Good morning.
Friday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of seventy-two. Sunrise is 6:13 AM and sunset 7:39 PM, for 13h 26m 43s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 16.2% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred eighty-ninth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1944, the Allies liberate Paris from the Nazi occupation. On this day in 1864, the 36th Wisconsin Infantry takes part in the Second Battle of Ream’s Station, Virginia: “Of 175 enlisted men and 11 officers who went into the fight, only 48 reported for duty the next day. The majority had been killed, wounded, or taken prisoner.”
Recommended for reading in full —
Aaron Blake enumerates 7 times Trump tried to call off the dogs on Russia:
In a must-read piece, Politico reports that President Trump appeared to pressure two Senate Republicans to back off their Russia-related efforts. Josh Dawsey and Elana Schor report that Trump vented frustrations about Congress’s Russia sanctions bill to Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) and tried to get Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) to back off a planned bill to protect Russia special counsel Robert S. Mueller III from being fired.
Add them to the list.
Trump’s attempts to influence actions related to Russia and the investigation that is now focused on him personally constitute a growing volume. Last weekend, in fact, the New York Times reported on another example that some may have missed.
Below, we recap all of them. If I missed one, email me [list of seven attempts folows]….
Judd Legum writes that Roger Stone promises a violent response if Trump is impeached:
Roger Stone, one of President Trump’s oldest and most-trusted advisers, warned that any politician who voted to impeach Donald Trump “will endanger their own life.”
Stone began by taunting members of Congress who were calling for Trump’s impeachment. “Try to impeach him, just try it!,” Stone exclaimed. He then promised that, if Trump was impeached, there would be a violent, armed response.
“You will have a spasm of violence in this country, an insurrection, like you’ve never seen,” he promised. “The people will not stand for impeachment. A politician that votes for it will endanger their own life”….
(Having spent these hundreds of days in correspondence with scores of Trump opponents, there’s not the slighest chance that they will relent. How their representatives will conduct themselves, one cannot say.)
Abigail Tracy reports that a New Russia Revelation Highlights the Big Lie at the Center of Trump’s Campaign (“A previously unreported e-mail reveals yet another Trump staffer discussing contact with Russians”):
In the last several months of his campaign, Donald Trump and his aides repeatedly denied that anyone in his orbit had any contact with anyone connected to the Russian government. “That’s absurd,” then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort said when asked about any ties. Donald Trump Jr. said that the idea that Russia may have helped his father is “disgusting” and “phony.” Both men, of course, had met with a Russian lawyer and a former Soviet intelligence officer just weeks earlier, alongside Jared Kushner, after being promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton as part of an explicit Russian government effort to aid their campaign. Still, the charade continued for months, even as Trump’s talking points drifted from claims that there was no “contact” to simply no “collusion.”
That lie, which was central to the Trump campaign’s messaging on Russia throughout 2016, was thrown into harsh relief again Wednesday when CNN reported on yet another potential point of contact between a member of Trump’s team and the Kremlin. Last summer, Rick Dearborn, who served as a top policy aide during the campaign and is now the president’s deputy chief of staff, sent an e-mail informing Trump campaign officials about an individual who sought to arrange a meeting between the presidential hopeful and Vladimir Putin. Discovered by congressional investigators, the e-mail may provide further evidence of the Kremlin’s effort to interfere in the presidential election, and of Trump’s associates’ efforts to conceal those efforts.
Dearborn sent the e-mail in June of last year, around the time of Donald Jr.’s rendezvous with the Russian lawyer. According to sources that spoke with CNN, the person seeking the meeting was only identified as being from “WV”—believed to be a reference to West Virginia. It is unclear why they sought the meeting and whether Dearborn or other Trump campaign officials acted upon the request….
Jennifer Rubin reminds that We cannot forget the unrepentant moral cowards on the right:
Scores of Republican politicians, activists and operatives who have supported and defended President Trump will be defined by the choices they made. If they choose to run for office again or be considered for future positions in government or maintain positions of leadership in political life, we think an appropriate series of questions must be asked:
Did they, from the get-go, spot Trump for what he was — a racist, a charlatan and a narcissist? (#NeverTrump Republicans and the Bush family did.)
If they didn’t spot him as such from the get-go, did they at least refrain from endorsing him? (A significant list of GOP members of Congress and senators, including Jeff Flake of Arizona, Susan Collins of Maine and Ben Sasse of Nebraska, as well as Ohio Gov. John Kasich, did.)
If they endorsed him, did they at least pull back their endorsement after he attacked Judge Gonzalo Curiel in textbook racist terms or went after the Gold Star Khan family?….
NASA describes The Hunt for Asteroids: