Good morning. 
Saturday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of forty-eight. Sunrise is 7:03 AM and sunset 4:22 PM, for 9h 18m 38s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 97% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is both the one thousand four hundred eighty-first day and the twenty-second day.
On this day in 1989, after widespread protests, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia announces it will give up its monopoly on political power.
Recommended for reading in full —
Ken Dilanian asks When he leaves office, can ex-President Trump be trusted with America’s national security secrets?:
[Former CIA officer David] Priess and other former intelligence officials say Joe Biden would be wise not to let that tradition continue in the case of Donald Trump.
They argue soon-to-be-former President Trump already poses a danger because of the secrets he currently possesses, and they say it would be foolish to trust him with more sensitive information. With Trump’s real estate empire under financial pressure and his brand suffering, they worry he will see American secrets as a profit center.
“This is not something that one could have ever imagined with other presidents, but it’s easy to imagine with this one,” said Jack Goldsmith, who worked as a senior Justice Department official in the George W. Bush administration.
“He’s shown as president that he doesn’t take secret-keeping terribly seriously,” Goldsmith said in an interview. “He has a known tendency to disrespect rules related to national security. And he has a known tendency to like to sell things that are valuable to him.”
Goldsmith and other experts noted that Trump has a history of carelessly revealing classified information. He told the Russian foreign minister and ambassador in 2017 about extremely sensitive terrorism threat information the U.S. had received from an ally. Last year he tweeted what experts said was a secret satellite photo of an Iranian nuclear installation.
The president also may be vulnerable to foreign influence. His tax records, as reported by The New York Times, reveal that Trump appears to face financial challenges, having personally guaranteed more than $400 million of his companies’ debt at a time when the pandemic has put pressure on the hotel industry, in which Trump is a major player.
Dan Friedman asks Was Trump’s Pardon of Flynn Part of a Deal?:
On November 22, 2017, John Dowd, then one of President Donald Trump’s lawyers, left a voicemail for Robert Kelner, who was representing Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser. Trump had fired Flynn for lying about his conversations with the Russian ambassador in late 2016, and Dowd suspected, correctly, that Flynn, who was under investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, was about to cut a deal with Mueller.
Dowd asked for a “heads up,” if Flynn was giving Mueller information “that implicates the President.” Apparently referring to the possibility that Flynn would cooperate without giving prosecutors damning information about Trump, Dowd also said, “remember what we’ve always said about the President and his feeling toward Flynn, and all that still remains.”
That sounded like a suggestion that Trump would pardon Flynn if he didn’t flip on Trump. In his April 2019 final report, Mueller cited the voicemail in a section analyzing whether Trump obstructed justice by dangling pardons to former aides being investigated by Mueller.
Dowd denies that he was hinting at a presidential pardon for Flynn. “It’s nonsense,” he said when reached by phone Wednesday, after the news broke that Trump was pardoning Flynn. “It’s not true. It’s a fucking lie.” Then he hung up.
Flynn did cooperate without implicating Trump. Flynn told investigators that Trump was not aware of his contacts with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the transition. And on Wednesday, Trump gave Flynn that pardon.