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Trump Russia Tag

Federal Judge T.S. Ellis denied a mainstream media coalition request to release the names and home addresses of the jurors in the Paul Manafort trial in the Eastern District of Virginia. The request by the media was made, to much fanfare and publicity, on the first day of jury deliberations.

The NY Times has a story today that is making waves, concerning the cooperation of White House counsel Donald McGahn with Robert Mueller and his team, with the permission of Trump. If true, it reflects an incredible naïveté on the part of Trump, and incompetence on the part of his first set of lawyers, as to how to deal with the Mueller investigation.

The jury in the Paul Manafort trial has ended deliberations for the day without a verdict. This comes after jury questions yesterday, including asking the judge to clarify the meaning of "reasonable doubt." As mentioned in yesterday's post, Paul Manafort is being prosecuted because of who he knows. I hope he walks, the judge's guidance probably didn't clarify anything:

The jury ended its first day of deliberations in the prosecution of Paul Manafort in the Eastern District of Virginia. When this trial is over, Manafort faces a second trial on other charges in federal court in D.C. The jury asked the judge for help understanding "reasonable doubt." As is usual in these situations, the judge didn't give much help, explaining that reasonable doubt was "doubt based on reason" but did not require "guilt beyond all possible doubt."

The United States has imposed sanctions on Chinese and Russian companies for violating the trade restrictions on North Korea. The move highlights President Donald Trump's strategy to keep tightening the screws on Pyongyang over its nuclear program. The Treasury Department blacklisted a Russian port agency and two Chinese firms on Wednesday for aiding North Korea's shipping industry.

Should Donald Trump sit down to a face-to-face interview with Robert Mueller and his team? The answer for me has been clear for a long time: Just Say No.

Robert Mueller did not start Trump Derangement Syndrome. That started before the 2016 election, but went ballistic when Trump won. #TheResistance movement immediately went into crisis attack mode, trying to intimidate Electors and to delegitimize the election result.

Are you getting tired of this yet? I know I am. The media obsession with non-stories is tiresome, but because the he-said, she-said is what's passing for serious news these days (regardless of veracity) we can't ignore it. So, here we are. Trump's former personal attorney Michael Cohen recently claimed that President Trump was aware of Don Jr.'s Trump Tower meeting. Left-leaning media is obsessed with the Trump Tower meeting. They're completely, wholly convinced it was during this meeting that Russia collision occurred.

The Department of Justice released the FISA documents, 412 pages total (pdf.), related to the surveillance of Carter Page, an advisor to President Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. The heavily redacted documents show that officials used "the infamous and unverified Steele Dossier" to receive the warrant in 2016 and the renewals.

When I was studying interpersonal communication and how to track an argument or any other verbal exchange, one thing that was very much emphasized was the difference between content and process. Content is just what it sounds like: the subject matter about which two people (let’s say, a married couple) are talking. “Did you do the dishes last night?” Process is everything else—for example, the emotion with which something is said, the type of vocabulary used, tone, repetition, body language, and the unspoken subtext (which can include a covert or overt goal of the speaker).

I watched the Trump-Putin press conference on Monday morning, then spent almost 8 hours in the car with only terrestrial news radio, when available. When I finally arrived and had a chance to catch up on Twitter and replays of cable news, it was obvious that I re-entered a world divorced from the reality that most people hear, which is short news bites while going about their lives.