Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of eighty-six. Sunrise is 5:33 AM and sunset 8:28 PM, for 14h 55m 01s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 30.1% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred fifty-first day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
Whitewater’s Alcohol Licensing Committee meets at 5:45 PM, and Common Council at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1865, successful in their defense of the Union, the 3rd and 18th Wisconsin Infantry regiments and the 1st and 6th Wisconsin Light Artillery batteries muster out.
Recommended for reading in full —
The Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal’s editorial page has been pro-Trump, but even that editorial board now addresses The Trumps and the Truth:
Don’t you get it, guys? Special counsel Robert Mueller and the House and Senate intelligence committees are investigating the Russia story. Everything that is potentially damaging to the Trumps will come out, one way or another. Everything. Denouncing leaks as “fake news” won’t wash as a counter-strategy beyond the President’s base, as Mr. Trump’s latest 36% approval rating shows.
Mr. Trump seems to realize he has a problem because the White House has announced the hiring of white-collar Washington lawyer Ty Cobb to manage its Russia defense. He’ll presumably supersede the White House counsel, whom Mr. Trump ignores, and New York outside counsel Marc Kasowitz, who is out of his political depth.
Mr. Cobb has an opening to change the Trump strategy to one with the best chance of saving his Presidency: radical transparency. Release everything to the public ahead of the inevitable leaks. Mr. Cobb and his team should tell every Trump family member, campaign operative and White House aide to disclose every detail that might be relevant to the Russian investigations.
That means every meeting with any Russian or any American with Russian business ties. Every phone call or email. And every Trump business relationship with Russians going back years. This should include every relevant part of Mr. Trump’s tax returns, which the President will resist but Mr. Mueller is sure to seek anyway.
Then release it all to the public. Whatever short-term political damage this might cause couldn’t be worse than the death by a thousand cuts of selective leaks, often out of context, from political opponents in Congress or the special counsel’s office. If there really is nothing to the Russia collusion allegations, transparency will prove it. Americans will give Mr. Trump credit for trusting their ability to make a fair judgment. Pre-emptive disclosure is the only chance to contain the political harm from future revelations.
(This editorial position, of course, assumes that Trump’s Russia contacts are politically manageable; this will come to matter less as a political problem than as a legal and moral one. Stains of that kind, to be sure, will prove indelible. The editorial is significant mostly because it shows that even defenders of Trump see his situation as dire.)
Benjamin Wittes observes that A New Front Opens in L’Affaire Russe:
Don’t look now, but a new front has opened in L’Affaire Russe. It will be a quiet one at first, but I suspect it won’t stay quiet for long.
The new front is civil litigation.
Last week, a group called United to Protect Democracy filed suit against the Trump campaign and Roger Stone on behalf of three people whose emails and personal information were among the material stolen by the Russians and disclosed to Wikileaks. The suit alleges that the campaign and Stone conspired with the Russians to release information about the plaintiffs—who are not public figures—in a fashion that violates their privacy rights under D.C. law. and intimidates them out of political advocacy.
See, also, a copy of the complaint at Invasion of Privacy Suit Filed against Trump Campaign over Leaked Emails.
Hannah Levintova, Bryan Schatz and AJ Vicens write that Four Spy Experts on Trump Blackmail, WikiLeaks, and Putin’s Long Game:
Steven Hall, who retired in 2015 after a decorated career at the CIA, ran the agency’s Russia operations.
Mother Jones: If you were involved in the Trump-Russia investigation, who or what would you hone in on?
Steven Hall: Mike Flynn, no doubt. It’s fun to think about what I would do if I was a Russian intelligence officer in charge of running these various operations. Not just the influence operation, which it’s quite clear now was pretty successful in increasing the likelihood that Donald Trump would be elected. But if I was the SVR [Russian foreign intelligence] guy who was told, “Okay, your job is to try to find whether there are members of the campaign who would be willing to play ball with us,” No. 1 on my list would be Flynn. First of all, he’s a former chief of the DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency]. He’s an intelligence officer, so he understands how discreet and clandestine you need to be if you’re going to cooperate on that level. And then, there’s the future: He’s probably going to land a pretty good job, assuming Trump wins. So it’s a win-win-win in terms of targeting Flynn. Furthermore, he’s come to Moscow. He’s accepted money from Russian companies, and he’s tried to conceal that. So on paper, he’s a really good-looking candidate for a spy.
