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Legal experts said the court filings indicate Mueller is running a serious, deliberative, and far-sighted inquiry... The first wave of charges came against two top Trump campaign officials, former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his associate Rick Gates. Their indictment describes a conspiracy to evade taxes and launder at least $75 million of foreign income into the United States from offshore accounts.

....Shortly after the Manafort and Gates indictments went public, President Trump ... dismissed the allegations against his two former staffers, noting the reported activity predated their time on his campaign. [Note from me - Not true. The time period covers his campaign as well.] He also repeated his attempts to shift the focus onto Hillary Clinton.

...Conservative media outlets had embraced a similar theme ... Trump allies seized on reports over the last week that Clinton campaign officials helped fund the controversial Steele dossier in an apparent effort to delegitimize Mueller’s probe. [Note from me: This was after GOP opponents of Trump apparently initiated the Steele dossier during the GOP primaries.] They also rehashed discredited allegations about her involvement in an Obama-era uranium deal that involved Russia.

....However, their efforts would soon be interrupted. Just over an hour after the Manafort indictment went public on Monday, the special counsel’s office revealed that George Papadopoulos, a former foreign-policy adviser for the Trump campaign, had become a cooperating witness. As part of a plea deal, Papadopoulos admitted to lying to federal investigators about his interactions with Russian nationals and their associates during the campaign.

...His indictment offered a trove of new details on the extent of internal Trump campaign discussions about overtures from Moscow’s intermediaries. [details in article]

...Most importantly, the filings and indictments signified that Mueller’s wide-ranging investigation is nowhere near over. The surprise revelation of Papadopoulos’s plea deal raises questions about what other evidence or witnesses Mueller might secretly have at his disposal that aren’t publicly known. Papadopoulos’s statement also includes a tantalizing clause that it “does not include all of the facts known to me regarding this offense”—a sign that other shoes could potentially drop in the future.

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Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon is pressing President Trump to curb special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian election interference, according to a Politico report... According to Politico, Trump considered the idea of ousting Mueller, who was appointed by Deputy Attorney Rod Rosenstein in May after Trump fired then-FBI Director James Comey, shortly after Mueller took over the Russia investigation, but ultimately decided against it.

CNN's Dana Bash also said late Monday that she had been told that Bannon was pushing Trump to take more aggressive action against the special counsel, including withholding documents requested by investigators.

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Britain’s spy agencies played a crucial role in alerting their counterparts in Washington to contacts between members of Donald Trump’s campaign team and Russian intelligence operatives, the Guardian has been told.

GCHQ first became aware in late 2015 of suspicious “interactions” between figures connected to Trump and known or suspected Russian agents, a source close to UK intelligence said. This intelligence was passed to the US as part of a routine exchange of information, they added.

...It looks like the [US] agencies were asleep,” the source added. “They [the European agencies] were saying: ‘There are contacts going on between people close to Mr Trump and people we believe are Russian intelligence agents. You should be wary of this.’ “The message was: ‘Watch out. There’s something not right here.’”

According to one account, GCHQ’s then head, Robert Hannigan, passed material in summer 2016 to the CIA chief, John Brennan. The matter was deemed so sensitive it was handled at “director level”. After an initially slow start, Brennan used GCHQ information and intelligence from other partners to launch a major inter-agency investigation.

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President Trump blasted the pharmaceutical industry for “getting away with murder” with steep drug prices during the campaign and since, but his administration has done little to force the industry to change its ways.

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President Trump will sign on Wednesday a resolution repealing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) rule on forced arbitration, a White House aide told The Hill on Tuesday.

Trump has been widely expected to sign the resolution repealing the rule, which bans banks and credit card companies from blocking customers from suing them in class-action lawsuits. The House passed a Congressional Review Act resolution to repeal the rule in July, which the Senate approved two weeks ago.

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The Trump administration rolled out a new policy Tuesday that states scientists receiving Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) grants cannot serve on the agency's advisory boards, a move critics decried as part of a war on independent science.

The policy, rolled out at an EPA event by Administrator Scott Pruitt, bars hundreds of expert scientists working in environmental and health fields at universities from serving on the boards. Conversely, it would almost certainly increase the representation from companies and industry groups on the panels.

...The American Association for the Advancement of Science, one of the nation’s foremost scientific societies, slammed the policy rolled out Tuesday.... “This EPA decision is motivated by politics, not the desire for quality scientific information,” he said.

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This week the House is considering the Resilient Federal Forests Act of 2017, a misguided bill that would seriously damage our national forests and reduce Americans’ ability to have a say in how these forests are managed.

In the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, related legislation is also under consideration. The House and Senate bills purport to solve the growing problem of wildfires, yet both bills are troubling in their approach to forest and wildfire management.

...But nothing is environmentally insignificant in the categorical exclusions within these bills. They allow exclusions for large logging projects up to 6,000 acres in the Senate bill or 10,000 acres in the recently passed House bill, to remove fire-damaged trees, create certain types of wildlife habitat or simply produce timber.

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The White House brushed off a bipartisan request from House investigators for details of senior administration officials' use of private email and encrypted messaging apps for government work, including possible violations of federal record-keeping laws, a letter obtained by POLITICO shows.

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If you are inside the “alt-right” information bubble, you might be preparing yourself for a civil war to commence this Saturday. Since late September, the idea has been circulating on Facebook groups, subreddit message boards, Twitter, and leading conspiracy media outlets that on 4 November, anti-fascist groups will begin a violent insurrection.

Some websites are telling their readers that antifa groups are “planning to kill every single Trump voter, Conservative and gun owner” this weekend. Hundreds of Facebook posts show how seriously consumers of such media are taking the news, and comments like “One more threat against white people and I swear to God I’m going to take a goddamn car and run over every fucking one of them” are not unrepresentative of the response.

But antifa groups have no plans to protest that day, and the small leftist groups who are planning protests have only dubious connections to the antifa movement. So what gives?

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President Trump pushed back Thursday on concerns about a lack of nominees for key positions at the State Department, arguing it wouldn't affect his agenda.

"Let me tell you, the one that matters is me, I'm the only one that matters because when it comes to it that's what the policy is going to be," Trump said on Fox News when pressed about vacancies by Laura Ingraham.

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“Sam Clovis was almost a comically bad nominee, even for this administration. He is inarguably unqualified, and he is wrong on almost every major issue relevant to the chief scientist post to which he was nominated," [Sen. Patrick] Leahy, a member of the Senate Agriculture Committee, said in a statement.

Leahy's comments come after Clovis, who worked on the Trump campaign, withdrew his nomination for the Agriculture Department post on Thursday amid questions about how he will feature in the special counsel's investigation into Russian election meddling. It surfaced this week that Clovis was the high-level campaign official with whom foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos, who has pleaded guilty to lying to FBI agents, discussed communicating with Russian officials during Trump's presidential campaign.

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Rep. Rob Bishop (R-Utah) recently shepherded five bills out of the Natural Resources Committee he chairs that would dismantle [the Endangered Species Act] piece by piece. ...

One measure would force the federal government to consider the economic impact of saving a species rather than make a purely scientific call. Another would require the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which administers the act along with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, to defer to data collected by states as the “best scientific and commercial data available,” although state funding related to the act accounts for a small fraction of that supported by the federal government.

Under a third proposal, citizens and conservation groups would be stripped of a powerful tool that allows them to file court claims against the government when they believe its protections fall short. Among other actions, the remaining bills would also remove protections for gray wolves in Midwestern states and block courts from ruling on the validity of the government’s decisions.

...Democrats say [that] on witness panels... farmers, dam operators, state wildlife managers and others opposed to the act got their say about its supposed shortcomings, without comparable opportunities for scientific and federal government experts to check those claims. The Interior Department even barred Fish and Wildlife staff members from meeting with the minority caucus’s staff members as they attempted to gather information for hearing preparations, according to lawmakers such as Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva (Ariz.).

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The four U.S. soldiers killed last month in an ambush were helping track and fight Islamist militants along the Mali-Niger border in the hours before their death, according to the nation’s defense minister and a wounded Nigerien soldier who survived the attack. The accounts raise questions about the Pentagon’s assertions that the American and Nigerien troops were on a low-risk reconnaissance mission and that chances of contact with militants were unlikely. They were, instead, operating in a dangerous and complex battle zone, where attacks happen frequently. U.S. troops are in Niger to train and advise, military officials have said, not to engage in combat missions.

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Congress’s watchdog agency [The Government Accountability Office (GAO)] is examining whether the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) violated legal provisions prohibiting lobbying and propaganda using agency resources.

At issue is a video produced by the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, in which EPA head Scott Pruitt participated.... In the NCBA video, Pruitt outlines his objections to the Obama rule, which redefined the jurisdiction of the EPA over water bodies for the purposes of pollution prevention. Many industries oppose the rule, including agriculture, homebuilding and fossil fuels.

...“We want farmers and ranchers across this country to provide comments.”

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The EPA is prohibited by appropriations legislation from using its resources to lobby Congress on ongoing legislative matters or to fund propaganda.

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A Russian lawyer who met with President Donald Trump’s oldest son last year says he indicated that a law targeting Russia could be re-examined if his father won the election and asked her for written evidence that illegal proceeds went to Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

The lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, said in a two-and-a-half-hour interview in Moscow that she would tell these and other things to the Senate Judiciary Committee on condition that her answers be made public, something it hasn’t agreed to.

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The American Bar Association (ABA) has deemed a fourth judicial nominee of President Trump unqualified for the job. The powerful legal organization's standing committee unanimously dubbed Brett Talley, a Justice Department lawyer, not qualified to hold the judgeship on the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama, for which Trump has tapped him.

Talley is the second federal judicial nominee tapped by Trump to be unanimously labeled not qualified by the ABA committee. The panel also deemed Leonard Steven Grasz, whom Trump nominated to a judgeship on the U.S. Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, not qualified late last month, with one member abstaining.

The ABA has long provided evaluations of prospective nominees to lower federal courts for the White House — a tradition first set under President Eisenhower.

The Trump White House notified the panel in March, however, that the president did not intend to follow that precedent

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President Trump blasted GOP gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie in a tweet Tuesday evening in an effort to distance himself from the Republican's losing effort in Virginia.

"Ed Gillespie worked hard but did not embrace me or what I stand for. Don’t forget, Republicans won 4 out of 4 House seats, and with the economy doing record numbers, we will continue to win, even bigger than before!"

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A year after suffering perhaps the most demoralizing defeat in modern political history, Democrats roared back on Tuesday, claiming big victories in races up and down the ballot and across the country.

...[In Virginia] Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam (D) won the Virginia governorship by a wider-than-expected margin... Democrat Justin Fairfax won the lieutenant governor's office, becoming only the second African American to win a statewide post in Virginia since Reconstruction, while Attorney General Mark Herring (D) won re-election.

More astonishingly, Democrats appeared to have captured at least a share of control of the state House of Delegates, erasing what had been a massive Republican majority. Democrats picked up 16 Republican-held seats, giving them control of 50 out of the 100 seats in the lower chamber, with three more GOP-held districts likely headed for recounts.

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Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap (D) is suing President Trump’s voter fraud commission, of which he is also a member. In a complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, the Democrat claims he has been blocked from receiving commission documents necessary "to fulfill the oath he took and the obligations to which he committed when he joined the panel."

... Dunlap said the lawsuit is an “action of last resort.” He claims the commission has violated the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) by preventing certain members of the commission from substantively participating in the work it does, as well as from accessing documents made available to some members and prepared for or by the commission.

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Carrier, which struck a deal with President Trump last year to keep jobs at its Indianapolis plant, is reportedly planning more layoffs at the facility. More than 200 additional employees will lose their jobs in January, Fox News reported.

Robert James, the president of the union that represents plant workers, said employees "just don't have any faith in this plant staying in Indianapolis." ...Earlier this year, the air conditioning company laid off 300 workers at the Indianapolis factory.

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Based on current land and mineral ownership, more than 40 parks could be opened to oil and gas wells. Icons such as Grand Teton, Everglades, and Mammoth Cave national parks are on that list. More than 12 already have active wells.

Development also moves in on parks from the edges. Leases are proposed for near Theodore Roosevelt national park that could punctuate the prairie the namesake president retreated to while grieving the deaths of his mother and wife. Drilling near Dinosaur national monument, conservationists caution, could be seen from the Carnegie Fossil Quarry. Zion and Capitol Reef national parks, Hovenweep national monument, and Fort Laramie national historic site are also targeted.

In August, the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks, an organization of former National Park Service employees, sent Zinke a letter expressing their alarm.

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A Navajo chapter house protested against oil and gas leases issued in January over concerns with the noise, traffic and air quality that development could bring close to homes. The BLM dismissed the protest because their rules require submitting such documents by mail or fax, and the correspondence was emailed.

In response to the pressure to expedite drilling and to leases listed this fall that came within 10 miles of the park, the National Congress of American Indians called for a moratorium on drilling throughout the greater Chaco Canyon region.

Hope had rested with a master leasing plan that could guide a more nuanced approach to development in this region and steer it from sensitive areas and viewsheds. However, those plans were listed among the “burdensome” regulations to target for rescinding, repealing or suspending in a 24 October report from the interior department.

aninkling wrote:

If I'm remembering it right, someone who's openly lesbian also won a race. I really don't understand why someone's sexual preferences should make anyone vote against them - though I know some do. It seems as irrelevant as saying "I could never vote for a cat-owner because I like dogs."

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It’s not clear what investigators will make of the correspondence, which represents a small portion of the thousands of documents Donald Trump Jr.’s lawyer says he turned over to them. The stakes for the Trump family, however, are high. Trump Jr.’s June 2016 meeting with Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer with connections to Russia’s powerful prosecutor general, is already reportedly a subject of interest in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, as is the White House statement defending him. (Trump Jr. was emailed an offer of “information that would incriminate Hillary,” and responded in part, “If it’s what you say I love it.”) The messages exchanged with WikiLeaks add a second instance in which Trump Jr. appears eager to obtain damaging information about Hillary Clinton, despite its provenance.

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The director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) announced his resignation Wednesday, giving President Trump the chance to reshape an agency that has long been the target of Republican ire. Richard Cordray expects “to step down from his position here before the end of the month,” he wrote in an email that was sent to CFPB staff.

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A federal judge in Philadelphia ruled Wednesday against the Trump administration's policy of withholding law enforcement grants from so-called "sanctuary cities," according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.

In a 128-page injunction, Senior United States District Judge Michael Baylson said Department of Justice (DOJ) law enforcement grants can't be withheld from Philadelphia because it refuses full cooperation with federal authorities on immigration, the news outlet reported.... In his ruling, Baylson said Philadelphia proved that withholding the grant money would cause irreparable damage, as part of it is used by first responders who provide life-saving naloxone to victims of opioid overdose.

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Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) released a modified version of the Senate tax bill late Tuesday that includes two key changes: the previously announced elimination of the ObamaCare individual insurance mandate and a sunsetting of individual tax rates in 2025.

The sunset clause in Hatch's "modified mark" would mean the new individual rates in the Senate bill would end 10 years after their creation.

This would solve a key problem in the Senate, which would have to prevent the overall tax bill from adding to the deficit after 10 years to make the new individual tax rates permanent — and use special budgetary rules to pass the package with a simple-majority vote and prevent Democrats from using a filibuster.

The Senate bill also reduces the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 20 percent. This would be permanent and would not sunset.

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The Senate Energy panel approved legislation Wednesday allowing for oil and gas drilling in a section of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in Alaska. The legislation is highly controversial, with Democrats and environmentalists slamming Senate Republicans for mandating new revenue from Arctic drilling as part of their tax reform push.

...Republicans and many Alaskans have long pushed to open up a portion of ANWR for drilling. They argue its especially important now, given the need for revenue as part of the tax bill and for the struggling Alaskan economy, which is largely based around natural resources development and has been hit hard by a decline in global oil prices.

