Good morning. 
Christmas Day in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of fifty. Sunrise is 7:24 AM and sunset 4:26 PM, for 9h 02m 22s of daytime. The moon is new with 0.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the one thousand one hundred forty-second day.
On this day in 1776, George Washington and the Continental Army cross the Delaware River at night to attack Hessian forces serving Great Britain at Trenton, New Jersey, the next day.
Recommended for reading in full —
Shane Harris, Josh Dawsey, and Carol D. Leonnig report Former White House officials say they feared Putin influenced the president’s views on Ukraine and 2016 campaign:
Almost from the moment he took office, President Trump seized on a theory that troubled his senior aides: Ukraine, he told them on many occasions, had tried to stop him from winning the White House.
After meeting privately in July 2017 with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Group of 20 summit in Hamburg, Trump grew more insistent that Ukraine worked to defeat him, according to multiple former officials familiar with his assertions.
The president’s intense resistance to the assessment of U.S. intelligence agencies that Russia systematically interfered in the 2016 campaign — and the blame he cast instead on a rival country — led many of his advisers to think that Putin himself helped spur the idea of Ukraine’s culpability, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions.
One former senior White House official said Trump even stated so explicitly at one point, saying he knew Ukraine was the real culprit because “Putin told me.”
Two other former officials said the senior White House official described Trump’s comment to them.
Anna Nemtsova writes Russia’s Twin Nostalgias (‘Vladimir Putin has a fondness for the Soviet era. So do many Russians—but often not for the same reasons’):
Here in Sochi, it is apparent that Putin’s memories of the Soviet era differ markedly from those of ordinary city dwellers. Putin has positive recollections of his time as a KGB officer, when the might of the state was awe-inspiring, its rulers held on par with the most powerful around the world. Sochi’s people, though, remember a time when their gardens and public spaces were open and accessible, not simply in the physical sense, but in the financial one.
A few years ago, the authorities here closed one of Sochi’s earliest spa hotels, Ordzhonikidze. It now stands abandoned, and when I visited, I could see its ceiling paintings rotting in the moist air, the building’s columns falling apart. Parts of statues had fallen off and wild ivy sprawled across the floor. The resort’s former gardener pointed out some trees in the resort’s park that she said were unique to Russia, and noted how paths that used to cut through neatly trimmed beds of flowers were now cracking. As I took it in, a female security guard wearing a camouflage uniform ordered me to leave, saying the building was “under the control of the presidential administration.”
I later spoke with a local artist, Oleg Korchagin, who fondly recalled an era I could barely remember, what he described as the “urban harmony” of the Sochi of his youth. “I miss the Sochi where I could walk freely, the Sochi of beautiful architecture,” he told me. “Unfortunately now, local people move along fences surrounding secret, specialized, resorts.
“My nostalgia,” he continued, “is different from the nostalgia of our authorities.”