MJ: Is there any parallel to this moment that you saw in your 30-plus year career with the CIA?
SH: The short answer is no. There have certainly been big spy cases in the past—Aldrich Ames, Robert Hanssen. But I can’t think of one that would be as senior a guy as somebody like the national security adviser, or even more unprecedented—if it turns out that the Trump camp had the go-ahead from the big dog to talk to the Russians prior to the election.
Did the Kremlin likely try to collect dirt on Trump? “I think the answer is yes.”
MJ: How likely is it that the Kremlin has collected kompromat on Trump?SH: I can absolutely tell you that the FSB [Russia’s Federal Security Service] are rigged up to collect as much compromising information against any target they consider to be valuable. So when Trump was there in Russia, would they have collected against him? I think the answer is yes. I think they would have seen Trump for what he was at the time, which to the Russian lens would have just been an American oligarch—a rich guy with considerable power who you might need something on at some point…He’s a good guy to have at your beck and call.
If there was compromising material that had a shot at actually making Trump behave the way the Russians wanted him to, I would imagine it would be something financial—illegal, dirty dealings, or something with legal import.
MJ: Do you think Congress is able to investigate the Trump-Russia allegations effectively?
SH: I don’t think so, given where Congress is right now in terms of partisanship. There might have been a time historically—15, 20 years ago. Short of having an independent investigator or some other mechanism that can get rid of some of the partisanship, I just don’t think it’s going to happen.
Michael Shear and Karen Yourish report that Trump Says He Has Signed More Bills Than Any President, Ever. He Hasn’t:
In fact, as he approaches six months in office on Thursday, Mr. Trump is slightly behind the lawmaking pace for the past six presidents, who as a group signed an average of 43 bills during the same period. And an analysis of the bills Mr. Trump signed shows that about half were minor and inconsequential, passed by Congress with little debate. Among recent presidents, both the total number of bills he signed and the legislation’s substance make Mr. Trump about average.
President Jimmy Carter signed 70 bills in the first six months, according to an analysis of bills signed by previous White House occupants. Bill Clinton signed 50. George W. Bush signed 20 bills into law. Barack Obama signed 39 bills during the period, including an $800 billion stimulus program to confront an economic disaster, legislation to make it easier for women to sue for equal pay, a bill to give the Food and Drug Administration the authority to regulate tobacco and an expansion of the federal health insurance program for children.
Mr. Truman and Franklin Delano Roosevelt both had signed more bills into law by their 100-day mark than Mr. Trump did in almost twice that time. Truman had signed 55 bills and Roosevelt had signed 76 during their first 100 days.
Sarah Kaplan writes that America’s greatest eclipse is coming, and this man wants you to see it:
Mike Kentrianakis is launched. He’s here at the Hayden Planetarium as an emissary of the American Astronomical Society, and his mission is to spread the word: On Aug. 21, the moon will pass between the sun and Earth, casting a shadow across a swath of the United States. The spectacle will be like nothing most people have ever seen….
Kentrianakis would know. He has witnessed 20 solar eclipses in his 52 years, missing work, straining relationships and spending most of his life’s savings to chase the moon’s shadow across the globe. The pursuit has taken him to a mountaintop in Argentina, a jungle in Gabon, an ice field north of the Arctic Circle — exposing him to every type of eclipse there is to see, on every continent except Antarctica. Last year he watched one from an airplane 36,000 feet above the Pacific Ocean. The video of his rapturous reaction went viral, cementing his status as a “crazy eclipse guy,” as he jokingly calls himself. “Oh, my God,” Kentrianakis exclaims 21 times in the 3½ -minute clip. “Totality! Totality! Whooo, yeah!”
Chasing the dark: The man who’s spent a lifetime pursuing solar eclipses presents Kentrianakis’s fascination: