Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy, with a high of forty-five. Sunrise is 6:19 AM and sunset 7:32 PM, for 13h 12m 15s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 29% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}five hundred sixteenth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission meets at 6 PM.
On this day in 1866, Henry Bergh founds the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
Recommended for reading in full —
➤ Philip Bump explains To search Michael Cohen’s home and office, the FBI had to clear a higher-than-normal bar:
Monday’s raid, though, was conducted at the direction of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, not the special counsel. Last week, Mueller’s team revealed in a court filing that deputy attorney general Rod J. Rosenstein (who, in May 2017, appointed Mueller to serve in his current position) had outlined in a memo last August particular areas for the special counsel’s team to investigate. Mueller could expand those boundaries, but only after getting Rosenstein’s approval. In this case, it seems, Rosenstein referred the question to the U.S. attorney instead.
There are specific rules that come into play before the U.S. attorney would be granted a subpoena, as outlined in the U.S. Attorneys’ Manual. A section titled “Searches of Premises of Subject Attorneys” details six additional safeguards to ensure that the Justice Department isn’t unjustly violating attorney-client privilege. It applies to subject attorneys — people who are “suspect[s], subject[s] or target[s]” of an investigation. That distinction was highlighted last week when The Post reported that Mueller had informed Trump that the president wasn’t a target of the investigation, but only a subject of it. “Prosecutors view someone as a subject when that person has engaged in conduct that is under investigation but there is not sufficient evidence to bring charges,” we wrote at that point. In other words, Trump wasn’t necessarily about to face charges, but he was under investigation. The same, it seems, applies now to Cohen.
To obtain that search warrant, then, the U.S. attorney would have had to meet six conditions, according to the manual [Bump then lists all six conditions].
(If Trumpists think this was an action of Special Counsel Mueller, they either don’t understand how these matters are conducted, or deliberately and falsely offer a distorted account.)
➤ Bill Whitaker reports When Russian hackers targeted the U.S. election infrastructure:
The U.S. intelligence community has concluded there is no doubt the Russians meddled in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, leaking stolen e-mails and inflaming tensions on social media. While Congress and special counsel Robert Mueller investigate Russian interference, including whether the campaign of Donald Trump colluded with Russia, we have been looking into another vector of the attack on American democracy: a sweeping cyber assault on state voting systems that U.S. intelligence tied to the Russian government. Tonight, you’ll find out what happened from the frontline soldiers of a cyberwar that was fought largely out of public view, on digital battlegrounds in states throughout the country.
The first shots were fired here in Illinois, not far from downtown Springfield, in a nondescript shopping center, the kind you’ll find anywhere in the United States. There, in a repurposed supermarket, is the headquarters of the Illinois State Board of Elections.
Bill Whitaker: This doesn’t look like a war zone.
Steve Sandvoss: No, it doesn’t, actually.
Steve Sandvoss is the executive director. He told us, in his first television interview about the attack, that this office is on the front lines of a cyberwar.
Steve Sandvoss: We have– a good I.T. department. But —
Bill Whitaker: No match for the Russian government.
Steve Sandvoss: Bows and arrows against the lightning, hate to say it.
Bill Whitaker: Bows and arrows against the lightning? Is that what it felt like?
Steve Sandvoss: At– at first, yes.
(Our fellow citizens need the full support of at the federal and state level to protect against persistent and devious Russian election interference. If there’s one place where federal and state power is needed, especially now, it’s to assure an unimpeded, undistorted right to vote.)
➤ Mark Sommerhauser reports State paid $541K to settle misconduct, harassment claims at UW-Madison:
The state paid at least $541,000 in settlements in the last decade in connection with allegations of sexual misconduct, including sexual assault or harassment, by UW-Madison employees, according to public records released Monday.
UW-Madison released records of 20 cases of alleged misconduct involving faculty, staff and students, as well as the university’s investigations of them.
The release came in response to requests for such records from the Wisconsin State Journal and other media outlets, and gives the fullest picture yet of how the university has responded to recent allegations of sexual misconduct.
The State Journal and other media sought the records after the State Journal chronicled the university’s handling of sexual harassment complaints in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning. The newspaper has also detailed weaknesses in the university’s ability to track and monitor complaints.
➤ Mark Muro, Jacob Whiton, and Robert Maxim consider How China’s proposed tariffs could affect U.S. workers and industries:
What do our tables and maps show? Our top line estimates suggest while the total number of jobs potentially disrupted by an all-out trade war remains modest, the count encompasses a diverse and shrewdly chosen “hit list” of hallmark American industries—one that appears well-calculated to scare both red and blue America.
Altogether, we count some 2.1 million jobs in the 40 industries that produce products now slated for possible tariffs, and see a wide variation in the type and number of exposed jobs in those industries. Here’s a look at the industry list:
Scan the list and it ranges from sizable industrial enterprises such as plastics manufacturing, aircraft manufacturing, and automotive/light/truck/motor home production (300,000, 230,000, and 200,000 direct jobs respectively, in 2016); to farm-sector mainstays like corn (18,000 jobs), soybeans (5,000 positions), and hog production and slaughter (147,000 workers); and into specialty industries such as fruit and nut production (187,000 workers), wineries (60,000 workers), and distilleries (12,000 positions).
Overall, the list suggests that Chinese trade bureaucrats have as good, or perhaps even better, of a feel for the diverse and culturally significant key elements that comprise the U.S. production base than their U.S. counterparts. High-tech and low-tech, industrial and agricultural, commodity and specialty production are all represented and put into play.
(It should come as no surprise that a competent Chinese analyst would have a better grasp of the American econony than any of the third-tier, talk-show loving officials of the Trump Administration.)
➤ Meet Nature’s Masters of Disguise: