Good mornng.
Saturday in Whitewater will be rainy with a high of forty-seven. Sunrise is 7:34 AM and sunset 5:42 PM, for 10h 08m 23s. We’ve a full moon, with 99.9% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred sixtieth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1922, British archaeologist and Egyptologist Howard Carter discovers entrance to King Tutankhamen’s tomb. On this day in 1847, the first class assembles at Beloit College.
Recommended for reading in full —
Philip Rucker and Matt Zapotosky report Trump breaches boundaries by saying DOJ should be ‘going after’ Democrats:
President Trump on Friday repeatedly called on the Department of Justice and FBI to investigate his Democratic political opponents, a breach of the traditional executive branch boundaries designed to prevent the criminal justice system from becoming politicized.
Trump urged federal law enforcement to “do what is right and proper” by launching criminal probes of former presidential rival Hillary Clinton and her party — a surprising use of his bully pulpit considering he acknowledged a day earlier that presidents are not supposed to intervene in such decisions.
In a flurry of accusatory morning tweets, Trump claimed there was mounting public pressure for new Clinton probes, including over her campaign’s joint fundraising agreement with the Democratic National Committee that effectively gave her some control over the party’s finances, strategy and staffing before the primaries began….
(Trump, expressing himself as what he is: authoritarian.)
WASHINGTON — Carter Page, a foreign policy adviser to the Trump presidential campaign, met Russian government officials during a July 2016 trip he took to Moscow, according to testimony he gave on Thursday to the House Intelligence Committee.
Shortly after the trip, Mr. Page sent an email to at least one Trump campaign aide describing insights he had after conversations with government officials, legislators and business executives during his time in Moscow, according to one person familiar with the contents of the message. The email was read aloud during the closed-door testimony.
The new details of the trip present a different picture than the account Mr. Page has given during numerous appearances in the news media in recent months and are yet another example of a Trump adviser meeting with Russians officials during the 2016 campaign. In multiple interviews with The New York Times, he had either denied meeting with any Russian government officials during the July 2016 visit or sidestepped the question, saying he met with “mostly scholars”….
(The more one asks, the more one finds, of Trump operatives’ lies and misconduct.)
Carl Schreck asks Who Are The Russia Contacts In The Papadopoulos Plea?:
According to U.S. court documents unsealed this week, a foreign policy adviser to the campaign of President Donald Trump said he was in contact with Russian officials and had been told during the campaign that Moscow had “dirt” on Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and “thousands of her e-mails.”
The documents related to the guilty plea of former adviser George Papadopoulos — the first admission of guilt to emerge from U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 election and potential collusion by Trump associates — do not provide the names of Papadopoulos’s contacts.
But the identities of two of these individuals appear to have been confirmed — a man described in court documents as “the professor” and another as a “connection” to the Russian Foreign Ministry. The name of another — a woman Papadopoulos initially believed was Russian President Vladimir Putin’s niece — remained unclear as of October 31.
Here’s a look at key individuals with ties to Russia in the October 5 plea deal signed by Papadopoulos, whose arrest in July on charges of lying to FBI agents only came to light after court documents were unsealed on October 30, and what we know about them [list follows]….
David Corn and AJ Vincens report Hackers Compromised the Trump Organization 4 Years Ago—and the Company Never Noticed:
Four years ago, the Trump Organization experienced a major cyber breach that could have allowed the perpetrator (or perpetrators) to mount malware attacks from the company’s web domains and may have enabled the intruders to gain access to the company’s computer network. Up until this week, this penetration had gone undetected by President Donald Trump’s company, according to several internet security researchers.
In 2013, a hacker (or hackers) apparently obtained access to the Trump Organization’s domain registration account and created at least 250 website subdomains that cybersecurity experts refer to as “shadow” subdomains. Each one of these shadow Trump subdomains pointed to a Russian IP address, meaning that they were hosted at these Russian addresses. (Every website domain is associated with one or more IP addresses. These addresses allow the internet to find the server that hosts the website. Authentic Trump Organization domains point to IP addresses that are hosted in the United States or countries where the company operates.) The creation of these shadow subdomains within the Trump Organization network was visible in the publicly available records of the company’s domains.
Here is a list of a Trump Organization shadow subdomains.
The subdomains and their associated Russian IP addresses have repeatedly been linked to possible malware campaigns, having been flagged in well-known research databases as potentially associated with malware. The vast majority of the shadow subdomains remained active until this week, indicating that the Trump Organization had taken no steps to disable them. This suggests that the company for the past four years was unaware of the breach. Had the infiltration been caught by the Trump Organization, the firm should have immediately decommissioned the shadow subdomains….
It shouldn’t be confusing, but sometimes it is —