Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of sixty-one. Sunrise is 6:00 AM and sunset 7:45 PM, for 13h 45m 17s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 46.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1970, the first Earth Day is celebrated: “The event was organized by a 33-member committee in Philadelphia. Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson advocated Earth Day to focus national attention on ecological issues.
Recommended for reading in full —
➤ The Brookings Institution presents The Life She Deserves, a new documentary short film that is an intimate portrait of Jennifer Collins and her family’s struggle to find a treatment to control her debilitating epilepsy and their fight to change medical marijuana laws:
(I’m not ill, and I don’t smoke anything, so this film doesn’t describe my situation. It’s enough to contend that the law should not deny Collins or others effective remedies for chronic conditions.)
➤ Scott Bauer reports 10 minutes at Supreme Court cost Wisconsin $60K:
Wisconsin taxpayers footed a previously unknown $60,000 bill for an attorney to argue for 10 minutes before the U.S. Supreme Court in the state’s defense of a redistricting lawsuit, records obtained by The Associated Press show.
A summary of bills provided by the Republican leaders of the state Senate and Assembly through an open records request shows the law firm of Kirkland and Ellis was paid $60,000 to make the Supreme Court arguments in October. The cost wasn’t included in original contracts signed by Republican legislative leaders in February 2017.
A spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald said when the contract was signed it wasn’t known whether Kirkland would appear in court or simply prepare legal briefs.
The Legislature asked for time to present its position during oral arguments, which resulted in the $60,000 bill on top of $175,000 paid to the law firm for other work, Fitzgerald spokesman Dan Romportl said.
The solicitor general for the Wisconsin Department of Justice had 20 minutes of time to defend the maps in the oral arguments in addition to the 10 minutes given to the attorney from Kirkland and Ellis.
The records show that another law firm that did work on the case, Bell Giftos St. John, has been paid $127,414 to date. The Legislature’s contract allowed for its attorneys to be paid $300 an hour with no limit on the total.
➤ The Committee to Investigate Russia writes of Two Curious Travel Discrepancies:
Both President Trump and his longtime personal attorney Michael Cohen are telling stories of past travel that don’t seem to line up with previously disclosed information.
When McClatchy DC reported last Friday that Special Counsel Robert Mueller has evidence Cohen traveled to Prague as described in the Steele dossier, Cohen doubled down on his insistence that was not true, tweeting “I have never been to Prague.”
However, Mother Jones‘ David Corn – the first reporter to reveal the existence of the Steele memos in October 2016 – says that is not what Cohen told him in an interview Corn conducted as he was attempting to confirm parts of the memos.
The claim that Cohen met secretly with Russians seemed to be one of the tales that might be confirmable. I took a stab at that. While pursuing that angle, I called Cohen. He insisted that there had been no trip to Prague and that he had met with no Russians during the campaign.
This week I reviewed my notes from that phone call. Here’s the direct quote from Cohen: “I haven’t been to Prague in 14 years. I was in Prague for one afternoon 14 years ago.”
What’s notable? In that conversation, Cohen acknowledged he had once been to Prague—but a long time ago. In his recent denial, Cohen, whose home and office were raided last week by FBI agents seeking records related to the Stormy Daniels case and other matters (including taxi medallions), asserted he had “never” been to Prague. How significant is this discrepancy? There is no telling. But it is an inconsistency. Cohen’s lead lawyer could not be reached for a comment.
This discrepancy mirrors one that recently emerged related to Trump’s 2013 visit to Moscow, when he presided over the Miss Universe pageant he then co-owned. That was the infamous trip mentioned in the Steele memos as the time when Trump cavorted with prostitutes in his hotel room.
According to the just released Comey memos, President Trump says he never spent the night in Moscow so the claims he interacted with prostitutes could not be true. However, as Corn notes, that is not what Keith Schiller told Congress.
Schiller reportedly told the House Intel committee he and Trump, while on their way back to the hotel later that evening, laughed about an unidentified Russian’s offer to send Trump prostitutes, and Trump went to bed alone.
Schiller testified that he stood outside Trump’s hotel room for a time and then went to bed.
One source noted that Schiller testified he eventually left Trump’s hotel room door and could not say for sure what happened during the remainder of the night.
Two other sources said Schiller testified he was confident nothing happened.
Yet Trump did indeed stay in the hotel that night. In our new book, Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump, Michael Isikoff and I detail Trump’s itinerary in Moscow during that visit, which lasted two days and one night. In fact, Trump’s longtime bodyguard Keith Schiller has told congressional investigators that he escorted Trump to his hotel room that particular night. There is no doubt Trump was in the hotel that evening. Yet he told Comey he wasn’t? That seems odd. Especially for the man who says he has “one of the great memories of all time.”
Furthermore, BuzzFeed News points out that President Trump’s social media posts from November 2013 reveal he did spend at least one night in Moscow, if not the entire weekend. Photos show Trump in Moscow on Friday and Saturday, and a tweet Sunday night reads, in part, “I just got back from Russia.”
➤ Julia Preston writes Should America Give Refuge to Abused Women? (“Trump seems to say, not anymore.”):
Women in an exodus from Central America since 2014 have succeeded in winning asylum or other protections in the United States as victims of a pandemic of domestic abuse in that region. Because of recent cases that established fear of domestic violence as a legitimate basis for asylum, those claims often found more solid legal grounding in immigration court than claims of people who said they were escaping from killer gangs.
Now the Trump administration, determined to stop the stream of people to the border from Central America, is moving to curtail or close the legal avenues to protection for abused women like L.C. While the #MeToo movement has swept the country, bringing new legitimacy to women’s stories and consequences for men who abused, on immigration President Trump is going the other way.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions, from his position as the top official in charge of the immigration courts, is leading a broad review to question whether domestic or sexual violence should ever be recognized as persecution that would justify protection in the United States.
➤ Meet the World’s Fastest (Backwards) Runner:
For most of his life, runner Aaron Yoder has been steadily moving forward. Then, he took a turn. After an injury prevented him from competing in races, Aaron searched for a way to keep up his love for the sport without impacting his knee. He discovered backwards running, finding that running in reverse put no pressure on his knee. Today, he holds the record as the fastest backwards runner in the world.