Daily Bread for 5.1.19

Good morning.

May in Whitewater begins with rain and a high of fifty-five.  Sunrise is 5:47 AM and sunset 7:55 PM, for 14h 07m 53s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 12% of its visible disk illuminated.

Today is the nine hundred fourth day.

Whitewater’s Tech Park Board meets at 8 AM.

The Whitewater School Board is scheduled to meet beginning at 6 PM for a closed session, returning to open session:

4. CLOSED SESSION

A. Adjourn into closed session, pursuant to Section 19.85(1) (c), Wis. Stats., to consider employment, promotion, compensation, or performance evaluation data of any public employee over which the governmental body has jurisdiction or exercises responsibility. Specifically, to discuss administrator contracts, evaluations, and performance of duties with the District’s legal counsel. (Action Item)

5. OPEN SESSION

A. Reconvene into open session per Section 19.85(2)Wis. Stats., for potential action on any matters discussed in closed session. (Action Item)

On this day in 1931, the Empire State Building officially opens.

 

Recommended for reading in full:

Devlin Barrett and Matt Zapotosky report Mueller complained that Barr’s letter did not capture ‘context’ of Trump probe:

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III wrote a letter in late March complaining to Attorney General William P. Barr that a four-page memo to Congress describing the principal conclusions of the investigation into President Trump “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance” of Mueller’s work, according to a copy of the letter reviewed Tuesday by The Washington Post.

….

At the time Mueller’s letter was sent to Barr on March 27, Barr had days prior announced that Mueller did not find a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russian officials seeking to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. In his memo to Congress, Barr also said that Mueller had not reached a conclusion about whether Trump had tried to obstruct justice, but that Barr reviewed the evidence and found it insufficient to support such a charge.

Days after Barr’s announcement, Mueller wrote the previously undisclosed private letter to the Justice Department, laying out his concerns in stark terms that shocked senior Justice Department officials, according to people familiar with the discussions.

“The summary letter the Department sent to Congress and released to the public late in the afternoon of March 24 did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this office’s work and conclusions,” Mueller wrote. “There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation. This threatens to undermine a central purpose for which the Department appointed the Special Counsel: to assure full public confidence in the outcome of the investigations.”

The letter made a key request: that Barr release the 448-page report’s introductions and executive summaries, and it made initial suggested redactions for doing so, according to Justice Department officials.

Jennifer Rubin observes Rod Rosenstein is leaving as a diminished man and shamed lawyer:

“Rosenstein talks a lot about the rule of law in very eloquent ways,” former prosecutor Mimi Rocah tells me. “But his recent actions — signing on to Barr’s letter which misrepresented the Mueller report and gave a legally indefensible and unnecessary conclusion, standing behind Barr at a press conference that was more like a defense closing argument — directly threaten the rule of law, because he no longer looks like someone leading the DOJ in neutral ways.” She adds that “we can’t have faith in decisions he’s made. For him to cite Trump as a defender of the rule [of law] given the damage he has done to the DOJ and FBI as institutions is shameful.”

 Large tornado caught on camera near Sulphur, Oklahoma: