Good morning.
Whitewater’s Friday will be rainy with a high of forty-three. Sunrise is 6:50 AM and sunset 4:29 PM, for 9h 38m 42s of daytime. The moon is new, with 0.8% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred seventy-third day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1968, NBC broadcasts the Heidi Game: “The Heidi Game or Heidi Bowl was an American Football League (AFL) game played on November 17, 1968, between the Oakland Raiders and the visiting New York Jets. The game was notable for its exciting finish, in which Oakland scored two touchdowns in the final minute to win the game 43–32, but got its name for a decision by the game’s television broadcaster, NBC, to break away from its coverage of the game on the east coast to broadcast the television film Heidi, causing many viewers to miss the Raiders’ comeback.”
On this day in 1861, the 4th Wisconsin Infantry reconnoiters Virginia’s eastern shore: “The 4th Wisconsin Infantry was among Union forces assigned to an expedition in Accomac County, Virginia. The regiment’s historian wrote, “The Fourth and a battery [of light artillery] and small cavalry force, embarked on an expedition to the eastern shore of Virginia, where they remained, encountering some severe marching through the mud and flooded roads, under the command of General Lockwood, until the 9th of December.”
Recommended for reading in full —
Rebecca Ballhaus and Peter Nicholas report Special Counsel Mueller Issued Subpoena for Russia-Related Documents From Trump Campaign Officials (“Senate committee also pressures Kushner lawyer to turn over more documents”):
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s team in mid-October issued a subpoena to President Donald Trump’s campaign requesting Russia-related documents from more than a dozen top officials, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The subpoena, which requested documents and emails from the listed campaign officials that reference a set of Russia-related keywords, marked Mr. Mueller’s first official order for information from the campaign, according to the person. The subpoena didn’t compel any officials to testify before Mr. Mueller’s grand jury, the person said.
The subpoena caught the campaign by surprise, the person said. The campaign had previously been voluntarily complying with the special counsel’s requests for information, and had been sharing with Mr. Mueller’s team the documents it provided to congressional committees as part of their probes of Russian interference into the 2016 presidential election.
The Trump campaign is providing documents in response to the subpoena on an “ongoing” basis, the person said.
A spokesman for the special counsel declined to comment.
Mr. Mueller and congressional committees are investigating whether Trump associates colluded with Russian efforts to interfere in the election. Mr. Trump has denied collusion by him or his campaign, and Moscow has denied meddling in the election….
Karoun Demirjian reports Senate Judiciary panel: Kushner had contacts about WikiLeaks, Russian overtures he did not disclose:
President Trump’s adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner received and forwarded emails about WikiLeaks and a “Russian backdoor overture and dinner invite” that he kept from Senate Judiciary Committee investigators, according to panel leaders demanding that he produce the missing records.
Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) and ranking member Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) sent a letter to Kushner’s lawyer Abbe Lowell on Thursday charging that Kushner has failed to disclose several documents, records and transcripts in response to multiple inquiries from committee investigators.
In the letter, Grassley and Feinstein instruct Kushner’s team to turn over “several documents that are known to exist” because other witnesses in their probe already gave them to investigators. They include a series of “September 2016 email communications to Mr. Kushner concerning WikiLeaks,” which the committee leaders say Kushner then forwarded to another campaign official. Earlier this week, Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. revealed that he had had direct communication with WikiLeaks over private Twitter messages during the campaign.
[Donald Trump Jr. communicated with WikiLeaks during 2016 campaign]
Committee leaders said Kushner also withheld from the committee “documents concerning a ‘Russian backdoor overture and dinner invite’ ” that he had forwarded to other campaign officials. And they said Kushner had been made privy to “communications with Sergei Millian” — a Belarusan American businessman who claims close ties to the Trumps and was the source of salacious details in a dossier about the president’s 2013 trip to Moscow — but failed to turn those records over to investigators.
Samuel Osbourne reports Trump Organization worth one tenth of value previously reported:
The Trump Organization in New York is reportedly worth one tenth of the value it previously claimed.
Donald Trump‘s family business had previously ranked near the top of Crain’s New York Business‘ list of largest privately held companies.
But this year it has fallen from number three to number 40 after the President disclosed the organisation’s revenue to federal regulators.
While the Trump Organization claimed $9.5bn (£7.2bn) in sales last year, Mr Trump’s public filings suggest revenues of less than a tenth of that amount, between $600m (£450m) and $700m (£530m).
(Trump as a fraud, yet again. See also The Case Of Wilbur Ross’ Phantom $2 Billion.)
The Economist lists The Trump administration’s latest misdemeanours:
AN ADVISER allegedly involved in a plot to force a migrant to return to his home country. An attorney-general who seems conveniently forgetful when testifying before Congress. A president’s son exchanging messages with an agent of a hostile foreign power. In past administrations any of these things would have caused shock, hand-wringing and, probably, Congressional hearings and sackings. But it’s just another week in Donald Trump’s America.
On November 11th the Wall Street Journal reported that Robert Mueller, the special counsel appointed to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 election, is looking into allegations that Michael Flynn, Mr Trump’s former national-security adviser, was involved in a plan to return Fethullah Gulen, a Turkish cleric living in Pennsylvania, to the Turkish government in exchange for $15m. Turkey accuses Mr Gulen of masterminding last year’s failed coup (charges the cleric denies) and has long sought his return….
Stephen Vladeck, a professor at the University of Texas specialising in national-security law, says the allegations against Mr Flynn provide “the first clear prospect of state criminal charges”. The alleged plot was cooked up in New York; Mr Trump can only pardon federal crimes, and thus would be unable to offer Mr Flynn the same lifeline he could offer Paul Manafort, Mr Trump’s former campaign chairman, and Rick Gates, a lobbyist, whom Mr Mueller has indicted on federal charges.
Spain’s found a new use for an abandoned nuclear power plant:
Its construction started in the 70s, but it was stopped in 1982 before the plant was operative. Nowadays the government means to reuse the plant as a fish farm.