Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of thirty-two. Sunrise is 7:16 AM and sunset 4:20 PM, for 9h 04m 54s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 16.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the seven hundred sixty-second day.
Whitewater’s Public Works Committee meets at 6 PM, and the Finance Committee at 7 PM.
On this day in 1833, Wisconsin’s first newspaper, the Green Bay Intelligencer, begins publication.
Recommended for reading in full:
Byron York contends that there’s been a “[s]udden shift in get-Trump talk; now it’s campaign finance, not Russia,” but Natasha Bertrand sets him straight:
nope, it’s still Russia https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/11/former-trump-aide-michael-cohen-admits-lying-congress/577003/…
(Trump has many grievous faults, not merely one.)
Pete Madden, Katherine Faulders, and Matthew Mosk report Maria Butina, accused Russian agent, reaches plea deal with prosecutors that includes cooperation:
Philip Bump observes It’s not just the number of Trump-Russia contacts. It’s the timing:
There are two facets of the Russia-Trumpworld points of contact that are interesting. The first is the volume: More than a dozen people who worked with Trump’s campaign or who were close to him personally had meetings, emails or calls with Russians over the year-long span from the end of 2015 to the end of 2016. But the timing is also interesting. The bulk of those contacts happened in the spring and summer of 2016, a period when it looked increasingly like Trump would be the Republican nominee for president.
Franklin Foer reports The Mysterious Return of Manafort’s ‘Russian Brain’:
In the Collected Works of Robert Mueller, there are Russian names that come and go. But there’s only one of these figures who provides a recurring presence in this oeuvre. He is a diminutive man, whom Mueller has called an “asset” of Russian intelligence. His presence is either the sort of distracting irrelevance that Alfred Hitchcock described as a MacGuffin, or he is the shadowy character who steps into the frame to foreshadow an ominous return.
Konstantin Kilimnik trained in Russian military intelligence as a linguist; he spent decades by Paul Manafort’s side, serving as a translator and then rising through the ranks of his organization. Eventually, Manafort would come to describe Kilimnik—also known as K.K. or Kostya—as “My Russian Brain.” He would travel with Manafort to Moscow to meet with their client, the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. When Kostya worked with Americans, they suspected him as some sort of spook. (Last June, I wrote this profile of him.)