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The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) said it has determined that hunting African elephants in Zimbabwe and Zambia “will enhance the survival of the species in the wild,” which is the standard by which officials judge whether to allow imports of parts — known as trophies — of the animals.

“Legal, well-regulated sport hunting as part of a sound management program can benefit the conservation of certain species by providing incentives to local communities to conserve the species and by putting much-needed revenue back into conservation,” an FWS spokesman said in a statement late Wednesday after hunting group Safari Club International announced the policy.

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The reversal is part of a wide-ranging effort by Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, whose department includes the FWS, to promote hunting.

“Some of my best memories are hunting and fishing ​with my dad and granddad, and then later teaching my own kids to hunt and fish​. That's something I want more families to experience,” Zinke said in a September statement in which he announced that the arcade game Big Buck Hunter would be temporarily installed in the department’s headquarters.

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A chorus of technology experts on Thursday heavily criticized President Trump’s plan to use artificial intelligence to screen individuals seeking entry to the United States, calling it “neither appropriate nor feasible.”

More than 50 computer scientists, engineers, and mathematicians wrote a letter to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) urging officials to abandon the so-called “Extreme Vetting Initiative” proposal to use data mining to vet immigrants and visa applicants using data from the internet and social media platforms.

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The Trump administration has been filling judicial vacancies in rapid succession, with the majority of nominees having one thing in common: ties to the Federalist Society. Groups on the left have accused the White House of outsourcing the nomination process to the Washington, D.C.-based group as it seeks to stack the courts with conservative judges.

Of the 13 judicial nominees confirmed since President Trump took office, 10 are either current or former Federalist Society members or regular speakers at its events. Eight of the 10 appellate Trump nominees pending before the Senate have ties to the group.

...Top donors [to the Federalist Society] include the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, David Koch and Koch Industries Inc., which each contributed $100,000 last year. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce contributed $500,000, according to the society’s 2016 annual report. Revenue and support totaled $26.75 million in 2016.

...The Federalist Society’s rise has come as the American Bar Association has seen its standing fall.
McGahn notified the ABA in a letter in March that the White House was ending the long-standing practice of inviting the independent ABA Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary to review the professional qualifications of prospective nominees to the lower federal courts before nominations are made.

The ABA is still giving ratings, but not until after the nominations are announced.So far, it has given four Trump nominees the rare “not qualified” rating.Those given the rating include Brett Talley, who has just three years of experience practicing law and has never tried a case before.

The Senate Judiciary Committee approved Talley’s nomination to a federal district judgeship in Alabama, and he is expected to be confirmed by a majority vote in the Senate, which is controlled by Republicans.

...The Associated Press reported this week that Trump is nominating white men to the federal courts at a rate not seen in decades. The report found that 91 percent of his nominees are white and 81 percent are men.

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Two Republican senators said Wednesday that they won’t support President Trump’s nominee to lead the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) chemical safety office. The opposition from North Carolina Sens. Thom Tillis and Richard Burr puts Michael Dourson’s nomination in danger. If one more Republican votes against him, he likely wouldn’t be confirmed to the post.

...The opposition from the North Carolina senators, first reported by the Wilmington, N.C., Star News, stems from a pair of major health controversies in the state surrounding water contamination at the Marine Corps’s Camp Lejeune and the recent discovery of the as-yet-unrelated chemical GenX in the Cape Fear River. The senators do not believe Dourson would be an effective force to protect the victims of those incidents.

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The Senate narrowly confirmed President Trump’s controversial pick to serve as the Department of Transportation’s (DOT) chief legal adviser on Tuesday. ...Democrats have opposed Bradbury’s nomination for a litany of reasons, including that he wrote the legal justifications that authorized “enhanced interrogation techniques” [a euphemism for torture] under the George W. Bush administration.

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Other Democrats, however, raised concern about Bradbury’s work in the private sector representing Takata Corp. The Japanese auto parts company is responsible for making defective airbags that have led to the largest auto recall in history — something the DOT has a role in overseeing.