memeorandum: LISTEN: Don Jr.'s Line Drops After Ingraham Asks About Conflicting Statements on Trump Tower Meeting (Aidan McLaughlin/Mediaite)

9:55 PM ET, August 6, 2018

Top Items:

Rick Gates Testifies He Committed Crimes With Paul Manafort — ALEXANDRIA, VA. — Rick Gates, Paul Manafort's right-hand man for years, began testifying against his former boss on Monday in federal court in Alexandria, Va. He is considered the most important witness in Mr. Manafort's trial on tax and bank fraud charges.

Cristian Farias / New York Magazine:

Paul Manafort's First Trial Is a Sideshow. The Next One Won't Be. — Back in May, T.S. Ellis, the veteran federal judge who is overseeing Paul Manafort's first trial in Virginia, whipped the Fox News set into a frenzy when he seemed to berate prosecutors working for special counsel Robert Mueller.

Josh Gerstein / Politico:

Manafort trial Day 5: Gates sings — Special counsel Robert Mueller's star witness, Rick Gates, finally took the stand on Monday, incriminating his former boss Paul Manafort in multimillion-dollar tax evasion, bank fraud and hiding offshore accounts, while also admitting to stealing hundreds …

Discussion: The Gateway Pundit, The Week, ABC News and The Daily Caller

Fox News:
Manafort prosecutors, Judge Ellis engage in 10-minute courtroom spat

Discussion: The Daily Caller

CNN:
Gates says he and Manafort didn't report 15 foreign accounts, knew it was illegal

Discussion: Politico, The Daily Beast, ThinkProgress, Shareblue Media, CNBC, FOX 61, KTLA, VICE News and The Daily Caller

Fox News:
Rick Gates testifies he and Manafort conspired to commit fraud

Discussion: TheBlaze, Raw Story, The Gateway Pundit and POLITICUSUSA

Washington Post:
Rick Gates says he lied for years at Manafort's request and stole from him in the process

Discussion: Lawyers, Guns & Money

Talking Points Memo: Rick Gates: I Committed Crimes With Paul Manafort

Reuters:
Star witness Gates testifies he committed crimes with Manafort

Discussion: The Atlantic

Dana Bash / CNN:

President urged to stop tweeting on Trump Tower meeting — Did Trump Tower meeting violate this law? — (CNN)President Donald Trump has been urged to stop tweeting about the 2016 Trump Tower meeting between Trump's top advisers and several Russians, a source familiar with discussions tells CNN.

Discussion: New York Times, Raw Story, Sputnik International, Weekly Standard, Hullabaloo, HuffPost, Hill Reporter, Axios, AOL, Common Dreams, Vox, POLITICUSUSA, Shareblue Media, The Capitolist, Law & Crime, Mediaite and Political Wire

Aidan McLaughlin / Mediaite:

LISTEN: Don Jr.'s Line Drops After Ingraham Asks About Conflicting Statements on Trump Tower Meeting — President Donald Trump's wonderful son Don Jr. called into Laura Ingraham's radio show on Monday, and had some well-timed technical difficulties. — Ingraham questioned Don Jr …

Discussion: Washington Post, MSNBC and Outside the Beltway

Laurie Kellman / Associated Press:

AP Explains: Why the 2016 Trump Tower meeting matters — WASHINGTON (AP) — Adoptions of Russian children? Opposition research on Hillary Clinton? — President Donald Trump has for the first time acknowledged that a June 9, 2016 meeting at Trump Tower was the latter.

Charlie Savage / New York Times:
Donald Trump Jr.'s Potential Legal Troubles, Explained

Discussion: Washington Post, Raw Story and KTLA

David A. Graham / The Atlantic:
The Double Damage of the President's Trump Tower Admission

Discussion: FOX News Radio, DownWithTyranny! and New Republic

Bob Bauer / Lawfare:
How the Latest Trump Tower Tweet Damages the President's Legal Defense

Discussion: ThinkProgress, The Gateway Pundit and BloombergQuint

TIME:
President Trump Changed His Story about the Trump Tower Meeting. Here Are the Facts

Discussion: MSNBC, NBC News and The Daily Caller

Byron York / Washington Examiner:
On a quiet Sunday, Trump Tower mania strikes

Discussion: CNN, Washington Monthly and Vox

Lisa Friedman / New York Times:

Trump Inaccurately Claims California Is Wasting Water as Fires Burn — In his first remarks on the vast California wildfires that have killed at least seven people and forced thousands to flee, President Trump blamed the blazes on the state's environmental policies and inaccurately claimed …

