Crooked Media - What A Day: From Russia, with love

Not only was President Trump repeatedly briefed about Russia offering bounties to the Taliban for the deaths of Americans, we now know that he was presented with some pretty fucking compelling evidence. 
 

• U.S. officials intercepted data showing large financial transfers from an account controlled by Russia’s military intelligence agency to an account connected to the Taliban, according to the New York Times. Using other intelligence, analysts concluded that those payments were most likely connected to the bounty program that detainees had described during interrogations. 
   
• Those intercepts were included in Trump’s written Presidential Daily Brief in late February, contradicting both prongs of his claim that he was a) never informed about the bounties because b) the reports were too flimsy. (The assessment was actually solid enough to disseminate broadly across the intelligence community.) Oddly enough, administration officials didn’t mention anything about the financial data to the House Republicans they selectively briefed at the White House on Monday.  But in their defense, it would have really messed up their propaganda message of  “¯\_(ツ)_/¯” and nobody had leaked it to the Times yet. 
   
• February wasn’t the first time this popped up on Trump’s radar. Top White House officials were aware of intelligence on Russia’s secret bounties in early 2019, and it was included in at least one of Trump’s written briefings at the time. To be clear, the president knew about Russia offering cash for dead Americans before the movie Detective Pikachu came out, and has done nothing. 

“But maybe Trump still didn’t know,” you say. “After all, he cannot read.”
 

• Great point, but he reportedly received at least one oral briefing, too: Former national security adviser John Bolton told colleagues that he briefed Trump on the matter in March 2019. Bolton has declined to confirm that, and in a Sunday interview repeatedly danced around what he knew, so we look forward to hearing his brave side of the story whenever he gets around to writing his next for-profit tell-all, The Room Where More of It Happened. 
   
• Speaking of people who could’ve said something earlier, Carl Bernstein reported that in hundreds of phone calls with foreign heads of state, Trump’s consistent unpreparedness, abuse towards allies, and fawning over authoritarian leaders convinced multiple senior officials that Trump himself posed a threat to national security. Trump frequently spent phone calls with Putin seeking out his admiration and approval, while ignoring substantive policy issues and steering clear of matters like, oh, Russia targeting American soldiers by proxy. 

Trump’s assertions that he’s a wide-eyed innocent hearing about the bounties for the first time are untrue, and his inaction over the past months is damning. Just as chilling is how little he’s had to say since the story became public: As Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) noted today, it boggles the mind that “the president hasn’t come before the country and assured the American people...that he will do everything in his power to make sure that we protect American troops.” Trump’s one concern is protecting himself, and for the next four months, it’s on all of us to work single-mindedly towards protecting the country from him. 

if you haven’t already, check out Pod Save the People’s latest episode to meet the show's new news correspondents, Kaya Henderson and De’Ara Balenger, who will be joining Deray and Sam for news updates. It's great, they’re great, subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts →

The Trump administration abruptly furloughed 13,400 immigration workers, which will effectively grind the immigration system to halt. Thousands of United States Citizenship and Immigration Services employees learned this week that they’ll be furloughed for at least 30 days beginning in August. At least 73 percent of the agency’s staff will be out of work temporarily. USCIS derives a significant portion of its budget from immigration fees, and President Trump’s cancellation of lucrative visa categories has exacerbated a loss of revenue due to the pandemic. A hobbled USCIS will tie up the immigration courts, and agency officials don’t see that as an accident: “Stephen Miller is getting exactly what he wanted.”

• Dr. Anthony Fauci warned senators today that the U.S. is “not in total control” of the pandemic, and could start seeing 100,000 new cases per day without more safeguards. At least 16 states have now paused or rolled back their reopening plans, and in a speech today, Joe Biden laid out an updated plan for fighting the coronavirus while eviscerating Trump for having “surrendered.”
   
• The Supreme Court’s conservative majority ruled that state programs to fund private schools can’t exclude religious schools, effectively taking a sledgehammer to the separation between church and state. 
   
• Amy McGrath has narrowly defeated Charles Booker in Kentucky’s Democratic Senate primary.
   
• China has passed sweeping national security legislation for Hong Kong that gives Beijing new powers to quash political dissent. The law is alarmingly open-ended and undermines both Hong Kong’s autonomy, and the freedoms that set it apart from China. One of Hong Kong’s most prominent pro-democracy activists disbanded his party in response to the news. 
   
• The Trump campaign has sued Pennsylvania over its mail-ballot drop boxes, asking a federal court to bar them ahead of the November election.
   
• In other attacks on swing state voting rights, a federal appeals court in Wisconsin upheld several Republican laws amounting to voter suppression, after a three-year delay. 
   
• A New York judge has granted Robert Trump a temporary restraining order blocking the release of Mary Trump’s book, because some courts aren’t just for suppressing the vote, they’re also for suppressing information that might make people not want to vote for you, in plain violation of the First Amendment.
   
• India has banned TikTok and several other well-known Chinese apps as tensions continue to escalate between the two countries.
   
• Comedy legend Carl Reiner died Monday, of natural causes. He was 98.
   
• Kim Kardashian posted a tweet bragging about her “14 gorgeous Freesians on the ranch,” in a tone-deaf affront to people struggling to make ends meet during a pandemic, and to horse girls who know it is spelled “Friesian.”

Facebook has long crafted its policies around accommodating Trump and right-wing users. As early as 2015, when Facebook executives declined to remove then-candidate Trump’s video calling for a Muslim ban, the platform has made concessions to Trump that paved the way for widespread misinformation and polarization. Vice President of Global Policy Joel Kaplan, Facebook’s most prominent Republican, pushed to exempt “newsworthy” political discourse from enforcement of community guidelines, in response to that 2015 video. After the election, Kaplan resisted crackdowns on misinformation and changes to Facebook’s algorithm that would have disproportionately impacted conservatives. Facebook isn’t just refusing to hold Trump and right-wing conspiracy peddlers accountable—it deliberately molded itself around their needs. 

For more on how Mark Zuckerberg has failed us all, check out our new video on a question from YouTuber Hank Green: Can social media sites violate the First Amendment?

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House Democrats have unveiled an ambitious plan to address the climate crisis, aimed at bringing the U.S. economy’s greenhouse-gas emissions down to zero by 2050. 

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