Steele’s Magnolia

From The Guardian:

The former MI6 officer Christopher Steele had a “personal” relationship with Ivanka Trump and gifted her a “family tartan from Scotland” as a present, the long-awaited report by US Department of Justice inspector general, Michael Horowitz, revealed on Monday.

Horowitz’s review of the FBI’s 2016 investigation into Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign and its links with Russia includes fresh details of Steele’s interactions with the FBI, and startling claims about his relationship with the Trumps dating back to the period before he wrote a controversial dossier on Trump.

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Putin says, “Leave elections alone? Kiss my asset!”

From HUFFPOST:

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Monday fired back at critics who accused him of being a “Russian asset” after he blocked legislation last week that would have strengthened U.S. election security.

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RICO Suave

From THINK PROGRESS:

During an interview on Sunday’s edition of This Week, Jay Sekulow — one of President Trump’s lawyers — admitted he was wrong last year when he claimed Trump “wasn’t involved” in dictating a misleading statement for his son about the infamous June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between his campaign and Kremlin-connected Russians who offered political dirt on Hillary Clinton.

 

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It goes from bad to Twitterverse

From the DAILY BEAST:

Kellyanne Conway and Donald Trump Jr. pushed messages from an account operated from Russia’s ‘troll farm’—including allegations of voter fraud a week before Election Day.

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Paul Manafort, You Bug Me

From ABIGAIL TRACY at VANITY FAIR:

While Donald Trump and his surrogates were loudly campaigning against Robert Mueller on Twitter and on TV, the special counsel and his team of F.B.I. investigators has been quietly building their case, the details of which burst into public view Wednesday when The Washington Post reported that the bureau searched the home of Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort in a dramatic pre-dawn raid at the end of last month.

The raid, which occurred one day after Manafort met with the Senate Intelligence Committee, indicates that the Justice Department investigation has entered a heightened stage—and that Mueller is willing to use any investigative tools at his disposal to determine the extent of the Russian government’s interference in the presidential election

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The Full Sekulow

From BUSINESS INSIDER:

President Donald Trump’s lawyer faced difficult questions on Sunday about Donald Trump Jr.’s attempt to glean damaging information on Hillary Clinton during a meeting with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer.

While Trump Jr.’s lawyers have remained primarily behind the scenes, the president’s personal lawyer has become a ubiquitous presence on television, performing the so-called “Full Ginsberg” by appearing on all five major political talk shows on Sunday.

 

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Bad Heir Day

From POLITICO:

It sounded like a scene from a Cold War spy movie: Donald Trump Jr. was in a helicopter flying low on the outskirts of Russia’s capital city.

“Buzzing the treetops outside Moscow at 100 knots,” Trump Jr. tweeted, adding the aircraft was flying “below radar in closed airspace,” for reasons he did not explain.

It was June 2011, and the future president’s son was on a business trip to Moscow, where Trump Jr. had recently become a regular — and admiring — visitor.

“I really prefer Moscow over all cities in the world,” he had told an audience a few years earlier.

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No Goldstone Unturned

From WIRED:

ROB GOLDSTONE, A British-born former tabloid reporter and current publicist, has found himself in the middle of one of the biggest scandals of Trump’s presidency thus far. When Donald Trump Jr. sat down with Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer with reported ties to the Kremlin (ties which Veselnitskaya denies), it was Goldstone who had brokered the encounter.

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