Discussion: New Republic, Fox News, CBS Chicago, Politico, Pacific Standard, ThinkProgress, Townhall, CNN, Washington Post and Mother Jones

Michael Hiltzik / Los Angeles Times:

In a strikingly ignorant tweet, Trump gets almost everything about California wildfires wrong — No one would mistake President Trump for an expert on climate change or water policy, but a tweet he issued late Sunday about California's wildfires deserves some sort of award for most glaring misstatements …

Discussion: Vox, The Daily Caller, San Francisco Chronicle, HuffPost, Axios, ABC News, Hullabaloo and Conservative News Today

Andrew Kaczynski / CNN:

Mike Pence's moral case for removing a president from office — (CNN)Vice President Mike Pence once argued the president of the United States should be held to the highest moral standards to determine whether he should resign or be removed from office. — Pence made the argument in two columns …

Discussion: Raw Story and Political Wire

Ryan Broderick / BuzzFeed News:

It's Looking Extremely Likely That QAnon Is A Leftist Prank On Trump Supporters — There's a growing group of Trump supporters who are convinced that the president is secretly trying to save the world from a global pedophilia ring. — They call the conspiracy “QAnon” and last week its believers ended up on national television.

Discussion: ThinkProgress, Washington Post, No More Mister Nice Blog, Raw Story, Lawyers, Guns & Money and NPR

Brett Samuels / The Hill:
Anonymous vows to take down, expose QAnon

Discussion: Hill Reporter and YouTube

Steven Perlberg / BuzzFeed News:

Jared Kushner Used To Personally Order The Deletion Of Stories At His Newspaper — Jared Kushner personally ordered a software developer at his newspaper to remove stories critical of his friends and real estate peers. — Now a senior White House adviser and son-in-law to President Trump …

Discussion: Mediaite, Political Wire and Deadspin, more at Mediagazer »

CBS Sacramento:

Sikh Man Attacked, Told To ‘Go Back To Your Country’ In Stanislaus County — KEYES (CBS13) - A well-known member of the Stanislaus County community was brutally beaten while placing campaign signs, and police are investigating it as a hate crime. — It was Tuesday night in Keyes …

Discussion: The Hill, TheBlaze, The Gateway Pundit, CBS San Francisco, The Daily Caller, Splinter and Talking Points Memo

Ron Nixon / New York Times:

Trump's Border Wall Could Waste Billions of Dollars, Report Says — WASHINGTON — The Trump administration could potentially waste billions of dollars on a border wall because it failed to fully account for factors like varying terrain and land ownership along the Southwest border, according to a new report.

Discussion: ThinkProgress and Splinter

Catie Edmondson / New York Times: An Airline Scans Your Face. You Take Off. But Few Rules Govern Where Your Data Goes.

Henry Olsen / New York Times:

Why the Midterms Won't Be Won by Playing to the Base — Some people changed which party's nominee they voted for from 2012 to 2016. They are key to who wins the House and Senate. — Mr. Olsen, the editor of the “Flyover Country” section at UnHerd.com, is the director and a co-founder of the Voter Study Group.

Discussion: Democracy Fund Voter …, POLITICUSUSA and The Guardian

Amber Athey / The Daily Caller:

NYT Makes Up New Abbreviation For The State Of Maine — The New York Times ran a shoddy graphic on Monday that included two extinct postal abbreviations for Maine and Texas. — “These Women Could Shatter Glass Ceilings in Governor's Races,” a story about women running in governor's races across …

Discussion: New York Times, Observer, Mediaite and Splinter

Matt Wilstein / The Daily Beast:

Joe Arpaio on Sacha Baron Cohen: I ‘Never Agreed’ to Blow Job From Trump … Former sheriff and current GOP Senate candidate Joe Arpaio apparently has no idea that he accepted the hypothetical offer of an “amazing blow job” from President Donald Trump on the latest episode of Sacha Baron Cohen's Who Is America?

Discussion: Phoenix New Times, Arizona Republic, One America News Network and IJR

Amanda L Gordon / Bloomberg:

Gary Cohn Is Happy in the Hamptons, Golfing and Crypto Investing — Trump's former economic adviser also looking at medical tech — Working on his short game and a memoir of time in Washington — Gary Cohn may be the most famous unemployed person in the Hamptons thanks to his wife, Lisa Pevaroff-Cohn.

