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Matthew Whitaker: An attack dog with ambition beyond protecting Trump

Matthew Whitaker: An attack dog with ambition beyond protecting Trump

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The New York Times reports: President Trump first noticed Matthew G. Whitaker on CNN in the summer of 2017 and liked what he saw — a partisan defender who insisted there was no collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. So that July, the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, interviewed Mr. Whitaker about joining the president’s team as a legal attack dog against the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III. At that point, the White House passed, leaving…

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FBI is investigating Florida company where Whitaker was advisory-board member

FBI is investigating Florida company where Whitaker was advisory-board member

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The Wall Street Journal reports: The Federal Bureau of Investigation is conducting a criminal investigation of a Florida company accused of scamming millions from customers during the period that Matthew Whitaker, the acting U.S. attorney general, served as a paid advisory-board member, according to an alleged victim who was contacted by the FBI and other people familiar with the matter. The investigation is being handled by the Miami office of the FBI and by the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, according…

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Tape of Khashoggi’s killing has been given to U.S., Saudi, Europeans, Erdogan says

Tape of Khashoggi’s killing has been given to U.S., Saudi, Europeans, Erdogan says

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The Washington Post reports: An audio recording tracking the dying moments of journalist Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul has been shared with Saudi Arabia, Britain, France and Germany in addition to the United States, the leader of Turkey said Saturday. “We gave it to Saudi Arabia,” President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said at the Ankara airport before departing for Paris for commemorations to mark the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I. “We gave it to…

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Britain funds research into autonomous drones that select who they kill, says report

Britain funds research into autonomous drones that select who they kill, says report

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The Guardian reports: Technologies that could unleash a generation of lethal weapons systems requiring little or no human interaction are being funded by the Ministry of Defence, according to a new report. The development of autonomous military systems – dubbed “killer robots” by campaigners opposed to them – is deeply contentious. Earlier this year, Google withdrew from the Pentagon’s Project Maven, which uses machine learning to analyse video feeds from drones, after ethical objections from the tech giant’s staff. The…

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Doctors have become the tools of their tools

Doctors have become the tools of their tools

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Atul Gawande writes: A 2016 study found that physicians spent about two hours doing computer work for every hour spent face to face with a patient—whatever the brand of medical software. In the examination room, physicians devoted half of their patient time facing the screen to do electronic tasks. And these tasks were spilling over after hours. The University of Wisconsin found that the average workday for its family physicians had grown to eleven and a half hours. The result…

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Navigation through the world and through the mind may involve the same neural pathways

Navigation through the world and through the mind may involve the same neural pathways

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Steven Novella writes: Have you ever been in a semi-familiar location but couldn’t quite place where you were, then suddenly the landmarks line up and you know where you are? This might happen when entering a familiar location from an unusual direction, for example. Also (a seemingly unrelated question), when you visualize abstract ideas, do you arrange them physically. For example, do you visualize time (like days, weeks, months, years), and if so is there a particular physical relationship by…

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Trump played central role in cover-up of his affairs with Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal

Trump played central role in cover-up of his affairs with Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal

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The Wall Street Journal reports: As a presidential candidate in August 2015, Donald Trump huddled with a longtime friend, media executive David Pecker, in his cluttered 26th floor Trump Tower office and made a request. What can you do to help my campaign? he asked, according to people familiar with the meeting. Mr. Pecker, chief executive of American Media Inc., offered to use his National Enquirer tabloid to buy the silence of women if they tried to publicize alleged sexual…

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After calling acting AG a ‘great guy,’ Trump now says ‘I don’t know him’

After calling acting AG a ‘great guy,’ Trump now says ‘I don’t know him’

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The Associated Press reports: Matthew Whitaker’s future at the helm of the Justice Department appeared uncertain at best Friday as President Donald Trump denied even knowing the man he had named acting attorney general just two days earlier. The Senate’s top Republican predicted a permanent replacement could be named soon for Whitaker, who is now overseeing the Trump-Russia probe. In addition to the negative comments from Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Whitaker’s past business ties and comments on…

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It’s probably too late to stop Mueller

It’s probably too late to stop Mueller

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Benjamin Wittes writes: Here are 10 reasons to think that [acting attorney general, Matthew] Whitaker may have less capacity to foil Mueller than the current moment—and his formal powers—may suggest. First, Mueller has spread the wealth around. The normal critique of special-counsel investigations is that they hoard jurisdiction, endlessly expand, and become personal roving inquests into their political subjects’ lives. The opposite is the case with Mueller. He has not merely referred to other Justice Department components matters at the…

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Jeff Sessions is out, but his dark vision for immigration policy lives on

Jeff Sessions is out, but his dark vision for immigration policy lives on

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Jonathan Blitzer writes: For more than two decades, Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s hostility to immigrants put him on the outer fringes of the Republican Party. When Congress seemed likely to pass comprehensive immigration reform—first in 2007, then in 2013—Sessions worked assiduously to scuttle it. In 2015, after the Republicans took control of the Senate, he circulated a memo titled “Immigration Handbook for a New Republican Majority,” in which he argued that the G.O.P. had lost the Presidency in 2012 partly…

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Trump put Obama family at risk, says Michelle

Trump put Obama family at risk, says Michelle

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Krissah Thompson writes: [Michelle Obama’s] memoir is not a Washington read full of gossip and political score-settling — though she does lay bare her deep, quaking disdain for Trump, who she believes put her family’s safety at risk with his vehement promotion of the false birther conspiracy theory. “The whole [birther] thing was crazy and mean-spirited, of course, its underlying bigotry and xenophobia hardly concealed. But it was also dangerous, deliberately meant to stir up the wingnuts and kooks,” she…

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Trump administration to end refueling for Saudi coalition aircraft in Yemen

Trump administration to end refueling for Saudi coalition aircraft in Yemen

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The Washington Post reports: The Trump administration is ending the practice of refueling Saudi coalition aircraft, halting the most tangible and controversial aspect of U.S. support for the kingdom’s three-year war in Yemen, people familiar with the situation said. The move comes amid escalating criticism of Saudi Arabia’s conduct in the war. Lawmakers from both parties have demanded that the United States suspend weapons sales to Riyadh and cut off aerial refueling of aircraft flown by the Saudi coalition, which…

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Trump’s appointment of the acting attorney general is unconstitutional

Trump’s appointment of the acting attorney general is unconstitutional

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Neal K. Katyal and George T. Conway III write: What now seems an eternity ago, the conservative law professor Steven Calabresi published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal in May arguing that Robert Mueller’s appointment as special counsel was unconstitutional. His article got a lot of attention, and it wasn’t long before President Trump picked up the argument, tweeting that “the Appointment of the Special Counsel is totally UNCONSTITUTIONAL!” Professor Calabresi’s article was based on the Appointments Clause of…

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Matthew Whitaker, Mueller’s new boss, concluded last year there was ‘no collusion’ with Russia

Matthew Whitaker, Mueller’s new boss, concluded last year there was ‘no collusion’ with Russia

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The Daily Beast reports: A year-and-a-half before he took responsibility for overseeing the investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, Matthew Whitaker, now the acting attorney general, had already reached a conclusion. “The truth is there was no collusion with the Russians and the Trump campaign,” he said in an interview on the Wilkow Majority show. “There was interference by the Russians into the election, but that was not collusion with the campaign. That’s where the left seems to…

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