WASHINGTON — President Trump’s legal team was informed more than three weeks ago about the email chain arranging a June 2016 meeting between his son Donald Jr. and a Kremlin-connected lawyer, two sources familiar with the handling of the matter told Yahoo News.

Trump told Reuters in an interview on Wednesday that he learned just “a couple of days ago” that Donald Jr. had met with the Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, hoping to receive information that “would incriminate Hillary” and was “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” A day earlier, on Tuesday, Donald Jr. released the email exchanges himself, after learning they would be published by the New York Times.

...

But the sources told Yahoo News that Marc Kasowitz, the president’s chief lawyer in the Russia investigation, and Alan Garten, executive vice president and chief legal officer of the Trump Organization, were both informed about the emails in the third week of June, after they were discovered by lawyers for Kushner, who is now a senior White House official.

Either Trump is kept out of the loop on stuff like this or he's lying. Neither seems better than the other.

...

The discovery of the emails prompted Kushner to amend his security clearance form to reflect the meeting, which he had failed to report when he originally sought clearance for his White House job. That revision — his second — to the so-called SF-86, was done on June 21. Kushner made the change even though there were questions among his lawyers whether the meeting had to be reported, given that there was no clear evidence that Veselnitskaya was a government official. The change to the security form prompted the FBI to question Kushner on June 23, the second time he was interviewed by agents about his security clearance, the sources said.

The ability to change your security clearance form ,just as people are about to learn you lied on it, is a nice perk.

Never believe that [they] are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. [They] have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

-John Paul Sartre, 1944.

His 'they' were anti-Semites. But this clearly applies to all disingenuous assholes.

HT DamnYankeesLGM

The History Channel documentary, Amelia Earhart: The Lost Evidence, which aired in the US on Sunday, made the claim that the American and her navigator, Fred Noonan, ended up in Japanese custody based on a photograph discovered in the US national archives that purported to show them standing at a harbour on one of the islands.

The film said the image “may hold the key to solving one of history’s all-time greatest mysteries” and suggested it disproved the widely accepted theory that Earhart and Noonan disappeared over the western Pacific on 2 July 1937 near the end of their attempt at a history-making flight around the world.

But serious doubts now surround the film’s premise after a Tokyo-based blogger unearthed the same photograph in the archives of the National Diet Library, Japan’s national library.

The image was part of a Japanese-language travelogue about the South Seas that was published almost two years before Earhart disappeared. Page 113 states the book was published in Japanese-held Palau on 10 October 1935.

life was simpler before they added the silent e

— Ken M (@horseysurprise) June 4, 2016

Merry and Pippin hit the pipeweed too hard and ended up in a Senator's office.

The West Hartford man who police said wrote profane and threatening anti-Trump graffiti at Morley Elementary School on June 15 has been ordered to stay off the property.

...

West Hartford Police on June 19 released a 28-second surveillance video clip showing a bald, white man wearing a dark blue Boston Red Sox t-shirt with khaki shorts riding a bicycle onto the Morley playground accompanied by a white and brown dog, identifying the man as the suspect. In the video clip, the suspect appears to write something on a sign located on the playground. The video was time stamped at about 10:30 p.m. on June 15.
West Hartford Anti-Trump Graffiti Suspect: "I'm Sorry"

Marks told police on June 19 he vandalized the property "out of 'anger towards liberals and they are breaking major laws everyday and being disrespectful towards our government,'" according to the warrant for his arrest. He told police it was his hope that the vandalism would appear to have been done by the "Left."

Shocking. Just shocking.

The United States of America is not the best country in the world. I say that without emotion like I can tell you that the Brooklyn Nets are not the best team in the NBA. Saying as much doesn't mean I hate the Nets or hate Brooklyn or hate the NBA. The Brooklyn Nets may actually be the worst team in the NBA. They should've received the No. 1 pick in this year's draft, but they traded it away years ago for old veterans. They'll lose next year's pick, too. The men they have on the team are great guys. I've come to know several of them. I've also come to know many employees there — great people — all of them. But the team is still in rough shape.

GameBoy

Astrophotographer Alexander Pietrow recently made some unusual photo history: he is apparently the first person ever to photograph the Moon and Jupiter using a Game Boy Camera.

First released in 1998, the Game Boy Camera is a monochrome, 2-bit camera that packs a 128×112-pixel CMOS sensor. At the time of its introduction, it was the world’s smallest digital camera.

A Pakistani guy writes the most New York Times article the New York Times has ever published.

It sounds like the beginning of an uncomfortable joke: Four brown kids of Pakistani descent — from Karachi, Dubai, London and Augusta, Ga. — walk into a Hooters on a recent Saturday afternoon.

They order cheese fries, mozzarella sticks and a plate of fried pickles that will later give the Londoner (me) a wild bout of indigestion. Waitresses in the company’s trademark orange shorts flit about, taking orders and smiling at families with children. Burly men in baseball caps clink pints of gold libation. Football plays on one flat screen TV, but is muted for the golf tournament that plays on another.

In truth, this expedition wasn’t a joke, but more of a fascinating ethnographic adventure.

Behold the exotic sports bar!

It was a strange sight, even for the "sport" of professional wrestling.

A wrestler holding a microphone faced an Appalachian crowd before a match and began unleashing a torrent of insults, the nature of which seemed out of place at a pro wrestling tournament.

"I understand now why you all identify with country music. It's slow and it's simple and it's boring, just like each and every one of you."

As the crowd grew increasing hostile, the wrestler's remarks became more politically-tinged.

"You know what, I think Bernie Sanders would make a great secretary of state."

"I want to exchange your bullets for bullet points. Bullet points of knowledge."

He even called Donald Trump a "con man." The crowd exploded in jeers. "Shut up," someone yelled.

Strange, indeed. But then, the muscular man's shirt read, "Not My President."

Meet the wrestler who goes by the name "Progressive Liberal" Dan Richards, the most hated character in Kentucky's Appalachian Mountain Wrestling (AMW) program, a small professional wrestling circuit.