Discussion: Axios and Breitbart

Manu Raju / CNN:

Trump Supreme Court pick: Presidents can ignore laws they think are unconstitutional — Kavanaugh reveals views on Mueller probe — (CNN)Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh in 2013 asserted that it's a “traditional exercise” of presidential power to ignore laws the White House views as unconstitutional …

Discussion: Talking Points Memo, Political Wire and twitchy.com

Victor Davis Hanson / American Greatness:

The Elites' War on the Deplorables — Recently, Politico reporter Marc Caputo was angered at rude hecklers at a Trump rally who booed beleaguered CNN correspondent Jim Acosta. — So Caputo tweeted of them, “If you put everyone's mouths together in this video, you'd get a full set of teeth.”

Grace Schulman / New York Times:

The Nation Betrays a Poet — and Itself — I was the magazine's poetry editor for 35 years. Never once did we apologize for publishing a poem. — Ms. Schulman was poetry editor at The Nation from 1971 to 2006. — During the 35 years that I edited poetry for The Nation magazine …

Anna Schecter / NBC News:

‘Manhattan Madam’ Kristin Davis set to testify before Mueller grand jury this week — Last week an investigator on Mueller's team questioned Kristin Davis, an associate of former Trump adviser Roger Stone, about Russian collusion. — Kristin Davis, the “Manhattan Madam” …

Discussion: POLITICUSUSA

Joe DePaolo / Mediaite:

LeBron James to Create Showtime Doc Series Called Shut Up and Dribble — You'll recall, back in February, Laura Ingraham of Fox News calling on LeBron James to “shut up and dribble” — in other words, to stick to basketball and not opine on politics. — The new Los Angeles Lakers star has decided …

CBS New York:

Police: Stranger Jumps Out Of Restaurant Freezer, Attacks Kitchen Staff, Dies At Hospital — NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) - Police say a man jumped out of a popular Upper West Side eatery's walk-in freezer, grabbed a knife and started attacking employees, then died later at a hospital on Sunday morning.

Discussion: KTLA, New York Post and Daily Wire

Globe and Mail:

Saudi Arabia's bold move has nothing to do with Canada — Bessma Momani is Professor at the University of Waterloo and Balsillie School of International Affairs. She's a senior fellow at Centre for International Governance and Innovation and non-resident fellow at the Stimson Center in Washington.

Discussion: BBC, Financial Times and Washington Post

Katherine Lam / Fox News:

Moms arrested after 11 children found in ‘filthy’ New Mexico compound with armed Muslim ‘extremists,’ cops say — The three mothers of the 11 malnourished children found living in a filthy New Mexico compound were arrested and charged Sunday along with two men described as armed Muslim …

Erik Larson / Bloomberg:

Mueller Secures ‘Firewall’ Counsel Over Evidence in Russia Case — The U.S. judge overseeing Special Counsel Robert Mueller's criminal case against Russians accused of interfering in the 2016 election agreed to appoint an independent lawyer to review pretrial evidence for possible national security issues …

Facebook:

Enforcing Our Community Standards — We believe in giving people a voice, but we also want everyone using Facebook to feel safe. It's why we have Community Standards and remove anything that violates them, including hate speech that attacks or dehumanizes others.

Hunter Walker / Yahoo:

New York race could spark new Trump investigation — WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. — While special counsel Robert Mueller's probe of — Russia's interference in the 2016 election could pose the most immediate threat to Donald Trump's presidency, there's another looming threat on the horizon.

Jonathan Martin / New York Times:

Trump Backs Kris Kobach for Kansas Governor, Against Republican Advice — President Trump turned aside the advice of party officials and intervened in the Kansas Republican primary for governor Monday, throwing his support behind the polarizing secretary of state, Kris Kobach, one day before voters go to the polls there.

Discussion: ThinkProgress, Washington Post, The Hill, Washington Free Beacon, Raw Story, Vox, The Week and Splinter

Kate Wagner / Vox:

Betsy DeVos's summer home deserves a special place in McMansion Hell — Kate Wagner dissects the shingle-style Michigan summer home of the education secretary. — Two weeks ago, somebody untied Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos's $40 million yacht from its mooring.

Jake Offenhartz / Gothamist:

MTA Previews Big L Train Shutdown With 15 Weekends Of L Shutdowns — The dreaded L train shutdown is coming sooner than anyone imagined. On Saturday, the MTA quietly announced that there will be no L train service between Manhattan and Brooklyn during 15 weekends in the coming months …