Good morning.
Fall begins in Whitewater with sunny skies and a high of ninety-two. Sunrise is 6:43 AM and sunset 6:50 PM, for 12h 07m 27s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 5.9% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred seventeenth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1862, Pres. Lincoln issues the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. On this day in 1863, the 1st Wisconsin Cavalry participates in skirmishes at Missionary Ridge and Shallow Ford Gap in Tennessee.
Recommended for reading in full —
Shane Harris reports that U.S. Monitored Manafort After He Left Trump Campaign (“The surveillance came as part of a counterintelligence probe into Russian interference with presidential election”):
U.S. authorities placed Paul Manafort under surveillance after he was ousted as Donald Trump’s campaign manager last summer, according to U.S. officials with knowledge of the matter.
The surveillance, which was part of a counterintelligence investigation into Russian interference with the presidential election, didn’t involve listening to Mr. Manafort’s phone communications in real-time, the officials said.
But armed with a warrant, investigators still could have conducted clandestine surveillance of Mr. Manafort, possibly by obtaining copies of his emails and other electronically stored communications, or by having agents follow him or conduct physical searches of his property.
The surveillance began after Mr. Manafort left the Trump campaign in August, but it is not clear when it was suspended. Mr. Manafort resigned after a spate of publicity about his consulting work in Ukraine on behalf of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s allies….
Carol D. Leonnig and Rosalind S. Helderman report that Mueller casts broad net in requesting extensive records from Trump White House:
The special counsel investigating Russian election meddling has requested extensive records and email correspondence from the White House, covering areas including the president’s private discussions about firing his FBI director and his response to news that the then-national security adviser was under investigation, according to two people briefed on the requests.
White House lawyers are now working to turn over internal documents that span 13 categories that investigators for the special counsel have identified as critical to their probe, the people said. Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, appointed in May in the wake of Trump’s firing of FBI Director James B. Comey, took over the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election and whether the Trump campaign coordinated with the Russians in that effort….
The requests broadly ask for any document or email related to a series of highly publicized incidents since Trump became president, including the ouster of national security adviser Michael Flynn and firing of Comey, the people said.
The list demonstrates Mueller’s focus on key moments and actions by the president and close advisers that could shed light on whether Trump sought to block the FBI investigations of Flynn and of Russian interference….
Josh Dawsey reports that Manafort used Trump campaign account to email Ukrainian operative (“Manafort sent the emails to seek repayment for previous work he did in Ukraine”):
Former Donald Trump aide [Adams: campaign manager, actually] Paul Manafort used his presidential campaign email account to correspond with a Ukrainian political operative with suspected Russian ties, according to people familiar with the correspondence.
Manafort sent emails to seek repayment for previous work he did in Ukraine and to discuss potential new opportunities in the country, even as he chaired Trump’s presidential campaign, these people said.
Manafort had been a longtime consultant for Viktor Yanukovych, the Ukrainian president until 2014, and his Party of Regions. During the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, Ukrainian investigators said they had discovered evidence that Manafort received millions of dollars in off-the-books payments for his work there.
In the emails to Konstantin Kilimnik, a Manafort protégé who has previously been reported to have suspected ties to Russian intelligence, the longtime GOP operative made clear his significant sway in Trump’s campaign, one of the people familiar with the communications said. He and Kilimnik also met in the United States while Manafort worked for the Trump campaign, which he chaired until an August 2016 shake-up….
Tom Hamburger, Rosalind S. Helderman, Carol D. Leonnig and Adam Entous report that Manafort offered to give Russian billionaire ‘private briefings’ on 2016 campaign:
Less than two weeks before Donald Trump accepted the Republican presidential nomination, his campaign chairman offered to provide briefings on the race to a Russian billionaire closely aligned with the Kremlin, according to people familiar with the discussions.
Paul Manafort made the offer in an email to an overseas intermediary, asking that a message be sent to Oleg Deripaska, an aluminum magnate with whom Manafort had done business in the past, these people said.
“If he needs private briefings we can accommodate,” Manafort wrote in the July 7, 2016, email, portions of which were read to The Washington Post along with other Manafort correspondence from that time.
The emails are among tens of thousands of documents that have been turned over to congressional investigators and special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s team as they probe whether Trump associates coordinated with Russia as part of Moscow’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 U.S. election.
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