Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be rainy with a high of seventy-seven. Sunrise is 6:08 AM and sunset 7:46 PM, for 13h 38m 10s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 79.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Alcohol Licensing Committee meets at 6 PM, and Common Council meets at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1959, Hawaii becomes a state.
Recommended for reading in full —
Aaron Blake writes Trump blurts out another Lester Holt moment:
It really was the Russia investigation all along.
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal posted late Wednesday, President Trump once again gave away the ballgame when it comes to his efforts to affect the probe and tear down its leaders (both current and former). He confessed that his true motivation for revoking former CIA director John Brennan’s security clearance was the “rigged witch hunt” that Brennan once “led.”
“I call it the rigged witch hunt; [it] is a sham,” Trump told the Journal’s Peter Nicholas and Michael C. Bender. “And these people led it!”
He added: “So I think it’s something that had to be done.”
You could be forgiven for having flashbacks to Trump’s interview with NBC Nightly News anchor Lester Holt in the aftermath of his firing last year of James B. Comey as FBI director. Then, as now, the White House offered a series of motivations for the crackdown on a person who was a liability in the Russia probe. Then, as now, it seemed clear what the actual motivation was. And then, as now, Trump appeared to go out and just admit the actual motivation.
Elizabeth Dwoskin and Craig Timberg report Microsoft says it has found a Russian operation targeting U.S. political institutions:
A group affiliated with the Russian government created phony versions of six websites — including some related to public policy and to the U.S. Senate — with the apparent goal of hacking into the computers of people who were tricked into visiting, according to Microsoft, which said Monday night that it discovered and disabled the fake sites.
The effort by the notorious APT28 hacking group, which has been publicly linked to a Russian intelligence agency and actively interfered in the 2016 presidential election, underscores the aggressive role that Russian operatives are playing ahead of the midterm elections in the United States. U.S. officials have repeatedly warned that the November vote is a major focus for interference efforts. Microsoft said the sites were created over the past several months and that the company was able to catch them early, as they were being set up. It did not go into more specifics.
Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit, which is responsible for the company’s response to email phishing schemes, took the lead role in finding and disabling the sites, and the company is launching an effort to provide expanded cybersecurity protection for campaigns and election agencies that use Microsoft products.
Julie Hirschfeld Davis reports Trump Says Hispanic-American Border Patrol Agent ‘Speaks Perfect English’:
WASHINGTON — It was supposed to be a White House salute to the heroism of immigration agents who put their lives on the line to protect Americans. But on Monday, President Trump appeared to have something else on his mind: the ethnicity of one of the men he was honoring.
“Speaks perfect English,” Mr. Trump blurted out as he encouraged Adrian Anzaldua, a Hispanic-American Border Patrol agent and dog handler from Texas, to join him onstage in the East Room. Mr. Anzaldua recently arrested a smuggler in Laredo who had tried to bring 78 people into the United States illegally inside a truck trailer.
(Trump’s a bigoted authoritarian grifter, but as his remarks again demonstrate, he’s also a notably vulgar and obvious one.)
Nick Miroff reports Border arrest data suggests Trump’s push to split migrant families had little deterrent effect:
The number of migrant families taken into custody along the U.S. border with Mexico remained nearly unchanged from June to July, according to government data released Wednesday [8.8], an indication the Trump administration’s controversial move to separate thousands of parents and children did little to deter others from attempting the journey.
U.S. border agents arrested 9,258 family members along America’s southwest border last month, down slightly from 9,434 in June and 9,485 in May.
The administration cited a springtime surge of parents crossing illegally with children as justification for its “zero tolerance” prosecution initiative, which led to the separation of approximately 2,500 families between May 5 and June 20, when public outcry forced President Trump to end the practice.
Since then, some of the policy’s defenders have argued the separations would have had a stronger deterrent effect if allowed more time. They insist its true impact would not be apparent until word of the crackdown had spread to rural Central America, prompting parents to reconsider travel plans.
But the July arrest totals released Wednesday suggest the separations made little difference. While families continued to arrive at roughly the same rate, the number of unaccompanied minors taken into custody dropped from 5,093 in June to 3,938 in July, even though that group wasn’t a target of the “zero tolerance” crackdown.
The Secret to Ant Efficiency Is [Occasional] Idleness: