Good morning.
Thursday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of fifty-one. Sunrise is 6:07 AM and sunset 7:40 PM, for 13h 33m 48s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 98.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the eight hundred ninetieth day.
On this day in 1906, the 1906 Great San Francisco Earthquake shakes that city, killing thousands and causing significant property damage.
Recommended for reading in full:
Natasha Bertrand and Anna Nemtsova describe The Trump-Putin Relationship, As Dictated by the Kremlin (“Why does the White House cede control of the narrative to the Russians?”):
It would have once been unthinkable to accuse a sitting president of putting the interests of a hostile foreign power above those of the United States. But Trump’s continual praise of Putin on the campaign trail, his pursuit of a multimillion-dollar real-estate deal in Moscow throughout the election—while Russia was waging a massive hacking and disinformation campaign to undermine his opponent, Hillary Clinton—and the secrecy that still surrounds his conversations with Putin gave many, including the FBI, pause.“All this would be unusual enough for any president,” The Atlantic’s David Frum notedin January. “It is more than suspicious for a president being formally investigated by the FBI as a possible Russian-intelligence asset.” ….
Trump took the extraordinary step of confiscating his interpreter’s notes after his first private meeting with Putin in Hamburg, Germany, in 2017, according to the Post, and demanded that the interpreter refrain from discussing the meeting with members of his own administration. (The White House senior adviser Kellyanne Conway told reporters earlier this month that Trump was concerned about leaks when he confiscated the notes.) Then–Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told reporters after that meeting that Trump and Putin had discussed Russia’s election interference in 2016. But he wouldn’t say whether Trump accepted Putin’s denial of any such interference at face value—providing Russia with another golden opportunity to shape the narrative.
Bess Levin writes Trump’s Lawyers Prefer His Exceptionally Shady Financial Documents Not See the Light of Day:
As we learned from Michael Cohen’s congressional testimony in February, a New York Times exposé last month, and documents obtained from The Washington Post shortly after that, Donald Trump’s long history of lying about his wealth has not been confined to bragging about it on TV, but also allegedly made its way into financial statements sent to banks and insurance companies, in which the ex-real-estate developer inflated his assets to obtain certain loans. For example, in a 2011 document, Trump purported to own 55 home lots ready to sell for at least $3 million apiece at his Southern California golf course; in reality, he’d only been zoned for 31, thus overstating his future revenue by roughly $72 million. A year later, in another “Statement of Financial Condition,” he tacked an extra 800 acres on to the size of his 1,200-odd-acre Virginia vineyard. At one point, he claimed Trump Tower had 68 stories, despite the fact that anyone with eyes could tell you there are 58.