred seventeenth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1862, Pres. Lincoln issues the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. On this day in 1863, the 1st Wisconsin Cavalry participates in skirmishes at Missionary Ridge and Shallow Ford Gap in Tennessee.

Recommended for reading in full —

Shane Harris reports that U.S. Monitored Manafort After He Left Trump Campaign (“The surveillance came as part of a counterintelligence probe into Russian interference with presidential election”):

U.S. authorities placed Paul Manafort under surveillance after he was ousted as Donald Trump’s campaign manager last summer, according to U.S. officials with knowledge of the matter.

The surveillance, which was part of a counterintelligence investigation into Russian interference with the presidential election, didn’t involve listening to Mr. Manafort’s phone communications in real-time, the officials said.

But armed with a warrant, investigators still could have conducted clandestine surveillance of Mr. Manafort, possibly by obtaining copies of his emails and other electronically stored communications, or by having agents follow him or conduct physical searches of his property.

The surveillance began after Mr. Manafort left the Trump campaign in August, but it is not clear when it was suspended. Mr. Manafort resigned after a spate of publicity about his consulting work in Ukraine on behalf of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s allies….

Carol D. Leonnig and Rosalind S. Helderman report that Mueller casts broad net in requesting extensive records from Trump White House:

The special counsel investigating Russian election meddling has requested extensive records and email correspondence from the White House, covering areas including the president’s private discussions about firing his FBI director and his response to news that the then-national security adviser was under investigation, according to two people briefed on the requests.

White House lawyers are now working to turn over internal documents that span 13 categories that investigators for the special counsel have identified as critical to their probe, the people said. Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, appointed in May in the wake of Trump’s firing of FBI Director James B. Comey, took over the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election and whether the Trump campaign coordinated with the Russians in that effort….

The requests broadly ask for any document or email related to a series of highly publicized incidents since Trump became president, including the ouster of national security adviser Michael Flynn and firing of Comey, the people said.

The list demonstrates Mueller’s focus on key moments and actions by the president and close advisers that could shed light on whether Trump sought to block the FBI investigations of Flynn and of Russian interference….

Josh Dawsey reports that Manafort used Trump campaign account to email Ukrainian operative (“Manafort sent the emails to seek repayment for previous work he did in Ukraine”):

Former Donald Trump aide [Adams: campaign manager, actually] Paul Manafort used his presidential campaign email account to correspond with a Ukrainian political operative with suspected Russian ties, according to people familiar with the correspondence.

Manafort sent emails to seek repayment for previous work he did in Ukraine and to discuss potential new opportunities in the country, even as he chaired Trump’s presidential campaign, these people said.

Manafort had been a longtime consultant for Viktor Yanukovych, the Ukrainian president until 2014, and his Party of Regions. During the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, Ukrainian investigators said they had discovered evidence that Manafort received millions of dollars in off-the-books payments for his work there.

In the emails to Konstantin Kilimnik, a Manafort protégé who has previously been reported to have suspected ties to Russian intelligence, the longtime GOP operative made clear his significant sway in Trump’s campaign, one of the people familiar with the communications said. He and Kilimnik also met in the United States while Manafort worked for the Trump campaign, which he chaired until an August 2016 shake-up….

Tom Hamburger, Rosalind S. Helderman, Carol D. Leonnig and Adam Entous report that Manafort offered to give Russian billionaire ‘private briefings’ on 2016 campaign:

Less than two weeks before Donald Trump accepted the Republican presidential nomination, his campaign chairman offered to provide briefings on the race to a Russian billionaire closely aligned with the Kremlin, according to people familiar with the discussions.

Paul Manafort made the offer in an email to an overseas intermediary, asking that a message be sent to Oleg Deripaska, an aluminum magnate with whom Manafort had done business in the past, these people said.

“If he needs private briefings we can accommodate,” Manafort wrote in the July 7, 2016, email, portions of which were read to The Washington Post along with other Manafort correspondence from that time.

The emails are among tens of thousands of documents that have been turned over to congressional investigators and special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s team as they probe whether Trump associates coordinated with Russia as part of Moscow’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 U.S. election.

Here are 5 great features added to Apple iOS 11 for iPhone:

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of eighty-nine. Sunrise is 6:42 AM and sunset 6:52 PM, for 12h 10m 20s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 2% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred sixteenth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

Whitewater’s Finance Committee is scheduled to meet at 7 AM, her Community Development Authority Board at 5:30 PM, and there’s a scheduled Public Information Meeting on the relocation of the city’s dog park from 4-6 PM.

On this day in 1937, J.R.R. Tolkien publishes The Hobbit. On this day in 1863, “1st Wisconsin Cavalry participated in an action at Dry Valley, and the 1st, 10th and 21st Wisconsin Infantry regiments fought in a skirmish at Rossville Gap.”

Recommended for reading in full —

Ben Collins, Gideon Resnick, Kevin Poulsen, and Spencer Ackerman report an Exclusive: Russians Appear to Use Facebook to Push Trump Rallies in 17 U.S. Cities (“‘Being Patriotic,’ a Facebook group uncovered by The Daily Beast, is the first evidence of suspected Russian provocateurs explicitly mobilizing Trump supporters in real life”):

Suspected Russia propagandists on Facebook tried to organize more than a dozen pro-Trump rallies in Florida during last year’s election, The Daily Beast has learned.

The demonstrations—at least one of which was promoted online by local pro-Trump activists— brought dozens of supporters together in real life. They appear to be the first case of Russian provocateurs successfully mobilizing Americans over Facebook in direct support of Donald Trump.

