Good morning.
Friday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of fifty-nine. Sunrise is 6:59 AM and sunset 4:44 PM, for 9h 25m 30s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 30.5% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred eightieth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1971, a man calling himself ‘Dan Cooper,’ and popularized in the media as D.B. Cooper, hijacked a “Boeing 727 aircraft in Washington, on November 24, 1971. Utilizing knowledge that was virtually unique to the CIA, he escaped by parachute with over a million dollars at current values. A massive search failed to find any trace. After decades of fruitless inquiries, the lead investigators began to publicly suggest Cooper had been killed and all physical evidence lost in the wilderness, although the FBI nonetheless continued the hunt for Cooper until 2016.”
On this day in 1959, I-90 opens to traffic: “Interstate 90 opened to traffic between Janesville and Beloit. Work was temporarily halted north of Janesville as the exact route was not yet determined and property not yet acquired.”
Recommended for reading in full —
Michael S. Schmidt, Matt Apuzzo, and Maggie Haberman report A Split From Trump Indicates That Flynn Is Moving to Cooperate With Mueller:
WASHINGTON — Lawyers for Michael T. Flynn, President Trump’s former national security adviser, notified the president’s legal team in recent days that they could no longer discuss the special counsel’s investigation, according to four people involved in the case, an indication that Mr. Flynn is cooperating with prosecutors or negotiating such a deal.
Mr. Flynn’s lawyers had been sharing information with Mr. Trump’s lawyers about the investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, who is examining whether anyone around Mr. Trump was involved in Russian efforts to undermine Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
That agreement has been terminated, the four people said. Defense lawyers frequently share information during investigations, but they must stop when doing so would pose a conflict of interest. It is unethical for lawyers to work together when one client is cooperating with prosecutors and another is still under investigation.
The notification alone does not prove that Mr. Flynn is cooperating with Mr. Mueller. Some lawyers withdraw from information-sharing arrangements as soon as they begin negotiating with prosecutors. And such negotiations sometimes fall apart.
Still, the notification led Mr. Trump’s lawyers to believe that Mr. Flynn — who, along with his son, is seen as having significant criminal exposure — has, at the least, begun discussions with Mr. Mueller about cooperating….
(The New York Times, above, first reported this story. Shortly afterward, the Washington Post confirmed the termination of defense cooperation between Flynn’s attoneys and Trump’s legal team. See from Carol D. Leonnig and Rosalind S. Helderman, Flynn’s lawyer shuts down communications with Trump’s team, a sign he may be cooperating with Mueller probe.)
Meanwhile, of Congressional probes, Mary Clarke Jalonick reports Congressional Russia probes likely to head into 2018:
WASHINGTON (AP) — Some Republicans are hoping lawmakers will soon wrap up investigations into Russian meddling in the 2016 election that have dragged on for most of the year. But with new details in the probe emerging almost daily, that seems unlikely.
Three congressional committees are investigating Russian interference and whether President Donald Trump’s campaign was in any way involved. The panels have obtained thousands of pages of documents from Trump’s campaign and other officials, and have done dozens of interviews.
The probes are separate from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. Mueller can prosecute for criminal activity, while Congress can only lay out findings, publicize any perceived wrongdoing and pass legislation to try to keep problems from happening again. If any committee finds evidence of criminal activity, it must refer the matter to Mueller.
All three committees have focused on a June 2016 meeting that Trump campaign officials held in Trump Tower with a Russian lawyer and others. They are also looking into outreach by several other Russians to the campaign, including involvement of George Papadopoulos, who pleaded guilty this month to lying to the FBI as part of Mueller’s probe. New threads continue to emerge, such as a recent revelation that Donald Trump Jr. was messaging with WikiLeaks, the website that leaked emails from top Democratic officials during the campaign….
Anna Nemtsova reports An Arrest in France Freaks Out the Kremlin Kleptocracy:
MOSCOW—He was one of Russia’s untouchables: the country’s 21st richest man, a senator in the upper chamber of parliament. He is part of the circle of businessmen known for their loyalty to President Vladimir Putin and the benefits they’ve reaped as a result, a billionaire member of Putin’s United Russia party who has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in important state projects to curry favor.
Such “pocket oligarchs” earn official status, even diplomatic immunity when they travel. And Suleiman Karimov, 51, reportedly has a Russian diplomatic passport. But according to the Russian press, when he landed in France earlier this week he was on a private trip, and didn’t bring it.
Then, almost as soon he got off the plane in Nice, he got arrested for alleged tax evasion and money laundering. And the vision of Karimov behind bars splashed in the Russian press shocked the country’s elite. Many of them, like Karimov, have gotten used to keeping their fortunes, their luxury properties, their yachts, and indeed their families abroad….
Olga Proskurina, who has been covering Russian business news as an independent observer since 1992, keeps a close eye on Karimov and many other Russian businessmen and officials enjoying their lives on the south of France.
“More than 350 Russian millionaires and eight billionaires own properties in Monaco and on the French Riviera,” says Proskurina. “Their real life is abroad, so they come to Russia just to make money, creating all sorts of schemes to cover up their true deals.”
Both liberal and conservative experts believe that Russians keep around $1 trillion abroad in offshore banks accounts.
“Karimov’s case made many in the elite concerned, as he seemed to be safe with his Russian diplomatic immunity,” Proskurina noted….
(Putin presides over an oligarchy of lies and corruption, where lies and corruption are the very least of his own wrongs.)
Peter Stone And Greg Gordon report an Exclusive: Manafort flight records show deeper Kremlin ties than previously known:
Political guru Paul Manafort took at least 18 trips to Moscow and was in frequent contact with Vladimir Putin’s allies for nearly a decade as a consultant in Russia and Ukraine for oligarchs and pro-Kremlin parties.
Even after the February 2014 fall of Ukraine’s pro-Moscow President Viktor Yanukovych, who won office with the help of a Manafort-engineered image makeover, the American consultant flew to Kiev another 19 times over the next 20 months while working for the smaller, pro-Russian Opposition Bloc party. Manafort went so far as to suggest the party take an anti-NATO stance, an Oppo Bloc architect has said. A key ally of that party leader, oligarch Viktor Medvedchuk, was identified by an earlier Ukrainian president as a former Russian intelligence agent, “100 percent.”
It was this background that Manafort brought to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, which he joined in early 2016 and soon led. His web of connections to Russia-loyal potentates is now a focus of federal investigators.
Manafort’s flight records in and out of Ukraine, which McClatchy obtained from a government source in Kiev, and interviews with more than a dozen people familiar with his activities, including current and former government officials, suggest the links between Trump’s former campaign manager and Russia sympathizers run deeper than previously thought.
What’s now known leads some Russia experts to suspect that the Kremlin’s emissaries at times turned Manafort into an asset acting on Russia’s behalf. “You can make a case that all along he …was either working principally for Moscow, or he was trying to play both sides against each other just to maximize his profits,” said Daniel Fried, a former assistant secretary of state who communicated with Manafort during Yanukovych’s reign in President George W. Bush’s second term….
(‘An asset acting on Russia’s behalf ‘: Manafort is an American, born in our free society, who surely became a tool not merely of a foreign state, but of a foreign dictatorship. For an American serve France or Sweden would be (at minimum) misguided; to serve Putin’s Russia would be (at minimum) far worse, as servitude to oppression.)
Here’s How SpaceX Salvages Falcon 9 Rockets: