Good morning.
Friday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of forty. Sunrise is 6:49 AM and sunset 4:30 PM, for 9h 41m 15s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 59.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the seven hundred thirty-seventh day.
On this day in 1896, Wisconsin’s first Rural Free Delivery route is established: “On this date the first Rural Free Delivery route in Wisconsin was established at Sun Prairie. Rural Free Delivery routes were free government mail delivery services in rural areas.”
Recommended for reading in full — Trump’s revocation of a press pass overturned, Assange secretly charged, has Whitaker already compromised the Mueller investigation, the moral and ethical rot at Facebook, and video explaining why there are rectangular icebergs —
Kevin Breuninger reports Judge orders Trump administration to restore CNN reporter Jim Acosta’s White House press pass:
A federal judge on Friday granted CNN’s request for a court order that would temporarily reinstate network correspondent Jim Acosta’s White House press pass, which had been suspended indefinitely in the wake of a fiery exchange between the reporter and President Donald Trump a week earlier.
The ruling from Judge Timothy Kelly, who was appointed by Trump, was the first victory for CNN in the ongoing case.
“I want to thank all of my colleagues in the press who supported us this week, and I want to thank the judge for the decision he made today,” Acosta said outside U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C.
“Let’s go back to work!” he added.
(There may be more litigation, but this was not a hard call, and Trump’s legal position was weak, with his staff’s justifications shifting opportunistically.)
Charlie Savage, Adam Goldman, and Michael S. Schmidt report Julian Assange Is Secretly Charged in U.S., Prosecutors Mistakenly Reveal:
Seamus Hughes, a terrorism expert at George Washington University who closely tracks court cases, uncovered the filing and posted it on Twitter.
A Justice Department spokesman declined to say on Thursday what led to the inadvertent disclosure. It was made in a recently unsealed filing in an apparently unrelated sex-crimes case charging a man named Seitu Sulayman Kokayi with coercing and enticing an underage person to engage in unlawful sexual activity. Mr. Kokayi was charged in early August, and on Aug. 22, prosecutors filed a three-page document laying out boilerplate arguments for why his case at that time needed to remain sealed.
While the filing started out referencing Mr. Kokayi, federal prosecutors abruptly switched on its second page to discussing the fact that someone named “Assange” had been secretly charged, and went on to make clear that this person was the subject of significant publicity, lived abroad and would need to be extradited — suggesting that prosecutors had inadvertently pasted text from a similar court filing into the wrong document and then filed it.
“Another procedure short of sealing will not adequately protect the needs of law enforcement at this time because, due to the sophistication of the defendant and the publicity surrounding the case, no other procedure is likely to keep confidential the fact that Assange has been charged,” prosecutors wrote.
They added, “The complaint, supporting affidavit, and arrest warrant, as well as this motion and the proposed order, would need to remain sealed until Assange is arrested in connection with the charges in the criminal complaint and can therefore no longer evade or avoid arrest and extradition in this matter.”
Max Boot asks Did Matthew Whitaker compromise the Mueller investigation?:
Whitaker can do great damage even if he does nothing more than read all of Mueller’s files – as he now will have the right to do – and share that information with the White House. Sure, he would be risking impeachment or even prosecution for obstruction of justice, but Whitaker is not someone who has exactly exemplified devotion to the rule of law: He believes that Marbury v. Madison, the seminal 1803 case establishing legal review of legislation, was wrongly decided, and he has said that only Christians should serve as judges.
There is already cause for concern that Whitaker may have tipped off the White House. On Thursday, Trump tweeted, “The inner workings of the Mueller investigation are a total mess. They have found no collusion and have gone absolutely nuts. They are screaming and shouting at people, horribly threatening them to come up with the answers they want. They are a disgrace to our Nation.” Trump has never used the phrase “inner workings” before. Maybe he was just spouting off. Maybe he was reacting to information shared with him by witnesses Mueller has interrogated. Or maybe he has suddenly gained a vantage point on the “inner workings of the Mueller investigation” that he did not have before Whitaker’s appointment.
Helaine Olen sees The moral and ethical rot at Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg’s Facebook:
As the Times reports, Zuckerberg and Sandberg were less than aggressive in addressing Russian use of the site to spread propaganda, and pushed out high-ranking executives who tried to address the issue in a more forceful way. At the same time, the company was able to successfully convince powerful politicians such as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) (whose daughter — surprise! — is employed by the Facebook swamp) to pressure other politicians to go easy on the company. They also hired a Washington-based public affairs firm, which went on to aggressively take on Facebook’s opponents, including in a claim straight out of the alt-right sewer saying that boogeyman-for-all-seasons George Soros was responsible for the “broad anti-Facebook movement.” Facebook itself at one point asked Jewish advocacy groups to characterize critics of the company as engaging in anti-Semitism. (Both Zuckerberg and Sandberg are Jewish.) This is the sort of stuff the Yiddish word “chutzpah” describes.
And, in what surely counts as one of the great missed opportunities of all time, the Times reported that Zuckerberg was personally horrified in 2015 about Donald Trump’s raging about Muslim immigration and asked Sandberg whether Trump could be tossed from the site for violating Facebook’s engagement rules. She turned to several Facebook executives, including a Republican lobbyist she hired named Joel Kaplan. (That would be the same Joel Kaplan who was prominently seated behind Brett Kavanaugh during his recent Senate confirmation hearing for the Supreme Court). They told her not to do it. You know the rest.
All of this was apparently done in the service of protecting Facebook’s enormous profits, and heading off the threat of increased privacy legislation out of Washington by placating Democrats, who are increasingly concerned about the power of big business over our lives, and Republicans, who are specifically concerned about less accurate complaints that Facebook is hostile for conservatives.