The Aug. 20, 2016, events were collectively called “Florida Goes Trump!” and they were billed as a “patriotic state-wide flash mob,” unfolding simultaneously in 17 different cities and towns in the battleground state. It’s difficult to determine how many of those locations actually witnessed any turnout, in part because Facebook’s recent deletion of hundreds of Russian accounts hid much of the evidence. But videos and photos from two of the locations—Fort Lauderdale and Coral Springs—were reposted to a Facebook page run by the local Trump campaign chair, where they remain to this day.

“On August 20, we want to gather patriots on the streets of Floridian towns and cities and march to unite America and support Donald Trump!” read the Facebook event page for the demonstrations. “Our flash mob will occur in several places at the same time; more details about locations will be added later. Go Donald”….

Bill Buzenberg reports that Putin’s Pro-Trump Operation May Have Been Far Bigger Than We Yet Know:

It’s been nearly a year since the US intelligence community publicly announced its determination that the Russian government took covert actions to sway the 2016 US election. We now know that Russia did so in part by buying Facebook ads and weaponizing bots, trolls, and other social media tools created by US tech giants. But there is still much that eludes the public about these attacks, as New York Times media columnist Jim Rutenberg pointed out on Monday: We don’t know what these Facebook ads looked like, we don’t know who they were targeting, and we don’t know how many millions of Americans may have been exposed to them. As the Washington Post reported, congressional investigators “have grown increasingly concerned that Facebook is withholding key information that could illuminate the shape and extent of a Russian propaganda campaign.”

We do know an elaborate plan for influencing the election reportedly was drawn up in 2016 by the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies, a think tank controlled by the Kremlin, according to reporting by Reuters. One document “recommended the Kremlin launch a propaganda campaign on social media and Russian state-backed global news outlets to encourage U.S. voters to elect a president who would take a softer line toward Russia than the administration of then-President Barack Obama,” according to seven US officials cited.

Another document that came from that Russian think tank last October, according to Reuters, “warned that Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was likely to win the election. For that reason, it argued, it was better for Russia to end its pro-Trump propaganda and instead intensify its messaging about voter fraud to undermine the U.S. electoral system’s legitimacy and damage Clinton’s reputation in an effort to undermine her presidency”….

Matt Gertz explains How Matt Drudge became the pipeline for Russian propaganda (“Drudge Report has linked nearly 400 times to RT, Sputnik News, TASS since 2012”):

On July 17, 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine, killing 298 passengers and crew. The next day, President Barack Obama alleged that the responsible parties were Russian-backed separatists seizing territory in the region following Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Obama’s statement came amid a furious effort by Russian propaganda outlets to foster confusion about the act. In their telling, the tragedy had actually been a failed attempt by Ukrainians to shoot down President Vladimir Putin’s plane.

The Russian propaganda effort received a substantial boost when right-wing internet journalist Matt Drudge highlighted a story on the topic from RT.com, the website of the Russian government-backed English-language news channel RT. Drudge titled the resulting item on the Drudge Report, his highly trafficked link aggregation website, “RT: Putin’s plane might have been target…” in bright red text.

After Drudge propelled the RT story to his massive audience, it was picked up by right-wing U.S. conspiracy websites. (Others on the right warned that Drudge had gone too far by aiding a Russian disinformation campaign.)

This was not an anomaly. Drudge has for years used his site as a web traffic pipeline for Russian propaganda sites, directing his massive audience to nearly 400 stories from RT.com and fellow Russian-government-run English-language news sites SputnikNews.com and TASS.com since the beginning of 2012, according to a Media Matters review. Those numbers spiked in 2016, when Drudge collectively linked to the three sites 122 times.

Drudge’s increasing affinity for and proliferation of Russian propaganda comes amid what The New York Times calls “a new information war Russia is waging against the West”….

James Kirchick contends that RT wants to spread Moscow’s propaganda here. Let’s treat it that way (“It should register as an agent of a foreign government”):

Last week, the Russian government-funded cable network RT announced that its American arm had been asked by the Justice Department to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Formerly known as Russia Today, RT was singled out this year in an intelligence community report on Kremlin meddling in the 2016 presidential election. “The rapid expansion of RT’s operations and budget and recent candid statements by RT’s leadership point to the channel’s importance to the Kremlin as a messaging tool and indicate a Kremlin directed campaign to undermine faith in the U.S. government and fuel political protest,” the report concluded.

Originally passed in 1938 to address the scourge of Nazi propaganda, FARA requires any individual or entity acting “at the order, request, or under direction or control, of a foreign principal” to register with the Justice Department. The agent must then periodically disclose the nature of its financial arrangements with the foreign principal and provide detailed, regular reports about the distribution of “informational materials” on its behalf. FARA does not in any way circumscribe what foreign agents may say or publish; the law merely requires that the information they disseminate be clearly labeled as originating from a foreign government.

The first entity convicted of failing to comply with FARA was a news service operated by the Nazi regime, and the law has remained relevant ever since. The New York bureau of the Soviet news agency TASS registered from the 1940s onward, as did a variety of other Soviet media outlets including Pravda and Izvestiya. Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, was recently made to retroactively register as a foreign agent on behalf of a pro-Russian Ukrainian political party after failing to do so from 2012 to 2014. Applying FARA to RT (and possibly Sputnik, a Kremlin-funded Internet “news” service also being investigated by the FBI) is long overdue….

(RT would be free to speak, but identified candidly as the state-controlled tool of the Putin regime that it, in fact, is.)

Here are The Strangest Sights Cassini Saw: Postcards From Saturn (via NPR’s Skunk Bear):